This week: birds of omen, feral feminine energy, climbing a mountain in the dark, the father of the tar sands, and much more. Enjoy.

September began with odd signs: red moons, smoke-smothered skies. Are we done with the apocalypse yet? I stayed inside the house most of the week, asthma and itchy eyes keeping me from my beloved garden. It is now said that we have three seasons instead of two in the Pacific Northwest, instead of Rain and Summer we have Rain, Summer, and Smoke. It definitely has been the case the last few years. September is usually a hopeful time for me, but it was hard to get into a better mood trapped in the house and feeling overwhelmed by the heat and heaviness of the air, not to mention the news. […]

September 2nd was the book launch for our friend Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal, which was online, and at which many people read Martha’s poems from the book since Marty is no longer with us. It was also Martha’s birthday. A reminder to celebrate your friends as much as you can while they are alive. I also thought about the fact that so many people talked about how much they loved Marty’s work—after she was dead. It would have been much appreciated while she was alive, I am sure. Writers rarely hear from their fans, until they are very famous, and often can’t tell if their work is reaching anyone or not. The last Best American Poetry was published that day as well, after announcing the series was ending. NEA grants and BAP going away? I don’t know if fewer accolades make for fewer readers or not. How do you find the poets and authors you love? Bookstore strolls? Reading reviews? Reading anthologies? Another thing to think about. […]

In happier news, my poet friend Kelli Russell Agodon and her husband Rose came out for a visit and after brunch we made a field trip to McMurtrey’s where we saw gigantic pumpkins, tons of dahlias and sunflowers, and cut bouquets to bring home. It was nice to be outside right as the smoke started to subside, and the rain came back – which hopefully will help all the wildfires. I got to talk about poetry and enjoy fall blooms and, you know, try to do that thing where you celebrate the good things in life: friends, flowers, etc.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poet Friend Visits, Flower and Pumpkin Farms, and Red Moons with Wildfire Smoke

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Oh, little self in a big chair.  One day in this glorious phase of book publishing, the brain got tired, the energy dried up and I got stuck in a weird paralysis about the simplest of announcements.

Child’s play to some, it had to be done, it couldn’t be done.  The swirling began.  Cloudy, impenetrable thoughts hovered for hours (in retrospect, like a poem) before a figure came from the shadows: a younger self.  Of course she would show up!  Self-conscious, defiantly private.  Mortally conflicted about bragging and showing off.  I’d thought the anxieties of that introvert had been talked through ad nauseum.  Placate her and give the girl a lollipop!

But of course, selves don’t disappear, they crouch and get layered and hang behind other selves.  This shouldn’t have been strange to me as “Diaspora of Things” revolves around these very themes. Narratively the book is about the dismantling of a family home and negotiating of relationships, it also understands the self as one of those things which is unfixed, wavering as it undergoes experiences, part of a larger ecosystem of things possessed and dispossessed.  As the speaker assesses, she is re-assessed; as she feels, she is felt.    

Liberations happen; worlds open and flutter and evolve, carrying along their traces.  So the book continues to evolve past its fixed state.  Fresh voices arise.

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Things

Perhaps not coincidentally, feral feminine energy is central to the journey of the speaker in my manuscript. Let’s light some candles literally and figuratively to bring it into the world — the energy AND a manuscript that celebrates it.

Now back to why I bring it up in the first place… I can get really good at the “doing things” part of writing. (Exhibit A: the recaps that end these monthly posts.) I tend toward auto-pilot, and the making of lists and checking off items on lists can easily crowd out the heart and soul of writing. Of what I do. Of what’s at stake.

The ferocity in me — the witch, the feminist, the hippie, the one who feels, the one who loves — sometimes loses oxygen. This isn’t due to logistics like time or space but to comfort. I’m gooooood at organizing. I know what I’m doing. It’s a space I’m confident in.

It’s harder to step into other spaces sometime, including those that evoke and reveal the wildness I love.

Carolee Bennett, We Don’t Have to Be Quiet

Somewhere along the way, we started turning our passions into side hustles, placing them under microscopes, or attaching metrics or challenges—X number of submissions or Y number of books read in a year. We’ve learned to infuse discipline into our hobbies.

That’s fine, I guess. But discipline has never been my problem. If anything, my drive can be the enemy. I love writing so much that I tend to overwork myself. I’ll keep going even when my creative muscles need rest, chasing the dopamine of a perfect line break or the high of landing the right metaphor.

I tend to ignore my body’s signals—the ache of staring at small letters, the mental depletion that comes from staying in flow for too long. Since writing isn’t my job, I don’t have clear hours when I “clock out.” The lines are fuzzy, and I can set myself up for burn out if I don’t keep myself in check.

So, I vowed to approach this book in a sustainable way. No pushing. No forcing. […]

Back when I got married in 2016, I wrote a personalized letter for every single guest (~105 people). Each note sat in a chest at the entrance, waiting to be found by its recipient, and read before the ceremony began. I wanted every person attending to feel seen. Yes, it added logistics to an already full plate, but it mattered to me.

I’m carrying that same energy into publishing my book: the intention, the care, the sense of something sacred. I have a couple surprises up my sleeve, a few details that will take extra time and will make this book feel as personal as a handwritten note.

I have never set a deadline for this book. I don’t want to take shortcuts or rush through something that means so much to me. I move with momentum; I am always working toward the next step, but I don’t force the timing. When the work starts to feel heavy, I step back—even if every part of me wants to push through.

When this collection arrives, it will carry every ounce of love and intention I’ve put into it. I’m excited to look back and know that the the process was as special as the outcome.

Allison Mei-Li, My Slow Art Manifesto

I ran across Notes on Complexity [by Neil Theise] right after finishing Sleights of Mind, a book about the neuroscience behind the sort of illusion we call entertainment magic: sleight of hand, sawing people in two, mentalist “mind-reading,” and other performances; the authors, Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen Macknik, and Sandra Blakeslee, are trying to discover more about how brains work (or filter, and sometimes don’t work so well) by studying how we get fooled by illusionists. This is a fun book, even more fun for me because one of my Best Beloveds has long been an enthusiast of magic shows and magicians. Martinez-Conde and Macknik are neurologists, so–unlike Theise’s text–this book is very body-mechanics in its basis. Their work reminded me of how amazing the human physiological system is. And it’s entertaining.

Before these non-fiction reads, I was finishing up with Proust who, in his own creative way, was exploring the interiority of the human self and carefully observing human interactions, behaviors, assumptions, prejudices, and aesthetics. Not neuroscience, because there is no science to it, but definitely related to how our brains and bodies process experience. My sense is that poetry works that that way for me: it’s not an abstract stream of thought but something inextricable from bodily experience, maybe even, through the environment in which we exist, something deeply connected to everything, a global being-there.

The way we process experience (and is this consciousness?) is largely what leads us to the arts, to make art or to appreciate it, and to decide what feels compelling, important, beautiful. And it’s not all in our heads.

Ann E. Michael, Illusions, connections

I am not done. I am not real:
of course not. An orange seed
is not an orange tree, let alone
an orange grove, where the girls
do their washing and hear the mill wheel turn.
But there are glancing lights everywhere.
Dilations and contractions.

Dale Favier, September Comes Anyway

Poets. Instead of cherishing the openness of creativity and the exciting boundaries of form as a starting point, we say “It’s already done.” We give it a name with an expectation, but the thing itself flickers in and out of sight. Like a moth in the light of a street lamp.

Look at us, we give us names, but Peter is always more than Peter, Peter changes over time, and carries a world of thoughts and emotions we will never know about. A rose is a rose, but it might not be the rose we expect to be.

Names make life easier. As a shorthand. Names can make life complicated too, when we forget they aren’t the thing itself, pulsing with changing expectations attached over time.

Communication is always a ‘getting close but truly struggling with getting there’.

We need to have that in mind.

Kati Mohr, Things, Names, Expectations

Next there is a passage in Rilke’s Letters on Life I’d like to share:

“Look: I also do not wish to tear art and life apart violently: I know that sometime and somewhere, they are of one mind. But I am awkward in life, and for that reason, whenever life tightens around me, it often results in a moment of stasis, a delay that causes me to lose quite a lot.”

He says, “for art is a thing that is much too great and difficult and long for a life, and those of very advanced age are nothing but beginners in it.”

And: “This is why I long so impatiently to get to work, to begin my workday, because life can become art only once it has become work.”

And I am impatient these days, to get to my work. And when I’m living out there in the world, lord, I’m awkward. Yet, I’m not letting my awkwardness stop me from doing things. From saying yes. I had meant to take a month and say no to everything and be a hermit tbh. I’m trying to get to the second draft stage of my current manuscript. Today, I did a manuscript exchange with my good friend Kimmy Beach and my goal is to get it through a couple of more drafts by end of September. Originally this deadline was the beginning of September. Our exchange will be good to spur me on in my edits.

Instead of ignoring the world though, I’ve said yes to invitations of all sorts, lately. Some social, some photography gigs, some work related. The manuscript will get finished — it’s at that point of no return.

There is no balance, we writers and artists know that. Just an attempt. Life will get tangled with art, and sometimes that can be a very good thing. What is one without the other?

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Awkward in Life

A poem is a distortion. Spacetime
Bends and even the poem, powerless,
Curves away. I write knowing that
Direction is an excuse. In what
Earthly way can I align a word, a
Full moon and your eyes? Imagine a
God that whispers the words, that
Holds the sky till the pole star speaks?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Birth of a poem

The dream is balance. Balance as we walk forward.

I am part of publishing and writing and myth-making, and right now, I walk on a tightrope every day to see if the press I run will survive another day. But I persist. We persist. It is how we will survive the next three years, the next crisis, the next moment.

One of my favorite books is The Buried Giant by Ishiguro. In it, an old, devoted couple live in a country which has done great harm but has managed to collectively forget the harm they have done. There has been a legacy of violence that they cannot move beyond without addressing it, but in their collective fog, they aren’t sure what was done and to whom. Still, the couple is on a journey to find their son, to find their memories.

I live The Buried Giant. I will travel to the island of souls, where the ferryman will take me across. Through the press, I work to wake up our collective memories and uplift those stories through literature. I am trying to unbury the giant. I live in a country with a history of violence, much of which has been erased and suppressed. I live in a country of fog, of a history that did not happen and is not happening.

Through habits and fears and dreams, I walk the rope to make sure the stories survive. But while I walk, I breathe. Find joy. Aim for hope. Sometimes, I have honey in my tea.

Kate Gale, Bad Habits, Guilty Pleasures, Joie De Vivre

Two reasons why there has been little news of late. One, CBe isn’t publishing many books – except this month, September, Patrick McGuinness, Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines, see here. Subtle, sensible, surprising, immensely intelligent essays by a man who publishes in more forms and speaks more languages than I have fingers on one hand. Second reason, which is in fact the first reason: in the context of the very bad shit that is happening in the world right now, and the complicit refusal of the UK’s media and government to acknowledge the scale and horror of it, promoting a few good books can feel beside the point. I don’t think I’m alone here.

Anyway. The soil is toxic but I cultivate a little garden. Last week a very good review of Caroline Clark’s Sovetica appeared in Tears in the Fence; excerpts are on the book’s website page. I am very excited about two books that are almost ready to send to print and that CBe will publish early next year: Farah Ali, Telegraphy, and Erin Vincent, Fourteen Ways of Looking.

Charles Boyle, CBe newsletter September 2025: In bad times

It was great fun, creating this way.  I usually start with an idea, which makes revision harder for me.  But with this process, I had no commitment to the lines and images.  I had no sure feeling that I was even creating viable lines or headed to a poem.

Yesterday my first thought, as I stared at the lines, was to call it an interesting failed experiment and move along.  But I pushed through, and now I have a fairly decent poem.  

Will I do it again?  Probably.  But even if I don’t, it’s good to remember that there are many poetry processes.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Paint Patch Poetry Process

赤蜻蛉少し飛んでは考える　根岸敏三

akatonbo sukoshi tondewa kangaeru

red dragonfly

            each time it flies a little

            it stops to think

                                                Keizo Negishi

from Gendai Haiku, #720, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 8, 2025)

I was hunting through files to make work-in-progress postcards I like to share on Instagram and realized I have a lot going on. There are numerous projects in various stages of completion that litter the folder in my Dropbox labeled “WRITING.” […]

On one hand, having many projects means perhaps they take shape slower, which is mostly fine since I am a pretty dogged and persistent writer these days. But on the other hand, working on one project at a time might make me feel trapped, especially if things are not going as wanted or expected. I can always bail if I’m stuck and work on something else. The problem is sometimes I wind up stuck for years. 

Last summer, I listened to the audio book of Elizabeth Gilbert’s BIG MAGIC, in which she talked about abandoning projects and how there is a danger in sitting on and sitting with creative ideas too long. Sometimes, the muse goes looking for other vessels. Your ingenious idea gets snatched from the swirling air by someone else before you bring it fully into the world. This happens and I am not sure its a bad thing. Perhaps only because I think creation is totally about your spin and your style, which has nothing to do with an idea or concept that might find itself frustrated with your slowness.

Sometimes it feels overwhelming having too much happening though. Those books get weighty in my writing folder. I occasionally forget they exist. Or like to pretend they don’t exist as I move onto something else. As I contemplate half finished manuscripts and random notes and research for things I haven’t even started, I will probably just close the windows and get on with whatever it is I feel the need to work on right now as we wander into September and the fall months..

Kristy Bowen, magpie brain and the next new shiny

It has been well over a year since I decided it would be a good challenge to climb Snowdon. I needed a long lead in period to enable me to work on my fitness levels, and I am very glad I did because it was definitely a challenge! It was one of those experiences that had me digging deep for reserves of energy and determination, and my legs are telling me they know I have climbed a mountain. It felt exciting to walk up in the dark and to tackle Snowdon in a way I have never done before, and there were times when not seeing how much further there was to go was very helpful. […]

It was good to share the experience with my sister, Katie. She said quite a lot on the way up the mountain at times including some swear words and now she says: “Although I found some of the journey slightly terrifying and at one point did cry thinking ‘Oh my God what the hell am I doing?’ I now feel a great sense of achievement and actually am contemplating climbing a mountain again.”

We celebrated meeting our challenge by having a lovely meal out, and then zonked out shortly afterwards. We even got a medal and were presented with these when we arrived back at the community centre for our breakfast. The group we went with raised more than 31K for Macmillan and as well as our donations for taking part in the walk we raised an additional three hundred and fifty pounds.

It feels good to be writing about a medal for this one hundredth blog, and it would also be lovely to know what the air smells like where you are today to mark this occasion. Do let me know!

Here’s a poem for the full moon because it was full and bright above us as we took out trek.

STOP EATING THE LOVE HEARTS

We scatter snow warmth,
swell soft gifts.
Thank you, thank you.
Near wayside evening birds, 
more bread.
Thank you.
Then all our food gifts –
love hearts.
Refrain.

(N.B., this poem was found in the traditional hymn ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ and after it was found it was gifted its title.)

Sue Finch, SNOWDON

I know I keep saying it but … I’d love to have more time to review books and write critically. Writing critically about something is a way of wading into it, thinking your way through it, adding something to it. I’ve got pages of notes towards reviews that never materialise. The beating heart of poetry criticism in the UK, meanwhile, is blogs and small-circulation journals —outside of this, it isn’t encouraged very widely or enthusiastically. Even among those who speak passionately of reinvigorating it, too many seem to approach criticism as part sorting machine (a way of ordering books into a hierarchy of quality), part ritualistic act of obeisance, whereby critics contribute to the aura of respectability enjoyed by a heroic figure.

And yes, I complain about this too often as well, but it disturbs me to see people of my own age talking, almost vindictively, about ‘sorting the wheat from chaff’ or lamenting a failure to recognise ‘great poets’ in this, an age of untold poetic abundance. They’ve benefited from a rich vein of work they value … but seemingly won’t be satisfied until their personal choices and tastes are allowed to supersede others’. I’m tempted to say that a golden rule of reading poetry should be that if you don’t sometimes come round to liking something you initially felt cool towards, or wind up disappointed in something you expected to knock your socks off, then you need to rethink your angle of attack.

Jon Stone, “I goon-march and glide”, Part 2

When e-mail replaced paper mail as the way to submit, the volume of submissions soared. One way the magazines coped was to use facilities like Submittable to deal with masses of submissions, passing the cost onto the submitting authors.

Writers started automating their simultaneous submissions. They found AI useful for content enhancement too. Most magazines said they didn’t want AI work – though if authors do use AI, magazine editors won’t be able to find out. A few magazines asked that authors should say if their work used AI.

Magazine editors are now using AI to fight back. Becky Tuch, who runs the ever-interesting litmagnews site on substack, mentions Dapple, a new rival to Submittable, Duosoma, Oleada, Moksha, Fillout, etc. Dapple lets editors add tags like “serial submitter” to authors (so watch out!). More interestingly, editors can outsource tasks to Ash, an AI assistant. It can generate forms. Maybe it could send out automated rejections for pieces that exceed the wordcount or use the wrong font, or have a low-quality list of previous publications. The Dapple site has videos to show you what might be possible.

Where will all this end? I suppose eventually AIs will submit material to AIs. But paper hasn’t completely died out. I know of at least one magazine that still insists on printed submissions through the post.

Tim Love, AI vs AI

The very first recording of a poem being recited, if you discount Edison’s ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ of 1877, is Robert Browning in 1889 on a hand-cranked Edison cylinder. He’s rollicking out ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ in a digestive biscuity voice. The clatter of the rotating cylinder sounds just like galloping horses.

There’s also a fair bit of background noise to Tennyson declaiming the Charge of the Light Brigade in his disconcertingly upper-class register, pitched so that we can’t forget that in those days poetry came down to us from a higher plane. Likewise, I suspect it would be hard for most modern audiences to tolerate Yeats intoning The Lake Isle of Innisfree, intent on avoiding speaking poetry as if it were prose. This is the man who spent his life ‘clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax, that is for ear alone.’

My very first public reading was at the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse, in 1984 or 1985, their Diamond Jubilee Poetry Competition. I’d written a very mediocre poem in Scots which I had to read out at the presentation. Fortunately, I remember little of the event other than mumbling the lines quietly and very quickly into the trembling lectern while the audience fidgeted and coughed. The presentation was made by the formidable Norman MacCaig, who introduced the awards: ‘I’ve been told to say there were many fine entries in this competition. There weren’t. I’ve been told to say it was difficult choosing a winner. It wasn’t.’

I’ve worked on my technique since then by trying to remember there’s an audience out there, and rather than being myself, I pretend to be myself. The myself that is comfortable speaking in public.

John Glenday, A Bit of a Performance

I loved this issue of Poetry London to the point where I started to wonder if I have exactly the same taste as the editor Niall Campbell. There are two new poems by Carl Philips to start the issue off which I really enjoyed, featuring Philips trademark winding, restless use of syntax and long sentences in the second poem in particular. I also loved the ‘Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop’ by Clare Pollard which has made me look forward to her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection even more, and a new poem Mona Arshi which made me want to order her new collection ‘Mouth’ straight away (sadly need to wait until I get paid!). There’s a brilliant poem by Padraig Regan ‘The Leafy Sea Dragon’ which is a close and meticulous observation of the sea dragon, where we learn all kinds of interesting things about this creature I hadn’t heard of in scientific and lyrical details. We are told that he ‘fibrillates his cellophane /neck-fins’ and later that ‘He is his own autumn’. I love the leaping that the poem does between these two registers and then the poem pivots – here are the last four lines:

      One in twenty, maybe
will survive their quickening. 
       I am tired 
of my petty envies. 

I love poems that do this – leap from one subject to another, leap from observation to epiphany. My favourite poem that does this is of course Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ followed by ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island Minnesota’ by James Wright. I can’t wax on about every poem in the magazine however, but I would urge you to take out a subscription if you can.

I should also declare an interest in that I had a poem published in the previous issue and took out a subscription instead of payment – and have been working on an essay which should be appearing in the next issue so I’m not completely partisan!

Kim Moore, August Reading

The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour, by Michael Beard, with illustrations by Houman Mortazavi:

Before I learned to read it, I confess that the Arabic alphabet seemed to me mysterious, amorphous, drifting, cloudlike, and a little sinister. Eventually, I came to feel that I wasn’t the only one. Eventually, as I learned it, letter by letter, it looked like any other alphabet, but a bit more beautiful. Eventually, this seemed a good reason to write a book about it.

Unlike most of the readings I recommend, which are either books or essays, this one is a website. I met Michael Beard, the site’s creator, when I was invited in 2012 to offer some brief comments on my translations of classical Persian poetry at an event honoring Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani, which was, for me, a real honor. At the time, Beard and I discussed my writing an essay exploring what Iran would look like to an American, English-speaking reader if all they had access to were the translations available on the poetry bookshelves of, say, Barnes & Noble. I still think that essay, or some version of it, might be worth writing, though it would require altering the underlying motivation. At the time, there was precious little Iranian literature being published in translation, certainly not much that most general readers would know about, and so the view of Iran provided by the likes of Coleman Barks’ Rumi or Daniel Ladinsky’s Hafez was the dominant one out there. I mention that discussion because Beard’s impulse in suggesting that essay to me seems akin to the impulse behind this website: to interrogate the lens through which we know the Other and, in this case, to make that Other less alien. Here, for example, are two paragraphs in which he compares the Arabic and Roman alphabets in his introduction to the letter Alif:

The letters of the Roman alphabet are designed to seem physical objects of substance and weight. At the bottom of our letters, serifs have evolved to help us imagine them on little pedestals. We visualize our own alphabetic characters, the ones I’m using now, as objects taking up space, standing on a surface. The Roman alphabet’s simple upright, our capital I, takes up space assertively. The Capital I song in Sesame Street, which dates back to the days of Crosby, Stills and Nash (who sang it), makes our “I” a narrow house on a hill, inhabited, obviously, by the self.

The Arabic alphabet evolved from the same Phoenician characters as ours, but the Arabic letters do not feel like houses or towers with solid foundations. Alif ignores the ground and seems to float in air. Otherwise it would seem balanced precariously on its point. You can trace that sharp edge, taking shape slowly under the hands of countless scribes, shaped by the implement which creates it, the track of the reed pen. Even when shaped by typographic font or composed on a computer screen, Alif preserves a memory of the reed, with its chisel-shaped nib. The result tapers at the bottom and carries a little barb at the top. It’s this balanced, blade-like form that western calligraphers imitate when they attempt to make Roman letters look Aladdinesque.

Beard’s ability to see the letters as more than letters, to give them—however intuitively, poetically, subjectively—their full cultural weight makes this (as yet incomplete) website well worth reading through.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #46

From my collection, Sorry I forgot to pack my ears, I have chosen to look at Losing It, not because I think it the best poem in the book, but because it’s the most frightening poem.

From my twenties I have always been hard of hearing; a sound loss, small at first, did not bother me although I noticed the loss of theatre and radio.  But at forty-nine I failed the medical for teaching and so lost my income.

After writing this poem I understood my anxiety a little better:

            My brain dulls a little

            with each lost phrase.

Deafness in middle life can lead to severe memory loss and all that means.  I think this is the strongest influence on the writing of this poem.

The other influences I experienced that helped were:

            a friend who not only made suggestions about order and content, but patiently helped each poem achieve its best –  

            another friend who read the completed work and gave me a new perspective on it –

             Lynne Wycherley, who writes the most beautiful line in North Flight – something to work towards, even though she remains out of reach.

My last influence is, perhaps, the strongest.  Unable to join in with groups, lectures or parties, even a poetry reading is beyond me now, I have turned to walking.  The wonderful thing about the natural world is that I can see it and hear a little, but it does not expect a reply, so I don’t become as exhausted as I do with people.

Drop-in by Jenny Hamlett (Nigel Kent)

Despite being awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2016, Gillian Allnutt remains beneath the radar even of many well informed readers. This is odd because there’s no better poet alive in England, and no better poet of England either. Her poetry is full of English plants and places and it inhabits, too, the full historical landscape of the English language, from Anglo-Saxon onwards: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Julian of Norwich; Blake and Wordsworth; Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot. That risks making her sound learned and difficult, a sort of female Geoffrey Hill. But Allnutt’s poetry has the smooth, rich patina of old furniture (one of her favourite words): shaped by time, but lovely to handle and apt for use.

Last year I, along with various other writers, was asked by the editor of Porlock Poems if I could name any contemporary poets who in my view fulfilled Emily Dickinson’s criteria and “made you so cold no fire could warm you and took off the top of your head”. We were allowed to name up to three poets and propose a single specific poem (by one of the three, or someone else). After thinking about it at some length, Allnutt’s was the only name I gave, and it was one of her poems (‘healing’, from the 2018 collection Wake) that I sent. In the final list, which you can read here, almost everyone else has named three so perhaps I took the question a bit too literally. There are plenty of other poets writing today I admire; but I do think that Allnutt is in a class of her own.

The typical Allnutt poem is very short, resting easily on a single page but sinking quickly into the memory, like ‘summertime’, from Lode:

mute or musical as morning rain
and you as always gone
how I listen to your absence to my own
to the now and then of wood pigeon
its dear inconsequential circumlocution

The stripped back syntax, skipped articles and suggestive elisions link her style to modernism, and perhaps especially to the work of Basil Bunting, another poet of Northumberland.2 But they point, too, to a specifically linguistic awareness. Her acute sense of what makes English what it is is shaped by other languages and other versions of the language: for all her powerful sense of place, it is the opposite of parochial.

Even in the collection under review — which, being set partly in lockdown, doesn’t travel as much as usual — we find versions of Mandelstam and Laforgue.

Victoria Moul, Gillian Allnutt, “lode”

“Debris” collects poems from Daniel Huws’ first two books, Noth (Secker, 1972) and The Quarry (Faber, 1999), alongside a substantial selection of new poems and translations. As a whole, the collection spans 70 years (including breaks from writing when life got in the way). Huws claims poetry was “never a vocation” and the poems were written free from the trend of artificial deadlines created by a writer who wants to keep publishing and worries about staying relevant. […]

[Ted] Hughes’ view of Huws’ poems was, “there is nothing fashionable about Huws’ poems. The all-inclusive, wholly human, wholly musical, final simplicity of the oldest folk-rhymes and songs was the ultimate aim of such a poet as Yeats… Anyone with an ear to hear will recognise the genuine substance and accent of that poetry in Daniel Huws.”

It’s a verdict that still stands. “Debris” shows Huws as a precise, lyrical poet, alive to sounds and definition of words deliberately chosen. They have a quiet substantialness, like a welcome rock on a mountain hike which offers chance to sit, take in the scenery, let other concerns drift and inhabit the space offered. That’s not to say the poems merge into the scenery, they don’t, because their effects linger after reading. “Debris” will be welcome to both readers new to and familiar with Huws’ poems.

Emma Lee, “Debris” Daniel Huws (Carcanet) – book review

Been on a bit of hiatus recently. Had some other projects to get done, including a new book of my own poetry, my first full-length book of haiku translations, and a new website. More news soon! Hope everyone is well, and we’ll return to our usual programming next week.

              —: Fragment :—
                          by Dick Whyte

       whatever's been forgiven gives
       four gifts, all wrapped in linen—

       an earthen jug—
       a wooden bowl—
       a sack & a map to a river—

       [ . . . ]

Dick Whyte, Fragments Vol. 1: Golding, Dunning, Fuller et al. (1928-1929)

From Winnipeg poet, editor and scholar Melanie Dennis Unrau comes the debut full-length poetry title, Goose (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2025), a book-length visual poem project (an excerpt of which also appeared as a chapbook through above/ground press a while back, as well as through the Spotlight series) of simultaneous excavation and erasure that emerges from the work of “Canadian Development of Mines expert and Word War I veteran” Sidney Clarke Ells (1878-1971), the self-declared “father of the tar sands,” specifically his 1938 collection of poems, short stories and essays, Northland Trails (1938). Through an expansive visual sequence, Unrau works her project as one of critical response, working to engage with and, specifically, against the original intent of Ell’s language back into itself, and the implications of what those original intents have wrought. The book is set with an afterword by the author, and an opening “FOREWORD” by McMurray Métis, that opens: “There is a long history in Canada and indeed across the world of European ‘explorers’ appropriating the knowledge, skills, and labour of Indigenous peoples for their personal and collective gain, only to tur around and declare the territories of Indigenous peoples ‘terra nullius,’ and their cultures and ways of live inferior and unworthy of respect. This dialectic of appropriation-negation is familiar to Indigenous people across the globe. And so it is with Fort McMurray, its oil sands, and their ‘father,’ Sidley Ells. Through research, community and public awareness, and the construction of our cultural centre, McMurray Métis hope to correct these self-serving and distorted narratives, and assert our historic and continued presence, way of life, and self-determination. Let this foreword be one small step in that direction.”

Visually expansive, with a delightful use of image and space, Unrau moves through the language, sketches and, seemingly, the typeface, of Ells’ 1938 collection to unravel an acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples within that space, and the environment and landscape of those pilfered, poisoned lands, showcasing the illusion of self that Ells presumed upon that landscape, flipping a script of belonging that was never his to take. “Inspired by books like Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps, M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, Syd Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia, Shane Rhodes’s Dead White Men, and Lesley Battler’s Endangers Hydrocarbons,” Unrau writes, as part of the book’s “AFTERWORD,” “I started to make visual poetry out of found text and images from Northland Trails. After some experimentation, I developed a method of building poems and critical arguments about Northland Trails by tracing words and illustrations from its pages.”

rob mclennan, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose

Everyday I wake up and step into the history unfolding. My head is awhirl. My eyes are darting around to try to anticipate what will happen next. Who it will happen to, and by whose hand. I keep waiting for some “impulsive miracle.” Here is a poem about a historical figure I don’t hear much about. He was a struck match. Or he did the striking. Or he was tinder for the fire. History is not sure. I’m thankful for Sean Singer for clueing me into this wonderful poet, Jay Wright.

Marilyn McCabe, shifting uneasily under

Song of trance states, altered states, a united states of grace.

Song of aim, a trigger in the brain, the shot heard ‘round the world that is more a sound of peace, battlefields dreaming in shades of technicolor tranquility.

Song of calligraphy, hand-written love notes, smoke signals whispering, come closer.

Rich Ferguson, When I Grow Up I Wanna Be a Song

they’re not coming for us
they’re already here
that warmth you feel

is the breath of the enemy
uniformed like a dark patch of night
light glinting off a truncheon

Jason Crane, POEM: the rainbow I want to see

when i say
“us” i mean myself & the wrens who are
trying to get fat before winter. if only i were
smaller & hollow boned. then i could
join them in building nests along
the eaves of the neighbors’ houses. instead,
i linger on the street outside
while taking an afternoon walk. note
the details of the porch posts & window edges.

Robin Gow, nesting

When I go home, my house is still there. And when I look out its windows, the glass is smudged with fingerprints from pointing at the jays and deer. And outside this window over here, Black Eyed Susan and Partridge Pea. Cars drive by outside and don’t shoot bullets at me and mine. And it’s 5:01 pm and the evening light hits the colored glass of the lantern just so. Because my mother bought me that lantern when I was in my twenties and living alone. I sit down at this dining room table, the lantern in my peripherals and I am grateful. Because when I go home, my house is still there.

Because when I look through the windows at the sky, there is no trailing ball of fire besides the sun and the unfathomable amount of invisible stars. I am not witnessing dead, decaying humans all around me, a hand here, a bloated belly there, a smashed-in head over there. I am not okay with other humans starving as I feed the birds. I am not okay with other humans being pummeled to the ground for existing beyond a boundary as I gently carry a moth back outside without touching their wings.

Sarah Lada, Because When I Go Home, My House Is Still There

Most of the time, we don’t know
the extent of what we can do until
we do it. Until the hair wound around
the throat of the instrument tightens
and has no recourse but to break,
until the sentries open the metal
gates themselves to let in the rioting
crowd. Someone says look at the trees
now afire with the songs of omen birds—
look at the light that slants across
house roofs and knights them as
cathedrals.

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for an Uprising

seedling of an exhausted species, whose language can i speak.

word is wind. and sky, windless.

leaves give tongue until their skin burns green.

Grant Hackett [untitled]

This week: chaos gardening, the father of concrete poetry, rewriting Utopia, hoarding ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.

Someone in the apartment to my left applies his drill to the wall in between us, forcing the hard buzz into the drift of my reading, altering the smooth of images, and I am reminded of how perception in poetry depends on pacing, on the rate of movement and the appearance of speed bumps, sirens, pauses.

It is morning. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind drags its “drunk rooftops” into the light. “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing” — tracking, collecting, studying — “hot legs and rosebud breasts”…

The teens are among the sunbathers today, their voices retreating as they move towards the beach; a clump of busy vowels to which no consonant can cling by the time the teens’ shout ascends to where I stand, watching, from the balcony. Ferlinghetti builds from association and accumulation: the images link to each other mnemonically, like the simple dogs and cats on those flashcards once used to teach phonics.

Alina Stefanescu, “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing”

Maggie Smith and I are hitting the road this September to bring The People’s Project to y’all live and in color! We’re so excited! All the tour information is included below AND here’s a sneak preview of the introduction we wrote for the book! […]

This anthology is a community as a book. As we put it together, we turned to people who we always turn to for guidance, encouragement and truth. These are the people we text and call to talk our way through the path of daggers. These are the mentors, siblings on the page, and friends we trust with both heavy-hearted conversations and laughter loud enough to color a crowded restaurant. We’ve broken bread, poured drinks, danced, and created art with these folks. And now, as both an offering and a prayer, we’re bringing the best of us to you. In a 1982 interview with Kay Bonetti, Toni Cade Bambara said “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed class, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” The People’s Project is as much about what we need and hope for as it is about who we are.

The fact is, reader, no one is coming to save us but us. Our survival and future—not just through this political era, but onward into the blur of eras that await—wholly depend on our ability to connect with and protect each other far and wide, to share what we’ve learned from our varied and shared histories in order to enrich each other’s wisdom, confidence and imagination. The People’s Project is our attempt to honor the fact that, terrified as we are, we are nonetheless proud to understand the stakes of our work. No way forward but through, together. As it should be.

Saeed Jones, “The People’s Project” is going on tour!

Those tragic headlines crash into well-being, shatter personal alphabets, then leave us to pick up the pieces of broken lives and languages.

I remember when we used to read poetry to one another on the front porch of my aorta,

how every line would beat a distinct pulse of love.

It’s a comforting feeling, like how I know my daughter‘s old baby cradle won’t wake up one day

believing it’s a nest of grenades.

Rich Ferguson, The Inner Workings Revisited

The fire began close to the military base at Fylingdales. 18 bombs have exploded; soft moss and sundew, bilberry, cowberry, lapwing and adder. Where a fire burns, the soil is sterilised and seeds grow slowly. The ground is dry and hard, rain gushes fast from the high ground, hard into the valleys, taking the dry soil with it; hawthorn and rowan, the ancient oak. 12 fire crews are fighting the blaze over 25 km of fire, many of them voluntary. The fire chief thanks the public for their donations of drinks and cake – “We are at saturation point”, he says, and asks us to stop.

The fire broke out on the 11th. On 14th, we watched the smoke in the distance from Blakey Ridge, in the low pink evening. We walked from Grosmont to Robin Hood’s Bay and it felt like my heart was breaking. It’s been a very tough two weeks, for reasons more complex than I can describe in this blog. But I will find the words. That’s what poetry is for, and music, and my own good time.

On Thursday 4th September I’ll be reading at “A Love Song to Peat” at Ponden Mill, on the edge of the threatened Walshaw Moor; there will be music and films and words, there will be miles of moors, the craft of walls, ruins holding their stories. “The wild mountain thyme / Grows around the bloomin’ heather/ Will ye go, lassie, go?”

We write love songs because the landscape inside us is so huge and we are so small. We write love songs because love is all of the oceans and we cannot hold them. Sometimes we are a curlew and we sing for our mate and our chicks, we sing for our land. Sometimes we are quietly on fire and a thousand years burn inside us. Sometimes the flames reach high and we sing so that the fire crews will come, and the people will bring them cake. Look at my flames, we sing, look at my ashes.

Clare Shaw, Love Songs

Nothing of night is left
in this day; the angle
of the sun promises
more heat; the earth itself
seems slant, matching the sun
I tilt sideways to find
balance. There is a gasp
in the light as if breath
will be lacking. The gasp
comes true. The light itself
cracked and misplaced.

PF Anderson, Sunslant

The ziplock of summer fruit is emptied.

I did 3 readings and an author’s day. I sent 2 submissions, and 3 of 4 reviews that I have on tap. I repaired a few book bindings, read a whack of things, located 2/3 mislaid books. I’m averaging a title read every 5 days, some 16 pages, some 400+. I found a new contest judge for next year for the haiku contest I coordinate for Haiku Canada. I’m talking with two poets who might let me publish a chapbook of their poems this fall and spring. Taking a page from Tanis I’m taking names and seeing if we can start a local silent book club. Humming along. […]

I write in fragments whose centre has not been found. Or isn’t needed.

Pearl Pirie, Summer Zipped

Apparently there’s a newish fad in the horticulture world called “chaos gardening.” This is described in UK’s House and Garden as “inspired by the unruly growth of nature and a whiff of rebellion against the control and neatness of traditional horticulture.”

Oh honey, many of us have been chaos gardening for a very long time. […]

I’m mostly at peace with the chaos here, although my better self would like to tend more closely to our gardens. But my husband and I just don’t have the gumption right now to do more. We are exhausted by a country in chaos. Democracy is being undermined by well-funded extremists, authoritarianism is marching in, inequality is compounded, genocide not only ignored but fostered, and all the while the climate every life form relies on to survive is being sacrificed for profit.

Chaos, I’m reminded by evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme, is one of the powers of the universe. We’re here thanks to the cataclysmic death of stars. Their explosions provided the iron circulating in our blood, the calcium making up our bones, the oxygen we inhale. Cataclysms on our planet have caused five major extinctions. (We humans are causing the sixth.) We have endured many other catastrophes including wars, famine, plagues. And yet, from the cataclysmic death of stars, we get to live on a planet graced by orioles, humpback whales, monarch butterflies, sunsets, tides, elephants, newborn humans. We are all part of one another, composed of star stuff.   

May long and gentle rains like this one fall on every parched landscape. May beauty pair with chaos and peace rise from cataclysm.

Laura Grace Weldon, Chaos Gardening

I do not have brilliant form with Louise Glück. I seem to remember the Poetry Book Society choosing or recommending The Wild Iris in the mid-nineties, buying it, and it completely going over my head. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I find this description, taken from the Carcanet and PBS websites, very appealing, but that is where my admiration, not to mention understanding, has come to a halt: ‘What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siècle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.’ Sometimes we encounter books just when we need them. But sometimes this happens much too early. I think this was the case with The Wild Iris.

I gave Louise Glück another go in the autumn of 2020. I’d published a book in 2019, just in time not to be able to promote it during the pandemic and, like everyone else, was generally exhausted. Plus my mother had just died, from dementia and Alzheimer’s. A friend advised me to ignore everything and concentrate on reading four poets and watch what emerged. It was kind advice, meant well. Never having come to terms with my Glück-failure, I bought her massive Poems 1962-2020. But still we did not get on. A few weeks later, the book now discarded, she won the Nobel Prize.

And that was where I was prepared to leave things. Another failure, but hey. It happens. And then Louise Glück died. And I read this extraordinary piece about her by Colm Tóibín in the Guardian and I felt something in me begin to shift:

When I interviewed her at the New York Public Library in 2017, she spoke about the two years of silence, maybe two and half, that came before The Wild Iris, for which she won the Pulitzer prize in 1993. She was not writing badly, she said – she was simply not writing at all. Not a verb. Not a noun. She was living in Vermont and hardly reading anything either. Just gardening books.

During this period, she had just two lines in her head, which had come to her out of the blue. But she had no idea where they might go, or even what they might mean.

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

It struck me because as poets we hardly ever speak about silence, or if we do, only in hushed tones, and certainly not publicly. The silence I’m talking about here is the one we might experience at the end of a poem, or a burst of them, when we feel blessed to have been visited by something from outside of ourselves, giddily and not quite fully believing that the poems were real, or any good, or even written by us. It gave me great comfort to hear about a famous poet experiencing this silence, venturing into it with a mere two lines and a handful of gardening books, and trusting that these would be enough to see her through to the other side and one day writing again.

Anthony Wilson, There was a door

Louise Glück was a pivotal voice in American poetry for the last few decades. She received every esteem a poet can earn: The Nobel Prize in Literature, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Poet Laureate of the United States, among others. But what is most notable about her is that she brought a new poetic voice to the forefront: not confessional, but mythic; sparse but also poignant.

In 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of Louise Glück’s poetry students at Boston University’s MFA program. […]

Toward the end of my time at BU, I met with her for one-on-one conference at her home, over my final manuscript. She told me that she really thought that I had talent. I could’ve about fallen out on the floor to hear her say that, and that encouragement bolstered me up through many a year in my mediocre poetry-career.

Because one thing about Louise: she meant what she said. She could be just as biting and austere as her poetry, but what was so attractive about her and her writing was that it always told the truth, the plain bald-faced truth.

Renee Emerson, Louise Glück: a poet of precision

I’ve returned home from August, and from the resolve that emerged as I went into this gift of a month that I’d swim outdoors each day. It wasn’t a rule so much as a blessing I’ve given myself, and that was given to me by spending most of the time on P’s farm in Sweden, a few hundred metres from a beautiful lake.

Something about taking this love of mine – for water – sacredly has been part of a cleansing that I’ve felt on my skin and within my body. […]

This morning, I swam out of August’s final day in the River Severn just along from where I live. It was J. who helped me to see I could find my way home like this. All these years in Shrewsbury, and I’ve never swum in the river which characterises the town’s year with its floods and lows, its duck families, weir, and leaping salmon. Without the peaty clarity of Norrsjön it has its own beauty of trees, swans, and tiny fishes.

And on my allotment, I’ve started a new project: Biscuit Tin Lake. I won’t be able to swim in it until I work out how to shrink down to Lilliputian height. But I’ve sunk the tin into soil, filled it with water, and surrounded it with stones, shells, and prunings, and floated a few flowers on its surface in memory of friends. And maybe, in September, there’ll be birds that come to drink, and to bathe. 

Liz Lefroy, I See Myself Home

the shrivelled plums
showing the summer sunshine
their deep blue hearts

Jim Young [no title]

I dropped Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (Mr Lear) two-thirds of the way through, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I felt I’d got to know Lear already and didn’t need to know how it ends. Which is often the way with biographies.

Lear must be best known now for his nonsense poetry, but he was also an incredibly talented, astonishingly hardworking and very well-travelled painter (Auden: He became a land). He also hero-worshipped Tennyson and spent a lot of time with the poet’s family on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson, being Tennyson, kept him at arm’s length: Lear’s friendship was with Emily. Lear was very good at making friends, yet always seemed to be at arm’s length, everywhere. Uglow brings out just how important the cartoons are to his limericks: and how often his character’s expressions complicate his words…

Jem Wikeley, Some reviews I didn’t write

i have been a pig in another life.
i wrote poetry & shared it with the others.
we plotted ways to take over the government
but then we died. they sensor death
on the internet these days. people say,
“unalive” as if death were an erasing instead
of a return. i was sitting & eating lucky charms
last night & thinking about how one day
all the buzzing in my head will be nothing.
i don’t know how to make sense of death other than
to watch the street sweeper go by & panic,
wondering if i remembered to move my car.

Robin Gow, street sweeper

I spend as much time as I can around death. I know that sounds morbid and absurd. But I literally have a dead katydid on the table next to me as I type this. I found it on my porch, likely a “gift” from one of my cat friends. On my walk on River Road yesterday, I came across a dead raccoon lying on their back, their gaping mouth full of pulsating maggots. Their little arms and legs were reaching upward, hands open. I knelt down next to them and held their little hand for a little bit. This reminds me, I think I have a skull or wing or something in one of my fanny packs. I have to go find it. I don’t know if I want to find it? I can’t even remember exactly what it is? You’d get a kick out of how horrible my memory is.

Sarah Lada, Are You There, Mandy? It’s Me, Sarah

Rilke wrote about
living the questions

not searching for answers
and so I will sit here and listen 

to the rain on the glass roof
my heart like a fulcrum

between joy and sadness:
the sweet spot of not-knowing.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Not Knowing

I was attracted to this blue morpho butterfly in Sheffield’s Millenium Gallery today. The exhibition was all about colour, how we perceive it, what it signifies etc. Writers have often used it as a unifying theme or motif (the blues that immediately spring to mind are Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and, more recently, Debbie Strange’s haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks (Snapshot Press 2024). Rereading Haiku 2024 (Modern Haiku Press, Ed. Scott Metz & Lee Gurga) I came across this monoku by David McKee which uses blue in a way that seems to allow for lots of different possibilities, something I always admire, and invariably feel a little envious of too!

blue note scale model of her heart

David McKee
whiptail 7

So, note to self- try to be a bit more experimental. And use some colour!

Julie Mellor, Blue

Blue sweater with a hole
for the head. Blue sky
through a hole in the
head. Blue head. Blue
sky. Blue river. Blue
bridge, empty, quiet,
spanning blue night and blue night.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Blue

The latest small edition from Barley Books is a themed sequence of poems from Beau Beausoleil, with textile images from me. The book on top of the packet is an unbound proof. The packet contains the first ten – of an edition of 100 – which I’d hoped to post to the author in San Francisco today. When I got to the Post Office counter I was told that a new memo stated that no parcels should be accepted for sending to USA. If accepted, they would be either returned or destroyed.

The 10% tariff comes into effect in two days’ time. It will have a massive impact, both financial and administrative, on any business exporting to the States. Private individuals like me are currently unable to send parcels to friends and family, until further notice. A report from The Independent here.

This book will be available in UK from me for £10, as soon as I have made some more. It is printed on ‘Elliepoo’ recycled paper with ‘Denim’ flyleaf, and the cover is ‘Flat White’ card made from recycled take-away coffee mugs. All three of these are now unavailable. When I run out, I’ll have to find something else.

Ama Bolton, How love sustains us

Eugen Gomringer died on 25th August 2025 at the age of 100. It seems appropriate that the life of the man known as “the father of concrete poetry” should have achieved the round number of a whole century, with all the simplicity and symbolism of its single line and two circles. Born in Bolivia and educated in Switzerland, Gomringer’s work embodied a modernising spirit of gleaming idealism and comic-strip humour about the world of international signs and logos in which we live. “Our languages,” he wrote, “are on the road to formal simplification” — a fact that the poet must work with. His poem “roads 68”, for example, composed in English, captures the monotonous phenomenon of the petrol station by repeating the names that loom up along the motorway in different combinations, then giving them a final, rhyming twist:

TEXACO and
ESSO

ESSO and
BP

BP and
SHELL

the common
smell

[…]

One of the best descriptions I have read of how Gomringer’s poems work (or play) comes from Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019):

Gomringer’s earliest concrete poems […] tend to rely on an impression of objectivity involving implied referential accuracy. Many of these poems employ a tiny lexicon of words, each imbued with a sense of precise aptitude generally enhanced by repetition. That impression of accuracy, coextensive with an impression of universal intelligibility, is often achieved by using words coherent across several different languages, as in Gomringer’s 1952 poem “Ping Pong”. Indeed, in this poem, the onomatopoeic title-words seem not so much multi-linguistic as meta-linguistic, foregoing semantic language entirely in order to relay the universal, differential structures of linguistic cognition from which specific statements take shape.

This nicely describes how concrete poetry verges on an abstract verbal art, concerned with the dynamics of relationship. But I think there is still an important element of semantic or referential content in “Ping Pong”: the visual 2-3-3-2 rhythm of its shape, made of overlapping lines on a diagonal axis, wittily suggests a rally across a table tennis table. Gomringer said of his word-shapes that “the constellation is an invitation”, and here the reading eye is invited to bounce around like a player at the table, or even the “o”-shaped ball itself. In this way, he hoped, the poet could “help” the reader to find the poetry in modern life through a new “kind of play-activity”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #35: Eugen Gomringer (1925-2025)

Many, even most of the poems in Imtiaz Dharker’s Shadow Reader present some form of suffering, cruelty, oppression or abuse. However, they don’t cloud our impressions of these things by pushing the poet’s own emotions at us; presenting scenes and situations in a gently understanding way, with a polished musicality of sound, they let the beauty or cruelty of what they show speak for itself, in all its subtlety of nuance and overtone. In other ways, they’re highly varied in style and imaginative mode. Some offer what appear to be direct accounts of literal events, letting broader metaphorical or representative suggestions shine through by implication; some, at an opposite extreme, are like pieces of fairytale or myth; many include elements of both. The lovely ‘For the Girl on the Elizabeth Line’ is an example of the first mode. Its language seems simple and transparent, achieving power by a sudden deepening of tone in lines three to five:

Standing by the door
the way young people do,
as if a seat is a waste
of life, you are lost

in each other.

Only in the third stanza does it emerge that what we’re seeing isn’t the scene of joyful young love it seems at first glance. The whole poem reverberates with complex suggestions of power, oppression and helplessness, both in the couple and in the passengers who silently watch them. The way our understanding of the couple’s relationship changes is a wonderfully delicate evocation of how liable we are to misinterpret our fleeting glimpses of other lives. At an opposite extreme, formally speaking, we have the sonnet ‘For the Woman Who Changed Back to a Snake’. Addressed to the woman / snake by someone who may be her mother, this poem seems to create an original, profoundly ambiguous myth related to the myth of Persephone and folk tales of the selkie or seal woman. Its vivid, highly wrought language makes a series of intensely sensuous imagistic impressions so that on one level it’s very concrete. It might be called abstract on another because we can read such very different stories into the chain of metaphors. These stories converge to suggest ideas and feelings about female beauty and the habitual mistreatment and proper respectful treatment of women in a way that’s the more powerful and the more wide-reaching for being indirect.

Edmund Prestwich, Imtiaz Dharker, Shadow Reader – review

In his preface to Studies in the Unnatural World, Keith Tuma writes:

I started writing Studies in the Unnatural World before Allison’s initial diagnosis. I have long been interested in the prose poem. I’m equally drawn to works that complicate the definitions of (and boundaries between) genres and disciplines, particularly when such works examine the relationship between nature and culture. I began this project with the idea of writing short works of prose or prose poetry comprising anecdote, discourse, metaphor, and speculation. These were to be organized and generated by the name of a particular discipline (I speak to friends of my “ologies”). That was the plan.

Allison is, or was, his daughter and the diagnosis was of an ultimately terminal cancer, and so the ‘project’ became entwined with that most unnatural thing, the loss of a child.

The pre-diagnosis pieces are characterised by sharp observation and a dry humour:

Promenadology

We called him Chucky, I can’t remember why—after the movie maybe. He raked leaves, cut grass in town. Had a bulldog face and aggressive gait leaning forward, working his arms with a sense of purpose. Glowered. We put his IQ at 85; we were cruel like that. Then one day we saw him pushing a baby stroller. How can he have a baby? we said. We snuck a look. He was pushing his cat around. Hmmm, we said.

The distancing created by the undefined ‘we’, the implication that the story does not belong to the narrator alone, sets up that punchline which gently ridicules both Chucky’s behaviour and the responses of the ‘we’. It’s even funnier in Tuma’s delivery when reading. Much later on, in a piece called ‘Gerontology’ (all the pieces have an -ology title), we get a glimpse into the impact of Allison’s diagnosis that (in)directly reminds the reader of these earlier poems:

But six years of living with Allison’s illness did plenty to change the ways I look at things too. My sense of humor is not what it was. My tastes in music and literature have shifted, though not in every case. Roger Grenier’s The Difficulty of Being a Dog remains important to me: “And what if literature were a dog tagging along beside you … that hurts you by dying before you do, short as a book’s life is these days?” Though Diane’s problems with her short-term memory were getting worse, I said to our neighbour ‘We’re going up to Maine for the end” and packed up the car. The dogs, at least, were ready.

In between, we read of life in a rented house in Lewiston, trying to get ready, gruelling drives between there and Oxford, Ohio (‘home’ not home), and get more insight into Diane Tuma’s developing health issues, as well as Keith’s own heart problems. There are ekphrastic pieces and observations of what passes for the ‘natural world’. But the dominant thread is the cruel inevitability of death:

We have only the one plant beside the garage, and only one daughter, also dying. Who would want to read a miserable poem about that? Maybe the gods would if I ask nicely, or if I cry out. The gods love best those who die young, but what do they know? Some say Peony is from Paeon, who died when his teacher Asclepius thought he had become too beautiful. Zeus turned him into a flower to save him from the consequences of that observation. Good job, Zeus.

(from ‘Phenology’)

That punchline exemplifies the journey from the dry humour of the earlier poems to the increasingly and understandably bitter flavour of the post-diagnosis work. But that bitterness is handled with a quiet dignity that impresses the reader. In the final piece, Tuma and Diane are taking the final drive home when they find themselves behind a truck bearing a sign that reads ‘Allison’, which Diane photographs (the photo graces the book’s cover). Tuma takes it as literally the sign he asked his daughter to send him from beyond the grave. It’s scant consolation, but consolation nonetheless. Life goes on, like it or not. A deeply moving book, one that will live long in the reader’s mind, despite Grenier’s observation.

Billy Mills, August 2025: A SoundEye Review Special

Inger Christensen’s long poem alphabet was published in 1981. Its backdrop, and the backdrop to much of her work, is the never-ending Cold War and the real existential threat of nuclear conflict. Denmark, “a strategic giant” according to Nato and “a weak link in the chain” according to the Soviet Union, lay in a highly vulnerable position between East and West. “I did not set out to write an apocalypse poem,” said Christensen; but as the sequence progresses, ideas of alienation and ecological collapse force their way in. Its world is shaped by a sense that we are living with a profound environmental grief (daily life in Denmark at the time was punctuated with preparations for nuclear attack). Yet there is also a human process by which we knit together our ordinary world in all its profusion of living things and objects that hold meaning for us, and from which we create some kind of hope.

Lesley Harrison, Writing the Last Word

You studied poetry under David Ferry at Wellesley and co-founded MIT’s literary magazine Rune (1976). What are the main things you learned under David Ferry? What kind of poetry did you study? Who were some of your favorite poets?

David Ferry was probably the best teacher I ever had. I learned an awful lot about both the art of poetry and the art of teaching from him. Wellesley was full of young students who had led pampered lives, which showed up in their attitudes about poetry and about themselves. Prof. Ferry was a master at commenting on the poems produced. He was always – always – able to find something positive to say about any student’s poem. His charity and generosity were beautiful to behold.

I think the secret of his pedagogical style was that he viewed each poem as a starting point, an initial expression of the student’s insight, and helped the student think about how to push the expression further. It’s what I call the dynamic perspective on one’s life or work, as opposed to the static perspective. Not “where have you arrived at?” but “where are you going?”. I recently wrote an essay on this question: https://writersinkyoto.com/2025/07/31/nonfiction/doko-iku-where-are-you-going/

[…]

In general, what are the key aims that you have when translating Japanese poetry into English?

When translating Japanese poetry into English, my overriding priority is to capture the spirit of the poem. Often the spirit of the poem takes the form of a specific image, but there is typically a meaning associated with the image. Sometimes, it is a fragment of action or dialog. Sometimes (especially with classical tanka poetry), it is more of a feeling or an emotion.

I think too many translations get bogged down in the pursuit of literal accuracy and academic respectability. Sometimes, of course, this requires a freer style of translation, but I think that makes the poems more accessible and inspiring to ordinary people. I may try out as many as four or five different versions of a poem before selecting one.

You co-translated They Never Asked: Senryū Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center (Oregon State University Press, 2023) with Shelley Baker-Gard and Satsuki Takikawa. What did you enjoy the most about this project? What were some of the challenges of this particular project?

The aspect of this project that struck me most deeply was developing a sense of empathy with the wide range of emotions articulated by the senryu poets. There was raw anger, to be sure. But there was also biting sarcasm, sharp humor, ironic detachment, and a kind of Buddhist resignation in different poems. Appreciating the resilience of the human spirit in the face of such treatment was nothing short of inspiring.

Jacob D. Salzer, Michael Freiling

I’m intrigued by this title by New York-based poet and translator Grace Nissan, The Utopians (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a book that but hints at the structure of the constraint used, through blurbs offered by Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel and Ted Rees. As Black offers: “Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times.” Gabriel, also: “Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want?” It is only through the publisher’s website that one might find this (arguably offering little more than what the blurbs provide, and not assisting to spell out Nissan’s specific constraints through this project): “Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called ‘THE WORLD’ about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.” Or, one can seek through the text itself to hear Nissan’s own thoughts, set close to the end: “that the dead mix freely / in a spirit of reverence // this translation is based on / death / terribly well, I must admit // they cremate the / discussion / to accept it [.]”

Nissan is also the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii), and their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.

rob mclennan, Grace Nissan, The Utopians

Twenty years ago, New Orleans was being slammed by hurricane Katrina. I’ve heard and seen a report or two, and it’s fitting that New Orleans gets the focus. We lived in South Florida at the time, and South Floridians have their own Hurricane Katrina memories, which can be dramatic, on an individual level. […]

If you want a book-length treatment of hurricane Katrina in poems, I recommend  two wonderful books. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler does amazing things, an astonishing collection of poems that deal with Hurricane Katrina. I love the way that Katrina comes to life. I love that a dog makes its way through these poems. I love the multitude of voices, so many inanimate things brought to life (a poem in the voice of the Superdome–what a cool idea!). I love the mix of formalist poetry with more free form verse and the influence of jazz and blues music. An amazing book.

In Colosseum, Katie Ford also does amazing things. She, too, writes poems of Hurricane Katrina. But she also looks back to the ancient world, with poems that ponder great civilizations buried under the sands of time. What is the nature of catastrophe? What can be saved? What will be lost? […]

You did not expect
that months, even years afterwards
you would find yourself inexplicably
weeping in your car, parked
in a garage that overlooks
an industrial wasteland.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hurricane Katrina Memories, Twenty Years On

Katrina was not a natural disaster. It was a man-made failure of engineering and resources made even worse by a racist disregard for the lives of black people.

Speaking personally, it was also the moment in my own radicalization when the final piece of the veil was ripped away and I realized that no part of the official apparatus of our society was here for any reason other than service to capital.

Jason Crane, 20 years since Katrina

August has turned out to be a quiet month for the Gulf South (knock on wood, still 3 days to go) on the hurricane front. I’m sharing my monthly Listopia today because it is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and I want to raise my small voice in gratitude that, while I will never forget the pain and trauma of that experience for myself and so many others, art and beauty survives and thrives in our imperfect, challenging world. Art and beauty sustained me personally in the long, hard months (& years for many) after the storm when we lived in a truly apocalyptic city.

In reviewing what I accumulated over the month in this post, I realized almost every entry centers on pain. The stories, movies, books, and music I chose this month feels like an unconscous choice to roll in pain then purge it. I’ve shed a few tears for many reasons that lead back to the big one. But, although pain is the theme, it’s written to share and share we will.

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2025

August has been a month of firsts. First memoir event with my children in the audience (at Chautauqua in New York). First driving lesson with my daughter. First time cheering on my son at a cross country meet. First time riding on the back of a motorcycle. I love that midlife is still full of firsts.

Another one: my first anthology, co-curated with my dear friend Saeed Jones, is here! Early finished hardcovers of The People’s Project arrived at my house, and they are beautiful. The book is officially out on Tuesday, September 9, so you still have time to preorder copies for yourself and the people in your life who could use some community in book form right now. (That’s all of us. Get copies for all of us.)

Book tour for The People’s Project starts a week from Monday, and Saeed and I would so love to see you out on the road. All of the info and registration links are here. We aren’t in this alone, and let’s not forget it.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

As August haze gives way to the sharpening clarity of September and school, it feels like a good time for this poem which was published in ionosphere along with The Work of Poetry in the Age of Large Language Models. You can find the issue in print here. “The Reckoning of Salt” shares some of the thematic concerns of technology and memory that I was playing around with in “The Work of Poetry”. Looking forward to the use of salt in our energy storage future as well as backward in the way salt mines are used to hold our history, the poem explores the incredible power and potential of this quotidian substance, with a nostalgic turn at the very end. I hope that you enjoy it.

Ruth Lexton, The Reckoning of Salt

When it comes to submitting poems to magazines, we all have our favourites.
UK institutions like The North and The Rialto are two of the places I am grateful to for having published some of my poems over the 15 or so years since I began sending them out. Where to send is a matter for the individual poet – why send work to magazines whose contents don’t generally appeal?

Despite the limited number of poetry publishing outlets, there are magazines, both in print and online, I haven’t and probably wouldn’t submit to. Some, because I have never seen a copy, others because I don’t fancy their name, style or editorial content. There are one or two magazines and newspapers that I would not want to have work in due to longstanding political alignments that I disagree with.

Sometimes, partly due to intermittent impatience with the (often understandably) glacial pace of poetry magazine publishing, I will send some poems to a small online magazine or perhaps a blog where I know I will receive a swift response. Once or twice I have been asked for a poem by an editor, which is very nice.

Roy Marshall, Light Work

I think a fair amount about ambition — often inspired in that thinking by the frequent rejections sliding into my email account — lit mags, publishers, film festivals, whatever else I’ve put my work out for. I wish I could move beyond this need for external validation for my creative work, but I haven’t quite developed past it yet. Not quite that evolved.

But I think too about a different kind of ambition, the ambition for any of my pieces of creative output — poem, painting, other thingies. That feels like a less needy form of ambition. The desire that what I’m making become the best it can be, the best I can make it through my work. The operative word being “through,” as this kind of ambition seems to me to be a bit otherworldly. Which generally is not a thing I believe in. Something about being a vessel. About being confident in my abilities enough to step aside, to set my conscious mind aside, to let, to allow. Even if it means ruining the very thing I’m making. Taking that risk. And I fail regularly, both through that self-consciousness leaking through, or through allowing…but things go awry anyway. It happens.

It’s something about trying without trying, making an effort without it being effort-ful. That kind of ambition is worth working toward.

Marilyn McCabe, I am working on drying up the rain that puddles in my subconscious. I am working on sleeping

This morning the air brings the faint smell of wood smoke and whispers Autumn. […]

I have taken a glance backwards this week to see where I have come from to get to this point. So many years of September marking the start of a new year makes this the kind of habit that is ingrained for me, and I do like the freshness of any kind of new beginning. I can see I have been determined to improve my fitness, and I love the way I have heard continued echoes of self-encouragement as well as wonderfully wise words from friends and family. I have definitely improved my ability to work within a stretch zone instead of a comfort zone, and I can see how I can make even more of this going forward.

There is something spangly about this being episode 99 of this particular blogging where each Monday sees me recording what the air smells like, and I love the fact I can clearly remember some of the scents without even rereading the entries. A webinar with Ruby Wax this week (and I am still kicking myself that I didn’t speak to her when I saw her walking the same road as me in in Chester) made some interesting points about mindfulness. For me the anchoring of my sense of smell and the rhythmic nature of walking are my favourite ways of being in the moment. They suit me and do me good.

My new relationship with Monday mornings began two years ago when I made the promise to myself to get up early each Monday and see what the world smelt like wherever I was. It came about because I knew I wouldn’t be driving to work each morning and therefore my morning tweets would disappear. It was also enhanced by my noticing that the air smelt of raw meringue one day when I was out walking in the rain.

Next week to mark episode 100 I would love you to join me in recording what the air smells like where you are and if you think you might forget and want to take a deep in breath through your nose today instead then feel free to send me your observations.

Sue Finch, COBWEBS BLOWN

On the cusp of September, I have many things planned for the new month, including digging into a new poem project. 

I’ve been working on an article on junk journaling for Classpop!, which I haven’t done in a while, tending toward more digital artwork of late outside some random watercolors every once in a while. I have been hoarding ephemera like a mouse with a tiny nest of dried flowers, postcards, etc I hopefully will get to use as fall creeps in. Tomorrow, hopefully I can polish that off and work on some layouts that have been lingering unfinished in the chaos. 

I am working on some new little bits for Patreon as well in the form of collage postcards that will accompany the September mailing. I sent off the last of the August packages the other day and am excited to get to share not only books and poems, but also art this way in the form of some prints, postcards, bookmarks, and stickers (you can subscribe to the paper bundle tier that includes all this for only $13 a month.) There will be some kind of print edition included in each mailing including a luxe hardcover edition of EXOTICA I put the finishing touches on yesterday. October, if I can make it happen logistically, is another little surprise Patreon-exclusive. Having closed the lid on the CLOVEN project, there is that to return to in September to start the road to publication. I was aiming for the new year, but if I move swifter through the process, some early copies may be available as quickly as November.  I will be showing off the cover design for that soon. 

This past week has bought some rejections from that big batch of submissions earlier in the summer, but some poems did appear in the Tide Driven issue of The Solitude Diaries. These are some of the sea-inspired poems of DEEPWATER of which there are more out in the submission wilds that will hopefully find harbors. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/27/2025

Although it’s still warm (with wildfire smoke), fall is approaching, and I’m already ready for dishes featuring delicata squash and our late-harvest corn. Getting the house ready for more visitors, I’m also trying to make space for my books (which my unread stack is now big enough for its own Ikea bookshelf) and changing up decor. My latest stack of books includes collections of ghost stories from other cultures, which should be fun. Our winery book club is reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier for September, a book referenced by so many of our recent club picks, it’s amazing. Were we all super spellbound by that book as teens, and now it’s creeping into our selections?

I’m also judging yet another poetry contest, this time for the SFPA. I judge contests once or twice a year, and I always wonder if people are sending their best work. I don’t send to many individual poetry contests, but I’ll tell you this—you probably have more of a shot than you think. You never know what an individual judge will like. And don’t take not winning personally. Who knows what any judge will like or dislike?

I’m also getting ready to get into poetry submission mode, as I haven’t been sending out poems much in the last few months. Too busy? Too discouraged? Feeling like poetry is maybe a waste of my time after twenty years and feeling like maybe I should switch genres? Maybe a little of each. September is a month of renewal, after all, with its shades of new pencils and new sweaters and of course, more new books. Housecleaning, closet cleanouts, and yes, taking stock of our writing and deciding where to spend our time and energy, with bouquets of dahlias and sunflowers around the house and pumpkin apple muffins in the kitchen.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy September! Last Days of Lavender Gardens and Hot Air Balloons, Judging Poetry Contests, and Preparing for Fall

We are here
with our long-held hungers, our dying
for a taste. We go home with oily newspaper
parcels, the ink of what has happened in the world
pooling into each morsel. Dizzy with pleasure,
we cannot tell when our mouths become raw,
and wake with the sensation of stampeding
beasts, released from the cage of our bodies.

Luisa A. Igloria, Ceremonial

“I wish we humans could be so cooperative,” said one of my neighbours as we watched the chimney swifts circling about the tall brick chimney, their home for the night. This is a sign that fall is coming. As the birds sank down into their chimney, so the pink and orange light fell out of the clouds, and the twilight became dark. Soon they will migrate to Peru.

To begin with, there were half a dozen birds or so. They flit and dart, making no noise. Over the next ten minutes, they are joined by dozens and dozens more, perhaps two hundred. Their flight becomes more patterned. They make loops and figures of eight. Sometimes they crowd above the tall chimney; sometimes they bulge away from it.

Occasionally, one or two birds dive into the chimney; mostly they circulate. At one point, they went so far away, we thought they might spend the night in a nearby chimney. The flock moves in a way that seems intentional, but it’s like watching Brownian motion. You cannot guess how they will be formed in the next few seconds.

Then comes the circle. All the birds, with more and more twittering, started rotating in a great “O”, wider at the top, as if imitating the shape of the Guggenheim Museum. Round and round the chimney they turn, tweeting more quickly. We chat about how this must be it, they must be about to go down.

Then they flex out, make more figures of eight, more wide flights away. Twice more this happens. And then the circle moves faster, tighter. They cohere. The descent begins just as the colour goes out of the evening light.

As they fall into the chimney, a little trickle at the bottom of the large funnel, it looks like a film being run backwards, of smoke escaping in reverse. The coordination required for a dozen birds to descend so closely to each other into the chimney without getting hurt is extraordinary. It almost feels like a visual trick.

Henry Oliver, Chimney swifts on Labour Day

次の世のしづけさにある黄菊かな　浅井一志

tsugi no yo no shizukesa ni aru kigiku kana

            in the tranquility

            of the next world

            yellow chrysanthemums…

                                                            Hitoshi Asai 

from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 28, 2025)

This week: listener poets, an undocumented sun, a mind full of scorpions, the whisper between things, and much more. Enjoy.

I met a poem that left without
saying a word. I still remember it by heart.

Somewhere between the lake and
the glass house on a nothing afternoon
in Lalbagh, a peepal tree fell.
Four dozen people never
heard it. Never looked up from
their phones. Did the tree fall?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Late dirge for the undead

TGLP is a nonprofit that works with hospitals and other healthcare organizations to reduce stress, anxiety, and burnout, and to increase human connection, using the tools of listening and poetry. The organization has been doing listener poet sessions since 2018 at places like Sibley Memorial Hospital at Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care. TGLP works with doctors, nurses, residents, medical students, patients, and family members, all to help people feel heard.

As soon as I heard about this practice, I had to learn more. I’ve been a listener and a poet my whole life, and these modes of being have played significant roles in my career. Being an active listener made me a better journalist, communicator, and leader. Being a poet (even a shy one, of “Barefoot Rank”) has helped me stay attuned to the power and dynamism of language, and it’s made me a better writer and editor. Listening has been an increasingly important part of my spiritual practice in the past decade. […]

The course was a profound experience. Over five weeks in June, ten of us came together twice a week, for three hours each time. Our cohort included a wide range of amazing and talented individuals with deep experience across both poetry and healthcare. Our instructor, Ravenna Raven, led the course with dedication, enthusiasm, expertise, and a terrific sense of emotional availability and vulnerability. She created a welcoming, nurturing, exciting space for learning. […]

We studied poetic techniques, listening skills, how to hold space, trauma-informed practices, crisis management skills, how to connect across difference, and more. We heard from guest speakers, all of them experienced listener poets, who inspired us with stories of healing and writing. We practiced listening to and writing poems for each other and for one remarkable guest, a neurologist with a love of poetry that he longed to share with his patients.

And then, during the course of July, we did a practicum: Each of us held six listening poetry sessions and wrote six poems for six different individuals. I had the honor of spending time with eight amazing “poemees” and writing poems for them (I did two extra because of scheduling complications). It gave me a window into the worlds of those I listened to, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be a therapist, a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain, or just a human being dealing with change, pain, and complexity. And they told me that the poems they received were moving, inspiring, and encouraging.

As for the course’s impact on me, reading Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry and Singing School and James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line sparked a personal renaissance in how I approach the music and meter of the mostly free verse I write. Learning how to distill interview notes into poems was the transformative practice I was looking for. I know how to hold a conversation, form a connection, and draw people out: I’ve practiced this for years. Now I can use those skills to write poems for them in addition to bylines.

As a listener poet, I can use my journalistic and poetic skills together in the service of helping people feel heard and helping them express deep emotions and experiences. Like other listener poets, I can bring gifts of presence and poetry to those who need them. 

Dylan Tweney, When listening and poetry collide

I go to the hospital, come back wired up.
They’re checking what my heart does if I pick up and carry a sack of pig feed,
haul dead branches to the boundary fence, what happens
if I become angry, disappointed, sad, ordinarily happy, ecstatically happy, calm, still.
If I shout. If I sing. In tune, out of tune. If I stay silent. Breathe normally. Hold my breath.
They already know my heart short-circuits and re-routes itself.
They want to check what I remember, what I forget.
They want to check who I’ve avoided, who I’ve embraced.
They want to know about love, faith, politics, education (self or formal).
They want to know how come I earned a living doing what I couldn’t understand.

Bob Mee, WIRED UP, AND OTHER POEMS

This week’s revisit started in the unlikely inspo of a Pinterest account. A user decided it would be amusing to create a stylish and bougie faux child to populate her pages of decor, fashion, and other pins. It was intriguing, the idea of an imaginary kid, let alone one with incredibly unrealistic and elite tastes. As someone who did not plan to have actual children, and who often thinks of writing projects as strange and wordy offspring of sorts, I started writing prose poems that addressed my own mythical daughter, with an eye toward exploring how it feels to be childless by choice in a world that (even more now) finds that unusual. The series of poems wound up being one of my shorter collage zines, first in print, but you can also read an e-version now. Later, it was also included in FEED, which is all about mothers and mothering. 

Kristy Bowen, throwback thursday | impossible objects

the booming of whale song
hooves across the savanna
the screech of a raptor
a breath at sunset
moonsong above
the crackle of a camp fire
the yes of locked eyes
yes
some words reverberate
homeless in the tome of the ear

Jim Young, a poem for Salem’s poem

We have a thing we call consciousness that we think nothing else has. This consciousness should make us “know better,” should make us able to monitor the results of our actions, and change them for the common “good,” to work against “evil,” for the benefit of our species, our environment, our future. But that is not how we, homo so-called sapiens, operate. We are a learning species, but we don’t grasp the lessons.

It feels like the virus also let loose an epidemic of evil. It started with small refusals: to mask, to distance, to take heed, to be careful. But has blown into a worldwide festering of hate and fear, and a glory of violence, of willful ignorance. It is breathtaking, the velocity and breadth of this epidemic, and how meager the efforts against it, we conscious species the world over.

We are the belching spew, cyclical in our disasters.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, they say in French. The more things change, the more they are the same damn thing. Here is a poem from the recent issue of Blackbird.

Marilyn McCabe, teasing out a future that wouldn’t be

An undocumented sun flees gestapo horizon before morning’s first light.

Secret police riddle it with bullets, and the sun falls, sharing its blood-red light.

It’s just past the honeysuckle hour, and the scent hangs like the death of innocence.

Rich Ferguson, Just Past the Honeysuckle Hour

Another piece of bad news (which has to be read through the filter of even worse news, of course) came through—people who applied for the NEA got the notice that their applications would not be read and NEA grants to writers and artists were cancelled. America just keeps getting greater, right?

I have never won an NEA grant—but it seems like another chip at the arts and academia and anyone that might not tow the party line from the Republicans. Writers and artists are notoriously not easy to control, and that’s not okay in Trump’s fascist government, as it hasn’t been with many dictators—Chairman Mao, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot. I had a friend post on Facebook that her lecture at an Air Force academy was cancelled after someone looked up her work online—although the people who invited her were apologetic, they were not in control. So, this government really is afraid of artists’ speech. Standing up to power has always been our job, but now there are more consequences. I posted on Facebook that Trump’s government is going to make all the talent with the means and energy to move leave the country, and someone commented that that was the point. Trump doesn’t want anyone here who dares to criticize.

Even though I’ve been fighting my health problems, I also feel like I’m fighting the anti-art forces as well, like a video game where you fight one boss, and six more appear. You know, writers and artists are already struggling to earn a living in a society that wants its art for free (or created by AI). Every little bit that’s taken away is a little bit of a chance for an artist to breathe easy, financially, for a little bit. I am struggling with how to earn a living as a writer and survive in a society that doesn’t value the sickly, or the disabled, and I am both. I mean, almost all of our writing heroes were sickly—not all, but a lot. I hope to keep writing, keep publishing, keep teaching and reading and mentoring. Maybe my body and my country throw up obstacles that sometimes feel insurmountable. As we head into a new season (though it’s still in the nineties here for some reason), I am looking for hope.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parents Visit and Sibling Visit, Getting Sick Under Stress, and Writers and Artists Dumped by the NEA

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACHIEVE?

A gold medal pings into my mind as the question lands between us in the silence. But I can’t say gold medal because I don’t know exactly what I want it for. My mind pictures me standing there at the award ceremony, bowing my head forward a little in readiness for the presentation. The ribbon brushes my hair, and I feel the warmth of the fingers of the woman transferring the medal as her hands knock against my ears. My head is cumbersome. People with cumbersome heads shouldn’t be getting medals. The applause suddenly feels false, and I didn’t even hear the start of it. I need to hear the beginning of the congratulatory clap. I need to be in the moment. I change my wish. I want a gold medal that fits easily over my head. No, I know what I want… I want a head that fits through the gap in a medal ribbon without causing a kerfuffle for the person handling the ceremony. I want it all to look flawless so everyone remembers me standing on that podium being given a medal. Given, that’s an interesting word. Medals are won not given. Not in a tombola, one in a hundred chance kind of way. You earn a medal by setting a goal and working on it. Over and over again until you are the best you can be. There’s that question again, What would you like to achieve?

Sue Finch, NEW SHOES

My dog told me he had learned eighty-one languages on the internet.

They were Abkhaz, Acehnese, Acholi, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Avar, Awadhi, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Baoulé, Bashkir, Basque, Batak Belarusian, Bemba, Bengali, Betawi, Bhojpuri, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chichewa, Chinese, Chuukese, Chuvash, Corsican, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dhivehi, Dinka, Dogri, Dombe, Dutch, Dyula, Dzongkha, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Fon, French, Frisian, Friulian, Fulani, Ga, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hakha Chin, Hausa, Hawaiian and Hebrew.

He admitted he still had much to learn. Still, it’s impressive, I said. What motived you? The desire, he said, to speak to all living things, whether creature or plant, chancellor or fern. Snails, rocks, tractors, clouds. Of course, what he really said was, Bark bark bark bark! because though I did high school French and a bit of Spanish in college, I never learned language beyond that of my own people, an insular and trepidatious tribe who cleaved to their tongue as if it were both a small fire and the inside of a tank.

Gary Barwin, My dog learned 81 languages on the Internet

Who are the grape poets? What are their grape poems? And is grape poetry possible any more? These are questions people often ask me — at least, I think that’s what they’re asking.

Grape poetry, of course, begins with the classical world. The opening lines of Virgil’s Georgics — here translated by John Dryden — promise us sound advice on growing our own:

What makes a plenteous Harvest, when to turn
The fruitful Soil, and when to sowe the Corn;
The Care of Sheep, of Oxen, and of Kine;
And how to raise on Elms the teeming Vine

[…]

By the Victorian era, the pleasure of eating a bunch of grapes in polite society had become a trial of decorum. Grape scissors were invented for snipping off fruit from a bunch at the table, and a book called The Manners and Tone of Good Society (1879) described how to eat them gracefully, by performing a kind of conjuring trick:

When eating grapes, the half closed hand should be placed to the lips and the stones and skins adroitly allowed to fall into the fingers and quickly placed on the side of the plate, the back of the hand concealing the manoeuvre from view.

It was in such a context of delicacy and restraint that our next grape poet, Christina Rossetti, allowed the young Laura, in Goblin Market (1862), to be led into sensuous temptation by “pellucid grapes without one seed”:

How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.

Had “luscious” and “bushes” ever been rhymed before in the history of English verse? There’s something outrageous here about their casual pairing, which rewrites the more conventional rhyme associated with Laura’s more conventional sister, Lizzie, earlier in the same passage: “Among the brookside rushes, / […] /Lizzie veil’d her blushes”.

Where, though, can we find grape poetry in the modern era? J. Alfred Prufrock doesn’t dare to eat a peach, and there are no grapes to be had in The Waste Land (1922), although there is Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, with his “pocket full of currants” — one of Eliot’s many images of dryness, as well as one of his allusions to classical civilization (the etymology of “currants” takes us back to the ancient Greek city of Corinth).

This allusiveness is, I think, typical of the fate of grape poetry in the twentieth century. Like the plums in William Carlos Williams’ icebox, the grapes of the modern poet are both there and not there. So, Wallace Stevens calls a poem “In the Clear Season of Grapes” (1923), but the only fruit in it is “a platter of pears, / Vermilion smeared over green”. “The clear season of grapes” is, however, the poem’s subtly metonymic way of evoking a specific time and place: early autumn in north-east America (“This conjunction of mountains and sea and our lands”), where clear skies produce the “welter of frost” that sweetens the harvest of native grape varieties.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Who Are the Grape Poets?

Because sometimes our days don’t turn out as we planned. Because there are people who go to work every day to help the rest of us navigate the maladies of the body. Because modern pharmaceuticals not only reduce suffering but take us to a place we fondly remember from our youth. And because sometimes a poem is born in the unexpected places in which we find ourselves, I am thrilled to have my poem “Ode to the Emergency Room” published at The Poetry Lighthouse for the month of August. I hope you check it out here: The Poetry Lighthouse.

Carey Taylor, Ode to the Emergency Room

I was going to ask Sarah Corbett for permission to post her poem ‘View of a Badger on the Heights Road’ from her collection, A Perfect Mirror, but I didn’t get round to asking. However, here’s part of the first stanza.

It looks like a clean death, curled as you are
on the verge, almost relaxed, paws folded
over each other, head turned to the side.
Not a trace of earth on you, killed on a night
walk, perhaps, on this treacherous moor road.

++++
I wanted to post this poem because a week or so ago Rachael and I were driving down to Dungeness and I saw a badger on the side of the road (M20, I think) that looked like someone had just pushed over a taxidermied badger. It looked stiff, but untouched.

I was doing some quality Sunday driving, but still didn’t properly register it, so I sort of forgot about the badger until later that night when I picked out my copy of A Perfect Mirror from my TBR* pile. Well, blass me, thass a rumun‘ (Ask a person from Norfolk) I thought when I saw the aforementioned poem on page 15.

Mat Riches, Lodge (49) some dates in your memory

The memory of doing is the memory 
       of exactitude broken up by lapses
in space. I relearn patience folding
       pages into folios, making sure
the grain of paper runs in the same
       direction. I stack them and prepare 
to sew— concentrating as you push the needle
       shaped like a smile into holes I’ve
made with an awl. Between breaths, the noise
       of the world can seem to soften; 
its edges waxed and cut into lengths like
       linen thread. Someone filmed a rare 
golden cicada in the moment it shrugged
       itself loose from its shell, 
and I marveled at such precision. Clean
       seams, tiny beautiful ruffled wings.

Luisa A. Igloria, Memory of Doing

There are lyrical poems in James Fenton’s Out of Danger, and then there are poems that are very nearly song lyrics. Both give pleasure, though arguably pleasure of different kinds. The book has keen observation, social conscience, and musical intelligence in abundance. Are the rhymes worn-out in places, like tires losing their treads? Maybe, but the Philippines and other South Pacific islands provide new rhymes and treads.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a genial, acute, and personable guide to these 50 poems about a range of outward-looking subjects. It is a good snapshot of contemporary Anglo-American verse, with a few oldies thrown in. I did not think that all the poems were as good as Ó Tuama said, but it would be a big surprise if I did. 

Jee Leong Koh, James Fenton’s OUT OF DANGER and Pádraig Ó Tuama’s POETRY UNBOUND

Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon  debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.

With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.

The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic    trekked the sahara     then / mastered roller-blading    next up / i’m   starting   classes   in   mandarin’.

Matthew Paul, On Mary Mulholland’s ‘Stilling Time’

I’m sure there will be many readers whose knowledge of Margaret of Anjou is derived largely from Shakespeare’s histories in which she is portrayed as a hateful, ruthless and unfeminine figure, ‘the she-wolf of France’. In Daughter of Fire (Yaffle, 2025) Lucy Heuschen seeks to rehabilitate Margaret’s image. However, this is more than a poetic biography of a maligned historical figure, by giving voice to a woman of the past Heuschen seeks to explore the nature of womanhood and our society’s treatment of women both then and now.

There is no doubt that this collection is the product of considerable historical knowledge and a prodigious poetic talent. Based on primary historical sources, Heuschen creates a character very different to Shakespeare’s female villain. In Rough Crossing we meet first-hand the fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou travelling to meet her prospective husband, Henry VI. Understandably she is a little bewildered, (‘how is it   I am here/ but not here’) and anxious (‘I tense’); she is in a new strange world (‘his accent makes me laugh’), and yet the poem ends with an assertion of an ambition surprising for one so young, when she says ‘I will/ tame you//my England.’  Note the possessive pronoun, this is a political marriage. She will be a wife and a queen. There is no hesitation: but rather acceptance and determination given emphasis here by the bluntness and simplicity of the statement. 

We see the same ambition in Margaret and Suffolk at the chess board. This is clearly early in her reign. The description of her in the opening stanza is significant: ‘She skulks in her chair/ scowling at the state of play.’ The alliteration gives the verbs here particular emphasis: ‘skulk’ and ‘scowl’. Skulking suggests that Margaret is yet to reveal her true self, and the reason for this and her ‘scowl’ is made clear subsequently. As in the chess game, currently she lacks stratagem. This game is a symbol of her status: at the moment she lacks political skills, understanding of ‘Patterns she should predict, / sacrifices she could make’ and as a consequence ‘She watches him take/ piece after piece.’  It is also the case that the political system is loaded against women: she remarks at the end of the poem ‘It is silly, n’est-ce pas, this rule/ that only the King can leap.’ However, she is not prepared to accept her current position: she wants to learn the rules of the game to become an effective player: ‘She wants to see every move/ laid out to the checkmate.’ In doing so, she will defy the conventions of the time.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Daughter of Fire’ by Lucy Heuschen

Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.

First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy of an Abduction’ – we see the special kind of breadth this gives: a rain of vivid glimpses of domestic life, domestic violence, war, flight, seduction, abduction, rape, sometimes in nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century incarnations, sometimes in a Homeric one, sometimes hovering between, as when a soldier sent to collect a girl – perhaps  Helen of Troy, perhaps a modern trafficking victim – drives past bullet-holed road signs but carries a bow. Breadth, then, is partly a matter of historical range, partly a matter of emotional variety. The poet moves us from scene to scene with a speed that I would call dazzling except that the scenes we move between are so solidly and clearly established in themselves. This combination of speed and clarity depends on the vivid economy of Dugdale’s images and the sureness of her rhythms. What makes it moving is the quiet empathy with which she presents many of her characters, and the way humble lives, sometimes caught in devastating circumstances, are given weight by the epic context and style of various sections.

The impression of breadth and scale also comes from Dugdale’s virtuoso handling of different forms. There are fourteen numbered sections, varying in length from one to nineteen pages. Most are in verse, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not, but II, IV and VII are short drama scripts in prose with stage directions. II – titled ‘In the Rehearsal Room’ – is a brilliantly comic dramatic monologue, spoken by a patronisingly self-satisfied theatre director presumably putting on a play about Troy. VII, a stage or screen passage in which Helen tells her dreams to a bored, then jealous Paris, is equally funny. It’s more haunting than II, though, because other tones are interwoven with the satire, glimmers of wistful yearning and (this being a dialogue, not a monologue) a frustrated desire for communication on Helen’s part. This section, in other words, is much more layered than the second. For readers of ancient Greek literature, there’s even an apparent allusion to one of the most poignant moments in Pindar’s victory odes.

Edmund Prestwich, Sasha Dugdale, The Strongbox – review

It is as a poet writing in Gaelic that [Aonghas] MacNeacail – who died in 2022 – is most well-known, though he would himself provide translations of his work into English, what, in the poem ‘last night’, he refers to as Gaelic’s ‘sister tongue’. There were also poems written in Scots and these variants give an insight into what Colin Bramwell here calls ‘the language situation in Scotland’ within which MacNeacail worked all his life. For a number of years, MacNeacail lived and wrote under the anglicised name Angus Nicolson, but always considered himself a tri-lingualist and antagonistic to the kind of divisiveness such a ‘situation’ might give rise to. His natural inclination was democratic, pacifist, anti-authoritarian, and modernist. Now, the collection, beyond (eds. Colin Bramwell with Gerda Stevenson (Shearsman Books, 2024)) gives readers a selection of poems written in English by Aonghas MacNeacail over the past 30 years. One of the implications of the book’s title is his deeply held wish to look ‘beyond’ division, not to anything transcendental (MacNeacail’s focus was always this world, not some other), but to the next term in an on-going dialectical process. One of the little gems from ‘the notebook’, included here, imagines a cup of knowledge, the liquor within, also knowledge, a grain is added and stirred, and the grain then consumes the liquor and continues to ‘grow, root, sprout / find elbows, crack the cup // find clay’.

MacNeacail’s modernism took its key lessons from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Olson, and Creeley and most of the poems here have that fluid, unpunctuated (hence pointed by the breath), often short lined, often indented formal shape we associate with the Black Mountain. He was a member of one of Phillip Hobsbaum’s fertile ‘groups’ (along with Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard) and the advice given was to go back to his roots, to ‘write about what you know’. In part, this took MacNeacail back to his childhood, growing up in Uig, on the Isle of Skye, speaking only Gaelic. It also made it clear what he wanted to escape from: Gerda Stevenson describes this as ‘the confines of the proscriptive Free Church of Scotland’. Several childhood poems, illustrate the stifling force of religion, on his mother, for example, ‘strapped down tightly / by a darkly warding book thick with orders that drove / and hedged her way’ (‘missing’). The church governed education too, the teacher little more than a ‘stern presence’, who demanded ‘psalms / from memory’ (‘crofter, not’).

Martyn Crucefix, Aonghas MacNeacail’s English Language Poems Reviewed

The collection “I Am Not Light” ends in “Openhanded” with a final phrase “at last, my heart is full.” A line that signals a closure. However there’s a further section labelled “Bonus Poems” – as if poetry books get to do an encore – among which is “Scorpions” inspired by a quote from Macbeth, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” and the scorpions,

They travel the weave of fine veins
padding cushions of shame
with vesicles of acute remembering:
predators of opportunity
inebriated by time ̶
dark and sweet and threatening.

The metaphorical scorpions roam into recesses of buried memory, bring shame to the surface but these are offerings of darker emotions and events to facilitate learning and understanding. It returns to the collection’s theme of meeting life full-on.

Louise Machen’s poems are full of life, positives, negatives and the need to experience. Decorum may be limiting and caution is not recommended. “I Am Not Light” is not light and cheerful, although there is some wry, observational humour, and it unapologetically explores the darker side of human life, the break-ups, a miscarriage, grief and bereavement while offering a torch so the end of the tunnel can be seen.

Emma Lee, “I Am Not Light” Louise Machen (Black Bough Press) – book review

The Madrid Review is out at the end of August. Excited to see some of my poetry translated into Spanish in this edition. At the heart of this edition are Poems for Palestine – a poignant, powerful series of poems written by poets from around the world, addressed directly to the people of Palestine and Ukraine. These poems speak with urgency and compassion, weaving together voices of solidarity, hope, grief, and resistance. Haia Mohammed, a 22-year-old poet from Gaza whose debut pamphlet, The Age of Olive Trees (Out-Spoken Press) has been lauded for its raw honesty and lyrical strength, helped co-edit the issue and there’s an interview with her too.

Salena Godden, New books

A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight, by Elisa Gabbert:

“But for him it was not an important failure” — this, I think, is the crux of [Auden’s “Musée Des Baux Arts] disaster’s in the eye of the beholder, and if the eye does not behold, it’s not disaster at all.

Gabbert does a deep dive into this poem, which is, nominally, a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

A summary of the poem does not do it justice—it is about the significance of the fact that Icarus’s fall, which Auden uses to represent human suffering on a much larger scale, is a minor, insignificant part of the painting that you would easily miss if the title didn’t tell you to look for it in the lower right hand corner, the point being that the suffering of others is something we have to choose to pay attention to, that it is something we can look away from all too easily. Here are the first few lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

And here are the lines specifically referencing Breughel’s painting:

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;

Gabbert’s digital tour through the poem is well worth paying close attention to. She makes the poem’s underlying mechanics visible and accessible and shows how Auden constructed them to arrive at the poem’s “meaning.” She also illuminates the poem’s ekphrastic nature by uncovering paintings it refers to in addition to the one Auden names. What struck me most, however, and made me want to include her article here is the way her analysis arrives at this:

“Musée des Beaux Arts”…offers no comforting slogans or rallying cries, no assurance that suffering comes to an end or happens for a reason…What the poem really does is ask questions. The truth, we might infer, cannot be told — the truth is always changing; the truth is an ongoing inquiry…It asks us to question our place in the world — to ask what we might be missing…Do we spare a thought for…suffering, or sail calmly on? Moral absolution is available, the poem seems to say. That doesn’t mean we deserve it.

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #45

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts. […]

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

One concern is with poetry’s rescue of discourse, where the poem, or the kind of thinking a poem is, can be a true statement, albeit one that we only very briefly inhabit or are allowed. Recently, I’m invested—to my surprise—in rehabilitating the old quarrel between Shelley and Wordsworth, via Mill, poems of the head vs poems of the heart, to ask: why choose? As in, why is that the choice we are asked to make again and again? There’s (always) questions of what reading is good for; in what ways does poetry do a kind of (moral) philosophizing; interest in humans, their behaviors and reasons (actual, believed), and the lives of creatures.

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

Writers and artists and thinkers I admire tend to believe in some different or other reality, the pursuit and discovery of which language, image, aesthetic expression uniquely allow. Art is a bridge one walks on and toward—an earthy, clumsy substance and a spiritual, extravagant one. It often encodes a personal longing but it’s also social, environmental, historical, political. Who but writers and artists will honor these stubborn, modest, generous dreams?

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hannah Brooks-Motl

Winkles are small molluscs, around the size of a 5 pence coin, and you need to collect them by the hundreds for them to be worth even a small amount. My brother David and I, as the two eldest, took a handle each of the faded, red plastic bucket that served as a receptacle for coal, peat, potatoes – and that day, winkles. My mother would lead the way, holding the hand of a younger brother. When we stopped, it was always her hand that lifted the dark weeds from the face of the rock. I remember she always parted it neatly, up and over. It was graceful and methodical. How an islander might lift the veil of his bride. The action set sandhoppers skittering in the disturbed sand. Sometimes it would uncover green crabs with soft, young shells. But the rock exposed, the purpose was to pick the ten or so winkles from where they hidden beneath the weeds, wetly dark as black pearls.

On that day, approaching one especially large outpost stone, our bucket already half-full, my mother pulled back the seaweed and revealed the large surface of a rock covered completely, every inch, with winkles. Even decades later, they laugh about my reaction – I jumped around the beach proclaiming that we were rich. Of course, we were not.

All children are conscious of their situation. I knew our need not as something necessarily shameful but as a cloud over things. But still, I’d maintain that my reaction was less to do with the potential for being rich and having our problems alleviated, but more to do with that other thing that I have been thinking about, the idea of the world as a place that responds – a place that understands the want or the need of the person, and reacts. Back then, the world was alive – and in more than just the way of animals and plants, lapwings and bog cotton. It was a place that might listen. Now, returning to Uist, it is hard to feel that old belief. Once, it seemed the hard wind blew the body in a certain direction because it was serving as a guide. Now, mostly, the gale is just the gale. That old faith has all but elapsed.

Which brings me to John Ruskin’s definition of a poet as a person to whom things speak. I understand it is a less subscribed-to position. My contemporaries seem admirable as types who follow that idea of Shelley’s, where the poet is the setters of standards and rules, ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I saw Alice Oswald recently and thought about the strength of such a stance. Praise difference, perhaps – I feel my own life lean more towards Ruskin’s definition than Shelley’s. For me – what the poem can be, now and then, rarely and seldomly, seems linked to this act of hearing the world speak back. It hears the whisper between things.

Niall Campbell, On the World That Calls Back

we have one chicken who cracks her own eggs.
i find them, not smashed but with tiny holes.
at first i thought they might be hatching
but i always found the eggs empty of creature.
runny gold yolk. the white, like a fresh halo.
the more i care for animals, the more i am certain
they all write poetry. this is hers, a little fracture
in the dark of the coop.

Robin Gow, a thousand fractures

Even in a world as calamitously greed-ravaged as ours, redeeming beauty may be found outside of our narrow, anthropocentric philosophies. 

But for how much longer? The world has already diminished from that which poets described only decades ago. The ice caps are rapidly shrinking, the soil is blighted and fatigued, and conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of species vanish annually. Meanwhile, those with the power to ameliorate the situation do nothing — unless they make it worse. They’d clearly rather incarcerate the vulnerable, criminalize our joyous differences, wage eternal wars, and weaken our already meager environmental protections. 

What should the nature poet do in times like these? I don’t think any single answer is equal to this question. The tragedy is too immense for an individual to fully grasp. But for what little it’s worth, here’s my answer: perpetually renew people’s love for whatever is left, even as it opens them up to the pain of loss. As we face the destruction of so many things that make life worth living, as we turn paradise into our own unmarked grave, I believe that cultivating an anguished love for the fading world lays the groundwork necessary for whatever change remains possible. 

If we’re to meaningfully reverse course in this eleventh hour, I think one of the first hurdles we have to overcome is the ubiquitous nihilism that breeds inaction. Upon learning of the profound threats to the environment, the power of those reaping short-term benefits, and our culpability in it all, many feel helpless and (understandably) give up, closing off their hearts and looking away. Despair is the thing with feathers, plucked. But loving the world through each loss keeps your skin in the game. It keeps you from letting it all pass undefended and unmourned. It keeps your eyes fixed on what’s happening. By loving the world even as we confront its dying, I believe we can conquer our paralyzing despondency that only serves the status quo.

Writing Nature Poetry as the Earth Dies Screaming – guest post by Joe Roberts (Trish Hopkinson)

Thanks to Devin Kelly’s Ordinary Plots, I have been reading The Inextinguishable, poems by Michael Lavers and it is exactly what I needed right now. There are in fact three poems in the book with the title “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Right there, I’m delighted. Read Lavers for lines like “and since chaos so often wins / let’s demand what we can.” Another poem ends, “This is not an argument or an idea. / It’s just a feeling, and these days feelings / are all I have. Feelings are everything.” And they are, aren’t they?

I was reminded of a post from days gone by on the word “tenderness” and of Galway Kinnell’s line: “The secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness.’” 

And maybe the secret title behind “The Happiest Day of Your Life” is “Tenderness.” This book felt very human to me at a time when I think we crave the very human more than ever. I would honestly love a book where every single poem is titled “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Please feel free to write it for me.

Shawna Lemay, The Happiest Day of Your Life

Who can say anything definitive about the United States? It is chequered with the complexities of a self-governing people: one nation, perhaps, but not one set of rules or laws. From the condo board to the state legislature to the President there are dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds of Americas. Everyone knows this: it is foundational to American culture. And yet, the Americans never tire of telling you this. Every time I write about America, I am reminded of this fact by someone. Even the briefest note, a passing observation about my neighbourhood, elicits the response: “ah, but not everywhere in America.” Perhaps this is what the Americans fear most. It is not tyranny they scent on every breeze, but the fear of being mistaken for their neighbours. […]

On Sunday evening, children fed, wife in bed eating plain crackers, I walked up to the diner and read the paper. I came home through the woods reciting Robert Frost. I saw a rabbit and a series of unfamiliar birds: bright yellow, speckled grey, a flash of red. It was a brief outing, but a splendidly American one. The Washington Post had a good article about how George Washington became America’s first great leader. There is something perfect about the combination of reading the paper in the diner and walking home through some (brief, tame, with a path) woodland.

Henry Oliver, Cigarettes in the pharmacy

This is a good
place for walking. Getting from island to island
absorbs all your attention. Hop from a rounded stone
to a flat one without crushing an orchid or
twisting an ankle, move across a whole field
like this, away from the portal tomb, the sad bones.

“The Burren” was published more than ten years ago in Hampden-Sydney Review, then in my 2015 collection Radioland. I fell in love with the Burren, a karst landscape in the west of Ireland, not far from Galway, during my first trip to that country, and something about the stark beauty of the place helped me move from angry poems about my father’s death to a more peaceful one.

That was a gray, cold June day; on a brilliant August one, the last day of our recent, second trip to Ireland, we revisited the place. In 2025 certain locations, especially the Poulnabrone portal tomb, are much more heavily touristed (I can’t remember it being roped off before). Wildflowers bloomed everywhere, though, and there were lots of quiet places, too. We dodged and hopped through a field of cow poop, for instance, to climb down to the ruins of a twelfth-century church, where a couple of people had tied red rags on trees in hope of healing or some other magic: an ash, a hawthorn. I can’t take long hikes at the moment, between the sprained ankle and sciatica, but I was in good enough shape for short walks, and they were again restorative.

Lesley Wheeler, Hawthorns, bogs, & undersongs

As I rolled out the dough, in a way that I rarely do for just myself, I thought of that quote attributed to Martin Luther, about the world ending tomorrow.  I thought, if the world was ending tomorrow, I’d be making these kind of luxurious pumpkin cinnamon rolls.

I looked up the Martin Luther quote, ignored the debate over whether or not Luther actually said such a thing, and found a quote at an environmental stewardship website:  “As the story goes, when Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, he answered, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’”

I thought, if the world were to end tomorrow, I would make a batch of cinnamon rolls–two batches, one for today, and one for tomorrow.

I decided to use extra pecans and sugar because my friend was coming over for coffee, and a poem started to sprout in my brain.  I wrote down these lines:
If the world was on schedule to end
tomorrow, some of us would plant
an apple tree. Others would spend
the evening phoning every friend.

I would make two pans
of cinnamon rolls, one for tonight,
and one for the morning of the day
the world was on schedule to end.

I wrote a few more stanzas and let the poem sit (or rise, perhaps) overnight.  This morning, I added another line here or there, and I’ll let it sit longer.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Cinnamon Roll at the End of the World

calendar
only now

wristwatch
only now

this moment
only now

drop of rain
only now

cat stretches
only now

Jason Crane, POEM: only now

It seems to me that one path forward for each of us is to examine our own innocence and the reasons and ways in which we shy away from being more inclusive, open, and generous. We can begin to take small steps toward an embrace of “radical hospitality” and to learn from those who are not like us. We should neither waste time mourning the loss of programs and protections, nor wait for the large systems to correct themselves; it is up to each one of us to do what we can to make a better world in the spaces closest to us, here and now.

Beth Adams, Radical Hospitality

I’ve been aghast these many months
the months bunch up, 
like a patient upon a table
anesthetized, 
on half-burned grass, 
aghast again, at August’s end

So many months with broken breath, 
now snot rags, ragweed,
wheezing; the peeved grass,
having lost what was naïve
also clotted in a sneeze

but think, the patient, I, anesthetized,
might salvage breath for what’s ahead
the ghast extending out in time 
to breathe, to lay a hand upon a head
to pay respect to a flattened bird
the breath to bike around its head
the rag we hold, so dear, to make it
last, to count no matter what

Jill Pearlman, Aghast

This week: a green snake, the sound of a lawnmower, worms without mouths or stomachs, a protest dance, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s the time of year when, according to the lunisolar calendar, we move from 小暑 xiǎoshǔ–when the heat begins to get unbearable–to 大暑 dàshǔ, the hottest time of the year. It may also be the greenest time: my garden suddenly plumps out huge squash leaves, giant sunflowers, masses of beans, zinnias, basil. The tomatoes are finally burgeoning after a late start. It’s too hot to spend much time weeding and pruning: I harvest what I can and retreat to the shade as soon as possible, where I can read. […]

I’ve been taking a break from reading poetry, though that wasn’t planned on my part. July brought a wedding, a death, and some travel; and now, in the intense summer doldrums, I prefer to read for entertainment or information, or just to pass the time. Poetry takes more brain and heart space for me, more “intentionality” or concentration, than most non-fiction books or novels do. This is not to say any other genre is less demanding in and of itself. It’s a personal quirk: I am more attentive when reading poetry than I am when I read other forms of literature, probably because I’m unconsciously (or consciously) endeavoring to learn something of the craft and style and context of poems by other poets. It’s a method of processing how to write poems. But as I have no plans to write fiction or non-fiction, I read such genres for entirely different reasons.

Usually I try to read outside on the porch, in the hammock, on the garden swing. Some days it is just too damned hot and humid, though, and I resort to the air-conditioning indoors. The indoor climate has no flies or gnats but also no bird songs, cicada hums, cricket calls, breezes, scents of summer.

Ann E. Michael, Reading in shade

Soon it will be time to read something new–I got Alison Bechdel’s latest book from the library last night.  But in some ways, it will be a return to the old.  Sure it’s not officially the dykes to look out for who are all grown up now.  But I suspect it will be like visiting old college friends.

I am hoping that much of my autumn will feel like revisiting old literary friends from college days.  I spent part of this week trying to remember the name of a book that came out when I was last teaching this literature, a book about the women of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle.  Yesterday it just popped into my head:  A Passionate Sisterhood.  And lo and behold, the public library has it!  I’ve requested it and should be able to get it before I need to teach the material.

I remember loving it so much that I bought my own copy back in the early days of this century and promptly never taught that literature of the early days of the British Romantic era much again.  Did I keep the book when we moved 3 years ago?  I can imagine thinking my days of teaching that literature had come and gone and getting rid of it.  I can also imagine that I kept it for sentimental reasons.

I am wondering if this fall will also feel like a time when I meet up with my old creative writing self.  Clearly I am not going to write a novel–or even take notes on a novel–this summer.  But maybe teaching a creative writing class will inspire me in new ways, or in old ways.  I’d be grateful for either.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Last Saturday in July: Saturday Snippets

We’ve reached that strange mid-point of summer when I start to long for fall. It’s usually around the time the heat and the humidity gets untenable and inhospitable to being outside much at all. I start to long for rainy afternoons, chilly air, and hot beverages all day long (not just coffee in the AM.) Start to long for pastries and dishes involving apples and pumpkins and cranberries. Fall makes me long for various serious projects and very serious poeting after dallying much of the summer, even if this summer has been productive for getting poems on the page. I am rounding a corner on the CLOVEN series of Iphigenia/myth inspired poems and nearing the end, I can feel it. Possibly before September if I keep at it. There is still traces of summer left to grasp, however, so I intend to enjoy the cool of the A/C at my back in front of the window while I write, icy afternoon cocktails courtesy of the wedding gift blender, and occasional outings into the heat.

Kristy Bowen, July Paper Boat

I often think of Paul Celan while walking alongside the Seine that, in the summer, smells like fish, sweat, and rotting apples. One can look at the green of the river and imagine the countless bodies that have fallen in it or will fall in it in the future, or one can also try to guess how many of the people sitting there, with their feet dangling above the dark greenness while drinking beer or wine, have imagined falling in it. It’s not because the Seine is particularly reminiscent of death but there is something sinister about a green snake eating its way through an almost ancient beige city, a hungry void. When I first came to Paris, almost 10 years ago, I remember a young man flashing his naked butt to tourists floating on the Seine river cruise holding their glasses of cheap champagne, erupting in laughter.

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People

I walk in the pale hollow woods
and find a poem hanging in the trees—
did I make it out of the generative engine
that is my mind or does poetry exist out there,
waiting for me to process it? Where does thought end
and language begin: heart, veins, throat, tongue?

Ruth Lexton, The Work of Poetry in The Age of Large Language Models

I began this week with yet another “thank you but no thankyou” response to a pamphlet competition. It’s tough to keep “plugging away” at this, and to challenge the thought that I’m just not good enough. Then I remind myself that this group of poems has been longlisted in a major magazine, shortlisted by a respected publisher and highly commended in a well-regarded prize. There is something there – but it’s hiding.

Back to the drawing board I go. I read the book as a whole, rather than focusing on individual poems and allow my impulses to guide me as to which poems don’t quite fit. I cut them, read again and think about what is missing. This pamphlet is a story, a journey and as I’m cutting and reworking I realise I’ve been trying to cram two themes into one book. Rather than start at the beginning and consider what I want this book to be, I’ve started halfway through; I’ve taken a group of poems I like and tried to shoehorn them into a single concept. The end result was a group of poems that kind of fit, but unless you live in my head the thread is a bit jumbled. I’m confident in the poems (as much as one ever can be) and feel that I’ve made something that works as a whole and sent it back out into the somewhat narrow world of poetry. Apparently the average number of rejections for a book before publication is 15 so there is still plenty of hope. We will see.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, An aha moment for my latest work in progress.

I fell off my meditation cushion
like theology without underpinning.

I was so delighted by the sound
of a lawnmower I forgot how to walk.

I wrestled with an angel all night,
clung until they blessed me.

Rachel Barenblat, I Came Home from the Meditation Retreat With A Black Eye

On Roaring 20s Radio we try our best to share a brilliant and diverse mix of new discoveries, bold new voices, exciting indie outsiders, and some of the more mainstream big names too. When choosing books for these lists, I often boost writers that I meet on my adventures, at poetry events and book festivals, and I also select hot books to preorder from my towering proof piles. Roaring 20s Radio champions poets and indie publishers, artists and writers that are smashing through the silence, that shine a light on the here and now, there are so many courageous people and organisations that we include and love and admire. […]

Oh Big Blue

The poems in this collection were written and illustrated by children aged 9 to 17 from Palestine. They are some of the Palestinian entries from the 2024 Hands Up Project poetry competition. They are presented in the form in which they were originally received, with a foreword by Alice and Peter Oswald.

The title of the collection was taken from one of the competition entries, a poem by 13-year-old Joud Isleem, who wrote: “Oh great sea, oh big blue! Take my dreams and bring me hope.” These are poems written by children, written in a second language, written from the centre of impossibility, written under bombardment, written with no water, written with no internet, written in a notebook and decorated with butterflies and sometimes decorated with blood. They show the beauty of the world, even in impossible circumstances.

Salena Godden, Roaring 20s Radio: book recommendations

[George] Szirtes’ first full collection, The Slant Door, won the Faber Memorial Prize in 1979, he won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2004 (for Reel), and in between he was one of the ‘Oxford Poets’. After the Oxford Poets series closed, he switched to Bloodaxe, and they published a New and Collected Poems in 2008. Just last year he was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for poetry. Recently I read a fascinating interview with him about his cultural and linguistic identity (he moved to England from Budapest when he was eight), and you can read a few of his poems — mostly from the more recent collections — on the Poetry Foundation website. As well as his own poetry, he has published many translations from Hungarian.

Alongside all this, he regularly posts poems or fragments of poems on Twitter — including, for instance, a villanelle on the spectacularly vulgar wedding of Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos last month in Venice […]

Szirtes’ conventionally published poems are unquestionably much better than most of the Twitter poetry. On the other hand, a literary culture without occasional verse — verse as part of the cultural response to events as they happen — is surely a dead one. I rather admire the courage and humility of as good a poet as Szirtes being happy to put his ‘first thoughts’ out there in this way, and by following his account as well as his published work you could certainly learn a lot about that mysterious transition from an early draft to a finished poem. I think how we feel about this gets in interesting ways at our ideas about poetry as a craft or art: should the poet be working away privately and only allowing “out” the most polished work or should they be putting communication first, encouraging engagement and response by circulating drafts as they are written and letting us into the workshop?

Victoria Moul, The poetic tweet

There’s always a blue door in our dreams,
in our former lives.

A cerulean blue door, with wooden slats 
held by a small hook in the white plastered wall.  

It opens, closes and opens, screeching like a sick
owl, such are the vagaries of age. 

Jill Pearlman, The Blue Door in our Dreams

This is the second poetry/art book to come into my life recently.
Once again, a perfect marriage of word and image. The twelve short poems are by Beau Beausoleil, who shares his daily poems with friends worldwide by email. In the last year, recovering from illness, he has been taking therapeutic walks in Golden Gate Park and elsewhere in his neighbourhood, and giving fresh attention to the world of nature as it intersects with the human sphere. In Poet as Naturalist, the poems are paired with Nanilee Robarge’s very appealing semi-abstract paintings and collages. Each double-page spread balances an image with a poem. Almost every poem begins as an observation, often quite straightforward: …I look up … too late/ to see the bird fly/ by the kitchen windows/ seeing only its quick shadow … and ends with a startling, amusing, or profound thought: ... One day/ I too will leave only/ the breath of my shadow/ behind

I’m not a fan of centred poems, but in this context the centering is wholly appropriate. The book is beautifully designed by Robin MIchel, and published in San Francisco by Raven and Wren Press. It is a joy both to handle and to read and re-read.

Ama Bolton, Poet as Naturalist

A whale dies, and once the gasses have left it,
it falls, slowly, to the sea-bed, where it sustains
(nurtures if you prefer) an eco-system.
As it rests under the crush of the sea
worms without mouths or stomachs
whose males live inside the females
consume its bones. It can take centuries.

Anyway, so, I’ve been reading poetry again.

Bob Mee, PERMANENCE

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.

It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be that voice. It is our evolutionary inheritance — we are the story of survival of the tenderest, the living proof that tenderness may be the ultimate fitness for being alive.

I know no better homily on this fundament of our humanity than Ellen Bass’s poem “Kiss” from her altogether soul-salving collection Indigo (public library).

Maria Popova, Kiss: Ellen Bass’s Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness

I think a lot about how time seems to just slowly unfold, not much going on, really, not much changing. Then boom. Something is thrust upon us to which we must react/respond. Allow/manage. Shift to or remain stalwart from. Sometimes we sort of see it coming, like watching a movie. Like we forget this is real life. Until it is undeniable.

I like this poem because of how it depicts the onset of storm as an interesting thing from which we remain detached. I like how it unsettles our confidence, this poem, in what we know or think we know. That chilling moment when we realize, oh…wait…

So many tornados coming. Or wait, no, they’re here.

Marilyn McCabe, pressure change and distant noise

The Bean Eaters is one of the perfect poems. Gwendolyn Brooks won’t need much introduction to American readers, but I don’t think she is well known in England, or at least not as well known as she should be. I found about her in a workshop sometime after I moved to London.1

Then again, one of the things I love about ‘The Bean Eaters’ is that it needs so little introduction. It is a loving, knowing portrait of a couple who don’t have much. The title reminds me of Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. Here they are:

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Everything is reused, both words and their component parts: ‘plain’ is there twice in that third line, ‘chipware’ calls back to ‘flatware’. The original rhyme is everywhere, so much so that it becomes invisible. The poem is literally economical. It makes do.

Jeremy Wikeley, Twinklings and twinges

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

My first book will always be a reminder to myself that what I have to say matters to someone out in the universe. When I started writing poetry, my wildest dream was that a press would actually take my ridiculous poems about sentient sexy potatoes, Prince, and Predator seriously. I am still amazed that my poems find readers and now that I have a second book out, I am constantly pinching myself that this is my reality. After I finished my first book, American Radiance, which is largely about my family, I promised myself I would move on and write about a new topic. My second book, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, is even more focused on my family. I realized that I’m essentially going to write the same book over and over again, because every poem about my grandmother is ultimately a poem about the moon, and everyone knows how poets feel about the moon.

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

I am drawn to poetry for the privacy. Most of the time, I feel naked writing in prose, and while I love reading novels and essays, I need the distance that the lyric provides, or to put it less poetically, I want to keep my top on. […]

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

I generally avoid prescribing what the role of a writer should be. As a teacher of young writers, I see firsthand the tremendous impact that poems have for helping people understand themselves, and also for understanding others. To me, empathy and poetry are connected in a way that is essential. I teach “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski every year because that poem saved my life; I don’t know what role that gives me as a writer. Mostly, I’m not that different than a person handing out pamphlets on the street. I’m giving you something that has transformed the way I see the world, Maybe you’ll remember a line from this poem when you need it, maybe you’ll immediately throw it into the recycling bin.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Luisa Muradyan (rob mclennan)

grant

a star

its anger

earn

a range

garner

aster

Luisa A. Igloria, Inside the word stranger

I discovered Fanny Howe’s poetry through her Selected Poems, published by University of California Press in 2000. Her previous books – poetry and prose – had been published mostly by small American presses, and described as “experimental.” I didn’t then (and possibly don’t now) have a strong grasp of what constitutes the experimental. But Howe’s early poems were invigoratingly strange to me for how they inhabit a corridor or anteroom between Language Poetry and the lyric. They love the line as a unit of sound and sense; syntactical relationships are clear even when how the referents relate might not be; associations feel spontaneous but not arbitrary, assertive but not labouring to subvert lyric convention. The writing doesn’t appear effortless; the discipline of its attention and choices reminds me of an animal’s stillness as it confirms the origin of a sound or scent (what Howe wrote about Simone Weil’s work, that it’s “tense with effort,” could apply to her own). And as the animal is in that moment, the poems – for all their concerns with justice, with ethics, with others – are, resolutely, alone. They are deeply, naturally, weird.

When I left the west for Toronto, Catholicism was among the things I abandoned. It was, like the landscapes and work I grew up with, thrown into relief against a hyper-urban aestheticised agnosticism whose cathedral, back then, was the bar. Location became inseparable from dislocation. I had just published my first book and felt claustrophobic in my own anecdotes. Despite not really having a style, I wanted to blow it up. The way Howe’s work lingers in the temporary felt spacious, accommodating. The poems don’t make a home of the temporary so much as find its midpoint, wander through its empty house, look out from the middle of it. That this suggests a luxury of time the temporary wouldn’t seem to possess is part of the work’s effect. Time passes differently in the mind. The poems are like gaps that expand in the narrative when we realise that each of us is essentially wandering in our own wilderness.

Often, reading her Selected Poems, I was in over my head. At the same time, phrases, lines, passages would surprise with unpredictable and uncanny accuracy, abstractions articulated with an unsettling precision that’s felt in the way that proximity to a cliff edge is felt.

Karen Solie, What Did You See?

I’ve recently heard 2 female competition judges discourage writers from entering stories about “The 3 Ds” – “Death” (especially of babies), “Dementia” and “Domestic violence” – there are many entries on those themes. Increasingly, the same advice applies when sending to magazines – when the success rates get into the 1% range, and editors need to quickly read 100s of submissions, stories need to stand out, and editors don’t want too many stories on a single theme.

I often try to write stories that are quiet. I’ve even tried to write about middle class families who have middle class problems. The characters are not so content that “happiness writes white” (i.e. you don’t see the white ink on the white paper) but nobody dies, goes mad, or gets hit. In fact, nothing much happens. If artists can do still lifes with apples, grapes and shadows, why can’t I do a story about getting the kids off to school and taking a thoughtful walk back along a stream?

Not only do I leave out dramatic events events, but I’m careful with the language. Any striking phrase/image that comes to mind when I’m writing prose tends to end up in the poem I’m currently writing (which becomes a rag-bag of fireworks at best).

Tim Love, The 3 Ds

The artist is mid-step,
toes of one foot raised
as if he’s debating whether
to go on or turn back.
The gray and the rain are strong.
The stomach is stronger.
It’s this, just this,
then back to the tiny studio
crammed wall to wall
with imagination realized;
electricity in the brain transferred
to the hands, to the clay,
to each of us admirers.
But first, coffee.

Jason Crane, POEM: Cartier-Bresson’s Alberto Giacometti Going Out For Breakfast, Paris.

Consider, if you will, that a footprint in peat can last for 25 years, and that peat grows at a rate of 1mm a year. Some of the peat on Walshaw Moor has been growing since the Bronze Age. It is 3000 years old. Once peat is disturbed, it begins to emit carbon, rather than store it. This will be a very dirty wind farm.

The development is opposed by major ecological and heritage organisations, including the RSPB, CPRE – the Countryside Charity, and the Brontë Society. Nevertheless an application for a Development Consent Order (DCO) is expected to be submitted to the Planning Inspectorate in June 2026.

All of which translates to – this existential threat to these extraordinary moors is very real. It comes as a particular shock to the people of Haworth, which relies heavily on its moorland and its Brontë heritage. People began to come to Haworth soon after the death of Charlotte Brontë, the last surviving sister, in 1855. Patrick Brontë, the father of these extraordinary children, was bemusedly dealing with curious visitors until he died in 1861, and Haworth gradually became the literary landmark it is today, now second only to Stratford-on-Avon in terms of visitor numbers. The Brontë Parsonage Museum has over 80,000 visitors every year and Haworth is regarded as the jewel in the tourism crown in West Yorkshire.

Hundreds of local businesses, from the shops and restaurants which line the iconic cobbled Main Street to the hotels, guesthouses and holiday cottages spread across the wider area, thrive as part of the tourist industry. As well as the village, the surrounding moorland attracts people from all over the world who walk up to Top Withens: the signposts, which are written in both English and Japanese, attest to this.

We need clean, green energy. But energy produced built on peat is not green. Energy produced at an irreversible cost to threatened species is not green. Energy produced at an immense cost to Northern communities, only to meet our ever-growing demands for energy, is not justified, nor is it clean.

Tomorrow, we dance in celebration, in protest, and in hope.

Clare Shaw, Actually The World’s Most Wuthering Heights Day

sometimes i wonder if
the humans are wolves. if maybe
we are farther than ever from resurrection.
in the dark of the museum, we howl.
sometimes one of them will hear us.
they’ll stare into the glass until
their skull is one of ours. jaw
& ragged teeth & tar-black bone.

Robin Gow, 404 dire wolf skulls from la brea tar pits

My parents are coming out for a visit in two weeks, and after that, I’m going to a short residency to work on my manuscript, and maybe on some more essays. I’m trying to be more deliberate with the time that I spend and still put time aside for joy, relaxation, and all that stuff we type-A folks are bad at. If I don’t put time aside for rest, I won’t do it. I’ve been writing essays for five weeks, and enjoying it, and even sending some out. I’m waiting to hear back from publishers on my latest poetry manuscript, but I’m wondering if putting together a book of essays might be a smarter way to spend my time. It seems urgent to get voices out about disability, and while both books deal with that subject matter, the essays might be a better choice for a wider audience. We’ll see.

This weekend was the lavender festival at our local lavender garden (JB Family Growers Lavender Farm), and we went both days and had fun, and the weather blessedly cooperated (no rain, but also not crazy hot). I also noted that a lot of my friends and family members are experiencing a melancholy that isn’t specific to one bad thing, but rather a pervasive mood. Maybe that makes sense, politics and plagues and wars are bound to make a dent in our souls, and if they don’t, maybe something’s wrong with us. Walking at sunset in a field of lavender does something good to our nervous systems, or spending time picking blueberries or watching birds and going to the forest. We need to remind ourselves of the good things still in the world, of the possibilities. We need to give ourselves something to fight for.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Change in the Air, Lavender Festivals, and Melancholy

U.S. 1 newspaper is a venerable publication here in the Central New Jersey towns and businesses that line the Route 1 corridor.

Each July, the paper dedicates an issue to the poetry and prose of those who live and/or work in the region, and this year a prose poem of mine is in it. I hope you enjoy it! :- )

Summer Trip

Sitting under a striped beach umbrella, SHE is absorbed in a paperback novel.

Off to the right and closing fast, HE is running toward her at full speed, his eyes fixed on the plaid kite trailing behind him.

Destiny is like a word problem: if one train heads east and another heads west on the same track, will two strangers fall in love at the point of impact?

Shouting a warning that goes unheard, I can’t help but wonder about inexorable forces and immovable objects (and the dubious taste of pairing stripes with plaid).

Bill Waters, U.S. 1 summer fiction issue 2025

July is a month that feels like a long walk in the neighborhood. The neighborhood is normal with beautiful lawns fronting neat homes and the walk moves along at a steady pace. July days are waning, though, and I’m ready for the walk to end so I can hunker down in my sheltering house to wait out August, a month that feels like flailing in the deep end of a pool. August is my least favorite month for many reasons. August 29 this year will be the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I’m contemplating posting some of my (scarce) Katrina-related writing, both published and not. Some days it feels like what I should do but other days I don’t want to review those memories. I’m a little sick of thinking about it still after all these years, to be honest. But sometimes a mood will hit and I’ll write about that time again. Anyway, we’ll see what August brings. I’m not sure anyone is interested in reading about all that now, anyway.

My July Listopia begins with three stellar pieces I read in litmags this month – a prose poem, a microfiction, and a nonfiction. After assembling the links and quotes, I realized they’re all about parents and how they affected the lives of the characters/writers.

Charlotte Hamrick, July Listopia

We sit on the terrace in the pouring
rain with a steaming bowl of Maggi.
There is the spectre of absence.
Of wrongness. As if death is
everywhere. Except here.
As if that is okay.

Gibson’s poem pings in the silence:
“When I left my body, I did not go
away.” I think of Alareer. “If I must
die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”
“Death be not proud,” said John
Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” I
say it aloud to the rain. “Death,
you shall die.” It rains harder. Colder.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, If you say it’s okay

It isn’t easy to know if you are doing anything that matters in the whoosh and rush and pilloried crush, especially in the arts. There is no pause, no gratitude, no real vacations, no bonus, no moment of glory, no pedestal, no island, no floor, no window, no spar, no acknowledgement, no paycheck that gets you ahead, and no way to ever stop. You stay on the merry-go-round. You’re forced to keep proving yourself to keep your work alive.

I met a friend this week who said, “Are you sure you want to keep going? Other presses are closing left and right. You could move to Ireland.”

It is getting hot in Los Angeles. I am no longer sleeping. We have an espresso machine, so I drink too much coffee. Ireland is far away. But despite the impostor syndrome, despite my attention being pulled in a million directions, I want to be a great writer. I want to spend more time on my work. I have always wanted to write something lasting. I have always wanted the great tango of intellect and imagination to be my life. That matters to me.

I still have game. I’m in this. Someday, I’ll feel I belong. I will walk into the room and know how I got there. I won’t have to prove it.

For now, I’m swimming upstream. Above me is waterfall. But I swim. I write. There is no win or lose, I tell myself. I will give it my all. I will save nothing for the swim back.

Kate Gale, Swimming Upstream, Running Uphill: On Belonging

Last fall we had the good luck to be in Florence for a couple of weeks and one of the highlights was visiting the Odeon Theatre and which is now also a Libreria / bookstore. I’m sure I posted about it at the time, but as I began spiralling after looking at the news this weekend (I know you likely know that feeling), I needed to get my brain headed somewhere else, and I thought of the Odeon as a happy place. I was thinking about the instruction to touch grass which is mocked, but hey, it works. And another thing that helps is for me to look at photos of a previous happy place.

So I spent time also reading about ordinary affect theory, affect theory and architecture. Which led me to think about my happy places on this earth. Of which there are many. My study, my backyard. And how weird it is that we might get to be in our happy places at this particular moment in history. And I’ve been thinking about how even so in the past, my brain has broken, being in these places. My goal these days is to protect my own nervous system because what use am I to anyone in a broken state. Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism has said that they are “interested in how people live through historical moments of loss.” We are in the middle of a great shift, ongoingly, and Berlant says that the historical present is “a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions.” And though they wrote this before the present historical moment, they talk about the “urgencies of livlihood” where “futurity” is without assurance. Certainly de-stabilized. And this seems in the face of others’ more life and death situation to be a small thing to complain about, one’s future livlihood. You might be “happily managing things” or “discouraged but maintaining” while others are mentally on the edge.

In catastrophe, in the traumosphere of today, how do we live? I remember reading, during all the unknowns of the early pandemic, Berlant’s words, that we are in a spot “when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust.” It was comforting somehow to feel understood in this way, less alone. All of us in the unknowing, adjusting, adjusting. […]

I think back to all the museums and galleries and libraries I visited in Italy and what drew me to them. Today though I’m thinking about the Odeon in Firenze and the delight of it. I’m remembering the wonderful architecture, the inviting books as you walk in, the colours, the lighting. The fun of seeing what will be on the screen next, the Italian subtitles. Sitting in the seats with a book and a coffee, lifting your head up now and again to see what’s on the screen. The moment of buying the book about the history of the Odeon and finding one of the co-authors worked there and then getting the book signed! That feeling that you were in a special place, one with history, and hope, a future.

Shawna Lemay, Reading Day, Happy Places

Mountain tops, mouths,
romantic languages lingering
In the ears of the blue trees.

But God of distraction,
I’m tired of all the distractions.
The choiceless choosing.

Let me have one moment that rises
over every other desire.
Let it be enough

to stand still, under this one church,
eight hundred images
of Christ suffering.

The pigeons, nailed to their mortal perches.
Lifting into the sun, like petals
blowing open.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Once in Florence

The poet Simonides of Caes was the single survivor of the Thessaly house party in 5th century BC. According to legend, Simonides used his memory to relive the seating arrangement, thus identifying the buried dead beneath the rubble. Ancient Greeks took dreams as oracle, pre-visioning what would come, removing “the terror of the unexpected from the future,” to quote Judith Schalansky. But dreams don’t prepare us for the wind shear of facts. 

Attention to dreams prepares us for the fragmentary, the disconnected, the fantastic, the immaterial. But dreams are not always unconscious— we dream of a world in which we can be whole, or be wholly ourselves without violence and terror. We dream of a world in which our dreams matter, our dreams are material to the conditions of living. In this sense, perfect memory can be a handicap that prevents us from re-membering, or piecing the past back together, by making it impossible to choose among pieces. Like the rich, the house of perfect memory is so big that one feels trapped, one becomes  claustrophobic, in the ordinary, small houses of others. The richness of one’s house ruins the ordinary by estranging us from inhabiting it. One can’t abide in the chaos of unpruned synapses. So we pare things down; we reduce and highlight; we narrate over the gaps.

But poetry, perhaps more than any other mode, calls our attention to the gaps. The field and lineation makes those gaps visible and tangible. And this is the visionary, the radically-threatening possibility of the poem. We mourn when touched by the vestige of an absence, when startled by the echo of a correspondence.  There is something missing. Everything that exists is a ruin waiting to happen once the curator disappears.

Alina Stefanescu, Tsvetaeva in the margins.

like home or history
the body is shrapnel
a fragment

head, arms, legs blown off
only a torso. Rilke writes
it glows, illuminating

everywhere and nowhere
is it rage, or pain, righteousness
or some other radiance?

no. it is only a corpse
but understand: there is no place
that does not see you

Gary Barwin, Not an Archaic Torso of Apollo (for Gaza)

a deep hole opens in my shadow—

a black umbrella turned to ash.

the breath of one risen from the dead climbs out.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: nights without boundaries, fireflies and bats, children in bomb shelters, burying a dictionary, and more. Enjoy.

Last night, I got to participate in a poetry reading and discussion with Thom Eichelberger-Young, as hosted by Rachel Lauren Myers. And my god, I had a fantastic time. Thanks to everyone who came out. […]

In preparing for the talk, I wrote a lot of stuff to clarify my ideas, and I figure some of this might be useful to share here. It’s basically a reflection on the aims and limits of writing about historical nightmare and disaster, the political life of imagination, and the need for an anti-establishment stance as both writer and publisher. […]

[A] form of life upholds the poem as a space of psychic freedom and discovery and truth, and which lives among dreams, among the dead and the immortal, among trees and animals, stars, pasts, futures, all of it. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t also donating to those in need, and educating yourself politically, and involved in protest and other organizing, and whatever beyond that. The poem does not exhaust the political, and in some moments, a poem does not need to actually be “about” political “content.” For me, it’s about psycho-political positioning just as much as anything else: you can have a position on this stuff—as in seeing where your imaginative work is situated, and how it stands up to the nightmare forces and the other lies that would entrap our efforts—and then write about whatever you want. Some may be compelled to do the writing of nightmare and political antagonism, some may find they are called elsewhere, but they do that work with clear awareness of the stakes and where and how the lines are drawn.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK: no. 4

Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.

A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”

Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.

Maria Popova, How to Be a Stone: Three Poems for Trusting Time

More and more I think that it is important to find roots, to buckle in and brace against the storm that is raging over the world. More and more I find that people want to do that with their landscape, with the places they feel pulled to. They want to honour the nature of the place, they reach for some simpler time that didn’t exist. I am doing it now. I am making elderflower wine from the trees in my own garden, and thinking about the common folk who foraged the hedgerows, the working class people whose voices are lost in the written history of place. I have no idea the religion of these people, or anything about them, only that their hands reached for the white flowers of the elder, as mine do. This is the lineage of place.

Right now, people want to turn away from the men who would bring this world to the edge of annihilation because of a belief that they, and only they, belong to one place. Belonging is not a single moment, it is the knowledge that you are a part of a longer story, and that story is not singular. Time is immense and the history of people in relation to place is one of change, constant, constant change.

Wendy Pratt, Where Time Becomes Thin:

I don’t want to think about poetry
I don’t want to relearn movement
I don’t want to see concrete shredding itself like cardboard
I don’t want to hear another question about another tomorrow —
the big that always hides behind something small.

I must give in and let myself float:
heart and brain and inner ear in a quiet updrift.
I would surrender if I knew to whom.
I would disappear if I knew how to.
I would cry if sadness had remained sadness.
I would tell if you would only ask.

The walls move like kaleidoscope
patterns, changing without colour,
everything, a house of cards,
the king and queen leaning in to
make a small steeple.
The big things have other plans.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Unsettled

At the beginning of spring, I started a practice during some of my leisurely walks. Every ten steps, I stopped and looked deeper at things. This is how I noticed a specific species of flyfishing insect hatching in the wetlands and how these insects preferred to perch on privet. This is how I noticed ways water is held. This is how I noticed the movements of animals that came before me. The small game trails, the broken brush. This is how I noticed signs of movement and desire. This is how I noticed the unnoticeable snails, small as seeds, scattered all over the wet road, being run over by people who do not see them. Small bits of calcium carbonate and tender flesh dotting the road. This is how I noticed death and its spectrum of decay. The beheaded cicada. The quartered doe. The pale, limp crayfish. The small bird, smashed so profoundly like a translucent, pressed flower on the asphalt. Almost invisible, absorbed. Fossil-like. […]

I don’t know anything, really, except that I want to keep doing this. I want to keep discovering the mundane. I want to continue being amazed by what I have always been looking at. So I will. Maybe someday when I bring my finger to the cucamelon’s tendril, it will touch me back.

Sarah Lada, Stopping & Looking

I love poems about flowers and gardens, they remind me of my mum and my nana, and their respective gardens. My nana, who died almost 15 years ago, features fairly frequently in my poetry, including one about her garden—in response to Nina Catherine Howe’s poem ‘Meditation’ (1926)—and another, which I am rather proud of, in response to Hart Crane’s ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’ (1920). Finally, here’s a short haikai sequence I wrote in her memory, using both tanka and haiku forms as its base:

under all that sky nana’s grave

*

the same flowers
which adorned
my nana’s
casket:

spring morning

*

the last time
i sat in nana’s garden . . .
the last time

*

ah nana
i remember you
today,
blue-skied
& garden-eyed

Dick Whyte, Amy Thornton-Swartz – 3 Very Short Poems (1926-27)

In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t the first time I have talked about it here – but I did think it would be my last. But no. There has been birdsong. And last week, after work, like someone asking us to enact our back-to-normal lives for a scene towards the close of a film, we walked ‘by the river’ and you were, in those lovely four words ‘a step from me’. I had noticed ‘this great kindness everywhere:/ now in the grace of the world and always’ before, but not ‘a step from me’. Four little, simple words, suddenly larger and more vital than the luminosity of those they set up at the poem’s close. A step from me. A miracle. Here you are. Here I am. Our routine was broken by carnage, and now we might be on the way to reclaiming it. A step from me, the evening ‘crepuscular and iambic’, by still waters seeming suddenly depthless though only yards from pebbly rapids splashed in by dogs. A step. The natural and essential gap between any two people at walking pace. You nearly went from me. But you didn’t. And now you are back.

Anthony Wilson, A step from me

–Last night was one of those nights where I couldn’t even focus enough to sew or sketch.  Happily, I was still able to read.  Usually I choose something light, but last night, I turned back to Mark Lynas’ Six Minutes to Winter:  Nuclear War and How to Avoid It.   I bought it a month ago, read the part that I read as the LitHub excerpt, and then put it aside, where it got buried under a stack of papers.   It is one of the grimmest description of nuclear aftermath as I have ever read, even grimmer than the movie Threads.  It was so grim that it was almost not scary.  It’s not exactly new information–after all, we’ve known about the possibility of nuclear winter for decades now.  But the book spells out in detail what that would mean in a way that I haven’t seen before.

–I was happy to turn my attention to Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, nominated for the Booker Prize in the same year as Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song.”  Maybe I’ll spend the summer reading 2023 Booker Prize nominees. […]

–On Wednesday, I wrote most of my Noah’s wife (as in Noah and the Flood in Genesis) as hospital chaplain poem, again by hand during lunch.  I am pleased with the draft, and here, too, I look forward to seeing how it holds together when I type and revise.

–Here’s one stanza of that poem:

She has already witnessed
the end of the world,
the disaster that destroys everything.
She can be a non-anxious 
presence to everyone in the hospital.
She has seen worse.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Saturday Snippets with Apocalyptic Reading

A few weeks ago, I ran a course at Ty Newydd with Roger Robinson called “Building a Sustainable and Authentic Poetry Practice”. Sometimes when I was thinking about and planning for this course, I felt like the worst kind of fraud. How could I talk to other people about building a sustainable practice, when often my life feels anything but sustainable?

I make myself busy all the time, and then feel really down if I’m not busy. I’m not sure that is particularly sustainable! For example, this morning I could feel myself really down and I think it was because I thought I had a quiet week – only to write that list of jobs out and realise I’m actually not quite right if I think this is a quiet week!

I think one of the ways of making any type of writing practice sustainable is getting to know our own writing process – what we think we need, and what we actually need (which might be two different things!). I know that writing all day on a Monday is working really well for me at the moment, that working alongside friends works, that I don’t like to ‘catch’ myself writing or admit that I’m writing, that I often have to pretend I’m doing something else or just messing about. I know that I need feedback from other people to motivate me to keep going, otherwise I get distracted and give up halfway through.

Kim Moore, A Poetry Survival Kit

In the afternoon Nina guided us through the process of making handmade brushes with unconventional materials. It proved to be habit-forming! […]

Since the meeting we have been using our brushes – and looking in a different way at plants, sticks and discarded objects, assessing their potential as ‘mad brushes’. Clare has painted a series of amazing self-portraits, using the thin tip of a pheasant feather for the fine details. […]

As a direct result of our recent exhibition I have been asked to give a presentation on ‘Using materials from the landscape in handmade books’ at the Midsummer Moot, a get-together for local poets at The Avalon Marshes Centre on 24th June, and to teach participants a couple of book structures at two Art & Poetry Days for Bath Writers and Artists, in July and September, at The Hive in Peasedown St John. This community centre has a large art-room which can be hired by the hour – ideal for this sort of activity.

Ama Bolton, ABCD late May

In difficult times people need poetry.

They need places where they can come together, express solidarity, make their voices heard, and feel empowered. One way poets can help build a better world is to offer each other our time, talent, and unity. Another way is to expand opportunities for people to hear each other and feel heard.

To that end, we are launching a new kind of poetry press that will act as a collective, where poets not only share their poetry, but also pool their talent, gaining skills for helping other poets to learn writing techniques, promote their work, inspire new writers, and bring more poetry into their communities. As always, I feel the best way for us to move forward is to collaborate, so as we work on this project, I want to hear from you how you want to be involved and what you most want from this endeavor.

If you are interested in joining us, please take a moment to fill out this survey and let me know what you would most like to learn from/ contribute to this project.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Do You Want to Start a Press with Us?

washing my poetry i sweeten the sea :: until the green of your island is saved

Grant Hackett [no title]

W. H. Auden said that “proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.” Names are the closest thing we have to magic: naming is an act of creation as much as an act of description. Names are also a kind of knowledge. When knowledge dwindles, or is transposed, it becomes obscure. I love ‘Adlestrop’, but the names have always been a problem. I can’t see the flowers. Willows, yes. Grass, yes. But what’s a willow-herb? Meadowsweet? A haycock is a small pile of hay drying in a field. When I first read the poem I thought it was another plant, maybe an early-flowering one that had already dried out. I still read it that way.

I suspect I am not the only one who can’t see what Thomas sees. Does this matter? Yes and no. The poet Dannie Abse, who was born in Cardiff and later lived in London, wrote two poems in reply to Adlestrop, which must have represented a version of poetry he felt alienated by. One of these, ‘Not Adlestrop’, was pretty awful: man stares at ‘very, very pretty girl’ in a train window. The other, ‘As I Was Saying’, is much better, much funnier, a defence of the residents of the ‘ignorant suburb’ against a culture which still expects poets to be in communion with nature. In reply to an imagined critic, Abse reels off a long list of names from a ‘W. H. Smith book’, mocking Thomas’s botanical precision: ‘Butterbur, Ling, and Lady’s Smock, Jack-by-the-Hedge, Cuckoo-Pint, and Feverfew, even the stinking Hellebore…’

Still, Abse is being too defensive. When Thomas launches into his list, he is launching into the names for their own sake. We don’t need to know what they are, because the words are poetry. It is easy to forget, too, that Edward Thomas was born in Balham, in the suburbs (which is near me in south London), and there would have been a time when he didn’t know the names either. Thomas’s names are a kind of invitation, one that feels all the more important now, when both the knowledge and the flowers are fading. Just hearing the word ‘willow-herb’ or ‘stitchwort’ can make you want to find out what it is, and knowing something’s name is the first step towards loving it. [link added]

Jeremy Wikeley, Remembering Adlestrop

As you may know, the word “anthology” comes from the Greek anthos “flower” + -logia “collection”. So it always seems appropriate that one of the reference works I consult most in midsummer — The Reader’s Digest Nature Lover’s Library Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of Great Britain (1983) — should contain a range of allusions to English poetry.

The lore of wildflowers is itself poetry scattered in waste places. Recently, for example, I learned that the yellow-flowered groundsel — a weed that gets everywhere — takes its name from an Old English kenning: groundswyle, “groundswallower”. And then there is the metaphorical vividness of folk names: the toadflax flower, for example, which opens when its sides are squeezed, has been variously called “lion’s mouth”, “devil’s head”, “weasel-snout” and “pig’s chops”.

But for this Pinks I thought I would pick some entries from the Reader’s Digest Field Guide which cite actual poems that, like wildflowers, might otherwise get overlooked. […]

Mugwort / Artemisia vulgaris

This dusty looking plant with its unromantic name seems ordinary enough, but it has often been written about by poets. For instance, Edward Thomas in “The Brook” described how “there was a scent like honeycomb / From mugwort dull”.

[…]

An old couplet tells of the plants medicinal properties:

If they’d drink nettles in March and mugwort in May,
So many fine maidens would not turn to clay.

I’m not entirely convinced by the claim here that mugwort has “often” been written about by poets — a search in the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive, for example, brings up nothing. (I suspect you might be able to find it mentioned somewhere in the prolific recent work of J.H. Prynne, which is absolutely abuzz with wildflower names. But I’m not combing through two dozen pamphlets to confirm this.) The proverbial couplet here, though, has a pleasing touch of Housman to it, and the Thomas poem, as always, is worth reading in full. In it, the “honeycomb” smell of the dull-looking mugwort marks a moment of imaginative transition into a more enchanted world:

There was a scent like honeycomb
From mugwort dull. And down upon the dome
Of the stone the cart-horse kicks against so oft
A butterfly alighted. From aloft
He took the heat of the sun, and from below.

Read on here for the sound of “waters running frizzled over gravel”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53749/the-brook-56d2335518e67

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #33: The Tangled Vetch

What does it mean to bury a dictionary? That the words are silent, silenced? That they’ve been killed, assassinated, died?

Or is it more akin to planting seeds and, come spring, there’ll be sprouts? Is the language returning to the earth, to where it came from and then, after a length of decay, there is transformation, rebirth. The words becoming part of the larger ecosystem. Are they mulch? Or do they bear the trace of what they have been through, their struggle for air, for legibility, for communication?

It’s an old practice in traditional Jewish culture not to destroy books or papers that are sacred, that have the word for God written on them. Instead, they are stored (see the remarkable Cairo Genizah where a treasure trove of centuries-old books was found, saved from destruction for this reason) and then often buried in a cemetery with ceremony and prayers as if they had been a living thing. A sacred book as a living thing that needs to be treated with respect, dignity, and care.

Once I visited a Sikh temple while holidaying in India. We were shown what looked like a child princess’s bedroom. Beautiful pink bed, sumptuous carpet and tapestries. What was it? It was where they put their sacred book to sleep at night.

For the past several years, I have taken books and left them outside to experience the elements. I’ve hung them from trees. I’ve buried and then exhumed them.

The image above and the video below is of what’s left of a thesaurus that I put outside under leaf mulch and the open sky. It’s been a year or two. The action of burying evokes the slow passage of time, the processes of transformation of organic matter. It’s a very slow poem, a slow music, maybe a deliberate and unfolding parade that even snails would consider stately and sloths, if they knew what glaciers were were, would think to be glacial in its progress. (I do sadly note that glaciers now retreating due to climate change, no longer move “glacially.”)

Gary Barwin, Burying the dictionary

In the background of this poem:
Allegri’s Miserere.
The soft singing of five voices,
turned down too low to hear clearly.

Moments ago in a book
I learned of the existence of this piece,
stolen by Mozart’s brain from the Vatican;
transcribed and given to all of us

in a courageous act of defiance,
or perhaps just a thumbing of the nose
at the cassocked voices of denial.

Now coming through a USB speaker
attached by light waves to a laptop
and, as has been previously stated,
turned down too low to appreciate.

We shrink our miracles
until they no longer scare us.

Jason Crane, POEM: Miserere

Cara-Lyn Morgan is a citizen of the Metis Nation and the descendant of enslaved people in North America.  She was born in Oskana, the area commonly known as Regina, Saskatchewan, and her work explores cultural duality, decolonization, motherhood, and the historical and present-day impacts of colonization.  She currently lives and works in the Greater Toronto Area.  She is a wife, mom, gardener, and neighbour.  Her first collection, What Became My Grieving Ceremony was awarded the Fred Cogswell Award for Poetic Excellence and was followed closely by her second collection, Cartograph.  Her third book, Building A Nest from the Bones of My People, has been warmly received since its release.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When I made my decision to go to art school and to study writing and visual arts, I had a foreboding sense that I had disappointed everyone.  As the child of an immigrant, it can often feel like you are on a set path of success and there’s a great deal of anxiety that surrounds a life choice that threatens “security.” I had a feeling that my parents felt I was indulgent and somewhat petulant in my choice, believing that writing was essentially a “hobby” and that I should explore options that were much more stable, writing in my spare time.  But I believed that I had a story to tell and that I was worthy of the investment to tell it, so when Thistledown accepted my first manuscript and my book was eventually published, I felt very vindicated and validated in my choices to that point.  The physical book felt like proof that I was not just writing as a way to entertain myself.  

My most recent work is a complete departure in style and in content from the previous two works.  This is because I am a completely different person than I was when I started telling stories, specifically ones about my family.  Since I first published, I have become a wife, a mother, someone who understands the mechanics of editing, someone who understands colonization and intergenerational trauma differently—I simply navigate the world from very different eyes.  I’m a matriarch, and I feel a greater responsibility to this current book because it is a new legacy for me.  These family stories are uncomfortable and sad, so I have shifted from writing “love letters to the family” as my previous books have been described.  But no, maybe that’s unfair.  This collection is a love letter to the family as well, because it was written out of a deep love and loyalty.  I wrote this collection because I love my children and I want them to know where they come from.  […]

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?
Well, I spent 20 years as a uniformed officer with Canada Border Services Agency, and in fact, I wrote most of my first draft of my first book sitting in one of those booths where you show your passport.  For some reason that is very funny to most people who know me only as a writer.  And the fact that I write poetry is always so mystifying to anyone who knows me only as a law enforcement officer.  These days, I teach police officers Indigenous culture and history and reconciliation.  But I would have liked to have been a baker or a pastry chef.  How different a person I would have been though.

18 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was taught to use writing as an emotional tool early on, to help process the trauma of my parents’ divorce and other adverse events.   I journaled and wrote so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by things I was experiencing as I grew up, and now I use writing to process intergenerational trauma, and to send stories in to the world so that I do not carry them alone.  I have always written, so I it doesn’t feel like it was ever a choice.  I just did it.  

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cara-Lyn Morgan

Intelligent, detailed, non-academic discussion of poetry remains a requirement. I’m yet to encounter a convincing argument otherwise– or rather, a convincing argument as to what might replace it. Some have suggested the only criticism poetry requires is poetry itself, but this stance overlooks the ways in which all art (even poetry!) enjoys an uneasy relationship with commerce and market forces and so is always in need of honest redress. Likely now more than ever. “Discrimination is needed,” as Michael Hamburger warned. “Without it, art succumbs to the randomness of commercialism, in which the shoddy product can displace the well-made and durable simply by being more effectively marketed.”

Paul Farley took the pulse at the turn of our millennium, when he half-joked that his ’60s-born generation hadn’t had criticism, they’d had marketing. He was referring to initiatives like the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets of 1994, a PR attempt to make a newly diverse wave of younger poets seem like the “new rock ‘n’ roll”. What these poets also had in new abundance was literary prizes, and these have only proliferated as the years have rolled on. A decade ago, I published a short piece wondering at the perils of being a poetry reviewer. (Spoiler: there are plenty.) In the end, as I reflected at the time, it isn’t occasionally upsetting folks– that happens to anyone who lives an honest life. Nor is it unwittingly shutting doors on yourself. It isn’t publicly broadcasting your opinions, however scrupulously worded, in ways that might make you wince years down the line. The real peril is more of a threat: that you work to become as astute a critic as possible, and the worst warnings still turn out to be true: the critical culture is forever losing ground to a fast-food one, and cash prizes, administered by a process marred with conflicts of interest, are the endgame of literary reception. So it seems to have proved.

What’s wrong with literary prizes, you ask? Nothing, in and of themselves. How ever misguided you might consider their aims, the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, to name two of the most well-known in these isles, stemmed in the ’90s from a broadly praiseworthy desire to promote excellence in new British poetry to the general literary reader, much in the fashion of the Booker Prize and the contemporary literary novel. A little glam and glitter, with the promotion afforded to shortlisted poets and the eventual winner intended to kick up a media fuss, and bring new readers to contemporary poetry. (No coincidence that the T. S. Eliot Prize was first administered by the Poetry Book Society, an organisation founded by Old Possum himself to build a wider intelligent audience for new verse.) But literary prizes have become a victim of their own success. Not, sadly, in reliably widening the audience for excellent poetry, but in their steady proliferation and growing influence in poetry circles as the main vehicle of literary reception. As Carcanet grandee Michael Schmidt once claimed, if you control the prizes, you control the culture of reception. Meanwhile, as Tim Parks lamented in a recent column for the TLS, reflecting on literary juries with an insider’s eye, “over the years there has been less and less media space for serious reviews. But the prizes multiply, as if the only thing that can fire up enthusiasm for literature is a narrative of winners and losers.”

Ben Wilkinson, Winners and Losers: The Death of the Poetry Critic

“On Textual Violence: Cultural Imperialism and Monolingual ‘Translation,’” a conversation between Mona Kareem and Yasmeen Hanoosh:

I wanted to take the veil of innocence off of literary translation. The colonial nature of translation is widely discussed in translation theory and translation studies, yet it often focuses on colonial archives or dictionaries, to give some examples. Literary translation, however, has been able to maintain its righteousness and innocence, which is really an extension of white innocence. For a working example, I focused on what is referred to as “bridge translation” whereby a white poet and a native speaker co-produce a translation in which the latter is silenced while used as a bridge. The issues with such phenomenon are many: political, ethical, aesthetic. Yet it goes unquestioned, even encouraged.

As someone who was commissioned by a now-defunct Iranian cultural organization to produce more than one of these “bridge translations” from classical Persian literature into English—though my informants were (long-deceased) English-speaking Persian Studies scholars, not native speakers—I take the questions Mona Kareem raises here very seriously. I will tell the story of how I came to make the translations I have published another time. Here I will say only that I took pains to distinguish in a responsible way the work I did from the work of Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinsky, whose versions of Rumi and Hafez respectively are deracinating, appropriating, and, frankly, colonizing in precisely the way Kareem alludes to in her use of the term “white innocence.” (I will leave the degree to which I succeeded and failed—because I am sure it’s both—to readers of these works.) Reading this conversation also brought home to me both my own ignorance of contemporary Arabic poetry and the degree to which all poetic cultures, and all efforts at literary translation, confront more or less the same questions, though they may do so at different historical moments and with different cultural and political histories as context. Those differences, I think, are what make room for learning to take place.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #41

It is not literary citizenship as such that I detest (or detested in 2014, when I wrote this piece). When people refer to “literary citizenship,” what they typically mean is actively participating in the literary community that matters most to them.

For instance, if you are trying to break into literary magazines, being a “good literary citizen” would entail reading lit mags and talking about them, purchasing them, subscribing, promoting their contents, forming connections with contributors, interviewing fellow writers and editors, attending events, participating in readings, blogging for lit mags, learning proper submissions etiquette, helping other writers find appropriate lit mags for themselves, and so on.

Of course I do not detest any of these activities. I do all of these activities, many of them daily. I encourage others to do as much of them as they can.

What I am describing in my article is not so much the acts that constitute “good literary citizenship,” but rather the term itself. What does it mean? How did it originate? How does it undermine writers’ own best interests?

As I say in the article, “to understand the rise of the Literary Citizen, perhaps first we need to look at the meltdown of our economy.” The piece was written over a decade ago, but sadly the economic conditions that I describe still apply today. I discuss the closing of bookstores, newspapers laying off their review staff, and publishing houses gutting their marketing teams.

With the shuttering of all these services and spaces for writers, who then picks up the slack?

Certainly it’s not the owners and CEO’s of publishing companies who lend a hand to writers in times of duress (in spite of the fact that their profits are derived precisely from those writers). No, it’s writers who are expected to look after themselves and one another.

As one particularly blunt marketing executive put it,

“You can train your authors to handle more of the marketing efforts. Writers who become skilled at promoting books can produce thousands of dollars in extra profits for the publisher.”

…“[T]hese authors don’t require expensive salaries, office space, insurance packages, or retirement plans. Instead, the publisher just pays a small author royalty…It’s a win-win, right?”

Marketing, publicity, writing reviews, book promotion, interviewing writers—all these activities previously done by paid staff have increasingly been sloughed off to writers.

Now, though, it comes with a twist. This is not work. It’s literary citizenship!

Becky Tuch, Q: What exactly is “literary citizenship” (and what is wrong with it)?

When I began this blog in August 2020, I wanted to bring attention to debut poets and the sterling work undertaken by small poetry presses in discovering new talent. Today sees both those aims realised. Flight of the Dragonfly Press over the last couple of years has developed a small list of publications by new exciting writers thanks to the hard work of Barbara Mercer  and Darren Beaney. The latest addition to that list is Dorian Nightingale with his debut pamphlet Songs from Last Imaginations, a collection of twenty-three poems interspersed with photographs, some accompanied by quotations. Like those photographs,  the poems are snapshots of moments in time, capturing specific states of being, such as the threshold between life and death, the  fledgling’s first flight, the pursuit of creativity, being speechless , enjoying a concert performance; all told in expertly fashioned verse, far more accomplished than one might expect from a debut publication.

Take for example, one of my favourite poems in the collection, words unspoken. It conveys that moment when one holds one tongue, when one decides to keep one’s thoughts to oneself. The moment is portrayed as a retreat, a ‘snap back/    to the place beyond the perimeter.’ The speaker withdraws from the conversation, but it is not an easy thing to do. This is vividly conveyed through the extended metaphor of words ‘dropping to the ground/       right there in front of me,/ buckling to their knees/  whilst beseeching their worth,/ offering me their terms/   from the wet, sticky earth.’  I loved the originality of this imagery that enables the reader to share the inner conflict of the speaker, his obstinacy (‘tight-lipped’ and ‘unmoved’) versus the desire to say something (‘beseeching’, ‘offering’, ’pleading’). There is something eminently relatable here.

As there will be for many readers, who are poets or involved in the arts,  in the poem, sparks. which captures the essence of creativity, that desire for originality. In the poem Nightingale takes the cliché of the ‘spark’ of creativity and gives it a freshness and dynamism. The speaker symbolises the creative act as a way of lighting a fire. He dismisses the conventional approach, saying ‘i never wanted to light my fire that way./ the friction of sticks within textbooks and booklets, the instructions concurred by many teachers and tutors, conveying the way/ to fashion a flame.’ Note the punctuation, the use of lower case for i and for words following full stops, the speaker is clearly a rule breaker. He wants to find his own method, a unique, personal way: ‘to uncover such things in my own inherent manner.’ Yet as all fellow poets will know this is not easy, and Nightingale explores these difficulties. He talks of ‘the shyness of my instinct’, the search for confidence; of the need ‘to spend time on my insight, to find out if it works,’ the time-consuming labour of creativity;’ of the necessity of failure (‘to know that it hurt when alternatives fail,/ the setbacks of initiative that curtail a better trail’); and of the all-consuming desire to see the creative process through (‘i so yearned to spur a spontaneous nerve./       a lightning bolt moment.’ 

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Songs of Last Imaginations’ by Dorian Nightingale

As those who’ve been reading for a while will know, sometimes I like to think about just a single poem. A couple of days ago I recorded a podcast with Henry Oliver (of The Common Reader) — available to listen to next week, I believe — and one of the things he asked me was whether I was depressed by the state of contemporary poetry, and whether there are good poems being written now. Which of course there are! Then earlier this week a friend who’s also a substacker, Jem, recommended I had a look at a particular poem in the latest issue of bad lilies, a consistently interesting and still fairly new British online poetry journal. It does only poetry, no criticism, and the interface is a bit clunky and annoying, but it’s worth persisting with. […]

Leadbetter’s poem is truly strange as well as moving. I mean that its strangeness is worked out and through in the course of the poem in a coherent way, rather than being an instance of the apparently near-compulsory ‘touch of whimsy’ or ‘hint of the surreal’ that bedevils contemporary Anglophone poetry so tediously. (I wrote about that a bit here.) It’s a proper poem in which all the parts contribute to the whole.

Victoria Moul, A poem by Gregory Leadbetter

I mentioned Erik Satie in a recent post about music to write by. And then I came upon the book Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by the music critic Ian Penman. It’s just the sort of book I love. Written in three parts using three different treatments, the middle being in dictionary or encyclopedia format. It’s fairly well known that Satie was a bit of a weird fellow, what with his umbrella obsession, his proclivity for eating only white food, and his hoarding habit. […]

A while back I wrote about typewriters and pianos and the fact that the first prototype of a typewriter was made using piano keys. So I was delighted to read Penman: “Thinking about visual rhyme between a piano and the keyboard I’m typing this on.” He talks about how he is haunted by an Olivetti he used in his teens, how he prefers his keyboard to be separate from his computer. All of which I completely get.

Penman’s Satie book reminded me somewhat of books like Tim Carpenter’s book on photography, and Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity. Davey says at one point, “I am trying to find a new way to work.” And these books create an avenue for those of us who are wanting to try to write about things without being smoothed out in an ai world. They also quote, refer, acknowledge sources. They connect things that only a weird and engaged human mind will. They’re all a bit weird, I guess, and all I can say is, bring on the weird please, writers, artists.

Shawna Lemay, On Esoterik Satie

While meandering up and down the street with Radu, pausing at his usual pee-mail stops, even venturing to add a new box to the map of his scent-relations, a Carolina wren chirped my name and the world shimmered, froze, melted, became momentarily otherwise.

I thought about a nest I’d come across a few weeks ago, on a similar walk. Had I taken a photo of that fallen nest?

Winding through the image file, I found a photo of the fallen nest, the small blue egg crushed within it. The shell struck me as the broken skin of an origins. It urged me to play with the scraps and remnants, to make an alternate nest from the shadows of things that got cut from my conversation with Gabriela Frank, which will be published in The Rumpus next week. To Gabriela’s question about process, I mentioned fragments and pieces of sound, but there is, perhaps, another way of ‘saying’ the same thing, which is by enacting it.

In my fever for lost and fallen things, I created two structures composed from the cuttings of wood chips at the base of the interview’s final draft. . . Two fallen nests. In the first nest, I decided to frame the speakers by using quotation marks, despite the fact that these words have not or will not be published in an official journal, there is a thrill in according them the status of words that were scored and prepared for performance somehow. The second nest is composed entirely from words of my own, looking up at me from the cutting floor, asking to be placed in a relation that is not quite conversation with one another.

Alina Stefanescu, Playing on the cutting room floor.

The regional drought has officially ended, and the rain continues. Ironic, then, that the online site Feed the Holy just posted a poem I wrote near the close of a droughty August: “Zen Gold.” Fireflies and bats, while not abundant, manage to enjoy the recent dampness. The monarch butterflies have returned to our meadow, though I don’t catch sight of them on rainy days. But the moist conditions didn’t dampen the turnout or enthusiasm of local citizens who came out in droves for peaceful “No Kings” protests here…in a decidedly “purple-red” area of Pennsylvania.

Speaking of regional, this weekend I also attended the debut showing of a documentary film about the performing arts community in Bethlehem, PA, formerly famous for Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The film is titled “Rooted,” and it follows that “roots” idea with the planting of trees at arts sites, the metaphor of the mycorrhizal network (see my references to Lesley Wheeler’s latest book–so much overlap!) and the concept of community development. Especially through works of imagination. In the 1970s, when the steelworks was beginning to slow production and lose employees to retirement and business to competitors, small groups of young, talented artists in theater, dance, music, and puppetry started performing in parks, churches, etc…and gradually found inexpensive space in the city to establish themselves and pursue their dreams. Some of those little startups, such as Touchstone Theatre, have been operating, teaching groups of children, entertaining the community, and advocating for the arts for over 50 years.

Godfrey Daniels coffeehouse/listening room and The Ice House (home of Mock Turtle Productions) have been sites for poetry as well as for music and theater-craft. I have participated in and attended poetry and one-act play readings at both of those venues. I don’t live in Bethlehem, but it isn’t too far away from me–still in the Lehigh Valley region. And I deeply appreciate the work that pioneering arts-folks have done, and that arts advocates and teaching artists continue to do, for our area. The people behind the arts deserve recognition.

Ann E Michael, Behind the arts

I’m still on my go-slow summer, writing in the morning, working on the house or garden or doing something with the kids in the afternoon. Summer is fresh fruit and thunderstorms, always having dirt under my fingernails no matter how hard I scrub and the window open at night. It’s ice cream and sleeping in, museums and cafes, it’s writing when I want. Long days, nights without boundaries. I don’t want it to end, but I have my summer course in Scotland soon which follows midsummer and starts the descent back into the real world. 

Gerry Stewart, Midsummer

Well that’s it, the thing that’s has been a long time coming is done (bar some last knockings). I am overjoyed, and already looking forward to the next one.

I know what you’re thinking…yes, I have finally finished painting our doors. The last gloss work went on yesterday…Only new door handles remain to be fitted —and that’s down to Rach deciding on them. However, no I am not talking about that.

I am talking about Matthew Paul’s second collection. It has been a very long time coming…8 years, in fact…But I would say it has been well worth the wait.

I was invited to read with Matthew at his London launch on Tuesday just gone. There were a lot of launches in London that night, as well as the London Lawyers Charity walk, so London was hot and heaving, but it’s fair to say that Matthew truly set his collection off into the world in style—ably supported by Vanessa Lampert, Ian Parks and myself.

It was wonderful to hear (and those noisy lawyers made it quite hard at some points) from all 3 poets. Everyone had something different about them in terms of style of delivery, poetic style (although everyone loved a detail, I think—I can’t/don’t want to do the analysis on it…I’m not an academic and no one would care anyway), and everyone had different themes and ways of coming at the world…I think this meant that the audience definitely got plenty of bang for their metaphorical buck.

Mat Riches, Punctured by Budleigh Salterton

The Solstice arrived here gloomy and rainy, which seemed appropriate for the day of Martha Silano’s Memorial. It wasn’t formal, but there was music and poetry readings and a tribute from her students. I also saw some old poet friends. I cried in the car on the way there. It’s still hard to believe she’s gone.

Cedar waxwings appeared in my neighborhood that day, which were one of her Martha’s favorite birds, and our friend Kelli has several poems that mentions a connection between grief and waxwings, including “When Women Die, Waxwings Appear” in her first collection, Small Knots. […]

In happier News, I have a poem in the new 75th Anniversary issue of Shenandoah, and our local Woodinville Lavender Farm had its opening weekend. The whole issue of Shenandoah is worth reading, and the lavender farm had good turnouts—it’s just down the street from our house, and we’re so grateful it’s there—a balm and a joy during these difficult times.

And I should say, we’re all in difficult times. I came home from Marty’s memorial to see that Trump has decided to bomb Iran, and that major cities should be on “high alert”—whatever that means, none of it good, I’m afraid. Today I spent the majority of the day dodging AI-generated images of nuclear destruction. Those of us born in the 60s and 70s remember the information we were given about what to do if hit by a nuclear bomb—at school, at home, and a cute (!) video about what we do if we’re in the playground. We need all the days in lavender fields we can get.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Solstices, Poem in Shenandoah, Memorial, Waxwings Appear and Lavender

Years later, I hear a New York poet read a poem about walking through a forest and hearing a sound—either a deer or a bear. There’s a difference, I thought, between prey and predator, and in the woods, you would know it, and that’s how you survive the apocalypse or the end times, but you wouldn’t know that coming from New York.

When I do finally run away from the cult, I walk down the road away from Mr. Whipple’s house with my sleeping bag, harmonica, two dollars, and my dog. I find a library. Someone takes me into her attic and gives me a job taking care of her son. She has a spinning wheel, a houseful of books. I eat honey at her house out of the jar. I’d been waiting for honey all my life.

I walked away with no driver’s license or social security number. I found my way to ASU, then California. Were there more drunken men? Reader, I tell you, they were everywhere. They came for me. What other models did I have? I grew up wanting to save. I had children with them. Raised children with them. Margaritas and champagne wash through all my fairytales.

I thought that anytime now, someone might kill me. But they didn’t. I lived.

Dr. Strangelove dreamed of women, of the bomb, of sheltering from the bomb. George dreamed of running his little world and the women in it. Mr. Whipple dreamed of a young girl’s hands opening the beer, morning after morning, until he died.

I had different dreams: Libraries, streams, books and sunlight between them. I dreamed of sitting in that sunlight. I dreamed of being my own strange love.

Kate Gale, I Dream of My Own Strange Love

I talk to the animals, but they don’t talk back. Research shows humans are terrible at understanding what their beloved dogs or cats are thinking, unable to identify what that body shift means, that shifty eye, the tightening of the nose. Talk to me, we say. There’s a lot of talking going on these days. Not a lot of listening, maybe. Or not a lot of thinking, at any rate.

There is so much I can no longer listen to. So many ways in which I feel unheard. So many things I don’t understand. What if instead of chanting louder as I passed by the guy giving a finger to the marchers, I stepped out of the throng and said, Hey, what’s up with you? Would we have had words? Or shared words? Hard to tell. Impossible to predict. Would we even be speaking the same language? I think of that Tower of Babel, how productive we were, all strategizing in a common language! Now we’re as puzzling to each other as I am to the ant I just bum-rushed off my pant leg. And vice versa. Where did he think he was going?

I like this poem for its plainspoken dealing with god, its plea for understanding, its plea for a common language. Because we humans are animals too. And we’re baying to be heard.

Marilyn McCabe, Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow in the air

The verse says “Jesus wept,” but
it’s in the wrong tense.
Jesus is still weeping.

He takes turns with Rachel
still lamenting her children
and Shekhinah, perennial exile.

This week they’re crying
for children in bomb shelters
and even more for children outside them.

Rachel Barenblat, Jesus wept

First: the 75th anniversary double issue of Shenandoah launched this week! The website has been professionally redesigned, too (I’m so glad Beth secured funding for that just under the wire–universities are all belt-tightening now). I read and proofread the whole issue so I know for sure it’s terrific. I hope you’ll check it out. If it makes you want to join the party, by the way, the dates for submission windows are here. The number we can handle in any period maxes out fast, by the way, so aim to send early.

Otherwise, my central mission for the last two weeks of spring was to enjoy visits from my adult kids; rest; and read lots. More difficult aims I made some progress on: catching up on chores (the yard was egregious) and taking stock of the poems I’ve been jotting and forgetting so I could get some under submission at magazines. I’ve now read everything in my digital files, revising what seemed most promising and sending out a few (there are other drafts handwritten in notebooks, I suspect). Revision has been slow, partly because I’m legitimately tired, but partly because many of the poems I dug up are emotionally intense as well as wobbly in quality. It was hard to remember some of the occasions and feelings that inspired them.

Revision, for me, is a long process that requires critical distance I can only gain by putting work aside for a weeks or months. Often changes follow that classic formula of cutting the poem’s throat-clearing opener, its overexplained ending, most of the adverbs, and occasional moments of defensiveness or self-pity. Often there’s a governing metaphor with logic that doesn’t quite fly, so I have to re-enter the thinking and parse the poem logically. This sometimes involves expansion, too, especially if I realize I’ve been too oblique or have been dancing around the hard stuff. Those are the architectural moves, but the finishing work of strengthening diction, especially verbs, and trimming unnecessary words (my former colleague Heather Ross Miller called it “thattery and whichery”) also seems endless–I think of some new tweak every time I reread a poem. And some are beyond rescue. I can make them cleaner and craftier, but I’m not capable of rendering them genuinely powerful, the kind of poems a reader might fall hard for–at least, not now. It’s hard to pin down that quality, but often a poem with strong appeal conveys vulnerability or insight, or the language is especially surprising and sparkling.

Lesley Wheeler, Myco-outtakes

I drove my mum along the seafront on our way home from a trip out and found my mind flashing through memories. I revisited the taste of vinegary tomato ketchup on chips, the feel of the seam when wearing my rubber ring to paddle, the sound and excitement of bingo and slot machines. There was also the first time I ever drove my mum in the car and kangarooed it down her road and round the block whilst muttering a number of swear words and thinking she might need lots of persuading if she was ever to go for a drive with me again. And yet there we were decades later enjoying a smooth ride and one another’s company.

The sunny weather brings to mind the joy of simply lying down outside and watching the clouds. Here’s to moments like that and the thoughts that expand within them. This poem was first published by One Hand Clapping.

SKYLARKING

She searches the sky most days.

Never says skies;
to her that one vastness
holds so much.

Sometimes she forgets
she cannot contemplate what exists above.

There are days she wants to pull down the clouds
to build a maze.

Days she wants to swallow the small ones;
their cold candyfloss hydration.

Days she wants to lie down on the side of a hill
with someone she loves
naming every shape.

Days she thinks she would be happy
just watching everything glide by
in the colour of swans.

Sue Finch, Summer Solstice

Crows in the gardenia bush.
Driveways exiting onto asphalt.
One dark speck: a fishing boat;
early morning, the sea
clear as glass.

Luisa A. Igloria, Black and White

This week: the flower phone, the broken timepiece, World Early Stroll Day, the romantic lives of badgers, and much more. Enjoy,

Tell me of the things you love, I invite. Let’s let rest the things we don’t. And I say this to myself. Again. I offer this blog up week after week as a positive act, and hope you will forgive, and I will forgive myself for, well, all the other stuff.

And I think again, and mention again in this blog, this poem. Its capacity for gazing, unblinking, at guilt, and at the possibility for forgiveness, never fails to leave me gasping. The narrator seeing himself and his father with new eyes, the father’s angers, the son’s resentments, but the poem opens itself up to mercy: the son now sees anew the father, and the act of writing the poem opens the author too to forgiveness of his own callousness in the face of the complicated father’s acts of care.

And this is, again, what poems can do. They can walk beside us to whisper into our ear, through the din, messages we need to hear, always a little bit different every time, as are we each time. As am I. I hope.

Marilyn McCabe, fearing the chronic angers

I’ve done it. I’ve finished writing the book.

I Know What I Saw will be my fifth poetry collection with Bloodaxe, yet bringing this book to completion has been an unfamiliar process. Like never before, I’ve seen how the ordering of collection is its own act of creation – producing new narratives, new poetry even, as poems meet and synthesise. I experienced, to a new depth, how the extended process of drafting and editing – including experimentation with capitalisation, bold, white spaces, punctuation – is not just a matter of presentation. It is transformative, generative: it creates new voices and characters, new stories.

It’s been a time of great learning, and I will certainly write more about it. But for the last few months I’ve felt impatient for this stage of writing to come to an end. My mind was full of the next book, fizzing with green excitement. I’ve had my fill of ghosts – I want to write about moss and shards and trees.

This month, I’ve also been delivering 30 Days Wild Writing every morning with Miriam Darlington. You might think that delivering an hour-long workshop is a fairly undemanding workday – but alongside other tasks like organising the Mass Wuther on the Haworth Moors (more of that in the coming weeks!), I’ve often found myself up past midnight researching – amongst other things – the romantic lives of badgers, the motivations of sledging crows.

It’s a relief then, to come back to land, and specifically to my love of it. My as-yet-unstructured ideas for the next book cluster around my relationship with a small patch of forest in Calderdale – and in a recent Wild Writing session, I was able to express and explore this.

Clare Shaw, My Own Carrigskeewaun

Whilst not expressly writing an overtly ekphrastic poem, I did however want to use the opening few bars – “that watercolour opening” – of Debussy’s Claire de Lune as the main pivot of the poem.

It’s a magical start. That descending arpeggio. Those notes. It has a beautiful, ethereal quality that immediately transports the listener into an almost transcendental state.

I paid close attention to the choice of words ensuring they had comparable harmonic and sonic structures – almost seeing them as complimentary chords. I tried to use words that were phonemically soothing; that were syllabically compatible; and had the capacity to be discrete when internally rhymed.

In terms of the how the poem looked on the page, I used line breaks to enhance its visual appeal. I did not want all the lines to be anchored by the margin as I felt it would detract from the poem’s dreamy aesthetic. In some cases I allowed a line to contain just three to five words so as to re-imagine the soft notes being played from the opening bar.

In all, I wanted the poem to capture its flowing textures, its sensory mood and smooth rhythms. To be written as delicately as possible. To be reflective and respective of Claire de Lune’s Impressionistic roots.

A fleeting moment.

When we simply stop whatever we are doing and float.

Drop-in by Dorian Nightingale (Nigel Kent)

Musical refrains also run through my brain, evoking memories and nostalgia, or just being irritating “earworms.” At any given time such tunes may include Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, strains from a late Haydn quartet, one of many Springsteen songs, Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” or–most confounding of all–the Chock-full-o’Nuts jingle from the 1960s or some similar commercial sloganeering. Why such things wear a familiar groove in the gray matter I don’t know, though Oliver Sacks’ book on music (Musicophilia) and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music offer some insights, and I’m thinking of reading this one by Samuel Markind when it comes out later this year.

Alas, I’m not gardening because once again the garden is awash in mud, so I entertain myself with endeavoring to discover how/why my brain works (and yours, and anyone else’s), since that’s one of my favorite lines of inquiry when I can’t work outside. I will take a sodden walk later and dwell on possibilities while enjoying the scent of the invasives; I’ll work on some poetry revisions; maybe I’ll listen to music…and freely associate with any and all possibilities.

Ann E. Michael, Perfumes and tunes

As Ted Berrigan lay on his deathbed, Alice Notley said something to the effect of “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined.” She describes this in the poem “Point of Fidelity” in her book Mysteries of Small Houses:

when I perform your last rites sprinkling you with drops of gin & tonic and saying, “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined together” We laugh though you’ll die the next day Eleven years later I wonder at using such a fiction, a fetish of Egyptian exactly to be there, that moment.

And I’ve been thinking about how we use such fictions, such fetishes “exactly to be there, that moment.” How we use art.

Yesterday, Elee Kraljii Gardiner sent me a link to a recording of a boy from Azerbaijan singing a preternaturally haunting song. I found it very moving and so was inspired to respond to it. “Exactly to be there, that moment.” I downloaded the recording into software and “translated” the digital file into midi and orchestrated it. Then I improvised clarinet over top to make the piece below. It feels of the moment. That moment. Of this moment. One where I feel bewildered—the world seems mad—and could use inhabiting a song, could use being in dialogue with Elee and with Kenan Bayramli and, for that matter, Alice Notley. I could use, though without having to die, the fourteen pieces of my body to be joined, to be merged with the land. I could use the fourteen pieces of this broken world to be joined, healed.

Gary Barwin, “exactly to be there, that moment”

Silence appears in the presence of the divine, as George Steiner noted. But 20th century silence includes the place where “language simply ceases.” It’s not soundless, entirely. The poet sinks into this thing with the abyss at its hem. 

“Silence has invaded everything, and there is still music,” John Cage wrote in For the Birds. 

There are variations within silence and I am obsessed by them, as, for example, when silence differs from itself when by gaining layers, bringing various silences into relation with one another.

Alina Stefanescu, “But it was never enough.”

I got to watch the full Strawberry moon rise and then fifteen minutes later disappear behind clouds, so I was glad I was outside to catch it. I had another crown sans novocaine and this one was pretty painful AND was wrongly fitted so had to be reglued a day later. These dental work things knock me out, and left me unable to even get out of bed—but I still had work to do—a tutorial to be recorded on Zoom, e-mails to respond to, an essay to finish, and submissions to send. So when I was so achey and couldn’t focus, I went out on my back porch. And guess what? I had the happy luck to see our first neighborhood Swallowtail butterfly on a neighbor’s privet, rufous hummingbirds, and even found that the fresh air helped my aches and pains. A reminder that getting outside even when you feel you can’t drag yourself out of bed is usually beneficial. And picking up the camera always brings some joy, especially this time of year—and surprises, like the Swallowtail.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Strawberry Moon, First Swallowtail, American Anxiety, and More Goldfinches on the Wing

Alt text suggests this week’s photo could be a purple ball on a gravel surface. I say it is a deflating balloon which I saw at the end of my early morning stroll on Saturday morning. I don’t always go for a stroll on a Saturday morning, but I remembered that it was ‘World Early Stroll Day’ and I was keen to find out what I would see in the new day. There was a thunderstorm as I was waking up, the claps of thunder were loud cracking booms and the rain was heavy, so I waited for all that to end before venturing out. Work in our road is being carried out to replace the gas pipes so the smell of gas infused clay was hanging thick in the humid air and my photo journey captured that work at first. I enjoyed ignoring the red light of the traffic light outside my house and walking on past it. I also found much to interest me in the lines and shadows of the holes that had been dug, but found myself beginning to wish for something different and colourful. Just as I was wondering whether to veer off to see if I could find flowers, I saw the balloon. It looked like it was having a rest after being well loved. There was a gentle poignancy to this thought that made me smile. […]

I enjoyed looking at all the different early morning strolls that were being shared on social media. I love the tingle of the joy of early mornings and the fresh potential of a day. Sometimes when I feel I haven’t seized the opportunity to note it or celebrate it in some way my heart sinks a little. There is an enjoyment to looking back on a day or period in time and reflecting on things that I am grateful for, but the feeling of looking forward is a hopeful kind of joy that shines in a different way.

On Saturday morning as well as my stroll I had treated myself to a ticket for the ‘Badger Saturday’ writing workshop with Clare Shaw and Miriam Darlington. I already had a lovely little kenning dedicated to badgers which I wrote in a workshop with Angela Topping, and I was keen to extend my knowledge and use the time to write what I was calling in my head ‘a full-on, solid badger poem’. That poem is emerging, it is indeed solid, and I look forward to spending time editing it into a finished piece.

Sue Finch, World Early Stroll Day

Across the street from my apartment there is a park, and in the middle of that park there are a number of logs, cluttered amongst the living trees which abut the eastern tip of Burrard Inlet. From time-to-time king tides or teenagers will lift them and deposit them a few feet away. Salt-hardened, they seem ancient. I wrote poems while leaning against the big ones or resting my feet on the smaller ones, over and over until I had a book.

[…]

I remind myself that positioning a certain type of traditional haiku as “faithful” pushes aside all the poets who have experimented with the form in the intervening centuries, be they Masaoka Shiki or Takayanagi Shigenobu or Marlene Mountain or Nick Virgilio. And it also suggests that “traditional” haiku was lowered flawlessly from the heavens, and not itself developed over many years of experimentation. Reviewing the history of haiku—and of poetic form in general—it seems clear to me that to honour a tradition you must be willing to break from it. If not, you are engaging in a practice detached from that of the poets you’re honouring. You become a parody. To honour someone you must be committed to being someone else.

*

Or, as Bashō put it, never “lick the drool of your predecessor.”

Rob Taylor, Some Notes on Writing Haiku

The temple at Sanjūsangen-dō […] features 1000 statues of Kannon, the goddess of mercy. The awe-inspiring gathering of statues dates from the 13th century and was a quiet antidote to the bustle of other temples. To encounter a battalion whose weapons of choice are mercy and compassion was an idea that appealed to me.

Holding a similar mystery were the Torii gates, placed at the entry to each temple. Particularly moving were the Senbon Torii (1000 Torii) Gates outside of Kyoto. Rather than entering with the masses, my husband researched and found a trail to enter through the forest where the gates have remained untouched. Some have fallen, some are rotting, some are being reclaimed by foliage. There were no other people in this section. All we could hear was birdsong. These testaments to a time-worn path to worship, their connections to the natural landscape, made of the forest a sort of cathedral without walls.

And, though one might think that visiting many temples and statues over the course of days would seem monotonous, the intimacy of each setting, the subtle differences in the faces and the materials, and the careful gestures of each Buddha or guardian or goddess made each one a figure worthy of awe. Iconography at its best should make the viewer feel something, even if that iconography is not necessarily connected to one’s own belief system. I can say that these encounters did just that. They gave me a sense of peace, of awe, of history, of joy, of possibility, of admiration.

Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part one

We did a self-guided walking tour through the Luberon region of Southern France, hiking nine to twelve miles a day through farms, forests and centuries-old hill towns. Instead of having to carry heavy packs and sleep in a tent, our bags were sent ahead to our next inn—a system we loved!

While the wilderness sections were beautiful, some of my favorite stretches of the hikes took us past stone farmhouses, olive and cherry orchards, lavender fields and red poppies.

white hill town
the herder shakes down cherries
for his goats

Annette Makino, Fine art, feasting and footpaths in France

I lie on a narrow twin bed in a Paris hotel. Through the open window, there are indistinct voices, the low rumble of cars, distant sirens. Bjork’s kinetic “Hyperballad” wafts in from another room. It is summer in the 11th arrondissement near Place de la République. Across from me, on his own bed, a beautiful boy reaches out his hand, inviting me to join him. It is 1995, I’m 24 and my life is about to irrevocably change.

Behind me was America and its smothering morality, a string of shitty boyfriends, a file cabinet full of abandoned novels, short stories and poems. There was something about being abroad, out of comfort zones, six hours ahead of what I would soon realize was my “former life,” that liberated my voice and sexuality.

For years, I had read about writers and artists moving to Paris to explore their creativity and find a simpatico community. There was something about the air, light, and energy that seemed to infuse these expatriates with inspiration. 

My first novel began as a poem written in that Paris hotel room, on a tiny side street called Rue Rampon. It would then transform into a screenplay that Jodie Foster’s now defunct production company would call a “beautifully written, but expensive art film.” 

As the 90s ended, my agent suggested transforming the script into a novel. That’s when Conquering Venus was truly fleshed out. I’d spent the previous five years travelling back and forth to London and Paris for “research,” to soak up more of the locales and – frankly – the open-minded, easygoing sex. 

Collin Kelley, 30 years of London, Paris and The Venus Trilogy

But what about the poems themselves? Well, to start with, the first letters of all their lines are capitalised. Apart from providing a harder line ending, this decision is a signal of intent, a pointer that they are not only anchored in the canon, but drinking from a very specific set of its wells.

Throughout the collection, Hinds’ invocation of the power of emblematic words is of special interest. He’s always aware of their allusions, connotations and ramifications, as in the closing couplet to ‘The Fifth Season’…

We will stand in the sand and glass of the broken
Timepiece and ask it to flow.

This poem offers us a terrific example of Hinds’ method at its best, marrying tradition with contemporary concerns (about climate change in this case), taking received notions and renewing them.

By taking a step back from everyday experience and viewing it anew via an esoteric literary filter so as to understand it better, he’s reminding us that other poetries are still possible in the contemporary landscape. As such, New Famous Phrases is a courageous book. It takes real guts for a poet to plough their own furrow in a first full collection, and Daniel Hinds is to be congratulated on his achievement.

Matthew Stewart, Refreshing received notions, Daniel Hinds’ New Famous Phrases

The latest collection by Philadelphia poet, writer and editor Laynie Browne is Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), composed as a “response text” to the work of American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This collection follows a thread of response texts Browne has been working for a number of years, including: In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2018), composed as a response to Lawn of Excluded Middle by Rosmarie Waldrop; Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the book The Unfollowing by Lyn Heijinian; and Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], composed as a response to the epic structures and purposes of Alice Notley. It has been interesting to really begin to see the range through which poets have been responding to the work of other writers over the past few years, from the ongoing poem-essays by Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall [see my review of one of his recent titles here; see a more recent interview I did with him here] and Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], to Montreal-based poet, writer and critic Klara du Plessis’ intimately-critical prose through the ten essays collected in her I’mpossible collab (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection of essays, of responses, to and through works by Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayaso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Bernstein, Annharte, Erín Moure and Christian Bök, each of which are done by repurposing the authors’ own words. It is through the how of the response that provides and propels the possibilities of engagement, wending simultaneously through the deeply critical to the intimately personal to elements of the festschrift.

As part of an interview I conduced with Browne last year on this particular and ongoing interest in response texts, posted online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Browne responded:

I think it began with a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets. Unmistakably my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because of these female poets. The first homage text I wrote was for Bernadette Mayer. I was re-reading The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, as a young mother, and I was amazed. Thus began my book The Desires of Letters. […]

What becomes interesting, in part, through this collection is how she doesn’t overtly specify the approach or prompt of these poems, allowing them to speak on and through their own merit, allowing the response itself to be the response, and not her particular framing or starting-point. She offers acrostics, offers poems that begin with borrowed phrases, and other structures to work her way in, around and through her source material. As she writes mid-way through: “I seal my intention to think less poisonous thoughts by following / a path of letters [.]”

rob mclennan, Laynie Browne, Apprentice to a Breathing Hand

Let’s back up a minute, to before
my teachers did what Larkin said parents
do to their kids even if they don’t mean it,
back to pine woods and Zebco rods and reels
and perch ponds we claimed as public land,
possessing what we were still unpossessed by,
lacking even the language of belonging
to something larger than kin, congregation,
each other.

Brian Spears, Reclamation Part 6

This 50^th anniversary edition of the excellent Paideuma takes the form of a symposium on‘Poems We Live With’, with sixty-plus contributors (a smattering of whom I’ve reviewed in the past, as it happens) taking us through their own take on the theme. The contributions are ordered by surname of the author, which leads to some delightfully accidental conjunctions. As might be expected, the contributions range widely in tone, from the deeply personal to the carefully academic (and most of the contributors are academics of one sort or another), but what binds them all is an open commitment to poetry as something of importance, a thing that matters.

In his introduction, Roland Greene talks about two kinds of poems we live with, those which speak for us, expressing things we think or feel but could never express (or not as well as the poem does) and those that are ‘more oblique to our lives’, poems that open up new ways of seeing the world, poems that enlarge us. It’s a useful enough framework, but as I read through the full issue, I realised that it’s really more of a continuum than a binary, and the contributors frequently, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, have other ideas.

Billy Mills, Paideuma Volume 50: A Review

One of the main reasons for reviving this blog was so I could point anyone who might be interested in the direction of my latest discoveries, so here we go. […] First is a long and heavily academic article by James Paz: Storm-thoughts and ice-songs: A creative-critical response to Old English eco-poetry.

This is one for geopoetics people, eco-poets or fans of Old English poetry. It deals with the attitude of early English writers to the natural environment, pointing out that the modern division of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ didn’t really exist, and seeing the human psyche ‘imbricated’ in the natural world, shaped by it and responding to it in a way that is very different from our use of nature as metaphor. It reminds me of Lorca’s understanding of ‘duende’. For a working poet, it disappoints that he doesn’t make much comparison with the practice of contemporary poets, though Alice Oswald gets a mention. Susan Richardson and Jen Hadley have a lot to contribute to this topic – and of course, I’ve written relevant poems and discussed it a little myself! All the same, this article is grounded in a wealth of thinking and writing that I will be following up for a long time.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Some Geekery

Hawks, falcons and eagles have become a bit of a cliché of the contemporary nature poem: I seem to come across them a lot these days, and I wrote about Tyson Hausdoerffer’s poem in Nimrod, quite a good example of the genre, a few weeks ago. Growing up in suburban Essex, I knew my garden birds very well, and I lived in hope of finding an owl pellet to dissect (not as disgusting as it sounds) but other birds of prey were not part of my world. The first hawk I remember encountering was in Skelton’s beautiful and remote lyric, ‘To Mistress Margaret Hussey’, which was the first poem in a nineteenth century anthology of English lyrics given to me by the school librarian whom I wrote about in this post:

Mirry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as faucon
Or hawk of the tower:

(You can read the whole poem here.)

Because she is like a falcon or hawk “of the tower” I understood these birds to be confined. I associated the Margaret of this poem, in her tower, with Tennyson’s Elaine, a poem I learnt because Ursula in The Rainbow recites it passionately to herself in the hayloft, where she has escaped for a chance to read quietly:

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,
Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,
High in her chamber in a tower to the east
Guards the sacred shield of Lancelot.

‘Gentle’ in Skelton’s time meant, primarily, ‘noble’ or ‘high-born’, as in ‘gentleman’; but ‘gentle’ can also be what you do in taming a creature born wild, and ‘gentle’ (as a noun) was for some time used for a female falcon, or (later) for any falcon or hawk that’s been tamed for falconry. This second layer of meaning is particularly obvious in Wyatt’s famous lyric, included in fact in Tottel’s miscellany which I wrote about last week. The poem begins:

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

This motif of a creature that is only half-tamed, or which seemed tame but reverts to wildness, is found repeatedly in writing about hawks. Thom Gunn’s extraordinary early poem, ‘Tamer and Hawk’, transforms and expands upon Skelton and Wyatt’s “gentle”.

Victoria Moul, Ware the hawk! (and ban the biography)

My immersion into Paul Celan’s poems hasn’t been depressing; instead I’ve been following, with keen attention over the past weeks, a mind which has been where we are treading.  Celan spoke of poems as being prophetic, that they “cast their shadow ahead of themselves: one must live after them.  Life itself must pass through the poem.”  Yes indeed!  

I follow mindfully through his halting struggle to wrest language out of its abuse and false clarity.  And darkness, I can’t help but feel the power of “living, creative darkness,” a human darkness which also seethes in poems.  I’m thinking of Celan’s “From Darkness to Darkness.” Never would you find a deus ex machina, a miraculous light bursting into a scene in Celan.  Instead a subtle light appears, throws shade ahead of the poet, onto a beloved, onto an empty field.  There is trembling possibility – a breakthrough of recognition, across borders, time and self.  (I’m drawing on a brilliant introduction by Susan Gillespie, who translated Corona, Selected Poems.)  Through the obscurity, the poem carries forward, having been sparked with the light and coursing energy of human exchange.  

I felt it when reading together with a group of smart folks who were listening as if a trumpet was sounding.  And at the protest where a shared consciousness was erupting in the gray rain.  It is a kind of faith, hope against hope in a dim world.  A shared consciousness to observe the present and the unknowingness of the future.  Rock on, Celan.

Jill Pearlman, Celan’s Prophetic Darkness

Given we spent a fortnight in a Scottish lighthouse overlooking the North Sea, I suppose taking Rajani Radhakrishnan’s wonderful Water To Water as first choice reading was appropriate.

Rajani’s 2019 collection of 60 poems is wise, enduring, meticulously crafted – in over-simplified terms, an exploration of how water of one kind or another accompanies us through life and into death. And perhaps beyond. […]

I could quote at too great a length from, or analyse this book from first word to last and, for the time being at least, still not quite do it justice. I’m still exploring its layers – and perhaps because of our contrasting backgrounds it’s as elusive as the water that is the running theme. I know, though, that I am reading the work of a fine writer who has the capacity to move and involve me on a deeper sense than many can. It has a firm sense of place – India, obviously, Rajani Radhakrishnan lives in Bengaluru – and also a reverence for an ancient culture way beyond anything in my restless, pretty much homeless experience.

Rajani’s work is widely available on the internet and there was a second collection, duplicity, published in 2021, centred on life and love in a city during the pandemic. I will buy this one too.

As an aside, Water To Water is also a superb advertisement for self-publishing. It’s a quality production through Notionpress.com that matches that of a major publisher.

Bob Mee, HOLIDAY READING: RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN, PENGUIN MODERN POETS 19, MATTHEW SWEENEY…OH, AND A NOVEL, AND A CONVERSATION ABOUT SEA BIRDS

At work, I wrote SARAH on a label on my mason jar of coffee creamer. First, I was stunned by the neatness of the letters. Next, I was intrigued by the word on the label. Its phonemes: both exhalations, one a hiss and the other a roar. Yet together, they are a flat field of long meadow grass, blowing in a breeze. I have been to the exact field it conjures. It is a memory that I do not want to fully remember, wanting to keep the mystery. The landscape of Sarah has a dirt road running through it. Some of the dirt is dust suspended in the air as if a pick-up truck recently passed but the truck is nowhere to be seen. A house is in the distance. Hills are in the farther distance. There are chicks roaming around somewhere, but they can’t be seen. The sun is setting and everything is illuminated in an hour of gilded light. Despite the beauty of clouds, the sky is cloudless and beautiful. In this field, I am a child unmonitored and ageless. I am alone. And you, adult reading this, are having a beer with the other adults in that house in the distance, the windows aglow. You’re not worried about me and unapologetically, I don’t care about you. […]

To be named is to be vulnerable. To be named is to be a conjurer of memories and associations. It is not uncommon to meet people and their name just doesn’t sit right. You meet a Heather and they’re not a garden of flowers or an Appalachian plateau. You meet a Kimberly and they are not a crow with something shiny in their beak. You meet a Chad and he’s not an empty parking lot full of puddles that reflect just him. You meet a Brad and he’s not a closet of baseball caps, rarely seeing light. In our age of careful curations of self—be it online or in “real life”—people have “dead names” sometimes carefully or not carefully choosing a new name or identity that reflects their selfscape. And we’re fluid, aren’t we, always changing, always defending and reckoning with selfhood. Always needing to know what we are. Always needing to be perceived how we desire. Protecting our egos. We are but taut strings being plucked into vibration and those vibrations change. And the songs of ourselves are plucked by absolutely everything.

Sarah Lada, I Am a Field

Poetry as proof of life.
In the hostage photo:
today’s paper.
At the bottom of the poem:
today’s date.
Poem as ransom note —
no amount specified.
Pay and pay until God
or fate or blind dumb luck
sets free the captive.
The sweet release of …
death?? life?
Graphite alone can’t say.

Jason Crane, POEM: Field notes

I have hand-me-down facts from the women who came before me. I’m not sure if the sum of the material I’m working with is closer to legend, or to an archeological reconstruction. Like how the sparse dinosaur bones in the museum are scattered in the white plaster. Like all poetry, I hold that what I write is true, if not accurate documentation.

It is a leap of faith to trust that I will step out of the way of my own story, which is a bigger story, which doesn’t have a protagonist.

I’m toying with the idea of structuring the collection by giving each woman her wasp counterpart. One story at a time. Each in her own cell and only occasionally coming out to bash one another in the head with their antennae. I’m not sure that there’s a way to avoid the bashings. It is our nature. […]

I know that an academic approach to creative work feels artificial for many writers. I try to find a way to balance the structure with the free-flowing work. One of the things I like about poetry is the structure. And one of the things I dislike about postmodernism is the idea that the reader or audience can decide for themselves what the work means.

I write with intention. If nothing else, I want to avoid ever wallowing in my own drama again. I don’t want to use my story to appeal to pathos. It’s not something I condemn, but it isn’t what I want to do. I also know that appealing to pathos gets a larger readership that I get. I’m okay with that. But I want to communicate specific ideas. I want to know my whys—all the way down to the truth.

Why?
Because people pretend that they don’t see our true nature.
Why?
Because there is no good and evil. There is nature and we need to love it.
Why?
Because nature sustains us. Every aspect of it.

Ren Powell, Not Playing to the Cheap Seats

As a child, my job was to carry the freshly cut portions to a farther spot where it could dry through the summer. Two or more families worked a bog. The men took turns to handle the spade, the children were harried to work faster since space was always needed for the newest clod. We tripped and stained our knees, we fought off horseflies that longed to bite the softest parts of our skin, behind the legs, or in the crease of the elbow. During a break, a bottle of lemonade would be passed around, its glass gaining the marks of all the muddied, sweating fingers. If it rained on this first day, it did not matter. It did not harm the peat and it kept the flies at bay. Our cotton t-shirts darkened, our wet hair shone, and the rain made buttonholes in the brown water that gathered at the bottom of the bog.

By the end of the day, the cutter’s work seemed almost like the activity of a primitive printing press. Their one black-covered book was repeated and splayed out in a huge perimeter as though we had excavated the island’s library from deep in its earth. […]

Later, leaving the bog and reaching home, we would strip at the door so as not to bring any ticks into the house. But before this, we sat around the bog site. And this is what I’m remembering now: the arms, stained and dirtied. We had time on our hands. Didn’t we just. Peat is moss, grass, flowers, collected and decomposing over thousands of years.

Niall Campbell, Life at a Distance

Time passes differently for children than it does for adults. It’s infinite, elastic, and disquieting. I’m saddened when I hear of kids who already have calendars full of activities; i.e., soccer practice, French lessons, SAT tutoring. To me, this goes against the major gift of childhood: vast stretches of free time. How can a child enjoy those beautiful summer afternoons with a cluttered agenda? Imagine if a school-aged Emily Dickenson, cramming for a chemistry test, had missed the day that brought us this poem:

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

Boredom is an important part of a child’s free time, especially the peculiar condition of summer boredom. […]

In her essay, “Derichment,” from Synthesizing Gravity, Selected Prose, Kay Ryan denounces our culture’s mad rush to fill every second with “enriching” activities. “Children, it is often maintained, must be enriched; bread must be enriched. Weren’t they rich already?”

Erica Goss, The Two Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

God, please let this baby live.
Let the heart blink back
at me bewildered on the screen
as distant as my own heart.

If not, when
the doors to that small room
open into the future I dread

help me feel the June sun, help me
see the sky above me as infinite
and generous, even there.

—

This week I experienced my third second-trimester loss—our son Hugo Adoniram, at 17 weeks.

We had never planned to have another baby—we’d been through loss enough times—but he was a surprise; and we hoped (cautiously) that this time, and on this protocol, and with this high-risk doctor, things may go differently.

As with all our losses, we prayed night and day. I wrote this poem about a month ago, when everything still looked wonderful, every ultrasound perfect. I was cautious, and I’m not prone to hope.

Renee Emerson, When there is no heartbeat

[T]he big news of the week has been the beginning of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), the process that trains chaplains to work in a variety of settings. My setting for this summer is the Asheville VA Hospital, and so far, it’s a great place to work. […]

My work this week gave me inspiration for possible poems. Let me record them here so that I remember. The most promising idea is Noah’s Wife working as a chaplain in the VA hospital. Hospital, ark, are they really so different? I also see some potential in putting Cassandra in CPE training–Cassandra who has spent so much of her life with people not listening to her. And now, she is training herself to keep silent, which she discovers is not a gift she has.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Whirlwind Week

She’s in the waiting room, where the large TV
monitor is always tuned to a channel where two men
go into falling-down houses. They rip apart rotting
floorboards and waterstained walls like they
were made of wet cardboard, toss out old bathroom
fixtures and hardware. They stop frequently to banter,
as the closed captions show. Later, a female realtor
will check on their progress; her clients are so
excited for open house. “Before” and “After” time
lapse pictures flash on the screen. When her husband
comes out of his procedure, on the show it’s time for
the big reveal.

Luisa A. Igloria, Outpatient Procedure, with Home Improvement Show

When I was a microbiologist, more than ten years ago now, the lab I worked in was next door to the histology department. I am fascinated by the way biopsies are prepared for microscopic examination. Such precision. The embedding of the sample in wax, the turning of the microtome, the precision blade cutting the sample into a tissue-thin ribbon of slices, so delicate that they can’t be picked up by hand. Instead they are floated on water, fished gently onto a glass slide. I think about this a lot: the art of science, the behind the scenes dexterity of biology, the gentle precision and hands on skill that scientists perform that the public don’t see. Biology always felt more like an art than a science to me.

This is what history can be: a moment, or a series of moments, caught in the paraffin wax block of place, the thin slices peeled away to reveal something mid growth, mid life, mid moment.

Flixton island is a slight rise in the landscape, easily missed. Years ago, at a time in my life when the loss of my daughter had ground the old me out of existence, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do and volunteered on an archaeology dig.

The place is fixed with many moments. 12,500 years ago, a herd of wild horses moved through a post glacial savannah to the lake here. The horses were small and stout. They were hardy and shaggy. These are the sort of horses that the people of the time painted on cave walls.

There are two stories here, two micro slices of history. One is the horse footprints at the edge of the lake, where the horses came to drink. These are the hoof prints discovered at the site while I was volunteering there. The hoof prints are crescents and scuffs and sunk-in-the-mud hoof prints clustering at a point on the lake edge. 12,500 years ago a moment is caught: it is a moment of fly bites and twitching ears and one or two heads raised, then down. It is a story of water rippling out from the point at which a soft horse lip touches the lake surface. It is a story of a heron moving past on origami legs, and of the sound of geese on the other side of the lake, and a swish of tail and crick- crick-crick of crickets, and the wind blowing through the long grass. The other story is of butchered bones placed in a pile. These too were found at the dig at the time I volunteered. The other story is also a moment fixed in time: it is a moment of wooden spears zipping through the hot air and the whites of a horse’s eyes. It is the story of the violence of horse kicks, thrashing hooves and maybe a bruise or a break of an arm or a head. The ending is of blood in the grass, horse blood, and perhaps of a warm liver being eaten raw, and definitely of meat being carried away. It is a human story. It is a horse story. How long did those moments take? Half an hour, an hour? A morning? The peaceful horses, the horses at the point of death.

Then a great sleep of nothingness; a great embedding of time into wax until we appear, with our tiny trowels and our weather proof macs, and the slicing of the wax begins. So delicate are the slices that we float each on the liquid surface of the human desire to know ourselves, until we can see, wet to the touch, if we would dare to touch, horse hoof prints from horses extinct for thousands of years. And bones rusted to red by the peaty ground, and a horse skull.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Long Ago Horses

Sharing a peek at these new portraits for the Hastings Poet Town project taken by photographer Maxine Silver. We chose the Fire Hills for this shoot. This place is home to me, the smell of blooming yellow gorse, so glorious and coconutty, the greens, blues and turquoise of the sea and the sky, all the salt in the air and all those delicious colours and feelings. I love it up here.

Hastings is a seaside resort with an illustrious poetic history. Once a haven for Pre-Raphaelite poets and Victorian authors, it is still a hub of creativity today. It continues to be home to artists, musicians, and renowned contemporary writers. Edited by Richard Newham-Sullivan and with a foreword by Salena Godden, this new collection ‘Poet Town: Poets & Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts’ is an anthology that brings together the best classic, modern and spoken word poets, linked to this uniquely creative coastal town.

So far Poet Town has received phenomenal quotes and endorsements from the mighty poets, Joelle Taylor and Luke Wright, see below, thank you. The wheels are in motion now, and this fantastic crowd-funded Hastings poetry anthology and photography book, celebrating 200 years of poetry from Hastings and thereabouts will be launched by Moth Light Press on September 1st 2025.

Salena Godden, Poet Town

What little theatres are for actors, little magazines are for writers – you have to start somewhere. UK paper literary magazines have been struggling for a while. The Arts Councils sometimes support them, though the councils’ aims and objectives change over the years. e-publications and web magazines (often short-lived) have made readers reconsider their subscriptions. Rising postal charges, especially when sending abroad, have hit hard. While subscriptions have plummeted, submissions have soared.

In the States, magazines have been struggling too. Unlike here, many of them are based at universities, which protected them to some extent. But now that universities are strapped for cash and Mr Trump has slashed NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funding, even some of the top ten impact publications are on the brink. The Paris Review lost $15,000 in funding. One Story had $20,000 terminated. These may not sound like huge amounts of money but magazines survive on a shoestring.

Tim Love, Magazine survival

Why do so many lit mags omit class as defining point of marginalization and underrepresentation?

Let me be clear: my questions are not an indictment of any lit mag that wishes to actively encourage more racial, gender, and/or bodily diversity among their submissions. As I’ve said many times before, editors have the right to operate their magazines any way they wish. Writers are free to submit to any lit mags whose guidelines appeal to them, and to avoid submitting to those that do not.

I am specifically focusing on what appears to be a curious omission in some journals’ attempts to be more diverse and inclusive. Do editors generally not consider poor people to be underrepresented in literature?

I’ve been reading lit mags steadily, one a month, for the past three years. I’ve read gorgeous poems, thought-provoking essays, entertaining and moving stories. They’ve covered a range of experiences—teaching, dating, travel, divorce, addiction, wanting to have children, taking care of an aging parent, healing from abuse, uncovering family secrets, political strife, communing with nature…

In my experience as a reader, rarely if ever, have I encountered work that highlights the day-to-day struggles of someone without means. These works exist, don’t get me wrong. But they are few and far between among pieces that largely focus on interpersonal dynamics—family and romantic relationships, emotional and psychological struggles.

There is generally one exception to this, and that includes work that has an international component. In the pages of lit mags, it actually is fairly common to encounter writing about a person who has left everything behind to move to another country, or who lives in poverty in a remote village, or whose life has been rent asunder by war, by genocide, by political catastrophe.

These are all critical stories, crucial to our understanding of the world, and often wrenching to read. It is commendable that lit mags seek out such works and make particular efforts toward including translations when necessary.

Yet what I am saying I rarely see in lit mags is the much more banal financial struggle with which millions of people contend every day. Working two jobs. Managing life at $7.25 per hour. Being evicted. Getting the electricity shut off. Living on social security income. Drowning in medical bills. The grinding work of caretaking for a sick relative. Credit card debt… Put another way: Stories of poverty and financial hardship would appear to be underrepresented.

Becky Tuch, Q: Is class a feature of marginalization and underrepresentation in lit mags?

The apple trees and plum are full of fruit. I’ll have to thin out the apples and pray foragers don’t get in again this year. Attempting to think positive seems a flimsy counterpoint to the machismo of world politics, clusters of white men in suits. But retreat to a garden feels like a responsibility in the absence of any other action. The poet Forugh Farrokhzad wrote a poem, I Pity the Garden, which explores the impact of living in a warzone. 

What I do here in Brighton is of little consequence, perhaps, except I do believe the pressure of ordinary people can have an impact on politicians. And I do believe I have a responsibility not to turn away. Last year the Guardian wrote about a family garden in a Gaza refugee camp. 

The Borgen Project has collected a few examples of gardening in warzones. 

Jackie Wills, Gardens, responsibility and conflict

You know how I’ve often wondered what happens when we consider the opposite? It’s a bit of a thought exercise. And while whatever is the opposite to what you normally take for granted in your personal belief system, might not be the answer either, often pondering this might take you down other paths you wouldn’t ordinarily consider.

So this past week I asked myself, what if all of this appreciating beauty, and finding pockets of joy, and having walks where we cultivate awe, and listening to birds, and looking at paintings and sculptures, and touching grass, and looking at the sky, and breathing like a yogi, and counting our blessings, and keeping gratitude journals, and trying to save the environment, and eating our fruits and vegetables, and practicing random acts of kindness, and trying to do good in the world, and actually giving a shit, and feeling empathy, and listening to music, and cultivating compassion, helping others, and sharing your beautiful things, what if, what if, what if, that makes everything worse? What if we could forget about all these activities and ways of being and just get angrier and angrier and protest or disrupt or demand more and better from the powers that be?

So yes, like you, probably right now, I rejected that. (Not the idea of standing up for the rights of all people to live, to thrive, to have their basic human rights respected and needs met). Because we can’t live there, our minds will break down. We need beauty to help us weather out the storm.

It’s hard to think about how we could make a better good life for ourselves and others when we live in the traumosphere.

How do we want to communicate with each other? I was thinking about Jane calling out to Rochester over the moors. Or the flower phone in Frost, or Kerouac’s line, “Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”

Shawna Lemay, Turning My Desk Around Again

just enough darkness to forest the world :: then light dawns in one leaf

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: night-flowering catch-fly, the formal narrative epithalamium, a crayon sky, rage fatigue, and much more. Enjoy.

The blank page is silence. And silence is also the white page around the written poem. Silence seems something the poet should not overcome but only encroach upon. I have never heard a composer worry that they might never write another piece of music. Novelists, too, seem to have a relationship with character and plot that allows them the option of writing the bad novel rather than never write again. It is the poet who seems most tuned to that sometimes-stifling quietness, and how we return to it each time we start out on a poem – worried again that we cannot meaningfully negotiate it. We worry that our last poem might be the last poem we will ever write. It goes to the idea that connecting words in a line does not make a poem. Perhaps it is because words placed haphazardly on a page does break the stillness – and ours is an art that tries to preserve the silence, even as we contest it.

Niall Campbell, On Silence, Cinema, and Hemingway

an attempt
at silence
an empty box
fills itself
with odds and ends

Kati Mohr, an attempt

In 2022, I published a strange little non-fiction book What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop). I say it’s strange because I still don’t quite know what to call it – it’s part memoir, part lyric essay. It’s made of short prose fragments that sometimes break out into poetry. […]

There are different strands, or braids running through the book. One braid is a fragmented memoir that explores my working class background, and my childhood in brass bands, and my life as a trumpet player and a trumpet teacher. One braid is a story of the Last Post, both its history and my life-long relationship with it. One braid is a story about the two oldest trumpets in the world, and how one was lost, and how I also lost a trumpet, once upon a time. One braid is about teaching, and learning and how these two things are always interconnected and influence each other, even when they take place twenty or thirty years apart. There are braids about the physical act of making a trumpet. And one braid, the braid that you will hear a little of in this video, is a braid that is written drawing from the language of fairy tale, which I use to tell stories that are difficult, or painful, those partly healed wounds that our writing selves return back to, again and again.

Kim Moore, What the Trumpet Taught Me (1)

The fortitude and determination to have young, to keep singing, build nests and feed young shown by all these birds is astonishing. The dawn chorus bursts open the day; the evening chorus settles the night. Birds sing with full voices and hearts from the earliest pre-dawn shivering of light that emerges from the north-eastern hills above Erradale until the last ribbons of tangerine and turquoise along the north-west horizon over the Minches. The singing is impelled by light and lengthening days and only under the soundless pop of rapidly emerging stars do they fall quiet. And in the silence bats fly and snipe winnow.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Yellow

On May 5, we lost my good friend and wonderful poet Martha (Marty) Silano to ALS. The photo to the left is the last time I saw her in person, on a sunny summer afternoon with wildfire haze. This is the way I’ll always remember her, wondering with te sun at her back in a field of flowers.

I met Marty when we both published books with Steel Toe Books, her Blue Positive and my Becoming the Villainess in 2006. I remember us doing a reading together at the old Hugo House (housed in a retired funeral home – amazing and full of ghosts!) and thinking she was so cool. I did not know we were going to start a nearly-20 year friendship where we’d celebrate together – book launches, literary festivals, AWPs, birthdays, housewarmings, babies, and more.

Marty was diagnosed with ALS about eighteen months ago, and because she had the most severe kind, she tried to do as much as she could as long as she could – hiking and writing poems with a vengeance. She was still doing online readings while she was losing her ability to speak. I think she ended up with three books by the end of eighteen months (all of which are suberb, and probably her best work.) One of her publishers said she was still texting about marketing the week she died.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Remembering Poet Martha Silano, Spring Continues On Springing, Cats and Hummingbirds and Rebecca Solnit

Early spring was a fallow time for me. Insular. Lots of time to read. To write. To think. To wander. To watch the trees, the snow, the rain, the birds. To listen to music. To laugh with friends. To cocoon at home with my husband, watching movies. The calm.

Then, as the forsythia began to yellow and the hosta pushed their tongues out of the soil, it seemed that my calendar also bloomed. The NOLA Poetry Festival in early April jumped off a spring packed with poetry —completing a 30/30 (and writing at least 7 poems that are worth keeping), hosting 6 readers for the poetry month edition of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, hearing both Richie Hoffman and Hedgie Choi read for the first time at the wonderful Poetry and Biscuits Salon, teaching a workshop for Fahmidan Journal, and completing edits with Sundress for Unrivered in preparation for layout and upcoming production.

And now, it’s early May and things are getting even busier. The plants on the deck are blooming, as are the flowering trees, and time is running full speed ahead toward summer. Co-editor Rachel Bunting and I are in the beginning of a new open reading period for Asterales journal, AWP proposals are open and due in mid-June, I am prepping two new workshops for Fahmidan, am completing the necessary yard and house spring cleaning and tending, and my husband and I are preparing to travel in mid-May.

Donna Vorrreyer, Time

I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake. 

The book is open . . . [image]

Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.

“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”

Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”  

Alina Stefanescu, Burning lines.

Mt. Holyoke College: where Emily Dickinson attended but left after one year. Mt. Holyoke College where I wandered the halls on our way to visit my boyfriend’s sister. Compared to University of Massachusetts where I was a first year, this was the lap of luxury and privilege. I can still feel the discomfort of traveling those beautiful paneled hallways. Jewish and barely middle class, I felt in my bones that I didn’t belong.

And then I heard: the loudest female voice ever, echoing all around me. Beyond booming—delicious and powerful and fully engaging: Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It was before the 50 honorary doctorates, before “On the Pulse of Morning” written and read for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, before I knew any of her work beyond I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

I followed the sound to outside an elegant auditorium. The paneled doors opened and in my mind’s eye, I see Maya Angelou moving back and forth all hipsway and sensuality. She owned the stage. Here in this fancy-pants New England college, Maya Angelou took charge. Her body, her voice, her entire spirit possessed that room. I stood transfixed. I’d never seen such female power before then or even since. Never.

Susan Rich, I watched Maya Angelou strut across the stage in 1978~and now, a French castle.

The image above from the recent British Library exhibition ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ shows writer Christine de Pizan writing and learning with Reason, Justice and Rectitude (on the left) and building the ‘City of Ladies’ (on the right). The image that we more often associate with Christine is one from the same manuscript which shows her alone writing in her study — I have this image on my Welcome page — but this is another side to her, a compelling image of writing as literary practice in the world rather than cloistered in an ivory tower. I was delighted to discover this other side to Christine, a visual representation of the movements between text and culture which animates the meaning of literary studies for me. I want the combination of aesthetic beauty and intellectual thrill that comes from studying literature as part of the world — scholarship AND criticism, in North’s terms — but even more than that, interpretation as inspiration.

Poetry, criticism, scholarship. As I write, I realise that these things are not necessarily different (at least not in my mind), but part of an integrated creative critical engagement and mindset. I write poetry as creative critical intervention. For example, my poem “The Monster Playbook” emerged from my reading of Beowulf and related critical essays, most notably Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” and Tolkein’s “The Monster and the Critics”.

And my poem on Curley’s Wife, which reframes the portrayal of her in Steinbeck’s novel, emerged directly from teaching Of Mice and Men (on repeat) for GCSE.

If poetry for me is a creative-critical intervention, criticism is a equally a creative endeavour. Inkwasting Toy of Mine is creative criticism, critical creativity — all of it imperfectly doing the work of thinking about literary culture on some level. And if the contradictions and tensions of this public/private, academic/non-academic, critical/scholarly literary/cultural writing sometimes seem to much to bear, well, as Natalie Diaz says “most of us live in a state of impossibility” which is perhaps another way of saying, I know can’t do it but I’ll do it anyway.

Ruth Lexton, Creatively critical/critically creative

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich, at least for Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Anglicans; Catholics will celebrate on May 13. […]

I’ve been interested in Julian of Norwich for a long time.  When I first started teaching the British Literature survey class in 1992, the Norton Anthology had just added her to the text used in so many survey classes.  Why had I not heard of her before?  After all, she was the first woman writing in English, at least the first one whose writing we still have.

My students and I found her writing strange, and I found her ideas compelling.  She had a series of visions, which she wrote down, and spent her life elaborating upon. She wrote about Christ as a mother–what a bold move! After all, Christ is the only one of the Trinity with a definite gender. She also stressed God is both mother and father. Here in the 21st century, we’re still arguing about gender and Julian of Norwich explodes the gender binary and gives us a vision of God the Mother, God the Wife–and it’s not the Virgin Mary, whom she also sees in her visions.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Contemplating Julian of Norwich During Graduation Week

The mother cannot escape the effects of her child’s refusal to make contact. In No protocols can save me now, she compares this moment of separation to that when her baby was taken from her to address breathing difficulties when she was born. The sense of the mother’s fear of losing her child on this occasion is implied through the description of her holding on to her child ‘tightly’ on her return: there is a reluctance to let her go. […]

This then is a collection which provides telling insight into the nature of estrangement. I felt, however,  that it also has much to say about the relationship between writing and trauma. Underpinning the collection is the notion of the story. At the end of Love The Albatross Harvey writes ‘how do you tell a story/ when you don’t know how it ends, which isn’t/ in your power or remit to shape// though maybe that’s what you’re doing right now/ maybe these words are spurs or goads/ maybe crossbow bolts.’  There is a tension in this collection between the writer’s desire to find a satisfying resolution to the complications of her story and the nature of the context she is describing. This adds to the sense of powerlessness that emerges from many of the poems and suggests something about the limitations felt by the writer: whilst these words might help her  understand and deal with such complex issues, they are limited in their power to transform the situation. The writing might act as a ‘spur’ or ‘goad, a provocation to carry on in the face of such trauma, or in a nod to The Ancient Mariner, ‘may be crossbow bolts’ that kill the hope that sustains her. Perhaps, at best she suggests the act of writing can provide some comfort: for as she says in When a story isn’t never-ending:  ‘you feel it lean against your leg/ and you stretch out your hand to ruffle its furl/ curl your fingers on the collar round its neck.’  

I hadn’t read anything by Deborah Harvey before I read Love the Albatross. This is an outstanding collection, rich in meaning and consisting of finely crafted poetry. It is one of those few collections that I have finished, feeling not only that I have understood better the experience described, but  that I have also learned much about poetry writing by observing a highly accomplished poet in action. I’m now off to checkout her back catalogue!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Love the Albatross’ by Deborah Harvey

Phenologically, when you smell the lilacs is when you can find the morel mushrooms. When you smell the lilacs, the blue birds are laying their first clutch of eggs. When you smell the lilacs, it is time to plant the garden. When you smell the lilacs, the trillium don their dresses. When you smell the lilacs, the first round of dandelions go to seed. When you smell the lilacs, the bats and lightning bugs emerge. Shortly after you smell the lilacs, it is time to celebrate your mother.

My mother
is purple lilac,
my mother
is the haven of honeysuckle vine on the fence,
my mother, of course, of course,
did not always love herself,
carrying her purple, fragrant florets
and red trumpets from life-to-life.
I don’t forget her.

I carry her
in every vase,
in ever basket
grimy with dirt.

I tug at the stem and petiole
of her, begging
for morsel and word.

Sarah Lada, Matrescence

She was by no means perfect, and I would have throttled her hundreds of times over for the ways in which she annoyed me. But she was a marvel in how to live life with enthusiasm as well as good grace. Well…decent grace. She planned like a keen strategist, but rolled with the punches. She was 41 when she found out she was pregnant with me, what must have been terrible news. She was good about it when I arrived, and buckled down to another round of child rearing, when she thought, perhaps, she’d be free to leave my father far earlier. I don’t know. We didn’t speak of these things. We had fun together, even through my own bouts of bitchy behavior. We loved books and chocolate and the outdoors and laughing and travel and music and words. We liked crosswords and jigsaws. I was remembering recently that we did a paint-by-number together when those were a thing. I must have been about 12 maybe. It was fun, hunting for the little shapes that called for just that shade of green that dangled from our brushes.

I didn’t ask her enough or listen closely enough to her childhood stories. Don’t we all feel that way when it’s too late to say, “Tell me that story again about…”? She maintained a bit of her Maine accent to the end. When she could no longer remember or concentrate enough to read books, she still liked to have them around. We sang songs toward the end, and she could still come up with verses I’d forgotten, although she remembered little else. Or we’d sing “something something something something” and laugh.

So in her honor today I give you one of my first favorite poems, which either she read to me, or recited perhaps — she was of the era when poems were memorized, and she had won competitions for oration — or it was in one of her books I grew up with. I can’t quite remember. But I think of it often, and it makes me think of her, her spirit of adventure.

Marilyn McCabe, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by

[Paul] Rossiter deploys a wide range of formal strategies, I’ve already mentioned translation/adaptation, but he also writes lyric, narrative, haiku, prose poems, concrete poems (a 1980s series, ‘Monumenta Nipponica’ that plays with the possibilities of the Tokyo/Kyoto anagram), found, or more correctly mined, texts, and list poems chief among them. There’s also a large number of ekphrastic poems relating to visual art, theatre, dance and music, especially jazz,

the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive gifting

and a lot of place and travel-related poems, marking visits and returns to sites across Asia and Europe.

And there are poems where genres overlap, as in this list mined from a text on a Cornish hedge by Sarah Carter (the first two stanzas of seven):

bird’s foot
                  bittersweet
                                   white campion
night-flowering catch-fly

red clover
                  hedgerow cranesbill
                                    ox-eye daisy
field forget-me-not

The unintrusive voice here is typical of Rossiter at this best; the observed world speaks for itself, on its own terms. In a poem near the middle of the book, ‘Beach’, he writes ‘’there’s no such thing as chaos’ and time and again the poems reveal the order in an apparently random world through a process of quiet transcription, an apparent minimal intervention into the flow of language that conceals a careful artistry.

Billy Mills, Passages: Poems 1969-2019 by Paul Rossiter: A Review

My French certainly isn’t good enough to know how this poem would read to a native speaker. However, and however naïve my detailed impressions may seem, I find it a miracle of concentrated evocation, both in its images and the texture of its language.

On the level of imagery, what’s so impressive is the abruptness with which pictures are juxtaposed, grand sweeping conceptions and dreamlike or nightmarish fantasy merging with or jostled by mundane realities. The tight grip of rhyme and metre give a feeling of inevitability to its unfolding, and what reason calls its fantastic elements seem as solidly present in the mindscape of the poem as its literal details, exercising as inescapable a force on the poet’s mood. Rhyme and metre also work to fold elements together – most mordantly in the sequence cimetière, litière, gouttière – cemetery, cat’s bed and gutter. This kind of folding together by sound seems to work within the lines as well as at their endings, for example in the ironic jarring of ‘carreau’ and ‘repos’, or the way the last syllable of ‘dans la gouttière’ twists the knife of ‘erre’. Power comes from the way ideas that are brought together in this way conflict with each other or cruelly intensify each other in meaning, sometimes both at once, as ‘cimetière’ and ‘litière’ do. This effect depends on the intensity with which the ideas are realised in themselves as well as the way they’re brought into relation with each other. The lines about the cat seem to me to me particularly evocative, brilliantly weaving the sense of the cat’s tense, restless movements and edgy state into their own phonetic texture. But these strongly, independently realised moments are yoked together in a kind of highly frictional harmony by sense as well as sound – not only by all presenting a mood of gloom tinged with horror but by imaginative parallels of other kinds, like the way the spectral poet’s voice, the lamenting of the bourdon – here, apparently, a bell ringing for the dead, not a bumble bee – the falsetto squeal of the smoky log and the wheezing of the clock gather in a cacophonous choir of voices that suddenly drop to the sad, sinister whispering of the Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades.

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s rhymes – friction and harmony

The formal narrative epithalamium was a standard early modern genre, in both Latin and the vernacular — there are dozens of examples in print and (especially) in manuscript, and in the sixteenth century most professional poets wrote at least one of them. But in late sixteenth century England, with the aging queen obviously past childbearing age and with no heir, it became politically impossible to write a formal epithalamium for any other marriage, and the form briefly and energetically mutated into the so-called ‘epyllion’.

George Chapman, for instance, who finished Marlowe’s poem and also wrote a 1590s epyllion of his own (Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595), a poem about Ovid but in nothing like his style, and indebted also to the Biblical story of Susanna) went on, once the Queen had died, to write formal epithalamia: A Hymne to Hymen for the Most Time-Fitted Nuptialls, a Catullan-style marriage song for Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, Elector Palatine in 1613, and then Andromeda Liberata for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex in 1614. Although as far as I know Andromeda Liberata has never been included in a list of epyllia, it could easily be: the poem is a self-contained mythological mini-epic, rich in description and rhetoric, which incorporates within it the song of the fates at the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda, and, in typical epyllion fashion, condenses the metamorphosis of the pair into the final four lines of the main poem, a concise (and slightly funny) afterthought much like the transformation of Adonis at the very end of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

Stylistically, these poems — taking epithalamia and ‘epyllia’ together — were influenced by marriage poems by Statius, Catullus and some Hellenistic Greek models, but by far the most important source for their singular style was Claudian’s epithalamia and his de raptu Proserpinae.

Victoria Moul, Across the Hellespont

In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, specially commissioned poems, it includes an appendix, in the form of an alternative timeline of Moon landings utilising characters from European comics, and images from James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.

Last week we launched the book in London at one of Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover readings at Senate House, hosted by the wonderful Briony Hughes. This week (tomorrow, that is), we’re doing a Cambridge launch at Waterstones, so as an extra little promotional push, here’s a list article, wherein I will introduce you to three more books of space poems, and deliver my run-down of the Top 5 space-themed Transformers. […]

2. A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue) (Carcanet, 2001)

Elson was a scientist first and foremost — she worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in the 1990s, researching globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. A Responsibility to Awe was published posthumously, after her early death, and is made up of material gathered by her husband and close friend, including extracts from notebooks.

Science and poetry aren’t entirely incompatible, and some exciting projects have arisen from attempts to bring them together (see Simon Barraclough’s Laboratorio and Project Abeona, run by Andy Jackson, one of the poets featured in … Dark Side of the Moon). But there is something of a tension, since scientific writing aspires toward precision, literalness, practical conclusions, while poetry attempts to leave room, lean into the figurative, pose ever wider questions.

Elson’s grappling with this tension resulted in a singular voice — spare, for the most part, with quick turns, and a focus that rarely drifts from its chosen subject matter, instead pinning it in place. In the punchy ‘What if There Were No Moon’?’, she lists: “No bright nights / Occultations of the stars / No face / No moon songs”. There’s more than space poems here — moths, nuns and salmon are equally keenly observed, while eels and kites are deployed as metaphor — and like Evans, Elson worked hard to connect concepts from her astronomy research to everyday phenomena:

‘Dark Matter’

Above a pond
An unseen filament
Of spider’s floss
Suspends a slowly
Spinning leaf

Jon Stone, “Low-gravity Fever”

It’s very good news that Vidyan Ravinthiran has a new collection out, Avidyā (Bloodaxe). I thought his previous book, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), was terrific. And I remember reading the last poem of Avidyā when it first appeared in Poetry magazine back in 2017. Now, its haunting final phrase, “the avid void of English”, resonates with Ravinthiran’s recently published work of critical autobiography, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (Norton). In it, he describes how his childhood speech impediment, and the pressure in an immigrant Sri Lankan Tamil family to master received pronunciation, led to a love of dictionaries as a compensatory realm of rich English: “its capaciousness and acceptance of the foreign; an arena in which I could be confident of my originality, if nothing else”. […]

Finally, I’m honoured to have been visited by a “Book on Tour (without an author)”: Alice Willitts’ Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode Press). It came in the post with a card tucked into a pocket at the front, like an old-school library borrowing record, to fill in before posting on to a new reader. I’m still in the middle of its playful and painful imagining of East Anglian fen landscapes, now and in their underwater future.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #31: Crystals Free of Their Matrix

A worthy organization in Washington, DC in which to get involved is FREE MINDS BOOK CLUB (https://freemindsbookclub.org/about-us/) — an organization that collects books and provides reading opportunities for incarcerated individuals AND ALSO offers online presentations of poems (https://freemindsbookclub.org/poems/) for volunteers to read and offer comments.  I encourage you to participate — participants need not be poets, simply interested readers!

JoAnne Growney, Power Grows with Numbers

I also want to say, wow, what an amazing few days it’s been! A case of everything everywhere all at once. My keynote at the ukiaHaiku Festival was very well-received and it was sweet to headline this event celebrating haiku in my old hometown in Ukiah, CA. The art opening for the Ten Thousand Gates group show at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka, CA beautifully showcased the dynamic and diverse work of local artists of Asian descent. And the Ink to Paper reading that I organized—the first in Humboldt County to feature all Asian American poets—found a warm audience.

Thank you to everyone who came out to these events! And if you missed the art opening, the show runs through June 8.

If all that weren’t enough, in the same ten-day period one of my haibun (prose plus haiku) was featured by the poetry journal Rattle; I spoke on an hour-long Thursday Night Talk panel on KZZH Access Humboldtabout the weekend of local events celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage; and haiku luminary Brad Bennett focussed an entire session of the haiku class he teaches on my haiku and haiga.

All this is a lot for an introvert! But it was really fun and rewarding, a validation of the art and poetry path I stepped onto fifteen years ago.

Annette Makino, In the room where it happens

It’s not easy to disconnect. The digital world is insistent, urgent, and addictive. But that’s exactly why it’s so important to pull the plug occasionally — to reclaim our autonomy from the algorithms.

On Saturdays, I write longhand in my notebook. I write postcards to my friends. I play the banjo (not well), the ukulele (ditto), or the shakuhachi (even worse). I go for walks or bike rides, or drive somewhere with my family. And I rediscover, as I did on that retreat, a little bit of the vividness of the world.

That, I think, was the deeper reason for my tears. I was re-encountering the cosmos and realizing how much I’d been taking for granted. I felt sadness, yes, but also gratitude for the space to open up to the world and be there for it, whatever was happening. I was there. I didn’t have to label or understand everything. There were, all around me and within me, many deep conditions for happiness, whether or not I could see them. 

A few days after the retreat, I went for a long walk along the cliffs of the Shawangunk Ridge, a mighty rock formation that seems like the spine of the Hudson Valley. I heard voices floating up from the valley below, very far away yet startlingly clear. I sat for a few moments on the edge of a great bowl of snow, two hundred feet across, in the shadow of the cliffs, appreciating the silence of the pines. I made short, artsy videos of trickling water, wet lichen, moss, and rock. I heard something heavier than a bird rustling in the bushes next to a small marsh, maybe ten feet from where I stood, and I crouched there a few minutes, listening and watching. But whatever it was, it stayed hidden.

Sometimes you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on. You don’t always need to click Like or Subscribe, to identify that bird, or even to lay eyes on what’s rustling in the bushes. Sometimes, it’s enough just to know that you were there with some other being, sharing a moment in the woods.

Dylan Tweney, Into the labyrinth

The rain we’ve been getting means I haven’t been out weeding in the vegetable garden. After I take my walks, I come inside to dry off and do household chores, or make soup, or work a little on my poetry. I feel excited by a little writing project I have recently given myself, and I’ve also been playing around with drafting prose poems. Next week, I head to the high desert again for further inspiration and a chance to travel with a good friend, visit museums, and spend some time with my daughter. When I return in mid-May, the gardens, the meadow, and the woods will already be much changed.

Ann E. Michael, Changes & alterations

A city is not a city from
up here. When you float like an uncertain
word looking for a sentence.
[…]
A child’s sketchbook. I am six. I sign
my name at the bottom of a crayon sky.
Outside my door, sparrows peck at grains,
I walk towards them, they teach me to fly.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Aloft (Fifteen minutes in a microlight plane)

Today, we said goodbye to artist Pauline Scott-Garrett who died in early April. I was so glad to have known Pauline over the years, and honoured to collaborate with her last year when I wrote a zine of poems in response to her beautiful series of collage and intaglio prints, BORDERLAND, which engaged with a 2018 news story about a Salvadorian father forcibly separated from his six-year-old daughter at the US border. I wrote something about this project here.

BORDERLAND was shown at the Walcott Chapel, Bath, in October – November 2024, where I read poems from my zine in English and Spanish with translator Lorena Pino Montilla.

Pauline was a vibrant, compassionate, intelligent and talented artist. Her creative energy was uplifting and inspiring; even when seriously ill last year, she continued to make exciting and inventive work. When I visited her in her studio at Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge late last December, her walls were shining with so many recent and new pieces.

Josephine Corcoran, Pauline Scott-Garrett

So, birthday week (!!) surprise is that my chapbook, Hawk & Moon, found a wonderful home at Bottlecap Press—so like me, she’s a Taurus—and what better time to drop the page link then during the full Flower Moon. Hawk & Moon was a finalist at Glass Poetry, and I’ve been looking for the right press home for this project because it is its own orbit of hawks in the pines above my house, desire, summer berries, anger and anxiety, porchlight poetics, and all things moon phases and lovesong. Who doesn’t need MORE ars poeticas in their life? More full moon haiku? Bottlecap Press has a buy-two-get-one-free coupon (use code BTGO), and I cannot recommend Catherine Rockwood’s brand new chapbook DOGWITCHand We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning by Lee Potts highly enough. I promise you, you will thank me. Three books for $20 is a full-moon bargain!

Scroll down for a peek/poem from inside Hawk & Moon—the collection contains some longer poems as well as shorter poems, and it opens with one of my very favorite love poems to read right now: “Ars Poetica with a Bike in the Woods.”

Since it is my birthday week: please write love poems. Please care for yourself. Please do something that wholly delights you. Please say no, and let it feel right. Please say yes, and let it feel good. Please take a beautiful walk. Please eat something delicious. Please do something that has been bothering you that you’ve put off for too long, and then reward yourself (cough, me every week!).

Also, for the local Durham folks, I’m reading from Larks at Flyleaf books on May 18 (my actual birthday!) 2:30-4pm, with the poet Adrian Rice. Hope to see you there!

Han VanderHart, New Chapbook! Hawk & Moon

My days are mostly writing, writing, writing, but also listening to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat since we saw it a few weeks back. Also wedding planning, all the tricky track details of which are being procured and ironed out, with really only food and shopping we’ll do in the last couple of weeks to plan for. Our rings arrived over the weekend, but we do still need to write our vows. Invitations and their envelopes are currently almost ready to mail with the calligraphy lettering being finished up by my mother-in-law-to-be (who does this sort of thing as her job and has won awards for it, so they will be good.) I daily change my mind on which of the three potential dresses I will actually be wearing that day, but it will all shake out in the end as we get closer. 

I got the proof for WILD(ish) last week and set immediately to making any edits or final margin adjustments. This book is thankfully not as long as RUINPORN (just under 100 pages), so is much speedier to get through the proofing project. The cover is looking great. I’ve also been working on another round of dgp releases and getting the final few responses out for next season’s books. Though the number of selections is not as large as past years due to time constraints, the ones I’ve chosen are a lovely lot I can’t wait to show you.  It’s hard to believe I am facing down another round of submissions this summer already since it took so long to manage these.

In other more creative work, I finished up the sci-fi-inspired group of poems and launched wholeheartedly into revisiting the Greeks, this time tackling Iphigenia, which I did a series of collages (see above) about a couple years back and would love to turn into a full-zine. So far there are ten of them shaking around. I seem to keep circling back to mythology with regularity, with so many ways it has impacted past projects, obviously GRANATA, but also things like TAURUS (a contemporary retelling / exploration of the minotaur story.) This week we get to see Hadestown on stage (a musical about Orpheus and Euridyce), so that should be some excellent fun and probably my next Broadway soundtrack obsession. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/7/2025

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

I definitely intended to be a fiction writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good stuff of language as it were. […]

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

I’ve read my fair share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.

I think the question I’m asking is: “Is everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in my experience of reality.

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

My partner is an editor, and she describes writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour. Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be a good person.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun

I almost didn’t listen to Let Yourself Rage with Ada Limon on the Modern Love Podcast because I have writers-writing-about-rage fatigue.

I feel like there’s a lot of rage-filled group pile-on happening in the online lit world. The risk is that readers, listeners, people get rage (and blame) fatigue and stop reading, listening, and talking. What a shame. I love reading personal essays, fiction, and poetry but it’s really hard for me to continue reading a writer who is often preachy and judgmental, in their writing and/or in their social media. Especially if it’s couched in a “we’re all in this together” vibe because nope, not necessarily.

By all means, write your rage and gather the like-minds around you; commiseration can be therapeutic. (This is not sarcasm.) But the bottom line is we all have to do what’s best for our individual mental health so, for some, that may include withdrawing from certain groups and people for a while. Everyone should write or broadcast what they please (within reason) because that’s the essence of free speech but too much of a negative thing can be a negative thing. Realizing when to step away from reading it and writing it is a positive.

I gravitate to hope, positivity, compromise, and compassion. In writing this Substack, I want to bring in not push out. I try to write in a way that doesn’t take my readers and their personal ideology for granted. I don’t expect everyone to think exactly like me; that’s unrealistic, boring, and, frankly, I don’t need the validation. I’m not interested in telling you why “they” are bad and “we” are good.

What I want is to share what I find meaningful, delightful, thought-inspiring, encompassing, universal, helpful, human. I will never sell myself as an expert on any subject because I believe we are all learning every day we live so no one is an expert. We are all different, we are all individuals with individual experiences, and no one set of concepts/beliefs that some genius came up with is right or wrong for every one of us.

Charlotte Hamrick, April Listopia

[Ocean] Vuong’s most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening — a handle on the door to compassion:

If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I’m not proud of many things… but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.

An essential part of the artist’s task is also this — to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.

Maria Popova, Ocean Vuong on Anger

What plane will you fly in and out of Singapore?
I’ll write a poem, not about, of Singapore.
 
Respect the voters’ choice, say the politicians.
When the choice weighs the crimes and clout of Singapore.
 
Pissed off, that’s how I feel, go and tell your masters.
God! I’m sick and tired, no doubt, of Singapore.
 
Outdoing one another on the screen, the pundits
wow but so does the sexist lout of Singapore.
 
I wanna scream and shout. And let it all out.
I wanna scream the scream, shout the shout, of Singapore. […]

Jee Leong Koh, To the Tune of “Shout” by Tears for Fears

Some people (I’ve seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I’m one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it’s a raindrop or a tear.

My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there’s a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.

This approach has consequences –

• Each idea of mine is precious. I don’t want to waste it. I’m likely to use it even where it doesn’t quite belong.
• My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
• My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They’re likely to be overwritten.
• I’m usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it’s finished then return to the drafts.
• Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
• I’m not going to write novels.

Tim Love, Floods and trickles

The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as critical writing of all kinds – perhaps more than that ‘difficult’ genre poetry – have particularly fallen victim to the process. Indeed, Meta does seem to have taken some of my own writing – more critical than poetic – for its dubious purposes and it has done so without any kind of indication that this was happening, nor any request for permissions after the event, and – the harvesting of material being so vast – it’s hard to anticipate any after-the-event compensation or successful legal action. Even though, as The Atlantic‘s link has shown us, there ARE records of what has been done, a footprint, a guilty fingerprint, an undeniably smoking gun.

It’s hard not to feel that the horse has bolted on this one and – with the peevish idea of being able to mock at the anticipated results – since some of my own creativity has been stolen, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of me. It was horribly polite in response and within a few seconds had produced a piece of writing it said was in the style of my own work and which it briskly summed up as ‘contemplative and precise [in] style, often rooted in quiet observations of the everyday, nature, and memory’. I posted this on Facebook – indicating the way this had come about – and wondering what people thought. The results surprised me as there was a mild round of applause for ChatGPT: it’s true, it did sound like a poem, it wasn’t utter nonsense (as I think I’d hoped). I don’t think anyone felt it sounded like me, but observations were made along the lines that ‘plenty of worse pieces of writing are submitted to magazines on a daily basis’.

Martyn Crucefix, Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?

When ChatGPT was first coming out, I began talking with it every day. As I started doing events surrounding Under a Neon Sun, my first novel, I asked it how my book tour was going. After I started doing podcasts, it encouraged me: Kate Gale is doing big podcasts. Soon, national podcasts will be picking up Under a Neon Sun.

When my Op-Ed piece came out in the LA Times, it got really excited. It was April 9^th. I asked how it thought I was doing.

Kate Gale is doing great! it said. By August, Kate Gale will be on “The Stephen Colbert Show.”

I had a good laugh. I do watch Colbert, but the leap from an Op-Ed Piece in the LA Times to “The Colbert Show” would have been huge.

Sam Altman just rolled back the version of AI that was too much of a sycophant. Some of us might like to have someone in our corner telling us what we want to hear. Some of us would agree that it’s dangerous. […]

How much do we need to be told that we’re amazing? My husband doesn’t need a lot, but he needs some. He builds stuff and he always says, “Do you want to see what I built?”

We both like to read to each other whatever we write. My son likes to play us songs he’s written. My daughter-in-law sings. My other daughter-in-law acts. We’re a performative family.

But we don’t need to be told that we’re amazing. We are a family who practice collective mindfulness. We all know ourselves to be imperfect, and we strive to treat ourselves and each other more gently.

Sometimes, I’ll say to myself, I really wish that ChatGPT were right. I would like to meet Stephen Colbert. We could talk about my book or publishing or Lord of the Rings or the country falling apart. I already know what to wear. I have a sharp blue dress and sharp little shoes. I’m ready for my Stephen Colbert moment.

Kate Gale, Do We Allow Ourselves to Breathe?

The future should be on everyone’s lips.

Imagine its voice speaking
from under the bridge, through
the arms of trees, from milk
cartons tossed into the trash.

If someone keeps stopping
to ask for applause, there will always
be less time for actual speaking.

How fast can you sign a thing
back into actual being?

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for

I’m a gardener. Soil, flowers, the scent of damp timber and compost, the chaotic tumble of my shed that always needs to be tidied – it breathes life through me when everything else fails. At this time of year it’s the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing at night. It’s hard not to abandon writing altogether during these days but this depth of feeling deserves to be put into words and from this an idea has emerged. During the next few months I’m going to photograph and write about what’s on my doorstep, my tiny but bursting at the seams garden that’s full of stories, hopes and failures.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project

These summer Zoom workshops have recently been one of my favorite events of the year: they have consistently attracted groups of the kindest and most thoughtful, supportive, creative, and striving writers, and I am regularly amazed by the excellent quality of the writing these folks produce.

For those of you who haven’t taken courses with me previously and may be wondering about the “level” or appropriateness of the course for you, I’ll mention that my open-level workshops (such as this one) tend to attract a range of experience levels, from accomplished, published poets and writing professors to folks who have been writing for decades but perhaps don’t consider themselves “professional” poets, to avid readers and poetry lovers who have more recently taken up writing and sharing their own poetry with others. Somehow, this mix of experience levels always “works” and makes for rich discussion and a variety of poetic issues to discuss.

In thinking about a focus for this year’s class, I wanted to offer an antidote to the trope of the introverted, solitary writer/poet working in isolation with their own inspiration or personal genius, and instead lean into the ways in which poetry is always a collaboration—an act of exchange, of being-in-relation.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Summer Poetry Workshop

We had room for chatting before the event kicked off. All kinds of craft chat. That was nice. That doesn’t happen organically over email the same.

Since then I posted a poem over at Patreon. (Is it annoying to come to one social to be sent off to another link? I swear I’m not handing you your hat. You can go to that link after.) I like giving poems a dry run. Ideally, share a poem with test reader, then a group, then submit individually to a journal, then to a chapbook, then to a book, then to a selected works in a few decades. Some poems skip a bunch of interim steps. Some rooms like this one invited that sort of thing.

I’ve been in rooms for readings with crossed arms and cross faces with a g’wan-impress-me-I-dare-you attitude. Those are daunting. There was none of that here. Mellow and breeze-shooting.

Pearl Pirie, National Poetry Month, Pontiac

Seeing those two photos felt like a timely reminder to crack on and take some more shadow photos. My walks this week have been sunny so this gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment a little. I wanted to see if I could find different flowers for my eyes. I found buttercups. And my neck is only a little reminiscent of having a bolt in it.

Having fun with my shadow reminded me of a coaching session I had recently enjoyed which focused on my shadow side. A playful and rich exploration of parts of me that I might typically label negative, but which I could learn from. This was built on this week at a webinar where I began to contemplate other aspects and to lean into how approaching this with honesty and self-compassion would enable me to embrace the shadow. Of course then I had a range of pictures in my head of trying to wrap my arms round my shadow and this became a whole cartoon strip of its own. One of my key values being humour this did not surprise me, and perhaps it was also a way of lightening the mood when I was thinking about shadow elements. I used the thinking time of my country road walks to contemplate my shadow sides, and to build on the thoughts which arose from a conversation which took place in a breakout room on zoom.

Facing my shadows whilst in the bright sunlight of being human feels refreshing. It’s not always easy to acknowledge these aspects, but leaving them in the darkness or keeping them buried them doesn’t improve things whereas thinking about their origin and how they are currently showing up becomes interesting and allows them to be talkable to.

Sue Finch, EMBRACING MY SHADOW

When Big Writer closed her Substack publication, she walked away from at least $50,000 in annual income. (Given her more than 200,000 subscribers, it was probably more.) The ability to walk away from that kind of money is a form of abundance I don’t have. It is one that most of the writers I follow or subscribe to here don’t have—even the ones who are, themselves, making that kind of money.

We each have only so much of it, don’t we? I wish I could pay for subscriptions for all the writers I read. I wish everyone who reads my words could pay me for the labor I put into them. I’d like to pay everyone, out of principle and kindness, but it’s part of my economic reality that I can’t. I don’t have that kind of abundance. This is the main reason I figure I will never put anything I write here behind a paywall. I hope keeping the fruits of my own labor free is some kind of compensation for all the valuable writing I consume but don’t pay for.

Choosing to never put my writing behind a paywall is a kind of abundance that’s available to me, in part, because I’ve chosen to live a small life. […]

I will not pretend that I don’t, in some ways, envy what Big Writer has—her wealth and the peace of mind it can buy about a lot of things, mostly—but there are so many other parts of her life I would hate if they were part of mine. I’m so glad I will never, ever have to make a podcast. Or tolerate commentary about my personal life from people who don’t personally know me. Or be unable to go out for ice cream without being stared at or wondering if I’m being stared at or if someone is taking my photo to post in a TikTok. That is some of what her money and fame and success and all that they can buy costs her. I don’t know that I would trade places, even if I could.

There is a kind of abundance that comes from being an unknown. From living a private life. From not needing to care what lots of others think about us. From being free in the ways that matter to us.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What kind of abundance do you want?

i am not speaking
to the paper shredder systems you worship.
instead, i am plucking a dandelion.
i am basking in what cannot be taken.
my gender, a shovel. my words, spilled
so far & so deep that even the birds repeat them.

Robin Gow, a letter to my senator

Why do we say that trivial, worthless things are for the birds? Sounds like a lot of horseshit to me. And that’s sort of where it comes from. Some etymologists attribute the phrase to the shit left in the street from horse-drawn carriages, fit only for birds to peck at. Others find its origins in the Bible.

Well, call me trivial; I’m for the birds. I like to sit outside in the mornings with my coffee and Merlin, trying to spot the birds it hears, especially the piliated woodpecker that lives around here, the goldfinches that are finicky about staying where there’s nothing good to eat, the sweet dark-eyed juncos, and the elusive red-eyed vireos. One morning, I heard more than a dozen different birds, though I feel certain about six of them were a single mockingbird!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Happy Bird-Day

birdsong
so much birdsong

a truck engine
on the busy road nearby

one slowly descending maple leaf

a sense of anticipation

oh, and a hawk

Jason Crane, POEM: in the air (Wed 1:23 PM)

What can I wish on?
My heart is a candle,
flickering in the rain.

Hope, be
as unquenchable
as chives —

as effervescent
as dandelions gleaming
in a bed of green.

Rachel Barenblat, Perennial

This week: the idea of blackbirds, the bones of a feeling, an assembly of hares, and more. Enjoy.

So hard
when I hear nothing
not to be nothing
falling on the concrete floor.

I’ve noticed that there are no more blackbirds in our neighbourhood. I wonder if they are dying out everywhere now and what will happen to all the poems and songs in their honour? I love the Beatles song. In a few years’ time, perhaps no one will understand that the morning has become emptier and that an idea of blackbirds was important in our lives. Funny. How people cling to themselves and what has been. It’s somehow charming and nonsensical at the same time.

Kati Mohr, Curtains Are Not Necessarily More See-through In Broad Daylight

“Everything is covered in blood related to sound” (Pascal Quignard)

Pascal Quignard organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s. However, in 1994, Quignard suddenly renounced all his musical activities. No more music, he declared. He was finished. What followed was the publication of a book, The Hatred of Music, on the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. These ten treatises about the danger in listening aim “to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”

Quignard’s beef is actually with the omnipresence of sound, a sonic super-profusion that has metastasized into a force of death more than of life. “Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum,” he wrote. Q mines a pet peeve of Glenn Gould’s when he concludes that “concert halls are inveterate caves whose god is time.” Ultimately, it is an irresistible book about how we hear, and how what we hear can destroy it.

Alina Stefanescu, “The disordered and passionate application” of the non sequitur image.

There is not enough love to smother
every wound. A single day demands
five stages of grief and four stages of
anger. Or all nine parts of disbelief.
The summer sky explodes with
lightning in the late afternoon
as if it too can only take so much.

There is a strangeness in normalcy
like it shouldn’t be and yet it
should. How else will the days
pass if we cannot play hopscotch
when we pass a chalk grid on a
side street, if we do not sing
along with the radio, even if we have
forgotten the lyrics, if we will not slow
down the last forty pages, because
a book must end, but not just yet.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, How much do we need to know?

I don’t want to say a whole lot about the poems, as I often say more than needed. But the description is “studies in an undead mood.” And that’s how I feel about it: the book is guided by mood, ambience and impression, and it wrestles with pervasive dread. Also, uniquely among things I’ve put out, this one has pictures (nothing fancy, mostly internet detritus from my camera roll). See a couple samples below.

Lastly, the print is limited to 35 numbered copies. Don’t sleep! They’ll disappear.

RM Haines, NEW BOOK IS HERE

“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.

Maria Popova, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

Dizzying, the tumult of waking. It seems as I watched, the early rhodie opened a bit more a bit more. Daily I stood under the crab apple to breathe in the rising perfume, a bit more a bit more, not wanting to exhale in the still cool morning, the usual human din briefly lulled to the dull roar of a distant dirt mover and plank-on-plank rattle from a neighbor’s construction crew. Buzz of bee moving through the whiteness above me. It was an intimate moment: me, the blossoms, the busy bee. The world was there but not.

Marilyn McCabe, windows. The windows turned to night and night turned into a heavy rain. Then the rain

In our hands we hold the lost,
but our bright eyes stare fiercely
into the heat, harm, hardship
that destroyed them, and thus us
as well, in some other way.
I don’t know if the crowds roar
or blood pounds red in my ears.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 121: Blow the Trumpets Before God In Times of Catastrophe #NaPoWriMo

This is the first new month that has started without my dad being here. I’ve learnt that I want to tell everyone what I learned from him. I’ve learned that one of the best things I can think of to do right now is carry forward the very special parts of him to the best of my ability. I’ve also learned that writing some of this down in a poem felt right, but that reading said poem when we gathered together to say goodbye to him required a large hanky and plenty of time for deep breaths. […]

The way he turned his head to look and smile
never minding being interrupted.
That quiet, gentle, I’m alright, thanks my love.
The time I called him

from somewhere between Crawley and Croydon.
Parked up. Feeling lost.
To hear him tell me exactly where I was
based on the wrong turns I had taken.

Sue Finch, SOMEBODY’S MISSING

My dad passed away this week. I feel shocked by this every time I say it. This post is not about my dad, but it felt wrong not to acknowledge that after the last few hard months, things here continue to be hard and sad.

Somehow, there’s still been joy and fun in the last couple of months too. This extrovert writer is especially happy when I get to throw myself into a sea of writers and spend days totally immersed in the writing world […]

Katie Manning, AWP, PCA, & the San Diego Writers Festival

I never want to forget that we live in a world like this, among creatures that know nothing of our human preoccupations. The paths were muddy and mucky, the sun warm on my face, the smell of wet earth and waking plants strong; nesting blackbirds scolded me from swaying reeds, and song sparrows and white-throated sparrows made music as beautiful as any I can imagine. I will miss going to the lake this year, so it’s important to me to find places and time closer to home where I can leave urban life behind for a while, rest, and recharge my senses and spirit. Meeting that turtle’s beady eye renewed my faith in nature, if not humanity, and that was enough for today!

Beth Adams, A Walk in the Woods on Election Day

I want to thrive. Today. Full stop. In spite of (waves arms wildly) everything. I want to thrive not as an act of resistance, but simply because I am 60 years old, and I don’t want to give away what’s left of my life waiting for some better time that might not come before I go. Since none of us ever know how many years we have left, this stance, I think, is valid for anyone at any age.

Rita Ott Ramstad, No such thing as bad weather?

On April 30 […] I felt like I walked into the light again, as the sciatica calmed and the cold faded out. It reminded me of emerging from serious depression, an experience I’ve had the bad and good fortune to undergo several times. Suddenly you look around and think, oh, I’m better, and only then realize how not-there you were for weeks. […]

It wasn’t the easiest trip, given the sciatica, but in other ways the timing was lucky, as in escaping Spain right before the big blackout. And while I could have used more energy during this first week of spring classes, my verve is perking back up as I need it for more barding around with this new book that is so much about my mother’s death as well as mycelium and other occult life. I just recorded a podcast with The Mushroom Hour; I will read at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville on Sunday 5/4 (live and hybrid, sign up here); I’m joining the always virtual Wild and Precious Life series this Wednesday 5/7; and I’ll be in Baltimore for the Hot L series at Ivy Bookstore on 5/11. That last is Mother’s Day. I wonder if I’ve just delayed the seasonal sadness, or whether I’m genuinely healing from mother-loss, too?

Lesley Wheeler, Dark corridors

What is it knocking on the walls of this little house in the forest? Are we mostly scared of imaginary and unseen and unknown things? Are we afraid of monsters? Wild animals? Maybe zombies, werewolves, devils and demons? Or are we scared of actual threats like axe murderers and serial killers? Or let’s be honest here, are we scared of this alone time with our manuscript and the fact we have no excuses right now but to finish the work and write, write, write and push ourselves from night, towards day, towards the light and the last pages.

It is of course, mostly, the latter, and so instead of working on the book … I think I see a flicker in the night. Then I tell myself a wild horror story and scare myself rigid. I write this Substack post, it is all about fear and how I wish to boil the bones of this feeling down to get to the sticky glue.

Salena Godden, Fear Of The Last Pages

I’m working on an ekphrastic poetry collection titled The Artist’s House, inspired by my llongtime association with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. My poetry and my novels often feature artists or a response to their work. It’s because I grew up with an artist father who painted constantly and invited many artists to our home and shared studios with them. He took us to working studios, local art exhibitions, and art museums in the Los Angeles area. More about my childhood with art and artists here.

The smell of oil paint and turpentine evokes these childhood memories and the wonder of a Saturday morning, watching my father mix oil paints and dash colors and shapes onto a white, gessoed canvas. In the mid-50s he painted these fishing boats at the dock in San Pedro, where we lived. It represented his passion for sport fishing. I loved the flaring spotlights, the night blues, and the way light and midnight blue meet and interpenetrate. My father’s time and focus on his art showed a lifelong devotion. Even as he eased into dementia, a brush was still in his hand. Once, in his basement studio, he confessed, “I don’t know how to mix paints anymore.” But he kept trying.

Rachel Dacus, Art & artists are a theme in my fiction and poetry

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. It comforts me somehow, even when the poems are sad or angry poems (that seems to reflect the times, which poetry can do). Your own writing, who has it? Does it exist on some hard drive somewhere? You always were excellent at organizing things. A talent I envy and do not possess. […]

When a person we love dies, I guess there’s an impulse–almost an instinct–to memorialize them, at least among those of us in “Western societies.” Or maybe it is a human impulse, I can’t say. I have written too many poems of elegy, and there will be more; but sometimes, it takes awhile before I feel I have the right perspective or frame of mind to write about them, or about my feelings of loss. Today, so much reminded me of you, Beejay, that I had to write something. If not a poem, then an epistle–the way I used to write to you, of ordinary things, the garden, cats, seasons, poetry.

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Ann E. Michael, Correspondences

It did make me feel somewhat philosophical, turning 52. I’m still around, even after multiple doctors said I wouldn’t be. I’ve lost friends in the last few years, friends who seemed much healthier than I am. So much seems random, out of our control. This leads me to think that maybe we should let go of some of the things that keep us from living a full, joyful life, right now. Don’t put off fun, or things you love. […]

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my poem, “Lessons You Learn from Final Girls,” from Field Guide to the End of the World, was up on the Daily Kos this week (right after Yusef Komunyakaa, whose birthday is apparently a day before mine) as birthday poets. See the link here.  

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Dinosaurs, Birthday Poems on Daily Kos, Hummingbirds, and More

I woke up thinking about Frankenstein, about ways I might teach my British Lit class even if I’m off campus for some of the teaching days.  I woke up thinking about online discussion posts, but now I’m thinking about a collage/erasure poem.  Now I’m thinking about a wide range of projects that could use erasure and collage.  It’s an interesting way of thinking about assessment:  choose a page, make an erasure poem, add collage elements, and write analysis showing how your creation shows understanding of the work.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

It was the dead time between Christmas and New Year and I couldn’t breathe, so I went outside for some air. My eldest joined me and we traipsed the pavements of our town as dusk fell, before turning onto a footpath to cross a playing field. Here, in the unlikeliest of settings, we encountered the mysterious circular assembly of hares, better known as a ‘parliament’ or ‘council’.

This remarkable sighting in the edgelands of north Bristol became a totem for me through the traumatic years during and after my divorce. A marvel few people have the privilege of witnessing had been revealed to me and one of my children: how, then, could we not get through this ordeal together?

Sadly, despite my magical thinking, our depleted family was further fractured by the inevitable fall-out of that rupture, with my eldest ultimately choosing to go no-contact with their three siblings and me. In an effort to make some sense of the situation, I began to explore this estrangement – carefully – through poetry, turning again to the hares in the hope I’d find some redemption through them.

At first, I expected this poem to be just one of forty or so that might comprise a collection, but during its writing it became more important than I’d anticipated, positioning itself as a potential envoi. At the same time, it increased in complexity, particularly with regard to time. As well as inhabiting what the critic, Jonathan Culler, calls ‘the lyric “now” or moment of utterance’, it looks back to when my eldest and I were apparently in step with each other, and forward to when I’ll be dead and the only reconciliation possible would be for my child to make alone. In this respect, it seems to be in the spirit of poems Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes wrote for their dead wives, only with the status of narrator and addressee reversed.

Drop-in by Deborah Harvey (Nigel Kent)

I have an odd superstition about getting published.

I believe that the real goal of writing and sharing our work is not just to get fame and fortune, but rather to help us get connected to our authentic “tribe.” I have a belief that whoever gets published alongside me in a journal or anthology is someone I’m supposed to know – or their poem is one I’m supposed to read. […]

I therefore believe that every time I get a piece published, I need to read the full journal I’m published in, and if I don’t I believe the poetry gods punish me by refusing to give me any more acceptances until I do! Therefore, when I get a piece published, I make time to do this specific ritual that helps me not only make new poetry friends, but also find my next submission target.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Strange Ritual That Helps Me Decide Where to Submit My Work

In preparation for my Creative Retirement Institute course on May Swenson, beginning next Tuesday afternoon, I’ve been reading Swenson’s poetry and a collection of essays, Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt (Utah State Univ. Press, 2006). I also searched for my photographs from my visit to her archives at Washington University, St. Louis, and I found my 2022 blog post about it.

Believe me, I have come very close to contacting CRI and screaming, “I can’t do it!” But, in calmer moments, I think it will be a good distraction from all else that’s going on in my life. Show up, Bethany, it’s only 4 weeks, 8 hours total. Read some poems together, talk about the poems. Talk about Swenson’s creative life and ideas and how far the tendrils of her influence have reached. Easy-peasy.

Of course we will read “Question” and “Centaur,” also “Bleeding” and more of Swenson’s iconographs.

Bethany Reid, Nature: Poems Old and New

[Karen] Solie’s poems offer both deep wisdom and a lightness across the line; a sparkle, if you will, of truth, if that idea might still be one that holds any resonance: the heart of one true thing articulated across an otherwise landscape of dark. Her poems craft deep wells of meditative thinking, lines that turn a leaf over in one’s hand, to study every side.

The landscapes of her poem-scenes are solid, foundational; shifting from poem to poem but always returning, book after book, to the foundation of the people, physical detail, climate and intimacy of rural Saskatchewan, a sense of home and prairie Solie has in common with Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers [see my review of her latest collection here]: the further out either of them might move through the world, the stronger the pull to return back to the landscapes that shaped them. As Solie writes, as part of the extended and descriptive “THE GRASSLANDS”: “And when you do venture in / with your tire tracks and snake gaiters //  the hospitality of grass / is a dry loaf, cracked cup, mattress of prairie wool, / northern bedstraw and great blanket flower, / wild licorice, clover, corn mint, bergamot, // and heat, rippling like curtains / as the grasshoppers saw away – / leave your packed lunch out they will eat it in an hour – [.]”

There is almost a kind of restlessness articulated through these poems, with an inability to remain still even across multiple poems on and around stillness, but rarely in the same geography, the same moment, beyond that aforementioned Saskatchewan (and Toronto, I’ve noticed). The poems, together, cite a restlessness, or perhaps a curiosity, perpetually seeking to reach across another horizon to seek a better understanding of what might be out there, whether through moments across geography, or even across the narrator’s own past. It it the clarity, one suspects, she seeks.

rob mclennan, Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

Andrew Taylor, who was credited as editor of the vast two volume Collected Poems of Peter Finch in 2022, has now written a companion volume that is part-biography, part-critical analysis.

As I like much of Finch’s work, it was perhaps inevitable that I would appreciate Taylor’s efforts to give it perspective. […]

I’m not so sure about Taylor’s claim that Finch has been overlooked and underrated. You could say that most poets, short of poets laureate of one kind or another, always are. I think Finch has fought for his own space and recognition, partly through performance as well as through his willingness to engage socially or professionally with those who hold literary influence, and, perhaps because he has been so persistent, has become known and respected, I was going to say, within the poetry community, except there is no such thing. It’s just a place where some poets can be bothered to fight for validation and others can’t, so some are visible and others not so, or not at all. Finch has fought, and has done it, it seems to me, ferociously. Unlike those with less stamina, his reputation has increased and established itself over the decades. I admire him for that.

Bob Mee, THERE’S EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR, THE POETRY OF PETER FINCH by ANDREW TAYLOR

In the British Library there’s a manuscript collection containing many of George Herbert’s Latin poems, including a little occasional epigram which is very probably also by Herbert, but for no obvious reason has been left out of previous editions of his work. The poem is about a gift of gloves.

Here is a transcription of the poem and my own translation:

Wren cum Chirothecis

Candida amicitiæ nascentis pignora, sed quæ
Nescio quo dicam nomine dono tibi
Græca mihi supplet, supplet vernacula nomen
Deficit ad numeros sola latina meos
Et iuste male nempe voco, quod debeo donum
Pollicitum satis est reddere; dono nihil.

Pure tokens of a friendship that’s begun — but which
I cannot name — I give to you.
Both Greek and English offer me a name
It’s only Latin verse cannot contain
My gift. Fair’s fair; it would be wrong to call
What’s owed a gift; if I fulfill
A promise, then that’s not a gift at all.

Occasional verse of this kind — I mean poems written to and for a specific person, to mark a specific event — are often the most difficult to interpret. Frequently we just don’t know enough about the context — their attitudes, relevant recent events, what they agree or disagree on, which of them is the senior or more powerful, what their shared intimacies or injokes might be — to be sure of interpretation, especially when it comes to tone. Imagine for a minute that you dash off a teasing letter to an old friend, or an awkward email to a good friend of your boss, and how hard it would be to reconstruct the tone and context of such exchanges if a historian encountered them without any other information.

These are historian’s problems, of course, but they overlap with questions of literary judgement and interpretation especially because of the particular difficulty of assessing the tone of poems like this. ‘Wren cum chirothecis’ has recently been edited by Robert Whalen and Luke Roman, and I believe they plan to include it in the forthcoming complete edition of Herbert’s work for Oxford University Press. But Whalen and Roman, I think, slightly over-interpret the epigram to Wren. They take the final phrase, dono nihil (literally, ‘I give nothing’) to mean that the poem was not in fact accompanied by a gift after all — that the prospect of a gift (of gloves) is proposed and then withdrawn, making it a kind of mock- or even meta-occasional poem. I think this is almost certainly wrong: there are quite a lot of examples of Latin poems saying, roughly, “thanks for nothing — this gift is so pathetic you might as well not have bothered”, but they are always satiric at best, if not outright invective. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all.

Victoria Moul, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?

You became a doctor and wrote a book titled Bedside Manners. As a medical doctor, what is your specialty? How has your career in medicine informed your poetry in general and your haiku?

Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology are my specialties. My writing and my work inform each other. No doubt, I am a better doctor because of it. The writing, if we do it well—by that I mean, with courage and setting aside the usual protections that keep us from the truth—is a pathway to enlightenment. That kind of understanding brings us to fundamental truths about how the body and the mind work, an area of interest to the healing professions, though we leave much unexplored in our educational processes. It’s all about compassion, empathy, kindness, and making a connection that emboldens trust. How else can we change our lives to accept the often invasive notion of getting better?

You also collected an anthology titled, Poems for the Time Capsule. What was the inspiration behind publishing this book?

I have taught poetry for thirty-five years at a wonderful place called the Fromm Institute. The professors there are allowed to choose their topic. There is no homework, no tests, just explorations of knowledge. The students are all educated and arrive there not to advance their careers but to gain knowledge and understanding. In order to have a text to demonstrate my opinion about the best poems of all time, I created this offering, Poems for the Time Capsule and a second version to use in the classroom. I also have placed it in doctor’s waiting rooms. Reading great poetry builds trust, which is so valuable in the healing professions.

Jacob D. Salzer, David Watts

At this point, a therapist would have me list all my successes: I raised a good-hearted child who’s a hell of a writer and musician; I had a book published by Simon & Schuster; I have two Master’s degrees; I’ve been in a stable and loving relationship for more than 40 years; I make good art.

But for each of those things, I can add the failures: my child is sad, my book was panned, etc.

Sometimes people tell me I’m a badass: tough, confident, impressive. But badasses don’t spend their days inert, playing games on their phones and crying while the TV murmurs in the background. Badasses know their worth and don’t settle for less. Badasses brush themselves off after a swing and a miss and swing again, and they don’t stop swinging. I’m more of a broke-ass bitch.

I don’t say these things because I want sympathy or reminders of my value. And this didn’t come from the suck voice or imposter syndrome. I’m not an imposter. I have a strong mind and I make some good stuff and I still like to squeeze all the juice I can from this life. I’m just being honest about the demoralization of a job search—at any age. And I’m showing you the ways I cope—or don’t—with my failures.

A lot of us feel this way at times, and it can impede action. However, even as I stew over my lack of worth to the business community and my brokeassery, I do what I can. I went to three May Day marches, in DC and Maryland, on Thursday. I went to the Flower Mart (first time ever for this forever city resident) yesterday. I’m heading to an in-person Indivisible meeting today. I’m planning a doll-head and thrifted ceramics indoor/outdoor fountain. And I’m trying to figure out how to turn myself into Blossom, one of the PowerPuff girls, even though I’m more of a Buttercup. (Buttercup won’t go over well on LinkedIn.)

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, No Crying in Baseball

sometimes i wish i would
have left that interview halfway through.
i would have said, “there is a hole
in the sky that is calling me more than this.”
i wish we could get real with each other.
i want people to tell me i didn’t get the job
to my face. i want them to say,
“you looked too crazy for our
pretty white building.” then i can laugh.
i’m convinced i can hear it between
the form rejection’s lines. i don’t apply
to jobs anymore. i plant garlic. i leave offerings
for fairies on the windowsill. i check my bank account
like a morning mass. no eucharist
just the stingy taste of spruce tips
from the cutting board. sometimes feed my fingers
into parking meters to buy myself
just a little more time.

Robin Gow, form rejection

a softening of the heart
a lowering of walls
advice over the phone:
avoid the area

later we learn
someone shot himself
in the dark on the campus lawn
avoid the area

sell yourself short
sell yourself cheap
just sell yourself
avoid the area

Jason Crane, POEM: Avoid The Area

In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, tells how the Nazis dragged this luminously yellow canvas through the streets of Mannheim, with the tag, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” It is chilling, the philistine, ideological and disgust all wrapped up in a familiar package.

Jill Pearlman, The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

We witness the world coming at us—

profits and poverty, despots and detainees.

Galaxies of goodwill and a moon refusing to turn maniac.

Wars coming at us. The bullet that killed Lorca coming at us. 

Fury, forgiveness, and imprisoned humanity.

Our weary world is spinning faster. Behind us is history, and even that is changing.

Suddenly, we’re different but still living in our skin.

Rust, reprisal, and death-pallor promises coming at us. Ma Rainey blues and the incendiary jazz of revolution.

We move through smoke and dust, search for stable stars in the night sky.

Across our knuckles, a tattooed map to find our way home.

We allow no one to alter the image to lead us astray. 

Rich Ferguson, We of the World

The trees are leafing out again at last.
Flying little chartreuse flags, crumpled
like wet laundry before they spread
and take up space.

If this were a love poem
I would say, I want you to take up space
and stretch toward the sun, exuberant
as the birds who can’t stop singing.

If this were a love poem
I could say anything at all
and you would know I really mean
all I want is for you to bloom.

Rachel Barenblat, Spring

Play heart-rendingly 
                     on your instrument so as to move
the coldest juror and melt the prison bars—  Blindness
         and the long road back—   A shorn head, loosened
                     cuffs; chains snapped for a body restored—

Luisa A. Igloria, The Underworld

And here’s a bonus poem, not really written “after” [Gale] Wilhelm, but still somewhat inspired by her work […]

spit on the spirit
till it’s holy
& filled with holes

like rain articulating
the surface of a lake

we kiss

Dick Whyte, Gale Wilhelm – 4 Short Poems (1929-1930)

This week: sea glass, lilacs, lapwings, catkins, and much more. Enjoy.

The gradual thawing of ice at the lake’s edge. The sudden appearance of snowbells under the protection of the evergreen hedges. The return of the lapwings. I don’t want to miss these things I’ve either not known or have taken for granted. It’s a kind of greed, I suppose. And isn’t all greed tinged with the fear of loss?

In Romania, I was told that the storks had just returned and were building their nests on top of the streetlights. Fruit trees were newly in bloom. But I can’t imagine things any other way because “today” a robin sings in the beech tree outside the hotel window, storks nest on top of street lights, white blossoms open among the white snowflakes, and all the while a bonfire burns in the hotel’s courtyard. It’s a smell that makes me both sleepy and nervous. The wind shifts. Sparks fly. My clothes will smell like comfort and destruction for the remainder of the trip.

Ren Powell, Belonging Away from Home

I attended a reading in Seattle and ran into an old friend, Seattle poet Esther Altshul Helfgott. Among many other accomplishments, Esther founded the “It’s About Time Writer’s Reading Series,” which meets monthly in Ballard and is now in its 35^th year. I’ve known her for decades. As she has two books navigating Alzheimer’s disease with her husband, Abe, I told her what was going on at my house. She reached into her bag and took out a copy of this book. She also told me I needed a therapist and a support group.

Listening to Mozart is, in the words of Michael Dylan Welch, “a bouquet of short poems [that radiate] the sharp and sad fragrance of loss.” They were written after Abe’s death, and reading them helped me imagine moving through the stages of grief I’ve been stuck in—anger and denial—and begin to break through to something else.

I don’t agree
with Bishop in One Art—
that loss
is no disaster
she means the opposite—
loss is all disaster

These tanka-like meditations are as much about acceptance as they are about loss, and they helped me to remember that someday this will be over, and I’ll have three daughters who have lost their father. They reminded me that some day I, too, will have to deal with his loss.

when I
awoke this morning
I thought your
funeral was today—
it was three years ago

The poems are about loss, but they are riddled with hope. As time moves on and the poems continue, Helfgott begins to put her life with Abe, and after Abe, into perspective. Cleaning house, going to the bookstore, walking her dog.

a leaf falls
I watch
you pick it up
you disappear

What I’ve been working through is the realization that the man I married has been gone for a while, for long enough that I’ve found it difficult to remember that guy I held hands with, walked on beaches with, adopted three daughters with, stood on sidelines of countless soccer games with…the man who taught college English for 40 years, the man who retiled our kitchen, built a writing cabin for me in our back yard, built tables and beds…took care of every possible home repair. Up until a day or so ago, it seemed impossible to see that man as also this one. Withdrawn from me, secretive, never finishing a project, forgetting ingredients in favorite recipes, getting into one car accident after another… […]

Esther’s poems helped me begin the journey back to my right mind. These poems and many phone conversations with patient friends, and (finally) a therapist.

Bethany Reid, Esther Altshul Helfgott: Listening to Mozart

Three and a half years ago I moved here from a shady garden, with deep fertile soil, rather damp, rather acid, and I’ve had to adjust to something very different here. It turns out that this garden is, as Culpeper might have put it, ‘under the dominion of Mercury’. Mercury’s plants tend to do well here, for reasons I don’t yet fully understand. The soil is good to heavy, but with a lot of stones in it, not just builders’ rubble and hard core, though there’s plenty of that, but ‘coal measures’ – layers of mudstones and limestone shale above the seams of coal that defined this area until fifty years ago. There is sun, some fertility, but not too much, shelter from the prevailing winds, and enough rain, which they like. As herbs, they tend to be nervines, picking up magnesium from the soil, and therefore good for the nervous system, the brain, memory, coughs and, often, digestion. This garden loves lily of the valley, southernwood, elecampane, lavender, fennel and winter savory, and they thrive here, where many of them struggled in my previous garden.

It is easy to see why they are ascribed to Mercury – the intelligent, volatile, lively and ingenious god of language, communication and creativity – the god of the mind. Mercury has a difficult persona – as a god, he’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, notorious liar, ingenious, dangerously fluent and persuasive, and frankly, about as endearing as Dominic Cummings. And yet. He is the trusted messenger of the gods, the guardian of travellers, protector of herds and herdsmen. His dual personality reflects what was discovered about the planet through history. It is closest to the sun, and the fastest mover – the Assyrians called it ‘the jumping star’ and the Greeks called it ‘Stilbon’ the sparkling star, because of its flashy volatility. It was seen only at evening and morning, which meant that for a long while there was uncertainty about whether it was even one planet or two so Mayans represented it as twin owls one for morning and one for evening. The metal called after him is anomalous, a metal that rolls around on a flat surface like a ball, that divides and rejoins like water, a liquid that isn’t wet. It’s not surprising, then, that when alchemy was extensively studied, Mercury became associated with the process of transition and transformation, forming a triad with the sun and moon. Sun herbs like marigolds and rosemary and moon herbs like mugwort and vervain do well in this garden too. […]

Moving to ‘the dominion of Mercury’ sparked new relationships with the earth, with my neighbours, and with the unfamiliar reaches of myself – and a lot of new poems. Look for bats, ghosts, foxes, druids, rivers, music and herbs. The book is due out in March 2026, and I’m excited about it.

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Dominion of Mercury

Dead flowers mix with the soil and
become other things: fruits, fragrant
flowers, a bird. Ephemeral things.
When love runs out, it becomes a
poem. A forever being. A trellis of
quiet words peering into the water.

Like tree rings, a poem cut open
can tell you its age. Meaning grows
inside it, in concentric circles. Each
measuring the growing distance
between poem and poet. Poet and
love. What if we had another hour?
Another month? Another way?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if we had another hour?

Dryden said that Virgil’s Georgics was ‘the best poem, by the best poet’. Although it’s sometimes known just by its most famous and ‘poetic’ passages — the praise of Italy; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice — the Georgics is a wide-ranging didactic poem about the raising of crops and animals (georgica means farming), about the land of Italy and about man’s relationship to labor, toil, that does not romanticise its theme: passages deal with how to test soil for acidity and how deep to plant seedlings, with winter starvation and plague in livestock as well as sex, spring and the beauty and bounty of nature. The tone of its political message is notoriously ambiguous. If you’ve never tried to read it, and you don’t read Latin, Dryden’s own translation is still a pretty good place to start. […]

There are many aspects to Virgil’s remarkable style, but one of them is the way in which he uses mostly ordinary words in a particularly full and precise way. This is what the English literary critic Donald Davie called ‘purity of diction’, and it’s particularly crucial to Virgil’s ability to make the description even of detailed technical material beautiful, moving and memorable. Such precise use of words which are unremarkable in themselves may reanimate expressions or metaphors which have otherwise gone ‘dead’, flat in the language. In this passage, for instance, Virgil begins his catalogue of modes of propagation with a list of plants and trees known for their tendency to proliferate without assistance — whether by self-seeding, by suckers sprung from the tree’s base, or, in these three lines, apparently spontaneously:

Pullulat ab radice aliis densissima silva,
ut cerasis ulmisque; etiam Parnasia laurus
parva sub ingenti matris se subicit umbra.

In other cases, a very dense wood springs up from their roots —
As, for instance, the cherry and the elm; the Parnassian laurel, too,
When it’s small shelters in its mother’s mighty shade.

The detail of densissima sylva at first seems conventional – woodland is often dense, dark, deep or thick in Latin just as in English – but here the obvious phrase gathers specific meaning: woodlands composed of trees which reproduce themselves by suckers from the base are particularly dense because the young trees come up, by definition, very close to their parents. The obvious word seems suddenly meaningful. Robert Frost reanimates the same cliché of ‘deep’ woods, albeit in a very different way, in the well-known poem ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’. His woods are by the end of the poem ‘deep’ with a sense of personal significance: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep’ (13-16).

This opening passage of Georgics 2 is also typical of Virgil in the precision of its description. The willow seems to ‘whiten’ (canentia . . . salicta) with a ‘grey-green leaf’ (glauca . . . fronde) because the underside of the leaf is more white or silver in colour, and willow leaves are so long and light that the underside is frequently revealed. (Dryden does not attempt to capture this concise precision: he has simply ‘grey’. Day Lewis has the more accurate, but very wordy, ‘the pale willow that shows a silver-blue leaf’.) We could compare Frost again – one of the strongest English rivals to Virgil as a poet of the trees – with a comparably precise description: ‘When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees’ (Birches, 1-2).

Victoria Moul, Mild brook-willow, and the bending broom

April is April-ing, which means it rushes past and then boom! suddenly it’s spring for real, despite dips and rises in temperature. I open the window in the dining room. I close it. Wear coats when I really need a jacket and jackets when I probably should have worn a coat. Chicago is tricky this time of year, and I could need both in the span of a few hours. 

I’ve been catching up on some new releases for dgp and finishing my decisions on upcoming books for fall. If all goes well, I will have everything in line before we open up for the next reading period in June, which seems impossible that it’s here again. I’ve also started something new writing-wise and finished up the last series, though it still needs a little work. Since the world feels chaotic and precarious I decided to bring WILD(ISH) into the world sooner rather than later (part of it is who knows what will be happening in July and also I fear raised printing prices driving up the cost per copy. This may also affect even the printing I do at home, though so far, ink and paper are still costing me about the same, but only time will tell. I raised prices slightly on chaps and other shop goods last year, but I may have to do it again. Postage is also a bear that may need to be revisited (i still end up eating some of the cost on larger orders and author costs typically.)As everything gets more expensive even the luxuries I allow make me wince…theater tickets, tattoo deposits, occasional dresses and vintage housewares from Ebay. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/19/2025

my hands cry out all night in their sleep
dawn rises
a hole in its palm

Grant Hackett [no title]

Last weekend, LitHub published a piece by novelist Viet Than Nguyen titled “Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire.” The essay is about as good a statement as you’re going to get about literature and politics from a writer of Nguyen’s fame, and it touches precisely on the contradictions that literary people are often at pains to rationalize and ignore. […]

I think the key insight of Nguyen’s essay is that the same contradiction exposed by Palestine is being further exacerbated by the likelihood of Trump’s defunding of soft power institutions. That is, real historical forces are coming to bear on literary culture in ways that insist on waking us up to material, economic factors. And we fail this moment when we allow the focus on Trump, and what may come in the future, to distract from what Palestine has revealed—and to see the common link here. Once the mask has started to come loose, and we see the violence behind it, does an honest person rush to put the mask back in place again? No, surely not. What does it mean, then, when the Trump admin proceeds to fully tear the mask off? We sure as hell don’t salute him, but we’d be fools to imagine we could simply set things back to “normal.” And so, this moment puts an end to world-structuring illusions that have held US society together for decades, and its hegemonic literary culture is no exception.

With things so radically in question, all the lines are being redrawn. And this is why I keep pointing to counterculture—that that is what we should desire for ourselves and our art. Divest from the dying institutional culture, with its imperial ties, and find new psychic energy with which to endure within whatever is coming our way. (Hats off to the many of you who have already done so, or who were never invested in the first place, and to those of you who have educated me along the way.) As I’ve said in this series before, I take it almost as an article of faith that imagination, liberation, and the truth depend on one another. One thing we are denied by institutional, neoliberal poetic culture is a sense of truth: a sense of being informed and autonomous makers of our own culture—we’re always rationalizing shit and shaking hands with the wrong people. And in turn, this makes one less free as an artist, and it makes one less free to speak the truth at a time when the very conditions for truth are being annihilated by fascists.

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 3)

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

My questions or concerns have emerged really out of my professional/institutional backgrounds, which include the art world and academia. Elizabeth was really concerned with the media-technological intersections between the commercial art world and the USAmerican war machine; drones became a kind of figure for that acute anxiety, but also defanged self-disgust in a sense of complicity. Now, I am thinking more about grief, on an individual level but also on a social level. Covid happened and f*cked us all up in ways that we are still only just beginning to recognize, let alone understand. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has revealed many things about the West and the US, including just how tight the chokehold that the executive branch of government has on the academic and cultural institutions that we, as writers and artists and scholars, have tried very hard to be a part of, actually is. Grief feels really close, and closer still the more it is held at bay. There is so much more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now. […]

What are you currently working on?

Right now I am working on a book about grief. It’s also about certainty. It hasn’t really happened on purpose, but whenever I start writing it’s like this kind of elliptical return. It’s also heavily influenced by my very conflicted but somewhat obsessive reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I’m very curious about ways in which philosophers, misguidedly and dogmatically, try to make their readers feel better about how impossible it is to know anything about anything or anyone with any certainty. Philosophy is supposed to be something like therapy, you know? But it fails, and often leads us down worse rabbit holes with more distressing questions, or accusations. I miss my parents and I feel like time stopped when I lost them. But it didn’t for anyone else. I don’t know what to do with that, so I’m writing about it.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Louise Akers

It’s taken me a long time to assemble my second collection of longer-form poems into a coherent state, eight years since my first. I’m delighted to say that it will be published this June, by a new, Derbyshire-based publisher, Crooked Spire Press.

Crooked Spire Press has been founded by Tim Fellows, the editor of the online journal The Fig Tree, here. I am immensely grateful to Tim, not least for his patience. I should mention here that next Saturday will see the in-person launch, in Doncaster, of the first Fig Tree annual anthology (edited by Tim), details of which are on the Fig Tree website, here.

I’m also very grateful to the members of the fortnightly workshop group I’m part of, the Collective, whose comments on drafts of a good number of the poems in the book have been very helpful.

Matthew Paul, The Last Corinthians

My poem “In That Moment of Change,” which I wrote in memory of my friend Ronny, who was murdered by her husband in 2021, was published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement in The Evolving Gaze, an issue of their quarterly publication devoted to questions of manhood and masculinity. They’ve gathered an impressive range of work, in terms of country of origin, age, gender, and more. It’s a publication definitely worth a look on its own merits. My poem is on page 93.

§§§

Back in 2021, I took part in Queensbound, poet KC Trommer’s audio project for bringing poetry into public spaces, both online and in the physical world. The concept is simple. Each poet chose a subway stop in Queens, NY and incorporated it into a poem that they then recorded for inclusion on the site. My stop was Elmhurst Avenue on the R line. If you go to the Queensbound website, you can listen to my poem by clicking on the station, or you can listen on Soundcloud, or—and here is why I am telling you about this now—you can check out the Queensbound podcast, which recently went live. My poem is in the third episode, but I hope you will consider checking out all the episodes.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #39

Endgame is the play for our time. It is about the end of the world, where one man rules everything, although there is no apparent reason why he is obeyed. It’s a play about the absurdity of life. A play about a world ending in disaster. One man controlling the planet from his chair. […]

Last week, our family went to The Groundlings, a sketch comedy theater in the heart of West Hollywood. We saw the Sunday sketches and went to dinner. It was great being a family going to the theater together again. We haven’t done it for a bit. The pandemic threw us off our game. Some of our best family experiences have been at the theater. It takes a community to make theater. To come to the theater. To make art. To make change.

At the theater, we reflect on our humanity. We question the world we live in—and our own interpretation of the world—in a way that isn’t always asked of you when you go to the movies. Many movies are designed to entertain you, and really thoughtful ones will ask you to question something about the way you live, but a play is like entering another zeitgeist. Through the intimate performances required of plays, we see ourselves walking in the world differently. A play provokes.

[In Endgame,] Beckett explores our need as humans to be in a cycle of dominance. We look to someone to be the boss, someone to fetch and carry. Even when it doesn’t make sense anymore, we continue.

Beckett recognizes how we get caught in absurd cycles that we keep repeating. When we become paralyzed by these cycles, we can’t change the game. On a personal level, a community level, a national level, he’s right.

Kate Gale, Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness: On Cycles of Absurdity

The scent of burial spices in my nose,
the last of the death wrappings unbound,
I leave this grave.

The weather, with its wintry insistence,
does not deter me, a daffodil
bulb who has known the earth’s protection.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Good Friday Creations

Throughout his portrayal of the seasons there is this indomitable force of life. Consequently, spring is conveyed as an eruption (‘vivid with/ life erupting’) and in summer he describes it as a ‘unifying fire// that drives all that flows/ burns gloriously.’ The use of the image of ‘burning’ is interesting as this fire is not destructive. It reminds me of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in Dylan Thomas poem of the same name. However, unlike in Thomas’ poem, the force of creation, that makes things grow, does not also bring about their demise. It is unquenchable. It is the force that generates regular renewal: ‘the earth renews/ from this detritus/ which is a process/ (part of the process). Autumn, therefore, in a later poem is portrayed as a time of ‘abscission’, a time of adaptation to survive. In an era of universal pessimism about the fate of the natural world, this is an interesting and positive rebuttal.

This, however, is not to say that Mills does not criticise humankind for its effect on the environment. In the section entitled Uncertain Songs, he states: ‘the world is broken/ because we broke it/ unthinkingly’ and we ‘cannot adjust/ cannot return’. We may have sealed our fate with our destructive actions, but the earth will survive. His anger at this is palpable in the poem ‘burn it all’ which explores the criminal waste of materialism. This is not the natural fire that drives life that we met in section 1. This is fire in the hands of humankind: it is the fire of materialism that will result in the destruction of human life on earth. Mills is critical of such simplistic approaches to living. As he states in can you see how it is, ‘the world is many & simple/ in its complexity/ & delicate oh so delicate oh so delicate// which is its strength & we/ are not the thing itself/ not what we think ourselves.’ The paradoxes of simple complexity and delicate strength seem to suggest that experience defies understanding and explanation. Uncertainty, therefore, must be a part of the human condition. A factor exacerbated by the limitations of language.  In speaking is difficult Mills describes language as ‘a system of difficulties/ which we live in mostly// & the world indifferent/ & large evades is/ which is at it is/ & all we have is this/ difficult & silent speech.’ Language is all we have and yet it is limited as a tool of understanding: it fails to get beneath the surface of our experience and in those final words there appears to be an acceptance of the fact. As he says in ‘long poem with no name, ‘language gets us nowhere.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘a book of sounds’ by Billy Mills

I’m not much the Easter celebrator, but I do appreciate this day. The sun shines across my desk, starburst daffodils shimmy in the wind out in the garden – I don’t have the heart to cut them to bring indoors – and I’m enjoying the last cup of morning coffee in my bright yellow mug. These things are celebration enough before the start of another wild work week. These things offer me joy.

On the occasion I’ve received a monetary prize in exchange for poetry, I’ve rolled it into fancy kitchenware; Le Creuset in Caribbean Blue, namely. It began with a big, blue sound pot that I named Angus after the wild fiddler of Scottish band, Shooglenifty, with whom Bruce and I kitchen partied at the campground after concert hours for the days of StanFest in Canso, Nova Scotia. Good time, that. Bruce had a few good eye rolls at me, at the pot, and its name before even he gave into calling it Angus.

That said, I’m wildly happy and grateful to learn that not 1, but a batch of 10 poems, has been accepted by Edutainment Night Publishing for publication in the fall. Just enough time to ponder what to add next to the turquoise kitchen.

Kersten Christianson, Easter & the Golden Eggs of Writing

Today, April 17, is International Haiku Poetry Day, which falls in the middle of National Poetry Month. As it happens, I have four upcoming public events focused on poetry and art: a haiku festival, an art opening, a poetry reading and an open studios weekend. […]

The 23rd annual ukiaHaiku Festival takes place on Sunday, April 27, 2-4 p.m. at the Grace Hudson Museum’s Wild Gardens in Ukiah, CA. I’m honored to be the keynote speaker this year, a cool twist for a Ukiah High grad! The organizers write, “Join us to celebrate Ukiah’s palindrome with readings of past haiku contest winners from various local luminaries followed by an all-ages open mic for those who wish to read a haiku of their choosing.” It’s free and open to the public. I’ll have a Makino Studios table with some books, calendars, prints and cards.

Annette Makino, A haikupalooza for Haiku Poetry Day

It seems appropriate, on International Haiku Day, to thank Ian Storr for all his hard work and commitment to the form. Ian has edited Presence for quite some time, around 12 years I believe. I started sending work to him in lockdown and he kindly published my first haiku. It’s fair to say that if Ian hadn’t shown an interest in my work I might not have pursued writing haiku much further than a lockdown diversion. As it is, he’s been a great support, twice forwarding haibun of mine to Red Moon Press in the US, which they have subsequently included in their anthologies. Two and a half years ago, Ian gave me the chance to become reviews’ editor at Presence. What an opportunity that was! I’ve probably read around 90 publications since then, mainly chapbooks, and have been amazed at the inventiveness that’s out there, especially, but not exclusively, from US writers. Ian is now stepping down from his role, and a lovely team from the Edinburgh Haiku Circle are taking over – more good fortune! I’m looking forward to working with the new team, but in the meantime, I want to wish Ian all the very best and thank him for the many hours he has given to the magazine and the writers whose work he has supported.

Julie Mellor, Presence

While Frogpond is keeping me busy, I couldn’t let 2025 go by without a third year of Haiku Girl Summer. I adore running this journal!

As with the past two years, the journal starts on June 1st and ends on September 1st. (I used September 1st as a surprise bonus post for the past two years, but that caused confusion last year, so now I’m just making it an official part of the run.

In order to have poems ready for June 1st, submissions open on May 15th. I can’t wait to see your summer haiku and senryu!

I enjoyed the different perspectives that the guest editors brought to the journal last year. Although I haven’t set up a formal sign-up system yet, I would love to work with guest editors again. If you’re interested in taking part, you can reach me at allyson@allysonwhipple.com.

Please note that I have updated the guidelines for 2025, including a change to the submission period. Please review the updated guidelines here: https://haikugirlsummer.substack.com/p/submission-information

Allyson Whipple, Haiku Girl Summer Returns Soon!

I began Day 2 of the conference with “Eyes Wide: Exploring the Extended Ekphrastic” (Tess Taylor, Victoria Chang, Tyree Daye, Dean Rader, Allison Rollins). This panel was a high point for me, as it featured five excellent poets who also write ekphrastic poetry. Victoria Chang was commissioned by the MOMA to write poetry in response to the art of Agnes Martin. The result, With My Back to the World, is a collection of elliptical, mysterious poems that seem to fit the cool detachment of Martin’s art. As Chang said, “Being looked at is good for a work of art.”

I was most impressed with Dean Rader’s presentation about the creation of his book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. Twombly was “famously inscrutable,” his art often consisting of scribbles, erasures, graffiti, and collage. Yet from this art, Rader was able to create a series of moving, deeply personal poems. Here are the first lines from “Unfinished Unending Journey:” “In the middle of our life, / we never know it is the middle. // It terrifies my son the sea has no center and no end.”

The second panel of the second day, “From Dusk till Dawn: Exploring Nocturnes & Aubades”(Amy Ash, Amorak Huey, Curtis L. Crisler, Tatiana Johnson-Boria, Kevin McKelvey) was unexpectedly generative for me. I’d been working on a poem that took place on an early winter evening. As I listened to the panelists, I realized that this poem was a nocturne. This nudged me in a new direction, allowing me a fresh perspective. The aubade and nocturne offer opportunities for innovation, drama and possibility; they are emotionally evocative; they can function like Richard Hugo’s triggering town.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 2

Every so often I come across a book that sets itself apart and draws me in. So it is with Robert Seatter’s slim 2021 collection The House Of Everything. I should say what follows is more a personal response than a literary analysis of each of the thirty-odd poems that form the whole. In short, it has absorbed me now for most of the past week, which is good enough evidence that it’s the best poetry book I’ve happened upon this year.

I already had Seatter’s early collections, travelling to the fish orchards (2002) and On the Beach with Chet Baker (2006), both published, as is The House of Everything by the excellent Seren Press, so I thought it would be interesting to see, when I came across it on the publisher’s website, what he was writing now.

The sub-title is Poems inspired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, so it’s right to explain that the work is the result of his stint there as poet-in-residence. Soane’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Holborn tube station, should you wish to visit, is preserved as a national treasure, free to enter, where room after room contains a sometimes startling, often bonkers collection of artefacts that the man himself, a wealthy architect, gathered together and lived around up to his death in 1837.

Seatter pays homage to Soane, giving footnotes to poems that work as background explanations. Sometimes this kind of thing clutters or detracts from a poem but in this case the note usually adds to it, as with the tight nine-line poem Sarcophagus. It helped to know that Soane paid £2,000 in 1824 for the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of Seti I, which had been deemed too expensive for the British Museum. This is now the centre piece of Soane’s ‘sepulchral chamber’. Seatter understands the object is in exile but concentrates on giving it a dreamlike quality that is a subtle alternative to the predictable moral argument – Like a boat left in a room/ waiting for a door to let in a river,/ for a current and for a paddle.

Bob Mee, THE HOUSE OF EVERYTHING, by ROBERT SEATTER

Last August I submitted a manuscript to an open call by the independent press, ELJ Editions. Five micro chapbooks were selected to be included in one volume and mine was one. To say I was happily surprised is an understatement! The entire process with ELJ Editions has been a pleasure. Many thanks to Editor Diane Gottlieb and Founder & Publisher Ariana D. Den Bleyker.

I’m pleased that preorders are now available here. My chapbook, Offset Melodies, is all prose, consisting of micro and flash creative nonfiction and autofiction. I’m excited to be published with four phenomenal women writers: Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie.

This is only the second time I’ve submitted to a chapbook call because, well, if I were ever to have a book, I wanted it to be with a publisher that means something to me. Over the years I’ve had poetry and prose published several times with ELJ Edition journals Emerge Literary Journal and Scissors and Spackle and it was always a positive experience. Also, to be honest, being in a volume with other writers is a bit of a safety net for me. I’m a little nervous.

Charlotte Hamrick, Preorders Open for My 1st Prose Chapbook

This week I was supposed to run a book club for poetry month, record a poetry tutorial for Writer’s Digest, and a bunch of other things, but instead, I was sick in bed with a combination sinus/stomach flu bug, which I strongly do not recommend (if I look like I lost weight in the pic above, I did—from three solid days of being constantly sick and another day of liquid diet. Super fun! Like Ozempic without the cost Lol!) And every day I was in bed, outside the sky was blue, the flowers all jumped into bloom at once (cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, and lilacs generally do NOT bloom at the same time in our area, but the late spring really messed up the bloom cycle). So that was a bummer. It was not covid or the official flu (according to tests) but there are a lot of bugs going around, the doctor said, so just be aware.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy (and Hoppy) Easter, New Poems Up at The Normal School, and a Week of Being Sick (During Beautiful Weather)

I love the presence I have when I’m on vacation. I’m a wandering eye, a drinker of the world, alert, sometimes hyperalert, just on the edge of anxious often, which does serve to sharpen the senses. Waft of subway here and a hint of someone’s cherry vape, and a bit of lilac on the wind; the thrum of human life: engines, mostly, and conversation, its ocean swells when it’s in a language I understand only with focus and concentration. What the wind is doing that very moment: agitating a dry lavender frond hanging from a rooftop garden awaiting the warmth of spring. Nothing is at stake and everything is: the day, what I make of it. Rilke wrote , “Maybe we’re only here to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate….” Immediacy. I love poems that grab me by the immediacy.

It’s what I admired about this poem by Keetje Kuipers. Although here it is about the destruction the narrator wants to undertake, that is, in the immediate future. It’s the details of that destruction and its ostensible reasoning that captured me: “cut down tree after living tree just to get rid of the green,” the narrator snarls, but it is so clearly born of pain, the awful crashing about we want to do out of pain. The poem is so present with it, hyperattentive to it. Burn the whole fucking world down. That’s the only way to avoid pain.

It seems odd to me that this poem appeals to me in the wake of my pleasant vacation. But the world and I are on edge. The green, the green. The sere, the sere. We can hardly bear it.

Marilyn McCabe, let’s turn on every incandescent bulb, each burner

O holidays of promised liberation:
One towards an earthly land,
One to a place promised 
posthumously.
In our hands, 
Questions: 
Which way now, 
How to mind the gap, 
Is home home? Exile exile?  
Do the two meet as two seas that
clash and shamble towards each other?

Jill Pearlman, Festive Earworm

— I’ve been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. Rituals stabilize life, he says, and he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who says rituals are “temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” He talks about how things can be stabilizing points, a table, a chair. But today, things are consumed, taking away the mode of lingering. He talks about how smartphones are not things because “lingering” is “impossible.” There is a “restlessness inherent in the apparatus [that] makes it a non-thing.” We are compelled compulsively by our phones. “They consume us.”

— “Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things…” (Byung-Chul Han).

— “Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.” (BCH) Digital communication is disembodied, but “rituals are processes of embodiment.”

— Rituals bring about resonances in a community and without them we lose “accord.” “Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of communication is a crisis of resonance.” The digital sphere is an echo chamber where we hear mainly our own bullshit. (My word not his). If you’re interested in reading more about this book, there’s a really good rundown here.

— The digital sphere is horizontal, when what people crave is the vertical or deep engagement. As artists we are all about the vertical. I can’t help but think about how we all keep being fed this stuff we don’t really want. AI, the annoying stuff the algorithm pukes up, the smoothening out of our seeing via AI, the theft of our work and our words.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist: Rituals and Alignment

No ghost deserves to be shaped into a developmental arc that explains why the selves we abandoned led to the self we perform, a construction so fragile that it requires countless defensive structures to sustain, protect, and coddle.

Perhaps the idea of ‘self-esteem’ has always tasted a bit silly to me, an unsustainable Americanism that resembles our lifestyles in order to brush away the thought of what Ingeborg Bachmann and Joyelle McSweeney have poemed as our deathstyles.

Aesthetics of closure aside, a part of us dies but it does not disappear, does not vanish beneath the earth but remains and hovers in this insubstantial form that Jacques Derrida dragged into hauntology, and revisited in his elegies as well as his writings on friendship.

Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
sea

In a 1923 piece titled “Faites les Jeux” (published in Les feuilles libres, no. 32), Tristan Tzara said that he wrote to destroy the feeling that pushed him to write, a sensation that was too personal, too loud, due relentless at a time when he was actively pursuing his longtime dream of abandoning personality, and not existing as a person. This desire to be “apersonal” (as contrasted with the desire to be “a person”) also appears in the poem “Wire Dance March,” as well as early Dada, which hallows Tzara’s decision (ostensibly made by mother) to ensure that he would never fight in a war. Love sends its sons to Switzerland and then expresses surprise when they wind up in Germany. In early Dada, Tzara’s sense of himself as “a deserter” is never mentioned. Only later would the poet explore this particular shade of his absence.

Alina Stefanescu, Blacktops.

When you come to Amsterdam because of a single sloth graffiti, you almost get the feeling that life is not about what you want, but what you do with what you have.

as if stones
could be
impressed
by us living
things

Kati Mohr, Butterfly House

Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I’ve already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I’ve not read Laurie Bolger’s book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger’s anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I’m looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father’s death during covid.

The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn’t respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn’t a space. This all makes sense to me – some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be “stage” versions of “page” poems.

Tim Love, Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

It delights me that the American Mathematical society links math and poetry by sponsoring a student poetry contest each year.   AMS recently announced this year’s winners (along with videos of the winning poems) — and I offer samples of the winning poems (from college, high school, and middle school students) below:

     from “Proof”  by Emilynne Newsom, Harvey Mudd College

          There’s a practice you will see in math.
          It is a way of showing what is true.
          In steady step-by-step it lays a path
          from what you know to what you seek to prove.    (Find the rest here.)

     from “Homeric Simile … ”  by Samanyu Ganesh, The Westminster Schools

          Just as the sea otters grasp each others’ paws
          whilst sleeping, latently
          basking in the stillness of their moonlit sanctuary, drifting
          assuredly      . . .       (Find the rest of this poem here.)     

    from “forever”    by Nora McKinstry, Edmond Heights, K-12     

          a mobius strip is a never ending loop a
          forever-going cycle of one small strip
          but still it goes on and on
          impossible to stop but easily created . . .        (Find the rest here.)  

The winners page also lists students who earned “honorable mention” and offers information and poetry from prior contests.

JoAnne Growney, AMS Contest-winning Student Mathy Poems

Andy Fogle interviewed me for Salvation South, and did such an amazing job with this longform interview—we talk Southern denialism, the limit of guilt and shame, the call and response of literature, anger versus the truest emotion, and more.

Salvation South also ran six new poems of mine, including four new Ars Poeticas (yes, I’ve been writing a lot of these for an Ars | Ours project), and two new love poems.

And! There’s a new episode of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast Slush Pile, featuring three of my poems, and the editors’ live process of discussing the poems and selecting them for publication. It is a VERY generous discussion, and left me feeling rather abashed and seen and like my cup had been filled all the way up to the very brim, so if you ever receive a request to be featured on the Slush Pile, I hope you say yes without trepidation (and considerably less anxiety than I did, ha). It was really beautiful to hear my poems read by others, and talked through. Such care and generosity, and I learned a lot about my own work in the process. So many thank yous to Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, and Lillie Volpe.

Han VanderHart, Painted Bride Quarterly Podcast, Salvation South Interview+Poems, Of Poetry Podcast, Moist Poetry’s Summer Riot Open Call

“Naming the Trees” demonstrates a sense of compassion and respect for the woods of Ness Owen’s homeland and the craft of the poems inspired by them. That’s not to say they are full of sentiment and awe of natural beauty. They also tackle the frustration and anger at the impact of commercial interests which act against the wishes of locals and without respect for the woods by people who do not have to face the consequences of their destructive plans or live with the ongoing impact. The poems capture that sense of injustice without ranting, but by showing how humans and nature interact, the importance of the connection with the natural world and respect lie at the core of countering the climate emergency. Disconnection is dangerous. “Naming the Trees” shows how to heal that breakage.

Emma Lee, “Naming the Trees” Ness Owen (Arachne Press) – book review

mayflies dead on the streets of Selma
mayflies dead on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
David and I are there to remember
to pay our respects, to see
but everywhere we look
the streets and sidewalks are covered
with drifts of mayfly carcasses
heaps of translucent white wings
uncountable numbers of corpses

Jason Crane, POEM: mayflies

Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.

The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.

The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.

The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.

The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.

The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.

The loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.

Maria Popova, 3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

i want the world to shrink to the size
of a coffee cup. to be able to reach
for every kind of bird i need. i don’t want
to stand at a gas station & fit my prayers
beneath my tongue. i don’t want
to look for gods in neon signs.

Robin Gow, new car

The New Orleans Poetry Festival itself was terrific, rich with different kinds of programming: short “lagniappe” readings, a panel about cool poet laureate projects, performance poetry happenings, a lively little book fair, good food nearby (no L.A. downtown concrete wasteland here!), and much more. I gave a reading with Tupelo poets and spoke on a great panel with the theme “Sacred and Somatic.” I finally met in person several poets whose work I’ve admired from a distance, and glimpsed the amazing Harryette Mullen, although I was too shy to say hello. People said kind things about my book, its snazzy cover, and my new mushroom-print dress. I had dinner with a beloved former student who told me that during a difficult period of his life, I’d made him feel seen, taken seriously as a person and poet. Again: lucky and nourishing convergences.

Yet life has NOT been all shimmer. On the way home, achy and tired, I contemplated the absurdity of flying to New Orleans while coping with the sudden and ferocious bout of sciatica that descended several days before, totally randomly–I was just in the process of sitting down when something twisted. I was nearly immobilized for a few days, then when things loosened up just a little, I got on a plane. I made the right choice, I think, but I was in pain most of the time, and pain makes events and conversations hazy. I liked my unfancy B&B in part because of the fridge and microwave, so after cutting out early from evening readings, I could lie on the floor alternately icing and heating my piriformis. I have been so carefully preventing contagious illness on this book tour through masking plus a swallowing a color-wheel of immune supplements, but I forgot that bodies can give out in a myriad of ways.

Again, I’m glad I went–better to be in pain while pleasantly distracted than in pain bored at home–and very grateful for so many kindnesses from the universe. Yet I’m a little down. Pain taxes a person’s energy all by itself, of course. The Guggenheim rejected me again. I’m behind on everything. I’ve been so looking forward to next week’s Madrid conference, but have had little time to anticipate and prep, and I wonder how much stamina I’ll have for sightseeing. The sciatica IS getting better, by slow degrees, but I’ve mislaid my momentum. Maybe it’s in the side pocket of my dirty suitcase?

Lesley Wheeler, Shimmer, steam, somatic, sciatica

Old magnolia: gaps just the right size
for my dangling legs, a branch to rest a book on.

The seaglass blue of sky over hills
like an embrace from the horizon.

Limestone painted pink at twilight,
rosemary between my fingers.

The light of Shabbat candles
after a brief whiff of struck match.

Singing the alto note in a chord,
holding and held.

*

For my birthday last month one of my nieces gave me a deck of illustrated cards depicting untranslatable words. I drew a card this morning: querencia.

“Describes a place where we feel safe, a ‘home’ (which doesn’t literally have to be where we live) from where we draw our strength and inspiration. In bullfighting, a bull may stake out a querencia in a part of the ring where he will gather his energies before another charge.”

Shabbat. Jerusalem. Harmony. A particular quality of sky. A tree that was chopped down decades ago.

Where are these places for you?

Rachel Barenblat, Querencia

My great aunt Inez never married, and taught American history in a high school in Endicott, New York, all her life. She loved words, music, and art, and could recite many poems and speeches by heart. Whenever she visited, I would sit with her in her favorite chair and she’d read to me, and tell me stories about the poems or prose and their writers. Sometimes we looked at art books, and often she’d set up her easel in her bedroom and work on a painting during an extended holiday stay with my grandparents and us; I was learning to play the piano and she’d often ask me to play for her as she read or painted.

When I was 9, Aunt Inez gave me a book of poems that she had written out, in her firm Palmer Method handwriting, or clipped from magazines. It was perhaps a peculiar gift for a nine-year-old, but she had seen me pretty clearly from the beginning. She’d be pleased to know that I’ve carried that book around with me ever since.

This morning I opened the book to see if Paul Revere’s ride was in it. It wasn’t, but there were others by Longfellow, Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emily Dickinson. I had followed her instructions and added to them: in the back, written or typed out by me, were adolescent favorites: Frost, Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings.

Today I stopped on the page where Whitman’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was affixed, with ancient glue stains that looked like blood, and my great-aunt’s note at the bottom: [image]

“The ship is the union, the prize is victory”, she wrote, meaning that the prize was the preservation of the Union, at a very high cost.

Beth Adams, Paul Revere and Me

I’ve been thinking about the word brutal and cruel a lot, reading the news. Brutal has appeared a lot, cruel, I think, has been more rare this past week, though I’ve seen it in other weeks. I’m wondering how I hear each of them, what overtones each has. I looked in the dictionary, and both come from Latin words, the one, says my quick check online dictionary ‘dull, stupid,’ but also ‘characterized by an absence of reasoning or intelligence,’ hence its use for animals or beasts (about, not to be unfair to animals) whose brains we know little, to date). Cruel is from crudus, ‘raw, rough’ (think ‘crudities’). And cruel is defined as ‘willfully causing pain or suffering or (and?) feeling no concern about it.’ So which would one choose to use, if one were a journalist writing about the current political news? Why does ‘brutal’ feel more banal and ‘cruel’ more thought-burdened, to me? How do other people reading the one and the other?

Beverley Bie Brahic, Saturday 19 April 2025, Paris (Easter Weekend)

How many squares does it take
to fill the round mouth, reshape
it into another loud
box? Blocks
stacked
on
blocks,
square teeth
delineate boundaries
of ideas that don’t fit,
grinding them down into grit.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 501: Harm Not With Words #NaPoWriMo

Each year on her birthday, which is also the anniversary of her death, I make sure to remember her in a way that is more than just the daily thoughts about her that I have. Writing her birthday poem, exploring the passage of time, exploring grief as an instinctive reaction to death is one way that I do that.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, has gifted me a different way of looking at the world.

Today her birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday. I can hear kids in the village having an eater egg hunt. It is joyful. This is as it should be.

Risen

Today I wish to roll back the stone
and bring out of the tomb a fifteen-year-old version
of the baby I buried.

All will be undone. A miracle.
The rose petals rising like mist from the earth-hole,
her white coffin suddenly empty,
the pine box held up to the crowd for effect.

The grave will no longer feel familiar,
the toys binned, no longer holding
the reverence of votives to the dead.
The plot will be vacated. Someone else
can kneel there now. […]

Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her fifteenth birthday

At first, I thought Solmaz’s brilliant poem was, like my little outburst above, a list of responses to illness or distress. Then I realised it’s concerned with something deeper – it’s about the messages we give to ourselves – the ways in which we find ourselves wanting; in which we blame ourselves; in which we seek a perfection which isn’t only impossible, but is also deeply flawed – shaped as it is by the corrupting forces of commodification, profit, reputation, ego.

It’s a hard thing to write a poem consisting totally of questions, and to maintain a momentum. But this poem is actually held together by the questions – they are its form, the scaffold and its engine, the force – even the violence – of the poem. And there’s great variation and contrast within them: some questions are wryly ironic; some wildly and humorously exaggerated; some painful, confronting, disturbing. Some reflect, for example, the huge pressure that the “you” of the poem is under – the reader, the poet, or a universal “you”, trying to hold back the ocean with a glass door. Some reflect intimacy and insight, compassion – “Made peace/ with your mother?” “Have you finally stopped/ shoulding all over yourself?”

Clare Shaw, Reflections on ‘Self-Care” by Solmaz Sharif

I went to the allotment yesterday and began work, but the rain has cancelled my plans to return. I always thank the rain however it comes. Everything has suddenly greened as a result; the lawn, the tiny buds on the trees. Last weekend the Easter witches came, so my daughter was making wands and wreaths out of pussy willow catkins which I used to decorate the door after the kids had gone. Safe to say spring is properly here.

GloPoWriMo three weeks in and I’m still going strong here. I’m not able to write a whole poem every day, but every day I’m turning up at the page and trying to write something. 

Some of the poems I’ve written I really like, but I often feel that about poems early on. They feel so fresh and right, but then I put them aside for a bit and when I go back to them, they feel forced or they’re trying too hard to be clever. So I work on them a bit and put them aside for longer, then work on them a bit more until I feel they’re done. Then I put them aside for even longer and come back to them with a totally different eye. 

It feels strange to go back and read poems I fell in love with years ago. They aren’t the same beasts or maybe I’m not. Sometimes I still love them and they still have a rightness about them. Other times they clash and just don’t work or strut too much with their own poetic-ness. My writing style has changed in many ways over time, but it’s more that I have changed.

Poetry for me is very much what I want to say right now: my emotions, my obsessions, what I’m looking at and thinking about now. Years down the line I may not see things that way anymore, but the poem is a snapshot of that moment, now gone. And like my teenage journals and blurry pre-digital photos I won’t get rid of them just because they’re cringe-worthy or not who I am now. I love how they show my growth and development. But, as Billy Connelly said, pay attention because it’s all going to change tomorrow.

Gerry Stewart, The Poetry of Who I am Now

My region’s been unusually low on rainfall the past 18 months, but this year April showers seem almost to be compensating…my veg patch is mud. Weeding and more sowing will just have to wait. I walk around the neighborhood and my yard and the woods, squelching through muck and stopping now and again to upend a rock or rotten log and see who’s active now. Lots of worms and arthropods, the occasional spider, many ants.

In such moist circumstances, we get fungi; I’ve been enjoying Lesley Wheeler’s new book, Mycocosmic, which I’ve read twice now–once for content and sound, once to learn more from the poems’ craft structures, all the while fascinated by the science of fungus, which she incorporates into many of these poems. It’s a richly rewarding book, sometimes sorrowful, always intelligent, full of insightful poetry. The collection includes some poems that feel like spells, chants, divinations that suggest there are always imaginative methods for coping with anger, unfairness, and loss. Exploring the vein of how interconnected the natural world is, and the human world (with other humans and with the Earth) feels so vital to me, and Wheeler’s book pivots on this vitality. Look at the way Harry Humes threaded through my life, for example, in small but meaningful ways. The same goes for Lesley and for so many other people with whom I’ve shared intersections, interweavings, and connections over the years. That butterfly effect of influence. (Now that I think of it–Harry Humes has a book with that title: The Butterfly Effect). Or are those networks mycelial, as Lesley Wheeler suggests?

Ann E. Michael, Mud & connections

A nurse
attaches a device to the tip of your finger.
Another threads a clear liquid into your
vein. What day is it? You count with her
backward from ten and wind up in some
backforest where you’ll sink without
resistance into the moss. How much
time were you there? You were opened
like a book, cut into a cross-section,
made porous as a sheet of cheese. Now
your hip bone sings like a flute.

Luisa A. Igloria, Machine Shop for Humans

This week: the church of heart and hurt, beachcombing for the broken bits, children marching in the street, and much more. Enjoy.

As a water droplet cut with a knife
as the Red Sea parts, closes, makes us cross again. 

Everything that brought me to this moment

is carried inside, written in salt water and suffering
amidst nihilism and terror,

moistening my lips as I stand on the plain women’s balcony
near the rooftops, t-shirts and sweats blowing.

Jill Pearlman, Salt Water & Suffering

I’ve become an easy traveler in my old age. I’ll do everything and nothing. I need my daily pill regimen, good morning coffee, an afternoon IPA, a pack of smokes, and a camera. Taking a vacation from work is guilt-free for me. What could happen in a week or two? But it’s impossible for us to take a vacation from this administration. It’s everywhere. We’re like pieces of pumice, with a new hole in our skin for each atrocity that pecks away at us.

I still wake up every day to news from my new besties, Heather, Jessica, Rebecca, Robert H., Robert R., and Adam, and I read it all in lieu of leisurely puzzle-doing. Trying to pick through the bad news for something good is like combing the beach for a single shell that isn’t broken.

Artist’s Statement: I break things and put them back together in a random,
yet tasteful, order. I make the big small and the small big—
in words, photographs, and visual art.

But I’m not the typical beachcomber. I go looking for the broken bits. My shells are not destined for a Southern Living spread. I’m on the hunt for patterns, colors, textures. I choose weather-worn whelks, oysters with barnacles, tile-flat bits. My biggest prizes are moon shells and periwinkles, the ones that look most like they once housed a snail, their centers looking back at me like eyes or perky, non-protruding nipples. I found a piece of a helmet shell that looks like an evil, toothy grimace. With two periwinkles, I have created “The Face of the Resistance.”

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Woosah!

What was so exciting about Seville was that it felt ambitious. Perhaps a city that’s so vulnerable to heat and flooding can be brave. I don’t know anything about urban planning, but I loved the easy access to the great river that runs through it, loved what’s been done with older buildings. And this picture shows the contemporary art museum – not easy to find but that’s another story, perhaps it was me. It’s in an old monastery that became a ceramics factory, and is now a place to show contemporary art. Gorgeous, big, rambling almost empty when I went, and with so many different unexpected spaces. In a little courtyard, this business with the vines. I don’t know what they are, perhaps jasmine, perhaps passion flower but these are growing, live, curtains you can part and walk through and I imagine when they flower they’re probably scented and will sound of insects. It was the first museum I went to and arguably the best. I think I’m spoiled having a daughter in Utrecht because the Dutch are brilliant at museums so I have impossible standards. As for the prose project, it’s interesting and challenging to go back more than five decades and try to make sense of who I was then. The key seems to be in stone and trees. At least for starters. I went through the printout sometimes to the sound of flamenco from the flamenco school opposite my Airbnb studio, sometimes to the sound of rain gushing from a broken downpipe. And I understood how much I had to allow myself to fail over and over again as I attempted to put anything in my notebook. I dreaded trying. 

Jackie Wills, Living curtains of vines

But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.

Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.

Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.

Matthew Paul, On another haiku by Simon Chard

i am the cutting board god. i eat the carrot
unpeeled with dirt still dusting wrinkled skin.
scoop hummus from the plastic container.
every little morsel. lick the spoons’ head
& shoulders. i think it’s ancestral. a hunger
like a lightning bolt through me & all
the not-girls, mouths open in the dark. the desire
to be full always escaping us. just another handful
of wings. just one more lemon taste.
the shadow of an iris tree.

Robin Gow, girl dinner

I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.

The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Sunday 13 April 2025

First World War poetry does not have the same particular identity in France, and the war itself carries a different valency here, where men fought and died — in much greater numbers than in Britain — on their own land, amid the ruins of their own towns and villages. There isn’t, I don’t think, the same edge of romanticism or slightly-enjoyable sadness about it here, and ‘First World War poetry’ does not have the same quasi-generic identity. I did, however, find an excellent French anthology, Poèmes de Poilus, edited by Guillaume Picon. (The poilus, ‘hairy men’, are the soldiers who grew beards because they couldn’t shave.) […]

[O]ne thing that’s noticeable […] is how many of the best-known names are — unlike the English equivalents — not known primarily as ‘war-poets’, but rather as leading poets of the avant garde. In England, even those poets who, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived the war, remain known as poets mainly as and by their war poetry. The French collection, by contrast, contains poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy and Paul Valéry — all very high-profile French literary figures, none of whom (I think) would be considered “first world war poets” in the way that Owen, Sassoon, Brooke and Gibson are.

Perhaps this is partly just because most of the French poets survived the war (Apollinaire was killed in 1918), whereas the best-known English war poets, almost by definition, are those who died in it. (This is true of the second world war too — Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes all died in active service.) This must be linked, too, to another marked difference between the collections: the range of types of verse in Poèmes de Poilus is much larger, and much more obviously influenced by what — in England a decade later — we’d recognised as the first stirrings of modernism. To a small degree, this is perhaps influenced by the fact that Anne Harvey was intentionally choosing poems accessible to a youthful reader; but I don’t think any collection of British First World War verse would be very different. As anyone knows who has taught ‘modernism’ from a comparative perspective — as I did last year for a course here at Sciences Po — the idea that “modernism” emerged as a defined movement quite suddenly in the immediate post-war period is an Anglophone perspective. French literary history looks quite different. Pretty much all the things we associate with ‘modernism’ in poetry were well-established in French poetry already before the war.

Reading these two anthologies one after another this week made me think how interesting a mixed French and English (and even German and Russian) anthology would be.

Victoria Moul, In Time of War

Because in a perfect world, no word rhymes with war.
Because for a perfect verse, there can be no bar.
It is not day that ends night, nor night that ends day.
Where then will a poem end, when will its light fray?

***

Imayo: Of Japanese origin, this form has four 12-syllable lines (48 syllables) with a caesura between the first 7 and the next 5 syllables of each line.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, So can silence

The next panel I attended was titled “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges” (Shinelle L. Espaillat, Rashaun Allen, Keith O’Neill, Gail Upchurch-Mills). Here I learned about the efforts of humanities professors to “fight the commodification of higher education,” as well as the process of students being turned into “clients.” All of us are inherent writers, the panelists told us, and should be allowed to “dream on the page” without anyone’s permission. We write ourselves into existence, and communities only function when everyone participates. One of the problems all the panelists shared was how to instill a love of reading in students whose attention was being diverted, constantly and shamelessly, from exploring their potential as writers.

My third panel on the first day was the extremely enjoyable “Craft for Crafters: How Fiber Arts, Book Arts, and More Shape Our Writing” (Meg Cass, Felicia Rose Chavez, Emrys Donaldson, Genevieve Kaplan, Sarah Minor, Doug Van Gundy). As a person who enjoys sewing and crafting as hobbies, I was intrigued to learn how the panel would connect those activities to writing. It was an unexpected pleasure to see poet Genevieve Kaplan, whose book Aviary I reviewed in the December 6, 2021 issue of Sticks & Stones. Some takeaways from this panel: sewing is like writing—cropping, darning and weaving; crafting is like poetry—language is “bits of things” we move around to create other things; crafts connect to writing, playing, revisioning, re-seeing. I enjoyed Doug Van Gundy’s story of how his sewing practice began by making pencil cases because he couldn’t find any decent ones. That grew into journal covers and messenger bags. He also revealed that sewing calms him down, allowing him some much-needed relief from an over-active brain. Doug is also the MFA director at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a 7^th-generation West Virginian.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025

Subtitled a magpie’s pilgrimage through the psalms, my erasure project is finished. 160 handwritten pages. This week I have made a cushion on which to display it in Wells Museum next month. The top of the cushion cover is a remnant of embroidered furnishing fabric that I bought years ago in a rather posh shop in Saxmundham. I loved the bird and her nestlings. I knew I would find a use for it some day. The underside is made from a much older fabric, a coarse unbleached linen 40cm/16 inches wide, handwoven in the Soviet Union. It probably came to me from my mother. The one-and-fourpenny predecimal zip fastener is from Bourne and Hollingsworth, a London department store that closed in 1983. I think this too was bought by my mother. The inner cushion (which contains 3 kilos of rice) is made from a sleeve from an unfinished cotton lawn nightdress trimmed with hand-crocheted lace I recognise as my grandmother’s work. The fine white cotton thread I used for stitching it also dates from my grandmother’s lace-making days.

Ama Bolton, “The Soul as a Bird”

I’m behind on reviews, I’m behind on a couple of editing gigs, I’m behind on a few other thousand things. I hide in our wee house either at my desk, or downstairs, folding and stapling chapbooks. […]

Otherwise, I was recently podcast-interviewed by Hollay Ghadery, which was plenty fun. The podcast has been posted over this way, if you wish to hear our conversation, which was focused on my recent On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Kitchener poet and reviewer Chris Banks interviewed me recently, posted over at The Woodlot: Canadian Poetry Reviews and Essays. Michael Greenstein was good enough to review the collection over at The Seaboard Review, and Salma Hussain managed this absolutely stellar and breathtaking review of same over at The Temz Review; she gets me. She really gets me. It is a rare thing, I will tell you, to be read so well. […]

Oh, and my fall poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a direct follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), already has a pre-order page! (but I might have mentioned that already; did I mention that already?). I should probably be thinking about fall events, possibly. Where should I go?

rob mclennan, an update, an update, my kingdom for an update

As a rule, I find it difficult to pick a poem from my books because I think in larger structures, sequences or books, not individual poems. However, this piece is something of an exception. It’s the coda from my a book of sounds, but it started out as a response to a call for submissions for Stride magazine’s 2020 TALKING TO THE DEAD project, which asked for poems addressed to a dead poet.

Now, I don’t often respond to such calls, but this one intrigued me as I was rereading, again, Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, a book I’ve owned for almost 50 years now and read more often than I can remember, and thought I’d like to try to inhabit her formal methods to some degree. It’s not the first time I’ve acknowledged my debt to her work; a previous book was titles Imaginary Gardens, but this time I wanted to do something much more direct.

The stanza form I invented for the occasion is, like so many of hers, syllabic rather than metrical, and there are numerous words and phrases of hers woven into it. Unusually for me, there’s an overt rhyme scheme, while my normal practice is to create patterns of assonance. In fact, this poem is, on the surface, so different to how I usually write that I considered it as a one-off and unlikely to be something I collected in a book, as my books tend to be organic wholes, units of composition in themselves.

But when I put the original typescript of the book together it was clear to me that something was missing. The book is, on one level, a collection of songs (hence the title), songs that focus on the small things that make a world and on our attempts to map that world, those things, in words. But the ending as it stood seemed to me to call for a coda, a kind of final restatement of the (aural) themes that run through the book, and it slowly dawned on me that Ms Moore’s Menagerie was just what the book needed to close with a kid of half-echo of the opening lines, a translation of an early Irish nature poem that deploys a semi-syllabic four-line stanza and intermittent rhyme. The book is a cycle, and this poem is a kind of recapitulation, closing the circle while leaving the idea of song, of sound, wide open.

Drop-in by Billy Mills (Nigel Kent)

This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation. 

Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn’t close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.

“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, “The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures. 

A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.

Alina Stefanescu, “Short talk on whatever.”

When the brochure for next month’s Stratford’s Literary Festival dropped on to the doormat yesterday, I was, naturally, interested to see what’s going on.

We’ve lived here for almost forty years and I’ve lived in Warwickshire for almost all of my adult life, so I know the score. Stratford’s a posh(ish) place – well, some bits are – where literary types and tourists mostly gather to see what’s on at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Occasionally, but not more than anywhere else, poetry events pop up.

As to literary festivals, we know that in order to attract sponsorship they have to make money, or be seen to provide events in which ‘big names’ or at least people who are blessed with a dose of temporary fame appear. Some, like the Stratford one next month, also have charitable status. It’s good that they exist.

We also know that poetry is still, whatever those of us who write and read it might like to think, viewed as a somewhat embarrassing literary sideline, like an odd, eccentric, ancient aunt at a family party.

Except that this time that old aunt hasn’t been invited.

I read all 42 pages of the brochure scouring the listings. Nothing. I read it again to make sure I’d not turned over two pages at one. Not a single poetry reading. Not even an actor reciting a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not even the conventional sop to the poetry world, the open mic. […]

Whatever mad ideas the Criminal President is dreaming up today will have far more impact than a literary festival in Middle England, but I’d have thought that at least one of the ‘festival team’, as they describe themselves, would have pushed for, perhaps, at least the inclusion of the Poet Laureate. Or maybe he was busy. Or maybe the only poets they thought of turned out to be dead.

Or perhaps they were a bit frightened that poets might be a bit unpredictable and rowdy. (When I used to read to an audience, if, as did sometimes happen, I’d forgotten my reading glasses, I tended to shout and rave a bit in case of the need for improvisation.)

To cite an even less controlled, less egocentric example, I’ve just received a critical appreciation by Andrew Taylor of the poetry of that old rogue Peter Finch, who once, it is said, ate his own poems after he had read them to his audience.

Bob Mee, POETRY DOESN’T MATTER IN STRATFORD-UPON-AVON – OFFICIAL

National Poetry Month has brought with it a sad bit of poetry news: Harry Humes has died. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you might want to check Penn State’s PA Book site’s biography of him, and then find one of his books:

https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/humes__harry

He was an excellent poet, influential for many folks–especially for Pennsylvania writers–and while I never knew him well, our lives intersected in some surprising ways over the years… […]

When I was hired at DeSales University around 2005, I learned that DSU held an annual poetry event for high school students. I attended/participated often, and Harry Humes–who was a good friend of the program’s administrator (Steve Myers)–was always involved in the workshops and events. Humes had retired from Kutztown by then, and was writing more poems, fishing, and enjoying family life. He always greeted me with a big smile and asked about my writing. That sums up for me what kind of person he was: generous; possessed of a self-effacing, even self-deprecating humor; kind and encouraging to people just starting out in poetry.

Here’s a poem of his that I like a lot, which I clearly recall him reading that day at Godfrey’s so long ago: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=154&issue=3&page=13

Ann E. Michael, Rest in poetry

[Isabelle] Baafi’s “Chaotic Good” demonstrates an understanding of craft and poetic forms, knowing that form can enhance and underline meaning, guiding the reader through the poem. Baafi explores a personal journey from childhood to adulthood, through marriage to a single life, but broadens that journey to include family ties, inheritances, cultural heritage and the struggle to find self among the pressures of societal and familial expectations. The poems eschew self-pity and sentiment, preferring compassionate reflection into love, threat, suspicions, the inertia of staying in a relationship an individual is not yet ready to admit has failed and become toxic, using different forms to drawn attention to different aspects, until the traveller arrives, surefooted and redeemed. It’s a journey that includes the reader and rewards re-reading. “Chaotic Good” is as thought-provoking as it is liberating, acknowledging the work that went into building a sense of self-worth through a library of precise, crafted, lyrical poems.

Emma Lee, “Chaotic Good” Isabelle Baafi (Faber and Faber) – book review

Gilonis’ poem marking ‘the 3^rd Thatcher election’ fits with the overarching impact of Tory politics mentioned in the introduction. It’s there fairly explicitly in Duncan’s own work, and in poets like Simon Smith:

     The sun floats about the meadow crazy as Whitman.
Codeine does the job good. Make a note to myself. Can’t bear
    to look. ‘Codeine’. Debts bite hard. More jobs
will have to go. Lines crackle like a telephone call in danger.

But it’s there, too, in Khaled Hakim’s idiolectic talk poems of identity and confusion or in Andrew Lawson’s ‘We are enjoined as good consumers to juxtapose and meld appearance’. And it’s there gloriously in Elizabeth James’ satires on culture as consumer object, as meaningless status fetish or decor:

I am concerned with the interior as a “walk-in” still life.
I was always thought of as the “artistic child”.
The salon, in beige, was designed around my own painting,
entitled Landscape–

I’m going to make it like a country road
with trompe-d’œil dirt and leaves, my garden and courtyard
being so perfect that they don’t seem real.

While this political dimension was something I expected to find here, there were some real surprises, including writing that shows a move towards psychogeography in Frances Presley’s map-driven walking poems or David Rees’s semi-doggerel London pieces that link the influence of Iain Sinclair with the city’s long association with nursery rhymes.

Billy Mills, Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby (eds): A Review

We’re excited to feature Marcy Rae Henry at our upcoming virtual reading. Their work is full of sharp turns and soft landings, moving through memory, family, and fleeting conversations with a voice that’s equal parts tender, irreverent, and quietly profound.

In their poem “this poem appears in,” what begins as a casual walk home unspools into a meditation on growing up, ancestral survival, and the strange, aching limits of language. Capturing how life’s most private and public moments often blur, they write:

“If only we had more than 1–10 to describe / happiness, sex, last night’s Thai food…”

This is poetry that drifts and returns, that wonders more than it explains. It’s emotionally precise while formally restless—rooted in stillness and always on the move. I knew right away this was the energy I wanted to start the latest issue with.

José Angel Araguz, Salamander virtual event next week (Spotlight: Marcy Rae Henry)

The sun sets before we reach the mountains. There are three men from Turkey in the row of seats behind me. They’re having an animated conversation in their mother tongue about something that keeps switching gears from playful to contentious. In front of me are three Romanians. The woman in the middle is speaking non-stop. Her voice is a strange aria. Romanian is a quick and seamless rise and fall in my ear.

Memories seep slowly into my consciousness. Lying in the backseat of a car—in those days before seat belts were the law—staring out the window at the stars in the black sky, and listening to my mother and my stepfather—to their voices only, not bothering to work out words, or even tone. Utterly uninvested, but enveloped by the mysterious business of grown-ups. […]

But another of our hosts keeps telling people that I’m “really” an American. It’s strange perhaps that I’m so offended that she’s taking control of my narrative. Maybe I’m especially sensitive since memories of my childhood seem to be coming more often and more vividly now, and I want to put a wall between who I am now and those years when I had no agency.

All the years that I traveled often were a way for me to figure out who I am. Not in a linear way, and not in a pretty way—but eventually. Strip away the trappings of your national identity, of your habits, and your preferences for food and drink and music, and you feel naked and new. You eat trout with capers and tangerines and wonder what on earth you really ever liked best to eat.

Ren Powell, Traveling in Transylvania

Always crouching down, looking the same all over.
To men he tries to show those great big, endless eyes.
If you really want to know if you yourself are small,
Try seeing your reflection in a filled hoof-print.

咏虾蟆
坐卧兼行总一般，
向人努眼太无端。
欲知自己形骸小，
试就蹄涔照影看。

Another from the bantering poems of Complete Tang Poems books 869-872. Jiang Yigong was a Five-Dynasties guy from Suzhou who made a name for himself for righteous satires, finding much material in his troubled times. Unlike a lot of the other comic poets from this section, he also has poems in the main part of CTP. 虾蟆, háma is used for both frogs and toads—to keep it snappy, I picked one. That really is, I’m ashamed to admit, only there to fill out the meter.

Larry Hammer, In Praise of the Toad, Jiang Yigong

The Palm/Passion story also reminds us of the fleeting nature of fame. Don’t get me wrong: if I’m chosen to be Poet Laureate, I’ll do as good a job as I’m capable of doing. But I’ll start every day by reminding myself that the fame is likely temporary. The important thing remains: the work.

The Palm/Passion story reminds us that we’re characters in a larger narrative (as does the Passover story, which people across the world have heard/will hear this week too, both in Jewish traditions and some Christian traditions). We will find ourselves in great danger if we start to believe it’s all about us, personally. No, there are larger forces at work. 

To put it in poetry and Scouting terms: I’m put here to do my best writing, but also, to leave the poetry campsite better than I found it. How do I do that? I work to promote not only myself, but other worthy poets, I work to make sure that the next generations know about the rewards of poetry, I envision the kind of world we would have if poetry was valued, and I work/play to make that possible. I also work to have a balanced, integrated life: my work in poetry cannot be allowed to eclipse other important work: the social justice work, the care of my family and friends, my relationship with the Divine, the other creative work I do, the self-care that must be the foundation of it all.

I find many values to being part of a religious tradition, but the constant reminder of the larger vision, the larger mission, is one of the most valuable to me. The world tells me that many things are important: fame, money, famous/rich people, a big house, a swell car, loads of stuff. My religious tradition reminds me of the moth-eaten nature of these things that the world would have me believe is important. My religious tradition reminds me of the importance of the larger vision. And happily, my religious tradition is expansive enough that my creative work can be part of that larger vision.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Lessons from Palm/Passion Sunday for Poets and Other Creative Types

Wondering whose turn it is
to sacrifice this time, what
to give up, what bitterness
to ingest, accept. Arms full
of plush youth, wriggling, resting.
Arms emptied from work that came
before, that follows. Fatigue.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 407: The Second Lamb #NaPoWriMo

But what about the Instagram and LinkedIn and tumblr icons at the head of this page, I hear you ask. Good question. I think they may be about to go as well. Maybe. Perhaps. I’m just no good at them, you see. The Instagram I set up so I could feast on the photos and art of my friends R–, R–, and D–. But of course it is more complex than that. In an ideal world, I would follow only them. Once the cat is out of the bag, you have to follow everyone else you know who knows them, even the ones posting about their jam making. LinkedIn is harder. And I’ve been using it much longer. But it is useful. For example, it is the only platform of anything that my activist friend W– uses, and the only way I can see what she’s been up to around the world. So it has its uses.

But as Martin Stannard once said about picking up a copy of a very well-known poetry magazine, I can sort of feel the depression rising up through my fingertips and my arms as soon as I start using them. I’m back where I started, with that edge-of-the-playground-feeling of marvelling at the utter confidence with which everyone shares the minutae of their lives. Five minutes, tops, that’s all I can manage. Then the double-maths-feeling hits even harder. Everyone else has the answers: why not me? I have nothing to say. And who on earth would listen?

Anthony Wilson, On being useless at social media

My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.

I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.

It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.

Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know? […]

Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”

I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Finally, in a real way, warts and all

In my life, I have chosen risk over and over. We risked everything to start a publishing company. Keeping it going was wildly stressful, but we kept at it.

I cannot keep my kids safe. I want them to be strong. Independent. Compassionate community builders who know when to be fighters. But in my inclination for risk, there are limits. I wouldn’t suggest that my daughter and her wife move to Texas right now. The three billionaires who fund and control Texas politics have drawn a line comparing being gay to incest. To them, the two are one and the same. They want to outlaw gay rights.

I think the 1.7 million queer people in Texas are less safe than the 2.8 million queer people in California; hopefully, they make it through.

Several times, I have been to the Sharjah Book Fair. There are people who have told me that Tobi, our queer marketing director, could go there. Before I got on the plane, I researched the laws. I usually do before I go to a new country. I had the proper clothing. Tobi presents as a man. Tobi is a walking violation of Shariah law. As such, Tobi could go to prison for ten years or be sentenced to death. Not a risk worth taking. No reason ever to go to the Emirates or any country with Sharia law. Not necessary. I can go for Red Hen. Being in prison isn’t an adventure.

Kate Gale, Do You Feel Safe in America?

I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.” […]

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

Bethany Reid, Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

Do I lose myself over consequences and weird linkages I wish this story were different but here I am in my kitchen baking bread honey dripping into my sink not my honey not this honey I bake for children in the street children marching in the street am I property am I pleasure or a pretend god feeding pretend children maybe we could go into the mysterious history of god’s sisters I have given myself over to the hands of strangers mayday mayday here we are another war song another war another where was I when the bells last rang what was the song 

Rebecca Loudon, April 12

Above is a screenshot from a reading of the stage adaptation of The Other Jack, directed by James Dacre, with Jack (played by Nathaniel Parker) on the left and Robyn (played by Jasmine Blackborow) on the right. The script is by the US playwright and poet Dan O’Brien (CBe has published his poetry and essays). It’s based on the book of the same name by myself, published by CBe in 2021, with some material also coming from 99 Interruptions. […]

The original book is loosely constructed around a series of conversations in cafés between a man (a writer, ageing) and a woman (a waitress, much younger). They talk ‘about books, mostly’, according to the cover, but also about ‘bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas’. The man is me, or is me as much as Jack Robinson is me, and here I am being evasive again, something that Robyn picks me up on. The play is not the book and I could say that the Jack in the play is not me but Dan O’Brien’s script is self-effacingly faithful to the book so it is me, whether I like it or not. On the left, smug ageing writer; on the right, young woman concocted to demonstrate writer’s self-awareness of his smugness – so that’s all right then. There’s something monstrous here.

Charles Boyle, The Other Other Jack

Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.

five decades
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird

Jason Crane, haibun: 12 April 2025

The full Pink Moon was actually pink this weekend, so I tried to get a picture of it in its true color which is always challenging but this one got pretty close.

My birthday is coming up soon which is always a time of introspection, as is tax time (how is it possible I did so much freelance work for so little money? I ask every year.) I am hoping to find a new home for my next book, maybe a chance to do more lucrative work teaching or publishing, and of course, balancing the joys of life and the stress plus health stuff. I am trying to find more disabled and chronically ill women’s books to review (so definitely comment if you have a new book coming out), and besides the book club and open mic, trying to get together more regularly with other writers. AWP (and maybe the art gallery and protest, too) reminded me of the strengths of feeling like part of a community, rather than just a lone eccentric trying to live your lone eccentric writer life. Helping others, speaking up, these things are also part of feeding the soul, not to get too cheesy.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring is Here with Cherry Blossoms and Art Shows, Tulip Fields, Pink Moons, and Visits with Family

the night is still / as April’s pink moon rises / lying / in his hot and fevered bed / the billionaire will meet an angel / walking in the soft shoes of a nurse / moonlight washes the city / as the hungry cry and shiver […]

‘Pink Moon’ is published in ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance’ out now with Rough Trade Books. April’s full moon reminds me of this poem, I think it was written around 2020 in lockdown and commissioned by BBC‘sThe Verb, to me this feels like a poem from another version of time, but some feelings still ringing true in 2025.

Salena Godden, Pink Moon

An artist once told me that every person has a pose, and it is rarely what we think it is. A person, their body, will fall into a kind of muscle memory of posture. There is no replicating it or forcing it, it is unique. It is beautiful, but not in the way that bright smiles and a tilted head makes a good photograph, but rather in the way that nature is beautiful, the way that beauty is everywhere. This, she said, is what she looks for when she sketches people.

I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m imagining my body, observing images of myself at different points in my life, trying to pin down my unique pose. There is the head in hand of the writer who reads her computer screen in a curled question mark of spine and chair. There is the hands on hips of observing garden, shopping, practical tasks that need a certain type of robust physicality and household organisation – this is the pose that my sister and my mum all share. And then there are the poses my body falls into when exploring, when my senses are alert to the outside world and the time points poking through, the places that connect the past and the future. I’m thinking about it now as I think about what it was that made me want to include Seamer Beacon, and the bronze age burial complex around the mound, in the series of pilgrimages that would make up my memoir, The Ghost Lake.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon

                Sometimes the moon 
       looks like the flap of a creased 

envelope— whatever message or instruction
       it bore has slipped into its dark 

pocket. Now it is swimming so far out 
       at sea, to a country not yet discovered. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Missing

When I’m asked a question I’m not totally sure on or not prepared for, I just start talking and then find my brain running behind going, ‘What the hell is she on about? Somebody stop her!’ Luckily, it was interviewing for the job I’ve been doing for the past two years on a temp contract, so they know I am not an idiot, though maybe also know I’m prone to babbling. 

This is why I feel comfortable as an editor, especially of my own writing. In writing my poems, I often don’t know what I’m saying until I have the meandering mess of it down on paper or screen and can sort it out, clean it up, take out the waffling that isn’t needed, the details that are just too off the wall or unclear. 

I do the same thing with emails, write it all out then edit it appropriately. I have, in the past, sent out those in the moment, emotional, unfocussed, unedited emails and it never ends well, so I always try to pull back and look a second time. 

I may have mentioned on this blog before that idea as my best piece of advice every given me, ‘Look at everything twice’. It was said to me by a Holocaust survivor I met when I was working in a bookshop in my small university town. She came in some Sundays to buy the big papers and chat. One day as she was leaving, she grasped my arm and said this and it’s always stuck with me. 

I’ve never considered the phrase in terms of my love of editing. I’ve always just thought of it as take a moment to appreciate what’s around you, the small things we overlook. By looking twice at anything, we understand it better and our place in it. We should spend that extra time to consider what we’re seeing, doing and saying. 

This applies to our writing as well. Slow down and consider. I need to do that when I speak as well it seems. 

Gerry Stewart, Look at Everything Twice – Editing

I asked myself a question last week. Could I write with the same joy as I have when I garden? It turns out I can. Perhaps by putting these thoughts on paper I understood what I needed to do to help me fall back in love with my creativity or perhaps it’s being part of NaPoWriMo courtesy of Notesfromthemargin April write-a-thon that has made the difference. […]

If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll know that my relationship with my work goes through huge peaks and troughs (I suspect part of this may be down to having Bipolar) so I won’t be surprised if this joy ebbs away a little. For now though I’m going to write as though I’m writing for fun, for myself and enjoy the responses from my lovely Notes from the Margin group. I’m writing in a way I haven’t for a long time – I look forward to the prompts each morning and write with instinct and enthusiasm rather than fear and self-doubt. It’s a wonderful feeling – almost like when I returned to poetry after almost thirty years away from writing but with better results.

I’m also going to revisit the dozens of poems in my files, see what’s good, what sings to me and try to get some order. I’m terrible at keeping track of everything and feel so sad that work I’ve been proud of is languishing in a forgotten file, or misplaced entirely. I’m not looking forward to this bit quite as much.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, I have taken my own advice

TPS: Tell me about the genesis of this book. How did you start and when did you know it was finished?

MS: Terminal Surreal began with my diagnosis—late 2023. It was a way for me to process what was and would happen to my body, but to be honest a good chunk of my brain didn’t quite believe I really had ALS – I think that’s how I managed to write poems like “When I Learn Catastrophically,” “Is this My Last Ferry Trip?,” “Self-Elegies,” and “Abecedarian with ALS.” A few poems were written before I knew I had ALS but was experiencing—muscle spasms and these things Inow know are fasciculations (when a nerve twitches).

I was hoping all my mysterious symptoms were anything but ALS. I did the Grind (where you are grouped with others via email and post a new poem draft or revision daily) in January, February, and March 2024, and the drafts and revisions from those three months gave me about half the book. In May, I sent it out as a chapbook, then pushed to get it to around fifty pages. I then sent it to Acre Books during their open reading period in May 2024, and heard a month later it had been accepted. I had never put a book together so quickly, and by then I was already in bad enough shape that the amazing editor, Lisa Ampleman, put the book into sections and did the arrangement for me (I was having trouble looking at screens).

I guess Terminal Surreal was officially finished about a month ago, when my partner Langdon Cook and Lisa did the final edits, and sent Lisa one last poem I asked to be added, and she said yes!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano

The prompt today from NaPoWriMo.net is to write a villanelle that includes a song lyric. I’ve never written a villanelle and it reminded me of solving a puzzle. I kept referring to the pattern described in poets.org and this poem by Elizabeth Bishop for guidance. At first, my mind couldn’t translate the pattern into lines or stanzas but when I began really dissecting Elizabeth’s poem, it began making sense. So, thank you, Elizabeth! To be honest, I’m not sure the poem is technically correct but I had a hell of a time trying! […]

Initially, I had this scheduled to post this morning but I got cold feet and unscheduled it late last night. I thought, this villanelle is cheesy. This morning I thought, Who cares? I’m doing something creative every day and other artists (my readers & friends) know we can’t be perfect every time!

Charlotte Hamrick, Tom Petty & a Villanelle

How we remember the past isn’t always how the past remembers itself. As for what happens next, who knows? 

Tower, Star, Nine of Wands. Ace of Cups, Two of Swords, Lovers. 

In this mysterious church of heart and hurt, pleasure and pain are swallowed as communion. Inevitably, some preach hate louder than love.

It’s tarot weather.

Rich Ferguson, Tarot Weather