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: 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

In this massive, end-of-the-year edition: gold paint and bird wings, throwing words to the wind, liquid understatement, stopping by woods, a river about a river, and much more. Enjoy.

Geography is elastic but night has reversed or doubled itself and it is not yet late but soon it will be if I am not diligent diligent being the rudder the bow the shoe’s heel and sometimes it is a memory etched on a sidewalk happy new year floating from my eves as the starlings shoot out.

Rebecca Loudon, Christmas Eve

I cleared my mind for Christmas photocopying outlines of birds and brushing them with gold. Paper birds flew across the front room and others, backed with pages from a dreadful novel, flew across the stairwell. I cut birds out of linen scraps and sewed them onto a tablecloth. I went down to the pier and watched them gather late one afternoon. I read my paternal grandmother’s fortune telling book, its auguries and instructions for interpreting the behaviour of birds (ornithomancy). 

I stopped by the sloe hedge opposite mum’s yesterday evening and listened to birds, far too late I thought, it was dark, and remembered the tunnel into the hedge used by the vixen who visits mum. The dark hillocky ridge beyond, punctured by rabbits. Mist sinking into everything. 

Jackie Wills, Gold paint and bird wings

Her eyes skirt the trees,
the marshy undergrowth
for a safe settling.
She tires easily now,
seeks sheltered landings
on timeworn wings,
her flight nearing
an unfamiliar shore
that beckons
with no promises.

Sarah Russell, Bird Woman

Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time of such profound pain and profound transformation that it fused reading and writing into a single, surprising act of the unconscious: I began making bird divinations to clarify the confusion of living and refill my reservoir of trust in the cohesion of the world. This daily practice left a great deal less time for other reading, especially anything new: The written word today seems more and more resigned to commodified virtue signaling and hollow self-help, so I found myself returning more and more to trusted treasures that have stood the test of time and changing moral fashions. 

Maria Popova, Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and More

I want to read more – but I do need to clarify in my own mind what I want to read, and why.

I want to write more – but I do need to clarify…

I want to keep posting online.

I want to keep connecting with lovely people.

I want to see more birds (real life as well as photos), photograph more birds, post more bird photos, read and write about birds (oh look, I’ve done some clarifying right there).

Sue Ibrahim, Another year…

Perhaps this particular bird is a singular bird:
its fluting tones original to its temperament

and not to any other in the larger murmuration,
though each wears the same coat lightly stippled

white, flocked with purple, green, and gold. Yet,
a song only becomes what it is when one note joins

or swerves alongside another, the mystery of never
breaking off a single feather even as it curves.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mozart’s Starling

A mixture of fear and feathers in Mary Ruefle’s “Tail Feathers” which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain. […]

Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.

Moist.
Like flames.

The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.

I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language. 

Alina Stefanescu, Fear maps.

A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted on the images sometimes, which he created after comparing my words to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot images. There were moments I’d say yes, this is perfect, and others when an image had the wrong vibe and I’d suggest it went with a different Major Arcana card instead. I love the results.

Lesley Wheeler, Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

just cold enough
for puddles to freeze . . .
cubist moon

Bill Waters, 2 poems

The poets whose books I reviewed in 2024 addressed grief and loss, the experience of exile, infertility, and the natural world, of living in the spaces between illness and health, and the power of resilience. They wrote of how the abiding presence of Nature balances an acute awareness of climate change, how language connects family, and why the dead are never truly gone.

Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones: 2024 Book Covers and 2025 Reviews

I’m surprised by my own tears and wonder why I don’t feel this deeply when I read other, similar headlines. Though, occasionally, one will stand out and some detail in the article about strangers will hook me and deepen my understanding beyond the intellectual. Something specific that sparks a network of memories, not their specifics, but the silent knowledge inherent in memory that makes facts move from the part of the brain that understands words, to the part that comprehends lived experience.

We witness.

This is what reading is about, isn’t it? When literature can witness lived experience in a way that mirrors what we recognize to be true. When an external perspective shows us more than we can see on our own. I still find it amazing how words can bridge the gap of distance, and of time.

It’s strange to be working on two projects at once. One is nearly entirely factual, shaped with imaginative connections (The wasp memoir). While the other is nearly entirely fictional, set within a framework of a few facts (The Baroness play). Both attempting to witness the human experience.

Scientists say now that our memories don’t function like recordings, but that we recreate the memory each time we bring it to mind. Every time I get caught up in concerns about writing the truth rather than writing what is true, I think of this.

It is true that my great grandmother was a cuckoo wasp. That my grandmother left the cramped, hexagon cell in the strange hive to wander over the moor. Potter wasp, intermittent mother to my mother. Solitary down the line. I am a witness.

Ren Powell, What it Might Mean to Witness

She turns a page in the journal.
Blank. White. What’s the point?

And then, one day, a request for an interview.
A girl, student of history, inquisitive, gentle.

A canvas bag, a notebook, pens of different colours.
She has tied her lovely red hair into bunches.

Larissa invites her to sit by the window, says.
There’s nothing especially interesting about my life,

but do you know how Margaret Clitherow
was crushed to death beneath stones?

Bob Mee, TODAY I TRIED TO THINK ABOUT HOW ONE WAY OR ANOTHER SO MANY OF US ARE DISPLACED

Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.

I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.

Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.

Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.

Ann E. Michael, Post-exertion malaise

I used to diarize and write my ideas down on napkins. Now that I don’t go to many places that have napkins, I bring along my book.

I’m a chronic chronicler. Every day on Facebook for a lot of years (and Flickr for many years before that), I’ve been posting a photo I took that day and writing about that day’s events.

It started as writing practice for times when I didn’t have a blog-worthy post. It’s where I dumped my shit, almost literally, like details about my colonoscopy. […]

My friend Susan, leader of writing retreats and author of several books and the Substack Writing and Roaming, advised me at lunch yesterday to get out of my own way. She saw that I was constantly throwing up roadblocks to keep from advancing to the finish line with my own projects: two unfinished novels, an unfinished children’s book about bugs (a passion project) and my finished poetry manuscript, Words with Friends.

I bought that manuscript with me, and she said “It looks finished! Why haven’t you submitted it yet?”

“Because it’s not organized. I need to put the poems in order.”

She said, “The last thing I want to read is six poems in a row about bugs” (or something similar), and I thought shit! She’s right. “Take this manuscript and throw it up in the air. Pick the pages up randomly, and that’s your order.”

Then she flipped through the manuscript, catching on a poem called “Pine.” I kept talking to her while she was reading it, and she was so intently focused on that poem. She pulled it from the stack and said, “Except make this one first.”

What has stopped me from pursuing personal writing goals and instead sent me to the basement to make lamps? Is it a fear of failure? Is it money? It’s certainly not a lack of time, now that I have nowhere to go.

I won’t call this a “resolution,” but I’ll try to spend my time more wisely.

In 2025, I will post my daily diary, along with other content, here, with a TL;DR summary on Facebook and a link to the post. And I will throw that manuscript up in the air and start sending it around.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Throwing Words to the Wind

Since it’s a big job, the remodeling of this site to contain both blog and personal website, there’s much to be done, including getting my book and zine page updated to reflect this year, which has been a whirl ever since last January when I decided to create monthly zines of art and writing work. At first, it was largely because I had had to graduate to a paid Issuu subscription, which was going to cost almost 30 bucks a month and I’d better take full advantage of that and actually use it. About midyear, I actually found a much better and much less expensive platform for hosting e-zines, so moved to that. I still enjoyed putting out monthly zines though, even with most of them being electronic with a couple exceptions. 

There’s something very rewarding about collecting and publishing poems this way, especially since my work is typically written as a series, and though I occasionally publish bits and pieces in collab zines, journals, and anthologies, they are best experienced in tandem with each other and any attendant artwork. I also like offering the bulk of my work with no impediments like expensive printing and shipping costs, especially in this economy.  I’ve been saving the printing costs for longer projects like this year’s full-length collection, RUINPORN, or the larger book projects that had specifications beyond my own printer like GRANATA and GHOST BOX (which was half created in studio, half by the professionals.)

As I was making the collage above for the webpage that lists everything, I realized that is quite a lot of work out in the world this year, which feels really good, because more often in previous years I’ve sat on things for years before releasing them, really with no benefits (at some point, they are done, so its not like they are aging like wine hidden away.) 

Kristy Bowen, bookish things

Here’s a sneak peek of the likely cover of my next book, coming out in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something good to read, I highly recommend a new anthology, The Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (edited by Todd and Noah Davis and and Carolyn Mahan). it pairs descriptions, habitat and lifestyle notes on key species in the region with poems about those species. Yes, I’m included (my entry is the mayapple). Among the other poets included are David Baker, Kasey Jueds, Chase Twichell, Lee Upton, Marjorie Maddox, K.A. Hays, Michael Garrigan, Jerry Wemple, Chard deNiord, and many more.

Grant Clauser, 2024 Update and stuff

Lately, it’s been about counting. Years. Runs. Words. Work. Breaths. Days. Trees.[…]

12,000 words – the number of words my novel has been stuck on all year. I lost my writing mojo in 2024, but I’ve found it again. Standby 2025, especially February 14th.

18 – the number of years I’ve spent at Wrexham University building a project which includes the voices of those usually excluded from education, from life, from being heard. A few days before my birthday, Outside In won an Above and Beyond Award for embedding Inclusion into the everyday life of the university. A day after my birthday, the group threw me a surprise party with more gifts than I could carry, some flowers that have lasted right up to today.

Breaths – who knows how many? But lately I’ve been practising Yoga Nidra as a way of grounding myself back into my adult self after the re-emergence of childhood traumas, counting breaths in through my nose, and out through my mouth. At first, I found this almost impossible to do. Now, it’s becoming more of a habit.

24 – the number of my advent calendar, and maybe yours: a treat I bought in the dark of November. Each day in December, I’ve opened a cardboard drawer to find a gift to myself. Lavender salve to rub into my temples, geranium hand cream, frankincense oil to rejuvenate my 60 year old skins. It’s taught me something about self-care that I don’t think I knew before – how to treasure myself each day, regardless.

1 – the tree that came to mind in a therapy session recently. This tree is real and imagined, a safe place of non-judgement, acceptance, strength, solidity and power –  somewhere I can go, in my mind, to find all that I needed when a child, all that I need now to draw upon when I’m thrown back into child-learnt fears. 

And so I find I’ve numbered my days, counted myself into my sixties and up to this Christmas  Day. And what have I found? 

Love. A growing into love for myself I’ve never thought possible. A growing into receiving love from others I’ve never thought I deserved. A growing love for this world, with all its darkness, all its lights.

Liz Lefroy, I Number My Days

Asterisks and diamond drops
and the cold, so cold,
Lording-over-us blue 

and the rose chill – 
sky’s bright rim of ear, 
so cold, asking to be nibbled

this renegade that escaped,
a maraschino cherry
a cocktail on ice

so raw and beloved
the song’s song be-
longing in our mortal ear. 

Jill Pearlman, Bright Rim of Ear Lyric

Is it wildly obvious that blue is my favorite color? I’ve recently learned that it’s scientifically proven that the color blue lifts one’s mood. I’ve just ordered the book Blue Mind by Wallace Nichols to learn more. Wallace’s focus is on blue water, but since I walk the shoreline where I live nearly everyday, I think that’s probably relevant, too. All I know is that the calm and peace the color offers me is real.

No wonder my most recent book is Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) has blue in the title or that the swag bags for Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women are also, blue.

It used to embarrass me that I had such an affinity to one color above all others, but not now.

Not being embarrassed anymore is one of the greatest gifts of growing older. Creating space in the world for others to walk through is another. Almost exactly, fifteen years ago, my good friend Kelli Russell Agodon and I dreamed-up the idea for a poetry retreat for women and Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Writing Retreat for Women was born over a glass of wine, sitting by a roaring fire.

We had both taught at several conferences that featured a less than nurturing atmosphere: a small inside stairwell, an unheated room, and the list goes on. Kelli and I decided, at our writing retreat everyone would feel cared for and seen. There will be swag bags full of new books and everyone will have a one-on-one conference at no extra charge.

Over the years, we moved from Florence, Oregon, to La Connor, Washington. A number of years ago we started inviting guest faculty which have included Elizabeth Austen, Jessica Gigot, Claudia Castro Luna, Michele Bombardier, January Gill O’Neil, Rena Priest, Maggie Smith, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Jane Wong.

This year writer-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield and poet Susan Landgraf will join me on the theme of wonderment and joy. What could be better?

Susan Rich, Another Year, Oh My: Celebrating

Sharing a name with a famous actress was innocuous enough, wasn’t it? We had little in common other than being white women. I am American; she was British. I’m a poet and writer; she was a renowned actress of the stage and screen. I was born in 1977; she was born in 1934 and had already won two Oscars by the time I was walking. Surely we wouldn’t be mistaken for one another!

But, to my astonishment and amusement, once I started publishing books and having a more public life, and especially after my poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, that’s exactly what happened. In 2017 Meryl Streep read my poem “Good Bones” at Lincoln Center, as part of the annual Academy of American Poets gala. I wasn’t in the audience that evening, but when I listened to the audio later, I heard her say, “I’m going to read a poem by Maggie Smith.” The crowd murmured with excitement, and she said, in her unmistakable voice, “Not that one. The American.”

I laughed. From that day forward, my social media bio has been either “Not that one” or “The other one.”

I hope Dame Maggie Smith, who was known for her wit, would have found all of this amusing as well. As her character Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, once said on Downton Abbey, “Life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”

Maggie Smith, The Other One, Forever & Ever

For me, the year really got started in April with the solar eclipse, which Chris and I watched from Burlington, Vermont, in the path of totality. I still tell anyone who will listen that it changed my life. It sounds goofy AF and over-the-top, and I just don’t care. What I saw and felt was the most profound awe of my life. The magic and power were undeniable, and it became clear: that giddy feeling was what I needed more of in my life. And I needed it immediately, so I spent the year getting after it. [….]

I spent the first six months of the year dramatically revising my poetry manuscript and continuing to send it out. In the process, I crossed the 30-submission mark. And then? I pressed pause. Even though some of the responses included positive signs about the viability of the manuscript, all were ultimately rejections except two that I’m waiting on. I am writing still, just not as much as I used to. I completed Sarah Freligh‘s August Micro-a-Day challenge, gathered some free writes in my journal, attended a couple of local open mics and featured at one.

I’ll get more serious about po’biz again in the future, I’m sure, but for now I’m reassessing what I’m doing, who I’m doing it for and what I want out of it. […]

Art making has come and gone in my life over the years, but mostly, it has been gone. This year, it started calling to me again, however. I had lots of resistance and fear about it initially because I was taking myself too seriously. I’ve been working through it and trying to make it about play. I have some things I want to pursue in 2025, but for now, I’m just practicing and exploring. (You can follow me on an Instagram account dedicated to this art journey here.)

So what now? What’s up next? On the heels of this awkward ritual — the recap — there may be another one: the resolutions, the intentions, the goals for 2025. But if not, the main theme is this: I’m trying to channel the magic and wisdom from 2024 into a new model for writing and art making and being in the world.

That means returning to this idea that we can create what we need for ourselves and for our communities. Our strength lies there, not with typical measures like publications or likes or beauty standards or even elections. That’s a story for another day, but sticking to the theme I have going here, we got us.

We got us.

We make something out of nothing. Almost every day. And the worlds we make are as real as any we’ve been handed. And they’re ours. They belong to us. Imagine how powerful we are when we keep building. Imagine it like it’s already true — and suddenly it is.

Carolee Bennett, To Make a Safe Space for Myself

The final poem in our Palestine Advent series is Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.

Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1933 in the village of Saffuriya and died in Nazareth in 2011. His So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 24: Revenge, by Taha Muhammad Ali

I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees.  I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot.  But through the years, I’m less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.

In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever.  Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they’re not going to be scientists–that seems very important to me.  Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Success of Adopting a Tree in a Composition Class

When I was a child, my sisters and I were told (and believed) that on Christmas Eve when the clock struck midnight, for one hour all of the animals could talk to one another. This was a magical happening, and also a secret: if we were to try to stay awake and observe this convening (which I suggested on a number of occasions), the magic would be broken.

In my early childhood, we lived in a suburban house with a wide swath of woods behind, and always cohabitated with at least one cat and one or two dogs. Later, we moved to a seven-acre farm and in addition to the animals who shared our house, we also lived alongside chickens, Nubian goats, alpacas, horses and a pony, two barn cats, and a pig, not to mention all of the other wild creatures–birds, squirrels, mice and moles, raccoons, snakes and lizards, turtles and toads, deer–that shared the land. At that point, imagining the conversations that would take place on this sacred night became even more mysterious. What, given the brief gift of a shared language, would all of these creatures say to one another?

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Christmas

i read in an old grimoire
that if we are sick we should bury all our hooves.
we should prepare for winter. we must
boil a whole tree until it is
soft as flesh.
i pickle the moon to go with it.
sweet lemon divine. i collect the hooves.

Robin Gow, healing spells

I grew up in the same New England that Robert Frost wrote about. I saw the roads. Drifts of snow covered them. New Hampshire used to get an average of 174 inches of snow a year. Now, due to climate change, just a lousy 60 inches, a third of what it was fifty years ago.

Snow or no snow, the question might be, do we take the time to look outside at all? Are we intentional about looking up from our phones? The answer is no. We don’t have time—or make time—to look at the woods.

What could possibly be happening on Instagram or TikTok that is more exciting than driving, crossing the street, or interacting with someone at our local coffee shop? It’s all too apparent that we are sucked into our devices. We are absorbed by our longing for the pixels of a digital world.

The first time I realized the phone was a competition was at a Red Hen poetry reading at Poets House. Leaves fell in New York’s late afternoon. Li Young Li was reading with Peggy Shumaker, two accomplished poets. Before the reading began, no one was looking through the Poets House library, one of the largest poetry collections in the world. They weren’t observing the beauty of the space. They were playing with their phones. I realized that the event was competing with something that could fit on their laps.

This was twelve years ago; the phone hadn’t really taken us by the throat. It has now.

Kate Gale, Stopping by Woods: On Returning to Intention

sun dying
i become
part of the darkness

Grant Hackett [no title]

In an Afterword, [Robert] van Vliet briefly explains some of Vessels’ compositional background. A few years ago, in the midst of the bleakness and isolation of the Covid pandemic, the poet was tied up in a difficult, exasperating writer’s block. Taking up a popular creative writer’s manual, which offered a method of daily exercises – applying aleatory, chance texts as writing prompts – van Vliet leaned instead upon three much-valued personal sources : the I Ching, the journals of Thoreau, and the gnostic Nag Hammadi Gospel texts.

The poet emphasizes the generative effect of chance operations, comparable to casting the I Ching oracles – and these methods clearly had a liberating influence, opening wide, exploratory dimensions, adding variety to the sequence. But if you read his explanation carefully, you find that the process involved several overlapping steps : sorting, mixing, shifting, recombining. And in fact this step-by-step approach allowed van Vliet’s own voice to emerge : quietly, subtly, unobtrusively. For me it emerges in the refined lightness, the liquid understatement, the powerful simplicity, of his images of nature. Like ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry in its foreshortened, whispering force, its emotional accuracy, his short lyrics find a place where heart, mind, and soul – feeling, thought, and truth – seem to merge in a transparency of light, wind, water, seasonal change.

The ancient source material is by no means an artificial scaffolding, a crutch. It is the avenue for an encounter : because for this kind of Transcendentalist, philosophical writing (think, Thoreau), there is no Truth but lived truth; there is no Word but felt words, embodied words – words in-relation to others, to otherness, to Another. The divine, the sacred, washes through these poems like a wind (or rain, or drought) : the fear and terror are there, as well as the longing and adoration. Moreover the free, questing, skeptical, philosophical mind is there : the only dogma, the only authority, the only truth… you must live them. You must experience them yourself. This is the encounter (in my rough approximation) that the reader will find in this volume. It is supremely paradoxical, supremely mysterious – as is our mortal life in this mysterious cosmos. The poet challenges himself – and the reader – to find life again, beyond the fraudulent twilight realm of illusions, self-delusions.

Henry Gould, A New Song : a New Walk

I’ve been thinking about connections, networks, and finding angels in strangers. These past two months have been an odd kerfluffle of dinners with family and friends, stretches of quiet, paroxysms of activity, stretches of how-can-it-be-only-4:30. My husband has invited another crop of people over for dinner, and I feel resentful. And I feel guilty for that. I don’t know these people very well, or at all. He relies on me for my conversational skills while he finishes cooking, and then also at the table. I don’t feel like pumping up that particular energy. I don’t feel like hearing myself say brightly to someone, “So…” and ask some question about their lives. I don’t care. But I ask myself, what is my preferred alternative? Another quiet dinner and then Netflix? Really? Again?

I think these people coming to my table have nothing to offer me, but how could I possibly know? And why would I cut myself off from the possibility? Don’t I believe that in community lies all hope and possibility, all potential for the human species on the planet? Don’t I believe that these interactions with friends and strangers make rich a life? What is my problem? Something inside me is unsettled and bleating mutely, and something about the prospect of these people, these particular people and their particular connection, makes me feel trapped. Which is completely ridiculous.

But I found a kind of resonance with the shrimp in this poem by Catherine Barnett, from her terrific book Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space. Alone or not alone enough, is the question of the poem.

But I think the real question of life is the “sharing a patch of sea grass” she mentions. I know from another book I’m reading right now, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, that it’s not just a couple of shrimp sharing that patch of sea grass, it’s teeming masses of bacteria and other teeny things, single celled whatsits and multicelled whosits, and fleas and waterworld insects, all awash in waves and winds frantically trying to keep everything in balance. I learned in some other article somewhere that even though we are an incredibly destructive force, we human species have also had some positive effects on the planet, and were we to disappear, those positive effects would disappear too.

I guess my point is, we’re all in this together, we shrimp and insects, we whosits and humans and winds. And although we’re never particularly alone, sometimes it feels like it, and against our will. So look, Elijah could show up for dinner at any time. Just set the table. Prepare to look at a stranger with your brainy eyes, and to say brightly, “So…”

Marilyn McCabe, then they’re gone again

There’s a delightful quickness of fantasy in early Yeats. When I was a boy, critics seemed to enjoy disparaging his ‘Celtic twilight’ poems as – I suppose – trivial and escapist. I don’t know if that’s still the case. Carrying Jeffares’ MacMillan paperback selection around with me, I loved intoning those early poems quite as much as the later ones and for the same reason – I gorged on the sheer richness and control of their music in a quite indiscriminate way. Nowadays the solemn drone of the Rose poems has lost its appeal for me. I don’t mean I now think of it as weak, or bad, or clumsy but that there’s something static and unchanging in its effect which means that it has lost its life through repetition. ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and similar poems have kept their freshness. I think this is partly because of the sparkling distinctness of their images. Each line brings a separate self-contained flowering of life as well as contributing to a developing narrative:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

The style of almost childlike simplicity is important. Aengus says things and we seem to see them with absolute clarity in a mood of wide-eyed, wondering but unquestioning acceptance. There’s no pushing of mood or meaning by the poet, and this is part of the difference from the Rose poems, and why this one seems to me so much more artistically resilient than they are. However, I think that there’s something entranced and entrancing about the feeling of the verse right from the start, before the trout transforms to a glimmering girl. What I started this piece hoping to do was to analyse how this feeling is given but that seems to be beyond me. All I can say is that the way we and the speaker are caught in the grid of these delicate iambic tetrameter lines with their abcb rhymes seems to have something to do with it, creating a sense of being in some sort of hyperreal, entranced state or space. 

Edmund Prestwich, Magic words: W B Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’

In the artist’s statement accompanying her “Poetry Recitation with Music: The Waste Land,” Beijing-based artist Wang Baoju concludes by saying that her recitation of a Chinese translation of T.S. Eliot’s famous 1922 poem performed in time to a Beijing traffic light’s beeping is “absurd.”

But if we stop at simple dictionary definitions (or stop with Google Translate), we lose some important word play. Wang uses the word 荒诞, pronounced huangdan and meaning “absurd, ridiculous, over the top,” to describe the nature of her performance. In doing so, she echoes the Chinese translation of the title of Eliot’s poem: 荒原 huangyuan.

The character 荒 huang repeats, suggesting that not only is Wang’s performance inherently absurd (or, better put, absurdist in the tradition of art that reflects real-world absurdity), but that it also does something with and to Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, that it, we might say, somehow wastes the poem, or uses the poem to waste something about poetry itself, or our time, or contemporary Beijing, that it somehow wastes the Waste Land, whatever that might mean.

What are we, as viewers, to do with this? 

Can we relate to interminable waits? 

To our time being cut up by machines, computers, algorithms, codes

Perhaps some of us might note that parts of Beijing look almost identical to parts of any other global megacity….

We might observe that traffic and people rushing about on their business in the city can, if we sit and watch for a while, seem somehow ghostlike, zombie-like, machine-like, unreal?

That we can feel unreal, too, in cityscapes shaped by the demands of commerce and technology more than by the needs of the human body, psyche, and soul? 

That maybe there’s something “dead” about this world we’ve made, with its pulsing energies and seemingly endless tearing-down and rebuilding, its material excesses, profligate consumption of resources, and flows of emissions and garbage?

That all of this is happening in a world that feels like it’s teetering on the brink of some kind of catastrophe, even as we drift through daily life as if things might go on forever just as they do now, distracted by our screens?

David Perry, Hurry Up and Wait: Wang Baoju’s Hyper-Unreal Absurdist Beijing Waste Land

Christmas himself was probably played by William Rowley, a famous comic actor who must — like Jonson himself — have been a large man, as he generally played jolly, plump parts (like Plum Porridge in Middleton’s Inner Temple Masque (1619) and the Cook in Jonson’s later masque, Neptune’s Triumph). But all the other actors were probably actually boys, drawn from the professional companies with which Jonson was associated. The contrast between their childish appearance and the adult jobs Christmas attributes to them (such as ‘Hercules the porter’) is part of the joke. The boy Cupid would certainly have been played by a child, as would his mother Venus, the only speaking female part.

Christmas has just got his show underway, and is part-way through his opening song, when he is interrupted, first by some noise outside, and then by the entrance of Venus, a ‘deaf tire-woman’ (that is, a dressmaker), who — a bit like Christmas himself — insists on coming in and, despite his protests, on staying so that she can watch her son, Cupid, who has a part in the play. Making Venus a deaf dressmaker and Cupid a local apprentice (to a bugle-maker, that is, a maker of glass beads) has obvious comic potential, and we duly discover that Venus lives on Pudding Lane (a poor neighbourhood, famous as the place where the Fire of London began later in the century); that she is the child of a fishmonger (a profession with a reputation for lechery and infidelity); that her husband was a blacksmith (an obvious reference to Vulcan); that Cupid is apprenticed to a bead-maker on Love Lane (slightly east of Pudding Lane), and so on.

The whole thing keeps nearly collapsing into chaos — more people want to come in; Venus keeps interrupting Christmas and then mishearing what she is told; Christmas’ children discover they have lost or forgotten half their props; and then Cupid begins his speech but, interrupted by his mother, loses his place and forgets his words:

CUPID: You worthy wights, king, lords, and knights,
O queen and ladies bright,
Cupid invites you to the sights
He shall present tonight.
VENUS: ’Tis a good child. – Speak out, hold up your head, Love.
CUPID: And which Cupid – and which Cupid [he keeps repeating it, unable to remember the rest]

There’s an energy to the piece, dependent to a large extent on the comedy of a performance going wrong — and never being quite sure whether all of the errors are scripted or not — which is quite a lot like a good pantomime, still a traditional part of the British Christmas.

Victoria Moul, Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?

Szirtes’ career illustrates what Pasternak discusses in An Essay in Autobiography (Harvill, 1990). Though our experience of the world is necessarily subjective, there is a sufficient underlying matrix that remains “the common property of man” – the hard-wiring implicit in being human. Superimposed on this is the softer wiring derived from upbringing, environment and education, and the self is ultimately a function of these base matrices in progressive interaction with individual decision-making in the flow of experience. So the objective world is processed through the individual’s particular matrices – his/her sets of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, texturised as it were, accordingly. From this, Pasternak argues that when an individual dies he leaves behind his own unique “share of this . . . the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul”. This, of course, is where “art finds its . . . field of action and its main content . . . the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience”. Art can be defined as the expression of experience playing across the matrices of the self, saying not this is me, but this is, this was, mine.

It is the raw imagery of stasis and movement that emerges in Szirtes’ early work as being truly his and it blooms into the maturity of the late 1980s. In short lyrical pieces the point of stasis is associated with the preservative of art in the spit ball gobbed by a foreign worker in ‘Anthropomorphosis’ which is caught and “suspended” by the poem. The afternoon rearranges itself around it and even the narrator “hung there / Encapsulated in that quick pearled light”. Versions of this encapsulation abound: girls creating a silver foil tree find themselves absorbed into a Keatsian “cold pastoral”. Such freeze-frame moments anticipate Szirtes’ sustained meditations on photography but early on, images of snow and frost suggest the ambivalent status of such suspension. In ‘The Car’ a snowfall is both beautiful and sepulchral: “Fantastic Gaudi-like structures hung / Under the mudguard . . . . / Wonderful, cried the girls under the snow”. A girl who is observed sewing causes consternation (“I do not like you to be quite so still”) caught in a stasis that can “eat away a life” that can “freeze the creases of a finished garment” (‘A Girl Sewing‘).

Martyn Crucefix, George Szirtes’ King’s Gold Medal for Poetry

on a notepad
in the stonemason’s yard:
names to be carved

Matthew Paul, My year in haiku

At the opening of The Grail, the final part of the trilogy, in a poem dated 31^st October 2024, we find ourselves back in the Providence of Roger Williams and Cautantowwit, in a sense Gould’s earthly Eden. But then circumstances plunge the poem back into harsh reality, with two poems dated the 4^th and 6^th of November, bracketing the re-election of Trump, and, as it happens, Guy Fawkes’ Night:

Election day, the traitor, redivivus,
golden-orange, breathing fire, emerges
from Hecate’s diamond basement (Hades)…
wearing Empedocles’ bronze shoe, Jesus!
No one could have predicted this. Amen,
howls each mesmerized hurt soul… He’s us!
Meanwhile… Roger, Coke’s fiery lamb… sighs.
These trials of conscience burden suffering MAN!
he shouts: Only soft-hearted JONAH can restore us.
(from ‘Twisted Knot’)

I want to pause a moment to unpack at least some of the references in this stanza, which is typical of Gould’s method. By association with Hecate, keeper of the key to Hades, fire-breathing Trump becomes Satan, the ultimate traitor, and with the figure of Fawkes, who figures in Milton’s ‘In Quintum Novembris.’ (On the Fifth of November), a poem that could be viewed as an early draft of ‘Paradise Lost’. Fawkes’ basement full of gunpowder being an analogical Hades of its own. And then there’s Empedocles’ attempted deceit, a brazen (pardon the pun) attempt at self-aggrandisement.

Next we have Roger Williams, whose patron, the English jurist Sir Edward Coke, prosecuted Fawkes for treason. Williams knew Milton and tutored him in Native American languages. He also founded Providence as an oasis of ‘liberty of conscience’. As it turns out, he also wrote about Jonah as being, perhaps, soft-hearted: ‘Jonah did not compel the Ninevites to hear that message which he brought unto them.’ (I cannot source the apparent quote that closes the stanza.) And it may be just me, but Jonah brings to mind Moby-Dick. One way or another, these lines illustrate Gould’s insistence on history as a kind of process outside time, or in which all times and places co-exist and illuminate each other.

Billy Mills, Three Books by Henry Gould: A Review

Over the last few days, I’ve taken some very long walks, several naps, and I’ve read What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, trans. and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill (LiverightPubl, 2025). It is being hailed as “a landmark literary event.” The poems, presented in the original German and in English, were never intended by Arendt for publication, and they don’t strike me as being poems one memorizes or writes out in a commonplace book. They compel, however, if taken as a diary of Arendt’s life:

The thoughts come to me,
I’m no longer a stranger to them.
I grow into their dwelling
like a plowed field.

(from Part II, 1942-1961)

If you aren’t already steeped in Hannah Arendt’s work, the footnotes and the introduction of What Remains are a necessary guide. Additionally, they offer the editors’ obsession with the poetry, and a direct look into one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century.

Bethany Reid, What Remains

Edward Storer (1880-1944) was born in Alnwick, England, lived in Rome, and then returned to England to live in Weybridge, London; “In November of 1908, Storer, author already of Inclinations, much of which is in the “Imagist” manner, published his Mirrors of Illusion, the first book of “Imagist” poems, with an essay attacking poetic conventions.” (Flint, A History of Imagism, 1915)

One of the founders of the ‘School of Images’ group in 1909, alongside F.S. Flint and T.E. Hulme, both of whom were also experimenting with free-verse, inspired by French vers libre, and Japanese tanka and haiku (the influence of tanka, for instance, is particularly obvious in Storer’s short poems, as well as in the stanza forms of his longer poems). The School of Images group also included Florence Farr and a young Ezra Pound, among others.

Storer published three books of ‘new’ poetry between 1907 and 1909—Inclinations (1907), Mirrors of Illusion (1908), and The Ballad of the Mad Bird (1909)—and was a significant forerunner to the ‘new verse’ movements which would eventually take both England and America by storm in the 1910s-1920s. In the 1910s he also published an influential book of Sappho’s fragments in translation, seemingly using tanka and haiku as a model.

Storer also wrote the one of the first truly ‘modernist’ essays on poetics, included as an appendix to Inclinations (1907), but largely ignored by historians. The basic tenant of modernist theory was that each art had its own, unique essence, which differed ‘absolutely’ from one another, and that an artist’s highest calling was to identify, and nurture this essence. Up until the late-1800s narrative had always been seen as one of the foundations of Western poetry, which Storer disputed. Narrative, as an inherently ‘realist’ pursuit relied on ‘believability’, which was fundamentally at odds with the poetic, he argued. Conversely, poetry ignored its own essence the more it engaged with narrative. This led Storer to argue for an ‘imagistic’ model of poetry, in distinction to any kind of ‘realism’, grounded in ‘suggestive’ linking and combination, rather than ‘narrative’.

Storer seldom gets sufficient credit for his theory of poetics, though Pound would go on to plagiarise Storer, Flint, and Hulme’s ideas, as well as those of earlier free-verse poets like Yone Noguchi, in his essays of 1912-1915, under the name of ‘Imagisme’. This ‘new’ Imagist movement went on to include numerous extremely talented poets like Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and Amy Lowell, and remains one of the most well know—if poorly understood—movements of the 20th Century.

Dick Whyte, Edward Storer – 7 Short Poems (1907-22)

Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony comprises around 450 poems that tend to begin with a name, a place (farm, factory, saloon, boarding house) and sometimes a time of day or the age of the named person if relevant, and that tend to end with violence – gunshots, knife wounds, mutilation in industrial accidents. Their language is court-room plain, these are the facts; courtly, I’d say, respectful; no Henry James sub-clauses; the power is accumulative. Testimony was published in the US in several volumes by New Directions and Black Sparrow Press between 1965 and 1978; it was reissued in 2015 by Black Sparrow in a single edition – subtitled The United States (1885–1915): Recitative – that also includes as an appendix the prototype volume, written in prose, first published in 1934.

I’ve known of this book without ever, until this year, getting to it. It is one of the books of the last century; it has never been published in the UK. Repeat: it has never been published in the UK.

Reznikoff (1894–1976), by all accounts, was a modest man. He was born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He sold hats for the family business. He wore out a lot of shoe leather, walking 20 miles a day on the streets of New York. In his twenties he had poems accepted by the magazine Poetry and then withdrew them; most of his work until the 1960s was self-published, and typeset and printed by himself. His poetry is included in anthologies of the Objectivists alongside that of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (all of them immigrants to the US or the sons of immigrants). He studied law and practised very briefly but then ducked down, Bartleby-ish, and for many years earned his living by writing summaries of court records for legal reference books.

‘I glanced through several hundred volumes of old cases – not a great many as law reports go – and found almost all that follows.’ This is Reznikoff’s brief prefatory note to his 1934 prose version of Testimony. Given that what comes to court is the bad stuff – murders, rape, theft, claims for negligence, property disputes and forged wills – Testimony is not a picnic in the park.

Charles Boyle, Late in the day, my book of the year

It’s nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden’s middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden’s travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.

Jee Leong Koh, Humphrey Carpenter’s W. H. AUDEN: A BIOGRAPHY

The poem I’m writing about is “Boxers in the Key of M” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from her book Apocalyptic Swing. You can find the full text here in the archives of The New England Review.

I first met Gaby when I moved to San Francisco in 2003. Amy and I house sat for her and took care of her cat Clemente while we looked for a place to live, and then, some years later, we worked together running the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. I have always considered her both a wonderful person and an extraordinary writer and I recommend all her books unreservedly.

I’ve always found Gaby’s poems to be intimate, whether writing in the voice of a character or when the line between poet and I is more blurry, as it is in this poem. And it feels weird to write that when the poem starts with an announcement of its poem-ness, a sort of half-simile.

As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon’s
younger brother Michael, a name I learned
in Catholic school.

The connection of boxing to music is a natural one. Rounds are three minutes long, roughly the length of a pop song, and many legendary boxers have been described as dancing around the ring. Michael Spinks was apparently a dancer before he was a boxer, and his wife was a dance instructor. Camacho danced on Univision’s Mira Quien Baila after his boxing career ended. And while Marvelous Marvin Hagler didn’t have the same reputation for dancing as many other fighters, he still stayed on his toes and bounced.

I also like where the mention of Catholic school takes us, along with the rest of that line and the next one, “St. Michael of the mat, / of the left hook and the deafening blow.”

Brian Spears, Sometimes there’s nowhere to run

The surrendering in the above poem speaks to me. And whenever I read from my volume of Hermann Hesse poems translated by Ludwig Max Fischer I am always taken with the commentary by Fischer. He quotes Hesse, “To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of the great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence…”

I’m interested in his insistence on love. I like that he “saw himself as an advocate for the soul, as an activist for the spirit in everyone beyond ideologies and doctrines.” Hesse saw words as instruments for the possible, and which could lead us to joy.

How many thousands of time in a life do we need to relearn the path to joy?

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – Winwood, Hesse, Michelangelo

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

Always. Yes. Probably the primary thing I am always thinking about is: How does poetry’s condensed nature/its condensation yield an outsized MEANING? What does it mean (for my experience of time and space) to prop those effects up in a kind of shadow box?

A couple books ago, I was obsessed with the impossibility of a coherent self and what it MEANS to control the flow of information on the page.

Right now, I’m thinking/writing about the gaze, infection, vampires, the tone of ordinary suffering, rage as a holding of the line . . .

In the work of other contemporary poets (and other types of writers) who are much bigger in their thinking than I (btw I am totally cool with being B-movie-ish, a petty tinkerer), I feel like some of the big questions of now are related to what the inside (terrorizing, terrorized) of looking and being is, how language and art $erve capital in ways within and beyond our knowing, how writing with and from sources can be an ethos that might help to de-center whiteness, how Literature can facilitate an expansion of collective knowledge . . .

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

The writer can help proliferate community and thus (quite actively or even very remotely/impressionistically) stabilize the fragile threads of solidarity between the many people needed to collaborate in service of surviving the horror of Now; 

can create literal or figurative occasions for what is also my current fave teaching strategy, “small explosive art situations”;

can narrate/express/compose/sing for the purposes of witness, observation, or mere preservation of the ephemeral–all of which can be meaningful to any single reader; 

can, because Literature is a shared experience and requires many types and modes of stewardship, be “a person for others” (I went to a Jesuit high school LOL); 

can offer a momentary or lasting un-selfing for another human, which might act as salve or as awakening;

can do what Grushenka (in Brothers Karamazov) suggests is as important as full devotion to goodness: at least once give someone an onion when they need it.

That’s what I can come up with right now. I’ll think on this again in ten years.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Olivia Cronk

From a construction point of view, the poem is a masterclass in the strong line ending, and the sounds of this…the ow sound of window, flower, over and glow vs the clipped ends of snapped, snipped, lapped, missed, and the rhymed couplets at the end, but beyond the technical details (in a book that is all sonnets) , I love it for its attentive nature, the partner noticing something that means something to their partner — I can’t always say I manage that despite my best intentions, but as I sit here at the end of a year that has very much done a number on me, it is acting as a reminder that I can and should do more to notice these little things.

Both R and me are struggling today to feel comfortable with doing nothing. She keeps wanting to do stuff (despite being knackered from organising Xmas and looking after my carcass for the last week). I am loathe to sit down having been ill for a week, feeling “better” but exhausted, so sitting still is hard, but we both need to remember we don’t “always need to be on the move”

Mat Riches, Uncareful Owner

the wild geese
are shitting on the snow
icy pond

Jim Young [no title]

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is poetry’s equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D – overused to within an inch of its life. I don’t care. Both are wildly popular because they are beautiful; simple enough to speak widely; complex enough to hold and engage. “You do not have to crawl on your knees repenting” is the line I’d like to live in the coming year. And this year, more than ever before, I found my place in “the family of things”.

More often than not, I forget to say that it’s Clare writing this article – but maybe it’s obvious from the different ways Kim and I write, and the things we say. For example – I want to tell you about how, decades ago, one of my girlfriends complained about the way I spoke about my family. It’s always THE family, she said – like it’s a unit. The Family is coming. I’m spending time with The Family. Like there’s no other family! Like you don’t exist without it!

But, I was the youngest of six – a Catholic family – and we were a unit. We were cubs, we moved and lived and rested in a pile. We had our own bible, our own lore. We shared our underwear, changed once a week and washed by hand, we bathed in the same water, smelled of each other, caught lice and worms from each other, ate choddy from each other’s mouths. The Family was my horizon and furthest place; the Family was much more than world. It was my fingers, my thoughts and all my dreams. It was my arterial system and my exoskeleton; my tastebuds and my lens. What do you do when your systems all fall apart?

Clare Shaw, Family Estrangement, December, and the Family of Things

How can we get a decent night’s sleep on a mattress made from fists and crumbling civilizations?

How can we turn a blind eye when reality’s mugshot is posted on the back of our eyeballs, continually reminding us of the crimes humans commit against one another?

A bullet isn’t like a trained dog. You can’t tell it to sit and expect a positive outcome when all it knows is kill.

But something I can say to you with optimistic certainty is this: the story of us has been woven from other stories; our stories will weave with different stories to create future stories.

A hymn about a hymn, a kiss about a kiss, a river about a river, forever flowing.

Rich Ferguson, A River About a River

Overall I read about 41,000 pages. That’s about 110 pages a day on average. It’s a ballpark because some were facing pages translations, some had no page numbers so I didn’t count or made a guess. I only counted up to appendices if I didn’t read those. Assist points go to my back and sciatica and energy crashes which left me capable of doing little more than reading.

I am always adding new questions to track. This year I added a couple new columns to the spreadsheet: re-reads (28 titles) and cost of title.

• 66% were free to me: downloads, contributor copies, review copies, gifts, jury copies, library, or little free libraries
• 19% were bought at full price, from the author directly, at small press fairs, by subscription, or else came from indie bookstores
• 8% from Amazon (sorry)
• 7% came from thrift stores or used bookstores (so 50 cents to $10)

[…]

Poetry comprised 60%. Most of the rest are novels or novellas. Chapbooks rang in around 20%. The next biggest categories were memoir or essays, then history or science. […]

What work is it that I want written word to do?

To expand me. To teach me how to be a better human. To understand angles of human nature. To conceive of a supportive world. To enter play and silliness, and to enter scary experiences completely unlike my own. To live more lives and to live a life I’m better equipped to understand.

Pearl Pirie, Self-audit and Best of 2024 List

About a week ago, I panicked when I realized I had promised two different writers blurbs for their next collections by the end of December. I had already read the books and taken notes, but I hadn’t started parsing my notes and my pulled quotes to make cohesive statements. I proceeded to put aside everything else I’d been planning to work on and make sure they got completed.

Being asked to create a blurb for another writer is an honor, one that I take seriously and one that takes quite some time. (See ’s excellent recent stack about writing and asking for blurbs.) It is the same with writing book reviews, something that I have done A LOT over the past five years. (Thirty-three poetry reviews at Rhino Reviews alone, six at Tinderbox Poetry – plus others at Limp Wrist, South Florida Poetry Review, and other venues. If you add them up, it’s around 10 reviews per year for the past five years – almost one a month.)

I’m not complaining. Reviewing has made me a more careful reader of poems and a better thinker about my own poems. I have considered this practice one way of giving back to poetry, one way of giving attention and respect to what poets do. I think about providing space for poets on my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey in the same way, and I hope that Asterales, the new journal I am launching with friend/writer Rachel Bunting next month, will be another way to showcase writers and artists with gratitude for what they create.

But all of these things take physical time and mental energy. The more time spent on blurbs, reviews, reading submissions, website work, booking, and promoting means less time on my own creative and personal pursuits, less mental energy for my own poems or freewriting, this Substack, artwork, or even pleasure reading. (Or other personal things like exercise, time with family/friends, traveling.) For this reason, and for some personal ones (including some travel plans), I have decided to make changes for the coming year.

I have decided I need to learn to say no.

Easy, right? Not so much.

Donna Vorreyer, Fa-la-la-la-Labor

Leaving aside the thornily persistent issue of whether ize or ise is the more authentic British spelling, I have to admit that U.K. poets who use American spelling really do grind my gears.

What’s more, I gather from other poets that certain U.S. poetry mags require American spelling and some U.K. mags demand British spelling. Both positions seem absurd to me. In fact, they’re only a short step away from asking poets to correct their use of an expression or a phrasal verb because the meaning is different on the other side of the pond. All these would be red lines for me, as my spelling and choice of syntax represent a key part of the roots of my poetry.

Mind you, before anyone starts getting twitchy about the potential politics of the above statement, it’s worth underlining that this is far from being a question of nationalism or Little Britain. Bearing in mind the negative effects of Brexit on every aspect of my life, I’m never going to be heading down that cul-de-sac! No, it’s more to do with how our uses of language in our poetry express our origin and identity. And we all write through both, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not…

Matthew Stewart, Americanised (sic) spelling

For the past two years, I’ve collaborated with haiku friends on what I call the Midwinter Day Renku. I created this renku variation in response to one of my all-time favorite works of literature, Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day. 

The story behind Midwinter Day is that Mayer composed the entire thing on Friday, December 22nd, 1978, the date of the winter solstice. The title refers to the fact that many older, lunar-based calendars consider the solstice the midpoint of the season rather than the beginning, which is the designation of the astronomical calendar we use today. 

Midwinter Day is a 100-ish page poem about the day in the life of a young family (Mayer, her husband, and their two children) living in Lenox, Massachusetts. Largely free verse, this poem is highly allusive, contains numerous lists, and frequently incorporates poetic devices such as rhyme. In Midwinter Day, poetry is not separate from parenthood and grocery shopping; it’s intertwined. There is no distinction between art and the rest of life; they are one and the same. 

Since first reading this poem in 2015, I wanted to create some sort of homage to it. But my attempts to truly imitate Bernadette Mayer fell flat, and didn’t feel true to the way I like to approach my own poetry. Once I went deeper into studying haiku and learned about the various forms of linked verse, I began experimenting with a linked form that I wrote solo throughout the day. But while you can certainly write a renku or other linked form alone, I found I didn’t really enjoy that. I wanted to collaborate. Midwinter Day might have been written by a sole author, and yet she is anything but alone. 

After a couple of years of noodling around ideas, I finally settled on a shorter version of the renku. I wrote the first one with my friend Claire, a poetry friend from my Austin days. Last year, I tried with a larger group: six people in three time zones emailing back and forth. Tomorrow, I will write the third-ever Midwinter Day renku with my friend Dan, who lives in another country. It’s the first international Midwinter Day renku! I’ve kept it just the two of us because juggling such disparate time zones is going to be a bit of a challenge, and I decided a smaller size would help navigate that. 

This approach to the form is still a work in progress. Not only do I keep learning more about renku, but I keep wanting to adjust the specifics of the structure itself.

Allyson Whipple, Midwinter Day Renku: First Notes on a New Form

Around this time of the year magazines ask contributors for their books of the year. Funnily enough, I am a lot less cynical about these than I used to be. But they are undeniably strange, in a way that should be familiar to anyone involved in publishing: you have to sign up to the fiction that the only books worth talking about were published in the last twelve months, when of course there’s no straight line between the year a book was published in and its relevance, let alone its quality. Many old books are painfully current. Plenty of new ones are out of date. […]

Winter Recipes from the Collective, Louise Glück (2021)

The first of Glück’s collections I’ve read, though I knew individual poems. Also her last book. So, I’m no expert and the Nobel Prize win probably speaks for itself. I will just say that the way her poems climb down the page is uncanny. And they are testimony to just how hard – in every sense – so-called free verse and so called-confessional poetry is, or ought to be. This is the beginning of “Night Thoughts”:

Long ago I was born. There’s no one alive anymore who remembers me as a baby. Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever. What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot. What harm could there be in that?…

Jem Wikeley, Books of the year

[I]t’s awards season in the literary community. Social Media is awash with announcements, congratulations, and virtual high-fives, as it should be. But I’d like to give a shout-out to writers who have never had a nomination for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Wigleaf Top 50, Best of the Net, Best American Essay, or any of the other awards that I’m not aware of.

There are lots of writers who aren’t on social media and don’t have the exposure others enjoy because, life. Writers who are writing on their lunch breaks, in rush-hour traffic, after putting the kids to bed at night, before the kids get up in the morning, on bits of napkin, on back of grocery lists and bill envelopes, on post-it notes, or maybe only in their heads for now. There are writers writing in liminal spaces as noted in Amy Barnes’ insightful craft essay in Reckon Review.

Lots of writers aren’t in academia, don’t have degrees in anything or maybe in fields like healthcare support or general business, who went to a technical community college instead of an Ivy League university. There are writers who don’t belong to writing groups or attend workshops, who believe in the stories they create in their own heads. There are writers who are published sparingly because the submitting process takes time they don’t have or cost money they can’t give. There are writers who aren’t aware, or maybe only peripherally aware, of literary awards. The first time I was nominated, back in the day, I had to Google the Pushcart Prize. I’d never heard of it.

I want to celebrate the writers whose own life stories, and their made-up ones too, beat anything written by a Booker Prize winner. Keep writing, keep living, hang in there. You are seen. You have people who are like you that read your work and think you are the bomb. Believe it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Reading & Writing a Strong Sense of Place

This year I’ve written 7 poems (none of them very good), 4 stories (2 ok), and 15 Flashes (some of them ok. Maybe 2 good). I’ve radically revamped 4 old stories – by merging 2 of them I think I’ve produced 1 printable piece.

I’ve had a dozen or so acceptances, mostly of old (sometimes very old) stuff.

Because I was long-listed in their competition, I got a story in the Leicester Writes anthology. And Full House nominated a Flash of mine for Best MicroFiction 2025.

And that’s about it. I sent 2 booklets off (one poetry, one prose) which got nowhere. This time last year I promised myself that I’d write some proper reviews. I haven’t, though I’ve read (or listened to) about 200 books. 

Tim Love, My Writing Year (2024)

I have to admit that this was a tough year for me. Is it because of my age? Is this a peri-menopause thing? A mid-life crisis? The election nearly wrung all my positive energy out of me. My last book’s sales were respectable but not great (not as good as my previous book’s), and my rejection vs acceptance rate was mediocre at best. I worked hard but felt a bit like I was butting up against a wall in the literary world. I am lucky to have wonderful writer friends but I’m missing the spark that usually drives me to write. Not sure if it’s plain disappointment or disillusionment or what, exactly. The grungy weather is bothering me a little bit more than normal, and my MS flared up worse this fall than it has in a long time—not sure of the cause, which left me unable to do much besides listen to audiobooks and watch old movies on TCM.

So, what do you do? Well, two good, very healthy friends—one died suddenly, the other experiencing a “surprise” terminal illness—have taught me a hard lesson. Maybe we should be kinder to ourselves, appreciating the days that we do have, and maybe not being so judgy about what we are accomplishing and focusing more and how much we are enjoying what we have, and experiencing things like “joy” and “awe”—things we often don’t put a priority on in our culture of productivity everywhere, all the time. While I am being scanned for tumors and tested for cancer and autoimmune problems, when I am dealing with yet another crown or root canal—I have to remember to prioritize the good days and take advantage of them. I have maybe, in the last four years, lived a too-circumscribed life, too safe? Certainly, too much damn time in doctor’s and dentist’s offices. Have I not been allowing myself enough adventure? Maybe that should be my goal for 2025—to live a more adventurous, joyful life—to maybe take a few risks in the days I have, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! Trumpeter Swans, Revaluating at Midlife after a Tough Year, MRIs, and Ballets

The sky is a persistence of cloud, its low mist erasing trees,
meeting fields, dampening my face, my hair; I feel like
a conduit between two states: earth and water. Perhaps
we always exist in dualities but rarely notice. Perhaps I am
beginning to understand both the beauty and decay
of my wondrous life, the gift and theft of inevitable death.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Superposition

[I]t’s less shocking than it is mesmerizing, even comforting, for me to see this evidence of my own aging, particularly as it means I get to see a little of mom every time I look in the mirror. It’s good to catch this glimpse every day because I need her—maybe actually I am inviting her, calling for her intercession with this very writing—to nudge me along on this book project which has already taken almost a year since I wrote the first unsure words.

I realized the other day that I need to look at it every day. I don’t necessarily need to write every day, but I need to keep it close to me because when I don’t, when I let weeks go by between writing sessions (because it’s painful to write about your mother’s alcoholism and recovery and death), my synapses get sleepy (a trauma response, remember?) and I lose the thread.

It took me 20 years to complete the book about my father. I do not want a reprise of that experience.

So. I hate resolutions, but let me try to keep this one.

Sheila Squillante, On eyeballs and grey hair and outlines

I made a decision at the beginning of last year to submit to publications I regarded as out of reach. Standards are higher, chances of success are lower – yet it’s a strategy that has paid off. Instead of chasing the dopamine hit of publication I’ve focused on becoming better at what I do, and really understanding what it is I want to say. I’m barely halfway to either of these things, but I am ending the year with two small collections of poetry that have a real sense of identity. Both have been longlisted in competitions I barely dared dream of entering and I am proud to have written them. Publication will come – I just need to be patient and diligent in finding the right home. I’ve had individual poems longlisted for publication in Butcher’s Dog, as well has being part of the final issues of Dreich and the fabulous Spelt Magazine. I’m growing braver in terms of style, and content as well as developing an understanding of what matters to me. […]

My morning has been spent looking at goals for next year – I’ve more work to do in terms of the nuts and bolts, but I’ve had a realisation that I need to give myself permission to focus on writing for its own sake, rather than as a potential income stream. My work as a bespoke poet and copywriter will continue, but as far as my creative writing is concerned I need to see the art as valuable for its own sake – which of course means seeing value in myself. I’m determined to connect with the poetry and writing community in a more meaningful way, rather than squirrel myself away in the safety of home. It’s hard to put myself “out there” but I can see how actively supporting others in their work offers a path to growth and nourishment for everyone involved.

I finish the year in a calmer place. I have a greater understanding of what matters to me, how I want to use my writing and where I want to be in this peculiar, terrifying world. I often bewildered and frustrated, and often filled with rage at my lack of confidence. I am proud that I keep going, and proud of how far I’ve come. As my mental health improves, I hope that the barriers I so frequently fashion will become less powerful and that I’ll be able to continue to develop my skills and build on the connections I’ve made.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I’ve learned this year

知らぬ間に冬の金魚となりにけり           遠藤容代

shiranu ma ni fuyu no kingyo to narinikeri

            without knowing how

            I become

            a winter goldfish     

                                                            Noriyo Endo 

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 21, 2024)

This morning I stepped out of my little house in my little village on a day of low cloud and thick mist to head down to the river Hertford. It was the first time I’d been for a walk since before Christmas and I was ready for it. I was looking for fieldfares, which I found, along with a white egret moving through the grey like an omen, and the creak and tick of water dropping through the bare, wet branches of the beech trees. The air was full of the calls of crows, the rattle and croak made more gothic than usual by a mist that sucked the light but leant all sounds a crystallised ring. Through the village I went and out along the farm tracks, passing people from the village; dog walkers, bird watchers, who passed the time with me, telling me about what they had and hadn’t seen – owls in Parish woods, a swell of a storm on the brigg, less roe deer this year, but a fox like an burning ember in the top field and always, always the otter sightings for the luckiest, luckiest few. I have never seen the otters. Though I look or signs and sounds of them, not a single sighting. Maybe they are a village myth.

Out and along the farm track where the land opens up, where the turbine sliced steadily away at the low cloud, and down to the Hertford, straight and low in its man-made state, flowing away from the sea in its strange manner, the sound of water over pebbles bright and hard in the gloom. I stood on the bridge and looked down its length and imagined I could see all the way down to Folkton, Flixton, down past the paleolithic islands of the long blade people to the Mesolithic site of Star Carr and my lake-people ancestors. The cloud was too low today to see any of it, or the mound of Seamer Beacon, or even the lip of the valley, Folkton moor over the rise, the site of the Folkton drums only visible in my mind’s eye.

Here I am, I thought, at the edge of the lake again, paleolake Flixton, The Ghost Lake of my book, my landscape-nature memoir which defined 2024 for me, the year it was published. I have washed up at the end of 2024 satisfied, happy, rolling dazedly to a stop here with the publication of my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, a kind of sister project to The Ghost Lake.

This is like the ancient custom of beating the bounds, of returning and marking your land, the boundaries of your community by beating on the boundary stones, as if waking up the spirit of a place and attaching yourself to it. Though, obviously, without smashing small boys about. I have this in my head as I tap my gloved hand along the metal of the bridge. 

Wendy Pratt, Beating the Boundaries

After ten years of sharing poetry on WordPress, it feels like it has lost its raison d’être. Maybe I, maybe poetry, maybe the passion, maybe that ecosystem — something, some things, all things – have crashed into a wall.

Not that there aren’t still things to say. Maybe just not there. Not that there aren’t any more poems. Though I don’t really know what or where.

But it is a new year. Or it will soon be. Just like this year was new, once.

I think of Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote so evocatively in ‘Burning the old Year’:

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

And even if there are solid keepsakes, events that will crystallize into memories, some even fragrant or warm – like Kobayashi Issa says:

New Year’s Day—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

How does one look back at a year? Never mind the sun, the silhouettes tell a different story. Different stories. The sky rips open. Moonlight bleeds like a wound all night. And the poet picks at scabs. It is their job. Sometimes it is poetry that is contrary, sometimes it is life. Sometimes, it is the poet.

It is cold and grey today and the drizzle is a fine mist. The impending year has brought me to this poem. Cold and grey and wet. Beyond this lies 2025.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, One for the road

This week: Amanda Gorman’s hollow place, a zone of ambiguous meaning, the next life like a footfall in the heart, a day without birdsong, the music of ghosts, and more. Enjoy!

My best poem of last summer…a winsome stranger.
When then friends asked about a line, I confided 

its secret.  I was so tuned.  Now Greece is far away,
another September song come. I lean in.  

As I stand by the window slicing tomatoes and bread, 
the inside of the chant gives….   

No shade between us then.  Pure radiance.  
Voicing summer’s depth. To carry into go-go fall.

Jill Pearlman, Inside the Summer Chant

I have made it through the Sealey Challenge, through 32 total books and out the other side of August (34 if you count Ravenna Press’s Triple as 3 chapbooks). I posted a photograph on Instagram of each cover with the day’s number, with the exception of this book. (For day 13, I posted another cover a second time.)

Let us admit that I got a bit lost at times. What book did I read yesterday? What book am I reading today? But, as these things go, each day brought stand-out poems, and — by the end — certain books loomed. Not necessarily that they were better or worse than others, but their impact on me, at the particular time (and mood) I found myself in, created a greater impact.

A literature professor once said to me, and to her class of graduate students. “I know it’s a lot of reading, but when the wave recedes I hope you’ll be able to tell what flecks of foam have stuck to you and left the greatest impression.” That’s how it feels this morning.

So.

Carol Frost’s Honeycomb (TriQuarterly Books, 2010) was one of those impactful books. The poems in this, her ninth collection, address her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, a journey I’ve also undergone. It’s hard not to quote the description on the cover, because it’s true: she writes “with unflinching sincerity and courage.”

Her mother’s memory loss is only one theme. The other, woven throughout every poem, is the decline in the bee population. Flying insects of all kinds are growing endangered, and the loss of our native pollinators is a disaster that really can’t be countenanced or compensated.

As is the loss of one’s mother. The poems are a perfect marriage of spirit and humanity and nature.

Bethany Reid, HONEYCOMB, poems by Carol Frost

Last week Cane returned to school, and I was reminded that for me, September will likely always be the start of a new year, one of my favorite seasons. I love new beginnings, the return to milder weather, and the lack of formal holidays. It is the time of year I feel most energized and hopeful. For me, it’s a much better time than January for new routines and intentions. I need them this year more than ever, as we’re forging a new normal. It’s the first time since I retired from full-time education work three years ago that we haven’t had one of my children living with us.

As I’ve been pondering what I want to bring in and let go of, two recent reads have been so useful.

Diana Strinati Bauer, in “The beauty that is aging,” suggests that the important question to ask ourselves isn’t how we can somehow hang onto youth (because we can’t) but is instead, “Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” She writes about wanting to be her “best me,” and doesn’t that sound like a great thing for all of us to be?

“Who do I want to be on the day that I die?” doesn’t feel morbid or gloomy to me, but clarifying. The more death becomes a concrete reality than a fuzzy, some-day abstraction, the more purposeful I get about living.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Spring cleaning and new year’s intentions

Lots of poets and literary types have been dismissive on social media about the poem Amanda Gorman wrote for the Democratic National Convention in the States. You can read the text of her poem here (you need to scroll down), but this is a piece of writing designed to be heard, so it’s probably better to watch or listen to her performance of it: [YouTube link]

I didn’t love Gorman’s poem — and I am certainly not its target audience — but I don’t think it’s terrible, and in lots of ways it seemed well suited to its occasion. It certainly seems silly to suggest that it’s not a poem at all (as some people have). It’s no more clichéd than a lot of published poems I see in top journals and winning prizes, even if the clichés it is dealing in — and the rhetorical tradition on which it draws — are quite different. This made me wonder what was so alienating or annoying about Gorman’s piece for many discerning readers of poetry, including many who are vastly more tolerant than me of the sort of prosy-introspection-with-a-couple-of-OK-metaphors that often passes for a prize-winning contemporary poem?

Victoria Moul, Amanda Gorman’s hollow place and the Carmen Saeculare

The marvelous chutzpah of Le Guin, to finish her career by writing a novel celebrating piety for an audience teeming with libertarian tech bros and lefty utopians! My delight in Lavinia grows and grows.

And having just got as far as Book VII in rereading the Aeneid, I’m staggered by a) how faithful she is to Virgil and b) how faithful she is to Ursula Le Guin. Her conversation with Virgil is a conversation between equals. 

The model of the book, maybe, is the intimate conversations in the sacred grove between Lavinia and the sending of Virgil: a girl speaking on equal terms with the incarnate Western Tradition. Just a conversation, between a girl and a dying poet. 

Le Guin is aware, no one better, that he is dying, and that we need to bring his lares and penates to a new shore.

“But what is piety?” asked Aeneas.
That brought a thoughtful silence.

Dale Favier, But What Is Piety?

I don’t have as much time for writing this morning–I spent some of my writing time making a peach chutney for dinner tonight.  I am remembering the first time I made a chutney–there was a recipe for a complete Indian meal in Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest Cookbook, and I tried the whole thing.  It was a revelation, the way different flavors combined in a way I had never tasted and would never have thought to put together.  It was long ago, and we didn’t have Indian restaurants in Knoxville, Tennessee where I lived.  The most exotic food we had was Chinese, and it wasn’t exactly authentic.

This morning’s chutney making has led to an interesting poem that I’m in the process of writing:  peaches that cling, a woman who has dropped her youngest off at college, the passing of the seasons, the growing up of children.  It may be done, but there may be more, so I’ll let it rest and see.

I am amazed:  two solid poem ideas in two days.  I have spent much of the summer wondering if I can even call myself a poet anymore.  I have written down a line or two each week, but that hardly makes me a poet.

Let me lace up my walking shoes and let this poem continue to percolate.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Peach Chutney and Poems

Listening to a Giles Peterson podcast the other day I was catapaulted back to a night  upstairs in a London pub listening to saxophonist Lol Coxhill and poet Bob Cobbing. I didn’t know anything about either of them, although I’d heard Cobbing’s name from a lecturer on my degree course. But the point of this is that Peterson’s podcast and the experimental jazz he was playing could have been from the early 1980s. Except we didn’t have podcasts. We went to the pub. I’d been going to the pub to hear music in fact since I was 14. It was allowed in those days. I started with a folk club in Crondall, where I also saw Alexis Korner. 

I couldn’t tell you the name of either pub but those gigs of Coxhill, Cobbing and Korner have stuck in my mind for decades. Experimental jazz takes listening and concentration. As does sound poetry like Cobbing did. And I was led to Peterson because I’d been listening to an improvised session my son did and it was brilliant. 

I’m creating very little right now. The demands of caring overtake everything. I earmark pockets of time when I might squeeze out a poem. I compensate with time travel. And a reminder to be open to the new, which may not actually be that new, but is experiment, improvisation and keeping going. Which is what I witnessed in that upstairs room. An absolute belief in just getting on with it. 

Jackie Wills, The mirror of the present and getting on with it

My thesis is this: there is value in broadening how you define your craft. Every new genre or form can school us in what we see as our “true” calling, and enrich it. When I joined my MA program for Creative Writing, I was a staunch anti-poet. Couldn’t see the point in it; all that spare, high-minded opacity. I was a Short Story Writer dammit, could spare no time for stanzas. But I needed to complete the poetry semester to pass. Spoiler alert, I now adore the form. It’s taught me to be brutal with word choice and concrete imagery, hammered home the value of understatement. Reading about William Carlos Williams’ “plums that were in the icebox […] / so sweet and so cold” was a revelation. Here was a rich tableaux of yearning and place, short as a tweet but achingly powerful.

In the job market there’s a phrase beloved by suits: transferable skills. It applies to the arts too. The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became. I have since written 200 poems, whole megabytes of them complete garbage fires, but each one a stepping stone. For better or worse, poems come quickly to me, which means I can look back at things penned just months ago and say, I am better now.

The better I got at poetry, the more vivid my stories and essays became.

Daniel Seifert, Swim Another Lane: Why You Should Write Outside Your Comfort Zone

Nothing is as relaxing as sustained concentration. Work is its own company. Unlike face to face conversations where responses are interpreted, weighed, collated and applied to new information, in poetry, reading or writing, you can just be while the poetry is. It’s like covert mind-melding. Intimate yet clinical or casual. Did I mention freeing?

Every book has a bit of that feeling of meeting in the equalizing blank face of font. Sure, typography is a clue, justification gives a read or cover aesthetic, paper weights, thickness, margins, gloss, sentence shapes, but largely it’s plugging into a brain through text. That’s freeing. That decluttering of identity to what is typed, that reach past circumstances of geography. That invisibility of reception so you can take your time absorbing, rereading, reflecting. It’s cut off from some of the complexity.

We can live in the time-sensitive, instant everything. You can research every node, build context from each thing mentioned into tangents to extract meaning. It can be a slow delve or intense as you want. Like people you meet once or twice a year for decades, building a picture in time lapse. And you can just not respond. Take it in, tuck it away or discard it. It can exist in a zone of ambiguous meaning, simultaneously in parallel mutually cancelling categories without being called out for not judging decisively in adjectives.

Pearl Pirie, Community

Drumroll, please…after four finalist nods, one runner-up designation, and many rejections, my manuscript Unrivered was accepted at Sundress Publications for a late 2025 release! This one is important to me. Stay tuned for lots of information as we roll things out. We are currently beginning the editorial process and I’m dreaming big for sharing this book—my last collection came out during lockdown, and I’m ready to support this one as well as I can.

What did I learn from this? To persevere if I believe the work is worth sharing. To not give up on myself, even in a publishing landscape that is PACKED with writers who all believe just as firmly in their work. To celebrate my successes. To keep going.

Donna Vorreyer, It’s Been A Summer

This was a magic night. I’m so happy it was captured, recorded and broadcast on the BBC this weekend. Tune in on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds to hear this wonderful and uplifting poetry gig.

I performed some pieces I haven’t performed before: two ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ poems, a rousing version of ‘Tell Good People Good Things’. Plus the gentle and surreal ‘Umbilical’ and a glorious sharing of ‘My Heart Is A Boat’ with a united and soft singing chorus at the end, singing in solidarity.

I felt very emotional, vulnerable and privileged to share my new work and these particular pieces on this stage and in this space and time. I also think this is the first time that I have had a whole set aired on BBC radio – it isn’t often as a poet you have much time, let alone a whole set, if you listen to this you can really get a sense of the performance energy, the beautiful human connection in the heart of the room. My lovely mum, sister, friends and family are in the audience at The Purcell Room on the Southbank — So I particularly love this gig memory. Thank you to Ian McMillan and Joelle Taylor for the stunning introductions and my fellow star poets Imtiaz Dharker and Rachael Allen, thank you to all the brilliant Verb and Outspoken crew and the generous Southbank audience.

Salena Godden, ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ LIVE on The Adverb at Outspoken

When I could see the publication whirlwind approaching, I was a bit worried I’d go into overdrive and burn myself out, which has, previously, been a way of being in control of the anxiety. It’s taken a while to work out that it is much more beneficial to find moments of existence, of peace and ‘being’ in the whirlwind. It’s those small pools of connecting to the world that really help and allow me to regain my energy levels and be the best I can be.

1. Walking. I’ve made time to walk and made sure that I saw that as equally important to my promotion work around the book. Yesterday I got caught in a light, late summer rain shower and stood under the trees listening to the water running over the leaves. Those ten minutes did so much for my sense of peace and belonging.
2. Reading. Not just stuff that I know I should be reading for events, research etc, but joy reading, comfort reading. Currently I’m re reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. There is something gloriously peaceful and nourishing about stacking yourself up with pillows and sitting on the bed reading while the world turns.
3. Gardening. My garden is out of hand. But just taking a few minutes daily to deadhead the roses, or trim the ivy, this is also a place of peace, of making sure my hands are in the earth, on the green leaves, in direct physical contact with the seasons.

This is success.

Wendy Pratt, How I’m defining success this week

We have salt from sieving sea water
through singed husks, charcoal, and ash.

We have stars because a woman took off
her adornments to pound rice in the mortar.

We have pineapples because a child
couldn’t find anything she was asked to find.

What of the origins of fire or flood, drought or war?
Centuries ago, boats with cannons landed on our shores.

Luisa A. Igloria, Fables

Earlier, I wrote a draft of a general post that encapsulated the past week, but I lost it when blogger glitched out on me before saving. In it, there were awesomely disturbing movies, new tattoos, and the usual ramblings about weather. But I don’t want to write it all out again, so instead I thought I’d write about books and seasons. How mariana feels like the perfect project to be working on now, with all its sea and salt-drenched monsters. How my final edits on ruinporn, which will be coming as soon as September arrives, is a very fall project filled with decay and crumbling houses, just as much as the carnival poems I just finished earlier this month felt very summery and swampy. 

Looking back, the fever almanac, though it was published in the fall was always a summer book, while in the bird museum was very winterish.  girl show and major characters… were definitely summer, but shared properties…was more spring.  salvage, with all its mermaids was summer, while sex & violence and little apocalypse were definitely autumnal. In newer titles I would say dark country, collapsologies, and granata are pure summer, while feed, automagic and animal, vegetable, monster are definitely winter or fall. 

Sometimes it’s about subject matter and imagery (Victorian inspired books def have a colder weather vibe while things like the Persephone book are more sunlit and Mediterranean.) It doesn’t necessarily have to do with when it was written, but I suppose timing also may have some impact, since I tend to like to work on summer-ish projects during warm weather months.  This fall, I have plans for a couple things that may be winterish in nature, so will probably wait til November to start them. 

Kristy Bowen, books and seasons

The last few years have led to a substantial backlog of poems and manuscripts for me, and I’ve wondered about the best way to handle these. While I’ve released my work through Dead Mall Press in the past, I’ve decided that further cluttering up the catalogue with the editor’s books would do a disservice to the other writers published there. After some reflection, I’ve decided to launch a new “Bookstore” feature here on the blog. There, you’ll see approx. half a dozen chapbooks of my own appear for sale across the next several months (unless I lose my mind in the process). All books will be $10 flat, shipping included. And if you pledge a paid subscription, the books will be heavily discounted (you’ll just pay a portion of the shipping).

RM Haines, A Dark Address (Redux)

Just like chess, sports and the arts can become our refuge from reality too. When we ware caught up with the Olympics spectacle, we could stop watching the massacres in Gaza and Sudan. The inclusion of Myanmar in the Games normalized junta rule in that country. Sporting rivalry could potentially defuse political and military conflict—fight on the soccer field, not on the battlefield—but it doesn’t.

Poetry, which is the form of art I know best, could be deployed to socio-political ends, and it is. Our press Gaudy Boy has published some of the best political poetry in Jeddie Sophronius’ Interrogation Records, Jhani Randhawa’s Time Regime, and Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left By a Snail Overnight. But as a practitioner of the dark art myself, I know intimately that writing about the thing is not the thing itself. When writing, I’m paying attention to, and enjoying, the sound and shape of words. I’m undisturbed at home, and not out on the streets, protesting. 

The best political poetry, I think, betrays this guilty consciousness. Like all poetry, it is double-minded. It is an existential lesson underlined by Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. The novel never gives us the actual chess defensive strategy, and Luzhin finds it in the end only by—. You will have to read the book to find out.

Jee Leong Koh, The Luzhin Defense

John Burnside’s swansong Ruin, Blossom was too full of Catholic theology for my taste, but did also include some memorable poems, chief among them ‘The Night Ferry’, which reads now like a death poem, in the Japanese tradition, with this ending:

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to bow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

The repetition of ‘done’ and the mention of ‘the compass’ in the same breath must be a nod to Donne’s great poem ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’.

Matthew Paul, July–August reading

But There’s So Much DIY to IVF That We Can’t Be Sure by Toby Goostree
This collection of poems is an up-close look at what it is like going through IVF to conceive a child. Many of the poems directly connect Old Testament characters with the writer and his wife’s personal journey through IVF (one of my favorites was “Moses,” which you can hear the author read aloud on his website). Another of my favorites was “The Blessing,” which recounts in brief the story of Jacob wrestling, connecting it to how one may wrestle through prayer, and ending on the question “Why did we close our eyes if / not to be vulnerable?”. I’m going to be honest, sometimes the poems told me MORE than I wanted to know about IVF, but, as someone who has read Sharon Olds, nothing shocks me anymore.

Renee Emerson, Who Eats What?, the Borrowers, Works of Mercy & more

“Ox and Mandarin | Wayfaring Strangers” is subtitled “A Counterfeit Zodiac” and uses two characters, Ox and Mandarin (and here the latter is the fruit, not the language or bureaucrat) […] The poems follow a reliable, hard-working character and his opposite, a story-teller, go-with-the-flow ball of sunshine. The poems meander across the page as both try to find their way through life, dancing around each other, circling but not quite meeting, leaving plenty of space for readers to complete the blanks.

Emma Lee, “Ox and Mandarin | Wayfaring Strangers” Milla van der Have (Hareific) – book review

Clare Goulet has apparently written a whole volume of poems devoted to lichen. I love this. I’ve ordered the book on the strength of encountering this lovely poem. It’s not grand in its ambitions, rather it gives an ear to the ear-like “elf-ear” lichen to hear what it’s hearing down there on the wood shelf.

I’ve been charging around mumbling about the meaning of life of late, wandering the roads of my rooms and neighborhood blind to my step. I’ve stopped short of flinging my arms about, but only just. Thanks heavens I was stopped in my tracks, however briefly, by the moment held in this poem.

The poem reads nicely in the mouth — full of r’s and hard and soft ch’s with some flicks of k. Read it aloud yourself, you’ll see. The poem asks us to slow the hell down, to look down, to crouch down, take a breath, give an eye, lend an ear. Wondrous things are everywhere around us.

Marilyn McCabe, You must reshape yourself

The latest from San Diego poet Rae Armantrout [see my review of her prior collection here] is Go Figure (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), adding a further heft to an already heft of multiple award-winning poetry collections going back decades. There is something intriguing about how the poems in Go Figure cluster, offering Armantrout as less a poet of single, self-contained poems than sequences of gestural sweeps that cohere into this meditative book-length suite, threading through numerous ebbs and flows as she goes. Her poems interact with each other, including poems that end sans punctuation, suggesting a kind of ongoingness, beyond the scope of the single page. As the opening of the poem “SHRINK WRAP” reads: “An idea is / an arrangement // of pictures / of things // shrunken / to fit // in the brain / of a human.” Armantrout’s poems are constructed through extended lines of precise, abstract thinking, providing specifics that accumulate into something far larger, and far more coherent, than the sum of their parts. Armantrout’s poems throughout Go Figure offer points on a grid progressing a single extended sequence of thought, as the author addresses culture, climate and financial crises, as well as echoes and influence from her grandchildren. At the core, Armantrout’s poems articulate how our experiences are held by and solidified through words, the very foundation of language that allow shape and coherence, meaning and context to those very same experiences. As the poem “DOTS” opens:

Poems elongate moments.

“My pee is hot,” she said,
dreamily, mildly
surprised

There is something, too, about the openness of her lyric: if you haven’t read Armantrout’s work before, one might say that any book of hers might be a good place to start, but I’ll say this: if you haven’t read her work before, Go Figure is a good place to start.

rob mclennan, Rae Armantrout, Go Figure

For the last week I’ve been away in Scotland with my husband and daughter – it has been a week filled with rain and un-forecast sunshine, and lots of driving on narrow roads that wind along the side of lochs and past mountains with tops covered in mist and green everywhere – thick vegetation and ancient woodland.

We’ve been staying in a house in the Highlands, courtesy of a friend. I was very excited to find a copy of My Name is Abilene (Salt, 2023) by Elisabeth Sennit Clough, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. I met Elisabeth on a residential voice coaching course that Ledbury Poetry Festival ran – this was many years ago. More recently, I saw her from afar reading from the collection at the Forward Prizes, as the collection was shortlisted for Best Collection last year.

On the back of the book, John Greening says that the collection is ‘almost a verse novel’ and I agree with this – both because of it’s page-turning qualities – I read it all in one go, cover to cover as if I was reading a novel, but also because of the way Elisabeth uses characters to hold what is a fragmented narrative together.

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. poem by Elisabeth Sennit Clough

We went to see the Grit Orchestra this week and they played a piece called Karabach. It came out of Martyn Bennett’s experience working in refugee camps in Armenia, and before the orchestra played, they ran the actual recording which inspired the piece. A little girl is singing to herself, very beautifully, very unselfconsciously, while in the background you can hear the sound of bombs falling continuously in the distance.

This recording is not just poignant and moving. It doesn’t just inspire outrage that we can do this to people. There is no moral to be drawn about resistance to evil, or the beauty of the human spirit. It simply tells us that art is survival. We don’t just need it, it isn’t just therapy – though it can be therapeutic and consoling and inspiring, of course. It is simply the expression of who we are. Creativity cannot be regarded as a luxury to be indulged in when the real important stuff is done. Once human beings are physically safe, creativity – music, stories, visual arts, drama – is their next most vital need. It’s how we build community. It’s how we access spirituality. The self-righteous who complain about unemployed people having television, refugees going to poetry classes, the provision of music classes rather than job ready training see other people as less than human.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Between the Human Places

Where the tenth elegy ends, another
grief begins. How many times, have we,
unknowing, cried out to Rilke’s angel? How
many times has she called but we have
not heard? Have not understood? What
if that epiphany in which the visible
universe unscrambles into meaning,
never comes […]

Rajani Radhakrishnan, After the elegies

My family is in the thick of carline mornings, both parents working, cusp of fall. I find myself so grateful for the access to books, texts, reading recommendations—especially digital and audio, especially via library apps like Libby. I’m always listening to a novel on audiobook, now (Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie at the moment, Piranesi by Susannah Clarke and Witch King by Martha Wells before that, and all The Murderbot Diaries this summer!), and podcasts accompany me when I walk or do the dishes, laundry. I love reading something just before bed—James Tate, lately (highly recommend his Selected Poems), but that quiet time solely with a book is rather rare. Of course there’s the kind of neurodivergent attention which does WELL doing multiple things (hello folks who knit and sew during tv, lectures, audiobooking), so I’m happy to accommodate my busy life with audio.

Although my job right now is writing faculty tutor at Wake Tech Community College here in North Carolina, I have a kind and supportive boss who secured grant money for me to lead a (free for students!) Friday creative writing workshop, and that begins today. I’m really grateful for this—the job, the workshop. Community-making. Academia is a mess right now, and it’s hard inside and outside traditional professor jobs. I think I’m—well, really happy working at Wake, and having time for Of Poetry Podcast (Fall guests & episodes include Sebastian Paramo, Nicholas Molbert, Molly Peacock and Dana Delibovi, Carolyn Oliver, Abbie Kiefer, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, and Sarah Carey!) and Moist Poetry Journal. We’re just wrapping up our Deep Summer publishing period at Moist, and you should check out these lovely poems, including three new visual poems by poet and collagist Sarah J. Sloat, whose work I love!

Han VanderHart, The When and Where of Reading & Generosity as a Practice

This was my second festival leading the poetry workshops as a disabled artiste. I was lucky to have an accessible venue and a really lovely group of people attending, some of them regulars, others new people. Most attendees returned to all four sessions. Each session comprises a ‘hot penning’ warm up from a prompt line, followed by two detailed exercises, which often include notes and a range of stimuli. Some are especially appropriate to Whitby Folk Week, others more general. We have some silent writing time and some sharing time with feedback. Every year I am impressed by the quality of work produced. Our last session is always one exercise preceded by a hot penning, then the last hour is a readaround where every participant reads two poems (if they wish) and I conclude with a short reading of my own work. This gives a satisfying close to the four sessions. I had some fabulous attendees this year and I hope they will return in future.

Angela Topping, Whitby Folk Week 2024

I’m sharing the following poem because it’s breathtaking. It’s haunting. It’s complex. In the middle of it, “a woman slaughtered for wonder.” So, it’s devastating. I keep hearing the voice in my head, “are we not of interest to each other” from the Elizabeth Alexander poem and yes, this voice in this poem, this writer, yes, you are of interest.

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – When People Say

A Facebook “memory” brought up something that caused me to do a brief life assessment—it was a blog post from about six years ago, when I was 45. The post was angry, frustrated, obviously a person who was struggling with many things in her life. Now six years later, I wonder why I was so angry. Of course, I had had a terminal liver cancer diagnosis the year before, and then an MS diagnosis—two things so devastating, and complicated by the fact that I have friends that still to this day have not called me since those two events (losing friends is tough, but I guess those weren’t real friends, as my mother would have said to me in eighth grade). The terminal diagnosis was wrong, at least a little premature, though I still have a liver full of tumors, and the MS diagnosis was wrenching, though years of physical, vestibular, speech therapies have helped a lot of the symptoms. I was frustrated by what I felt like was a stagnant writing career, full of frustrated ambition. (It could also have been the beginning of perimenopause, often punctuated by mood swings.) One good thing about blogs is that they capture a certain moment in time, in your life. Was I feeling lucky that we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic, that I could go to the movies or dentist relatively freely? No, I was not. Ah, hindsight. […]

At 51, I wish I could tell my previous self about what was to come: the pandemic and all it would change, the fact that I would make new friends (and renew old friendships unexpectedly), that my marriage would improve, that my writing career might not be rocketing towards stardom but feels like enough to me these days. (I did have a book come out to some success, some good reviews, appearances in Poetry Magazine and Poetry Daily that bolstered my confidence, among other things. But also, a shift in mindset about what constitutes “enough” success?) That I would build connections to my community (and a pretty decent garden) during the covid years. That though things aren’t perfect, I no long feel as frustrated in my daily life. My health isn’t perfect, but my dental hygienist commented on how much better I was doing physically than five years ago, which caused me to wonder—what is she noticing that I haven’t about improvements in my overall well-being? I’m no longer in a wheelchair all the time, many of my MS symptoms are less acute, I’ve been getting treatment for more of my weirdo stuff. I lost weight during the last four years and increased my bone density, not usual at 51! I feel grateful for these positive changes, though sometimes they’re so gradual you might not remark on them.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, September Begins: Changing Seasons and Life Assessments, Reunions with Old Friends, and Back to Work

Today, August 29, is the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the New Orleans levee system. It’s an event that residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf coast who experienced it will never forget. There have been essays, memoirs, books, songs, and all kinds of art made from this disaster. Today I’m sharing an essay I wrote that was published in Atticus Review in 2021. There are many more eloquent accounts than this but this is my story.

[…]

Days passed. The whine of patrolling helicopters and the growl of chainsaws were our only company. Have you ever experienced a day without birdsong? There were no birds. Or traffic noise? There were no buses, no moms driving kids to school, no one going to work. Or a city in total darkness at night? There were no streetlights. All but two homes on our block sat as empty as a politician’s promise. We were under curfew, but it didn’t matter. There was no place to go.

So, I blogged. I coped by writing about beauty, wonder, love—while bubbled in a suspended life. I researched and wrote about local history, about space and astronomy. Armchair visited other countries and cultures. I discovered other local bloggers who were sharing disaster relief information, dispelling wild myths circulating about what was happening, and raining hell on people saying New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt. These bloggers were the first writers—grassroots writers—I came to know in real life.

They wrote about the strange lives we were living, the collapse of the city infrastructure, the incompetent response of the government. They wrote about the growing piles of garbage, the stink, the coffin flies, nails in your tires, how to clean out rotting food from freezers and refrigerators or how to duct-tape them closed and haul them to the curb. They wrote about dozens of fires from leaking gas lines, the heroics of the NOFD who worked beyond exhaustion. They wrote about rich men planning to move our beloved football team to another city. They wrote about the lack of healthcare and the growing number of suicides and deaths by stress and grief. They tried to hold insurance companies and politicians accountable, swapped info about blue tarps, Red Cross stations, food lines, medication shortages. They gave me something to hold on to and kept me company in that long dark autumn. Despite the tragedy that spawned this network of bloggers, it was a golden era in the New Orleans online writing community.

*

Dreams can be warnings but also opportunities. Someone dreamed of an invisible superhighway, accessible to all, connecting all, creating community across time and space. In that way, the Internet is like a dream we are all having, a déjà rêvé of time and space and memory.

Charlotte Hamrick, DÉJÀ RÊVÉ IN THE GULF

earlier this year
there was a small earthquake
& books fell from all the shelves
in my house. you called me after
& said, “are you still alive?” you had been
in the woods & felt the ground tremble.
there are these little moments that
teach us urgency.

Robin Gow, instructions on finding a place to scream &/or being a sibling

Now that school’s back in—first year of middle school for my son, sophomore year of high school for my daughter—I have my days to myself again. I’m deep into a new writing project, which means some mornings I sit down with my laptop and then look up to realize it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, I forgot to eat lunch, and the kids will be out of school in an hour. I love that sense of flow, when you’re really in it. […]

I do want to heartily recommend Susan Rich’s latest book of poems, Blue Atlas. If you know her work, you’re one of the lucky ones—and if you don’t, you’re about to become one of the lucky ones. The opening poem, “This Could Happen,” is the perfect invitation, pulling the reader inside.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

It has been one year since I started this blog and my new relationship with Mondays. This time a year ago I decided to start a blog as a way of documenting my year and holding myself accountable whilst I started a new journey in life. I had handed back the keys to the primary school I had been head of for seventeen years, and I wasn’t buying new shoes for a new term or planning my first assembly of the school year. I decided to see what the air smelt like each Monday morning as each new week began.

I see now why I focus on providing time for people to ‘think, breathe and be’ when I work as a coach. I definitely needed time for those three things at that period of immense change. This is wonderfully illustrated by the fact that when I started this blog I didn’t immediately record it as a podcast. This came a few weeks later when I had begun to land in my new space and find the voice that went with it.

The title of the podcast, ‘Singing as the Darkness Lifts’, comes from my love of and gratitude for three things:

• the sound of birds welcoming the dawn,
• the feeling of darkness lifting,
• the moments of joy that make my heart sing

Start and keep going. That’s been a useful motto for me. I know that small things repeated will make a difference and I know that it is better to get started than wait to be fully ready. I think it would have taken me a very long time to feel fully ready for blogging or podcasting. In fact there is a distinct possibility that neither would have happened if I had waited for that kind of feeling. And, I knew that at the very least I would have a pretty impressive diary for my year even if nothing else came from putting my words into the world.

Sue Finch, A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH MONDAYS

This morning, waiting for the dog to do his thing in the front yard, I saw a bee and two species of wasps hovering over the goldfinger blossoms. I realise how much I have changed in a year. In little ways like this. I’m calmer now when I meet them. […]

Earlier this week a woman struck up a conversation, telling me about how important it is for us to take care of nature. When I told her that I was currently learning a lot about wasps for a book I am working on, and that I had a new appreciation for them, she told me that they need to be eradicated from the suburbs where people live because they were too dangerous. I started to counter but stopped. I stopped because only the night before, I’d seen a theater production where the monologist talked about nature. Nature as a balm for all the stress we have in our lives. You know the trope: clouds, flowers, the sound of winds in the trees. That kind of nature. The kind of idealised version of things worth protecting because it is useful to us. Nature as kitsch. The idea of nature.

I’ve learned that there is a time and a place for real discussions, and it was not the time nor the place to try to scratch into something covered with so much varnish. Let her save the nature she holds at arm’s-length.

That matters, too.

During the 1800s, the Romantics created present nostalgia, with their soft monsters, and softer comforts. Ibsen went from Peer Gynt to Ghosts, riding the pendulum of contemporary art we saw in the 1900s. Naturalism: Antoine projected films of maggots in rotting meat onto bodies on the stage in order to “get real”. But it was the idea of real.

This week I’ve been thinking about “getting real” and what that means in art. Is it even something to aspire to? Anything filmed, photographed, staged, framed, is removed from what is real. Denis Dutton argued that this kind of special focus is what defines art as discrete from real life.

A wasp pinned on a specimen board is not—not really—a wasp anymore. Neither is a single memory, a real life.

At this point, I’m finding this thought freeing.

Ren Powell, The Illusion of Real

I belong nowhere.
Not in a fierce wind.
Nor in a month’s rain
in one dark day.

The music of ghosts,
their laughter,
the impression left
on the shroud.

Bob Mee, SMALL POEMS IN AUGUST

天高くなんにもなく青く　山本素竹　

ten takaku nannimo naku aoku

            high autumn sky

            nothing there

            and blue

                                                Sochiku Yamamoto

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 27, 2024)

This week: an orchestra of inflammation, a library of lost chapbooks, words written in eyeliner on a band aid wrapper, and a complicated kind of joy… among many other things. Enjoy!

We heal in small ways. Bread, milk, and honey. Kindness. And through the magical science of blood clotting around the break, its meshwork of proteins plugging the gap, the immune system’s orchestra of inflammation, stem cells migrating from tissue, bone marrow and blood to form cartilage, more bone.

We are our own small miracles. We remake ourselves over and over. Tell me now of your own renewal. How you rose again from pain, loss or grief.

dislocation/fracture
we are so much more 
than the bones of ourselves

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Remade

As a teacher, I am more concerned with my students’ process of exploring poems than I am in any final analysis paper or final product. I do not teach this poem or that poem. Doing so is a surefire way to kill students’ love of poems, resulting in students thinking they just need to create some “BS” that sounds “deep” to try to impress me or to succeed on some highfalutin, raised pinky explication or literary analysis paper. Well, that’s not my concern. What impresses me is when a student notices all of what is literally there in a poem and making their own connections about what they notice. The exploration of what’s literally present in the poem and all of those nuances allow for connections to be made across “noticings”. Those connections result in observations and idea-making. It does not need to happen in the artifact of an analytical paper (it could, but it’s not necessary for me to see students’ engagement, understanding, and ideating). I’d much rather students share what they notice in a Socratic Seminar or even a less formal dialogue.

Scot Slaby, Exploring Poetry: 5 Strategies & Best Practices for Teachers & Students

I write this today to celebrate digital chapbooks and little self-published collections. Stuff that doesn’t make it to Amazon or the corner bookstore. Stuff that has no Goodreads review or ISBN number. May they all reach many, many hands. May they all be passed from reader to reader. May they all rest, worn and creased and loved, along with precious others. May they be read. A little. […]

Should there be a library of lost chapbooks? Should anyone care? Should they die like they were born, quietly, wearing their Adobe best, in the archive of a blog or a social media post?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, For what? For whom?

In Paper Doll, this notion of self is developed further. This time the focus is on the separation between the public and private selves. The public self’s function is to protect. It ‘kept us alive,/ deflected blows,//absorbed each wound.’ Whilst the public self is portrayed here as singular, the private self is referred to as ‘us’,  as a multiplicity of selves, portrayed later in the poem as a ‘chain of paper dolls’. This image is powerful and telling, for like a cut out paper doll, these selves are featureless, indistinguishable from each other with ‘featureless hands’. The poem ends with the symbol of a paper doll’s hands ‘reaching for the air’ in help, or possibly in desperation: a sign, perhaps, of the narrator’s inability to locate her true self, if such a thing exists.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Company of Ghosts’ by Lucy Dixcart

My poet friend
messages me to say we are or should be
writing just for the sheer joy of creation
and being in conversation with the dead—
I agree one hundred percent. In that the world
constantly, intensely, makes us aware of our
own mortality, I guess you could say we are also
always in conversation with ourselves.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Eternal Recurrence

When I’m commenting about poems I try to be aware of some of my prejudices –

• I fall for poems about unwanted childlessness and dying children.
• I like new metaphors (though I take marks off for ones I’ve heard before).
• I admire technical mastery (e.g. a sestina that works!).
• I like poems that seem to be about one thing until the last line.
• I’m suspicious of “simple but strong” poems.
• I distrust poems that look too much like confessions or therapy.
• Poems like “The Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin trouble me too. It’s prose until the killer final line. Should a single line be sufficient to win a prize? If it’s memorable enough, perhaps it should.

I try to compensate for these idiosyncrasies. But what about the ones I’m unaware of?

Tim Love, Impartiality

I don’t submit to as many literary journals as I once did, and I have a variety of reasons for that state of affairs.  The main one is that it costs so much more than it once did to submit.  I know that journals will tell us that they aren’t charging much more than the cost of postage, printer ink, and paper, but I can do math, and that’s just not true.  They charge 3-5 times more than the cost of postage.  

And yes, I could afford a year’s worth of fees, but do I want to spend my money that way?  Just on the slim chance that a poem will appear in a journal?  If my goal is to have readers, I’d have more people see my poem if I published it on Facebook or on this blog.  If my goal is to have my poems in a form where future generations might see it, I might be better off taking all those fees and self-publishing in book form, and then sending that book to as many libraries as possible. […]

One thing that’s strange about me is that I like the process of submitting.  I like going through my poems and putting together a packet of poems that speak to each other.  I like remembering the poems I’ve written and thinking about them as a larger way.

Still, I submit occasionally, especially when it’s free, and I’ve gotten encouragement in the past.  This morning, I submitted a packet of poems to Beloit Poetry Journal.  Long ago, when I was first submitting poems printed on paper and mailed in envelopes, I sent a packet to them, and they published it.  That was in 1997 or so, and I’ve been submitting regularly since with no luck.  But I submit because it makes me happy to remember that long ago acceptance.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, My First Publication

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 have a very dark bent. I see the shadows in everything and in all my work (poetry, short fiction, long-form narrative) I am definitely trying to see into that grey space. What’s in there? How does it affect us? How do we affect it? In terms of technical concerns, I do struggle with the parameters of genre writing, in particular. It is a difficult balance to produce original work that still adheres to the word counts and plot movements that publishers and agents are looking for. Mostly, I want to write what excites me. If I am laughing diabolically at my desk, I feel that is a good sign. […]

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Well, the first piece of advice that I received at large—and actually attempted to follow—was to write daily. You learn so much about your own process, and it’s good to maximize your productivity once you understand what the best writing times are for you … but it’s not always possible. That’s an ideal situation to aspire to.

The best piece of advice I’ve received recently came from the editor of this collection, poet, and novelist Sue Goyette. When we first met virtually, I was nervous about what was expected of me. She said: “Your orders are to prepare to do the work. Get yourself in the right headspace. Spend some time clearing your mind.” I don’t think anybody had ever given me permission to do that before! To just take some walks, dabble in reading, relax, and ponder. Very helpful advice.

And my own advice is: Keep those scraps! Every bit of writing that actually makes it onto paper or into the screen has some value. You wrote it down for a reason! Last Hours was very much conjured from literal scraps of paper, accumulated during a hectic time of raising young children. I tried so hard to “write,” but the time just wasn’t there. Those scraps and fragments ended up holding so much beauty and meaning, and I feel very proud that I fought to get them recorded, whatever way I could—I think there were even some words written in eyeliner on a band aid wrapper!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer May Newhook (rob mclennan)

The thing about attempting to write as beautifully as love, is that one is in the joy zone, in the radiance. One begins to insist, and things happen. Maybe heartstorming is just figuring out new ways for us to be in communication, to generate ideas while insisting on a stance of love, on a stance of the good. I keep writing things in my notebook, like, what are some ways of talking to each other, truly communicating? How to create the conditions where excellence speaks to excellence? What hunger and emptiness can our art fill now? Praise, excess, love, blessings — what happens when we start there?

I also write things down, like: Do not complain; be reverently content; raise a little hell.

I write, in my mad-about-AI moments: Artists will adapt — they always do, always have. Creativity is joyful and tricky and innovative that way!

I tell myself, and I write this again and again, Do not squander and be a good guardian of your gifts. Persistently perceive. I write, you don’t make art so that people will like you, you make art so you can love yourself, and love your life. I write, be a joyful weirdo.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Heartstorm

The creative act is not a party trick, it is a deep seated evolutionary need that, although not everybody can take to professional level, everybody is capable of. I think we lose sight of that, sometimes, in a world utterly swamped with voices, comparison and competition. My courses, my workshops, my methods tend to focus these days on the act of creation itself, as a catalyst, as well as a career. My style is holistic – finding the interconnectedness between the writer and their work. Sometimes that is less obvious than it should be.

Wendy Pratt, Self-Portrait as a Door – a writing prompt based on Donika Ross’s poem

Then bits of language foiled and curled in my mouth – funny what autocorrect does with words. My mouth has a bit of autocorrect in it. Dada, surrealism. Sometimes you get what I mean. When I hear lies, I think I’m on another planet. Those ten insane minutes before everyone in the world slagged off. (We might be ready for the metric system, if we base everything on measures of ten.) Anyway, the car was wrecked. It took the Russians Ten Days in October to change the world. We’ve had future shock; it took me ten minutes.

Jill Pearlman, Sorry I Crashed Your Debatable Car

Human beings are not problems to be managed. The scapegoating of migrants has broad implications. It perpetuates stereotypes, fuels division, and distracts from addressing the systemic issues that contribute to migration flows. It risks normalizing discriminatory attitudes and policies that can have far-reaching consequences for our communities and abroad.

This presidential debate serves as a stark reminder of the power of language and discourse in shaping public opinion and policy. I mean, the word “border” was used a total of 38 times—which is to say that 38 times I felt the world get smaller—and here I am trying to show how presence is political.

My act of presence this time around includes this post but also a series of erasures based on the aforementioned transcript. I’ll be sharing the Debate Series here and on my Instagram account, @poetryamano, over the next few weeks. See the first set below. I ended up doing two takes on each quote to represent the “two sides” of the debate.

José Angel Araguz, Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential debate + new project

truly, everyone’s tongue is just
a temporary salamander. in the night
mine goes looking for rocks to tell
the truth to. i don’t need
a shoe box for my lungs. i need
a sail boat. i need a man made lake
where all the shorelines are
rolled-up sleeves.

Robin Gow, eyes in the back of my head

I had observed without really realizing it some of the details that poem invokes — how wind kicks up a brook, carries and takes away scents and petals. But I had not been conscious of knowing those details until this poem asked me to conjure them up. Isn’t it magic, how language can do that? How words make memories come alive. How stories activate the memory and the senses.

I was reading a review of a book about adolescence recently. The author had interviewed some thirty-somethings about their recollections of their adolescence. The interviewees told the stories of their profound moments in that turbulent time in their lives. And the author found that even in the telling of the story of their own lives, the interviewees were changed, and began to re-understand the stories they had understood about themselves.

Marilyn McCabe, My mind lets go a thousand things

Though these poems are deeply influenced by my response to the attacks in Oslo and Utøya in 2011, Impermanence isn’t about that terrible day. It’s not even about death — though it is a meditation on how things fall apart, including our bodies.

Someday I may write more specifically about July 22, 2011: how the grief was simultaneously mine and not mine.

But for now: on July 23rd, 2011, while I was running along the beach, I was smacked by the absurdity that I wasn’t dodging the usual bird carcasses that morning (that would have been a tidy metaphor). Instead, I found a lemon, a head of cabbage, and a potato in the surf. I felt like the universe was mocking the absurdity of all those deaths, trying to overwhelm me with meaninglessness. Maybe forcing me — by the means of a summer salad — to make meaning.

Ren Powell, 3 Poems from Impermanence

To write ‘Blade’ I saved a link to a photograph of a dagger from a news article. I also put my writing journal on my desk so that it would be the first thing I saw the next morning and would therefore remind me that I had something particular to explore. It was such a great picture I knew I wanted to create a response of my own to mark it. You can find an image of the blade here: Crystal Dagger. 

I got up the next morning ready to write, and set a seven minute timer. The writing desk in the lounge is tucked in its own corner and feels like a solace all of its own. Like going somewhere you can visit and come back from. It’s very old, and very small but as a space it works! 

The ‘grassed air’ bit of the poem comes from my memory of visiting the circus with my sister when she was young. Entering the warm humid space to find our seats (or perhaps bench space) I was hit by the seeming greenness of the air I was breathing. I do love it when a phrase flows when I am writing and that one seemed an appropriate description. I imagined being a sword swallower with a dagger carved from ice. The poem was starting. I had to let the images of the lion and its trainer work their way out of my head, and the memory of me and my sister re-enacting the part where the trainer put his arm in the lion’s mouth. We were in awe when it didn’t bite him and loved the way he rubbed its forehead gently to get it to open its mouth in the first place. Filtering out the real and keeping my pen moving on the new felt fast and furious and that’s a good way into a poem in my opinion.

Sue Finch, Running Away with the Circus

beside the whitewater
a faint fluttering
in the ferns

Tom Clausen, fern

[I]t’s noticeable that none of the authors of the “best first collections” are now, 25 years on, what we might broadly term a “major” UK poet, and in fact a quick review of the other shortlists between 1994 and 2005 suggests this is quite a consistent pattern. There are a few names which are now high-profile, and some years had a higher predictive hit-rate than others, but in general being shortlisted for — or even winning — the “best first collection” doesn’t seem to mean that much, longer term.

I suppose there are different ways of thinking about this. It might be that it’s just quite hard even for experienced readers to spot the most promising authors on the basis of a first collection. Conversely the pressure might be more the other way: when judging that year’s crop of collections by established poets, the committee is under pressure to shortlist mainly or entirely a handful of well-known poets who have already been widely acclaimed, so surprises are rare. And of course, some authors of genuinely excellent first collections will go on to do other things, while the most original poets might tend to be passed over at the first collection stage. Winning or being shortlisted for a first collection prize must create certain opportunities, but perhaps it also creates quite a burden of expectation.

Victoria Moul, First collections and poetic “careers”

I first came across Wahtola Trommer in the Poetry of Presence anthologies. Based on the evidence of those few poems, I decided I had to see a larger sampling. Along comes hush. And it lives up to its name. The poems are lullabies for a troubled spirit. They spell us into nature and soothe us into becoming cottonwood tree, becoming larkspur. “There is no way / to be anywhere but here,” we are reminded. But we are also reminded that we have some control over where we place our bodies. […]

The epigraphs are a map to the poet’s influences— [Rachel] Carson, William Stafford, Shakespeare, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry. Praise poems, lamentations, and invitations to healing that arrive “so soft that at first / you aren’t sure / it is raining / but the fragrance / overcomes you” (“Wish”).

In this weirdly busy season of my life (broken engagements, family dinners, an aging dog; political and international news insisting on attention alongside daughters’ road-trips and their cats needing to be fed; classes and readings and writing conferences) this book was a balm.

I read it twice.

Bethany Reid, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, HUSH

morning sunshine 
a cobweb thread is shining 
on the lavender 

Jim Young [no title]

A writer friend shared a poem recently from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I’ve seen so many of you share her work, I decided to click over to her site to learn more about her.

Oh, my.

It would be so, so easy for me to slip into a pit of bad feelings about my writing, seeing how very prolific and accomplished this other writer is, especially as she is a woman whose writing career began at about the same time I had the beginnings of one. She has been writing a poem a day—a poem every single day!—since 2006! AND she publishes prolifically AND she teaches widely. And her work is beloved by many. Rightly so, I think. Damn, but wouldn’t I like to be like her!

But I am not. There are things that have kept me from being the kind of writer she is, and I could probably list them here, but I don’t think that would be helpful or useful. Not for me, and not for any of you.

We are, each of us, who we are. We do what we need to do and what we can. If we can look back on our time at the end of a day and see that it was full of what matters to us, we don’t need to be more disciplined. We don’t need better strategies or more organization or new jobs or different family members and friends. I mean, maybe we do, if we want to create differently than we now are, and maybe we will someday (people and circumstances can and do change) but I don’t think we can will ourselves to be who we currently aren’t. And thinking we should is probably not going to take us anywhere other than into that bad-feeling pit.

I think if it really mattered to me to be that kind of writer, I would be. I think you would be, too, if that mattered to you. Or you would paint or knit or sew or bake intricate loaves of gorgeous bread.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Free to be you and me

During the past few weeks, I have been reading–one at a time, with pauses–the essays in Ross Gay’s book Inciting Joy. His earlier book (The Book of Delights) was easier, a bit less complicated. About, you know, gratitude–even though he describes his father’s death in the first essay of that one. He gets to something about grieving in the 13th “Incitement” of this book, however, that made me put the text down and say to myself: This is what I have been trying to get my poems to do for some time now.

(I did pick it up again and finish reading it, by the way.)

He insists that we remember how transforming grief is. Not can be, but is. Always: “When that one thing [that we grieve] changed, everything changed. Light through the trees in October now different. The sound of the playground…cooking a meal. The future. The past. All of it changed. That is what the griever is metabolizing.” He points out this metabolizing can’t be timed, that grieving pays no attention to whether it has been a day or a year or decades: “It seems to me that grief is not gotten over, it is gotten into. And the griever teaches us, or reminds us, there is no pulling it apart. Because grieving, alert to connection, is never only one person’s experience.”

Maybe we grieve for one person, or one beloved companion animal. Maybe we grieve that our youth is over, that our children are grown, that our favorite mom & pop store has been razed to make way for a Starbucks. Or perhaps we grieve for our planet, as Greta Thunberg does: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words…People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.” There are so many reasons why we feel loss. Loss is what life offers us, loss but also transformation. I think what Gay tries to say in his recent essays is that because there is something to sorrow that we all can connect with, our grief itself can connect us, give us understanding–maybe even joy.

A complicated kind of joy. A joy that acknowledges that life can be tough and sad.

Ann E. Michael, Transformation & intention

I’m not even going to attempt to paint a full picture of Jackie [Hagan], and her legacy. That will have to come over time, because Jackie was a solar flare and a dormouse and a lovely sofa and a battlefield and loads more. But Clare Beloved got me out of bed this morning telling me it’s time to find the words, and Conor Aylward suggested that the German language probably has some sort of compound noun for the laughter and the hurt, and that poetry, with its infinite possibilities of form and music, is the best way I know.

After my mother died, and my ferocious migraines started, I fell out of love with reading. It had been a particularly co-dependant lifelong relationship, and finding myself unable to read more than a book every couple of months was a profound loss and a big shift in my identity. I’ve had around five years of reading very slowly and sporadically – relying largely on audiobooks. But the last few weeks of intense grief and burnout have returned me, somehow, to the act of reading – often with a pint, in the company of my post-GCSE teen, in the pub.  I’ve just finished Airea D.Matthews’ Bread and Circus, Jodie Hollander’s Nocturne, and Amanda Dalton’s Fantastic Voyage – and I would be reading Kathleen Jamie’s Cairn if the teen didn’t keep on stealing it.

And of these wildly varied books are a beautiful, genius lesson in form, and how it can hold almost anything – philosophy, illness, neglect, love, 18^th century economics, abuse, racism, post-structuralist linguist theory, trauma, and in Amanda’s case, the grief  of losing a life partner, which finds both its metaphor and form in water. Like Conor just said to me in a text – “We need crutches to talk/walk around death”, and as one of Jackie’s closest people, he should know.

Kim Moore, On Losing Friends and Finding Words

Occasionally, I will be working on a poem and the words do not even feel like my own. Maybe some communication from the ether or the netherworld that channels itself through my hand, down into the keys and onto the screen. Other times, the lines are hard wrought and feel more like sowing something, planting something in a dark little garden that may hopefully bloom by the end of the poem. Or other times like a machine that clicks and winds and begins to purr. I never know which of these things will happen in a given piece of writing. Or if any will. Or, if I am really lucky, all of them at once. 

Different things have taken precedence at different times in my career as a poet. The early poems were so hard and so fretted over. I barely knew what I was doing. I slogged along and each line felt like pulling something out of my body. I knew what I wanted and went hunting for it. Later, I would jumble the words and images and spangled contents in a bag and shake them out onto the page, much in the way I would make a collage. While this was not as difficult as the first few years of writing anything worth reading, it was still hard to have them fall into line in a way that made sense. That seemed like I wasn’t just randomly making word salad.

There was a shift slowly over the last decade toward poems being more sound generated than image-or content generated. Like if I could just get the first few lines rolling, the poem would almost unwittingly write itself–that tiny machine–that hopefully would get me to the end point. Unlike the order of the early poems, or the chaos of the later ones, these poems somehow assemble themselves according to their own logic and feel much smoother going. So much so, I never quite trust them. 

Kristy Bowen, notes on process

I believe in the magic of index cards. When I get stuck on a poem, essay or review, I will stop everything and revert to my trusty pack of unlined index cards. Just shuffling them for a few moments can give my brain the break it needs. Then I grab a pen and start writing things down on them, after which I spread them over the floor. Staring at these white rectangles helps me figure out a path through the piece I’m writing, sort of like Hansel’s white stones. The interesting part of this exercise is that I don’t always stay with the outline the index cards suggest. In fact, laying them out seems to reveal a new path that I hadn’t seen before, hidden in the spaces between the cards.

Erica Goss, How I try to be a better writer

I was reading over my notes from Essay Camp when I realized that in several times of intense stress I have manifested ear worms. Music is an important part of my life – I listen to it almost daily. I don’t play an instrument and it’s a regret in my life that I never learned how. I guess it’s not surprising that music fills my head when I’m exhausted from a smothering level of stress. […]

The other song was “Room at the Top” by Tom Petty.

“I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down, I ain’t comin’ down”

This one really, really almost drove me wild. It was the worst earworm happening at the worst time. Looking back I remember just wanting the situation to end. Wanting to go away somewhere and leave it all behind. But we can’t do that in life, can we? We face the darkness and work our way out.

Charlotte Hamrick, When Music Hurts

Patton Oswalt has a great talk where he says There are No Gatekeepers Anymore. He says that today’s artists no longer need gatekeepers to give them permission, “Because of this,” he says, and takes out his phone. He points out the phone is now a home studio anybody can use to create and distribute their work.

And this is true. My husband, who is sixteen years older than I am, keeps reminding me that there was a time when there were only three networks—CBS, ABC and NBC. Now there are seemingly infinite numbers of channels and sources of media. The market is divided, and any artist can find their own “tribe.” They don’t have to pander to masses so much as they need to amass the people who will “get” them.

Be the Change You Want to See on Social Media

If there is something you want to see changed on social media, change it.

After Stevie Edwards gained traction with her vulnerable poems about mental health, she wanted to then write poems about pleasure and happiness. She founded Elysium Review to do just that.

In my interview with Rita Mookerjee, she told me that for years she gave up on poetry because people told her there was no market for the kind of work she was writing. It wasn’t until Dorothy Chan (also a fabulous poet we interviewed) encouraged her to write that she started to see how wrong those people had been. Now she’s the editor of Honey Lit, which gives voice to writers who have traditionally been marginalized.

As she says in our interview, nobody is paying us enough to keep quiet.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Be the Change You Want to See on Social Media

Sheffield was wonderful. It was nice to go back. I’ve been back once or twice in recent years. I used to go across when I was at uni in the first year to see my then girlfriend, Jenny. The last time I was there was to record a Northside gig with another mate called Simon (he’s also a fan of Flowered Up, and my closest mate).

I think we walked past the Air BnB he’d booked for us last weekend, and I think I walked past a park near where Jenny used to live. I recall writing a bad poem in there. It was called Endangered Species. I think it was about our relationship, and I know it made reference to a Smashing Pumpkins song called Rhinoceros. I know this as I’m looking at the poem now. I was going to post it, but it’s too bad. It can stay in the juvenalia folder.

Mat Riches, Flowered up afternoons of the rhino

I do love the fact that the island wildlife is so different than ours in Woodinville—filled with blooming orange and red poppies, lush pink dogwood, and of course, more foxes and whales. I loved watching the sea for seals, porpoises, and orcas, although I consider myself more of a woodsy/mountain elf than an ocean elf, if you know what I mean.

And I really did have time to write a few poems, look at the order of the manuscript, tweak it a bit, and cut about ten poems (needed, unfortunately). I think the real benefit of giving yourself a dedicated writing retreat—be it in the desert, or the woods, or an isolated island—is that it forces you into new thoughts, new perspectives, and maybe even new inspirations. Does seeing new flora and fauna, even experiencing the discomforts of being in a new place, cause our brains to work a little better, a little harder?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, San Juan Island Report Part 2—This Time with Hospitalization at the End

A poem for the 70 individuals who walked to Singapore’s Istana to deliver 140 letters to the PM on 2 Feb 2024, as part of the National Day of Solidarity with Palestine. 3 of them–Sobikun Nahar, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori, and Annamalai Kokila Parvathi–were ridiculously charged with disturbing public order by illegally organizing, or abetting with organizing, a public procession in a prohibited area. […]

They do not need a head nor do they want a tail.
They are all heads, all eyes, all mouths, all legs, all hands,
umbrellas up against the onslaught of the sun.

They are cool, and young as the crescent moon
lighting up lovers’ rendezvous and drinking parties
and the unworldly debates of secret handshakes.

Jee Leong Koh, Walking to the Istana

In what feels like a year of elections around the world – India, South Africa, Europe, Iran, France, Britain, the USA – “Soundscape” also expresses my belief that we should all spend more time listening. The shoutiness of political discourse is deeply, deeply dispiriting. Politician or poet, farmer or officer worker, pensioner or student, we need to pay considered attention to the voices with which we disagree as well as to the voices with which we agree. We must take time to listen, not only to those who shout loudly and incessantly, like the traffic on the motorway, but also to the quiet conversations in the reeds, the trees, the marshlands.

Most importantly, we should listen to the silence that underlies the sounds. 

Marian Christie, Listening

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

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 35

This week: panic needles, jellyfish tentacles, the poem as a begging bowl, mixed mental arts, and more. Enjoy.

Wind gets under my skin. It feels like panic needles it ricochets up my spine like some kundalini junkie robot waiting to jump me on a dark street corner and drag me back to my home planet. Wind makes the power flick off then on then off it causes the trees to wave their crazy arms and screech outta the way! outta the way! in their keening tree voices and squirrels bombard my roof with tiny pine cones in their terror. In my wee brain the moon controls the tides which controls the wind which controls the celestial bodies which control not only my thoughts but my mood swings. Huge swathes of mood swings. Crazy Girl mood swings but Crazy Girl no longer lives here just water and big trees and bigger water and waves sloshing up the earth’s crust saying howdy!

The best way to count this measure is to think of it as one statement that’s divided in its inflection.

What was Beethoven living in this moment? How many times did he divide the inflection of a measure until it was perfect? If you look at his original scores he tells exactly what he was thinking there and there and then faster there too. He wrote during storms. Like this one. He too hunkered down his ear pressed to the piano’s throat so he could hear the low pounding chords that rolled through everything he ever wrote.

Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report March the Eighth: storm watch edition

When Adar enters, my parents wave
from beyond the veil.
They followed each other
out the door and into
the early spring earth.
My mother blazed the trail
like a 1950s movie star
perched on a pretty little horse,
riding into the sunset.
Dad was lost
the minute she left
but he found his way. The last thing
he murmured was, “looking good” —
to my brother? to himself
in the mirror behind closed eyes?

Rachel Barenblat, Adar

This is a picture of me on Tuesday of this last week. So happy to be out in the sunshine (despite the 45 degree temperature) enjoying the early flowers, some deer crossing in front of her on her street, walking along Lake Washington. So terribly unaware of the how the rest of the week would go. The bobcat, the predator, appeared last week. This week, the prey, the deer, appear on my street. So which am I to believe, the predator or the prey?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Good Day Followed by a Terrible Week, MS Awareness and Women’s Awareness Month, and Writers, Disability, and Money: Some Thoughts

she listens at night
for the purr of an engine
for the whistle of a rocket
for the bark of a gun
for a bang on the door

she hides her daughter
she does not ask her sons
where they go each night

she scavenges under a curfew
she hides under a false name

she mourns the dead
she knows the mourning
will never be done

she hopes for a clean death

Ama Bolton, Civilian

---

The harp is an ancient instrument — as old as civilization itself. It was used to call to the gods, and to offer up praise. The harp accompanied the ancient stories, the stories we told about who we are and how we came to be.

This poem made me think about my own father, who terrified me when I was a little child, so volatile was he. I had no idea what might trigger yelling or being spanked. Cause and effect is confusing for a child; life is confusing. The whole house tiptoed around his anger. He died just as I was reaching adolescence, and we had been estranged from him for some years. I resent him still for how this all shaped me.

But when I’m feeling larger in spirit I try to imagine what he was, his inner self. I try to empathize with what may have been someone who had dreams unrealized, had skills and creativity unfostered. He was an asshole to me, yes. And he likely was also carrying his own burdens. As do we all. He may indeed have had a harp that he wanted to play for the world.

This is what Bruce Weigl’s poem makes me think about. Even my own worst self, judgey and unfiltered, impatient, disdainful, even that person has a harp she’s carrying around trying to make music for the world. Jangled though it may be in that moment.

Marilyn McCabe, Many small and beautiful welds

I have been having fun with digital images and collages and making strange little bits for my own amusement (see above.) I’ve also made progress with daily writing on a new series of poems that will probably eventually be a zine. So far, there are about a dozen salvageable pieces shaking around with some more to come as I gear up to start something entirely different for NaPoWriMo next month. Which something is still up for debate, but it may be the Mary Shelley/ Frankenstein-inspired project I’ve been waffling on starting up for months (I wanted to work on it and share some of it in October for #31DaysOfOctober, but it just never happened.) 

Each spring I question whether I should commit to 30 poems (I write daily sometimes, but definitely skip some days and take the weekends off.) The imperative does keep me moving, and some of my best shorter writing projects were either finished or started in April of some year or another, including the villains series that recently became a zine. 

Otherwise, life lately is fancy croissants and tea when we can afford them, a couple new sundresses that are still too scanty to wear, and lots of decor and DIY writing on everything from Victorian architecture to using vintage suitcases and trunks for storage.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things 3/9/2024

But the slap on my face will do, in place of understanding, the sting
of celestial fingers on my face;
swim in the Sound in spring and the jellyfish will lay their tentacles
across your nose and cheek, just so:

Many messengers, one message. You are asleep at your post.

Dale Favier, March

Can you draw a bicycle from memory? In one experiment only 25% could. I know the tangible experience of a bicycle. I rode one nearly daily for several years of my childhood, ruining the cuffs of how many pairs of pants that caught in the chain? But I’m not among the 25%. I see nothing, I hear nothing, but I can shape everything through a tiny alphabet and hope it’s adequate, and somewhat true.

These questions sit heavier on my heart than usual because I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a memoir. Again. But there is always the question of having to confront myself and the limits of my perspective. I can’t be a heroine in anyone’s story. Certainly not mine. And I am not fond of the cynicism I see as inherent in an anti-hero perspective. But the more often I pick up a memory, the more I turn it over, the more faults I find—in me, and in the circumstances. Timelines never line up. I don’t like myself then. Nor then. Can I ascribe a motive to myself, much less to someone else?

I can’t sort out the elements of my memories into a nice, meaningful arc. That dull, red rubber ball that I caught more than once square on my nose during a game of dodgeball that I was forced to play? (The smell, the sting, the metallic taste of blood.) Where does this go? Insignificant, maybe. But certainly the stuff of metaphor.

It’s like playing a game of solitaire and trying very hard not to cheat.

Ren Powell, Dodging Memoir

After I had dropped out of college and was working under the table, waitressing as an “illegal alien” in the North of England—yes, that really was the term— I volunteered for the Lancaster Literary Festival. It was my first experience of any type of arts gathering and I loved it. It felt like entering a parallel universe.

I remember most meeting Linton Kwasi Johnson who brought a crew with him—maybe for company or protection—most likely both. His performance was electrifying. But I also remember who didn’t accept the invitation to appear.

U.K. Le Guin (as she was known then—on the cover of all her books) wrote a beautiful letter to “Jo” who was the Director of the Lancaster Lit Festival that year, turning down the offer to headline the event. Jo was so thrilled by a personal letter from her favorite writer that it took a little sting away from the rejection. This was Spring of 1981 and Jo’s choices were ahead of the time. In fact, this may have been the first, or one of the first of the Lancaster Lit Festivals, held at the Dukes Playhouse directly across Pizza Margherita where I worked. I don’t know what my volunteer job was besides getting in free to most events, but I know I learned much more than I offered.

And although Le Guin wrote to say she was not in the habit of making public appearances, she was still very honored to be asked. This must have been the first time I learned that she was a she, an Ursula, an esteemed writer who was trying to remain out of sight. Oh, for a time when that was still possible as a writer! Clearly, her gender reveal made a lasting impression—as did having the Lancaster Lit Festival directed by a woman.

Susan Rich, My dinner date with Ursula K. Le Guin

I found a bunch of big boxes on my doorstep! 500 copies of Eden Is a Backyard: New Climate Poems from Word to Action (Edition Eupolinos) are printed and ready to put in readers’ hands. The paper feels wonderful, the type face is beautiful and the cover art is just gorgeous (thank you Lindsay Lusby). As far as content, consider this: Rachel Carson said that no one could write truthfully about nature and leave out the poetry. The artists that graciously offered their words to this book beautifully weave nature’s truth throughout the poetry.

Cathy Wittmeyer, Our Book is Here at Last!!!

While the energy of that music (not just the Minutemen, but punk music more broadly) had been a part of my life since my teenage years, it never really entered into my poetry. I wasn’t sure how to make that happen. But without trying to or planning it, that’s what started to happen last summer as I sketched new drafts. I found myself writing about making things & circulating them on a shoestring; about staying focused and inspired even when it feels dead all around us; about capitalism and fascists; and also, for some reason, about eternity as something tangible and here, even though it couldn’t be held onto. Eventually, I realized that the music’s energy was only accessible to me through writing in an affirming and almost ecstatic voice, something I basically never do (much of my work is doom-laden and frequently impersonal). So that was the real spark: to follow the music, the energy, and the voice as they stumbled into an affirmation of striving, creating, and living

Amplifying this further was an unlikely connection. Unknown to me, Mike Watt (the band’s co-founder, bassist, and frequent vocalist) had been deeply inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses—maybe the most important book in my life—around the time of the band’s classic double album, Double Nickels on the Dime. Apparently, Raymond Pettibon (artist and one-time illustrator for SST records) had introduced him to it, and it changed him. The band even named a song “June 16th” after Bloomsday. As Watt stated, “Just finishing [reading Ulysses] at that time and getting ready to record [Double Nickels on the Dime] . . . I was inspired. With songwriting, you could talk about anything!” (qtd. in Rutland, Corporate Rock Sucks, Hachette, 2022). This feeling of being freed to say and discuss “anything” is connected to a sense of totality:

It seemed to me then, and still does now . . . that [Joyce] was trying to write about everything. And in a way the Minutemen were trying to do the same. Never sat down and agreed to do this or anything, but it seems like we’re trying to write about everything. The whole world, the history, the future, what can be, could be, would be, what might have been.” (qtd. in Fournier, The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (33 1/3), Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2007)

Ultimately, it was this convergence of the band with Joyce that truly unlocked the poem for me. This freed perspective in which anything reveals everything is crucial to how I went about writing it.

RM Haines, The Minutemen on Bloomsday

Patsy Rodenburg made us sit what felt like six inches away from each other and say lines of one of our poems without losing the gaze of the poet sitting opposite. Then at a slightly greater distance, eventually moving to arm’s length. For the next two hours all we did was stare into each other’s eyes.

I was aware of two forces in Carole’s eyes, which dwelt in equal, not opposite strength to each other: the first, of unqualified acceptance and second, a steely, not quite austere benevolence. I don’t remember her blinking once. The same lines, over and over, to the same pair of eyes, for a whole afternoon. You’d think we’d get bored. But not a bit of it. ‘Did you really feel the emotion of every word you were speaking into your partner’s eyes?’ Patsy asked. If the answer was no, we did it again. And again. When I give a reading now, I still think of her gazing back at me, accepting my words and without saying anything (those were the rules), encouraging me to do and be better.

Anthony Wilson, Carole Satyamurti’s eyes

When I interview writers, I ask them to share writing-related advice (i.e., “hacks”). I also obsessively search writing craft books for tips I can use. Most boil down to the same basic principles: get your butt in the chair, make time for writing, call yourself a writer, etc. But sometimes I come across a piece of thought-provoking advice that makes me take notice.

It’s important to clarify that a writing hack is not a writing prompt, although they share certain attributes. A prompt is an instruction designed to spark creativity—“write a Shakespearean sonnet describing the last three cities you saw in dreams.” A hack is less specific. I like to think of a hack as a shortcut to get you in the place where you can start writing. So, hack first, prompt second.

Here are a few unique and useful writers’ hacks I’ve come across recently.

The Begging Bowl: From my March 4, 2024 interview with poet Joy Manesiotis in Sticks & Stones: “I think we must be careful about adopting the industrial model of production for art, and to realize that even though words may not be coming onto the page, we’re still working. For me, it’s not how many words or pages I got, but how fully can I show up. My friend Marianne Boruch says, ‘the poem is a begging bowl.’ You hold the bowl open and hope.”

Erica Goss, Hacks for Writers: A Personal List

Words are neither concrete nor physical. Even when they get out of my head and into a place I can share them, they are still ethereal, and I can’t live in the ether all the time. The air there is too thin.

Sometimes, we need to get our hands dirty—literally—and not because we have internalized toxic messages about productivity or the relationship between godliness and cleanliness. We need to because we need to get re-grounded in the here and now, or we need a small win, or we need a way to feel some control in our lives, or we need a place of sensory calm so our nervous systems can rest.

We need a clear runway for the next flight of our minds to take off from.

Rita Ott Ramstad, A creative hangover cure

One of the first poem endings I fell in love with was the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. After twelve lines of explaining what real love is and isn’t, the sonnet ends with the couplet “If this be error, and upon me prov’d, I never writ and no man ever loved.” It’s a mic drop. It’s the brashness to say that everything he has asserted in the poem is absolutely true. That’s bold. And I love it.

Ending a poem can be difficult. One impulse is to get didactic at the end, make sure the reader knows what point you are trying to make. (A workshop leader I once had said that most people can chop off the last three to four lines of a poem, as that is where most poets try to “explain” their poem.)

Another impulse is to wrap up the poem with a “kicker,” with a “gotcha” or “aha” moment. Another is to tie the end back to the beginning or the title in some way, creating a loop. Yet another is to leave the poem’s concerns unresolved, letting the reader fill in the blanks. Each of these moves can be effective in a poem, if handled deftly. As with openings, there are no wrong ways to end a poem.

Donna Vorreyer, Sticking the Dismount

It’s E. Pauline Johnson’s birthday today and  I’ve been invited to read some of her poems at her birthplace, Chiefswood. Since Margaret Avison said that the best response to a poem is another poem, I “translated” a couple by two different proceedures. The version of “The Bird’s Lullaby,” I took all the words of the poem and made a new one. The version of “The Song My Paddle Sings” I translated through about 10 different languages in Google Translate and then edited. I’ve posted the original poem and then the translation. […]

We left life early
Now we are far away
The water flows over us
The water flows over our bed
The corn is planted, the corn is harvested.
It wrote this song
this song for us to sing

Wind from the mountain
Wind from the west
The west wind blows and whistles through the grass
We are nothing but bones

Gary Barwin, Happy Birthday E. Pauline Johnson.

What are you currently working on?

I already noted that I have been writing a collection of lyric essays. But, with my new poetry book just about to come out, it’s not the time for another publication. And I am trying to put aside the validation of having the essays readily accepted by journals and learn to gauge for myself what finished really is for my prose, since I’m a beginner in the genre.

I am also composing new poems, because there will be a fifth collection someday. In order to help me get out of essay mode and back to poetry, I assigned myself to draft without any capital letters or punctuation. This is hardly revolutionary, I know. Many poets have written in this manner, including Ellen Bryant Voigt in her wonderfully refreshing Headwaters. But it’s a huge shift for me and, so far, these poems are more fun than what I usually produce. That said, they can’t contain as much information as essays and they don’t yet have the intricate craftmanship I tried to achieve in Colorfast and my other collections.  Maybe a current project should be remembering to celebrate Colorfast when it is finally in print and, rather than newness of style, the quality of endurance that is often what the poems are about.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rose McLarney

i spare no expense in my mask.
it’s got to have feathers & gold. it’s got
to make everyone think you are not
a burning staircase. sit outside & think of
stock photos. think of women without
doorways or living rooms. when you get
right down it there is no rope to climb.
there is no microwave to talk to. just a series
of zippers. here is the seal. here is the selkie.
here is the dream in which we are both
talking our tongue languages.

Robin Gow, how to wear a mask

Every year I ask my students what they understand by the last line of the poem (“Her heart was not in the dancing because she was doing it only for white patronage.”), and every year I ask them how the speaker “knew” it. Someone or another eventually hits on it: the speaker too is a Black immigrant artist, and he knew it from his own experience.

Then I ask, does it matter that the speaker is male and the dancer is female? For the man to claim to know the innermost part of a woman? Does not the man “devour” her in his claim of knowledge, just as the wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys and girls do? Here, the distinction between speaker and poet becomes important because how can we be sure that the poet has not taken that possibility—that the speaker is also a devourer—into account? Another way of putting this is that the poem always knows more than the poet.

Jee Leong Koh, In That Strange Place

On Sunday I went to CB1 – live, open-mic poetry in Cambridge. Maybe 30 people were there. My favourites were a poem about grief (with mirrors and boxes) and a comic piece that kept coming up with good lines (I wish I’d written some down). I read a 250 word piece of Flash – maybe the shortest piece of the night.

On Monday I Zoomed into a Milton Keynes Lit Fest event – a discussion about Flash with Electra Rhodes and Jupiter Jones. About 70 people attended. Rhodes gave some useful checklists of ways to improve a text. One idea is to use vocabulary from one domain (e.g. knitting) for a piece that has nothing to do with that domain. What most struck me was the number of Flash pieces she’s published given that she only started writing Flash during Covid. I manage about 5 published Flashes a year.

Tim Love, 3 events this week

It has been some time since the last post, and what has happened? Not much, I guess. I have finished 3 poems in the last month, which is, I think, roughly 65% of my entire output for last year, so that’s a positive sign.

I did the second date of the Collecting The Data world tour in Arundel at the start of Feb. I was asked to do two sets as the other poet that was meant to read was ill and the back up got the Covids. Obviously, I was sad for them, but their loss= my gain. […]

Outgoings
I spent £30 on petrol for the petrol to cover the 120-mile roundtrip
I spent £18 on a pint and burger in the Norfolk Tavern (where else would I go) as I’d left work early to get there and missed dinner.
Earnings
I sold 3 books = £21
I was paid £20 for the reading (nice..I think that makes it my first paid gig).

Total outlay = £48
Total earnings = £41
A net loss of £7

A 30-minute set meant 4 miles driven for each minute of reading. I think that roughly works out at 34p per mile driven or £1.37 for each minute of reading..

Interesting. One more book and I’d have broken even. Did I need the pint, perhaps not. Could I have eaten cheaper, perhaps…Am I complaining here? No, I’m not, this is just an observation. More data required to make a proper analysis (e.g. more paid gigs please).

Mat Riches, Fag packet maths

I can only recall ever attending one house concert. It was during my college days–1977 or ’78–and took place at a large Victorian house in Ann Arbor, MI. We sat about on chairs, sofas, stairs, and the floor to listen to blues/folk singer and guitarist extraordinaire, David Bromberg. It was a pleasant environment in which to hear the musician–an intimate and attentive audience, a sense of camaraderie and shared appreciation, and quite comfortable. But I never managed to attend another house concert…usually, such events are fairly private and by invitation (as I think that one was), so you don’t hear about them until after they’re over.

I was therefore delighted when friends suggested that they hold a “house concert” or, in this case, a house reading, so that they could share my poems with some acquaintances. A new audience! A comfortable, non-intimidating space, terrific food, and the kindness of people willing to listen to a bit of poetry…what’s not to like about that? There were over a dozen folks in our friends’ pleasant home, and at the close of an evening of wine and food and conversation, I was asked to read and talk about my poems. And promote my new book (which is now available to order on Amazon).

My gratitude overflows, Don and Jeannie. You’re the best!

An unexpected aspect of the house concert event was that it was delightful to meet the “audience” first, before the reading–a reversal of the usual order, and very helpful in getting me to feel more comfortable not just in presenting my work but in deciding which poems to read. In addition, the cozy atmosphere meant listeners felt free to ask questions and continue the conversation to include thoughts on song lyrics, “private” poetry (that people write for themselves alone), favorite poets, and the context of the work of poetry in the world.

Ann E. Michael, House concert

hospital form
for religion
I put Haiku

Tom Clausen, hospital form

Sasha Dugdale is the kind of poet who is as interested in the work of others as she is in her own. As editor of Modern Poetry In Translation between 2012 and 2017 she championed poets from all over the world; as a translator of Russian poetry and prose she has made the work of writers such as Elena Shvarts, Natalya Vorozhbit, and most recently Maria Stepanova, accessible to the non-Russian-speaking world; and as poet-in-residence at St John’s College Cambridge she organised poetry readings and discussions for both students and those outside the university. And I know from experience that she responds gratefully, enthusiastically and kindly to unpublished poets, readers of poetry and reviewers – encouraging reviews not of her own work but of other poets she admires and who she feels are under-appreciated. There may be other established poets in the UK with this level of generosity, but I can only say that I have not come across them. I’m tempted to say that she puts the Art before the Artist, but that is not quite right. From her earliest collection, 2003’s Notebook (Carcanet), she has been interested in the interaction between Art and Artist, how they simultaneously make and define each other. And how they both arise from their particular social, political and historical contexts – but in doing so become something that transcends those contexts.  

In Notebook she considered JMW Turner, imagining him into existence in a series of short dramatic monologues which tended show the man and his work alongside his intimate relationships and social milieu. In The Estate (Carcanet 2007) she turned to Alexander Pushkin, taking the spaces and objects in his Mikhaylovskoye estate as inspiration for ruminations on the poet and how proximity to the material of his life impacted her own writing. In the long titular poem from Joy (Carcanet 2017), she focused on William Blake’s wife Catherine just after Blake’s death in a Forward Prize-winning dramatic monologue which builds in quiet intensity from bleak despair to an almost visionary expression of her intense love for her husband and her own creative identity. Then, in one of two major sequences in Deformations (Carcanet 2020), entitled ‘The Welfare Handbook’ (which I have previously reviewed here), Dugdale used letter cutter and artist Eric Gill’s own letters and diaries to devastating effect, casting difficult artistic light on his sexual experimentation and abuse of his daughters. 

Chris Edgoose, Eggs, Dreams, Reflections: on Sasha Dugdale and The Strongbox 

Alexander Pope’s Imitations of Horace are one of those texts which are still much cited — obviously, you can’t really talk about the reception of Horace without mentioning them — but, I suspect, not much read, even by the dwindling band of enthusiasts for eighteenth-century literature. This is a shame because — although not close translations — they are by far the most successful Englishing of the hexameter Horace that we have, and a fine introduction to this part of Horace. That makes them, though, sound a bit dry which is the opposite of the truth. Pope’s extraordinary verse still sings with ferocity and precision; and alongside the satiric force for which Pope is famous, I find the the subtlety of his interpretation of Horace very moving. […]

The Imitations have been particularly poorly served by recent scholarship. The standard discussion remains Frank Stack’s Pope and Horace, published back in 1985. It’s an excellent, sensitive interpretation, with a detailed chapter on each major poem, but as far as I’m aware, there’s no easily available edition of Pope’s text itself that really helps you read these poems as they were intended: that is, alongside the Latin. […]

This is a real loss for lots of potential readers: not only anyone who would like to appreciate fully one of the greatest English classical imitations, but also anyone who would like to know Horace better, or to get a feel for what Horace has meant for English readers. Pope’s version is not a literal translation, but it is steeped in his love and knowledge of Horace as a whole, and his versions also draw frequently on a very rich early modern commentary tradition from which we can still learn. If you don’t have any Latin, but would like to read Horace’s hexameter verse, for my money Pope is still the best place to start.

Victoria Moul, Pope’s Horace

THE FAMILIAR: POEMS, Sarah Kain Gutowski. Texas Review Press, Huntsville, TX 77341, 2024, 94 pages, $21.95, paper, texasreviewpress.org.

I reviewed this book at Escape Into Life (EIL), but now that the hard copy has arrived I’m dipping into its pages again, still feeling astounded by its chutzpah.

From the cover:

Gutowski’s poems are breathtakingly smart—controlled, precise and exquisite as diamonds—and yet they vibrate dangerously from within, as if anticipating, as she writes in one poem, “so much broken glass.” –Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

You can visit EIL to read more about what I find fascinating about the story-in-poems of one woman’s prism of selves (Ordinary Self and Extraordinary Self are the main characters).

Bethany Reid, Sarah Kain Gutowski: THE FAMILIAR

I’m still also reading Exhausted by Anna Katharina Schaffner, and it seems to hold so much of what I need. I wrote in a previous post about it, and how she says our burnout is tied to “the stories we tell about our exhaustion” and that these matter because “they shape our experience of it and the actions we take to counter it.” She believes in drawing on “mixed mental arts” to combat our fatigue — coming at it through the “healing power of philosophical reflections and historical and sociological insights.” Our exhaustion, in the end, is a thing that might protect us — it may cause us to change our lives for the better, or to at the very least compel us to regroup, reflect. And so, this book is really helping me navigate my life right now, my new day job situation, my brain situation, creative life, burnout life, and all of this amid the horrific news of the day. We can of course keep going back to Virginia Woolf’s, “Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?” Which I quoted in my first book, ten thousand years ago. And now thinking, as Barbara above quotes Diane di Prima, how do we do all this and shove at things from all sides?

As part of my launch reading, I’ve had people bring things to a communal table, and bring that to the making of a still life, and I know I want to work more with that idea, at a larger scale. So, more to come on that…..

Shawna Lemay, A Little Bit of Everything

“I didn’t know you had a book out!” a writer I admire recently said. I laughed. And, then, I went quiet. Because: fair enough. I’m dedicated to teaching and writing on the writers that I love. I spend a great deal more time doing that than working on my own writing.

But for all you beautiful readers who subscribed in the last year, let it be known that I wrote a book of poems. Two books of poems. American Faith and Wound is the Origin of Wonder. Today, I’d like to tell you a bit about writing the latter and what I think—and hope—you can take away from it as you work on your own book, even if that dream seems far away.

Lucille Clifton said “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing,” and I agree. Wonder’s signature mix of awe and inquiry drives us to the blank page.

But with the feeling of wonder comes an intuitive recognition of our own mortality. Were the eventual end of all feeling not guaranteed, I’m not sure we’d experience wonder in the same way. I wanted to write poems that captured both sides of the spiritual coin: the awe and renewal that wonder invites and its corresponding bewilderment, its sense of being breached by the cause of our wonder. “Wonder,” after all, is thought to be a cognate for the old German wunde, or “wound.”

Maya C. Popa, Wound is the Origin of Wonder

Like so many my story is a tapestry of survival, and maybe needs a level of exposure I’m not quite ready for. And then it struck me – I can post this poem. It’s honestly one of my favourites for so many reasons. I loved researching and writing it. I loved when it was paced in the first poetry competition I entered (which in turn introduced me to

Wendy Pratt who is an astonishing poet and kind, encouraging friend) and I love that it explores survival, trauma, misunderstanding and victory in a way that a few lines of my story never could.

My death will grieve foxes is also a poetry film. It has been selected to be one of 21 films displayed as part of Stanza International poetry festival. You can view the films and vote for your favourite on the festival YouTube channel. Wish me luck!

Kathryn Anna Marshall, My death will grieve foxes

In December two poets, Artyom Kamardin and Yegor Shtovba, were jailed for seven years and five and a half years respectively for reading poems critical of the war in a public square in the centre of Moscow. They pleaded not guilty while a third poet, Nikolai Daynek, pleaded guilty and was given four years.

Kamardin’s wife, Alexandra Popova, said he was arrested at their flat 24 hours after the reading. She says she was dragged across a room by her hair and had stickers super-glued to her face. She was also shown photos of Kamardin naked and ‘covered in blood’ in the next room. His lawyer said he was subjected to an horrific sexual assault and forced to record an apology.

In November an artist, Sasha Skochilenko, was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony for replacing labels in a supermarket with anti-war messages. Her sister fears she will not survive, given she has coeliac disease and a heart condition. “She is everything the authorities hate. She is artistic, fragile, lesbian and has a Ukrainian surname,” said the sister. […]

Compared to the horrors that these people went through, and which other poets around the world go through every day – please see old blogs here for other examples – my being called names on social media for speaking out against genocide in Gaza and the callous destruction of life in the Democratic Republic of Congo is ‘sticks and stones’ playground stuff.

Bob Mee, RESPONSIBILITY

meanwhile a child looks
skyward, most times in
fear, sometimes in hope —
there is a calculus somewhere
that thinks one cancels out
the other. It is the absurdity
of the English language
where gravity has two
meanings. One
that suggest that the
falling in itself may be of
grave concern. Grave.
Concern.

The other that insists
that what is falling must
fall. That, once set in
motion, there is
no other way.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Untitled -18

            to avoid my hands
an injured finch
            flutters from death on the road

Grant Hackett [no title]

Loving and lethal, gobsmacked and ghost.

Listen to the loose change of hope in my pocket, its bright jingle singing counterpoint to these chaotic and crumbling city streets.

Rich Ferguson, If within me is the totality of humankind

You wrap your body in any season, regardless of weather.

The minutes tick quietly above the counter, practicing for the final season.

And yet, so much refusal of what’s final; look, leaves rain down but blossoms open.

It’s like the world refuses to give up just yet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Water Clock

the words in my poems and tweets
come from places i have never been
speak in a language that translates me
they explode at the speed of an eruption
congeal like lava losing heat
i fear to walk on the crust of them
come closer
throw me a rope

Jim Young, oh i say

This week, poets were visionary, resolute, hunkering down, easing back into the grind. Some evinced minds of winter, while others dreamed of warmer times and climes. Enjoy.

One of the beauties of winter is the dampening of sound, the narrowing in of possible activity. I have friends who get so stir-crazy that they fly to warmer climes where walks in the desert, or drinks on the patio, or swimming at the beach are still possible. But I relish the slower pace of this season and the quiet. Evenings when the predominant sound is the crackle of wood burning and the tick of the stove expanding.

And even though my January work-day feels like the gun-crack leap off the starting line for myriad tasks, my post-dinner evenings have room for poetry – both the reading and the writing. Perhaps because of the pace of the season and my ability to take breaks during the day to walk with my small dog or to stand for a moment on the porch and count magpies, the still close to five hours of darkness I have between waking and sunrise, I have the luxury and responsibility to listen closely to the world.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Quiet and creation

Yesterday I took my first walk without my lovely old dog, who died over the Christmas period. I’d spent the week before getting used to a new, dog-free routine and talking myself around the guilt I felt at even thinking about going on his favourite walks without him. But then social media showed me a photo album of all the walks we’d been on, and all my own solitary walks; the ones I’d taken while writing The Ghost Lake, the ones that he could no longer keep up with, the ones in which I had felt myself connected again, as an animal myself, feeling the push and pull of my own body navigating paths and hills and crags, and I realised if I didn’t get out soon then I was going to lose that connection and that love of the environment which has always felt like belonging, for me.

Yesterday was the day. This week I’ve been up and leading my Dawn Chorus writing group, running the What to Look for in Winter course and I’ve been working on copy edits for The Ghost Lake. All editing is accompanied by imposter syndrome for me – a fire which I am constantly putting out in my head. Walking is a way of extinguishing that fire. It felt good to get up, put my wet weather gear on, my fleece lined trousers, my walking boots, my hat. It felt good to be in the routine of locking the door behind me, turning and exiting the interior and entering the exterior. Even the cheek numbing sleet felt good.

The thing about having a dog is that they give you purpose – you have to walk them in all weathers, so you end up experiencing all weathers and the changes in the world around you. These small experiences are important, or rather, noticing these small changes is important, it builds connection to environment to see how a tree branch changes throughout the year, to see the leucitic blackbird in the same spot daily, the crow who hobbles, the barn owl, so that you recognise the territories of the animals you share the world with, the life that is around you.

Wendy Pratt, 100 Birds – Protest and the Small Acts of Noticing Nature

Of course, going back to work on 2nd January has a habit of applying the brakes to New Year momentum. But in the not-work part of my life, I somehow, between all the loveliness of actual New Year and the getting into the business of a day-by-day new year, mislaid resolution. Resolution is (I hardly need to mention) a word which suggests resolve. And the word resolve suggests ‘to decide firmly on a course of action’ (Google English Dictionary). None of these (decide, firmly, course, action) were thoughts I could lay hold of in those following January days; it’s been more a case of unresolve: indecision, apathy, physical and mental wobbliness. 

It was poetry that resolved me. It was poetry in community, and wise, compassionate, playful, poetry at that. At Shrewsbury Poetry, we were lucky enough to host Philip Gross and Steve Griffiths for our first get together of the new year yesterday evening. Among our online poetry community, and among open mic poems which resonated and flowed with the thoughts and feelings emerging, Philip and Steve held a conversation. As with all remarkable conversations, this one shifted something for me. 

If I were to pin the shift down to something, I’d pin it down to this. While Philip was reading his poem ‘Of Breath (Thirteen Angels)’ I visualised my lungs for the first time as wings (“don’t look for it outside”) unfurling with each breath. The poem came to me as a winged messenger through the black and white memories of my lungs, x-rayed when I was a child for damage after pneumonia. I could see myself now in full technicolor, complete with “pink and glistening cavities” breathing in oxygen, breathing in life, readying for the brief flight necessary to enter each moment, and this new year. 

Liz Lefroy, I Reframe the New Year

The highlight of my trip, and the reason I chose this travel package, came on my last day in Paris.  In pouring rain I found my way to the Cluny Museé du Moyen Age, which has a great collection of medieval art.  While it was worth taking time all the way through, the major piece is the room containing the “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries.  After studying these for several years for Lost in the Greenwood it was amazing to see them “in person.”  The photographs cannot give the full effect, though small sections come closer. I sat there for quite some time looking from one panel to the next. […]

Lion and unicorn
carry sculpted poles,
bodies facing outward.

Their heads, ears, lean in
toward the woman musing.

Ellen Roberts Young, Trip, part 4

None of this is writing writing it’s old person rambling I catch myself doing it every once in a while but I don’t care this thing that happens when I am flooded with memory   washed over a baptism every time a soft feminine fever   with bready angel wings yeast in the font   now I am collecting bees in a jar at four my brother convincing me to crawl into the neighbor’s window to thieve whatever might interest four year old and five year children   now at 50 having a panic attack right before being slid into the terrifying hole of the mri birdcage snapped firmly over my head   now camping on Camano Island with my toddler son building a fire in the morning thinking how lovely it would be to live here some day   now at 19 on the mountain baking bread for 12 people on a frozen morning a cloud still floating in my body   now in my seventh decade now getting married but in love with someone else   I understand Alice’s changing deeper than ever   here this morning with a cat on my lap and one at my feet in front of a propane fire and I know this is good and pure and right

Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

when i stay at the house i grew up in
i always sleep in the chimney’s throat.
there, dead birds & fire ghosts
tell me “we saw everything.”
mice in the walls. laughter the color
of bruised mountains. what do you do
with your child self to keep it
from kicking?

Robin Gow, chimney dwelling

Although the word “vision” derives from the Latin visionem, it first appeared in English with the definition of things seen in the mind or via the supernatural. Vision as simply the sense of sight is a later meaning (late 15th c.), and vision referring to foresight dates only to 100 years ago [see https://www.etymonline.com/word/vision#etymonline_v_7835]. The cliché “a vision of loveliness” provides an example of the early, 13th century meaning, as does the phrase “visions of sugarplums.” Poets have long been known for writing about, or being under the influence of, such vision.

When the first flush of poetic vision inspires work that later needs some adjustment, writers turn to revision. According to Etymology Online, revision’s history in English first showed up as a noun in the 1610s: “act of looking over again, re-examination and correction,” from French révision, from Late Latin revisionem (nominative revisio) “a seeing again” … the meaning “that which is revised, a product of revision” is from 1845.” This noun, and its verb form (the act/work/verb-sense of revising), keep me occupied a good bit of the time, especially lately while I’m trying to catch up with a large backlog–20 years of poetry drafts.

Ann E. Michael, Vision/revision

walking with the green sea
walking with a gift
tumbled from it

Grant Hackett [no title]

In 1400, according to the Historical Thesaurus, the word ‘nought’ meant poverty. The thesaurus is a browsing place like charity shops on London Road, a rest for the mind through strange provocations and this time it was my tax return, filed yesterday, that took me there. 

Years ago the same experience led me to a poem that became the title of my first pamphlet of poetry, Black Slingbacks. I’d noted the cost of a taxi from my boyfriend’s flat after turning up unexpectedly. Those shoes were in the hall. 

This year it struck me that being broke and all its synonyms are terms, as the late sociologist Stuart Hall pointed out, with a moral tone. I don’t describe myself as poor but my income was truly a pittance and takes me a very long way from what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculated I’d need in 2022 for a minimum acceptable standard of living. 

Of course having a house is all. Even with damp, peeling windows, leaky roof. And I manage by limiting my scope. But can we talk about money, who has it, how people are paid, what they are paid, the failure of benefits to improve lives, the cost of everything from public transport to a block of butter, and the role of wealth in maintaining inequality? And privatisation and profit? Like the outfit that supplies home safety aids like alarms in mum’s area, contracted by the council, is owned by a private equity company.  

Jackie Wills, Come to buckle and bare thong

end of the dock
in the bitter wind a service
for someone

Tom Clausen, the return

As poetry editor of the Evergreen Review, I’m organizing the NYC-based journal’s new year poetry celebration “Resolutions and Irresolutions,” featuring Amber Atiya, Brad Vogel, and Katherine Swett, on Tuesday, Jan 16, 7 pm, at a Tribeca home (RSVP me at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org).

Why that event name? I was thinking of the obligatory new year resolutions, certainly, but I was also thinking of the equally obligatory irresolutions of poets and poetry. The fiercer the pressure on poetry to be didactic and activist,  the harder I find myself resisting it in favor of indecision, ambiguity, questions, and irony.

There is a gap, I have discovered, between being a citizen and a poet. They are related, but they are not the same. The citizen wants justice above all, the poet wants beauty. And an ideal society worthy of its name must find the space to accommodate the poet, its unreliable ally, its steadfast critic. If not, it is but a totalitarian regime.

Jee Leong Koh, Resolutions and Irresolutions

I’ve been wondering why I’ve been longing to teach literature in my home scholarly field again, as I am now, because I also enjoy the writing workshops and speculative fiction that were on my docket in 2023. My latest thought is that I needed some relief from the very contemporary work in which my recent reading as well as my teaching has concentrated. I’ve been excessively driven by professional ambitions during my adult life, sweating the so-called failures more than I would like to. I tend to be all too aware of how the contemporary writers I read and teach jostle for social media attention, space in big periodicals, prizes, and the rest. It helps my sanity to shrug off that hyper-focus and go back to Ginsberg, O’Hara, Plath, Brooks, and others. I feel reasonably expert, well-read, able to swim in these old currents. Their work is personal, but it’s not personal to me, except in that I’ve been companioned by their work for so many years. Phew. […]

I was thrilled to see my 2020 novel Unbecoming cited on Substacker-nonfiction writer-poet-tarot reader-astrologer Cameron Steele’s list of “magical” books she read in 2023. See her full post at the wonderful newsletter interruptions here, but she calls it “one of my favorite novels I read this year, and not only because its plot includes both magic and menopause, two parameters of my own daily life. Wheeler is the kind of poet whose poems always make you wish there were more of her to read. Ghostly. Luminous. Fungal.”

Lesley Wheeler, Teaching the poetic 50s, with sincere relief

Lately, my favorite words are those that make
me feel the textures of things: cotton and copper,

eggshell, seagrass; waxed flax thread, bone folder,
crease. When I am folding paper and cutting book

board, the edge of the blade moving over the surface
makes a sound like a miniature zipper, only softer.

Steam from the rice cooker scents the air.
Night drops its paper screen over the windows.

Luisa A. Igloria, Being Here

For secondhand books, Westleton is the best NE Suffolk option, since it now boasts both the professional and well-organised newcomer, Barnabee’s Books, and the long-standing Chapel Books. The latter opens randomly at various times: the eccentric owner, sometimes clad in pyjamas and a woolly hat, will offer you a cup of tea and, if you ask nicely, usher you into the back office to inspect the antiquarian books. It’s a blissful instantiation of the ideal second-hand bookshop, though admittedly chilly in winter. We didn’t make it this time but it often has a lot of old editions of the classics, and always a substantial poetry section. Unless someone has bought them in the last year or two it also has a huge run of the Pali Text Society, which might be a top tip for someone, you never know. I can never buy them because we are always either without a car or the car is already completely full of bickering children, buggies and discarded rice cakes, more’s the pity. (Westleton also has a very good pub, a lovely church and a playground with a zip wire.)

Pali is a language closely related to Sanskrit, though generally written in Roman script, and it’s the language of most of the early Buddhist canon. There’s something peculiarly fascinating about two plainly closely related languages which nevertheless developed an entirely different literary style and atmosphere. The poetry of the Pali canon is quite unlike most Sanskrit poetry, even though early versions of many of the metres which became standard in classical Sanskrit can be found in it.

Much of the Pali canon is very old, dating from the first few centuries after the Buddha himself: roughly contemporary, that is, with the core texts of classical Greek literature, and older than Roman literature or the texts of the New Testament. Recently I reviewed Kaveh Akbar’s new Penguin Book of Spiritual Poetry, which includes poems or extracts from the earliest antiquity to today. Several of his best choices are Buddhist poems — Buddhist thought and writing has long been a popular recourse for Westerners seeking the spiritual-but-not-religious — and he includes a translation by Susan Murcott of one of the poems from the Pali canon. In my review (which you can read here), I expressed some reservations about Akbar’s inclusion of some fairly random bits of Sappho, as being vogueish rather than appropriate — there’s nothing really ‘spiritual’ about either of them, and the same point can be made about quite a few of the selections. But Sappho is really everywhere in anthologies these days. Even John Carey’s recent 100 Poets: A Little Anthology — a totally different sort of anthology from Akbar’s — has a bit of Sappho. Indeed both Carey and Akbar, for all their differences, made the same decision to represent the whole of ancient Greek literature with just two authors: Sappho and Homer.

Victoria Moul, Book shopping in Suffolk (and why we make too much of Sappho)

Since Christmas the view down from my desk chair has been this – Reggie, a dachshund I am dog-sitting – and I have been a member of the club of dog-keeping small presses. Kevin Duffy of Bluemoose Books posts regular photos of Lottie. William Boyd recalls visiting the ‘small cramped offices’ of Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine and of the London Magazine editions (the model for CB editions): ‘Books everywhere, of course, but there were two dogs sprawled under his desk …’ Ross published Auden’s ‘Talking to Dogs’ in a 1971 issue of the London Magazine: ‘From us, of course, you want gristly bones/ and to be led through exciting odourscapes –/ their colours don’t matter – with the chance/ of a rabbit to chase or of meeting/ a fellow arse-hole to nuzzle at …’

Charles Boyle, Dog days

A while ago Charles Boyle (CBeditions) noticed that a book he published which the TLS described as “an astonishing achievement” and the Literary Review described as “a masterpiece” sold fewer than 100 copies in its first year.

In ‘Next time you dive’ (or How to play a poem) from “The Friday Poem” Jon Stone “illustrate[s] what he thinks we need to do to broaden the readership of poetry“

Helena Nelson has a piece in the same issue. In “Are poetry reviews pointless?” she writes “First, I want to test out Stone’s theory that I can profitably respond to a set of poems as “toys”. Second, I want to review a book in a non-typical way, avoiding “florid” terms and a standard evaluative stance.“

When I read a book, I write it up online. I used to try the odd review-style write-up – I keep a list of longer poetry reviews online. Nowadays my write-ups are mostly jottings. I posted a write-up each Wednesday and Saturday, which used to match my reading speed. Now that I’m reading (and listening to) more books, I’m filling up future Wed/Sat slots so fast that I’m up to April 2025. So to slow myself down I think I’ll try to write some reviews again.

Rather than toys, I think I react to poems as if they were disposable alien technology – if I don’t understand what a part does, I remove it to see what happens, or re-assemble the pieces. Biologists try to understand DNA that way sometimes. However, I have a feeling that I might end up writing similar reviews to before, “fun to play with” becoming a substitute for “good” when describing a poem.

Tim Love, How to review poetry

When we consider English poets of the last century or so, few – if any – have surely written about trees as extensively, and as well, about trees as Michael Hamburger. […] In ‘Oak’, a tree ‘alone looks compact, in a stillness hides / Black stumps of limbs that blight or blast bared; / And for death reserves its more durable substance.’ The poem’s ending is reminiscent of the writings of Roger Deakin, another Suffolk-dweller, who wrote extensively about trees, especially in Wildwood, and lived in an Elizabethan house with great, creaking beams:

How by oak-beams, worm-eaten,
This cottage stands, when brick and plaster have crumbled,
In casements of oak the leaded panes rest
Where new frames, new doors, mere deal, again and again have rotted.

Unsurprisingly, Hamburger also wrote, in the section’s last three poems, about the Great Storm, of 17 October 1987, and its aftermath. ‘A Massacre’ begins in an uncharacteristically Blakean vein,

It came like judgement, came like the blast
Of power that, turned against itself, brings home
Presumption to the unpresuming also,
To those who suffered power and those unborn.

Throughout Hamburger’s tree poems there is a deeply-felt admiration, both explicit and implicit, for the endurance of trees.

Matthew Paul, On Michael Hamburger on trees

I have been down several rabbit holes since I last posted. Many of them are to do with the updated translation of the Charm of Nine Herbs I’ve been working on in a random fashion for a while. I have been pondering words like ‘poison’, ‘venom’, ‘plague’, ‘in-flying infection’. I’ve been thinking about ‘elf-shot’ and the notion that tooth-ache is caused by worms gnawing at decayed teeth. I’ve been wondering what it was like to try to heal people when you didn’t know much beyond the basics of anatomy, and didn’t have access to microscopes.

I discovered historical records of a ‘yellow plague’ that ravaged this area in the 5th and 6th century, killing at least one local king, which led me to wonder about the other colourful diseases mentioned in the text. Epidemics, food poisoning and diseases caused by polluted water must have been common – are the words ‘plague’, ‘poison’ and ‘venom’ just the best guess for the causes of illness too small to see without the naked eye?

I’m also querying my identification of atterlothe – I went for ‘burdock’ for what seemed to be good reasons – it is an alterative, native and well-known, exists in more than one species (because the only other use of the word refers to the ‘smaller’ atterlothe being used with betony for coughs) and generally fits the bill. But on the other hand, there is another Old English name for burdock – ‘clate‘, and down the rabbit hole I went. I looked at speedwell, which was indeed used with betony for coughs, self-heal (no mention in Old English texts), bistort, cockspur grass, Viper’s bugloss, which Culpeper says was used as a substitute for speedwell, and now I’m eyeing up cinquefoil and vervain (I would love it to be vervain!). The trouble is that Old English scholars tend to be poor at botany, and botanists tend to blank Old English. And both are a bit rubbish about monasteries. But that is another rabbit hole, and yes, I did go down it!

Elizabeth Rimmer, Down the Rabbithole

With its invocational quality, the poem begins almost like a version of Genesis I, calling the earth into being through language. In section 10 (J in the abecedarian), however, the reader learns that “atom bombs exist// Hiroshima, Nagasaki…” after which nothing on earth, and therefore the poem, can be the same. So, in the following section, the world has become imminently and unavoidably mortal, and creation begins to operate in reverse: “people, livestock, dogs exist, are vanishing;/ tomatoes, olives vanishing, the brownish/ women who harvest them, withering, vanishing,/ while the ground is dusty with sickness…” (26). As you can imagine, the Fibonacci pattern means that the sections get quite long by the time we get to the letter N, where the book leaves off mid-alphabet for nuclear destruction. What began as the enumeration of life’s splendor ends as an elegy mourning the profound, irretrievable losses humanity has perpetrated on the planet.  By this point in the poem, the earth has transformed into a post-nuclear wasteland wherein the cities are poison and children are living in caves.

Christensen’s exquisite use of language does not claim to heal or “solve” the sickness and death wrought by modernity and its death-drive, nor does it undermine the gravity of the destruction. Rather, the hybridity and, thus, the magical thinking of the poem comes from its collaboration with both human-made (alphabetical) and organic (mathematical) orders as a method of structuring some understanding of ecological disaster, of the end of the world we know and love. In other words, to comprehend the terror of mass extinction, Christensen concocts a spell from an essential pattern within creation, the design we find in the structure of leaves, trees, seashells, ferns, spider webs, and even the shape of an ocean wave. Death inseparable from life, as always. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Apricot Trees Exist

I don’t have much writing time here this morning, because I’m trying to get a rough draft of my sermon done before we go across the mountains for a quick trip to see my inlaws’ new house in east Tennessee.  I want a rough draft so that I can let it percolate and return to it to see if I’ve got any additional ideas.  I’m at the point of sermon writing where it seems stupid and just repeating what we already read and what is the point of it all?

It’s never as bad as I think that it is.  Going through this phase where I think it’s pure drivel week after week is both tiring and a comfort.  At least I know it’s not unusual to doubt my writing this way.

It’s interesting to think about sermon writing and the other types of writing that I do.  Blogging feels less formal to me, and very few people are likely to read a blog post.  I’m not paid to do it.  I don’t usually go through the phase where I think it’s all too stupid.  

I think of yesterday’s poetry writing process.  I had a vision of Winnie the Pooh in the old folks’ home, and I wondered what had happened to the rest of the characters.  Writing the poem was a delight.  Is it profound?  It doesn’t seem as profound as some of the things I’ve written, but it also doesn’t seem as trivial as some poems I’ve written.  These days, I’m just happy whenever I write something that could be a poem.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Pure Drivel Phase of Writing

I’d like to say this girl is unusual, but when the high school swimmers are in the locker room, I hear a litany of complaints about their sylph-like bodies. The girls are forever sharing advice and cosmetics and clothes and romantic tips.  “I think one of my boobs is getting bigger than the other. Can you tell?” “Do you have any coverup—I have new zit in my cleavage.” “Do you shave your toes?” And then, there’s always the question,  “Do I look fat in this?” as they giggle and twirl in front of one another.

I wonder if the boy swimmers are primping in the Men’s locker room. If there’s a skinny kid among them who stands on the scale every day and worries about his weight. Who pinches his skin and wishes he were leaner, smaller, or somehow other? Do men get cellulite or fear it? 

I am reminded of the premise in Buddhist psychology that we don’t see who and what we really are. We lack clarity. It’s as if we are looking through dirty glasses that we can’t clean.

I think of this now as I try to edit on my latest book, Son of a Bird, a memoir, due out in 2025. I keep changing the sentence-order, questioning my word choices, my logic, my everything. I feel an overwhelming sense of self-doubt. If only I had a little more clarity. I am beginning to wonder if I am just too much of a perfectionist. Am I, like the anorexic teenager, unable to see what is in front of me?

I have been emailing my editorial questions back and forth with two accomplished women-poets. They, too, are agonizing over their final manuscripts. They, too, lack confidence in their own vision. I also correspond regularly with several male poets, but I never hear them questioning their validity in the same way. I’ve never had a male poet send me an accepted manuscript and ask, “Is this as bad as I fear it is?”  

Nin Andrews, Tis the Season for Resolutions

This post will be short – I am still not up to a great deal of writing, but I am so twisted by my own silence I have grasped the “don’t get it right get it written” attitude. At the end of last year you may remember I realised the degree self censorship suffocates my work – I filter before I even get it onto the page. I’ve had a strange disconnect from my thoughts and feelings over the last few weeks. This may be a kind of self-protection or it may be a more M.E. related thing – perhaps a mix of the two. Whatever the reason it is unsettling. I reached the point of sitting outside for a while yesterday just so I could feel something.

And it seems to have worked. I’m working with prompts from Wendy Pratt’s “What to look for in winter” course and finally, finally I have written something. It’s not going to set the world on fire but my pen and hand, head and heart have reconnected. I am healing, yet again. I am reading, I am writing, I am feeling I am breathing. Deeply.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, New Year begins on the 10th of January

Yesterday, I was happy for isolation and canceled plans as the snow was falling in huge and hefty chunks outside the windows, all very nice when you don’t have to brave errands and bus stops.

Today, however, still sniffling and coughing, it was back to the usual grind. The days seem really short no matter what time I get up, and dark, as if the sky is low and gray, hovering just over the highrises over by the water. It’s hard to get productive or be useful beyond the required things (those involving money and deadlines), but I did manage to draft a new poem and send some others to a newly discovered horror-ish journal. […]

In other creative news, a new switch-up at the platform I use for posting e-zines forced me into paying for what used to be free, which means, in an effort to get as much out of it as I can each month, I may be posting a lot more zines a lot more regularly (I’ve been hoarding them the last few months waiting to get a chance to work on them. This ideally will mean monthly zines, which may be writing, may just be art or other random nonsense, but will still be fun to see what unfolds. The first offering?  This short series of poems and collages I made late last year, URBAN CRYPTOZOOLOGY…

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 1/10/2024

My face burning with the Siberian wind, my toes locked solid with numbness in my cheap boots, deeply regretting I didn’t bring the green knit hat that I bought at the hospital gift shop when we gathered to Decide, crying in the waiting area with the austere, honest doctor who was there to Present Facts and ask us What We Wanted as a Family. Deeply regretting I didn’t have that green knit hat now, to protect me from the glacial and bitter bite of grief, to envelop my head with the loving intent of the person who made it, perhaps pre-cognating the anguish of its recipient.

What lessons, Cold? What learning, now in my bereavement. When will the warming be? In what timelessness will I wait, to forgive and be forgiven, for the final release of this sorrow that strangles my sinews in its bleak and Polar branches? When clemency. When the sun’s climb into my orbit? God said to wear a coat. I wrap myself in it and remember the Three Friends of Winter: pine, bamboo and plum, thriving in the frost, and I reach, each for each, dreaming of Spring.

Kristen McHenry, The Anatomy of Cold

For those hexed by the polar vortex, swarmed by severe thunderstorms, januaried to death by wintergeddon, I wish I could strike a match of California sunshine to warm you. Inject the blonde rush of Venice beach bliss into your chilled blood. I say damn the frostbitten machine of bitter cold weather. Crank the audacious anthems of acetylene sunrises. Rhyme your shine to summertime.

Rich Ferguson, Rhyme Your Shine

Frost from people’s mouths, and vapors
like chilled aerosol rolling across a blurred surface,
and wind, a muffled character from offstage 
unwinding its repression; now sandals won’t do.

An artist made me hear silence with his
violin; at first, the irritation of a bow bothering
a string – people coughing, dropping pens.
But then ice shards talking?  Longer shards

with more between; the breath of dreamers
in the spheres, spectral celebration
and those who ease noise into quiet presence.

Jill Pearlman, Wind Chill Symphonic

I don’t make new year’s resolutions. I used to, but not any more. It’s not that I don’t want to ‘change’ or ‘do new things’ or ‘have new adventures’: I just don’t see why any of those kinds of decisions needs to happen at a point in the year when I tend to be at a low ebb and energy seems harder to come by. If anything, I long, this year, to be completely ordinary. I’m stealing here from the evergreen and still-amazing blog of Simon Parke, who as always says it first and better and with fewer words.

What do I mean by ‘ordinary’? The church uses it to denote ‘the season of the Church year when Christians are encouraged to grow and mature in daily expression of their faith outside the great seasons of celebration of Christmas and Easter and the great periods of penance of Advent and Lent.’ I like that phrase ‘outside the great seasons of celebration’. I also like ‘daily expression’. They aren’t very sexy, instagrammable. They suggest hiddenness, a kind of dogged fidelity to practice that isn’t for show, but just is. That’s what I will be aiming for this year, not via a grad resolution but via small changes to habits that no one will know about but me.

God knows, I need them. I absolutely loved publishing my book of poems The Wind and the Rain last year. (Just as I absolutely loved Christmas.) But it kind of diverts attention, for me, from the real thing of just, well, getting on with it which largely involves reading, walking, taking the odd photo and staring into space. And waiting. Absolutely waiting for something to arrive.

Anthony Wilson, On publishing and Christmas

Silence in the comic strip as if only puffs of speech and thought like clouds of breath or actual clouds were hanging in the emptied rooms, the vacant roads, the grass outside the house. There once were people. Or soon will be. There once were the things they said or thought or would say. If there’s wind, it’s invisible, moving through the panels like a vague presentiment of the end of what—possibility, communication, ink? We say what we cannot say, think the impossible, something edgeless, blurry, the heart, useless, has lost its chambers and so pulls and pushes, sucks and squirts in unrecognizable rhythm, pumps because what else is it to do? A kettle boils for no-one. The sprinkler is on. The difference between everything and nothing is not clear.

Gary Barwin, Nancy without Nancy

That he is vanishing all men know:
a lift slant eyelid tells them so,
not that I think it’s noticed much —
not a vanishment as such —
so much as shrinking from the touch,
a disinclination to know at all,
all that he knew in time before.

Dale Favier, Vanishment

Have you ever come across a lit mag that has asked for a photo of you when you submit your work?

This question came up in our Lit Mag Chat yesterday. I thought it was interesting. I’ve submitted to a few lit mags that have requested a photo. In each case the photo was optional. In each case I declined.

Why did I decline?

Personally, I find it a bit invasive. What if I don’t have a great photograph of myself? What if I don’t like my own physical appearance? On top of everything else I worry about with my writing at the time of submission, do I now also have to worry about my hair and my teeth?

Becky Tuch, How do you feel about lit mags that ask for a photo of you when you submit your work?

In Rome this past time, I knew I’d be returning home to my book Apples on a Windowsill arriving soon after in the world. One of the first things I did when we got there was to put some apples on the windowsill. These ones. When we got to our place we didn’t know what the light was going to be like at what time of day. We’d looked at all the reviews and photos of the apartment, but the reality is always a bit different. What would the view from the windows be/feel like? What would the windowsills really be like? How could we adapt ourselves to the conditions? […]

I always think it’s an interesting time in the writer’s life after a book has just barely made it into the world. You’re done with it, but then talking about it and reading from it will often spark more ideas on the same subject…and then, where to put those? Are the ideas for something new…or just to hold on to for oneself?

It felt so bittersweet to photograph these apples on a windowsill in 2023 after the book had been “put to bed.” But also, hopeful — the process of making, creating, trying, delighting, that all can still continue. The certainty of changing conditions will always be opening up new vistas….

Shawna Lemay, The Writing Life, Ongoing

this is the problem,
poetry plus coffee plus
the immensity of
unfairness on a tropical
winter morning and
suddenly time is
pixelating and everything
is smudged neon green
and pink and voices
no longer match the
lips that move, all
desire to be is frozen,
life buffers, asking for
permission to end,
coffee burns your burnt
tongue and the poem
refuses to end with
word or punctuation,
and all this, still, at 5:52
AM, unless the clock too
has stopped. Dissolving.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Life Buffers

Can one dream while lying awake? This proximity of cloud. Consensus, the end of parenthetical. Draws curtains, threat. This pragmatism: my mother gave birth to it. Melancholy, melancholy. Ask anything you want. What measure, propositions. Withdraw. Jolting, epiphanic effect. This sentence, shadows; these missives on death. Slammed door, sliver lining. Declarative: I would have liked to move the earth. Imagine, the desire for mute prose. Liquid. This body or death. This end of text.

rob mclennan, from Fair bodies of unseen prose

my grandfather walked out of Eden
the world is large as he discovered
there is enough room for everyone

Paul Tobin, ENOUGH ROOM FOR EVERYONE

This one is 17×57. It’s tentatively called “A Mother Who Loves Books,” because I was thinking of my mother when I made it, and the text is a poem from Let it Be a Dark Roux, “My Mother’s Perfume.” It’s linen, and I am loving how unfinished linen looks like on the edges. I’ve been working on a few more, unfinished, pieces using torn linen, and I can’t imagine tiring of the tearing for awhile. There’s something powerfully, almost…archaic about linen that’s unraveling a bit at the edges.

Sheryl St. Germain, Color Dreams

Last week, I attended the launch of Matthew Stewart’s collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press) and Mat Riches’s Collecting the Data. The latter, available here from Red Squirrel Press, is Mat’s long-awaited and excellent debut pamphlet. The launch itself was a joyous and merrily raucous occasion, with readings not only from the two launchers, but also some mighty fine guest readers – Eleanor Livingstone, Hilary Menos and Maria Taylor.

There was a lot of love and affection in the room for Mat and his warm, witty  and well-crafted poems.

Matthew Paul, On Mat Riches’s ‘Half Term at Longleat Safari Park’

And it’s only now that I’ve managed to really sit and think about the fact that I have an actual book out there in the world. I’m not 100% convinced I will ever truly come to terms with it. There’s certainly a feeling of well, what now…? The poems are out there, people actually own them in a book. I’m not there to read them to them with an intro. That’s quite a strange feeling to come to terms with, but I’m getting there. What do I write next? When? How? For who? All good questions, but not for today. And not a question for this book.

I’ve found myself sitting and staring at it whenever I’ve had a spare moment. It’s a beautifully produced thing, just looking at it as an object it astonishing.

Mat Riches, Dating the collective

Last weekend I attended a funeral for a family member. “Have you been doing any writing?” my cousin’s husband asked me. He was a musician when I first knew him; after his son was born he gave up playing professionally and took a full-time day job with good pay and benefits. For years he has asked me this almost every time I see him, and my answer is always the same: “Not really.”

“How come?”

I shrug and smile. The real answer feels like too much to say in a big group of people standing around a small kitchen. I don’t actually know what the real answer is, but I know that much about it.

There is nothing like an unexpected funeral for someone younger than your parents to make you contemplate what it is you are doing with your life, and how it might be even shorter than you have, in recent years, come to realize it is.

“Are you just feeling like you don’t have anything to say?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. That is a truth: I don’t have anything I feel compelled to say. But I was also thinking: Or maybe too much. And: There’s not enough time. And: There are so many voices in the world already, so much that I feel like I’m drowning in the cacophony.

Rita Ott Ramstad, It’s been a lot

this room this bright quilt
winter waits on the other side
of these dark windows
elsewhere cities
in dust and rubble
everywhere cities

on fire all this has nothing
to do with me the naked child running
through fire has nothing to do with me
these buildings become dust
have nothing to do with me
I sit on this bright quilt

blue and white and red
patterns of flowers and thread
I drink from my modern porcelain
blue and white cup a pale
version of Italian cappuccino
what is true? who is to blame?

Sharon Brogan, there is no good news

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

A poem usually starts for me with a bit of language that I overhear or receive subconsciously. Many poems start with my wife, the poet Kodi Saylor, saying something incredible. I’ll often respond, “That sounds like a line of a poem,” and she’s usually like, “Well, go and write it then.” Usually that little snippet of language has some rhythmic quality that suggests a next line. That’s usually enough to get started. I let the rhythm and associations of sound and image suggest themselves and just go with it. The poem emerges. I try not to overthink it, but of course I do sometimes. Currently, I’m much more of a writer of short pieces that accumulate into a larger project. The stakes are lower for me that way which is important for me to combat the voice of the perfectionist that lives inside me.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matt Broaddus

My name is on the book cover, but the book is in fact written by many hands. My grateful thanks to the many Singaporeans in America who shared their stories with me and gave me permission to write them up in verse. Here it is, a book about us: SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA.

“Based on personal interviews, these poems together tell a part of the story of the migration of Singaporeans to the United States of America. Sample and Loop traces the nonlinear, multidimensional, and surprising trajectory of lived experience in musical verse. Here are the Ceramicist, the Pediatrician, the Scenic Designer, the Chef, the Porn Star, and a host of other migrant-pilgrims sharing the tales of their lives even as they continue to make those lives in a country not of their birth. By narrating their discoveries, troubles, hopes, and sorrows, they refract a powerful beam of light on both countries and compose a wayward music for the road.”

All sale proceeds go to Singapore Unbound, the NYC-based literary organization that envisions and works for a creative and fulfilling life for everyone. You can find the book on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

Jee Leong Koh, Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America

[The Poetics of Wrongness], published earlier this year, is made up of four sections of newly edited texts originally delivered as lectures as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series (2016). Publisher Wave Books calls it [Rachel] Zucker’s “first book of critical non-fiction” and refers to its sections as “lecture-essays of protest and reckoning.” It says the poetics of wrongness itself — the list of anti-tenets Zucker offers as a new poetics — offers a “way of reading, writing and living that might create openness, connection, humility and engagement.” […]

This book strips off the itchy robe of what’s presumed to make poems successful (“Oh, teacher, I say you are wrong,” p. 8) and streaks through the halls of academia and publishing. It jumps over gates. It walks on the grass. It picks locks. This book encourages a build-our-own poetics. This book is a middle finger to the tools of the patriarchy embedded in so many of the “rules.” It disturbs the universe that makes oppressors comfortable and offers renewed, modern senses for beauty and time.

Carolee Bennett, my love letter to “the poetics of wrongness”

tonight i will show you
one thing. here is the bowl of whipped cream.
here is the spoon i use. here is
the way my stomach feels full of clouds
when i am done. here is how
i try to lick the last tastes of sweetness
from the bottom of the bowl.

Robin Gow, 11/11

One of my goals for 2023 was to want nothing from my creative work but good work. I mean, obviously, we all want things, book sales, publication opportunities, someone to just acknowledge that we exist and don’t suck. And partaking in things like social media and promo is part of it. But earlier this year I decided that those things, that kind of scrambling, was not where my best efforts lay and maybe I get more enjoyment from sharing and letting the chips fall as they may. I would continue to write and share things and express myself and create tiny strange worlds. It was freeing, but also think it kind of tripped me up. What to do? Where to go? If I am not struggling to get people to buy my books, read my publications, come to readings, etc. how does anyone ever encounter my work in a way that makes me feel seen? I tried to channel those energies into the writing instead, but what happened is that every great piece I wrote felt like yet another brick in a wall that made me lonelier. I am not sure I have crawled out of this funk just yet, but I am writing daily again. So we will see how I fare.

Maybe it’s chaos. And maybe it’s okay that it’s chaos. That it all means nothing. I will write and people will read it or they won’t. They will buy books and read posts or maybe they won’t. I will just keep doing my weird little things and take the joy from that. No one cares. It’s terrifying and sad. But it’s also kinda magical. Like tiny spells you throw out into the world and maybe one lands somewhere that needs it.

Kristy Bowen, chaos and magic

In 2000, friends of mine saw [Stanley] Kunitz read at the Dodge Festival. They both witnessed him helped to the stage and from their seats, they could see nothing but the crown on his balding head. But then something incredible happened. As Kunitz began to read, he became taller, his face appearing above the podium. It was as if poetry (they said) had restored his youth. Reading his poetry to a receptive audience brought him more fully to life. I have never forgotten that…

Here is a stellar interview I discovered today between Gregory Orr and Stanley Kunitz taped when Kunitz was 88 years old. He reads “Father and Son,” a poem written when Kunitz was a young man, giving a hard and uncompromising vision of his dad. Orr offers that Kunitz is the first poet to write of his father in this way. Kunitz shakes that accolade off but he has lots of important things to say about poetry. He also reads, “The Portrait,” a kind of self-portrait, perhaps one of the first pieces that has led to our preponderance of self-portrait poems today.

GO: What purpose does poetry serve?

SK: Poetry is most deeply concerned with telling us what it feels like be alive. To be alive at any given moment….Before the poets we had no idea what it meant to be a human person on this earth.

Wow. Kunitz lived to be 100. He won the Pulitzer prize when he was 63, became Poet Laureate at 95. He is an incredible example of poetry being a life long pursuit. When it was an incredibly unpopular thing to do, Kunitz consciously chose to elevate domestic experience in poetry. This was before Roethke, before Lowell, before Plath.

Susan Rich, Stanley Kunitz on my fridge, in the garden, and the joy of surviving.

Are your dreams shuffling
like cards (a random draw
flashing in the dim light),

stretching like strange cats,
or climbing upwards,
clutching to rockweed,

stiff salt stalks of kelp
guiding seaworthy
travelers from weight

of the waters to
the weightlessness
of approaching stars?

PF Anderson, Dear You

Writing is noticing, but it can also be the song of oneself. It can speak of who you are. And it gives you the opportunity of declaring it in your own voice and in your own words.  As UK writer John Berger writes, “Nobody knows exactly why birds sing as much as they do. What is certain is that they don’t sing to deceive themselves or others. They sing to announce themselves as they are.”

We can speak of the experience of others. We can speak of the experience of ourselves. In writing, you take agency. It is your story, your words and you are saying them when you want to. And writing imagines community. Perhaps you imagine sharing your words with another. Of creating a connection. Of being in this—all of this—together.

There’s an iconic poem called “Motto,” by Bertolt Brecht that you perhaps have heard:

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

What does singing about the dark times mean? If we sing a happy song in a dark time, we know we are singing in the context of that dark time. Maybe it is a defiant, subversive act, a refusal to despair or be cowed by the darkness. If we sing darkly about the dark times, we name what is happening. We name what we are experiencing. We remember our humanity, our shared humanity. Our story may be dark, but we are the ones telling it. To tell the story is to have agency. […]

As a small child in Ireland, I remember hunting around my dad’s office and finding a little box that perfectly held a hundred blank index cards. The box seemed so magical and full of possibility I knew I had to write some magic spells, some mysterious incantations. I snuck the box into my room and immediately began writing on the cards. I didn’t know any spells but I wanted to capture the feeling of magic so I just made up a script. No one could read it, not even me. But that wasn’t the point. I filled all the index cards with this cursive hoodoo. My goal was to create a feeling, to use the form of spells and the loops and swirls, scratches and knurls of my invented script. I was whispering to life itself. We were connecting. My writing put me at the centre of speaking. In the middle of secrets. 

Gary Barwin, THE SONG OF OURSELVES IN THE SHADOW OF NOW, a speech about the importance of writing in dark times

This poem had its genesis in my move from London to the village of Rottingdean on the south coast of England, where you can stand on the South Downs and listen to the sea at the same time. Words and images often float up when I’m walking here, and I type them into my mobile app before they disappear. Then, when there are enough of them and they’ve had time to ripen, I sit at my computer and see what happens.

Winter shadows are accentuated in open spaces. When there are contours too, you get shadow magic, where you see your shape, or that of others, distorted, elongated, living a separate existence. Much of A Pocketful of Chalk is about seeing the ordinary from a different perspective, finding new aspects of yourself in the full glare of nature. We create mechanical things such as a windmill to harvest nature, and perhaps, because of this, become giants in our own minds. By the end of the poem, however, I’m insubstantial, ‘I float in the beaks of birds’.

Drop-in by Claire Booker (Nigel Kent)

At the terminal’s

edge, sunset outlines a row of cranes so they look
like a fleet of otherworldly sentinels, snouts

scouting the air. And I can hardly bear to watch the news:
for instance, today, a father wept as he dug, in vain,

for his children’s bodies. Around the bombed ruins of homes
can we say it is by luck or grace the living grieve? Even

the youngest ones can’t stop trembling: this word, from
the Latin tremulus—pertaining to the trauma of a wound.

Luisa A. Igloria, Tremble

My first purchase from Trickhouse Press was the inaugural Oulipo Puzzle Book (Spring 2022), one of a series of four delightful anthologies of poem puzzles that are informed by various constraints. In your introduction to Issue 4, you write:

‘My secret belief about Oulipo, in poetry and otherwise, is that the joy of Oulipo lies in the crafting of an Oulipo work moreso than in the reading of one…. What I’ve attempted to begin with this series of puzzle books is to put the pen in the reader’s hand, quite literally, and create spaces for readers to engage in Oulipoean thinking themselves. An Oulipo puzzle isn’t just a puzzle or a word game – it can also be a writing prompt, a springboard, a summertime, an autumn leaf, or a winter wondering land.’

Can you expand on this, with particular reference to your own relationship to poetry – as a reader, student, editor, and writer?

Dan [Power]: When I was a kid I was obsessed with wordsearches and mazes – actually I still am – and I liked making them and drawing them even more than trying to solve them. It’s very satisfying when you’re putting together a wordsearch or a crossword and you find the perfect word that intersects with the other words you’ve put down, and fills the space you’ve got left. Similarly with Oulipo, I like the challenge of writing under a constraint. I’m not great at it, and I think the things I’ve written that I’m most proud of came about from writing with absolutely no constraints, but it’s much more satisfying to complete an Oulipo poem because it has a kind of finality to it – there’s set rules, and a task to be completed within those rules, and eventually you get to a point where you can say for sure that it’s finished. There’s no finality with an unconstrained poem, you can keep editing and changing it forever. I thought of Oulipo writing as a kind of problem-solving, and a puzzle book working with Oulipian constraints seemed like a logical thing to make.

The idea for the Oulipo puzzle books came a few years ago when I was trying to get my head around how cryptic crosswords work, and I realised they had their own pretty consistent sets of constraints, and I wanted to see what other kinds of puzzles were possible by placing different sets of constraints on different kinds of puzzles. I also liked the idea of Oulipo as a method or a process, and was always more interested in the process of creating an Oulipo work than the finished work itself, trying out different combinations of words, exploring all possible avenues, tracing all possible connections… placing constraints on a piece of writing really makes you consider all the different detours it can take! As I said in the quote you mentioned, the puzzle books are about trying to give the reader that experience. The unfinished puzzles aren’t the poems, and the solutions aren’t either, they’re more like prompts – the poetry is going on in the reader’s head, it’s the thinking and the problem-solving itself.

Marian Christie, Anything could happen – An Interview with Dan Power of Trickhouse Press

The launch event for the Hastings Stanza Anthology last month was standing room only, and we were thrilled to raise several hundred pounds for the brilliant Refugee Buddy Project. Copies are still available (ask me) and since we’ve covered our costs all sales income now goes to the Project. The cover features a painting by the multi-talented Judith Shaw and there’s lots of lovely work in this book as you can see from the below.

I went to the London launch of Clare Best‘s new collection Beyond the Gate last month and it was a super evening. Unfortunately, having to leave to catch a train while Clare was still surrounded by a crowd of acolytes, I was delighted when my signed copy arrived in the post. It’s an excellent collection. I do love Clare’s work.

Also on my ‘to be read’ pile: Isabel Galleymore Significant Other (Carcanet) and Jane Clarke A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe), both poets I’m going to be interviewing soon for the podcast. Jane’s book was shortlisted for the Forward Prize this year and is on the TS Eliot shortlist. And I’m pretty sure Isabel’s collection was on the shortlists a couple of years ago.

Good news on the submissions front – Pindrop Press has offered to publish my collection next year and I’ve signed the contract, so I guess it’s official.  I’ve been so impressed with editor Sharon Black’s communication and enthusiasm. I feel very fortunate indeed, and in safe hands.

Robin Houghton, Currently reading, plus an anthology & a contract

I find it impossible not to feel guilty that I’m living a life without hardship and pain when others are not. But guilt is a pretty useless emotion, isn’t it, and rather self-indulgent. I have allowed myself to switch off the news and to think of other things once I’ve written and donated and done the small empathetic actions available to me.

On Saturday, I met with others from Trowbridge Stanza, the monthly poetry group I organise, and I ran a workshop centred on the Penned in the Margins anthology Adventures in Form. There were ten of us, reading about, trying out exercises, writing and sharing fragments of writing that might become poems. The session was quite tiring but fun and stimulating, according to feedback!

Josephine Corcoran, Guilt and Empathy

We stand on the street corner
for those whose streets run red
with blood and fire.

We stand on the street corner,
praying to awaken
from our collective nightmare,

to discover it was all a dream,
that we are safe in the arms of loved ones,
that all we hear are birds

and the laughter of children.

Jason Crane, POEM: Vigil

It’s a wide spectrum between the frictions of our daily lives and the bombs and rubble of Gaza and Ukraine, the Peace Wall in Belfast, but we’re all on it somewhere. When my Jewish friends worry about the surge in hate crimes, in verbal abuse on social media and on the streets, I sympathise of course, it must be horrible and frightening, but I’ve been surprised to find it so difficult. On summer Saturdays I have to listen to my neighbours singing songs about wading up to their knees in my blood, and we’re supposed to take it for granted – it’s just the marching season. When I hear people who wouldn’t personally be mean to a soul complaining that ‘you’re not allowed to say anything any more’, I wonder how their queer neighbours or their disabled friends feel about that. And when we say ‘we must be able to get along and why can’t people just be nice to each other?’ I think we don’t really understand peace at all.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Peace, Peace! They Say but There Is No Peace

gale force
how the shadows gesticulate
on the morning wall

Jim Young [no title]

“Where” was inspired by my maternal grandmother, who died in October 2000 after suffering from both cancer and Alzheimer’s. The poem began with a realization that what I wonder about more than where she is now, after her death, is where was she then, at the end of her life. Watching a loved one deteriorate is heartbreaking, and witnessing my vibrant grandmother lose access to her own memories—to her own life and sense of self—rocked me to my core. It was a formative experience for me as a human being and as a writer. I don’t think it’s an accident that so much of my work is concerned with memory.

I found myself, early on, testing the elasticity of the opening sentence. How much could it hold? How long could I extend it? The unwieldy nature of that first sentence reflects the difficulty I was having grappling with the subject matter. How best to articulate something that resists articulation? Then again, this is the work of poems, and—I think—work that poems are uniquely suited for. I think the commas create tension; those pauses that slow the reader down while at the same time building momentum because many of the sentences go on and on, and they’re loaded with repetition.

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

I’ve read many memoirs and non-fiction books about cognitive decline and living with a beloved person who has a neurodegenerative condition; from Oliver Sacks to the recent biography of Terry Pratchett and many of the books we’ve read in my “morbid book group,” information in these texts connects with the personal emotions involved in deeply complicated human ways. There are also quite a few poetry collections themed around this type of loss, and I ought to compile a list one of these days, because poetry has been helpful to me as my family and I contend with elders dealing with forms of dementia (and there are many forms). That fact has led me to wonder whether readers even need another poetry collection centered around cognitive loss. Since so many of my poems during the past four or five years intersect with or explore that topic, I have considered making a manuscript of them. I hesitate. Too much sadness?

Yet while the circumstances that evoke such poems are usually sad, the disease progression differs, as do the personalities of the persons with cognition loss and the personalities of their loved ones. Perspectives on the persons and the diseases also vary a great deal. Similarities exist–enough to make a reader feel recognized–but situations and value systems mean there are as many ways to write about dementia as there are to write about anything else. […]

These days, my mother sometimes seems unmoored from the present moment, but not absorbed in memory either–just kind of lost in the ozone. Self, language, memory…sometimes they slip away from her physical body. In this process, though, she has things to teach me. Just as my hospice patients do, and as their families do, by helping me to widen my understanding of human beings and how we get by in the world. Or how we flounder differently from one another. Or how we rescue one another.

I take this gradual loss into myself–that’s what most of us do–and it’s hard, it’s painful to keep myself open to learning and love when what I first notice is untethering and loss. But yesterday when visiting my mother I noticed she has a cobbled-together notebook in which she sometimes writes (in tiny, indecipherable script). Some pages she had divided into three columns, some have scraps of letters or newspaper clippings stapled to them. Are her pages a record, or a practice? She cannot tell me. Yet it was kind of amazing to realize she does this with apparent intent. She has her reasons, if not her reason in the classic sense.

Ann E. Michael, Untethering

I came across the most astonishing gentleman on YouTube this week named Troy Hawke. His entire shtick is dressing up in a ridiculously ornate suit, complete with an ascot, and walking around in public complimenting people. It’s really quite magical. I believe he is bestowed with a Godly gift. His compliments aren’t random or insincere, they are extremely incisive and show that he really sees the people that he compliments. In complimenting people, he shares a moment of joy and recognition with them. For example, he stops by a bench where two friends are chatting and says, “You look very comfortable in each other’s presence. It’s a lovely way to be with another human.” They light up with with delight at their friendship being seen and appreciated by another human being. I find his videos light and humorous, but also truly uplifting. And who doesn’t need some of that in the midst of what the world has become?

Kristen McHenry, DP Progress Pics, I Baked Bread, Compliment Man

I had a brain-wave a couple of months ago when I was out walking. Using my copy of Mammals of Prince Edward Island (And Adjacent Marine Waters),  my plan is to respond to entries in the book with a poem and a sketch. It’s a winter project for my personal enjoyment but I’ll share what I make on this blog. Please excuse my rough drawings – maybe just maybe, I’ll get better as I do more of them. Here’s my first poem and sketch.

E.E. Nobbs, The Flying Squirrel

It’s World Basking Shark Day. Airplane Mode Off.
Text Predictions On. Personal Data Up To Date.
I read your diary from before you knew me.
Bombs fall on refugee camps, hospitals, schools.
Ten thousand dead in a month. Save Draft.

Bob Mee, ON WORLD BASKING SHARK DAY, I READ THE BEEKEEPER’S BIBLE

I’ve been trying to prepare a 15-minute talk for my winery bookclub this Wednesday. We’ll be discussing the late Louise Gluck’s terrific book, Meadowlands.

I’ve taught classes to veterans and disadvantaged high school kids and college students, but I thought since I usually teach creative writing, I would instead talk more about how to write a poem than how to read one!

I know what I don’t want to say—poetry isn’t supposed to be an escape room, it’s supposed to be something enjoyed or appreciated the way a piece of visual art or music. Poetry isn’t autobiography—it can be memoirish, but it can also be fictionish.  But there are some tools poets use that non-poets might want to understand or know about, so I thought I’d talk about those—tone, diction, punctuation, sonics, images, metaphors, etc.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, How to Read a Poem, In Between Holidays, and Galloping Toward 2024

Yesterday I tried to take some old wooden rabbit run panels to the tip. It turns out that the tip is closed on Wednesdays, which I knew but thought, inexplicably, that it was already Thursday. I’ve not been well this week, which might explain my confusion. I’ve had a stupid a virus; which has been bad enough to make me uncomfortable and a bit brain-foggy with a cough and a heavy, liquid feeling in my lungs, but not bad enough for me to cancel work. I hate feeling vulnerable. And illness makes me feel exposed, and miserable and like my body is not my own. I have, however, enjoyed my work this week which has mostly been running early morning writing groups. There is something particularly special about the dark morning turning to light as you sit quietly, writing with others. It’s one of my favourite parts of being a facilitator, and of being a writer. I’ve fallen into a pattern of working from 6.30am until about 9am and then going walking with, and sometimes without, the dog. We don’t go so far anymore on account of the dog being quite elderly. But last week I walked up to the river which runs along the edge of our village. The river Hertford is a strange river, it rises just outside another nearby village, Muston, and despite being just a mile from the sea, it flows inland, down the wide, glacier carved valley where I live, where I have always lived. On the day I walked up to it I’d seen a fellow dog walker in the lane. I stroked the long muzzle of his lovely greyhound and we passed the time of day, talking about the ash and the beech leaves and how autumn had arrived so suddenly, how it seemed to do this every year, and that each year we were surprised. His dog waited patiently. My dog wound himself around my legs. He told me he’d been up to the river and had seen a king fisher for the first time in ages. I had never seen one, though had been with people when they had seen one. It seems I have often had my head turned the wrong way when the king fishers appear. On the day we; the dog and I, walked up to the river, we were lucky. We arrived on the wide metal bridge and stood patiently, or rather I stood patiently, but the dog got bored and started winding round my legs and trying to get into the river and then suddenly, out from under the bridge, there was the kingfisher. It was the colour of an Egyptian amulet, jewel-like, the most beautiful, bright blue I have ever seen, completely at odds with the brown, draping, wet landscape. I watched it flit down the length of the river and away and stood with my mouth open in an O of surprise. Perfect.

Wendy Pratt, If the Landscape is a Body then the Hertford is a Wound

Can we pray for rain yet?
Has time stopped?

Are we still family
even if we disagree?

Where is everyone else
in this cloud of unknowing?

Rachel Barenblat, Unknowing

I have been immersed in quilting since Wednesday afternoon.  It has been strange to resurface, strange to do other things.  I’ve gotten my reading responses done for tonight’s seminary class.  I’ve thought about other writing that I haven’t been doing, the writing that always slips to the bottom of my to do list when I have a chance to immerse myself in a retreat.

I’ve also been thinking about poets and quilters, wondering if there are similarities to what I’ve seen and experienced.  At the risk of talking in huge generalities, let me muse a bit.

–I am a person making it up as I go along.  I’m more in love with the fabric than with the quilting process.  I create quilts because it gives me a reason to collect fabric, but then I have to do something with it.  Once I might have thought about making a living with this art–even more reason to collect fabrics!  But now, I’m happy to be in my own corner of the world.

The same is true of writing.  Once I wanted to make a living with my writing, and if it should happen, I won’t complain.  But I want to do the writing I want to do, not what is likely to sell in the wider world.

–This week-end, I’ve watched many quilters working from kits.  Not only do the kits come with instructions and pictures, but they also come with pre-cut fabric.  There are designers out there that not only design the finished quilt, but they also design the fabrics.

I look at the pictures that come with the kit, and I think, no, I’d do it this way.  Nope, that color choice is all wrong.

In the writing world, the kit might represent an MFA program or a literary journal–that hope that there’s one way to do things, that we can unlock that one way if we go to the right school and get the right publications.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Quilters and Writers

The mixed-use heart.
All warmth and passion

or is it all red fury? 
Red Alert – a love or war 

emergency? 
Blood as in beating and alive,

or draining on a sidewalk?
We are unhappy people

in a happy world.  I heard
it said.  And it wobbled

in the red, fully lit garden.
Something will happen

We just don’t know what.

Jill Pearlman, Code RED

I talk to the birds about complicity
and courage. How both need wings.
How both burn red. How both grace
and macabre defy gravity. If only,
briefly. They come every evening.
Pied Wagtails with homes somewhere
I cannot see, to hop around on the
tiles and sing from the terrace walls.
All. All things can be obliterated in
moments.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Untitled -9

It’s a beautiful day in Portland, Oregon, sunny, with bright fall leaves blowing down and gray clouds massing in the distance, after days of rain, and that’s a peacock on the roof. I came here to help my daughter have a baby, and that has indeed happened. A beautiful baby named Lola, 8 lbs, 12 oz, 22 inches long. So far, she likes to sleep in the daytime and keep her parents awake from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., like lots of babies who sleep while the mother is active by day and kick around nocturnally. I am happy to hold this baby and stare at her. The activity that rocked her to sleep in the womb included a daily neighborhood walk that I got to do with the family a couple times before the birth, and that’s where the peacocks come in. Just as there is a flock of wild turkeys back at home, or trail turkeys, since they walk the Constitution Trail as well as the neighborhoods, here there is a flock of wild peacocks. Or you might say a pride of peacocks, a muster of peacocks, or an ostentation of peacocks. Although these local peacocks are quite modest and unostentatious. Shortly after getting this picture through my son’s window, I got to witness this one fly gently down to earth.

Then time stood still, as they say, suspended itself, and we had days of labor in a hospital room. The baby was born, and then my mother died, as if she had been waiting for the baby to come into the world before she went out of it.

Kathleen Kirk, Peacock on the Roof

立冬や椅子一つある古本屋　西生ゆかり

rittō ya isu hitotsu aru furuhonya

            beginning of winter−

            a second-hand bookstore

            with one chair inside

                                                Yukari Saisho

from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, November 2022 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 9, 2023)

It’s rare to read a poetry collection and enthuse about every one included in it. Inevitably some poems will resonate with us more than others. But Matt Morden’s collection, Stumbles in Clover (Snapshot Press 2007) has me savouring every single haiku on every single page. I felt like that when I first bought it and feel it again today.

Nigel Jenkins, on the back cover, said, ‘They are as spare and translucent as it’s possible to be, yet they are deeply affecting…’. ‘Spare’ could easily suggest something that has been pared back to the detriment of content and meaning. But Morden has such a wonderful eye for detail, and humanity observed, that his micro poems expand beyond their physical boundaries. They are like miniature doorways into shared emotions, felt experiences. And the natural world, where it appears, always feels, through suggestion, like a parallel to the human one. […]

I mentioned in a previous post that, for me, the best poets and poetry collections are the ones that fire me up to write too. Here are a couple of haiku written today, thanks to Matt Morden.

unsettled weather
she deletes her Whatsapp
while I am reading it

summer’s end
he buys me a chilli plant
called ‘Basket of Fire’

Lynne Rees, The Sealey Challenge

I came across a poem today that speaks with the voice of my aching heart. I was delighted to find the author is Amanda Gorman, whose poetic voice often resonates with me. She’s a poet for this moment on earth. Young, truthful, gifted, she speaks plainly with vibrant images, simply but with rhythm, alliteration, and assonance. Amanda Gorman is the author of The Hill We Climb and Other Poems. She was the youngest inaugural poet in America.

Right now, we are in a transitional world, upside down in our values, experiencing the hottest days on our planet and the most confusing and dichotomized (is that a word?) society. I am aging. At 74, my heart and my body hurt a lot of the time. We’ve survived a pandemic together, but somehow also apart. That experience has re-sculpted our way of life. Gorman’s poem felt as if it was torn from me.

Rachel Dacus, When Everything Hurts, Poetry Heals

While looking for a nonce meter form to use for this collection about sin-eaters and ornamental hermits, I’ve been wanting to follow numbers. 40. 42. 6.

Today, because of medication, my red blood cells are collectively at a low point—but if left alone, the individual cells would rise and fall independently in a staggered rhythm of roughly 40 days.

It takes 40 days to mend a fracture, and 40 days to replace the epidermis. Hindu women spend 40 days secluded after childbirth. Jesus spent 40 days in the desert. Muslims believe the dead may return on the 6^th day or on the 40^th.

The list goes on as far as you want to follow it. One half-truth will beget another.

In fact, you can pick any path alongside a river and follow it to the one sea.

This is my path.

Ren Powell, Searching for One True Form

John Greening’s recent, self-confessedly ‘tightly-focused’ little selection from Goethe’s vast output is, in part, a campaigning publication. In his Introduction, Greening notes the difficulties surrounding the great German poet’s presence in English: the sheer volume of work, the range of that work, the man’s polymathic achievements (as poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic), the long life untidily straddling all neat, period pigeon-holing. Christopher Reid has called him ‘the most forbidding of the great European poets’, but perhaps the English have come to see him as a mere jack-of-all-trades? And where do we turn to read and enjoy the poetry? Michael Hamburger’s and Christopher Middleton’s translations look more and more dated. David Luke’s Penguin Selected (1964; versified in 2005)is the most reliable source. But tellingly, as Greening says, one does not find young, contemporary poets offering individual translations of Goethe in their latest slim volume in the way we do with poems by Rilke or Hölderlin.

So here Greening sets out a selection box of various Goethes to encourage other translators: we find nature poetry, romance, the artist as rebel, meditations on fate, erotic love poems, a rollicking ballad, dramatic monologue and a very fine sonnet. I like Greening’s determination not to lose the singing. Here, he has ‘shadowed’ the original metres and retained rhyme schemes, though he sensibly makes more use of pararhyme than Goethe’s full rhyming. While not approaching Lowellesque ‘imitations’, Greening has also sought a ‘contemporary texture’ by venturing to ‘modernise an image or an idea if it helped the poem adapt to a different age’. For example, in ‘Harz Mountains, Winter Journey’ (‘Harzreise im Winter’) Goethe’s buzzard has become the more familiar image, in southern England at least, of a red kite. The carriage or wagon (‘Wagen’) driven by Fortune becomes a car in a ‘motorcade’ and another vehicle is imagined ‘winking on to / the slip-road’. There’s also an enjoyable touch of Auden in Greening’s updating of ‘crumbling cliffs / and disused airfields’ (Middleton has ‘On impassable tracks / Through the void countryside’).

Martyn Crucefix, Goethe’s poetry – some new translations by John Greening

I ran into a poetry acquaintance recently, and on being asked, I churned around in my brain and realized it has been 14 years since I got my MFA. The person then asked, “Are you still writing?” I stared at them blankly, thinking, “What the hell else would I be doing?” But I just said, “Oh…yes,” and was left feeling a bit stunned. You who know me well may know that I “quit writing forever” on a regular basis. I’ll have to remind myself of my stunned reaction next time I’m tempted to declare, “I’m done, done forever.” I’ll remind myself how stunned I was by that question, how confused that I would have quit writing, even though that degree is now in the murky past. How startled I was at the thought that not-writing might be “a thing.”

Marilyn McCabe, What’s he doing in there; or, On “Being a Writer”

Oh, well. Once again, I had every intention of following through on the Sealey Challenge this year and posting about what I read. Instead, I did a little traveling and the whole shebang fell apart. I have continued my way through my stack, but will not give extended commentary here. (The post would be very lengthy.) But here is the list of what I’ve read since the last time I posted:

• Carl Phillips Then the War and Selected Poems
• Mary Jean Chan Flèche
• Robert Hass Time and Materials
• Tiana Clark Equilibrium
• Roberto Carlos Garcia What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems
• Edna St. Vincent Millay The Harp Weaver and other Poems
• Tracy K. Smith Such Color: New and Selected Poems

[…]
I went in to substitute teach for the afternoon on the first day of school at my old building, filling in for a friend who had to attend a family funeral. The kids were nice, the afternoon went quickly, I saw some old friends. But I got home and was TIRED. ALL CAPS TIRED. I legit yawned from 6:30 PM on like I hadn’t slept in days. A good reminder that I retired at the right time. And that teachers have one of the hardest jobs in the world.

Donna Vorreyer, The best of intentions…

If I were doing the Sealey Challenge this year, I would embark on a re-reading of the Maureen Seaton books in my possession, having just learned of her death. I met her in Chicago and took a seminar with her, and she was an inspiration. She encouraged me to send some prose poems to Quarter After Eight, where they were taken. It became a favorite journal of mine, full of the challenging and unexpected. 

I would probably start with Furious Cooking.

Sadly, I am not doing the Sealey Challenge this year–voraciously reading a book of poems a day in August–because daily life has gotten a bit too complicated by caregiving, though resting with poetry might have helped. The heat wave did not. Now I think of throwing my ivy comforter on this wooden glider, putting the stack of Seaton books beside me, and at least leafing through, pausing here and there to concentrate on a poem. But the afternoon is spoken for.

Kathleen Kirk, Furious Cooking

This morning, news of 2 deaths took me back to specific times in my life:  Bob Barker and Maureen Seaton.  I was surprised, in some ways, to learn that Bob Barker had been alive these many years, and saddened to realize how relatively young Maureen Seaton was when she died, in her mid-70’s.  At this point, if there’s a cause of death, I haven’t found it.

Bob Barker seemed old when I was first aware of him, lazy summer days watching The Price Is Right, with my mom and sister.  We loved this game show, and I’m not sure why.  Looking back from a distance, the prizes seem less than fabulous, unless one won one of the showcases at the end.  I remember one babysitter pointing out that the contestant was lucky to have won extra cash because she’d need it to pay the taxes on the prize package.

Still, we tuned in, almost every morning, unless we had swim lessons.  And the show went on–and on and on–long after we quit watching, long after Bob Barker stopped hosting it.  Reading the news coverage, Barker seemed like a good human.  I’m glad he lived so long.

Maureen Seaton also seemed like a good person, but unlike many of my peers, I was not her student.  I was an adjunct at the University of Miami where she taught, but our paths rarely crossed.  Once I went to a reading where she and Denise Duhamel read from their new work.  I bought Little Ice Age, which had just been released.  Seaton signed it, and told me how much she appreciated the fact that I bought her book in the hardback edition.

I looked up the publication history–that reading must have been in 2001 or 2002.  Wow.  It seems a lifetime ago, and in so many ways, it’s just as distant a time as my suburban childhood watching The Price is Right.  I went to poetry readings so often that many faces started to seem familiar.  I had dreams of my own book with a spine, and when my first chapbook was accepted in 2003 for publication in 2004, it seemed a tantalizing possibility.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Pivoting to Past Times

I was very sad to hear about the death of poet Maureen Seaton, who was a tremendously encouraging and supportive writer as well as a really fun writer—I’ve been reading her for years, but it is her steady kindness to others that I saw in all the mentions of her in social media. I wonder—does our work matter more, or how we treat people along the way? Either way, if you haven’t picked up anything by Maureen yet, you should. Ed Ochester, the editor of 5 AM and University of Pittsburgh Press for a long time, also passed away—another poet who was known for kind editorial notes and support for writers. Yes, he sent me some of those notes. We feel real sorrow—not just an abstract sense of loss—when these kinds of people pass away. The poetry world can be cold and indifferent, but these were people who made it less so. It’s hard to say this without sounding like a cliche, but they were people who reminded me to be not just a better poet, but a better person, and I will miss them. I want to remember to be kind, how important it is to write that note, or that blurb, or that appreciation or review.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Review of Flare, Corona in F(r)iction, Still the Smoke and Heat, Poetry World Losses, A Blue Supermoon Coming…So Look Out (or Up)

The latest from Redmond, Washington poet (and that city’s second official poet laureate) Jeannine Hall Gailey is Flare Corona (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023), a constellation of first-person narrative lyric portraits and self-portraits clustered into four sections—“Post-Life,” “Harbingers,” “Blood Moon” and “Corona”—as she articulates an uncertain future around the weather, ongoing fires and the opening months of the pandemic, and of living with Multiple sclerosis. “You were warned.” she writes, as part of the poem “To Survive So Many Disasters,” “You promised / never to return. You set out on a journey / far from home. You looked out into darkness / and saw possibility.” Her poems explore layers of complication, both from within and surrounding, simultaneously burning out and refusing to fade away. There are moments in poems that see powerful lines occasionally buried, but Gailey writes from the centre and from all sides of each of these ongoing crises, offering her lyric as a way to document what has happened, what is happening, what might still be happening. “Under the mountains,” she writes, as part of the short poem “That Summer,” “the earth tried to shake us off. / The oldest oak trees fell, / people sheltered and burned in swimming pools, / the screams of horses in the air.” She speaks of climate crisis and its ongoing traumas, as the poem ends: “We were tied to a troubled earth. / You said it was too late to leave anyway.”

rob mclennan, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Flare Corona

I had actually forgotten that I’d written this poem until someone shared this image on the site formerly known as Twitter. As soon as I read it, I remembered what was on my mind and heart when I wrote it. I had to search on my hard drive to date it, though — I wrote it in spring of 2015, earlier than I thought. Looks like it was originally written in couplets, though I also like the shape that someone gave it in this image. (There’s a slight transcription error in line 8, but I’m honored that someone liked the poem well enough to share it this way, even without the original punctuation and italics.) It’s not exactly a sonnet, in terms of rhyme or meter, though it’s inspired by the movement of a Petrarchan sonnet — eight lines, a turn, then six lines. My favorite line is still, “God isn’t / a diner waitress saying: what can I get you, hon?” That’s not how I understand prayer to work, even petitionary prayer. Sometimes I can’t help wishing it worked that way, though. I would order so much wholeness and healing and sweetness and fulfillment of hope. 

Rachel Barenblat, Find

Today’s post draws from my research into how, exactly, wonder can work in service of preservation efforts, and how poetry can be the invaluable link connecting the two.

I often revisit the work of my most humble, most brilliant friend, Robert Macfarlane. In addition to being one of the most mesmerizing and thoughtful writers on nature, he has, in my estimation, done the best job of succinctly capturing one of the chief issues we face in our efforts to address threats to the Anthropocene:

“As a species, we will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name.”

Inspired by the findings of Cambridge researchers who discovered that British children aged eight and over were significantly better able to identify Pokémon than organisms found in the natural world, Macfarlane set out to write a book that would reclaim “the magic of naming nature” through “summoning spells,”: short, rhythmic poems. That book, beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris, is called The Lost Words, and it celebrates the identification and cherishing that naming the natural world allows. He provides a lexicon of slowly vanishing words—acorn, adder, bluebell, and so on—relying on a visual acrostic, whereby each stanza is capitalized to highlight the letters spelling out the thing described. Here is “Bramble”:

Bramble 

Bramble is on the march again,

Rolling and arching along the hedges,
   in to parks on city edges.

All streets are suddenly thick with briar:
   cars snarled fast, business over. 

Moths have come in their millions,
   drawn to the thorns. The air flutters. 

Bramble has reached each house now, 
   looped it in wire. People lock doors,
   close shutters.

Little shoots steal through keyholes,
   to leave – in quiet halls,

Empty stairwells—bowls of bright
   blackberries where the light falls. 

The poem relies on what Francis Spufford in The Child That Books Built called the “gloriously embedded” elements of language to which children are so attuned, “its texture, its timbre, its grain, its music.” Bramble is personified as “on the march again” across rural and urban landscapes, while the tightly woven pattern of full rhymes, “hedges / edges,” “flutters / shutters,” and slant rhymes “briar / over,” capture bramble’s invasiveness. Where things might turn sinister in the fifth stanza, “People lock doors, / close shutters,” Macfarlane redirects the story to acclaim the power and literal fruitfulness of bramble: “Little shoots steal through keyholes / to leave…/ bowls of bright / blackberries where the light falls.” The almost incantatory stresses make the poem ask to be spoken aloud.

In short: the poem enacts the wonder of the thing it describes.

Maya C. Popa, Wonder Wednesday: The Lost Words, Wonder, and Environmental Preservation

when were stars erased by rain

when did sleep still live in a tree

who was the first to murder a dream

Grant Hackett [no title]

I’ve been a bit scant on posting this month because I’ve been a bit scant on everything—inspiration, creativity, energy, and pep. August feels like it has dragged on interminably, and I haven’t been able to get forward momentum on anything. The heat, smoke and terrible Seattle air quality hasn’t helped with my general sense of stagnation and ennui. I’m left to just sit and wait out whatever this is, while I hope for a return to crisp, cool air and a good week of cleansing rain. In the meantime, I haven’t had a lot to say, and I haven’t had the to drive to fight through it and muster up a post anyway.

Despite my listlessness, I have managed to make one decision this month, which is to return to journaling. I used to journal daily, and I can’t pinpoint the exact time that practice fell away for me, but I haven’t journaled in many years, and it feels like it’s time to start again. Journaling always brought me clarity, and I am feeling a need for clarity on many things right now. The act of sitting and writing with pen and paper, physically moving your hands over the page and connecting your thoughts to the movement, imbues a sort of magic. It brings calmness and calls forth truth and orderliness of the mind, which is something I long for right now. And of course, returning to journaling means buying a plethora of fancy new journals, which I am definitely not addicted to and don’t have a hoarding problem with at all.

Kristen McHenry, August Blahs, A Return to Journaling, Training Re-Set

I recently came across this blog post by Naush Sabah about why we send our poems to magazines (or not). I’m in agreement with her on just about all of it, although I needed telling some things; for example:

You needn’t seek to publish every poem you write. Some work is for the drawer, some work is for an audience of one or two friends, some work is better within a book, some work is for the trash and, if you’re lucky, a key to unlock the next piece of writing.

It hasn’t been a conscious thing, but when I think about it, I can put most poems I write these days into one of these categories. I haven’t been sending out as many poems to magazines as I used to, and among those I have sent not many have been accepted. I’ve been a bit disillusioned about this to be honest.

And yet at the same time I can see that quite a few of these poems belong with others in order to have the impact I’m after. In other words, in a collection.

A few might even be poems I should be treating as stepping stones to the actual poem I’m after, the ‘key to unlocking the next piece of writing’ that Naush talks about in her piece.

A funny thing to be saying, given my unofficial role as cheerleader for submitting to magazines. I still believe in the magazines, and still encourage people to send in their poems. But it’s what I’ve always said: it’s not a strategy that suits everyone all the time. Goals and ambitions change.

Robin Houghton, The positives of submitting less to magazines

Scientists say faking happiness can hurt you.

Scientists say the average person walks the equivalent of five times around the world in their lifetime.

Scientists say when you die, some companies will turn your ashes into fireworks.

Scientists say the universe is like a giant brain.

Rich Ferguson, Scientists Say

Last week, I was watering our garden in an effort to stave off the effects of the high heat we’ve been living in. I was in a hurry. I was impatient. I was anxious. I yanked the hose, and I broke off two large branches of a shrub I’d once given up on. It had been all wonky, growing a few measly branches on one side, with the other side of the bush bare. I moved it to its current spot, almost daring it to live. If it died completely there, I figured it was no loss.

It’s not only lived there, but thrived, filling in beautifully. It’s a story that has given me some joy. And then, in one quick moment, I broke off two full branches, returning it to a state of bare lopsidedness.

I was so glad that it was me who did that, rather than Cane. Because it just made me sad. I was glad to be angry with myself, rather than him.

Cane suggested putting the branches in water. Maybe they will sprout roots and we can replant, he suggested, get a new plant out of it. I think that’s not likely, but I did it anyway.

This morning, as I sat here writing these words, the branches were right in front of my face and I noticed something that stopped me:

The branches are flowering. My broken branches. Sprouting tiny little flowers. Not the roots we hoped for, but flowers we didn’t even know to hope for.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Wonky

Who knew, at the bend,
a long slant sun would meet me,

we’d eat a burst of tomatoes 
at night, already in shadow,

a wall of sound, sonic crickets
like monks in saffron robes 

lined from here to the mountains,
soft, soft their silken chant, hand clap.

Jill Pearlman, Slanting

I can now share/remind you that the launch event will also be on the 7th November, at The Deverux Pub in Temple. I will be reading with Matthew Stewart (launching his second full collection. I’ve read it and it’s excellent). There will also be readings by Maria Taylor, Hilary Menos and Eleanor Livingstone. It’s a Red Squirrel Press and HappenStance read off. Who will win? Who will hold the coats???

Come along to find out…I am very pleased as it will be the first time I’ve actually met Sheila, Hilary, Maria and Eleanor.

More details here. And my thanks to Nell for putting this up (and for putting up with me). And very much thanks to Sheila for agreeing to publish me in the first place.

More from me on the book when I have it, but I am very, very excited now and it’s all starting to feel scary. 

Mat Riches, Varroa-iations on a theme

Super-excited to share this cover! Thank you to everyone at Sundress Publications for their work on this! Special thanks to Ani Araguz, my partner and artist behind the artwork on this cover. […]

This piece is entitled “we go to sleep early so we can dream what’s never in it for us.” I love the sense of at once feeling mired and also breaking apart. This ties into the way ruining and becoming ruins because of want are used as a metaphor in the book.

Also, happy to share that the project has a description as well. Check it out:

Is selfhood constructed? And if so, by whom? Exploring queerness, race, body image, and family, Ruin & Want is a masterful meditation on otherness and identity. In a series of gripping, episodic prose pieces centered on an illicit relationship between a student and his high school English teacher, Araguz peels back the layers of his marginalized identity. By reflecting on his childhood into adulthood, Araguz grapples with finding a sense of self when early, predatory experiences have deeply affected his coming-of-age. In quixotic, deeply eviscerating lyric prose, Araguz delivers a troubling but bold memoir that handles this topic with courage while grieving what it costs survivors to reckon with harm’s aftermath. Yet in the midst of this struggle, we find many bittersweet and lingering gifts such as, “For the first time I saw myself as someone worth seeing,” that make this work necessary and unforgettable.

I’ve been working on R&W since 2016. The work has had me learning and growing over the years. The book is a testament to my survival. The final year of work had me realizing that I have been late in embracing my queer identity, something that has been difficult to do until the completion of this book. Still learning as I go.

José Angel Araguz, Ruin & Want cover reveal!

Writing really is a long game. I wrote Murder Girl gets wired in 2007 after I’d relocated from Perth to Adelaide and was still elbow-deep in writing for theatre. I didn’t know about prose poems. I thought I was just writing little sketches (were they poems? were they stories?) with a view to heightening ordinary fuckd-up urban and suburban folk to a kind-of mythological status. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d give my characters names like Murder Girl, Violet Sweets, Beef Boy and they’d always drink too much & have low self-esteem. Auto-bio much? Now I can hear rhythms & a smattering of rhyme in this poem, which were the precursors to me writing and performing my first spoken word poem in 2016.

In 2020, when I received funding to record my first collection SIARAD as an audiobook & make some video poems, I wanted to record multiple sound-tracks for this poem, which were then edited & enhanced by the audio genius Jeffrey Zhang. Then, the poet indigo eli introduced me to featherful (not their real name) who agreed to make the video-poem. I still remember the feeling of being blown away the first time I watched it. It exceeded my expectations in capturing the feel of late-night, urban-gothic youth culture in small city Australia. The video poem’s interplay of dark and light, appearing & disappearing, is eerie.

Caroline Reid, VIDEO POEM: Murder Girl gets wired

Earlier in the week, a facebook friend asked everyone if they could think of a time they wanted to stop writing, and what made them carry on regardless.  How did they work through it? I was thinking of responding, but then realized the answer was way too complex and convoluted to deal with in a comments section. There are days when I feel this way about poetry specifically, not really writing in general, of which I have done many different types and genres at various points.  I love that I get to make a living writing other kinds of things now, but poetry sometimes feels like something I could easily drop from my life like a napkin from a table and I’m not sure anyone would notice. It certainly doesn’t contribute financially to my life, nor does the pursuit of it necessarily all the time contribute to my mental well-being. It is a lot of time and effort invested with steadily diminishing returns, something that took me a long time to realize.  That working harder or more or better wouldn’t necessarily show any kind of difference at all. And by returns, I don’t necessarily just mean po-biz things, many of which I have let go of in the past several years.  But more so the sense of purpose that I sometimes lose the thread of at times. Would I not spend my time better by writing things that allow me to make a living rather than dropping poems into what usually feels like a void. Would not these energies be more productive leveled elsewhere?

And yet, I don’t know how I would live without it. Or where I would channel those same storytelling energies. Fiction, sure, but I am not really very good at it.  Essays, maybe. Writing poems, good or bad, have been part of my life since I was a stupid teenager who did a little too well on an English assignment and somehow locked in hard on a genre that most people don’t seem to care about at all. I used to dismiss that Rilke quote about HAVING to write, of dying if you were forbidden to do it,  as pretension and dramatics, but maybe he was right. Sometimes I am not certain how I could ever consider stopping. Sometimes I am not certain how I can keep going.

But there are still poems to be written. Projects to be executed.  I am digging in on the video poems that I will be releasing in September–the villains series–armed with a fancy new microphone […]

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/28/2023

One thing I love about poetry is the space it holds for nuanced conversation. It’s so magnificent when poets get their teeth in something, shake it about and snarl at it or fawn over it (or both!). Poems are places where we can wonder about things and be in awe just as likely in response to something beautiful as to something terrible.

Barbie is a spectacular subject for poetry. In addition to the cultural baggage noted above, she offers opportunities for ekphrasis and persona poems. She conjures nostalgia and personal story. She invites reflection on identity and body image. She churns up questions on gender, class and power. And of course, there are all those outfits: Who is she, really? “Just” a doll? Perhaps.

It’s all grist for the mill, as they say — frothy, frothy fodder for poets.

I, personally, haven’t written any Barbie poems, but I always enjoy reading them. Of course there are full collections worth noting, including KINKY by Denise Duhamel, Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang and Never Picked First for Playtime by Dustin Brookshire, which is an homage to Duhamel’s.

Carolee Bennett, barbie in the poetry world

“From From” explores the question “Where are you from from?” (where are you really from) by investigating the awkward state of being American yet being othered by white Americans and of the feeling of incompleteness when you discover your heritage through English sources. Youn’s approach is less direct than Claudia Rankin’s but equally as eloquent. Youn’s studies are inventive, setting up two perspectives to interrogate received knowledge and bias. “From From” is a multi-layered collection that rewards re-reading.

Emma Lee, “From From” Monica Youn (Carcarnet Press) – book review

My father died five years ago. Yesterday was his death anniversary. Five years seems wrong. It feels both too long and too short. In this state of unmooring, one becomes time’s orphan, just as moving from Singapore to New York made me an orphan of place. I have lived in New York as a foster child for 20 years. 20 years seems wrong too, for the same reason. Yesterday I tried to recall the exact day I landed in JFK airport and took the bus to Grand Central Station, in order to board the train to Sarah Lawrence College, where I was to learn how to write, but I could not remember. What I remembered was sitting across from an older Jewish man on the train. He told me he was a jeweler who opened his own shop. Tonight, 20 years after I came to this city to see if I would be any good as a poet, I am having dinner with a younger Singaporean poet and her mom. She is here to pursue further training in the craft of writing, as I did. She will meet a host of interesting people in NYC, the sedulous, the sadducees, the seducers. I hope she will meet my jeweler.

Jee Leong Koh, Foster Child of New York

I visited Magnetic Poetry this morning aka The Oracle. This is what she imparted.
Happy Saturday.

Beneath dreams and
shadows
your sweet tongue
bares a fasting and
a wanting
pants for roses raw and light
licks an ache
a sleeping love
cooling to rust

Charlotte Hamrick, a little something

Highland Park Poetry press has set up a book launch/poetry reading for The Red Queen Hypothesis (and me) with poet Rene Parks and an open mic to follow. This event takes place Saturday, September 9th at 5 pm, at Madame ZuZu’s, 1876 First Street, Highland Park IL. Here’s a link, and here’s another link. It’s a ways to travel from eastern Pennsylvania but a good reason for yours truly to visit a new place, meet new people–including the book’s publisher–and listen to other poets.

Too often, perhaps, I stay around the home front, indulge in my introversion by gardening and reading, and shy away from promoting my work. Lately, it’s been months since I did any submitting. There was my participation in the annual Goschenhoppen Festival, then a short but lovely week in North Carolina, camping and seeing friends. Now, the veggie season is starting to wind down–tomato sauce simmers on the burner–and I will have fewer excuses for why I am not sending out poems.

But my travel for the year is not quite done. In September there’s one more trip away from PA, and after that we can settle into autumn. I have writing plans, so once we return, I need to create a schedule that is flexible enough I can stick to it but framed clearly enough that it feels necessary and not difficult to integrate into my days and weeks. Every one of my writer friends knows how challenging that can be. Wish me luck. There’s a chapbook that’s been languishing in my desk area for quite a long time, but to which I’ve recently returned; there’s a ream of poems under 21 lines that might make up a collection, too. Then there’s the next manuscript, rather grief-heavy at present, that I need to re-think and revise.

Oh, and all those poem drafts I have not looked at in awhile…

Ann E. Michael, Book launch, travel, PR

Ann E. Michael, The Red Queen Hypothesis, Highland Park, 2023

Like her wonderful blog, Michael’s second full-length collection is meditative, witty, and smart, with a scientific and sometimes philosophical bent. Also like her blog, it’s closely observant of the more-than-human world in flux. “The Red Queen hypothesis,” I learned, comes from biology: species must keep evolving to survive. Poems and the people behind them must keep changing, too. In addition, The Red Queen Hypothesis suggests the advantage of sexual reproduction, and there are plenty of seductively “soft persuasions” in this collection. Like the “Stew Cook” speaking to her beloved, this is a book to “fill nooks with aromatic hours.” Shout-out to all the tasty slant-rhymes amid a profusion of traditional forms: rhetoric/ lick, beige/ strange, viola/ Iowa. My sense of knowing Ann pretty well by now might be an illusion—I’ve spent way more time reading her work than with her in person—but then again, intimacy with another person’s way of thinking is one of reading’s chief attractions.

Lesley Wheeler, Holding dear

As I was writing You Could Make This Place Beautiful, taking risks with both form and content, I suspected that for every reader who attached to certain craft choices, there would be a reader who’d chafe at those same choices. (Sort of like, “For every bird there’s a stone thrown at a bird.”) The direct address, the vignettes, the meta aspect of the narration, the privacy boundaries—I knew all of these were “love it or loathe it” choices.

All of this to say: I knew I was writing a book with a strong flavor. But I love strong flavors! Blue cheese. Smoked kalamata olives. (Smoked anything, really.) Very dark, bitter chocolate. Very black, bitter coffee. Chili crisp. Rose lemonade. Dill pickles. Hot curry. An imperial IPA. I find these things delicious, but I also completely understand how they might taste terrible to other people.* Taste is subjective.

You’re not for everyone. Your work is not for everyone. So be it!

“You are not responsible for the world—you are only responsible for your work—so DO IT. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any preconceived form, idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.” —Sol LeWitt, in a letter to Eva Hesse

Whatever happens to your work when you send it into the world, with its sometimes treacherous landscapes, is none of your business, really. You made the thing, and now people can make up their own minds about it. Will everyone love it? Probably not. Will everyone hate it? Also, probably not.

But do you love it? Are you proud of it? Do you stand behind your choices? Have you made something uniquely yours?

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

Does this story know how to walk into the sunset, arm around the waist of hope? Does it know when to stop, to let the past become the future, let the future rechristen the past, let time recalibrate itself around words — words written now, words written then, words that make no sound? Where the last part of the story stops, more has already happened. Before. ‘On Turning Fifty’ was a milestone-chapbook I released in 2019. Then from the quiet of the year that followed, came ‘The Night is my mirror’. The continuity surprises me, though much of it was inevitable. There was more. From the horror of the pandemic years came the anguished poetry in ‘Duplicity‘, released in 2021. All the dots are connected now. Do you see the pattern? Do you remember the crow that became a line in the sky? The first line. Do you see what geometry that line has wreaked? How solemn are those polygons? Which side is up? Some of those edges follow the horizon, some of them touch the acute angles of one blinking star in the sky.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Interlude (53)

awaiting the summer rain:
a stick shaped
like a bird’s foot

Jason Crane, haiku: 28 August 2023

On Sunday I was part of a group of poets and musicians reading at an outdoor event in the Italian Gardens in Scarborough. I don’t think I’ve been in the Italian Gardens since I was a child. I have a strong memory of my mum and myself having a day there together, me playing with my Sindy doll and running around the pond and up and down the stairs imagining I was in a fairy world, my mum quietly reading a book in the shade. It was just as I’d left it, though in the mean time it had become quite run down, before receiving funding to be brought back to its former glory. As I sat in the shade with the other readers and musicians I could hear the breeze blowing through the leaves and the scent of the sea and the flower gardens were carried up to us. […]

Mostly I have been stuck in the office this week sending literally hundreds of emails to Spelt competition entrants, letting them know the outcome. Our brilliant judge Jane Burn has sifted through 788 individual entries to whittle down to a longlist of twenty poets. Alongside that I have been pulling the last bits of issue 09 together and sorting out problems with it. We’ll be going to print with it soon. And as if that wasn’t enough, I’m working on yet another Arts Council England bid for some Spelt stuff too. If you know me you will know filling in applications makes me want to pull my own eyes out and kick them out of the window. But I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. After spending so much time at my desk, we decided to have a walk along the beach last night at about 8pm. It was glorious. The sea was a gentle murmer, there were still people on the beach, some of them with little fires which seemed brighter in the dusk. Scent of sausages o the breeze. There were lots of dead jellyfish looking like hazy autumn sun sets.

Wendy Pratt, Late Summer – A Sensory Experience: The Scent of Summer

Heavy trucks cough out a smell of omelettes and salad, financial ruin.

Food is an answer, yes, always, but remember to spit it out.

I stood to one side, didn’t understand, didn’t get involved.

A book called A Very Short History Of Friends.

Guilt is a secret hand opening ancient maps, spreading them out.

Bob Mee, MEDITATIONS ON GUILT

Committing to commas, semi-colons, and cover layouts is an act of courage not demanded of us in the day-to-day virtual or verbal worlds where mistakes can (usually) be corrected at the touch of a few buttons, or with a cough and repetition of a line. It may not feel like it if you haven’t done it yet, but be assured that the process by which Moth, Aunts Come Armed with Tea Cakes (Thirza Clout), Body of Water (Emily Wilkinson), Lucidity (Ross Donlon), and I Buy A New Washer (Yours Truly) (all published by Mark Time) came to be in print form is a matter of precise, finite, and often late-at-night-squeezed-into-the-rest-of-life decision making. It’s also a matter of kind discussion with our editor, Ross, of benefitting from his poetry wisdom and skills.

It’s the finite, deadline bit that’s so difficult: a form of existential angst, made manifest. Never mind that saying, the one about ‘abandoning poems’; when you publish them on paper you have to release them carefully, tenderly, precisely, and, it may surprise some, soberly, and after lengthy and serious thought. This is because you release them to the possibility of changes of mind, misunderstandings, and (oh horror!) typos, as well as joy, understanding, and connection.

Liz Lefroy, I Mark Time

No time for lingering, except to linger
       in a room filled with simple light; no
call to pilfer coins it scatters freely
       at your feet. Bowl, water glass, figs 
softening on a tray—enough of need.
       Clear-eyed, unclouded: even as 
sweetness falls away, you want 
      the making of things that last.

Luisa A. Igloria, Ode to the Unsentimental

Ordinary poems about ordinary days, grey

pigeons and pallid skies, ashen self-pity and line
after monochrome line of mundane mediocrity.
Poems that taste of bile. Of an inertia that

stretches long and undefined. Poems like tepid
beer. Like days that have forgotten themselves.
Poems not brave or sad enough to cry. That

evening by the Vistula, I traced the contours
of my formless quiet into yet another faded,
anaemic poem. A train rumbled by, unnoticed.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 60

Growing up out of the stone ground, a large cast aluminum tree was tangled in the branches of second tree — like two hands grasping each other—while the second tree hangs suspended upside down in the air. The grey metal of the trees, surrounded by white walls is starkly devoid of color, while the roots reach upward toward the sky, untethered and seeking some ground in which to root itself.

Andrea Blythe, The Flourishing Beauty of Ariel Schlesinger’s Interconnected Aluminum Trees

In a week where southern California is under a tropical storm watch, with storm Hilary expected to dump as much rain in 2 days as some parts of the southwest get in 2 years (2 years!!!), and wild fires continue to blaze across northern Canada, and a heat dome will break all sorts of records across the nation–I began this week of historic weather by getting my contributor copies of this book, Dear Human at the Edge of Time:  Poems on Climate Change in the United States: [photo]

I’m very pleased that “Higher Ground,” one of my Noah’s Wife poems was selected.  One of the joys of blogging is that I have an easy way of looking up my writing process, at least for this poem.  This blog post tells the genesis of this poem, the day in January of 2020 when my boss insisted that the registrar put unqualified/uninterested students in classes so that we would meet our ARC goal, which brought the wrath of Corporate on us, which made our boss enraged, an unpleasant day all the way round.

I look back and think about the ways our lives and our school were about to unravel, all of the power struggles that would mean so little in the end, as the pandemic unspooled, and new owners arrived to change the school in ways that meant that very few of us would still be employed there. I think back to days like the one in January of 2020, and I’m amazed that I could tolerate that work situation as long as I did.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Climate Change and Poetry and an Acceptance

The 3rd of my poems published by Verse-Virtual. There are so many beautiful poems in this issue. I’m honored to be among them.

Seaweed calligraphy at the tide’s edge.
A crab tracks through, smears the ink.
I wait for the fog to lift. The gulls argue
over someone’s sandwich crust, get on
with survival. I remember your words,
the undertow.

Sarah Russell, On the Shore

This time of year always makes me think of the past somehow, which probably has something to do with the start of school and the bygone sense of blank pages. This morning, I was thinking about 10 years ago, a period of time that seems sort of muddy with a relationship that was well past its sell-by date, but also good things like the release of shared properties of water and stars and Pretty Little Liars marathons complete with a very tiny Zelda racing back and forth across the back of the sofa. Late in the summer, we visited my cousin who lived way up in northern Wisconsin, which already had a fall-ish tinge to trees even in late August. We drank overly elaborate Bloody Marys and went antiquing in a tiny town with many stores where I got my prized Roloflex camera for a steal at $10 and several pretty antique postcards. I’d wake up in the mornings on the sofa with my cousin’s enormous golden lab sprawled across me. Smallish bears would ramble through their yard from the surrounding woods at dawn. The weekend was campfires and pontoon rides and, perhaps most importantly, both my parents were still very much alive and healthy.  

20 years ago, I was 29 and on the verge of starting my MFA studies, going to overly bougie and posh several-course lunch orientations at the Union League Club back when Columbia was spending money like it had it.  Later, at the meet and greet with other students and faculty, I would feel like I didn’t fit in–a feeling that would pervade me for the next four years of study. On my one day of full classes that fall, I kept returning to the Art Institute, which was pay-what-you-can in the afternoons to gaze at the Cornell boxes–still in their location in the old modern wing before the new one was built. A project that would also take four years to finish.  I would take my notes to the cafe across Michigan and turn them into poems that eventually became at the hotel andromeda. I was tentatively sending out the first version of what would eventually become the fever almanac, though it would change a lot before getting picked up two years later. I was still mulling the idea of starting a chapbook press that wouldn’t bloom until the spring, but it was a tiny kernel of thought I’d turn over and over in my head while waiting for the bus or working nights at the library’s circ desk.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/20/2023

Well, writing this missive from inside a smoke attack so bad that we have the worst air quality in the world right now. Just two days ago, it finally cooled off from the nineties to a more pleasant 75, and I felt good enough to make a brief trip out to our local Woodinville Flower Farm […]

We came home, having spent time with finches singing and coming home with handfuls of corn and flowers, and decided to stay in for a couple of days while the smoke came in. It might be gone as soon as tomorrow. We’re also keeping a close eye on our friends in California which is facing a hurricane and flooding, so soon after the disaster hurricane/fire in Maui. We are hoping everyone stays safe.

So when the weather isn’t trying to kill us, we’ve got to get out and try to enjoy it. My second favorite season, fall, is approaching fast: Facebook is full of back-to-school pics, and I’m ready to shop for office supplies and cardigans—rituals I continue even without the school year structure.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Writing from Inside the Smoke: with a Brief Respite in a Flower Farm and Is It Fall Yet (September Readings and More)

In a NYT newsletter Saturday, Melisa Kirsch wrote about how time away from home can help you see your home’s absurdities. For her, time away makes her question everything about home and realize how much of what she has there is unneeded.

Boy, that’s not me.

Time away–in a place where it was too hot to go outside, where we didn’t have any furniture to sit on, where we lived out of a suitcase for weeks and weeks–has made me realize how much I appreciate what I have here. How much I appreciate a comfortable, functional home and being able to live the summer months in it.

So, I am busy cramming as much summer as I can into these last weeks of it. I was home for only one day before my daughter and I got in the car and drove north to visit my parents in the place that I really think of as home. Every cell of my being was craving big water and cool, marine air. It was actually pretty warm there, too, but low 80’s felt like such a relief after weeks of temperatures above 100.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Of dreams and time warps

This morning I set out with the old dog down the lane now overhung with trees heavy with seeds. There are now sloes in the hedges and crab apples, and small hard plums (bullaces?) appearing. As we turned onto the old bridal path and began to cross the grass I felt the dew on my skin of my feet, through my sandals; not unpleasant, it was refreshing, seeping under my soles, and up to my ankles, cool and silky. The horse chestnuts are already beginning to turn, already beginning to brown at the edges, the conkers already fat and spiked. There’s a scent to the air that is difficult to place: something loamy, earthy. We are nearing autumn.

This week I received some exciting news about a new poetry collection I’ve been working on. I can’t say anything yet, but it was the sort of news that made me leap about the room yelling. That sort of news doesn’t happen very often. It’s the sort of news that feels like a real step up the ladder. It came at just at the right time as I was feeling a little out of love with poetry and wondering where my work fit into the poetry ‘scene’. I need to take the advice I so often give mentees and just write the poems I enjoy writing, write for myself. It’s hard to write truthfully, to write authentically without feeling the pressure to conform to a certain style or a certain fashion. I don’t want to say too much about the collection until news is made official, but with this collection I took risks and pushed my own boundaries, and was worried that it might not work. Even though I felt it worked and that the poems had worth, another part of me was rubbishing my positivity. I have been working on undoing that internal voice of late, but it’s lovely to feel the validation of someone I respect hugely seeing worth in my work.

Wendy Pratt, Late Summer – A Sensory Experience – The Touch of Summer

The cat can tell the moment I’m awake.
He purrs because he knows breakfast will come.
It’s dark: I’m not so thrilled to be alert
this rainy Tuesday dawn, brain sputtering
on far too little sleep, running on fumes.
Next time the former president is indicted
for racketeering I shouldn’t stay awake
refreshing headlines, waiting for the news.
Of all the things that don’t belong in poems —
though justice does, blindfold and sword and scales.
This week our Torah portion is called Judges.
(I cannot make this up.) Too on the nose?
“Justice, justice” — Moses said it twice.
I live in hope. What else is there to do?

Rachel Barenblat, Pursue

I’m a little surprised I never titled a blog post “Home Again, Home Again” until now. I did title one “Jiggedy-Jig” on October 1, 2006. That was a short, Millay-Colony-aftermath update that included a prescient announcement: New manuscript title: “Theories of Falling”… 

As I type that, I feel both the nostalgic wave of joy that I got my first collection published at all, and then one of sadness that New Issues Poetry & Prose—which gave a start to so many poets, including Jericho Brown and Chet’la Sebree—was recently shuttered by the university that should have protected it. I have to link to the University of Chicago Press’s distribution page here, because that’s the last place one can easily survey the incredible back catalogue. You should grab copies while you can! The future of that distribution relationship is TBD once October 2023 is behind us. The New Issues website is down, perhaps for good, since there’s no longer staff to follow up on getting the URL registration renewed. Ooof. This is such a harrowing time for university presses and MFA programs on an infrastructure level, which is in such sharp contrast the vitality of these programs in person. 

People still sometimes find “Chicks Dig Poetry” through a particular archived post, or because someone mentions it while using an old bio note to introduce me at an event. I don’t plan on ever retiring the blog entirely unless (until) technology forces my hand, even if it survives simply as one or two posts a year. Everyone should have a place to speak freely on the internet, and recent months have made it clear that Facebook, Twitter/X, and other social media platforms are only “free” up until it is the whim of their owners to dictate otherwise. That surely applies to this place too—I notice that one of my posts has been flagged for “sensitive” content, though I can’t tell which one. But for now, I’ll treat it as the closest I have to a soapbox in the public square.

Sandra Beasley, Home Again, Home Again

Writing, at least for me, and at its heart, is necessarily incohate. Words come out. You work out what to do with them later. Or not: one way of thinking about literary modernism is as a kind of cult of the first draft (see, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s diary). Poetry, in particular, seems to grow in the gaps. Small poems, lyrics, appear like changelings in and among other things I thought I was writing. I might work them up in the ‘poetry’ book later, but they rarely start there.

This doesn’t mean they always come out looking like prose. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they are trying very hard (possibly too hard) to get away from the prose around them. I’ve come to think of poems like the mushrooms put up by fungi: sometimes they disguise themselves as the detritus they are feeding on, sometimes they look very different indeed. But it’s all one forest.

Without wanting to labour the metaphor, they are also, quite literally, feeding on wood. I’m not sure it would be possible for these different kinds of writing to get tangled up with one another if I was starting everything on a computer.

The impact of word processing is rarely discussed, even by writers. Like all technological changes, it is hard to see the scale of it from the inside. In this case, the key villain is the ‘document’. These are individual, bounded off from one another in the way that pages of a notebook aren’t. They also present themselves, on the screen, as something already published. The purpose is fixed from the beginning: there are no cracks left to grow in.

Jeremy Wikeley, Why poems are like mushrooms

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Attempting fiction and nonfiction writing in college was how poem writing first happened to me–I’d jot down ideas for essays or stories I couldn’t actualize offhand, stuff to unpack later, and littered a bunch of notebooks like that. When I of course never unpacked anything I realized I was enjoying more than anything the poetic potentiality of that shorthand. Then weirdly poems taught me how to reapproach prose with a more poetic posture, which has helped prose feel lively again. […]

Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Poems tend to start as sound for me, in the air, usually when I’m walking or in a space in the day where it feels possible to ask a question, even a basic one, like what now? Then I work something out by hand in a notebook, pen and paper, sometimes many times, then transfer it into a document when the pages start to get so cluttered I can’t see the sound/thing anymore. So I go from trying to hear the thing to trying to see it. It’s in the document phase, when I’m working with something as standardized text, that it starts to harden into something that feels like a poetic object, as if the ease of pushing something around in a text doc is concurrent with the imminent sense of its hardening. That’s when I think I try to feel the poem, fix it until I think I feel it as an organism. Essays actually work similarly, or I’ve been applying my process with poems to prose writing. Books are still mysterious to me. I have no idea what a book is but I would like to write a good one.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jed Munson (rob mclennan)

Play with these tools a while, and you begin to recognize a pretentious, generalizing style that’s heavy on ecstatic adjectives. There’s no formal analysis in the ChatGPT essay, either; this is an irregular sonnet, a detail I consider pretty relevant. But the essay as a whole is fluently written, logically organized, and full of plausible points. Honestly, many first-years even at a highly selective college struggle to hit that baseline.

In fact, asking an AI tool to write an essay (or blog post) about a poem works better than asking for the same about a novel. If you can’t feed in the whole text, ChatGPT “hallucinates” evidence including, if you nudge it for textual analysis, atrociously fictitious quotes that a half-conscious teacher would instantly recognize as not part of the original. But cutting and pasting a short piece, such as a poem, into the query slot is easy and results in accurate quotations. The essay ChatGPT generated for me even noted a mix of abstract and concrete nouns in one of my lines–from a first-year writing student, that would impress me. […]

I remain worried about the students who struggle to write clear sentences. Now they can dump a draft in a query box and emerge with something pretty. Is that a great equalizer, enabling them to succeed and me to focus more wholly on the quality of their reasoning? Can they learn what they need to know by examining how AI “fixes” their writing? Or do they struggle with how to punctuate for the rest of their lives, needing to run every single email they write through an editing program, when in a previous world coursework might have nudged them to learn the rules?

Some good results I anticipate: literature and writing teachers will have to think hard about why we read and write, and how those reasons should inform what we teach. A sense of intimacy with other human minds via their personally chosen words will become even more electrifying. And easy generalizations about challenging texts will never again pass muster among anyone who is paying attention.

Lesley Wheeler, Writing about poetry with AI

To celebrate Poetry Month in Australia, I am sharing video poems and performances of some of my poems. I’ll also include a synopsis, a bit of history about how the poem came about, and the full text of the poem. Here’s the first one: LOST, a video poem. Enjoy!

In 2017, I won my first poetry slam hosted by Draw Your (S)words. As part of that prize I got to work with emerging film-maker Pamela Boutros to make short film or video poem of one of my poems. We spent a day shooting in Port Adelaide (Yertabulti) and made LOST. […]

regrets / i’ve had a few / but then again
the only thing i truly regret is
that i didn’t listen more
to the wind, shifting / the earth, trembling / and to my heart, that old chestnut
bcs if i had known how to listen
i might have discovered sooner how to trust
getting lost in these spaces / these places
between poems

Caroline Reid, Short Film: LOST, featuring Caroline Reid & Port Adelaide

I’ve been reading I Am Flying Into Myself, Selected Poems 1960-2014 by the “perpetually insolvent” poet Bill Knott. In his introduction, Thomas Lux describes Knott as a “quintessential, almost primal lyric poet, primal in the sense that his poems seem to emerge from his bone marrow as well as his heart and mind.” Knott was fond of creating neologisms, such as “shroudmeal,” “Rilkemilky,” and “gangplanking.” He was also, according to Lux, “thorny, original, accessible, electrical, occasionally impolite, and heartbreaking.”

Reading Knott’s poems made me want to stop reading them and start writing. I decided to try to decipher what they were doing to my brain, and how I could funnel the experience into some practical writing advice.

Erica Goss, Write More Poems

As the months wore on, and spring turned into the heavy heat of July, Sophie blurted out in the middle of a Monday, repotting a ficus benjamina, (a weeping fig) that her previous employer had killed herself. Sophie had previously been employed as a live-in cook/housekeeper, and the beautiful boyfriend had been there, too, working as the family’s car mechanic. “A poet,” she said.

HER KIND

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton died on October 4th, 1974 and I met Sophie in the spring of 1975. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. I so wanted to ask questions about what Sexton was really like, did she like working for her? But the only thing I remember is the anger that poured out of my co-worker. Angry at Sexton for leaving her family, for leaving her.

Sexton’s suicide, coming only 11 years after Sylvia Plath’s, shook the New England poetry world all over again. It was a terrible message to leave to a teenage poet. Did one have to kill herself to be held in high esteem as a woman poet? Did poetry and the hyper tragic go hand-in-hand? Somewhere in the backrooms of The Plant Company, Sophie taught me to reject that pain-filled legacy; to embrace weeping figs and date palms, jade trees and succulents instead. It’s a lesson I hold onto still.

Susan Rich, Anne Sexton and Me

All of my life I’ve been a one book at a time reader. My younger self would immerse herself in long sessions of a singular story. I could do that because I was young with few responsibilities and limited demands on my time. Even into my 20s life was simpler so reading mega-paged books was doable. Of course, as life became more complicated my reading suffered. It took much longer to read novels or memoirs. My working life got busier and busier so reading books became sporadic. Watching TV was easier, demanded less focus.

Fast forward, I discovered litmags on the internet.

Sidebar: when I bought my first laptop it sat on my coffee table closed most of the time. I couldn’t think of anything to look up! I’d only used a computer for work til then so I associated it with work. Then, Hurricane Katrina happened, making my laptop a communication line to events in my neighborhood and city while I was in exile and opening the online world to me.

Once I discovered litmags, most of my reading time was there. I still do lots of litmag reading, especially now that I “know” writers that I seek out to read. But I had an epiphany a while back: it’s ok to read more than one book at a time. I can do it. I am doing it. The key for me is reading in different genres. I know if I try to read, say, two novels about an inter-generational family I’ll get characters confused.

Charlotte Hamrick, Books: Down & Dirty

Portuguese poet Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), in her life and work, reminds me quite a bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The disadvantaged background giving rise to huge literary ambitions. The New Woman of early 20th century. Loving the sonnet form for its combination of control and ecstasy. The sustained aesthetics of late Romanticism and early Modernism. Her frequent use of exclamations is off-putting to my ear, but the deployment of ellipses gives her sonnets a rare quality of inarticulateness before the ineffable.

Jee Leong Koh, This Sorrow That Lifts Me Up

A J Akoto’s “Unmothered” explores the taboo of the failure of maternal love and becoming an unloved daughter. It does so without sentiment or the daughter, who voices most of these poems, feeling sorry for herself. Akoto has kept focused on the relationship, its fragmentation and fall out. The mother’s viewpoint is explored as the daughter tries to understand her behaviour, but mother claims her behaviour is motivated by love, a position the daughter struggles to follow. A startling collection which is confident enough to allow readers to inhibit and react to the poems.

Emma Lee, “Unmothered” A J Akoto (Arachne Press) – book review

In Metamorphosis, the next and final collection published during [Sanki] Saitō’s life, much of the work of answering the question ‘What is Life’ focuses on coming to terms with death, the deaths of family members and fellow poets:

A fly on his dead face –
I whisk it off.
just whisk it off

This sense of almost numb acceptance is frequently juxtaposed with a sense of personal struggle, a need for escape that is apparent in the poem that gives the collection its title:

On the green plateau
an unbridled horse, my metamorphosis –
Escape!

The sense of ecstatic relief expressed here is, I think, uncharacteristic. More mundane, yet for me at least more moving, is this poem from a few pages later:

Wanting to gain the strength
to rise and run away,
I eat potatoes

Here the need for escape is grounded in the earthy need for sustenance, for connection to the body. It’s fine, moving poem that opens up more and more on rereading.

This is a typically handsome Isobar volume, and Masaya Saito has, insofar as a non-reader of Japanese can judge, done sterling work in bringing a large representative sample of Saitō’s work to an English-speaking audience. In addition to selections from all the books he published when alive, he gives us a body of work that was either published posthumously or published in journals but never collected. For those of us interested in haiku as more than a museum piece, it’s a vital volume.

Billy Mills, Selected Haiku 1933–1962, Sanki Saitō, trans Masaya Saito: A Review

This week I have been reading issue 46 of The Dark Horse. To cut a long story short, it’s a tribute issue to Douglas Dunn in his 80th year, and a poem that pops up repeatedly in the contributors’ recollections and comments is Friendship of Young Poets—not sure this a a sanctioned link/publication of the poem, but have a look if you don’t know it. I didn’t, having only read Elegies and bits of Terry Street. I will be working my way through the lad’s catalogue now though.

After a week where there’s been some fractiousness in what we can loosely call “poetry world”, or at least a small corner of it, a line like “the friendship of poets,/ mysterious,[…]” seems apt enough for me, and a good place to end.

Mat Riches, Putting in a fest-shift

In the first half of the poem we’re very much looking down: the leaves, the path, the mud. I can almost see my welly boots nosing into the picture. As we near familiar territory though, attention drifts upwards to the leaves in the trees, the wind, the birds. Time seems to slow down as we join the poet in attentive presence, in “quiet applause”. And then this lift at the end, as we’re swept into a more expansive kind of consciousness that reaches out and beyond. It’s a beautiful, transcendent finish. Big-hearted, and at the same time emotionally complex, embracing human connectedness and limits. Spiritual, we might call it.

Indeed there is religious imagery here – the congregation, the dove. Incidentally, I love how the speaker doesn’t just perceive but “joins” the trees. There is a deep appreciation for the natural world in this poem. Or maybe that’s the wrong way of putting it, implying a kind of separateness. We’re not looking on here, but from within. At the centre of the poem is this line, “they have no book”, and I find myself thinking that the spirituality here is one that’s available to all of us, regardless of faith: to “breathe, drink light and listen”.

Jonathan Totman, Morning

The rain falls and falls
cool, bottomless, and prehistoric
falls like night —
not an ablution
not a baptism
just a small reason
to remember
all we know of Heaven
to remember
we are still here
with our songs and our wars,
our space telescopes and our table tennis.

Here too
in the wet grass
half a shell
of a robin’s egg
shimmers
blue as a newborn star
fragile as a world.

Maria Popova, Spell Against Indifference

My own sense of the spiritual, of the divine, has always remained at a distance: I was raised attending religion but never garnered a faith (I write poems for a living, so I don’t think I can claim to live without faith), growing up amongst the dour, stoic and unspoken ripples of old-style Scottish Protestantism. It was years before I understood my father’s own devotion, let alone the depth of it, attending weekly services as far more than a matter of routine or cultural habit, always appearing to me as a matter of custom, gesture and rote. I’ve long repeated that I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic – I’m not sure what I don’t believe – but hold an admiration for those who carry spirituality as a matter of good faith, instead of, say, those who believe uncritically (including a refusal to question, which seems unsettling), or use any of their beliefs as bludgeon, or as a false sense of entitlement or superiority. Listen to Stephen Colbert, for example, speak of his Catholicism: an interview he did with Jim Gaffigan a couple of years back on The Late Show I thought quite compelling, in which they spoke of their shared faith. There are ways to be positive, and through this collection, [Kaveh] Akbar not only finds it, but seeks it out, and embraces it.

There is such a lightness, a delicate touch to the poems assembled here, one that broadcasts a sense of song and a sense of praise to the notion of finding that single spark of light in the dark. “Somehow eternity / almost seems possible / as you embrace.” writes Ranier Maria Rilke, as part of ‘The Second Duino Elegy’ (as translated by David Young), “And yet / when you’ve got past / the fear in that first / exchange of glances / the mooning at the window / and that first walk / together in the garden / one time: / lovers, are you the same?” There is such a sense of joy, and hope, and celebration across this collection of lyrics, traditions, cultures, languages and faiths. If there is a thread that connects us all together, might it be the very notion of hope? If this collection is anything to go by, that might just be the case. Whether spiritual or otherwise, this is an impressive and wonderfully-expansive collection that can only strengthen the heart.

rob mclennan, The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, ed. Kaveh Akbar

We went to Edinburgh for the start of the Festival to see the Grit Orchestra, and it has developed a few more thoughts on culture and tradition first inspired by a short on-line course I took dealing with the archive at Tobar an Dualchais, which I want to develop over the next few posts. There is a crossover with the thinking I was doing on healing and recovery earlier this year, and the work I am still trying to do on the Nine Herbs Charm, via the concept of ‘Lǣc’. I wrote about it a while back

‘Lǣc’ is the important stuff you do when you aren’t ‘working’ – what my Church used to call ‘servile’ work’ – all the life admin, busywork, earning a living, mundane day to day stuff. ‘Lǣc’ is ‘recreation’ spelled re-creation as the self-help books do, holiday spelled ‘holy day’ as they used to do in the Middle Ages, the difference between ‘relieving symptoms’ and ‘healing’.

It’s a bit more than healing, though. It’s a communal activity, with a link to the sacred. It is demanding, and needs ‘duende’ – when I first read about it I thought of the Zen art of archery, or the tea ceremony, and the ‘lek’ where grouse and capercaillie meet in forest clearings to strut their stuff. And this brought me to the Eightsome Reel and the William Wallace quotation in the title, from before his country-defining victory at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. It occurs to me that this art, this culture, is serious stuff:

To sing here you will need
to open the heart,
the lungs and voice,
and meet it square.
You can’t sing from hiding,
nor drunk or afraid.
You can’t sing this softly
like chocolate in the sun.
You must give yourself
to the fight with all your strength.
It will take all you’ve got.
It will feel like death.

The Outcry from The Wren in the Ash Tree, in Haggards

Now that summer is over, I am here, at the ring. Now to see if I can dance!

Elizabeth Rimmer, I Have Brought You to the Ring

What is spirit: This is a question much addressed in poetry. There are many questions much addressed in poetry that weary me, but this is not one, this mystery, one that confronts us with every loss.

Here is the first portion of a poem by Michael Klein called “Scenes for an elegy”:

I haven’t learned to live abandonedly yet
mother & wonder when I dream of you
if I’m meant to & if there’s such a thing as light
going on without us–or if we die into what
I think we do: something already finished
that we’re just adding us to

And I love this image from his poem “Captured”:

…the empty field with the wind thrown over it.

Isn’t that great?

Klein writes many poems that feel elegiac, and beautifully so, whether he is mourning a lost marriage, a lost youth, or a dead friend, so beautifully that life rises inevitably from these poems. I had not known his work before but have enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it this week. He has a new and selected volume coming out some time soon from The Word Works. Keep an eye out for it.

Marilyn McCabe, Gathering up the tears; or, On Elegies

who hasn’t an eye that refuses light

        and helpless blood in their breast

when shall our honey smell faintly of death

Grant Hackett [no title]

I only bought Linda Pastan’s collection, The Last Uncle (WW Norton & Co 2002),a few months ago. I bought it after reading the title poem on a poetry website. It rang so true as I lost my last two uncles at the end of 2022 and the beginning of this year and one of my cousins had said, ‘We’re the older generation now.’ I wrote about it on here. 

Reading through the collection today it’s another poem (‘The Vanity of Names’) that reaches me. It’s about a house staying ‘fixed in its landscape./ Rooms will be swept clean/ of all its memories. Doors will close./ Even the animal graves out back/ will forget who planted the bones/ …’ I am selling the house I was born in, two years after my parents died. In those two years I have spoken to them there and watched grief change shape. I felt less of their absence and more of their eternal presence. I came to be comforted by the home they lived in from the moment it was built in April 1957 until March 2021. But it is still hard letting it go. And that’s going to happen in the next few weeks: my last visit, the last time I open the front door. The last time I step into the room I was born in. The last time I close the door and turn the key. Before handing it to a stranger.

Pastan understands that her house ‘will enter/ the dreams of other people’ but ‘to acquiesce/ is never easy. It is to love the unwritten future/ almost as well as the fading past./ It is to relinquish the vanity of names/ which are already disappearing/ with every cleansing rain …’ Yes. A leap of faith into an unwritten future. And, ‘the cleansing rain’. I can work with those. 

Lynne Rees, The Sealey Challenge

But everything sinks that once
rose; everything returns to the cradle

where it was forged. There is talk
about planting barriers of seagrass,

raising walls against the onrush of water.
With arms the sheen of oyster pearl,

the current pulls its retinue of ship-
wrecks and prehistoric fish.

Rivers dream of the day
they are returned to themselves.

Luisa A. Igloria, Riverine