This week: intense incomprehension, the strings of things, apple maggots, plastic words, and much more. Enjoy.

Spring begins today. The seasonal gate swings open on its equinox hinge. And I’m also in-between things : the end of a years-long writing project, on one hand, and a new and unexpected set of social responsibilities, on the other.

So this is just a diary note, a fugitive transition report. Stray thoughts.

When you are absorbed and propelled by the magnetic field of an extended poetry project, you are really in that world. Wearing thick horse-blinders donated by Pegasus. So when you emerge, everything looks slightly changed.

And what have I sought for, all these years, eyes fixed on poetry? Yet maybe this is the wrong way to put it. The ideal, the model, of poetry is out there, in the world; yet the quiddity of poet-qua-poet is constituted by an ongoing relationship, with an emerging process – that is, between the poet and poems themselves. And over time, sometimes, this relation becomes more symbiotic, more “second nature” : “Time silvers the plow, and the poet’s voice” (per Osip Mandelstam).

When Mandelstam was asked by one of his Soviet media handlers to define “Acmeism”, the literary movement which he helped bring to birth, he replied : “Nostalgia for world culture.” His remark encapsulates one of the evergreen, effervescent aspects of the poet’s métier : a sense not only of tradition, but also solidarity with fellow workers in the verse-furrows – all over the world, all through both time and space. It can make you giddy just to think of it.

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

I have twelve hives of bees. Some are on a farm, at the edge of a field in a long strip of woodland. Amid the scrub there is a small tree which in late Spring is a cloud of blossom. I notice it because it sings: the insects that are feeding on it are so tiny, they can only be heard. They greet the nectar with a high, sweet note – pure elation. […]

Sean Borodale’s wonderful Bee Journal should be prescribed reading for all aspiring or armchair apiarists. Everything happens : they swarm, they die, they reinvent themselves, all while he learns to do the hardest thing of all – nothing. From its Introduction: “When the wider landscape parches in high summer, this shaded, humid locality divines its insects and flowers; re-builds itself delicately in colour, sugar, water and sunlight”. He understands the life-force of the colony as a manifestation of Lorca’s “duende” :

All that has dark sounds has duende. Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art …

Bee Journal came from notebooks he took to the hive : “inside the increased effort of simultaneously writing and ‘keeping’, I experienced a pressure, a slight emergency of the senses”. His poet’s attentiveness allows him into their world. He quickly gave up trying to write while also tending to an open hive, but the poems really do hold what he hopes is “the poetic pulse of the poem in progress”. This “raised alertness” – to the radical geography of the bees’ orbit as well as to the tiny intimacies of the bees themselves – really do capture the experience, including, frequently, “intense incomprehension”.

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 
irremediably.

Dale Favier, Already Spring

Another reason I love reading poetry in the morning is that, more often than not, reading others’ poems inspires me to write my own.

I have a “daily” poem exchange with a few friends on email this month (we’re calling it “rogue” since we’re not actually required to write every day—so yes, we’re definitely playing fast and loose with the word daily here). But it’s been a reminder to me that writing has always been the one thing when I’m doing it, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. And many times, just by showing up, I end up with a draft of a poem. Other times, nothing—or a poem that feels like it was written by a feral raccoon who just discovered he has big feelings. But I’m okay with that, I’m okay with a not-so-great poem. When it comes to poems, I realize I’m less attached to outcome and more attached to the idea of play and process.

But as you know, it’s a hard mix these days—to be creative, happy, engaged, and informed without short-circuiting. So I’ve been trying to keep things simple when at home, I reach for the natural world and books (my two comfort animals in tough times) along with daily Biscoff vanilla cream sandwich cookies (sometimes a few or more) and Mighty Leaf Ginger Twist tea at night (no, I am not a sponsor of either of these products, I just somehow became accidentally devoted to both of them recently—some of you will remember my expensive French yogurt kick). Yes, it might sound a little dull (poetry, cookies, tea, the sky, robins, early spring flowers, etc.), but I’m recommitting myself to the small luxuries in life. 

Kelli Russell Agodon, Rogue Poems & Reasonable/Unreasonable Amounts of Cookies

I write to my elected officials, I donate when I can, I hold a sign at rallies, I feel helpless.

After reading for a few hours, most nights I still lie awake trying to keep my mind from heading back to poet and activist June Jordan’s question, “How many gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?”

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

Every once in a while, you stumble upon something so lovely, so unpretentiously beautiful and quietly profound, that you feel like the lungs of your soul have been pumped with a mighty gasp of Alpine air. This Is a Poem That Heals Fish (public library) is one such vitalizing gasp of loveliness — a lyrical picture-book that offers a playful and penetrating answer to the question of what a poem is and what it does. And as it does that, it shines a sidewise gleam on the larger question of what we most hunger for in life and how we give shape to those deepest longings.

Written by the French poet, novelist, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Simeón, translated into English by Enchanted Lion Books founder Claudia Zoe Bedrick (the feat of translation which the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska had in mind when she spoke of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes … a second original”), and illustrated by the inimitable Olivier Tallec, this poetic and philosophical tale follows young Arthur as he tries to salve his beloved red fish Leon’s affliction of boredom.

Arthur’s mommy looks at him.
She closes her eyes,
she opens her eyes…

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

Puzzled and unsure what a poem is, Arthur goes looking in the pantry, only to hear the noodles sigh that there is no poem there. He searches in the closet and under his bed, but the vacuum cleaner and the dust balls have no poem, either.

Determined, Arthur continues his search.
He runs to Lolo’s bicycle shop.
Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time, and is always in love.
He is repairing a tire and singing.

So begins the wonderful meta-story of how poetry comes into being as a tapestry of images, metaphors, and magpie borrowings. Each person along the way contributes to Arthur’s tapestry a different answer, infused with the singular poetic truth of his or her own life.

Maria Popova, This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
If I were a liar, I would say it was thanks to the mentorship of [INSERT IMPRESSIVE NAME] and [INSERT PRESTIGIOUS SCHOOL]. The truth is that I squeezed between Jim Morrison lyrics and the skips on Dylan Thomas records I took out of the library. How else does someone like me discover poetry? I’m from the Bronx. Nobody had books in the house.  

3 – How long does it take to start a writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Writing is slow for me. Until it speeds up. Until I have something I have something to stretch across the room. Each project is intended as a new experiment unto itself. For /face, I started sampling images and language from Google Patents on facial surveillance technology. My first ten or twenty pieces were nothing anyone cosplaying mid-century Confessionalism would recognize as poetry. That’s the standard I set for myself. That’s how I view “experimentalism.” I was confused but also encouraged when I heard right back from editors who wanted to publish the material. Of course, unlike in the movies, any acceptance was followed by ten more rejections. Anything I achieved with this book came after this 1-in-10 ratio, which, for me, became a game of how weird I could make the work and which snob magazine I could freak out. That was my “journey,” as the kids say. That and a lot of reading and research. Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Shoshana Zuboff. They all rode along in the back seat. In the front was Nancy Spero squeezed alongside Don Mee Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.   

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
All poems begin at the bottom of the esophagus, where gastric acids begin breaking down anything I’ve ingested. Nutrients become energy; the rest, the materials that cannot benefit the body; they become poems. Everything starts with a few lines, then a few more. I cannot work without an idea for a “project.” Everything has to be an attack on a larger order, or why am I even bothering? 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with William Lessard

Its origin is unclear: it may or may not have been Oscar Wilde who said a net is just a bunch of holes woven together with strings. He may or may not have been quoting some ancient Asian wisdom. But I like the notion. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by John Irving, but I loved the books of his that I loved because of how the strings of things in the stories would wander around then come together in the end not in a tidy bow but in a weave, the weft bending to the warp of all the crisscrossed lines, the gaps suddenly making sense. I try sometimes to think about my own life that way, to catch a glimpse of some fabric of it. It’s hard to see the fabric of one’s own life, so close are we to the weave, trying to peer through the holes, missing the overall pattern often. I like this poem by my friend Jessica Dubey because of its filaments, and how they dangle and tangle, and how by the end something unexpected is woven, and something is caught in the net.

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

 I want to share this essay in Annulet by Ryan Eckes and Laura Jaramillo: “Searching for the Commons through Precarity and Crisis: American Poetics since 9/11.” Both Ryan and Laura are my age but they feel like my elders in the world of poetry and politics, as they’ve both been tapped into things throughout the entirety of the last few decades (whereas I have been playing catch up for the last 7 years or so). This essay offers a really insightful history of what it was like as a poet on the left through the Bush years, OWS, and beyond. There is also a really astute analysis of how social media and the internet more broadly has impacted us as poets striving for a common connection. It’s a great essay and one not to miss. (They also happen to give a brief shout out to Dead Mall Press, which is much appreciated.)

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

Rabble rouser, organizer,
bold bright spirit wrapped in awkward
flesh and cotton ball softness and
carrying the most essential
pastels (pink as your cheeks, baby
blue like your eyes, and white as grief
and graves and talcum powder). You
flung your arms up, shouting over
signs and crowds and floats wheeling on
hidden wheels with black treads. You lead
the Pride parade; you celebrate
the you others have yet to learn
to see—

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

The past couple days have found me stuck on the latest play script, at the end of Act I, which is about usually where I’ve been getting stuck. It’s turning into a mystery, almost, and I am not sure I want it to go in that direction. I am the writer, after all, you would think what I say goes. But then again–many poem projects have gone in entirely different ways than intended, so maybe I should let the writing wander as it may.  I will return in a couple of days and see if it’s working better or if I can find a way to make it so. 

In the meantime, I have been writing some early bits to a newish project, the bone palace, which was meant to accompany a set of fun fauxtographs I made up a couple years back. The images are proving a ripe and fertile space for building stories around and within them. The project as it starts feels very similar to errata, which was just a little chap of borrowed formats, something which I love doing in the midst of other kinds of projects. But the narrative feels sharper here and less collage-like […]

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

On Thursday, I finally submitted the manuscript for my fifth collection, I Saw What I Know. For the past six weeks, I’ve needed to write a blurb for it – the short summary which appears on the back cover. Instead of writing it, I wrote an article about blurb writing. In the process of finishing said article, I began researching the process of caring for cat litter trays. ADHD procrastination and paralysis is REAL.

The thing is, I don’t have a cat. So I invite you to celebrate with me the miraculous fact of having writing not just this article, but also my fifth collection. […]

If you think that writing a blurb for someone else is hard, try writing your own.

Seriously, try it. There’s a lot to be gained from it. Not only in practicing your skills for concise, original writing – but also, developing a deeper understanding of your own work. If you can’t explain concisely what you’ve written; if you can’t describe what someone may gain from reading it – maybe you don’t know your work enough; maybe you don’t love or believe in it enough. And maybe you can change that.

You don’t have to have written a pamphlet or book. If you’re not working towards publication, or you’re years away from a completed collection, it doesn’t matter. Just pull together a bunch of your writing; say 10-50 poems.

Read them; make notes. Identify your primary concerns, the recurrent topics and themes. State – at least to yourself – what your strengths are, how a kind and interested reader might describe your voice. Consider what that reader may take away from the experience of your work.

Writing about your own work will give you a stronger appreciation of your own voice; an understanding of your techniques, your intention, your focus. The river of poetry has its own currents. It will – and should – always take you in unexpected directions – but at the same time, you have oars, you can build your own craft, you can follow a chart. You get to decide what you are writing about, and how, and why. A blurb is a great way to dip into the process.

Let yourself be lavish. Get drunk on your own wine.

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

The other morning, leaving our Mexico City apartment after reading the news, I had the thought, “Everything I do is meaningless in the face of all this violence, and in the face of death.” But then we spent that day in the National Museum of Anthropology, where thousands of ancient objects from the civilizations of Mexico, all made with extreme care, are housed in a magnificent building, also made with care and attention to every detail — and I came back to myself and my purpose.

We are living in a time when the concentration of money and power, ruthless economic competition, and the demand for everything being done immediately are forcing the prioritization of speed and efficiency over perfection and care. Carefulness will increasingly be found in individual and small enterprises that exist more and more outside of, and independent from, mass production. In Japan, master craftspeople are revered as “living treasures”, but there is a real question of whether our western societies will have the capacity in the future to appreciate and preserve not only what artists, craftspeople, poets, and musicians produce, but the traditions, rooted in care and attention, that are the foundation for these arts.

For a long time, we’ve counted on arts organizations and institutions to do this work of preservation, education, and passing on. Not only are those institutions under political and financial assault, but their “gatekeeping” has been criticized as exclusionary and discriminatory — and rightly so. That in itself is another subject.

The point I want to make here is that living in a very different culture, as I’ve been doing for these weeks — one that has had a long history of political disruption, colonialism, violence, discrimination, and economic hardship, and where individuals could not expect much of anything from outside themselves and their communities — makes certain things clear. The vibrancy of the arts here is the result of a choice: people have taken that responsibility upon themselves because they know that art is intrinsic to life. The work that is shown in the National Museum of Anthropology is almost entirely unattributed: these are extraordinary objects that were made by anonymous master craftspeople. Many of the people who live in Mexico today have spent their lives knowing and valuing those traditions more than they value personal recognition. The indigenous woman sitting in the street selling exquisite needlework take pride in her craft, sells it to make a small living, and smiles when she sees that you appreciate it. The older man who takes my hand and draws me into an impromptu salsa in a city street is filled with an ebullient joy that he freely gives to me. I doubt that either of them has an easy life. But I would argue that both are more in touch with their humanity than many of us.

The sickness and malaise we are experiencing in the western First World is a disease that comes not only from the top down — which it surely does — but because too many of us have lost the conviction that art for art’s sake is vital for our own spirits, and for our communities. When we, as artists, buy into the capitalist model, thinking that money, fame, titles and rewards are the measures of our self-worth as creators, we have already missed the point and made it far harder for ourselves. One does not have to be a famous poet to write words that matter. Art and music that lift people up can happen when two or three people get together to make some “house music,” or dance in a park.

Beth Adams, Care

There’s been a good sprinkling of words in my week all round because as well as reading I have been writing. One of my favourite ways to write poetry is when there is a compelling feeling of being pulled to set something down. This week my sister was my muse. We had been talking on the phone and after telling me something she hadn’t told me before she said it would make a good poem if I wanted to write it. I pondered on what she had said on one of my walks and came back with a pretty much fully formed poem. I remembered to leave it to rest overnight as well as read it out loud to check it sounded right before editing it and smoothing its edges. Then I recorded it as a voice note and sent it to her.  We both agree that is has something special about it so I am hoping it will find a home in the not-too-distant future.  

Sue Finch, A DAFFODILESQUE DALEK, THE FIRST MOW, AND THE MUSE

Rather incongruously, I am a member of the French Rugby Federation (FFR) — this is because I do all the admin for my middle son’s rugby club membership — and as a result I had access to early booking for the last game of the Six Nations tournament, which was played last Saturday night at the Stade de France — a huge, 80,000-seat stadium in the north of Paris. Thanks to my prompt use of the booking link, I managed to secure for my son and I what turned out to be amazingly good seats, just behind one of the goals, for a very reasonable sum. […]

Pindar’s victory odes are some of the most sublimely beautiful poems in the entire Western tradition. But they are also, quite sincerely, about sport. We don’t have a Pindar today, but I was struck by how the spectacle and conduct of the match provided in many ways most of the elements of a traditional epinicion. The match itself was preceded by a very impressive show, featuring two men dressed as medieval knights mounted on horses riding onto the pitch (they carefully covered it up first, presumably to avoid the possibility of the players ending up face-first in a pile of horse manure). I’m not sure exactly what they were meant to represent, as there was no explanation as far as I could tell, but the pageant was clearly intended to allude to the long history of conflict between France and England — as an Englishwoman, I thought of Agincourt, but perhaps the French would recall rather the Battle of Hastings.

Pindar’s epinicia, similarly, always have a structuring myth linking the present-day victor and his sponsor to the distant past — generally, Pindar liked if possible to work in Achilles, Hercules or Ajax, presumably as their manly credentials seemed the best fit for athletic victory. But unlike the organisers of the Six Nations spectacle, he had the somewhat harder task of creating in each case a link between a reasonably well-known myth and the specific family, town or island of the victorious athlete and/or his aristocratic sponsor. Partly as a result, Pindar’s versions of myths are often eccentric or obscure, and he may have invented details to suit his purposes. The style of formal epinicia, which generally avoids direct names and narrative in favour of complex allusions, adds to this effect. So overall, the fact that I wasn’t quite sure exactly what story this moving and impressive opening show was alluding to was also rather authentic.

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

Great imagist poetry is distinguished by its ability to immerse the reader fully in the immediacy of emotion. Amy Lowell’s sensual warmth, Richard Aldington’s taut emotional energy, and the deceptively simple yet resonant details of William Carlos Williams all exemplify this tradition. I Am Not Light by Louise Machen (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) demonstrates that same capacity. The collection is arranged in three parts—Into the Darkness, Origins of Darkness, and Into the Light—and throughout them Machen’s urgent, sensuous poems exploit the powerful cultural associations we attach to darkness and light. Darkness appears as a space of turmoil, threat, and uncertainty; light signals growth, clarity, and renewal. Yet in Machen’s work, the two are not oppositional. They are symbiotic. Darkness becomes a necessary condition of transformation, a landscape to be endured before light can be reached. […]

Louise Machen’s nomination for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem feels entirely justified. As Briony Collins notes in her endorsement, there are echoes of Sylvia Plath in these poems, but Machen’s voice remains unmistakably her own: contemporary, incisive, and deeply resonant. I Am Not Light establishes her as one of the most compelling poets writing today.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘I Am Not Light’ by Louise Machen

There’s a folio of 45 Ottawa poets up at Periodicities. 2 of my poems are included, “memento vivis” and “a placebo science” which are ghazal or ghazal adjacent. Don’t miss Michelle Desbarats‘ and Sarah Kabamba‘s and Tamsyn Farr‘s while you’re there. Ooh, and Cameron has a book of essays coming out this fall.

Word from David O’Meara, “When you’re starting off, it’s easier to take writing really seriously while also having a really good time doing it. I want to do whatever I need to, in my writing, in order to be doing those two things simultaneously again. “This matters” plus “This is fun,” the whole time I’ve got my notebook open.”

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

Reviewers, particularly poetry reviewers, aren’t usually paid (the commissioning editor themselves might be an unpaid volunteer so this isn’t a ‘pay the writer’ argument). They get a free copy of the book they review. That’s not to say the reviewer doesn’t benefit from reviewing. They get an introduction to a book they may not have chosen to read or couldn’t afford to buy. There’s value in writing a review: assessing the poems, developing critical skills, learning how to justify an opinion and argue a case. Reviewing is also a way of getting or keeping a reviewer’s name in print in between publications of their own work where the reviewer is also a practitioner. Occasionally a reviewer may be thanked.

There should be no reason to unpublish a commissioned review. A review is only commissioned on books that a magazine editor has deemed worthy of a review. A reviewer has read and re-read the book, written and edited the review, the review has been further edited and agreed. After that lengthy process, which gives the editors and reviewer plenty of time to withdraw if there’s a disagreement about the tenor of a review or the reviewer can’t edit it to the correct length, before the review is published. The writer or publisher of the book under review may ask for inaccuracies to be corrected, but they cannot dictate what a poetry magazine does or does not publish if the references to the book are accurate. A disagreement about the opinion expressed should not sway a magazine editor to take down a review.

It is galling to see a review taken down after publication, when there was nothing wrong with the commissioned review. When Gutter magazine took down their commissioned review of Polly Clark’s “Afterlife”, a review good enough to be used as part of a ‘book of the month’ feature, alarm bells rang.

Alarm bells continued to ring as the review was not withdrawn for reasons of quality or even disagreement with opinions and arguments put forward in the review.

It seems the withdrawal was actioned on the basis of a complaint from a reader (whose name may be known to the magazine editors but has not been revealed publicly) not about the review, not about the contents of the review, not about the book being reviewed, i.e. not for any legitimate reason. The review was taken down because the complainant drew the editors’ attention to social media posts made by the poet whose book was reviewed. While I’m not discussing what those posts were or the views of the poet, this review was withdrawn after agreement to publish for reasons that had nothing to do with the review.

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

Power and authority are at stake when we talk about what makes a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ poem. This is what animates much of the discourse. Without power and authority, the critical judgement of poetry experts has no answer to the popular appeal of Insta-poems and other money-spinning media forms — they are reduced to customers reviewing niche products.

But power and authority is hard-won; genuinely illuminating, convincing evaluations of individual poems and books take time to muster. Meanwhile, there is the constant need to promote interest in those same poems and books, as well as related events.

So shortcuts are taken. Agreement among a small and insular group is presented as widespread consensus. Authority is extended far beyond its natural purview, as when a poet who is successful and well-liked among his coterie, but limited in range, makes pronouncements on the state of the whole scene. Bad poems need to be invented, and need to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the authoritative critic to have a function. What’s more, the criteria must remain somewhat hazy in order to avoid the average reader learning how to consistently apply it themselves. Periodic trenchant denunciations of work that, to the untrained eye, is remarkably similar in character to that which the same critic praises are a smart move.

By the same token, the real offence committed by those editors and activists who rule out work by avowed political reactionaries, or are overly interested in poets’ claims to membership of an oppressed group is that their criteria are too transparent. They make it too easy to jump through the hoops, and in so doing threaten to mortally wound the power of other editors and critics — which is wielded on the basis that they possess an exceptional capability when it comes to judging poems.

Jon Stone, ESSAY / What is a ‘bad’ poem exactly?

2. In the thick of the monsoon, the poem should hold its breath and sink into standing water. In the deepest murk, lie the choicest words. A poem must be an abalone diver.

3. Through mango-hued summers, the poem cannot be shadow. Cannot be shade. The poem should climb up a light beam to interrogate the sun. To look into its eyes. To hold itself up to that light. A poem must sweat.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Things you should teach your poem-child before it leaves home

This morning, I’m thinking about the downside to surprise—the sudden stroke that leaves you fatherless, the burst in the dot-com bubble that evaporates wealth you realize was only ever imaginary, the rollover that leaves your twin brother paralyzed from the neck down. . . . During the summer of 1988, my mother went into an operating room for a routine hysterectomy and woke to a diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

This kind of surprise has a profound effect on character. Often, during the seven years of my mother’s intermittent treatment, I thought about how hardship turns some of us bitter while others become better versions of themselves. Once during those years, I visited the family farm after my parents had gone dancing. During that season, chemotherapy was having its way with Mother. “Well,” she said to me, “I could stay home on a Saturday night. And be alone with the side effects. Or I can be among friends. I can dance with your father. The music, the company will take my mind off how I feel.”

During the years I lived in Austin, my husband Scott and I became friends with the Houston poet Erica Lehrer. I well remember the time I saw Erica get out of her car for a reading and walk toward us with a cane. A decade younger than I, Erica was a vital, healthy presence in the poetry community. She’s turned an ankle, I thought. Soon she’ll be tossing that cane. Erica’s need for a cane, I soon learned, was far more serious than a sprain. She’d been diagnosed with ataxia, one of three in every hundred-thousand. Also known as Multiple System Atrophy, ataxia is progressive, affecting coordination, affecting speech, affecting everything.

Once on a visit to Houston, Scott and I stayed with Erica and her husband. By then, Erica was using a wheeled walker. She spoke haltingly, her tongue uncooperative. Still, Erica entertained us. She made us laugh. She found humor in carrying a medical document about her diagnosis—to save her from being arrested for public drunkenness.

Yesterday, I pulled Erica’s poetry collection from my shelves. The title says so much about this remarkable woman: Dancing with Ataxia. The poems are sometimes bluntly honest about the grueling losses exacted by ataxia. But never self-pitying, always alive with the resilience that defined Erica Lehrer. 

David Meischen, “I Am More”

I get as close as I can to Turtle, careful to read their body for signs of unease. Turtle does not move, but stares right at me. Or through me. A heft. A mountain. A gargoyle. A carapace of watery wisdom. There are so many ways to describe and honor Turtle. Staring into the ancient, the ancient stares back. Maybe someday I too will be craggy. Maybe someday I too will have deep rivulets across my skin and in them a language of time well-spent. But right now I am soft. My shoulders are worldless. My language, young and unsure.

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

William Wordsworth famously described poetry as “strong emotion…recollected in tranquility,” and that is how I want to think about—or think with and through—this collection of poems by Thomas A. Thomas, a photographer and an extraordinary poet, now the Assistant Managing Editor at MoonPath Press.

Because My Heart leads us down the path of a partner’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the painful decline, to loss, I both wanted to read this book, and I very much didn’t want to read it. Before my own husband was moved into a residential care home, I picked the book up multiple times, but couldn’t make myself continue. Around the first of this year, however, I told myself it was time, and I took it with me to a local café. Once I began, I read it all the way through. Five sections, 29 poems: I thought I could easily gin out a review. Tried. Couldn’t. A few weeks ago, having read it through again, I found my way in. Narrative arc of disease and death aside, My Heart Is Not Asleep is primarily a love story. So that’s the book I’m here to tell you about.

“Around Us,” the second poem in the collection, lights up the two main characters like gods in an ancient Greek drama. They may be on their way to a hard fall, but, reading this poem, I knew I wanted to be there to see it:

A beam of full moonlight falls through the skylight and
graces our pillows, our faces, lights up
dust motes, like stars turning silently above our bed.

Silver lights reflect “high knotty pine ceiling / and the knotty pine walls, each knot / you said, a galaxy.” The poem holds the arc of the whole book, ending with “eons exploded and long gone dark stars.”

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

When I was 17 or 18 years old, we read in class Milton’s Paradise Lost. The poem, written in blank verse, retells the biblical Fall of Man — Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden — in over ten thousand lines of verse, first published in 1667. Lucifer, cast into the fires of Hell after his failed rebellion against God, resolves to take revenge by corrupting humanity and its innocent residence in paradise. He arrives into the Garden of Eden and, disguised as a seductive serpent, tempts Eve into eating an apple. She bites, then Adam bites into the apple. Their disobedience to never taste the forbidden brings upon the world sin, death, and shame, and they are expelled from Paradise. But Milton reassures his readers: the divine angel Michael reveals that Christ will one day redeem humanity’s fall.

Last summer, I went to Giverny. Among the purple, and the pink, and the red, and the blue flowers, in the middle of ice cream shops that sold melon and strawberry parfums, there are rows and rows of apple trees in bloom, with green and red apples hanging off the branches, apples of varying colours rotting on the soil, apples eaten by worms, insects and birds. Codling moths and apple maggots laying eggs on apples, living inside apples, feeding and living their lives inside the flesh of apples. Have you ever seen apple trees in bloom? On a sunny spring day, have you seen fully ripe fruit, a pear or a fig or even litchis, placed right next to each other, full and bright? A few days ago, at the Port Royal farmers’ market, where I like to go sometimes, a man cut a section of a mango that could almost have been as good as an Indian mango. 

If I were to choose between god and an apple, I would always choose an apple. But I am one of the fallen people. 

It’s the biting of the apple that makes me human.

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

Read literally, alongside its setting, “You Are Not Christ” might be regarded as a kind of prayer for, and to, the people of New Orleans who suffered during the flooding: a simultaneous wish for strength and softness. It is a poem of tremendous compassion, its employment of the second person performing a kind of compassion transfusion in the reader: Imagine this, the poem insists: the moment of your drowning, of the body overruling at last—as it will—what we call the mind and by which we mean insight, planning, steadfast belief in futures. What you wish for yourself in this instant, the poem reaching into your chest, itself a sort of “strange new air,” is what you’d wish for anyone alive to these same circumstances.

I’ve called this a prayer because it insists on a variety of humility. Both “wonder” and “a need to know” are presented here as separate from actually living, from the need to simply continue doing so; at the same time, the poem predicts, you will not ask after meaning: What, after all, could be the meaning of drowning? What is meaning to the one who ceases seeking it? So unguarded, or defenceless, you become “like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,” but here the simile is load-bearing. You’re not prey, not the lamb—not some Christ figure suffering a millenia-defining passion—but what makes Christ possible.

What can this mean? So we bleat on, Christs against the current . . .

It’s been a difficult month, but I’m still here. Reading this poem now, with the knowledge that a strange new air, of sorts, does fill my lungs, I’m delighted to follow Laurentiis’s instruction. If I read it as a prayer for the already departed, for myself I read it as a kind of spell, an incantation for continuance: “You will not ask / what this means.” This is the way to be ill, at least for me, I have come to understand. It’s also, I’ve begun to suspect, simply the way to be alive. I knew this, in the blithe repose of health, acknowledged it far more than I ever felt it, but now, having run short on the prophylactic illusion of mortal exceptionalism that mostly keeps us sane and swimming, I find I need something else: whatever it is that precedes meaning: that makes it mean.

Vanessa Stauffer, “You Are Not Christ” by Rickey Laurentiis

i have been reading up
on how to become a ghost.
i think i was made to stay
past my welcome in a house
no longer my own. i was born
in the united states which means
i was fed a sick promise
that everything should arrive to us whole.
someone else can fuss with the pieces.

Robin Gow, assembly required

We make such a fuss of the dead. It is as if they’ve gotten closer to god, have become untouchable, holy, sacred, elevated. They can no longer make mistakes or let us down. It’s almost of some comfort when they’re gone, both the good and bad, the tyrant and martyr become stars we gaze upon or curse safe in the knowledge they’re floating in a far off orbit.

The living piss and shit and make a mess of things. They will talk out of turn, interrupt us, upset us with sudden opinions we wish they never held. Half the time we wonder what they’re on about. Sometimes, regrettably, they explain. Worst of all they will show us their poetry. They want us to listen as they read and then, when they’re done, they’ll ask for applause or money or love or praise or prizes. A dead poet will do none of these things. A dead poet rises above such vulgarity, a dead poet no longer has success to suffer, has no further failure to relish. Their work is done. Ours, set to continue as we carry them on, perhaps out of duty or pity or for beauty and the eternal.

I must tell you of the morning I left that house. We – and I say we because he was there too, the dead poet. I had sensed he’d been awaiting my arrival, approached me ghostly when I first crossed the threshold. He was cold and unfriendly but gradually he’d warmed to me. Or maybe I’d cooled to him, met his temperature, adjusted my thermostats accordingly. This is what you have to do with poets, dead ones especially, this is how we must approach poetry. We need to reconcile with it, become accustomed to it, assimilate with it. It requires effort. We must fully immerse ourselves in it.

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

Mat Riches’ poem puts me in mind of Margareta Magnusson’s 2017 book Döstädning: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The aim of this practice is to go through possessions before death to avoid leaving your family with the huge task of clearing them after you have died. Sadly, the experience of many of my bereaved midlife friends belies this, and they end up burdened with emptying entire houses of a lifetime of things whilst also trying to deal with their grief; something Riches skilfully evokes in this poignant poem. I was startled to find out whilst researching this piece that Magnusson died very recently aged 92; I assume she left everything tidy.

As with Anne Stewart’s poem last week, the title is a ‘Ronseal’ title: does what it says on the tin, appropriately enough for a shed poem. It immediately signals either illness or bereavement; “Dad” is not able to do this job himself, and no longer needs the things in his shed. The first stanza sets out the Herculean task, and we share the speaker’s sense of overwhelm as he shows us how: “Tobacco tins of tacks and screws / cover every surface and shelf.” (1-2). The departed dad is of that war-born generation which remembers rationing and never throws anything out that might be useful; commendable in today’s need for sustainability. However, these repurposed tins from the days of loose-leaf tobacco are full of things that have not, in fact, been re-used and now won’t be. […]

If this is a man cave, the man is missing; we are in the territory of absence as presence. There is life here, but it is the sort that contributes to decay: “The spiders have been working hard” (5).

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

I don’t know about you, but when I read this I found it an incredibly uncomfortable, but joyous experience. I knew from reading previous editions that this wasn’t going to be a kicking, and look. I knew it was coming because Suzanna asked me, but even so, until it landed in my inbox on Friday morning, I had  no idea what she would say. How deep is deep (deep, man..), etc.

And I think this is about as deep as it’s possible to get with that poem. As with all good critical writing, I think it teaches the writer themselves something back to them. And Suzanna has really made me see under the hood of my own work. I’d be lying if I said all of the things that she points out were intentional. I’d be lying if I said that some of it isn’t the work of craft and having worked on poems enough now to sort-of-have a sense of what I’m doing (not always, but sometimes).

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

                                              I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

I was very pleased to receive my copy of this poetry pamphlet, published by Jem and selected (with an introduction) by Victoria. […] I have left behind me in England all my books of Elizabethan poetry. Bullen’s Shorter Elizabethan Lyrics, collections of madrigals, that sort of thing. I do have Gardner’s Oxford Book here, and now a Golden Treasury, and Fowler arrived recently, but not my Ben Jonson, my Cavalier poets. No Donne! One manages, of course. First world problems and all that. Still, this was a very welcome addition to my stocks.

Naturally, Victoria Moul has made a very fine selection, and with some unfamiliar poems. The idea is that some of these poems are rarely anthologised. At least two of them, Like to the falling of a star by Henry King and Dazzled thus with height of place by Henry Wotton, are in Gardner, but not in Ricks. (Why Ricks excluded them is a mystery to me, though it’s not his period and it was Gardner’s.) Some of them are in Fowler too. But there are several poems not always available elsewhere and the overall selection has a good balance of the familiar and the unexpected.

Victoria says in her introduction that it was taken for granted in the seventeenth century that a poem “teaches or expresses something that it is helpful to remember as one tries to conduct a decent life.” This is the theme of the pamphlet. Here, in that spirit, is the Henry King.

Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Even such is man, whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot.

Hot stuff, and really quite modern. Clive James was writing things like that final couplet in his early days. One can mistake this for mere verse, too simple, too gross to be “great literature.” Well, read it again with a real sense of your own mortality. The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entombed in autumn lies—this is the good stuff.

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

Publishing by subscription has a long history, of which the platform that hosts this newsletter is only the most recent example. Once upon a time, publishers would send letters out drumming up interest in a title before committing to print. This continued (and evidently continues) right into the era of commercial publishing, especially for niche or expensive works; Edward Lear was always buttonholing wealthy friends and patrons to support his books of illustrations. There is nothing new under the sun, as the teacher said.

I’m working in a tradition, then. I had more recent inspirations, too. Several small publishers I really admire, like Galley Beggar and Peirene Press, both of which mainly deal in fiction, offer annual subscriptions to supporters as complement to a traditional distribution method, though complement isn’t quite the right word given the scale of the challenge facing independent publishers these days. The subscription seems well suited to poetry: poetry publishing is scrappy, and slow, and it relies on individual risk-taking to make things happen.

The model also suited me because I am doing this, for the most part, in that fabled thing called “spare time”, so wanted to publish in a way which at least felt sustainable, while also allowing me as much time and momentum as possible to find a readership for each pamphlet—or at least, to give each one its moment in the sun. That moment is something that, from my own observations, poetry presses often struggle to create. The model also imposes a limit and a rhythm, both of which seem well suited to poetry. Well, we shall find out.

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

When we sit down to work together, it isn’t just about placing an image next to a stanza. It is about a “shared attention,” temporary alignment of perception, where the boundary between your inner world and another person’s becomes briefly, thrillingly permeable. It’s a commitment to looking together until something new emerges. Our latest collaboration, Feverdream, grew out of Renée’s poems of grief, illness, and the complex physical and healthcare landscape in Appalachia. In this context, attention, when it is shared, becomes a form of care. 

For the artist and writer looking to embark on a similar journey, we’ve distilled our process into a practical roadmap for creating a book that is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

A collaboration needs a foundation stronger than just “liking each other’s style.” For Feverdream, the root system was Narrative Medicine and the bodily experience. Renée spent two years writing with patients in a chemotherapy clinic while her own brother underwent treatment, experiences that profoundly shaped both the content and the process of writing these poems. Sally’s work, centered on the human form, met those poems in a deeply personal space and allowed for word and image to create a reflective intimacy. The body itself is where external and internal meet, and both the art and poems share this embodiment. The body doesn’t belong fully to either world, which makes it such fertile ground for both poetry and visual art to speak to each other.

The Shared Lens: A Practical Guide to Creative Alchemy – guest post by Renée K. Nicholson & Sally Brown (Trish Hopkinson)

In my last post, I wrote about habitat loss and language. I considered how language can act to connect us to the increasingly “lossy” habitat of the material world. This leads me to consider how language itself, language as a habitat in itself, is also subject to the depredations of the modern world. I do feel that language as a habitat is under threat. It is being taken over by corporate and other geopolitical sources of power.

In Uwe Pörksen’s conception, according to Andrew Sweeney, “plastic words” are “words that have become supremely abstract though being stripped from their original context or meaning.” I can’t help but imagine a further process whereby microplastics have entered language like they’ve entered everything else. Language is suffused by capital, technology, commodity. In the contemporary world, it’s hard to find an outside.

If feels like, down to its bones, language has become entangled. Of course, language has always been implicated, forged, through power relations. Made from the societies it is part of. But something has changed with virtuality, AI, and the acid rain of the contemporary media panopticon. We’re soaking in it, Marge.

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Depth is the culprit hastening shrinkage,
meltwater and the salty layer

drivers both of change and loss.

We measure warmth and the salinity,
quantify the calving and new fracturing,

conclude our lack of means to stop
makes faster flow and level rise,

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

No slow surrender, they to land.
No adaptation, for us no plan.

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

I studied with a famous poet when I was in college. I took two poetry workshops with her, and it’s safe to say that her approach to critical reading and revising made me a much better writer. It also made me into an editor, and that led to a long career in journalism. Although I was writing and editing prose about tech, I used skills I had developed in those poetry workshops every day: Close reading, attention to nuance, an ear for rhythm and flow, a sense of structure and drama, an ability to hear what’s left unsaid or what could be said better. 

But for about ten years after college, I wrote no poetry at all. She was such a sharp critic, and her voice was so powerful and distinctive, that I could not write a single line without hearing her comment on it. Fairly or not, I imagined her voice as a disparaging one, and it discouraged me from continuing to write my own work. Without explicit assignments, I simply couldn’t get started. 

My way back into writing for myself (poetry and otherwise) started with haiku. I found the form was spare enough, and modest enough, that it could slip past my internal poetry sentries. 

Haiku are extremely short, and the form eschews most of the tools used by modern poets: Metaphor, overt allusion, excessively self-conscious wordplay, direct descriptions of emotions. It is a self-effacing form, Zen in its origins and aspirations. I found I could write haiku about the plum petals in my daughter’s hair, an orange-brown leaf twirling down next to a Calder sculpture, a flock of crows crossing the space between skyscrapers, or the moon rising over a neighbor’s house. I might not have been writing great poetry, but these little moments satisfied my need to connect with the world and to express myself. Then I found that the words on the page set up a kind of resonance that started to shake loose the rust and get the poetic wheels turning again. 

That gave me enough of a charge to keep going. I discovered the haibun (a form mixing prose and haiku) and from there started experimenting again with longer poems and essays. 

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

Belfast Twilight – haiku, senryu and micro-poems, Liam Carson, Salmon Poetry, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-915022-96-7, €12.00

Upward Spiral – haiku and senryu, Tim Murphy, Red Moon Press, 2025, ISBN: 978-1-958408-73-5, $20.00

It appears that Irish haiku poets are like busses; they arrive in twos. And while my previous reviews touching on this genre have focused on women poets (think Maeve O’Sullivan and Rosie Johnston), this time it happens to be two male writers, one based in Ireland, the other in Spain.

The inclusion of the word ‘senryu’ in the subtitles of both collections raises some interesting questions around what the haiku/senryu distinction might mean in the context of urban-dwelling, 21^st century English-language poets for whom the urban landscape is more present than the natural one and whose world is more defined by human behaviour than the motion of the seasons.

In Japan, the distinction began to dissolve with the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s and 40s, with works like Sanki Saitō’s airport haiku and his war poems which were derived from news reports rather than direct experience. These poets also tended to dispense with the standard kigo (seasonal identifier words) that typified traditional haiku. And so the lines became blurred. […]

I’m tempted to link Carson’s use of assonance to his positioning of his work in a distinctly Irish tradition. It may be fanciful to hear an echo of the Celtic Twilight in the book’s title (less so, perhaps, given the Jack Yeats poems), but the Irish literary link is most forceful, unsurprisingly perhaps, in a set of five haiku in the Irish language under the title ‘Séideann An Gaoth’ (The Wind Blows). One poem in particular has a very specific and resonant allusion to the Early Irish:

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

It’s impossible not to be reminded of the widely translated 9^th century poem often referred to as ‘The Blackbird of Belfast Lough’ behind these lines, particularly given the broader Belfast connections in the book:

Int én bec
ro léic feit
do rinn guip
glanbuidi:
fo-ceird faíd
ós Loch Laíg,
lon do chraíb
charnbuidi.

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

Along with, perhaps. a hint of the tale of ‘Buile Shuibhne’, the mad birdman of Irish legend. The poem also resonates with Carson’s English-language ‘nature’ haiku, quite closely in this example from ‘Island Haiku (Árainn Mhór)’:

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

Belfast Twilight is a fine collection, full of quiet moments of delight.

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

I’ve had an interest in translating poetry for as long as I can remember. As an undergraduate, I was awarded the B’nai Zion medal for excellence in Hebrew, largely on the basis of an independent study I did with Professor Robert Hoberman for which I produced translations of biblical, medieval, and contemporary Hebrew poetry. If I am ever able to locate those translations, I will publish them in a future issue of On My Desk Now.

If I had to trace my interest in translation to a single point of origin, though, it would be to the year in junior high school when I-don’t-remember-which-rebbe encouraged our class to buy the ArtScroll edition of Shir Hashirim: The Song of Songs, so that we could better understand “the most misunderstood book in the entire Tanach.” Because the ArtScroll translation was allegorical, he explained, it revealed the text’s true significance in a way that translations based on the text’s plain meaning did not. I don’t think I understood at the time what the word allegorical meant, but I was in for a shock when I opened the book. I understood Shir HaShirim to be a book of sometimes quite erotic love poems, the beginning of which is usually rendered as something like “May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” The same verse in the ArtScroll version, however, is translated like this: “Communicate Your innermost wisdom to me again in loving closeness…” Many years later, I would discover a podcast episode in which the host offers a really interesting, philosophical, and very-much-worth-wrestling-with justification for the allegorical translation. At the time, though, my only response to what ArtScroll had done was anger, since the only purpose I could discern for their allegorical approach was to obscure the eroticism of the original. Ever since then, I have been fascinated by what’s at stake culturally and otherwise in why and how a text gets translated from one language into another.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Translating Korean Poetry

Selecting one Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem is no easy task because of the depth of her work. But, I settle into “The Bean Eaters,” one of her most visible poems, mainly for the poem’s richness as a love poem but also because of its sharp contrast to much of today’s world. The lines point toward a future that has dissolved aloneness: “Two who are Mostly Good. / Two who have lived their day”. They go about their lives, always moving in the same direction. This is one of the secrets to their shared life. They’ve become accepting of their moving together.

What’s gained isn’t the accumulation of material things – though their physical world is always present to them – but the gain is in the actual living. There’s repetition, surely – they “keep putting on their clothes / And putting things away” – but the writing shows this more as a natural flow, as an order to their world, rather than actions or fear that have trapped them. There’s no real glamor in the simple things that surround them, that give them comfort, but Brooks makes clear the lasting value of this life that is theirs. It’s their world on their terms.

This is also a beautiful poem about memory, about aging. The “twinklings and twinges” that are the real stuff of living a full life – are significant because they’re shared. The pair is busy at work – nurturing their love, taking in the necessary source of life that will allow them to continue. Happiness finds itself in the intimate simplicity of chipware, creaking wood, and tin.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters”

Tonight, at a literary event at Parnassus with our author Laing Rikkers, I met up with Major and Didi Jackson. I also met a woman who told me she would like to be a poet. I asked the woman whether she had ever studied poetry, and she said no. I asked if she had read much poetry, and she said, “Robert Frost.” It’s a good start. Robert Frost is a man of letters, well-loved for a reason. But becoming a serious poet requires reading, writing, and living with poetry. Going to readings is a part of that journey. I grabbed dinner with Major and Didi after the reading, and I thought about how being in the company of great poets—having an artistic community—is also part of the building blocks of a creative life.

The building blocks of a creative life aren’t really blocks at all. I like to think that what moves you toward a creative life are nonlinear, wild spaces you wander through that might add up to a creative undertaking. […]

What you don’t want to do is carry invisible suitcases with opportunities you didn’t get. I didn’t go to a good college. I didn’t have the resources to go to Breadloaf or any other writing conference. I could take stock all day, but it doesn’t help me write my next book. I’m working on a different frame of mind when it comes to creating a life that centers on artistic work.

All the men on my list started the race way ahead of me; that’s a fact. But if I stop to complain, I’m not in the race. And it isn’t a race. For them, maybe it is. They are building a Literary Career.

I am walking out into the clearing and finding my writing self. That creative self reads, writes, dreams, arches toward sunshine, swims, stretches, trains for greatness, learns from mistakes, is crazy and afraid. In my writing life, I’m not clawing my way out of the bottom of the well. I’m walking the clearing, finding my way toward creative work, soul work, publishing work, body work, family life, dream life.

Expectation is everything. So, young woman who wants to be a writer: Read a lot. Create a writing schedule, and make it flexible enough to adapt when work and caretaking pull your attention. Send out work to literary journals and magazines at least once a quarter. Try to spend some time with other writers or literary professionals. If the people in your life don’t take your writing seriously, get some people who do.

Most importantly, don’t compare yourself to others. Writing is hard enough.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Clearing: The Thrum of a Creative Life

Last night’s rain still lines the undersides
of leaves, and the lamps on the street have not
yet gone out. I am always standing in the in-
between, one hand folded around a dream, the other
raised toward the shape of a decision. My ear
turning toward the last place it remembers
an animal once stopped for water.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem with a line from Linda Gregg

So I have these boxes of postcards and letters I’ve received decades ago, ticket stubs, hard copy photographs that are so badly out of focus or dark, but there was no option but to keep them as they may have been the only record of an event. My analog past I can’t bear to throw out. I’ve been scanning some of them to print in photobooks. I love the accidental finger, the overexposed blanch. That’s who I was, I barely remember her. 

In the midst of this paperwork bog, I’m trying to write poetry about happiness and where I find it. Finland has been voted happiest country again and my writing group has decided the theme for our next anthology will be ‘happy places’. So with war everywhere, job insecurity, my kids growing up and a lack of happiness where I am, I’m looking backwards, trying to remember what happiness looks like. 

Gerry Stewart, Wallowing in nostalgia is better than red tape.

Here in Seattle, though so far it’s been cold, I love to see the cherry blossoms and daffodils that are the first heralds of spring. Also, more birds popping up. I’m hoping I can make it back up to Skagit Valley some time in April though my schedule is packed with book clubs, the Poetry night at J. Bookwalter’s restarting with a feature with Kelli Russell Agodon and her delightful new book from Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, and more medical appointments that tend to come around in my birthday month for some reason. (Does this happen to you too?)

I really like celebrating National Poetry Month—it’s nice for the world (and myself) to put a little more attention on this mostly neglected art form. Do you look forward to cooking something in spring? I love the influx of fresh peas and asparagus, and I love the rituals of Palm Sunday and Easter, which always feels like a celebration of chocolate and pastels (even if you’re not particularly religious). The myths of rebirth are generally hopeful, aren’t they? April is also my birthday month—and though I am getting older, I am thankful that I am still here, even for the hard parts. I am trying to adjust to 1) surviving ’til I was 50 and 2) realizing I am, if you’ll forgive a pun, no longer a spring chicken. I am adjusting to the shift into elder mode—along with losing so many friends and family, which seems like a part of aging. I am actually physically in better shape and in less pain than I was ten years ago—food allergies sorted, out of my wheelchair thanks to my MS diagnosis and subsequent physical therapy focusing on balance, and better able to appreciate the smaller joys of life.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Day of Spring, Hawks and Cherry Blossoms, April Rituals: Poetry Month and Birthdays

My Lenten poem-a-week project has been going better than I expected, and I’m grateful that I’ve actually been able to produce a draft poem a week as intended. It’s been freeing to not overly-worry or think too much and just get something written and posted on whatever topic or prompt was occupying my spirit in a given week. But as Holy Week and Easter approaches, I am feeling a sense of needing to slow down and really take time with these last two. They are on heavy topics that I feel extremely ill-equipped to deal with as a poet and a human being, not to mention a somewhat newly-reverted Catholic. Yet they are haunting me, and I feel the need to go deeply into their mysteries. And going deeply into a mystery takes time, silence and attention.

Kristen McHenry, Poem of the Week Interlude, Catana Lives!

So far in this National Year of Reading, I haven’t bought any new books. At the end of last year, my daughter suggested buying Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020) for me as a Christmas gift, since she knew the film was coming out but, once I’d heard the plot involved a child’s death, I said no. Then, when I saw a trailer for the film, I thought perhaps I should have said yes. Then there were advertisements, trailers, clips, snippets EVERYWHERE and I thought perhaps I should have tried to read the book before seeing the film. After that, the onslaught of film publicity turned me off both the idea of the book and the film, but, THEN, my friend Isy gave me her copy of the book, when I popped in to see her and her new baby. So, I started reading and, without meaning to, I still haven’t bought a new book. […]

Although never named as William Shakespeare, Agnes, her playwright husband, and their family live in Stratford-upon-Avon (although the playwright has to spend much time in London),in the late 1500s. The book’s introduction plainly states that it is a work of fiction, so a few esteemed Shakespearian experts who have questioned the accuracy of the story are rather missing the point, in my view.

It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a book. What an extraordinary phenomenon reading can be. I still haven’t seen the film – I think I need a little distance from the effect the book had on me before I book any tickets.

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

It’s World Poetry Day so instead of talking about my favorite famous poets (Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Jericho Brown, Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirschfield – is there anything that hasn’t been said?) I thought I’d share this epistolary poem written for me, something I never dreamed would happen. I’ve known poet Robert Okaji for many years, after we virtually “met” on his poetry blog and mine around about 2010 or so. Robert writes the kind of lyrical, meditative poetry that I could only dream of writing.

Thank you, Bob, for your years of friendship! Here’s to many more.

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

Dear Charlotte: The sun here winces daily, stumbles
across morning before smudging gray like an old slate
scarred with decades of chalk dust and erased messages.
I’m hunting work, and there are days when it feels
as if past experiences have been rubbed out, or maybe
I can’t make myself slog through the powdery white
crusted blend of ennui and discounting youth. […]

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

“Dear March — Come in —,” written in its author’s great creative surge of the early 1860s, feels slighter and lighter than many of the poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) we’ve discussed here before. In this poem, no carriage bears the speaker toward eternity. No life has “stood a loaded gun.” The “frock I wept in” never offers itself to be worn here. But then, we knew already that Emily Dickinson liked March, having read only recently her lighthearted “We Like March,” which dates from roughly a decade later.

That poem of the early 1870s turns on Dickinson’s knowledge of and love for natural philosophy, with its references to violets (which are certainly March’s purple “shoes”), the Adder’s Tongue fern, the sudden nearness of the sun after the long winter, the ubiquity of mud as the snow melts, and the “buccaneering” bluebirds. It is a poem of the out-of-doors, full of the wind and bluster that signal New England’s return to life.

Today’s Poem, by contrast, bustles with a hospitable domesticity, welcoming back the traveler-month after a long absence. March returns like an old school friend, its bluster reduced to mere windedness after a long walk, to be beckoned upstairs for a gossip. In precisely this way the young Dickinson did write to her school friends, with ardent affection, longing always to see them and trade news.

Her speaker’s emphatic tone here — alternately chiding March for staying away too long and turning up without notice, and apologizing in a hostessy manner for not turning the hills purple enough — is underscored by the poem’s meter, a variation on her characteristic common or hymn measure. Here, especially in the first stanza, she has cast many of her lines in dimeter, as though to divide the expected tetrameter in half, an effect that suggests a hostess’s distraction, bustle, and fluster when a guest arrives at a time not precisely appointed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Dear March — Come in —

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 23, 2026)

I don’t think of this blog as being primarily about hope, but hope is certainly an undercurrent. Possibly one of my favourite poems that I’ve ever posted is “Hope is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat” by Caitlin Seida. It of course refers to the Emily Dickinson poem. In her brilliant book on the writing life, Opacities, Sofia Samatar quotes a friend who talks about “doing an Emily Dickinson” which is to say, disappearing from the internet, and who knows where else. And isn’t it tempting?

But then, also, I think of Simone Weil, and unrelatedly, ageism, or being an artist and writer these days, or being someone of the artist class, and this line by Weil: “Indeed for other people, in a sense I do not exist. I am the colour of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.” I think about my goal, after Rumi, to be the one in the room the least in need. (Bad career move, good soul move). And then, I also think about what Anne Bogart says about how “we have something to learn from the person who has not yet spoken.” (This in the context of civic conversation, the hope and the notion that everyone should be heard). I think of the line from Elizabeth Gilbert who said, “no one is thinking about you” — that salve. And it’s true, it’s really true. What to do with these gifts?

I recently quoted Rebecca Solnit on hope and her saying that “maybe the community is the next hero.” And while I do believe that this is the answer politically, I, a bundle of contradictions myself, also crave the hermit life. At the same time, I also wish to be seen, heard. (Generally speaking, the eternal writer’s conundrum/quest — how to be known and seen but also simultaneously invisible). We want our due and not too late, unlike Jean Rhys, quoted as saying at an award ceremony where she received accolades late in life, late in her career, “It has come too late.” In a James Wood essay in The New Yorker, he said of Rhys, “She lacked hope, but never courage.” In truth, most of us are unlikely to win any awards.

Ah well, it’s courage that’s the thing. It’s not time we lack, said Adam Zagajewski, but concentration. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all in equal measure, hope, courage, concentration.

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

Go green. Green light, go. Green thumb deep digging in flowered earth. Greenhorn morning wet behind the ears. Green promise. Green renewal. Greenbacks riding cash cows in green-dawn calm. Green hornet. Green goblin. Grass is greener where envy grows, green screen sky edit me a ton more trees. Green frog rap, green moss nap. Green apple. Green peas. Green light, go get me more world peace.

Rich Ferguson, Green

‘Rosie Jackson and Friends’ gave a short reading of poems celebrating kindness on Saturday evening at Rook Lane Chapel in Frome. It was the final event in a week-long Festival of Kindness co-ordinated by The Good Heart, a volunteer-led community group. The chapel was decorated with local schoolchildren’s kennings on the theme of kindness.

From left to right in the photo above, the line-up was Morag Kiziewicz, Stephen Boyce, Tessa Strickland, Rosie Jackson, Ama Bolton, Michelle Diaz, B Anne Adriaens, Rachael Clyne, and hidden behind me is Dawn Gorman, reading for Claire Crowther. We had a wonderfully attentive and responsive audience of about thirty. Rosie selected and sequenced the poems with great sensitivity. The programme included three pieces by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Some of the poems featured personal encounters, while others responded to appalling recent events. Morag’s poems celebrated the kindness of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. One of Rosie’s poems was addressed to the schoolgirls who were killed during the first wave of air-strikes on Iran. At the end, Rachael led us all in a short Buddhist meditation. […]

Yesterday skylarks were singing above a nearby field. This morning the sky above me is full of the noise of military aircraft. I have heard this sound twice before in the past forty years; the first time, the target was Libya. The second time, it was Iraq. What can fifty minutes of focus on compassion do to counteract the daily horrors of these terrible times? Perhaps it effected a small change in us. Be kind to yourself, dear reader, and do no harm to others.

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: beach cobbles, resonating surfaces, ambiguous texts, imaginary friends, and much more. Enjoy.

South African President Nelson Mandela famously said “Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.” I borrowed this quote when I applied for my Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa where I wanted to investigate the poetry of protest — South Africans who had written during the anti-Apartheid movement of primarily the 1970’s and 80’s.Poets such as Jeremy Cronin, Ingrid de Kok, Zakes Mda, Mazizi Kunene, Wally Serote and many others. I was fascinated.

Now, decades later, I am “back home” seeing my own country under siege. In the month of January, two American citizens were gunned down in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota—a city hitherto known for down home midwestern hospitality and as the birthplace of Prince. For years, I taught a class on the history and literature of the Holocaust. The years leading up to the final solution, look remarkably like what we are living through now. […]

Can a poem offer solace to a community? Can a few thoughtful lines calm a life? Alter the course of American history? Probably not. And yet poetry is what we look to in times of crisis. After September 11th, the New Yorker Magazine, published “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski.

I also think of William Yeat’s poems “The Second Coming” and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, “Praise Song for the Day.” I think of Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” and Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem “Running Orders” — all poems that spoke in the immediate wake of trauma but that also endure over years, decades.

These poems rise up from my subconscious unbidden during hard times. The power of the work continues on as documents of our times. All of these fall under the heading of documentary poetry. These works are also among my favorite poems written in the 21st century. They matter on an emotional register as well as a historical.

I don’t want to pretend that the poem I wrote last month has the same staying power. All I know is that these poems that come unbidden, out of great pain, matter.

As a working poet, the poems I’ve written about my human rights work in Bosnia Herzegovina, or Gaza and the West Bank, or post Apartheid South Africa are among the poems I’m happiest to have written.

Susan Rich, What Poetry Can and Cannot Do:

January was supposed to be quiet. Instead, it was a rollercoaster ride – atmospherically, emotionally, politically – a rocket-fuelled start to 2026. Weather patterns continued to see-saw. An oscillating Jet Stream travelled further, both north and south, dragging weather systems to unexpected latitudes. The perturbation and chaos continue to unfold. Impacts are becoming more extreme.

The Jet Stream is a thousand-mile-wide river of power, bigger than the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges, greater than the sum of all these mighty flowing waters. The energy involved in moving masses of air so swiftly is almost incomprehensible. Warnings from science and voices of reason, already slow to enter our collective consciousnesses, are repeatedly overwritten by hollerings about politics, Epstein-omics, warmongering and military hardware. If only the strutting brawn, with their big tech, bags of dollars and guns, could perceive real planetary power, its truth, they might think differently.

Natural phenomena, geopolitical and socio-economic ‘landscapes’ are increasingly turbulent. I feel these ‘unsettlings’ increasingly and deeply. I watch my grandchildren play. My emotions swell and threaten to spill out. […]

The great dunes at Red Point were white with frost; the billion-year-old Torridonian sandstone boulders and beach cobbles shone purple and mauve. We sat and drank hot black coffee and watched dozens of divers float on a current of calm. At Mellon Udrigle we stood at the water’s edge while a group of seals swam and played nearby. At Opinan, the sea was flattened by wind power. Its surface seethed and writhed like thick paint being stirred. Further out, the Minch flexed sapphire and holly-green, bursting with diamond-white flecks. And every so often, small waves broke into spindrift, each one releasing a rainbow made of gauze.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, on light, time and mars

It all seems to be about trees at the moment. I picked up The Overstory by Richard Powers in the Huddersfield branch of Oxfam and am enjoying it hugely. Each chapter is really a short story, linked by the theme of trees, but that’s underselling it. Powers conveys the ups and downs of people’s lives with a deft brushstroke, a style that allows him to compress a character’s life into a few pages, without compromising on depth. And then I found myself at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park today, immersed in the light and sound experience of an installation called ‘Of the Oak’, effectively the life of a single tree, but the science behind it allows you to see and imagine the mesmerising beauty of it. If you every doubted it, trees are incredibly alive!

Hopefully a tree haiku will emerge from all this, although it has to be said, I need to slow down a little and make space for writing again – not the first time I’ve had this thought!

Julie Mellor, It all seems to be about trees …

I can stay in my chair

but when I let my ears
turn wild I hear
You shouting
in the winter wind

Rachel Barenblat, Listen

The world is a mess, we know that. Joseph Campbell said: “The Bodhisattva voluntarily came back into the world knowing that it’s a mess. He doesn’t come back “only if it’s sweet for me.” The Bodhisattva participates joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

This doesn’t mean that we should give into the doom scrolling. We can know what the news of the world is without further traumatizing ourselves or seeing the same thing over and over. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are writing “signing off until spring” or some such posts on social media, and this might not be the worst idea. I’m on less right now, too. And I do believe in doing a two week or longer re-set with it all. It’s a tricky balance when you’re trying to promote your (or in my case your partner’s art and upcoming art show) work. […]

So, yes, I’ve been retreating to my sacred space, my study, as much as possible. And what I realized one morning after I’d spent (not kidding) over an hour writing correspondence where I basically just said no to 80 percent of the asks, was that my belated word of the year is: hermit. I’ve had years where my goal was to say yes, to embrace everything, the all. But this year, like many, I think I need to re-set. Read more books. Go more analog. Get into nature more. Garden more. (Once the ice ball that is our backyard at latitude 53 melts — somewhere in early May).

And though I am a firm believer in promoting and encouraging excellence, I also want to dabble more, as Karen Walrond would say. In her latest book she says that an amateur is defined as “one who loves.” And I think dabbling can make you even more appreciative of the art or craft you admire. Pick up some paints and you’ll certainly come to a new understanding of how Vermeer got the light on the pearl earring or how each petal was painted on a Rachel Ruysch flower. Walrond extolls the virtue of play, just like Campbell, and in her project to try new things she insists upon play, on curiosity, and to prioritize practice over perfection. We need to feel good! And dabbling can take us to good places mentally.

Shawna Lemay, Participating Joyfully in the Sorrows of the World

In my last post I declared that for me poetry was on hiatus. I intended to veer back to where it started, to the telling of short stories, the challenge of flash fiction.

And, as always happens, my inside has taken hold and now all these poems are emerging, and I can’t help but tell these stories by rhythm and line break and white space and even punctuation if I can get it right. I’m exploring emotion thanks to a poetry school course and it’s tough and awful and wonderful and magical. I’m getting feedback on my words and feedback on my feelings and people talk about a safe space and this relative anonymity makes me feel I’ve found it. And safety cushions danger, which make creativity and suddenly I don’t mind that this post will not be opened, read or shared or liked on here because 17 other people are reading what I write and they’re not commenting for algorithms or to make useful connections they’re comment because we each know how it feels to draw out words we hope will land.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, On the freedom of writing about everything with little care if it is read.

It’s been a long time since I have needed painkillers for six days in a row and I did a lot of talking to myself about this during the week. Lots of words about needing to be patient and wait for things to pass. Reminders to myself to look for the joy in those glimmering moments when putting the washing on felt doable, when different drinks soothed my sore throat in different ways, and giving myself a gentle cheer of encouragement when I had the desire to pick up a book and read.

In amongst the resting to recuperate elements of my week, I also had the wonderful joy of being invited to be a guest on a podcast. I loved so much about this… the being asked, the feeling of being recognised as having something to say, the thinking about what we might talk about and then the absolute joy of being in the moment of the conversation. I was able to hear myself think out loud and there was laughter, and those are truly lovely things to be gifted when you share time with someone.

Sue Finch, UNDER A BLANKET

Yesterday I drafted this blog from inside a very cold bongo drum. High winds rippled and banged our metal roof riotously: “Thumbing / the tin roof like a smoker who / cannot get the house to stay alight,” I wrote in Mycocosmic, in a poem about perimenopausal sleeplessness.

Even though hot flashes are rare now, I’m still not sleeping well. The radiators blast dry heat, a vaporizer blasts vapor in an attempt to counter the dry heat, and the dial on my brain’s worry machine is set to high. The U.S. is in very bad shape. Some beings I love are suffering. (The cats don’t mind if I violate their privacy, so I’ll say thyroid medication isn’t reversing the weight loss of our older cat, Poe; the young one, Vincent, has this condition where he’s allergic to his teeth. If you could use a reason for gratitude, there you go: you’re probably not allergic to your teeth. He’s the white cat pictured here in the bliss of painkillers.)

During Virginia’s uncharacteristic Big Freeze–just beginning to ease–I was unable to walk much, and losing that outlet affected my mood. In this tiny town unused to harsh weather, the snowplows do a lousy job, and many neighbors don’t shovel sidewalks, usually the rich ones in red brick mansions. Wealthy students slide their enormous SUVs into rare street spots, totally oblivious to the possibility that a local resident shoveled it with difficulty and wants it back when they return home with groceries. Small gripes. I think what’s getting to me is seeing so much cluelessness, people unaware of or indifferent to the needs of others–now, of all moments. Paying attention is an ethical obligation, a pretty minimal one. I know I’m not alone in that conviction–sending awed love to Minneapolis!–but so, so many people in my red county seem to have iced-in hearts.

So, as others have been blogging, I’m finding a sense of community where I can. I did two poetry events this week that made me feel genuine connection to others: the Bardic Trails virtual reading (an exceptionally warm, lovely group!) and a panel discussion of poetry and the environment in the nearest big town, hosted by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont, which is just getting off the ground as a welcoming public space, an oasis amid development. I also tuned in by Zoom to a panel discussion hosted by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, just as a listener, and the panelists were SO smart. Poet Maya Jewell Zeller, talking about her forthcoming memoir Raised by Ferns, was one of them.

Lesley Wheeler, Winter bongos

Even the best poems have a habit of disappearing until the right person, at the right moment, presses them into our hands. When I first started reading, it was the introductions that drew me in: old Penguin anthologies, Faber’s Poet to Poet series, staple-bound pamphlets. Books you could carry in your pocket, chosen by an individual personality and introduced with style (and without condescension). Introductions are the way poetry survives. They are also, I think, something of an endangered art. Which is why I am starting a poetry press.

Headless Poet—more on the name below—will give writers and poets space to recommend poems and poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. It will also publish brief introductions to the best new poetry. There will be little-known early modern poems, reassessments of figures like Thomas Hood and Lilian Bowes Lyon, entirely new work—and more besides, with introductions on their way from Victoria Moul, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Alex Wong, Tristram Fane Saunders and Camille Ralphs. I am looking forward to sharing them all.

Jeremy Wikeley, Why I’m starting a poetry press (and how you can help)

Today’s post is mostly about Horace — with some Wyatt and Jonson at the end. As any keen Horatians among my readers will know, the dictum that poetry should be both beautiful and useful comes from Horace too, so it is appropriate that I heard just this morning that a little collection I’ve edited, Poems Beautiful & Useful, is now available for order from the very exciting new Headless Poet press run by Jem. This is a selection of the kind of poems that were most popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawn from both manuscript and the obscurer reaches of print. Several have not been published before, and most of them are not well-known. I am proud and delighted to be the editor of Headless Poet’s very first publication. Jem has a whole series of publications planned for this year, all ‘introductions’ of one kind or another — definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Victoria Moul, How come, Maecenas?

Jayant [Kashyap] was a winner in the 2024 Poetry Business New Poets Prize, judged by the brilliant poet Holly Hopkins. I was really pleased to see that Jayant had won, because I recognised his work and style from a previous year when I’d judged the competition and he’d been shortlisted. In the back of the pamphlet, it was interesting to read that when he won, it was his fourth time of submitting – proving again that sometimes being published is not just a matter of talent, but of persevering, of finding a way of dealing with setbacks and rejections.

Notes on Burials is a wonderful pamphlet – held together by a concern and interest in what we bury, what we carry with us and what we leave behind, how we die, and by extension of course how we live. There is sometimes a surreal touch to the poems – in ‘but dogs don’t want their puppies buried’ the poem talks about a mother dog carrying dead puppies around and finishes ‘once I buried two dead pups in shallow ground / and next morning they were back up out of the mound playing with her’. This image has really stayed with me, and it’s an unsettling poem in terms of thinking whether this is an unreliable narrator, or whether this is surrealism, or the simple truth of a mistake or something else. Whichever, it often feels as if that border between life and death is more permeable than we usually appreciate in many of these poems. […]

There is also a playfulness to language here – the roots of words are often examined closely and held up to the light, but I think Jayant is also interested in how words slip in and out of themselves and into other words. In “Oak” the speaker asks us to “Imagine it standing / at the edge of a forest – hermit/heretic/heritage”.

There is a run of really moving poems towards the end of the pamphlet which finishes on “Prayer for My Mother As A Child”. This is a beautiful poem which starts “Let me carry myself like a quiet emptiness in her school bag”. This line almost made me cry – that wish as a child to go back to before you were born and see the mother as a person, before they carried you – both physically and metaphorically and spiritually. It’s a poem full of longing for the mother figure to live a life she did not get to live […]

Kim Moore, January Reading Diary

Shared Origins/A collaboration between three poets, Mike Jenkins, David Lloyd, and David Annwn, The Seventh Quarry Press, 2025, ISBN: 9781919610085, £6.99

Giraldus Redivivus, John Goodby and David Annwn, Incunabula Media, 2025, £12.00

The concept behind Shared Origins is both simple and intriguing. Take three poets who started their writing careers together as students in the 1970s at Aberystwyth University and put together a set of poems from each of them that, in part at least, reflects their relationship with Wales and Welshness. […] [It’s] a fascinating case study in how three poets can start out from much the same place and shared concerns, to one degree or another, but end up with radically different approaches to writing, From a personal perspective, it also introduced me to two poets whose work is new to me, which is always a good thing. Thank you The Seventh Quarry Press for making it happen.

Along with David Lloyd George and certain 1970’s rugby internationals, Gerald of Wales is almost certainly Ireland’s least-favourite Welshman, with his Topographia Hibernica being widely regarded as the spiritual forebear of Punch magazine’s caricatures of our 19th century ancestors. The Welsh, of course, may take a different view of his two Welsh books, the Journey through and Description of Wales.

Neither John Goodby not David Annwn is actually Welsh, but they both have long-standing relationships with that country, both personal and professional, and in Giraldus Redivivus they reinvent the Journey as a piece of 20th century intertextuality. In doing so, they take their lead from polyglot Gerald, who interleaved slices of French, Greek and Welsh into his Latin text, a text that contains quotations from classical and British authors, anecdotes (his own and reported), acute observations, smatterings of local history, and a sense of the hardships of travel all structured around a circuit clockwise from the south-east corner of Wales and back again. It’s a genuinely non-genre-specific work.

In their reimagining, Annwn and Goodby mirror the portmanteau, collage-like method of the original, with more-or less straight ‘found text’ sections, passages that weave phrases or images from the original into passages of their own making, and a variety of verbivocovisual pages that either concretise the shape of what’s happening or make actual the difficult experience of reading the manuscript original, with the large A4 page size put to good use.

Billy Mills, The Matter with Wales: Two Books

In 1976, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Bathanti began his “walk away from [his] past” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That he’d earned a master’s degree but “wished to spend [his] days among criminals” left his parents confused and hushed. Bathanti knew nothing of the place he was heading to — North Carolina — or of the place to which he’d been assigned — a prison in Mecklenburg County. For this newly minted VISTA volunteer, any road out of Pittsburgh, to freedom, he was glad to take. That “[his] life was just starting” left Bathanti “near euphoria.” Driving south, he could never have guessed that it would take him more than three decades to articulate one of the most important lessons he learned as a “fugitive from [his] former life” up North: that we all, in our way — some by our choices, others by the misfortune of our circumstance — put in some “felon time.”

*

It was not until the fall of 2013 that Joseph Bathanti, formerly, Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-2014), published Concertina (Mercer University Press), a remarkable collection of narrative poems that, in language both colloquial and lyrical, relate his true introduction to life, not only inside prison but also outside the razor wire. […]

Time does not temper the truth Bathanti distills and documents on every page decades after his VISTA assignment ended. As he declares in another profound moment, “So help me God, there is no whole truth.” (”Jury Duty”)

Yet, there is respite from the ugliness and violence, for truth is never one-sided and life is never all-bad. Indeed, the brilliance of Concertina lies in its skillfully ingrained and repeated refrain about the dualities present in all of humanity, whether a “mother, shackled to a sweatshop / Singer in a dim downtown tailor shop” (”Faccia Tosta”) or the inmate “too exhausted to lift his heavy hands to protect himself” from the blows of his keeper. (”Cletis Pratt”) “A guard is not much different than a convict. / One hates the other, loves the other.” (”Transfer Day”)

The concertina, after all, can be played, too, and it’s possible to enjoy, as Bathanti does, the intermezzos — the downtime with Joan, the woman whose hand Bathanti clasped on “[his] first Sabbath out of the penitentiary,” who “lived in a boxy mill house on Moonlit Avenue” (”Moonlit Avenue”), with whom he enjoyed “miso soup and Roastaroma mocha, / the verse of Kim Chi-Ha.” (”This Mad Heart”) With Joan, the woman who was to become Bathanti’s wife, “[e]verything was crucial.”

The love that passes for poetry between Bathanti and Joan prevents hardening and cynicism. It makes it possible for Bathanti to draw on poignant moments for sustenance: visits to the women’s prison of children “in their perfect innocence and self-possession, / toddling dutifully into the arms of anyone // who reaches for them” (”Women’s Prison”); the sight of “project kids” practicing etudes in a church cellar while, upstairs, ex-cons partake of “soup kitchen food” (”ECO”); a reading lesson with an inmate whose “tragic flaw” is “the presence / of an extra 21st chromosome,” who, “[w]ith childish wonderment, / [. . .] whizzes through the drills.” (”Teaching an Inmate to Read”)

What comes clear in Concertina is this: where there is room for love and understanding, there is a place for hope and the possibility of redemption.

Maureen Doallas, Joseph Bathanti’s ‘Concertina’

squeaky snow
nothing more to say
to myself

Tom Clausen, antler shed

A mouth is two things, a conduit for food or a means to communicate. Mona Arshi’s “Mouth” focuses on the latter, or rather how something that should be used for communication can also be silenced. A shut mouth says nothing. Power and societal imbalances can make it dangerous to speak, particularly if the person being spoken to is minded to wilfully misinterpret what the powerless speaker is saying. […]

A mouth can be silenced, or it can speak lies when it is not safe to speak the truth. Eurydice feels compelled to diplomatically entertain in public but swear in private. She calls it “bragging”, talking up the King’s achievements and putting a positive spin on the negatives. From “experiments” to “expletives” the poem feels wordy and employs the rhythm of prose, deliberate strategies like Eurydice’s attempts to be diplomatic. The last four quoted lines employ more poetic devices such as consonance and the repetition of “o” mimicking an open mouth, usually a sign of surprise or horror.

Later the “Blind Prophet Tiresias Warns Queen Eurydice She Will Be Collateral Damage”. He notes, “Prophets are translators./ The first rule of a bloodthirsty regime/ is to bury translators. It’s a fact.”

Emma Lee, “Mouth” Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus) – book review

Eavan Boland’s Eurydice opens her silence in song, a counter-song if you will, to that of Orpheus’ lament, a lyric that gives us reason to believe that knowing one another is fundamentally impossible. The lovers lament different things. […]

Boland’s poem reminded [me] of a wonderful essay by Jack Foley on Gertrude Stein’s portraits, and how he notes that time “is not only a subject but a condition of the piece,” a text which was also a portrait.

Foley thinks Stein deploys palindromes as a sort of mirror for which “the line runs out and then runs back.” The idea of recognition that Boland’s poem engages aligns somehow with Foley’s description of Stein’s palindromic relationality:

The first half is identical to the second half—except that the second half is backwards. She has a phrase in still another portrait, “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”: “Idem the Same.” The word “Idem” is Latin and means “the same,” so the two halves of the phrase are saying the same thing—but they are saying them in two different languages. Stein’s relationship to the people she makes portraits of is like that. She and Picasso are “Idem the Same”—the same but different; they are like words which mean the same thing but exist in two different languages. Together, they constitute a kind of palindrome; they are full of the same elements, but one of them is running one way and the other is reversing that movement.

Similitude meets me in my daily life as a lyric of resonating surfaces, or patches of sound that connect the world across languages, linking the experience of being as I apprehend it in the fluidity of Romanian and the more rigid, consonant-heavy textures of English.

Alina Stefanescu, Eavan Boland’s Eurydice.

Who now reads him, who now cares? George Meredith (1828–1909) was once a name to conjure with, one of the last great High Victorian writers, a peer of Thomas Hardy and Henry James. His 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel brought him public fame. His 1879 The Egoist and 1885 Diana of the Crossways were considered additions to the canon of classic novels. His poetry was successful too.

His 1883 poem “Lucifer in Starlight,” for example. His 1881 poem “The Lark Ascending,” describing a bird in flight, inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams to write a 1914 instrumental work with the same title.

And then there is Modern Love, Meredith’s 1862 sequence of fifty poems about a failing marriage. Written in a curious pseudo-sonnet form, the 16-line poems trace out in pentameter the incidents, the words spoken and unspoken, that reveal the collapse of love, sympathy, and any desire for mutual understanding in a couple.

In today’s Poem of the Day, for example — the 35th in the sequence, beginning with the husband’s mean-spirited resignation when he realizes that “Madam would speak with me” — that husband in Meredith’s near novel-in-verse knows that his wife’s “quivering under-lip” means that she is near to bursting into either tears or raging anger (“The Deluge or else Fire,” “Niagara or Vesuvius”).

And he is concerned only to circumvent any such meaningful exchange. They speak in platitudes about their health and the news — so that “With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense,” and thereby the husband escapes the drama he can no longer feel worth the effort.

The 16-line stanza — built of four quatrains with an envelope rhyme: abba-cddc-effe-ghhg — is a sharp performance of Meredith’s skill at describing envenomed human interaction, and it reminds us that maybe the fading of the Victorian writer is a loss for us. And yet, I cannot bring myself to like the poem much. The commonplace meanness of the husband, the manipulative mood of the wife: just a little local unpleasantness that gives me a shiver and makes me wheel away, turning my collar up against the chill.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Madam would speak with me

I’m immediately struck by the poems in Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s second full-length collection, For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first of her work I’ve seen, and an apparent follow-up to her debut, sur vie (Fathom Books, 2020). Across four sections of first-person lyrics—“DEATH OF THE MOTHER,” “LIKENESS,” “AS IF” and “SECOND LIFE”—the poems are dense and intense, graceful and substantive. “I am preparing to write a book,” begins the first stanza of the eleven-stanza opening poem, a piece that pushes, swirls and loops in a remarkably dense yet nimble pattern. As the two-page piece ends: “Or lacking all these / to write the book about the death / of the mother you simply need / a mother, who is dead.” The opening poem immediately sets the tone and tenor for the book as a whole, writing out a bursting, bubbling grief of graceful and substative gestures, offering a light touch of lyric through lines thick with emotional heft. “We all know Mother means / I was born from your body but I too / guaranteed your living. // In the mothering reign where / you are always alive,” opens the poem ‘PREULOGY,” “alone and evenly / breathing, a place // of exile where you remain / a figure leaning lazy on a rock, / black spot of ink bored into sand, [.]” Her poems are collaged and purposeful, direct and layered, writing out all the mess and contradictions of mothers, of family, of grief and sentences. Offering a marvellous and subtle fluidity, these poems are delicately crafted with such utter grace and punch.

rob mclennan, Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties

When I take my first clear breath after illness,
the world smells both sharp and tender.

I remember echoes in stairwells, and streetcorners where
small flames were tended in the service of our hungers.

There are flowers that don’t recognize boundaries.

Luisa A. Igloria, Everyday Ciphers

On Tuesday evening I finally started reading my copy of Harry Man’s ‘Popular Song‘. It’s taken me a while to get to reading it, having bought it at the London Launch at the Torriano Meeting Rooms. Harry was a very entertaining reader that evening. I know he read with Matt Bryden, Tom Weir, Tiffany Ann Tondut and Michael Brown too…I’m sure I’ve written about it here before). Christ, it was nearly 2 years ago. Sorry Harry. However, we move…as the young folks don’t say anymore.

I was working my way through Harry’s book and got to his poem ‘I waterskied lonely as a clownfish’, and more importantly I got to Line 5 of the first stanza and knew I a) was reading a great poem and b) I had my blog post ready to go..

Mat Riches, Harry the Man

When Auden wrote his poem, the war economy that had won the Western Powers their victory was only just metamorphosing into what would become known as ‘late capitalism’. But he is already meditating on what is happening to society, and the world of work, in those lines about the “unimportant clerk”. As Hecht points out, Auden’s definition of a ‘worker’ (in his commonplace book, A Certain World) is that of someone who is “personally interested in the job which society pays him to do”, and not that of a “wage slave”. For Auden’s worker, “what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play”. With that as context, Auden goes on to ask a question first published over a half a century ago, in 1970:

What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen percent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get much bigger in the future.

Without belabouring the point, for what passes as a member of the literati today, crushed on all sides by dwindling sales and diminished retail space, by shortened attention spans and FAKE NEWS, it might be understandable to cultivate an “imaginary friend”, or in other words, an ideal sense of ‘the reader’. That goes double for the poets.

There are some people (particularly in poetry, with its aesthetic pretensions and apparent disdain for marketing) who claim writing for a reader is a mistake, that it imposes unreasonable objective expectations on their subjective artistic expression, that one should place primacy on the writing impulse and leave the audience to organise themselves. As even Auden seems to concede, writing is “voluntary play”. It is possible these people are kidding themselves, and others, but if they are being sincere then they are playing on their own, without any imaginary friends. Just ask any small child if that’s a good idea.

If, on the other hand, writing for a reader imposes some rules on the play, perhaps that’s for the best. They are the rules of friendship, after all. In this reading, all the literati should indeed keep an imaginary friend. It makes the writing more likely to be any or all of the following: to be entertaining, to be edifying, to be … excellent.

And here’s the thing. Poets have always written for an imaginary friend, and not just in the specific mode of literary address that Anthony Hecht refers to. Poets write, in a conversation of influence and allusion, with poets that went before them – and given those poets tend to be dead, any friendship being forged is by definition imaginary. At the same time, implicit in the idea of posterity is the sense of writing for readers that are not yet born. Whose “sleeping head”, in his ‘Lullaby’, is being asked to lie, “human”, on Auden’s “faithless arm”? Or, to use perhaps the single best example in literature, who do you think John Keats is holding out his “living hand, now warm and capable” towards? Clue: he only goes and tells you.

Andrew Neilson, Auden’s ‘Imaginary Friends’

Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.

In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.

When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.

Maria Popova, The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

Is there, then, room to be made for a cultural space where the individual, their identity, and all their baggage, are left to one side? Might this be part of a movement that begins to redress the balance of this (actually quite precious, for all its faults) liberal democracy? I think there is, although what it would look like I’m not sure. I imagine an online platform where a weekly anonymous poem is shared, and anonymous commenters are welcome to leave their thoughts. A community of poets and readers who know nothing about one another. There may be some rudeness if the poem met with disapproval, but how long would such rudeness last if the nymity of the poem was denied? Where is the fun in trolling if you don’t know who it is you’re trolling? And might, at last, some form of trust ensue? 

The second argument comes from a feeling I have that many (perhaps all) of us tend to base our judgements of poems as much on the identity of the poet and what other people have already said about a poem, as we do on the objective ‘thereness’ of the words on the page. This is part of the function of the blurbs on book covers; they’re partly there to sell the book, obviously, but also, I feel, to tell people what to think: oh, X says this is great; then it will be okay for me to think it’s great too. And this focus on context and nymity also leads (I suspect, although I’m not sure I could prove it) to a slightly cowardly tendency of some online reviewers to wait until a collection has been well reviewed by a couple of other critics, so they know whether they are safe to like or dislike it.  

As I say, context is important; but there is also a sense in which critics’ views are both formed and then validated by the identity of the poet. A new poem from a much-admired, multiple TS Eliot Prize winner sits in a different spot in a reader’s brain from one by an unknown – or known and disliked – poet. And can we really say we read a poem we know to be written by a man in the same way as one we know to be written by a woman? Likewise race and sexual preference. 

There is a fair rebuttal of this argument, which is: of course we read these works differently, and so we should. There is language that is appropriate for some groups and not for others. In fact, you can probably go further and say we need to know as much as we can discover about a poet’s cultural identity so that we have the information we need in order to form an appropriate opinion of their work.  

But this argument only goes so far. 

The need expressed in the previous paragraph is only a need if your approach to poetry is extractive and judgemental: one in which you ask yourself, ‘What can I take from this work, and what opinion can I form about it?’. But there is another approach, and one I prefer, which where the reader asks: ‘What can I give of myself to this work, and what can I learn from it?’ 

If I take the second approach, my own identity and context are key, because I cannot escape them. Outside that… there are words; and there is what occurs when those words meet my own particular outlook on the world. This is my reading; and I must ask myself, what happens to my outlook on the world, now I have encountered these words? What aspects of my Self must I open up, and scrutinise, and change? This process could be seen as a gift I receive from the poem and my encounter with it. I am not so much extracting from the words, but in opening myself up to them, they respond by giving themselves to me.  

Chris Edgoose, On Anon: the case against ‘Nymity’ 

Radoslav Rochallyi  is a poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary artist living in Prague, Czech Republic — and the author of eight books of poetry.   Recently I found his work featured here in Math Values, an online publication of the MAA (Mathematical Association of America).

In Rochallyi’s article — entitled “Vector Poetry” — he shows us three different illustrations of poetry portrayed using vectors.   He takes a phrase that he would like to communicate poetically and offers three examples of how it could be portrayed using vector poetry.  The phrase is:

“Time is pouring out of my broken watch glass. You look ahead, and you’re right. Because the potential of the past is just … a sandcastle.”

Here is a link to Rochallyi’s complete article.

JoAnne Growney, Vector Poetry

Why should people with money get to use a special lane? That’s not fair. Yeah, yeah, life isn’t fair, people with money use special lanes all the time. Still. This road was supposed to be for everybody! Now, as if the grind of traffic wasn’t bad enough, you have to sit in your old junky Toyota and stare at those mofos in their Lexuses gliding along the interstate with their SmoothPasses? What fresh hell is this?!

Not to mention, now the lanes for everyone else are even more congested! Where before this interstate had four lanes, now there are just three. The city gave that fourth lane to the SmoothPass drivers! They built a Lexus Lane!

So, okay, yes, the commute has gotten better, but only better for some people, the ones who can pay for it. The rest not only have to wait but have to wait even longer. The city has privatized a public problem, sloughed off financial solutions onto its citizens, and officially made things worse for the majority of people.

Crimminy.

There has to be a better way.

*

By now you’ve probably guessed that I am not writing exclusively about interstate travel. This is not, after all, Highway News.

What I am talking about here is the recent trend of magazines offering expedited response times to their submissions. In a recent weekend column, I stated that this was unusual, generally not done. Several readers pointed out that I was incorrect.

Over the past week, I’ve learned that these readers are right. Numerous magazines have adopted this practice. In exchange for a response anywhere from three days to two weeks, writers can now pay between $5 – $25.

Becky Tuch, Q: Are literary magazines building Lexus Lanes?

The judges, I could tell, were very interested
In what I had to say. They let me speak
More than others; they rarely interrupted.

Continue down a road for long enough:
Eventually, to turn aside requires
An act of will beyond your reach.

Some power must remove the rotten things
And all the dirt that’s settled on this world;
And some new instrument must be created.

Brad Skow, Walther Funk Interviewed at Nuremberg

I compared this video Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper to my own experience of reading a lot of ebooks and a lot of traditional books.

And then I tried to compare whether the books were poetry, lit crit, social sciences or physics.

The results don’t fit the patterns this guy is describing, and I tend to think therefore that he’s talking about a certain genre of book (fiction and certain kinds of informational book) that I don’t read but that are all that many or most readers read.

I feel he was good at describing the pleasure of reading real books, but he had to do so by denigrating reading eBooks. Obviously books have a tactile feel and a smell, and yes you can go back to something you’ve read by flicking back and forth and remembering where the sentence was, recto or verso, top or middle or bottom.

But you can also do word searches on ebooks, and I for one use these all the time, with very satisfying results. Because I’m interested in ambiguous and layered texts, with subconscious meanings, I find that word searching flushes things out. I find the eye makes a SUMMARY, and then on several occasions has told me that such and such a page, in total, means only the SUMMARY. I am then quite surprised, by changing the font or the text size, or coming at a text via search, by something very specific that I have been overlooking – but which is now impossible to overlook when it’s distorted or magnified or sticking out like a sore thumb by these “linear and scrolling” ebook habits.

Above all, I would point to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Because it was written by a professional singer and lover of music, and also a lover of signage and words in visual designs, on buildings and in newspapers, it is in some ways a collage and in other ways a symphony. The collage and symphony aspects tend, as all good paintings and music do, to feel different on different hearings and hung differently in different light with different neighbours. Ebook reading of Ulysses offered me this. It took away from the literally awe inspiring look that printers (guided by Joyce) gave the novel on the page. Awe can blind us, and create fetishism. Ebooks give a flow back, and resist certain stuck habits.

And a book like Ulysses, like a poem, is about much more than the rational business world, or the creation of a world and drama in average fiction. A poem can be much more spiritual, about life lived on many levels. And poets often write to aficionados (either other poets or the trained reader) for a reason, the same reason that a composer writes a chamber piece; or you shouldn’t attend Wimbledon hoping for test cricket. There are expectations, there is fancy footwork to be admired, as well as a certain metronome (but not a rhythm as such, not merely more of the same, in the same rhythm, as we got in the venue the previous day).

Ira Lightman, Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper (a critique)

I have been thinking about the artifices of art, the superficial surfaces, the pleasing semblances. “It looks just like a photograph,” said someone approvingly of a realistic scene painted in oils. (No one says of the photograph, “It looks just like the real thing.” They might say, “It looks like a painting.”) And the so-called “real thing”? What does it look like? And a misty version of that realistic scene? Is that integrating something of emotion, or the murkiness of memory? And the impressionistic version, is that closer to how the brain grabs at colors and edges and scents and sounds and forgets all kinds of details? And if the surface of the scene is nubbled with thick paint, what then? Are we disappointed to find that the painting is a painting? Or does it enhance the experience with its tactility, its boldness? And if there are other substances on the surface — tissue paper, string? And if someone sticks a sticker of a dinosaur and calls it absurdist? That too can be pleasing. Or not. What does it mean to “enter” an artwork? What does it mean that something of the work prevents entry? I’m reading a collection of poems that have a lot of…er…words in them, but I can’t quite make sense of it all. I can’t gain entry. A poem is all artifice. Text and space and form. No one mistakes a poem for a photograph or for the “real thing.” But I can get lost in fiction. Can look up suddenly from the page, disoriented to time and place and even myself. Isn’t that funny? And music — it’s all artifice! Banging and strums and dingledingle. And it can make me cry. What is up with that? Fool me once. Fool me forever. Please.

Marilyn McCabe, Tell me, train-sound

I attended a talk on Sylvia Plath and Mysticism and Witches by someone who is publishing a book on the subject. Almost everyone in the Zoom room had a Dr. before their name (except me), but I felt so comfortable during the talk—after all, I’ve been studying Plath for over thirty years, before it was cool! The talk itself really inspired my thinking about witchy poets, too. And about whether or not I should go get that darn PhD, health issues be darned. I really could use more intellectual stimulation—after all, I might have limitations in my body, but my mind gets really bored with limitations. […]

This also caused me to take another look at the relative witchiness of the manuscript I’m currently circulating to publishers. […] I did work with changing the manuscript’s title again. How do you land on your titles when you’re sending out your books? Do you fiddle with them, adjusting them to what you think a particular publisher might like, or do you just stick with one until it’s taken? I’m afraid I am a fiddler. But it is good to step back and look at a manuscript as a whole and ask—what story is this book telling? What characters are central? What are the general vibes? Are there too many books out there with a certain title already?

I like anything that puts my work in a different light, that helps me think of it in a different way.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Superbowls and Sunshine, Witchy Poets, Wordclouds and Titling, Changing Perspectives and Losing Control

When Red Hen began growing, I went to New York, and for the first time, I met with a few agents with the idea that in some glorious future, we might be significant enough to take books from them. I met with one well-known agent, Georges Borchardt, who told energetic stories about his years in the business. “When I was first working with Sammy,” he said. “Sammy wasn’t that famous.” I didn’t know who Sammy was, but as he kept going about the times that Sammy flipped between French and English, I looked behind him on the wall, where he’d hung a large picture of Samuel Beckett receiving the Nobel Prize. Sammy!

I was fascinated. I asked about Marguerite Duras, the French author whose work I knew he had introduced to Americans. He spoke about her like he’d just talked with her yesterday, like she was a dear old friend. Speaking of T.C. Boyle made him light up. He loved talking about his legendary boots, the California rush of his books. Then he started on Eli Wiesel, one of the most notable voices in Holocaust literature. After Wiesel became famous, they held parties in his honor, and he asked Georges to come along. At some point, Georges would decide to leave, and as he stood by the elevator, Eli’s footsteps would rush up behind him.

“The party is for you,” said Georges. “You have to go back!”

“I’m coming with you,” Eli would say.

“No, you’re not. You have to stay.”

After an hour of meeting, Georges invited me to dinner at his home. His wife, Anne, made a lovely soup, and I marveled at their two libraries: one in English, one in French.

After that, I thought maybe we should try to last longer as a publishing house, meet more people like Georges Borchardt. But there was no one else quite like him: erudite, well-read, generous. He was curious about what I was reading, what books I liked, what authors I had met and wanted to meet. Being in the room with him was like a crash course in publishing. He explained to me that the whole publishing business used to be built on midlist books—those that weren’t blockbusters but were still viable and worthwhile to publish—but then it changed, and it was all about the big sellers. Mid-list was an easier category, he said. Ian McKuen and T.C. Boyle started as midlist. They had breakout books, books that took longer to catch on, but Georges stayed with them.

Across all these years, I’ve still never met anyone quite like him. He just died at ninety-eight, and his daughter, Valerie, has taken over his agency. He will be missed. […]

Publishing is a kind of madness. Anything else would be easier. But we remain in the hard work and tumble, thinking bigger, building our legacy. Borchardt stayed in the thrum of it until the end. A hero of literature.

Kate Gale, On Georges Borchardt & The Maddening Dream of Publishing

I wrote this poem for the late Richard Sanger, with whom I had the pleasure to work on his last collection, Way to Go (Biblioasis, 2023). It was published posthumously, which Richard knew would likely be the case while we were working, and I remember how inspiring I found his patience about this fact. By that point I’d seen the publishing industry rush enough books to press for one reason or another, few of them matters of life and death. That he remained more committed to making the best poems he could make than to whatever personal edification or pleasure he might take from seeing them published was rare, and inspiring. I admired him very much. Here in the uncertainty of my own illness, his conviction about how a poet lives—how a poet dies—is even more profoundly moving to me.

I don’t much care for opining about my own work insofar as intent or, ack, interpretation, but in the spirit of engaging with all of the poems I share in this newsletter, a bit of context. At Richard’s memorial, speaker after speaker got up and remarked on his humour and playfulness and irrepressible verve, but I noted how a handful of remarks—mine included—commented on the seriousness with which he regarded poetry, in both his teaching and his own work. A young woman who’d been his student remembered being advised to set a draft in blank verse, and that it had unlocked an entirely new dimension in her writing, and so, for both of them, this one is blank verse as well: five beats per line, which alternate between rising—the iambic da DUM—and falling—trochaic: DA dum—rhythms. I didn’t undertake the last part consciously, but I’d hazard that my ear was appreciating the tension between fear and acceptance: the pounding of the fearful heart, the gentle acquiescence of the resting.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Elegy for Richard”

January was a blast, despite the year’s first rejection winging its way to me on only the 5th: I’ve been far more productive, poems-wise, than usual. That may in part be due to reading the long, elegant, syntactically-gorgeous lines of C.K. Williams’s poetry at bedtime, which seems to have unlocked a part of my brain hitherto securely bolted. I’ve been to two fantastic weekend workshops, at both of which the other participants wrote amazing, inspiring poems. In editing my own, I’ve found, not for the first time in the last year or two, that I’ve spent at least as much time adding to the poems as I have deleting or tweaking phrases and lines; for me, that’s a very happy place.

I’ve been delighted to see some poetry pals buoyed by recent successes, a reminder, if one were needed, that the poetry world has room enough for everyone with flair, imagination and a willingness to work hard at their craft.

Something else which has made me think a lot about the use of language is learning Italian: I’m in the second year of evening classes and I’m at the point now where I relish the challenge of rendering Italian into idiomatic English. (Or even idiotic.) I can’t say that I’m speaking Italian with great confidence, but I like having a go and I enjoy how the words flow into one another more seamlessly than English words do.

Matthew Paul, February update

Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the architects of post-independence anglophone poetry in India. With 18 books of poetry over 5 decades, his work is exemplary in the way it is located in his immediate landscape – physical, social and political – and in its ability to overcome all linguistic hurdles to evoke deep Indian sensibilities. But he was also unsparing of himself, bringing a brutal honesty to his poetry. His poem ‘A tale, to begin with’ is one of his many attempts to articulate what he saw within. It starts with this line:

“Jayanta Mahapatra never did anything worthwhile’

When did a line like that not make the reader hold their breath till the conclusion? When did the end of such a poem not become the beginning of a thought experiment? I was moved to write something that was not as much response as it was salutation, not as much “shalI I” as it was “do I dare.”

Here’s the poem I wrote. I hope you will be kind to it!

*

The poem expands in the hollows inside me
like sacredness slowly builds up to ten-
dimensional rapture. Silence echoes like
a refrain. I imagine the poet must have dipped
his pen deep into atmosphere and amygdala,
into myth and maelstrom, into singularity
and solitude, to find these words. Or he
writes like the river flows: through physics
and compulsion and irrepressible love.

I become a figure by his window, behind
his retina, inside his nights. I can see where
my shadows intersect with his shadows. [….]

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Of love and self and a poet and poem

I’ve written a lot of poems based on fairytales in the past. In fact, I often chide myself for doing so almost too heavily in my early work (things like literature, folklore, art, and history are great subject matter when you haven’t yet lived enough or learned to harvest your own life for poetic material).  In some ways, it felt like a crutch. In others, writing about cultural touchpoints can be a great way to connect with readers and explore retellings of stories they already know.  These iterations can sometimes offer more in-depth examinations of themes–those drawn out by the author or already there in abundance. I tend to also gravitate to works, both as a reader and editor for the dgp series, that work and re-work fairy tales and folklore.  One of my first artist book projects was a series on Little Red Riding Hood called THE BOOK OF RED. My third full-length book THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS had, at its heart, the Goldilocks tale. Later,  I wrote a more witch-sympathetic interpretation of Hansel and Gretel with PLUMP. There are also other loose poems that do similar things with existing stories. 

As someone newly married, Bluebeard has been on my mind. Probably because the first couple years we were seeing each other, I had not been to J’s home and was completely convinced he was too good to be true. So obviously had to have a basement full of dead women he was hiding somewhere.  It’s also especially funny since he actually eventually moved in with me, so all the secrets and locked rooms had to be mine. (I did tell him to avoid the entryway closet with its ever-avalanching mounds of press and art supplies I shoved in there when I moved out of my studio space and just haven’t found a home for elsewhere in the apartment.) For this project, I was also a little inspired by the musical SIX, which details Henry VIII’s wives and their mishaps, which, while all did not die at his hand, can be an interesting correlative in terms of the powerlessness of women historically.   

The poems are going well, and I will be sharing bits from them in the coming weeks. They will also be part of the Patreon offerings for February (still working on what that will look like. I decided the epistolary was a perfect form for them, as in letters from the last wife to Bluebeard himself, though she becomes a chorus of other fragmented voices of dead wives. 

Kristy Bowen, the abattoir letters

In stories, you’ve learned that the blackbird of what holds all of us together sings when we’ve lost our voice.

That the blackbird of our shared joy lends us wings when we’ve forgotten how to fly.

Sometimes in sleep, you see your other half.

You ask one another what the weather is like in your different states of being.

You ask one another what the world looked like before guns, before hate,

before all those broken mirrors ago.

Rich Ferguson, Somewhere in the World

Before yesterday, I had planned a snow/winter weather theme for my Advanced Creative Writing class, and having snow drifting by the window was the perfect touch.  On Tuesday, I read Dave Bonta’s Poetry Blog Digest, on his Via Negativa site, as I do most Tuesdays.  He linked to this post by Kristy Bowen, which concluded with ten wonderful poetry prompts for winter.  They’re the best kind of prompts, the kind that work not only for poetry but for all kinds of creative thought.

I put each prompt on a slip of paper and had them put the slips of paper face down on their desks.  Every five minutes, they turned over another slip and wrote for five minutes.  At the end of five minutes, they could keep going, or they could turn over a new slip.  

They were all writing on laptops, which was fine with me, although I did realize that I had no way of knowing if they were really working on prompts.  But from observing them, they did seem engaged, and they did turn over slips.  At the end of the process, I had them select one line from their writing and put it on a blank slip–and then I read all the slips as one poem, an interesting experiment.

I did a variation of the writing too, although since I was the timekeeper, I couldn’t lose myself in my writing the way I might have.  I did come up with some interesting lines that I hope to continue to work into a unified poem. 

By the time I got on the road to drive home, the sun was shining, and while it wasn’t warm, I wasn’t afraid that the roads would freeze–it’s the best kind of winter weather, the kind that doesn’t disrupt but does inspire.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Weather and Writing Prompts

I haven’t posted a good stuff round-up in a while—and frankly, the news feels like a relentless round-up of bad stuff, so I need to shift my attention. Last night was some very, very good stuff, between Bad Bunny’s joyful celebration of the Americas and Brandi Carlile’s moving performance of “America, the Beautiful.” I don’t know about you, but I needed that. My kids did, too.

What else is good these days? My birthday is this Friday, and my fifth book of poems, A Suit or a Suitcase, is out next month! […]

That opening couplet of “A Suit or a Suitcase” has me thinking a lot about my country right now.

You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.

The cruelty has been devastating to witness. We have a long way to go and a lot to learn—about ourselves, our history, and each other. In these harrowing times, I’m so grateful for writers, artists, and educators, and for their work—films, plays, books, and music—that teaches us about ourselves, our history, and each other, and that reminds us of what it is to be human.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

i am the idea of a limb.
you can chew on me
until you’re bored. you can
give me a little hat. tear the clouds
out of my chest. make a sky.

Robin Gow, dog toy

I’ve given myself a difficult task. Yet we learn through difficulty, do we not? Often, too, the unlovely poems are those that deal with how rotten human beings can be, or illuminate the worst of times and offer us insight and information that we had not been taught, hidden horrors, trauma, all of the above. I have written many lovely poems about lovely things. The world, however, manages to be far more complicated than beautiful, a mixed bag of joys and miseries, and it seems to me that literature and art ought to reflect that fact sometimes.

What I’m posting below is a very rough draft, just to demonstrate how I begin a difficult poem, a poem based upon historical facts that I’m learning myself. It’s a completely different process from when I write from an image or observation of my own. For example, the “Librarian” poem, which is about 15 pages long, took me a couple of years and a visit to the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) at Carlisle Barracks, PA! First I pull some quotes, make a lot of notes, highlight images or place names that seem most resonant. Then I develop these into what I call “jottings” and fragments, and start setting them into an initial sequence–which I often change later.

Stanzas? Line breaks? Metaphors? Meter? All of that can wait; I like to work on structuring the narrative first when I try something in this vein, and I want to find images that might speak to a reader. So it is clear to me that this poem is not one I’ll have finished before the end of the 5-meetings-long workshop. Assuming I ever do finish it. Yes, poetry is hard work.

Ann E. Michael, Unlovely drafts

And the seeds under our steps sleep in vernalization.
It is a patience I wish I had, staying hard until things turn.
Until the snowmelt and soil-shift are messages beckoning warmth.
And the smallest tendrils inside us crack through the crust of ourselves,
and shove granules aside, one instant at a time.

Sarah Lada, Vernalization

This week: a hell hole, relearning the world, wormy things from the sea bed, a single blue tree, and much more. Enjoy.

Three bullets fired. A poet shot in the face.

I read her lines. I read them again. How her poem begins with I want and ends with dies there. In one lilting tower, there is ovum, sperm, and wonder. I wanted, also. More of her lines. But I couldn’t find them, so I took a walk to Hell.

Hell, where like her body, it is cold. People huddle together now for warmth. Some tempt fate, balancing themselves on the frozen surface of the watering hole. Everything is putrid, being eaten, digested, spewed. A flute up the ass here. A pig guised as a nun there. I hide in the eye of a donkey skull and look about. A man’s body is skewered in the strings of a harp. Dark birds fly out of a man’s ass as he’s being eaten by a bird-man who shits out people into a hell hole. Into the hell hole, a man vomits his wine and another man shits out wafers.

Smoke wafts in from the faraway fires in the background. Nothing is good here. Not even the birds. Not the skin or earth or sounds. God is panels away and out of control of his creation. A shell of a man is bright in this hellscape. Poised on his tree trunk arms, he looks back at a ladder that leads up into his eggshell torso where people gamble in the darkness. He watches his own ruin, the calmest look on his face.

I slide down the nose of the donkey skull and land where the ladder is. Do I climb? Do I steal a brass instrument from a demon and make my own music?

Sarah Lada, In the Garden of Earthly Horrors

The poem knows that paradise has been lost – that’s a clear-eyed assessment.  It gathers evidence and clues without putting together answers or a coherent narrative.  Is it environmental destruction?  Malfeasance?  Incompetence?  But on the loss of paradise, it isn’t giving up. 

If anything, paradise is lost, then regained through poetry.  The poem’s title, “U-topias,” refers to the original meaning of utopia, no-place.  That could be a name for poetry itself.  Poetry is the place, and it is involved in restoring lost value in the world.  Restoration through humble things. The humblest of things.  The world of love and things of the earth.  Rebirth of paradise in the heart.

Jill Pearlman, U-topias

We are now out at the very, very edge of the textual record, and maybe the beginning of our cultural memory, when language and writing began to give us a notion of ourselves. The writing becomes the weather; whatever the runes are saying, their presence is as much a matter of this place as the weather or this lump of slate or anything else.

‘Sleep is the other half of us … It is us, in our absence’. (Marie Darrieussecq, Sleeplessness). These poems explore paths we’re not quite aware we are following; and the tracks we trace, half-consciously, into the future.

Lesley Harrison, Presencing

throw away the key. i will eat
with my eyes. pay an application fee
to look at the moon. they say it is withering
with each poet’s glance. that we must conserve it.
soon we will run out of metaphors
& we will have to start screaming.

Robin Gow, 1/15

There are very specific memories around the traumatic events of the day he died, which I intend to write about more someday (one poem I wrote in the thick of deep grief describes it, I still cannot read it aloud), but the day he died, he was very quiet. It was the quietness that was the most striking but probably, in hindsight, not the most surprising. His voice was near silent. He slept quite a bit. He looked at me with worry yet strangely far away.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Intuition. Connection. Voices.

There are two ideas that have stuck in my mind from my professors back when, which I still find unescapable. The first was my Milton professor, who claimed that Milton was the last man to know everything at a time when it was possible to know everything. I knew even then that the professor was very wrong (how much did Milton know of the ideas of the East, for instance?), but still, I envied the idea that such a thing could be possible. The second comes from a lecture by Mary Reufle in graduate school, where she was reading from the letters of Emily Dickinson, noting how there was no distinction between Dickinson’s poems and the letters—she had one mind, one voice, and it filtered all the world as poetry.

Of course, I want that to be me.

But I don’t speak in poems. And my work-a-day emails don’t bear a trace of lyricism. Does that make me less of a poet? Or, was Emily Dickinson just very lucky to not have a day job (and a 21st-century one at that)?

Carrie Olivia Adams, Opening & Closing Lines for Your January

In January 2021, during the second lockdown, I hosted an online discussion of the books on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist that year. A poll at the end showed the audience favourite was the outsider choice: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry). The judges agreed. Kapil’s sequence of vivid, compact free-verse poems about the violence of colonialism (figured as a house stay) is, to my mind, one of the best books to win the prize. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance (The 87 Press), presents extracts from all her work woven into scripts made with the multidisciplinary artist, Blue Pieta. […]

Kapil fans will want to know that she has a new prose poem in Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber), the first anthology of nature writing by African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora poets in the UK, edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Another new poem in here that I enjoyed was Moniza Alvi’s “At Walberswick”, which considers the fact that some locals in the Suffolk coastal village claim to have seen two circus elephants ferried across the River Blyth, and yet no evidence for this newsworthy event survives.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #39: The Patter of Thaw

A few weeks ago, the Best American Poetry blog ended. And when it disappeared, hundreds of interviews and reviews and insightful posts by and about famous poets and writers vanished with it. I am still grieving its loss. But it’s not all bad. A new blog will soon begin—this one from Etruscan Press. There will be new posts on poetry and all things literary weekly as well as old posts from Best American and other places. I will keep you posted . . .

But before that happens, I wanted to post a review by Dante DeStafano that appeared on BAP, and of course, is now gone.

I admit that posting this review makes me feel a little queasy. It is so kind. So before posting it, I thought I’d post a picture from the book of me as a child. What I don’t say in the book is that I think I am holding a manure ball. I’m not sure, but it looks like it . . .  

Nin Andrews, Review of Son of a Bird by Dante Distefano

For the last few months I’ve been reading and re-reading the work of Souleymane Diamanka, whose work I mentioned briefly at the end of a reading round-up in the autumn. Diamanka is a French poet who was born in Senegal, before coming to France as a toddler. He started out in slam / hip-hop and his earlier printed collections are also available as recordings (this is not, I think, the case for this most recent book, 50 Sonnets pour mes 50 Printemps).

Shortly before Christmas I went to see him live in Paris. Diamanka recites all his poems from memory, many to a kind of musical backing. He also performed a couple of pieces in a duo with his friend John Banzaï. At the end of the show, he invited the audience to provide ten words and promised to improvise a poem on the spot using all ten of them as rhyme-words. The first person to call out suggested rhizome: he asked politely for a definition and noted it down. Some of the subsequent suggestions were more traditional ‘poetic’ words like amour (love), âme (soul) and chocolat, and someone asked for habibi (an endearment borrowed from the Arabic for ‘my love’). My favourite request was curcumasse, which at the time I took to be an obscure variant of curcuma (turmeric) but I think was actually the imperfect subjunctive of a verb I didn’t know existed, curcumer, ‘to add some turmeric’.

The poem he produced after perhaps 30 seconds of reflection had a narrative structure – it started with him arriving for the performance and meeting this audience and ended with him saying goodbye. So far I’ve only seen him perform once so I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that he often or always uses a similar structure when improvising a poem with words provided by the audience.

The improvised poem was funny and charming and the audience responded with whoops and applause after each rhyme-word duly appeared. This reminded me of Agha Shahid Ali’s description of how ghazals work in performance (he is writing here about the Urdu tradition):

The audience (the ghazal is recited a lot) waits to see what the poet will do with the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] when the poet recites the first line of a couplet, the audience recites it back to him, and then the poet repeats it, and the audience again follows suit. This back and forth creates an immensely seductive tension because everyone is waiting to see how the suspense will be resolved in terms of the scheme established in the opening couplet [. . .] I should mention that a ghazal is often sung.

Ali also describes the audience reciting elements back to the poet. Diamanka’s performance has aspects of this too: in several poems he encouraged the audience to join in with, and then finally to provide, a refrain.

Although he incorporates a little improvisation at the end of his performance, and expresses his admiration for le freestyle — a kind of rap competition which relies entirely on improvisation — Diamanka is not mainly a poet of improvisation himself: his poems are composed and then memorised. He is, however, emphatic about the centrality of orality and performance to his work.

Victoria Moul, On improvisation and the poetic occasion

–In my English 102 classes, I’ve been using Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel.”  I often use it as a way of talking about whether a piece is a poem, a journal entry, a very short story, or something else.  I did that this week.  But I also talked about Forche’s time as a human rights adviser for the U.N., and the situation in El Salvador when she was there in the late ’70’s.  I have concluded by making connections to Venezuela.

–It is strange how events have changed since I taught this poem in the fall.  Now we have invaded Venezuela.  In some ways, it’s not a surprise.  After all, the U.S. has inserted itself in many a country, especially in Latin America.  But this time, the surprise is that the U.S. has been very covert in the past.  Not this time.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fragments–So Fragmented that I’m Posting Late

Among the new collections I’ve enjoyed and admired of late are Lady by Laurie Bolger (Nine Arches), In the Lily Room by Erica Hesketh (also Nine Arches), Lives of the Female Poets by Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe), and, at the moment, I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon). The latter consists of single-paragraph prose-poems. In their quirkiness, they remind me of the epigrammatical mini-essays by Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), which were really proto-prose-poems, I think. […]

In a letter dated 21 May 1919 to Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf described Pearsall Smith thus: ‘I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in him.’ As a young man, he was a friend of Whitman’s in the latter’s old age, and they used to take (horse-drawn) cabs round Central Park following ones in which lovers were passengers to see how far they got, as it were. That incident apparently sparked Robert Lowell’s line ‘I watched for love-cars’ in his great ‘Skunk Hour’, available here, the last poem in Life Studies. Who knew? Well, I didn’t until I read the notes in the very heavy paperback I have of Lowell’s Collected. I’ve been reading Lowell off and on since I first read his poems at school, in the first year of sixth form, way back in 1983, and many of them remain among my all-time favourite poems.

Matthew Paul, New Year resolutions

I’ve been re-reading my Denise Levertov. She’s always meant a lot to me but her work hits differently these days. Which is likely always the case for a body of poetry, and/or reading anything over and over through time, measuring yourself and the surprising people (never just one really) you have become. Her longer poem in letters, “Relearning the Alphabet,” for example. “Relearn the alphabet, / relearn the world, the world /understood anew only in doing.” And doesn’t it seem like we’re relearning the world over again every day in these times?

Shawna Lemay, Flowers in the Dark

When the disembodied voice of Philip Levine comes to you in a desperate hour, Gerald Stern can’t be far behind. During my recent hospitalization I discovered my personal essential-texts test might be: Would I want this with me in the hospital? John Irving’s latest novel? I brought it to the ER, knowing I’d have a long wait to be admitted, and promptly regretted it; it remained unreadable even after I was discharged. This Time, Gerald Stern’s 1998 new and selected, which I bought at the Dodge Poetry Festival in September 2000? Twenty-five years later I asked for this book to be brought to me, on day seven of nineteen, as I underwent urgent radiotherapy for what pathology would eventually determine to be a rare recurrence of the rare cancer, a type of sarcoma, I was first treated for in 2011.

That day I was feeling, oddly, lucky, amid the whirlwind that had begun with a clinic visit on a Saturday morning for the seemingly innocuous sluggishness and what I took to be sinus issues that had lingered on after Covid and flu vaccinations and abruptly became suspected recurrence. I first had it in my leg, and was treated with radiotherapy and surgical resection that left a long scar down my left hip and took a healthy margin from several muscles: lateral hamstring, quad, glute medias. I went on to race bicycles and hike arduous distances and hit a one-rep deadlift max of 245 pounds. Too, to train for and run my first half marathon, just this past October, and so it remains difficult to get my head around the idea that I have two large tumours in my lungs, and that one is involved with my heart and my superior vena cava.

I don’t particularly want this to become a cancer newsletter. I’ve never written about my health despite various concerns thereabout being a continuous presence I mostly manage to forget about; I suppose I have found it uninteresting to anyone but me, and often uninteresting even to me, its captive audience. But I do believe that we keep poetry alive—and perhaps it keeps us alive—when we are reading and responding to it with our whole selves. When we are open to, and about, the truth of our lives, we are able to receive the truth of poems. So there’s no real way to tell you why “Lucky Life” came back to me, what it means to me now, without the context: I was in the hospital, adrift on a sea of uncertainty, and thinking of what was certain, of that which I have rarely, if ever doubted: my friends, the cavalry of happy warriors I reached out to with the news and who reached out to me with their best and most hilarious idiocy and cat pictures and funny books and treats and sticky-limbed ninjas that, when flung against a wall, climb down with a herky-jerky unpredictably, much to the delight of both humans and felines.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Lucky Life” by Gerald Stern

In 1934, Tristan Tzara released a major collection of prose and poetry, including both linear argument and surrealist fugues, called Grains et issues. It was a very dense work of combined poetry, poetic theory, and Marxist thinking, and as far as I am aware, it has never been translated in full—or even much in part. While I can’t promise anything close to a full version (it is close to 200 pages), I have started chipping away at one section called de Fond en comble la clarté, which can be rendered as “From Head to Toe Clarity,” “Clarity from Head to Toe” (alternately, “Top to Bottom,” or similar idiom). Here, I’m calling it “Clarity Through and Through.” The whole chapter begins in dream-like prose, shifts into free verse lines, and then turns back into prose for several paragraphs. Here, I’m offering only the free verse passage, as it stands alone quite well and shows an good example of Tzara in his surrealist era.

As always in Tzara, you cannot always tell what modifies what, or where one thought or sequence begins and ends. Despite title, nothing here is clear. He collides fragments and complete sentences with no concern for clarity or transition, and disorientation is a primary effect he’s after. (Or, more precisely, he’s less interested in “creating an effect” than on direct transcription of his imagination in its uncontrolled flight through language.) […]

bitter eye undivided
the fresh water longs to assemble
if only for a moment an image dissolved
on the path of survivors
cross-sections of membranes with the look of life
air melted to the root

R.M. Haines, BY THE SALAMANDER WALL

E. G. Cunningham is the author of several books of poetry, most recently the text-image collection Field Notes (River River Books, 2025).  Her work has appeared in The Abandoned Playground, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fugue, The Nation, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications. She received the LUMINA Nonfiction Award for her lyric essay “The Exedra,” and the Judith Siegel Pearson Award for her collection of lyric vignettes, Women & Children. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Edmonds College in Western Washington. […]

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 try to be as aware as I can about the questions that the work is asking. Equally as interesting to me are the unconscious pulls and drivers that inform the writing itself. Only after the fact am I often aware of the questions being asked. As an example: when I began writing Field Notes, I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between the field as an historical site of oppression and the field as a kind of idyllic mythos; I was surprised, however, by how forcefully other inquiries, related to family history, memory, and the making of art itself, arose.

My theoretical concerns have to do with the nature of time and memory, the role of desire in both, the relationship between place and (personal, social, familial, political) identity, the loss of and role of nature, death, endings, the invisible and the unknown. These of course are questions that artists have always confronted; the difference now, as I see it, has to do with a shared awareness of a foreshortened future in a truly ongoing, accelerating, and global sense. All of the metaphysical questions, the epistemological and existential questions, are entirely rearranged by the exponential facts of climate catastrophe (which I’m using here as shorthand for myriad ills, including biodiversity loss, species collapse, soil depletion, extreme weather, etc., etc.).

For the painfully aware, even something as seemingly simple and beautiful as a walk on the beach conflicts sharply with the paradigms of decades prior. Once one knows, for example, that ocean spray releases more microplastics than nearly any other natural phenomenon, well, that quite changes one’s view of and relationship to and available means of expression for such phenomena.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with E.G. Cunningham

We got some rain on Saturday, which we’ve needed, and dismal cold rainy January days are perfect for settling down with a book. I’m reading The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (1977) by poet, writer, farmer, educator, activist Wendell Berry, still working at 91–his book Sabbath Poems was published in 2024. I’m much more familiar with Berry’s poetry than his prose, though he’s written at least half a dozen novels and many books of nonfiction. This text, I’ve since learned, is one of his more famous–it’s been revised and re-issued six times. The copy I got from the library is the original version and features cover blurbs by Gary Snyder, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, and Stewart Brand, among others; Publishers Weekly summed up the book as “a cool, reasoned, lucid and at times poetic explanation of what agribusiness and the mechanization of farming are doing to the American fabric.”

Which is a fairly good one-sentence précis, though Berry’s wording often strikes me as more passionate than “cool,” and agribusiness is only one aspect of his critique. […]

The sections of the book that most resonate with me are those in which he writes of nurturing and relationships, and points out that good relationships involve responsible actions and collaborative, mutual care whether they are marital, family, or social relationships or relationships with the soil, the flora and fauna, the whole planet. He predicts a future in which people live in their houses and not with the land, or even within their communities, and where wilderness is “conserved” so that it can be exploited for entertainment and scenic views. People in the US, he says, don’t feel responsible for the land on which they live; they don’t understand its cycles, its weather patterns, its waterways; their property is merely property–a commodity for convenience and investment. I’d say that future is already upon us.

Ann E. Michael, Unsettling

Today, as I worked on chapbook cover designs and poems in the swine daughter series that I am realizing more and more reflect the heaviness of my mood, J was in the other room, playing a video game over Discord with his friends (the same couple we play real-time D&D occasionally). It got me pondering how, while I was invited to play provided we get another controller, I really feel like all my free time (“free” meaning not writing for money or peddling away on press/shop things) I should be writing or making art. That those slivers of time can sometimes be the most productive. While I was once quite good at Nintendo games when I was a teenager, once I started writing in earnest, my free time was for poems–both from a vocation and a hobby standpoint. I enjoy gaming as a social endeavor–board games and RPGs

This doesn’t mean I didn’t have other hobbies. Though I make money from it now, my visual art endeavors were once a hobby, less a profession. I have always had a maddening/productive way of turning hobbies and interests into side hustles, which at various times have included collecting vintage, jewelry making, soap making, and other crafty things.  My other interests, like horror films and theater are more passive (though my dip into writing things for the stage may change that slightly.) 

I used to talk to a friend about the difference between consumption and creation. How, as artists or writers, you are focused predominantly on making things. On expression and creating worlds. While her hierarchy placed the consumers of culture lower than the creatives, I don’t think it’s that simple.  One, after all, needs to other to exist. While the audience for things doesn’t always rival the people making any given thing (especially poetry–where poets often bemoan the sadness of writing only for other poets) they still need to exist for either side of it to work. There is a lot of talk about the dangers of AI, how it takes away the creative and panders to the consumer but really doesn’t create anything new. Basically, every one becomes consumers but there is really nothing real to consume. 

But I also think creating can come in many forms […]. While my parents were not really artists, I think often about the ways they laid the groundwork for not one, but two children with artistic leanings. I’ve spoken before of the years my mother spent painting plaster figurines. Or about the surprising revelation that my dad, as a kid wrote horror stories when he was supposed to be paying attention in class. My mother also, like me, shared a love of decorating and setting the tone of a space. How my dad turned his love of betting on horses into a science and a little extra money. These were in addition to things like gardening and fishing and cooking that littered their time. 

Kristy Bowen, creation vs. consumption

I like the ability of the internet to connect people of like minds or experiences and far distance. I like the critical thinking skills of people who make rather than only consume.

I like the free exchange of ideas and people who are curious to learn. People who declare they “don’t want to be influenced” worry me for that alone and for the mindset of proprietary insular ideas instead of community and growing together in an interdependent way. Aren’t we each isolated enough without deliberately avoiding listening to one another? It’s never made sense to me.

Pearl Pirie, So glitchy

I have clear memories of 1956, the year my mother became ill.
A room in lamplight, curtains closed, yellow wallpaper faded to brown.
The computer offers me a drone tour of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The computer tells me it’s freezing in Downham Market.
The president condemns a protester for shouting Shame, Shame, Shame.
His stormtroopers cover their faces, arrest a clown for dancing in the street.

Bob Mee, A LAYING BARE OF THE BRAIN, THE RHYTHMS OF HOPE AND OTHER BUDGERIGARS OF THE HEART

My husband reads physics books all the time, and most of his own novels are based on entanglement and quantum physics. He is fond of explaining the double slit experiment to new Red Hen staff people. If you aren’t familiar, light changes when observed, almost as if it’s aware of being watched.

We change when we are observed. Our lives change. Some of us are more anxious, some less, some fatter, some thinner. If I were single, I would live on air. I would always have sake and champagne in my fridge for emergencies; other than that, I would live on fruit, tuna, and arugula. Like light particles, I change through observation. I’m more civilized, less savage.

When I grew up at the Farm, I spent much of my life with no people watching me. I was always told, God is watching you, so I talked to God. “God,” I said, “Are you watching me right now? I’m going to do something dangerous. Watch this.”

Yet we do get married to live an observed life. We have families to observe what we have done, who we have been, to be known and remembered. This weekend, we are hosting a family dinner, one of thousands we’ve had at my kitchen table.

We live, now, in a society where we are watched all the time. In Washington, D.C., there are 44 cameras per 1,000 people; in New York, 10; and in Los Angeles, 12. Atlanta has 124 per 1,000 residents, a product of Operation Shield, a massive police surveillance system known to unfairly target Atlanta’s Black residents.

In Beverly Hills, there are 62 cameras for every 1000 residents. It’s a small town with a population of only about 30,000 people, but with an average home price of five million, that small town is carefully watched. The park where I hike does not have CCTV, and I go there to get away from electronics and breathe.

But the observed life we live with our spouse and our family is not surveillance. It’s a story, a long narrative. Alone, we are looking to achieve great things, yet we are in the dance together. Sometimes it feels more like we are lurching around the dance floor, but in our best moments, we twirl.

I am living in the gift of an observed life with the people who truly see me. This includes the family I have chosen.

Kate Gale, The Marvel of an Observed Life

first light
the frost on the hillside
is turning pink

Jim Young [no title]

The Little Review (“a new pocket-sized magazine for anyone interested in poetry”) has quickly become one of my favourite (little) magazines, not least because it really is designed to be carried about in your pocket and I do a good 50% of my reading on the tube. But also because they are committed to the art of the review, and know that poetry isn’t always the most interesting thing about poetry. You can subscribe to their newseltter, which includes gems like CG’s piece on Sylvia Plath’s prose, here on Substack.

They throw good parties, too. The review below, of Matthew Buckley Smith’s second collection, Midlife, was first published in Issue 2 last November. One cold, rainy Saturday, I went along to read at the launch party on a cosy old boat in Canary Wharf (a distinctly un-cosy area: the contrast was surreal).

How do you perform a review? We agreed I’d simply read something from the book, without any discussion, so I read ‘Object Permenance’, of which more below. I am glad to say several people came up to me afterwards to say how much they’d enjoyed it and asking to see a copy of the book itself (which was quite possibly the only copy in the UK at that point), promising to get hold of one. It was a strange, and strangely gratifying, experience. Though it has its pleasures, at the end of the day reviewing is always a strange and solitary task. I often find myself mentally distancing myself from a book, and the review itself, once I’m done. Suddenly, I was the book’s ambassador, enthusiastic about the poems all over again and basking in their borrowed glory. Perhaps all critics should be given the opportunity to impersonate their victims.

Jeremy Wikeley, The things you’ve said and done

wormy things from the sea bed
making ink from sediment
they are snapping at our heels

that one’s got money in it
an unsympathetic material
frozen in body and brain

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2026

Eve Luckring’s Signal to Noise grows out of her own experience of progressive hearing disability to become a study in incomprehension, or failed comprehension, or random misapprehension, which is to say it concerns language.

The book is constructed in two complementary numbered sections, with the longer second part also bearing the title ‘A Lexicon’. The first part consists of a set of texts bound together by some formal, or semi-formal repetitions. One of these is a thread of five-line pieces that read like, and may well be, transcripts from a single-word speech audiometry test, though some of the vocabulary seems unlikely:

“Say the word ’Haint’…”
“Say the word ‘Strop’…”
“Say the word ‘Rift’…”
“Say the word ‘Lure’…”
“Say the word ‘Whom’…”

The refrain-like anaphora is picked up, with variations, in a second thread of four-liners (in two couplets) on the following pattern:

I hear a voice calling my name
I can’t tell from which direction or how close it might be.

I can’t tell if it wants to harm me or tell me something
important; I know it wants attention.

As we cycle through the iterations, the owner of the voice and the person addressed change, as does the uncertainty of the remaining lines. These uncertainties reflect the limitations imposed by hearing impairment, which are a kind of subset of the limitations imposed by language. Who amongst us ever really hears things clearly? Which is not, let me be clear, to diminish the impact of hearing loss, but to set it in a broader spectrum of human experience.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading January 2026: A Review

I think I need a bigger “leap” for the last image. I read about a hoax where an 17th or 18th c. woman pretended to give birth to rabbits (15 of them!) in order to gain money to feed her actual children.

not a sleepwalker’s hands
or the space between
but a rabbit in the womb
instead of capitalism

Nah! Interesting but not yet. So what happens if I change the opening two lines. There’s no reason to keep them, or for that matter the form — the four lines — though I’ve imagined the poem to be this Knott-like short text.

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon
where do they walk?
east then west
north then south

I like the question here, but the ending sounds good but doesn’t deliver an imagistic “zing.”

Maybe the whole thing would be better with just those first two lines, those are the ones that are working the best.:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon

I kind of miss “the space between the sleepwalker’s hands” which is what occasioned the poem in the first place. Something mysterious and interesting about that space:

a sleepwalker eats a womb
believing it the moon

not the sleepwalker’s hands
but the space between

Hmm. That has potential. I’m going to leave it for now, since I still have to prepare for the reading! If you have any suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Gary Barwin, Revising the Sleepwalker

Again (again?) thinking about that treacherous “about”-ness of poems, or of my attempts toward a poem. How seeking to write “about” some Important Thing makes my work flat and explainy and earnest in the way of a Hallmark card. Nevertheless, I persevere. I have been trying to figure out how to write a poem that informs, as I want to talk about Important Subjects in a way that Opens the Eyes, but I want to do it with grace, ease, play, subtlety.

But do I, as a reader, want to be informed? Is that what I want from a poem? No. Something else. I want the something elseness of poetry. The subtext and subtle unsaid and loud silences and momentary confusions that ease into — what? — a moment of wisdom, maybe, or of connection to an Other, or of perspective, insight, or something more visceral — the ah ha, the oh, the yes.

What I admire about this poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney is that she is committed to communicating information but also to the playful use of sound and language to carry that information out of the sometimes-tedious realm of explication. And also how the denseness and movement of it enact the subject matter. How it dams and flows, hurriedly gathers and lets loose.

I sometimes ponder the arcane information I have learned from fiction — I know to keep my heels down if I go off a ski jump (thanks, Nancy Drew), and how starfish regrow arms (thanks, Madeleine L’Engle), that the province of Quebec is a hotbed of organized crime (thanks, Louise Penny). But I have not considered all that I’ve learned from poems, mostly because what I learn is less arcane information and more like life. But hey, if a poem wants to slip me some info, well, bring it.

Marilyn McCabe, and stops the smock and linger of pond racket

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was born in Saki, near Osaka, and as a teenager began submitting shin’taishi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) to Myōjō magazine, founded by Tekkan Yosano. Later, Akiko married Tekkan, and her poetry would go on to be a significant influence on both the shin’taishi and the shin’tanka movements, alongside her husband, and poets like Masaoka Shiki, Yanagiwara Akiko, and Kujō Takeko.

Akiko’s first solo shin’tanka collection みだれ髪 (Midare’gami; ‘Tangled Hair’) was widely read and especially popular among radicals and “free” thinkers of the time, particularly with regards to feminist discourses in Japan. This frightened the tanka establishment, who publicly attacked the book. Tanka poet and critic Nobutsuna Sasaki, for instance, claimed Akiko was “corrupting public morals” and “mouthing obscenities fit for a whore” because she composed tanka on the topic (dai) of breasts. Despite this—and equally because of it—Akiko’s work remained popular among radical poets and the general public alike, and she would go on to publish 20 tanka collections, becoming one of the most famous poets of the shintai’shi and shin’tanka schools.

Dick Whyte, Akiko Yosano – 8 Tanka (1901-1928)

My daughters play that the mud is soup,
the treehouse a boxcar. They tell me how
they came to be here, little women
growing wild as if sprung up from the dust,
or taken, gently, from a bone.

Renee Emerson, Dorothy Sayers, Mystery Writer

“Familiar Phantoms” are the gentle ghosts that act as reminders of people and things no longer in our lives that we don’t want to let go of yet. The familiarity comes from the repetition of memory, not necessarily the person or object themselves. While no one who witnessed it may have forgotten the karaoke performance from the curate, no one in the audience is likely to have been close to her. Sometimes the familiar is in something apparently trivial, a repurposed needle or a biscuit barrel, that has no financial value but an intrinsic one because of what it represents. Sue Forrester has created a subtle, multi-layered collection.

Emma Lee, “Familiar Phantoms” Sue Forrester (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

Why I Wear My Past to Work (Parlyaree Press, 2025) was written over three years and during that time, a friend of mine who I’d known since we were two-years-old, passed away. I’d moved from the village Simon and I grew up in when I was 14, but we were at the same school for a couple more years and later would meet up if I was travelling through the area.

We had many adventures, often in the Meadow at the end of our road. It was an old school playing field and fired our imaginations as explorers, often wanting to jump the fence into the farmer’s field beyond. I’m fond of Warwickshire and like many kids, we would spend what we could of weekends knocking on each other’s doors, playing street hockey, or cycling up to the Meadow, trying to find enough of us to have a proper game.

I began ‘The Meadow, Dugdale Avenue, 1993’ shortly after Simon’s funeral as a way to process his loss and the memories we shared. The collection explores the past and male and family relationships, and I admire Lewis Buxton and Luke Wright’s work on these themes. For me, great moments involved lying in the Meadow, exhausted from football, and looking up at the moving sky – clouds disappearing like days do now, more than 30 years later.

It’s not just long, sunny days I remember as a child, but looking out of my bedroom window before bed to count how many others still had their lights on. Simon and I joked it’d be great to have a walkie talkie at night, so we could discuss plans for the next day – which sport to play or trees to climb. I moved to the Cotswolds after that, and while I wouldn’t trade its landscape and stillness (which wasn’t always appreciated as a teenager), I always missed my friendships in Bidford-on-Avon.

The poem starts with a Meadow flashback. I remember Simon’s early support for Manchester United and opinion that strikers ought to be selfish to score goals. I felt quatrains worked best as the poem highlights loss and boyhood, and that provides space for different memories – the stages you go through when you lose someone close. It felt right to begin in the Meadow and the proceeding stanzas feel like the meet ups we had in the years after school.

Drop-in by Chris Campbell (Nigel Kent)

Last night I was reading at the Needlewriters in Lewes, which always feels like a second home. Despite the foul weather there was a good turnout. A warm and receptive audience including lots of friends, and a wonderful reading by Maria Jastrzębska from her forthcoming memoir. I’ve no more readings in the diary now until June. But who knows.

An exciting project that I’m currently working on is the long-awaited (by me, anyway) update to A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines. This was a wee guide that I produced firstly in 2018, then updated in 2020, and both editions sold out quite quickly. I’ve thought a few times about updating it and then a few months ago someone asked if it was still available. After explaining it was out of print, I got out my copy to review it. I was actually quite shocked how much of it needed updating, for example many of the featured magazines have folded. Not only that, but if you consider how the poetry landscape has changed there were a number of things conspicuous by their absence. As a result, I decided the new year was a good time to bring this baby back in to the present day. Once again, I’ve asked magazine editors for their thoughts and ideas. I’ve also asked a number of seasoned ‘submitters’ about their own learnings. I’m also going to include some information about competitions and pamphlet publishing. The end result, I hope, will be an informative and motivational guide for anyone who is aspirational about their poetry and either new to submitting to magazines or just needing a regular nudge to keep going and take it further. More on this soon!

Robin Houghton, New Year, new projects

The other morning I woke up singing – Try A Little Tenderness – remembering the first person switch, singing it as woman, as she, as I, just as Little Miss Cornshucks and later Aretha Franklin chose to, a bit like this…

I may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress
But while I’m weary
Try a little tenderness

I may be waiting
Just anticipating
Things I may never possess
Oh, but while I’m waiting
Try a little tenderness

I make coffee and think about this one song and all it means to me. I watch a light snow fall outside my window, and then listen to it, again, the Aretha version and then an early take of an Otis version. I think about the meaning of this song to us, to me, and the lyrics. I ponder on what ‘tenderness’ could mean in that crazy violent world and what it means now in this crazy violent world.

The dictionary meaning: Tenderness, the quality of being gentle, loving, kind.

I sit with all the feelings this melody conjures, and notice how the song changes shape and power when sung in first person. the things I may never possess. Then I remember the lost Cornshucks version and recall what a tough and tumultuous life she was living when she sang and recorded her rendition of this.

So next thing I know, I find myself rummaging through my archives, boxes of discs and files and old computers to find this one documentary we made one snowy January in Chicago back in the day. Was it 2013? 2014? Of course, all of this is a great procrastination from doing my tax return. I know, I know … but I am glad to find this recording and now share it here as I think some of you might dig hearing this and the sounds of old Chicago too.

Listening back to this show we made maybe twelve-odd years ago, my mind floods with images and fond memories of that trip to America. I remember the thrill of travelling with my producer, the brilliant Rebecca Maxted, I remember the heavy snow in Chicago and seeking the jazz ghosts of Cornshucks. I can recall us sharing Chicago deep-filled and thick crust pizzas and beers, and then exploring incredible lively jazz and blues clubs. I remember with great fondness all the beautiful people we met and talked to. The wonderful Lester Goodman, then aged 98, sharing his stories with so much kindness and sass and soul. The gorgeous and generous family of Cornshucks who welcomed us with open arms and fed us stories and delicious food. It is with gratitude I remember them all here. As I listen to this programme it already feels as though it is a recording of a different me in another life in the old times far away from the here and now.

But the music is forever, the song is timeless, the story never changes.

Salena Godden, Try A Little Tenderness

a blue lake sleeps at the foot of a blue mountain. where my 

life is an island adrift. poems sail into a mirrorless day.

each end of the sky moored to a single blue tree.

Grant Hackett [no title]

In this sonnet-length pentameter stanza, many lines begin with the hammer-stroke of a trochee, as though to echo a burst of wind or the lashings of the rain. The rhyme scheme, ababbcdcdefefd, initially suggests a Shakespearean sonnet but begins to deviate from that expected pattern by line 5. This deviation reinforces the poem’s sense that although the Christian might expect to find comfort in that promise following the great deluge in Genesis, even in the light of that promise, reality and our perceptions of it do not proceed in any straightforward or predictable way.

The strangest moment occurs at line ten — where, in the chaos of the storm, and in possibly the closest thing to a volta in this poem, the language itself turns strange. The poem shifts its gaze from the scene outside to the interior of the cottage, from whose doorway the cotter has been peering out. Though “glabber” is a Scots word for liquefied mud, we seem to be, now, huddled around a fire, with “flaze” apparently signifying gazing at the fire — the people talking until a frightened woman hushes them to listen to the storm’s ferocity. Only when the wind has blown itself out, and the end of the world hasn’t happened, can anyone go to bed.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Nightwind

There are
things whose passing you’ll grieve,
sharp as a shard of laughter

floating in a hallway long
after the one who lofted it into
the air has left. Once, the shape

of the future was a mere speck
in a wilderness of tomorrows, but
now the light has shifted.

Luisa A. Igloria, Stay

Ah, January 2026—so far, not a month many of us will look back on fondly. This past week I did everything I could to get myself back into a better headspace. I changed my hair (back to auburn—the color I was born with!) I visited the Seattle Art Museum to fill my head with beauty instead of the awful state of things on the news, to wake up my inspiration. […] An installation of happy little clouds in the entryway ceiling made for a cheerful entrance on a gray January day.  Then, a new acquisition is right at the ticket takers—a Takashi Murakami 3-D piece called Flower Globe.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Change in Mindset: A Visit to Seattle Art Museum, A Friend from Out of Town, New Year’s New Hair

sanctuary woods
a scatter of feathers
under the pine

sanctuary by tom clausen

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

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

Renee Emerson, The Language of Loss

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

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

Bob Mee, POETRY AS AN UNCERTAIN COLLECTION OF NOISES

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

Sarah Lada, The Valley Dwellers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Rant.

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

Robin Gow, uses for water

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

Seven days of sitting with all that quickened love
sickness

Still so opened; still the quivering shell
of darkness

Jill Pearlman, City Shiva

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

not 
at 
all. 

Saudamini Deo, Leaving Paris

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Solstice and poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maria Popova, If Birds Ran the World

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

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

rob mclennan, Eric Schmaltz, I Confess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Winter Solstice 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, O Bright Moon

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Peace to all on this Cluttered Earth

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, The Great Pink Sea Snail rides on

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

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

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Cry’ by Katy Mahon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Christmas Pageants, Modern and Medieval

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

*Lithuanian for granny, grandma

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

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

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Looking for matches.

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Curwen, Opening the author’s copies

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

2025 Poetry:

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

[…]

2 dozen “Backlist” Favs

Poetry:

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

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025

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

[…]

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Countdown conversation

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

Ann E. Michael, Last messages

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

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

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

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

Surrounded by motion: tranquility’s tent.

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

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

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

smokestack sunset by tom clausen

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

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

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

You can read them both here at One Art.

Grant Clauser, Almost Christmas Poetry

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the mirror and the oracle

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Seven lean years

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, I eat the many possibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

地球儀が鞄に入り日短　常幸龍BCAD

chikyūgi ga kaban ni hairi hi mijika

            a globe
           fits in a bag
            short winter day

                                                BCAD Jōkōryu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, committing to simply keeping it going?

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

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

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

Kate Gale, Kissing in the Year of the Horse

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

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

i feel the splinter in my palm burrow on.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you read each water anew.

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Everything I have not written

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where am I?

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

sacred shrine
worshippers raise
their selfie sticks

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

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

rice paddies blurring into the past bullet train

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

Annette Makino, Three wayfarers in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, A little story of birds and birdbrains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

james mcconachie, A Vein of Abiding Mineral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, October Reads

It started with a joke in a direct message… 

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. Now more than ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Solemn-sinister wreath-rubbish

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

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

Jill Pearlman, On Seeing Kara Walker in Mary Janes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You never see all of yourself.

Explore the places you’ve never been”

(Wolf Eye)

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

“Have you

seen the faces of flowers? …

What wallpaper did you choose for your face

before you went out?”

(Have You)

“What is the smell of mirrors?”

(Mirrors)

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

Victoria Spires, Alchemising the mundane

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

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

But look, you say, she is smiling.

And she is.

Her long hair floats out
like golden pondweed […]

Sue Finch, No Terrapin Today

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Captain Haddock in Monte Carlo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejections to Treasure

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

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

“Like what?” we asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, curation vs gatekeeping

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, The Power of Celebrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Stone, ESSAY / The Amalgamist’s Workshop

old encyclopedias:
I buy a complete set
for collaging

Bill Waters, A Collection of Moments: Library Book Sale

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, The poem within the poem

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

Bound Voices #001: A Conversation with Victoria Moul

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

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

https://sheilabender.substack.com

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

Bethany Reid, Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Blessing” by James Wright

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

I want to read those writers.

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Writing Prompts & Working Class Writers

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

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

Sarah Lada, We All Become Just Bodies

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

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

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

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Being present in grief.

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Landfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Jewish Heretics and Wild Writers

old skin. thin.

one can see through it to a future.

crows feed on the sunflower’s eye.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: the walker faces due west, a gun utters a death wish, a spare poem spares us nothing, and much more. Enjoy.

九月尽く雨の匂いの象を見に　菅井美奈子

kugatsu tsuku ame no nioi no zō o mini

            September ends
            I go to see an elephant
            with the scent of rain

                                                Minako Sugai

from Gendai Haiku, #718, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 30, 2025)

I see how fragile everything is
around you, how tenuous
any peace. Reasons for sorrow
pile up like fallen leaves.
Feel my heart touching yours,
enfolding yours.
I’m here with you where you are
under this roof that lets in rain

Rachel Barenblat, Fragile rejoicing – songs for Sukkot

Keats wrote To Autumn while he was staying in Winchester, England’s old capital, in what was then a very rural but fast-changing Hampshire. While there, he wrote a letter to a friend describing his surprise at a stubble-field that looked warm, just like a painting of a stubble-field. Some critics see the poem as a response to the growing tradition of English landscape painting. The images are left as images, with little exclamation or explanation.

It is, in that sense, an unusually modern poem: the poet draws back from the scene. The Romantic poets are often caricatured as being all about the ‘inner light’, the celebration of the self. That autumn, Keats was looking. […]

What was Keats looking at? In their article Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester Richard Turley, Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas point out that most recent readings of the poem abstract it from its particular place:

As diverse as they may seem, the most resonant recent readings of ‘To Autumn’ share a feature in common: all, in various ways, abstract the ode from its specific Winchester setting… Helen Vendler’s formalist critique recognizes the poem’s ‘remarkably meticulous topography’, but, finally refers the land’s (and the poem’s) meaning back to literary precursors and classical myth. Nicholas Roe’s… takes its brio from the relocation of the dissenting energies of Keats’s ode some 200 miles north to [Peterloo]. Jonathan Bate, in his provocative analysis of the ode as ‘ecosystem’… [contends] that the poem is a ‘meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature’.

When Winchester is mentioned, To Autumn is usually associated with the water meadows south of the city (you can take a guided walk in that direction). The great revelation in the article is that the place which matters most is, in fact, another location Keats visited: St Giles’s Hill, on the east side of the city. The slopes are now occupied by a multi-story car park, while the South Downs beyond have been cut through by a motorway—a huge chalk scar I’ve driven through hundreds of times.

The article goes on to argue for the importance of the poem’s engagement with the local agricultural economy and the shifting social make-up of the town. I did not find this discussion entirely convincing, interesting as agricultural history always is. But the topography matters. From St Giles’s:

the walker faces due west, and in the late-afternoon may observe the ‘maturing sun’ together with the tincturing changes it brings to the landscape (the ‘rosy hue’ of the ‘stubble-plains’), as well as indigenous wildlife such as low-flying swallows gathering insects over the Itchen’s reed beds before nightfall. From its brow, the sights and sounds remembered in Keats’s poem—from the ‘half-reaped furrow’ on which the reaper sleeps, to the bleats of ‘full-grown lambs’ on ‘hilly bourn’—could be observed in one glorious sweep.

No hill, no poem. I can believe it.

Jeremy Wikeley, Walking with Keats

As I walk, there are two rhythms: the pace of the gait, which is surely a beat as intrinsic to the human condition as that of the heart, hypnotic once it has settled into a steady pulse. There is also the ‘biophony’, in this wild and richly biodiverse middle of nowhere. I’m pretty good at identifying birds by sight, but absolutely hopeless with all but the most singular and iconic calls. Of course I have a birdsong app, but when it listens to my recordings it effectively asks, ‘err..which one?’ I am woven into the bird-realm, the Énflaith of John Moriarty’s ‘Invoking Ireland’, an ecumenical communion of all living things. It is the surge and settle of a collective mind, all of us wild and smelly animals listening to each other’s ’languages, if we’re lucky, living long enough to learn something from each other.

I have a theory, based entirely on unscientific and solitary rumination, that language and certainly music, or the music of language, evolved in a din of birdsong and probably pulsed with the beat of walking. As someone who’s often had to walk some distance through this high country out of necessity, I noticed I’d acquired the ‘caminar dels masovers’ This rhythmic long lope of a country people, living in masias like mine, is a natural development of need and environment. If you have to walk 10km for car parts or a jerrycan of diesel in 40 degrees, the brain falls quiet and your trancelike reduction slowly devours the distance. In such a situation, haste or overexcitement will precipitate an ‘event’ and maybe lop days off your life.

All very heroic I know. It’s a privilege to live in this noisy, lonely labyrinth and one I enjoy more and more with the passing of time. Today’s song is the wind’s, sculpting a colossal and invisible transient structure over the woods and crags, itself a language. I’ve learned some of its vocabulary; dark, low and strong on the mountain to the south means big weather, long days of the Cierzo to the north-west means dry cold and dazzling light. In high summer, when there seems not to be a breath of air on the move, a thin finger of wind might tousle the tops of the high pines across the valley with a cool hiss, just enough to tell me the Earth is still turning.

james mcconachie, Biophony

I’m sitting at the desk for the first time in I don’t know how many months. I’m still N.E.D. when it comes to the physical signs of having cancer. But I didn’t realize how much of a psycho/spiritual crisis the experience would ignite.

I am scraped raw. Whittled down by one breast and over a dozen lymph nodes. Perforated bones, and perforated memories. Once, a week ago, I finally turned on my computer but couldn’t figure out how to access my files. I turned it off again.

My world is tiny. A few rooms. Far fewer voices. The tinny reverberation of chronic pain, of chronic loneliness. So much shame. […]

The last of this year’s wasps fly heavily in the fog. While waiting for the train, a paper wasp lands on my collar and my student wants me to swat it away. It’s fine, I say. I’m not that sweet.

I wouldn’t know if it was a queen. If so, she’d better be looking for a cozy place to slip into for the winter. And if not, let the worker keep looking for a bit more sugar before she’s done.

I’m not done. Just starting again, slightly out of season.

Ren Powell, Too Many Metaphors

under the poet’s mask
there is another mask
it has always been
a masqued dance
words dancing with words
each carrying its own secret
hidden even from itself
they dance the candlelight hours
daylight masked
night’s eyes masked
clawing at the reader’s mask
the catastrophe of love

Jim Young, the masque

Do I feel the treeness in my body? More than I feel a relation to buildings, except through a process of what I’ve just termed anthropometaphorizing. I feel closer to a mountain than a skyscraper. But closer to a tree than a plant. I feel the treeness deeper in my body than I feel squirrelness. That doesn’t feel very deep. Is it my spine? My ambition to be more like a tree than a squirrel? My relation with gravity? Gravitas? To have the slow, rooted wit of a tree? Its apparent understanding and perspective. (Except you, aspen. Settle down, you.) To live in time as a tree lives? To live in interrelation? I realize that whatever the cause, I feel a connection to trees in an embodied way. I could turn into a tree and feel satisfied (or so my body thinks) whereas a squirrel—not so much.

Gary Barwin, My mirror neurons vibe with trees: On anthropometaphorizing

I am in Derry. We walk over the Peace Bridge, and the River Foyle, and registration starts at 10am. By 10.30, the sound of 400 delegates is an differentiated roar. We find the conference quiet room, and the silence is a cool relief.

Then the conference opens with Seamus Heaney’s “The Tollund Man”. Now that the journey’s nerves and uncertainty are over, and we’re safe at a table at the back of the room close to the exit, I start to feel excited. I studied Heaney’s bog body poems for my A-level – learnt them off by heart at work from small handwritten notes as I buffed the floors. “Some day I will go to Aarhus” – and tomorrow, I will go HomePlace, between Heaney’s two childhood homes in Mossbawn and The Wood, close to his grave in Bellaghy. It’s also the site of the latest bog body discovery: beheaded and left to the bog 2000 years ago, a young woman, initially assumed to be a man.

“I will feel lost, and happy, and at home”. Though there are hundreds of people and every conversation brings me out in a sweat, I have never seen so many delegates in walking boots and fleeces. These are outdoor people, passionate and friendly; some of them geeky and awkward and shy. I hear passing conversations on ecology and pollution and birds; I talk with a woman about the use of sheep’s wool in peatland restoration. There’s a table of sphagnum plugs, soft and wet; a copy of “Book of Bogs” on the registration desk. My conference delegate lanyard states that I am Clare Shaw, Boggart, which is the name Anne Caldwell invented for our loose confederation of bog-loving artists and writers.

Tomorrow, Anna, Johnny and I will be leading a day-long workshop: “Getting into the bog: creative skills to support your practice”. We know the power of creative expression, especially in words – and we want to share creative skills and strategies with people working with peat, from researchers to conservation officers to fundraisers.

The scientific method, and hard data, gave us penicillin, and pasteurisation, and flight, and on the whole, a turning away from the kind of superstition, bias and dogma which saw hundreds of thousands of people accused of witchcraft. This pursuit of objectivity removed the emotional and subjective, from knowledge – but in doing so, it produced a scientific and academic discourse which can feel peculiarly disconnected from everyday language, let alone a language of emotion, or imagination. As a result, the way we talk about science – no matter how profound or vital – can leaves people cold; the way we express ourselves academically excludes; the way we communicate professionally feels soulless and empty of meaning.

And it matters, because when it comes to bogs, and other habitats, we need a language which communicates their importance, their layers of meaning, the deep feeling we have for them. Creative expression – as opposed to academic or scientific writing – can be more accessible; more meaningful to people without specialist knowledge: It can offer a real-world translation of complex data and concepts into lived experience, making it more relatable and engaging. It creates a fuller narrative – the writer is present in the writing as a person, with feelings and emotions, a history and culture. There’s space for nuance and contradiction, uncertainty and change; space for the reader to find their own meaning, to own their own personhood, in the act of making sense. It opens up new possibilities; ways to remember and dream and observe.

Most importantly, for me, creative writing in ecology creates a living account, in which the reader can enter the world of the writer; share their fascinations and their emotions. It’s a more immersive experience for the writer: you can more fully inhabit the emotions that brought you into this work – your love, your curiosity, your fears. Instead of reproducing corporate/ organisational narrative/discourse, you have a sense of connection with the work you produce.

Clare Shaw, Lost, happy, and at home

In the current timeline I live in, magical realism is necessary. When hate-mongering is knitted into our fabric, I need the neighborhood gentle giant to hand me a bouquet of flowers held between his fingertips. Where logic is discouraged, I need for my house to float away via millions of balloons to a faraway land. Where truth is manipulated, I need a gigantic, smoking caterpillar to tell me what’s what. In a world where a man is celebrated for saying horrible things about women, I need for a man to turn into a skittish deer.

The poem “Native Species” [by Todd Davis] starts with the image of a man looking at paintings of deer online. The paintings conjure for the man the sensations and fluidity of hunting a deer in a landscape of multiflora rose and briar. To navigate within such a relentlessly thorny landscape is to develop a kinship with it. Like Sisyphus’ hands creating grooves in the boulder, a hunter blazes a path leaving nothing behind but footprints. In a way, to hunt the deer on the mountain is to, in a way, become the deer on the mountain. […]

In the poem, the hunter labored with a meat saw, embodying the art of loving what one kills. Like something straight from a Robin Wall-Kimmerer book, the hunt is thanksgiving. The hunt is reciprocity. And in the poem, hunting season slips into winter, a landscape where a lucky person can find a shed antler like a crown removed before sleep.

I underlined that line in the poem for several reasons. Because deer do wear crowns, don’t they? Because the hunter and the poet imagine deer not just as kings, but kings that requires rest and safety in the confines of briar and snowdrift. Because of the word sleep, and how this poem—so narrowly conjuring similarities between the deer and hunter so far—is soon going to enter the dream-like, magical reality of a man turning into a deer.

Living a good life thus far, I imagine magic for myself. How about no longer commuting those precious 70 minutes for work four days a week. How about no longer needing to work 40+ hours per week. How about winning the lottery I never play. How about the Chronos I live in expanding beyond 24 hours so that I can give time to all my passions and loved-ones every single day. How about actually, really helping people. How about actually, really helping the earth. How about not needing to sleep. How about no more divisiveness. How about a president who reads books and talks about it. How about guiltlessly spending an entire day just watching one flower bloom. How about people walking into the woods where all the mirrors are.

Sarah Lada, The Comfort of a Tail’s Flash Along Treeline

I’m here in Holland as a guest speaker at The Writers Unlimited Festival – Winternachten. Sometimes you have to go outside to go inside. I switch off this computer and take a walk around this beautiful Dutch city. I am thinking about this essay, the theme of skin. Black skin. White skin. I have the words of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ in my headphones, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. I take my title for this essay from that beautiful song. It makes me recall the flaw in every story that reveals the truth, the words beneath the words. It makes me think of the charm of our imperfections. And there is a skin on everything that stops the light getting in, a wallpaper of doubt or fear that covers over those cracks and stops the magic happening, the light getting through.

Last night the Winternachten festival opened with a ceremony for the Oxfam Novid Pen awards for freedom of expression. The winners were two courageous writers: The Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh who is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia accused of renouncing Islam. And Indian investigative journalist Malini Subramaniam who was forced to leave her home after death threats following her outspoken reports on human rights abuse and sexual violence against women. Her humility and courage as a woman and as a writer, a shining example to us all. Later during the ceremony, the Booker Prize winning author Michail Shishkin delivered a keynote speech, his words moved me. The theatre was so silent you could hear a pin drop, a stifled sniff and a tear fall. His deep voice resounded in his native Russian and above his head the English translation scrolled on huge screens. He began by describing the famous protests of human rights organisations in Red Square. Then he spoke of lesser known protests, the names that nobody knows, the writers and protesters that have been tortured and murdered, quietly, out of sight, and out of the public eye. Shishkin asked us to consider why they protested? Listening to Shishkin I was reminded of the power of freedom of speech, how important it is as a writer to speak up and to live true rather than to stay quiet and live safe. The meaning of life, Shishkin continued, lies not in survival, but in the preservation of dignity.

Salena Godden, Skin

A gun utters a death wish. A surgeon removes the wrong organ. A police helicopter circles above.

Late afternoon does what it always does in some places, then slowly graffitis the sky to dark-scrawled night.

Everything just beyond is bright morning—

coffee brewing, journaling,

a father hearing his baby daughter speak her first words upon rising.

Rich Ferguson, What the Day Does in Some Places

On Saturday morning, the person occupying the White House announced that he is directing our Secretary of War to send armed troops to my city, calling it “war ravaged,” and authorizing the use of “Full Force” [sic]. This is a gross insult to any place that has truly been ravaged by war, a waste of resources we all contribute to, and an unconscionable act of aggression against those of us who live here. […]

The Furies are goddesses of vengeance. They are of the earth, Gaea, and are associated with earthly fertility. They live in the underworld but ascend to pursue the wicked. They are particularly opposed to crimes within families, which makes sense as they were born of blood spilled when a son castrated his father to take his power.

I gathered my basil in a basket I once used to carry my premature babies with me from room to room of our home. I was not much of a cook or baker when my children were growing up. I am three generations removed from the farmers I descend from, and none of their knowledge was passed to me. My great-grandmother used to send us jars of applesauce she made from fruit grown on her trees, but convenience foods were a staple of the diet I was raised on, meals that came largely from boxes and cans and mixes and packets. Chicken soup was one of the few things I made that my children loved; it was so much better than the tins of stuff I ate when I was a kid. Recently, my daughter shared a photo of chicken soup her husband made from my recipe, more than 5,000 miles away from Portland. It lessened regrets I have about the kinds of things I didn’t do when she was growing up, didn’t understand back then. I certainly didn’t grow any of our food in those years, but now I am learning how to. This year we successfully raised onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas, squash, parsley, thyme, and basil. The pears in my galette came from a tree in our yard. The apples came from local growers. Sunday morning, we picked up carrots from the stand in front of a u-pick farm about a mile from our home. This summer, I taught myself more about how to preserve the food we’ve grown, so we can eat it through the winter.

How does a commoner respond when a ruler spreads lies and threatens peace and seems to be instigating—perhaps hoping for—violence in her home?

In lots of different ways, I suppose. I can’t tell you, exactly, why I felt compelled to spend our beautiful weekend in the kitchen. I only know that I did, that I needed to tend my garden, reveling in the sun on my skin and the earth under my nails; that I needed to harvest our already-gone-to-flower basil before this week’s promised rain, marveling in its bounty; that I needed to feed myself and my family, delighting in our full, satisfied bellies.

I needed to revel, marvel, and delight in my place on this earth. I needed to fuel my Fury on that which makes her stronger, reminds her of what she will not give away.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What feeds us

i see a picture
of a local slumlord’s house online. it is huge &
i imagine it as an advent calendar.
what do they count down? i am looking
for hope in bites. in windows. in doors.
in holding on to autumn. i open a door.
the bathroom light like a star or an angel.

Robin Gow, 10/3

I have been waiting for this collection to come out ever since I first heard about it, and it does not disappoint. Incidentally, I think Clare Pollard was the first poet I ever saw perform live. Clare came to Ulverston to read for “A Poem and a Pint”, a wonderful reading series that ran for many years (more on this in another post!), and this happened to be the first poetry reading I’d ever been to. I’ve just googled it to find it was back in 2006. I don’t remember much from that night, other than being utterly astonished by Clare’s reading, and particularly by the subject matter of the poetry, which felt utterly daring in its exploration of female experience.

So back to Clare’s latest book, The Lives of the Female Poets, her seventh poetry collection with Bloodaxe. Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets gets taken to task here. The first poem does not shy away from anything either – Clare gets stuck in straight away with “Poetess” – exploring its use as a ‘derogatory term’, pointing out that ‘it’s true that the adjectives ‘feminine’ and ‘Poetess’, / when modifying poetry / can be exchanged either with ‘minor’, ‘popular’, or ‘sentimental’ / without injury to sense.’ The ending of the poem is fabulous – we are left with an image of the Poetess at the ‘female empire of the tea-table, /where She sweetens the tea /with sugar’s tender hiss.’ I love that the ‘hiss’ of the final line picks up and echoes ‘Poetess’ and ‘sense’.

This book takes us on a dizzying journey from the grand heights of Inana – an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, love and fertility to a battle between a mother and the head-lice that infest her children’s hair. How many poems are there about this battle that perhaps all mothers have gone through? I’m not sure but I thought this one was fabulous – dark and playful and funny and disturbing. And also delicious to find out that the oldest known sentence in the earliest alphabet was inscribed on a 4000 year-old ivory comb and is ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’. That the first known sentence is an act of care is wonderful.

I enjoyed every single poem in this collection, and enjoyed the feeling of meeting my literary ancestors – some of whom I knew – Sappho, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Bishop – but there were plenty I didn’t. I’d not heard of Praxilla for example, and the beautiful fragment of her writing that we are left with.

Kim Moore, September Reads

Playing always puts me in my happy place. So being a poet and knowing that the theme for National Poetry Day this year was ‘Play’ was a gift to me. One year ago, a friend messaged me on National Poetry Day to say they had read a poem of mine to a group of people at a celebration event. I messaged back to say I was delighted and that if they held a similar event I would be very pleased to go along. They didn’t forget, and this year I visited that group of people to read a dozen of my poems. It made my day shine. We also tried out a writing exercise from The Poetry Society which had been produced for the day. It worked well for those who considered themselves to be poets and those who had not done much poetic writing before, and each participant was able to create their own poem during the afternoon.

I had road-tested my set of poems earlier in the year when I read them from a bandstand in a park, and they worked well. This time I was also able to add in Toffee Hammers as the opening poem. It delighted me to have finally finished this poem after many years of wanting to write it but never really coming up with a final draft that said what I wanted to say. It was good to have been spurred on by the theme and by my desire to have a new poem for National Poetry Day. To celebrate the poem’s emergence I chose it for Poem of the Month on my YouTube channel. Sharing poems with a new group of people enabled me to hear the poems afresh and highlighted the joy of having a themed reading. It is refreshing to see how the poems land in different listening spaces, and which ones elicit specific audible responses. I chuckled this time to hear someone say “Oh your poor mum,” in response to the poem which recounts my falling in a pond when I was little.

Sue Finch, PLAY

Since the miscarriage, I have started reading and abandoned probably a dozen novels and memoirs. I don’t feel bad not finishing a book—I’m not assigned this reading—but I don’t typically read a third or even half of a book, then give up. The books have felt pointless. Predictable. Boring.

I have Reader’s Block. Other than poetry collections (where I skip around and dip in and out), middle grade novels read aloud for the family (where I have an audience / demands to read), and picture books (again, audience with demands), I finish nothing.

Just to put this in context, reading is my only actual talent in life.

I have my library card number memorized. My children’s names are all from classic novels. The only detention I ever received in school was for reading a novel during science class.

I remember being in first grade, walking into our school library with my class. The librarian showed us the section of books at our grade level, then took me aside and gestured to the whole library – “this is your reading level,” she told me.

I suppose I’m back to the small shelf right now. […]

Proofs and Theories by Louise Glück
I’m writing a class on Glück, so I skimmed through and reread parts of this collection of her essays. They are a mix of thoughts on writing, on becoming a poet, and scholarly criticism of other poets – “I wrote these essays as I would poems; I wrote from what I know, trying to undermine the known with intelligent questions. Like poems, they have been my education” – she says. I think that if you are not very interested in reading or writing poetry, you may not like it—but if you are at all interested, there were some valuable insights into seasons of writer’s block, how to challenge yourself as a writer, and the use of “silence” in writing.

Renee Emerson, Reader’s Block

I was saddened to hear of the death of Brian Patten this week. I can’t claim to have known the man but we talked on occasion and he was complimentary of my poetry. He was generous enough to offer to write something more for the blog the last time I saw him read. I don’t know why I did not take him up on his offer, I suppose I thought I could in the future, sadly it was not to be.

Paul Tobin, SIDESWIPE

I don’t know why the death of Brian Patten saddened me more than most. I met him only twice. Yet I found myself thinking about it more than is usually the case when a poet, or some kind of artist, or just somebody I knew something of, dies.

Patten had a peculiar place in the evolvement of British poetry, forever linked as he was to Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, who were lumped together as ‘The Mersey Poets’ in the 1960s. They complemented each other – McGough, whose humour was laced with down-to-earth political commonsense, Henri, the strange, eccentric, painter capable of a furious energy, and Patten, the young, lyrical, mostly love poet who also had a surrealist, absurdist mind. The Penguin Modern Poets 10, labelled The Mersey Sound, sold millions. It was published in 1967, when Patten was 21.

He was a precocious talent, obviously, and most of the poems he wrote back then remain read today. I still have my favourites from that and his early individual collections, Little Johnny’s Confession, Notes To The Hurrying Man, Vanishing Trick, The Irrelevant Song and Grave Gossip, the latter released when he was still only in his early 30s. I still love the opening lines of Ode On Celestial Music: It’s not celestial music it’s the girl in the bathroom singing./ You can tell. Although it’s winter/ the trees outside her window have grown leaves,/ all manner of flowers push up through the floorboards. Others I like to read again from time to time include Interruption At The Opera House, You Come To Me Quiet As Rain Not Yet Fallen, and Albatross Ramble.

It was in 1975 or 1976 that I read as ‘support’ to Patten at the Benn Hall, Rugby. I was almost certainly awful, the poems of my youth perhaps sounding a bit better than they were. It didn’t matter. I was pleased to have had the chance to do it. People had come to hear him anyway and, my bit done, I sat enthralled at the way he held his audience, was warm and direct, connected to them almost immediately and sustained a long, enchanting reading for the best part of an hour, then, the job done, caught the train back to London.

A couple of years later I wrote as a part of my final degree an essay on ‘The Mersey Poets’, which was in effect a defence of them against the supposed might of the academic world, which mostly either ignored or tolerated them, and any of us who took them seriously, with an air of benign, quasi-benevolent pity. I felt, having seen the effect Patten had on that single night in Rugby, their poems would be read for generations to come and would reach far more people than most of the poets who were products of the ‘approved’ academic system.

Bob Mee, BRIAN PATTEN (1946-2025)

Here in the US, we have a new poet laureate (announced by the Library of Congress on September 15, 2025)  —  and this selected poet Arthur Sze sees poetry as a unifying agent — “verse can bring us together“.

Sze is a poet whose work I value reading — but its links to mathematics are gentle and scattered.  Here is a sample —  the closing lines from Sze’s poem “Sight Lines”.  (The complete poem is available here at poets.org.)  

from  “Sight Lines” by Arthur Sze

. . .  when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—
I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—
I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—
I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—
though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—
though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—
the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—
I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—
fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—
though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

From The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). 

JoAnne Growney, The Geometry of Verse

“Where to begin.”

To quote Renata Adler.

To start with the favorite, or one of the favorites, or the favorite at 2:13 p.m. in the week of Robert Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960.

To refuse to think about these poems in the order they are given.

To choose, instead, the unscrupulous preferences of one’s own exuberance, one’s own tonalities, one’s own stammering speculations.

To be small, then. Small as this spare poem that spares us nothing.

A creature of three stanzas that reassures the extra line of its role as tiny ruiner. 3-3-4, the extra word.

Alina Stefanescu, Bob Creeley’s LOVE.

There’s long been a deep precision cut with the metaphysical through the works of American poet Susan Howe, including in her latest offering, Penitential Cries (New York NY: New Directions, 2025), offering prose stretches that seem to break apart even as they interconnect. Her poems have long held that particular tension: between breaking into component parts and small piles while simultaneously held together through sheer, impossible coherence. How does, one might ask, the centre actually hold? I’ve been reading her work for years now without fully able to articulate what it is that strikes me so deeply, while also finding it incredibly generative, a series of works one needs to sit in for some time, to allow into and underneath the skin. I still recommend her collection That This (New Directions, 2010), a book that included the death of her husband [see my review of such here], to anyone who has experienced a recent loss, finding the collection enormously helpful after the death of my mother, allowing or even providing a permission to attempt my own examinations. Through Howe, connections of sound, meaning and form interact and interconnect underneath each book’s umbrella, whether that be through a particular subject matter through idea, or a phrase, watching the whole of her life and thinking and research and immediacy fall into how her inquiries take shape.

rob mclennan, Susan Howe, Penitential Cries

One of the things that most surprised me in my first year of this substack was when I started to be sent poetry books — both by authors and sometimes direct from the press — in the hope that I might mention or review them. Much as I appreciate all of you discerning readers, my audience is hardly enormous, and to start with it was truly tiny so I hadn’t expected this at all, but these days I receive a steady stream of poetry books and pamphlets from around the world. The fact that authors and presses bother to do this for such a small publication is probably a depressing indication of just how little mainstream poetry reviewing is now going on, but of course it’s a great perk for me. I get to read all sorts of things this way I would never otherwise have seen. I always make it clear that I cannot promise to mention or review anything I’m sent, but I do try to get round to as much as I can eventually. So do send me things! (Especially if you are a woman — Anglophone poetry is surely at least 50% women these days, if not more, but it’s almost exclusively men who send me books.)

At the moment I have quite a pile of things I found engaging in various ways, so this week I thought I’d try to do a kind of round-up in the hope that there’ll be a bit of something for everyone. This is a long one. […]

Henry Gould[‘s] … publications are I suppose strictly speaking mostly chapbooks or pamphlets, but not at all in the sense that this usually means. In a quick search, I’ve rounded up eight of them that I’ve received from Gould in the last year, and I’m fairly sure that’s not quite all of them. Gould is doing something quite unique — writing broadly, I suppose, in the tradition of Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, and more generally in a tradition I think we could fairly though surprisingly call Pindaric, his verse is unembarrassedly high-flown, even vatic; rich with a huge array of cultural references; fluent in the grand style — but also extraordinarily topical, and produced at a prodigious rate. These multiple pamphlets consist largely of individual dated poems, each between a page and several pages long, written just a day or two apart. So a whole pamphlet represents often only about a month’s production, and is then published very rapidly.

Gould has many quirks and distinctive cadences, especially in his closural use of parentheses and asides. Read at length this distinctive style can be sometimes hypnotic, occasionally same-y, but it is often beautiful. His range of reference is wide and markedly eclectic but he has written so much that you after a while you get the hang of it, and what might first have seemed obscure becomes almost friendly. It is also enormously ambitious and expansive: in a very old-fashioned way Gould takes it for granted that the long-form poem is the proper place to bring together philosophy, politics, history and religion. And it’s often quite funny as well.

Victoria Moul, On confidence and self-consciousness in poetry

I’ve always found the Lament for Boromir one of Tolkien’s most beautiful poems but the way it’s sung by the Clamavi De Profundis musical group brings out subtleties in its composition that I’d never paused over on the page. Their sensitivity to Tolkien’s expressive handling of a difficult metre has changed the way I say the poem to myself.

Essentially, I think, the metre is a freely handled iambic heptameter, with frequent substitution of trochees (feet of two stresses) or other non-iambic feet for the iambs. The problem with the heptameter line is that it can easily fall into a kind of mechanical gallop that gives each line a similar cadence that flattens out meaning and expressiveness. Tolkien has resisted this by varying the metre. Usually this means slowing the movement by runs of stressed syllables (‘long grass grows’, ‘West Wind comes walking’, ‘saw him walk’, ‘saw him then no more’, ‘North Wind may have heard’, ‘high walls westward’) or by introducing an additional stressed syllable (‘ride over’); sometimes it means lightening and speeding it by runs of unstressed syllables, very obviously in line three, where we have three extra unstressed syllables. The Clamavi De Profundis singers emphasise this by sounding each word and syllable clearly and distinctly and pausing between phrases so that we feel the unique aural contour each individual phrase has, as well as how the underlying metre gives pattern to the stanza as a whole. They help us see the lovely way in which Tolkien has made separate, specific moments of memory and feeling flow together in a single powerful expression of love, yearning, grief and compassion.

Edmund Prestwich, Tolkien’s Lament for Boromir

Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’ addresses that great working-class signifier, ‘the best room’. The parlour of the terraced house was burdened with a number of roles: the room ‘kept good’ for special occasions, for Sunday use, for rare visits from one’s betters (the minister, usually); for those brief family celebrities, the dying or the dead; or the room where the family’s golden child – a grammar-school boy, say – might improve themselves in its silence. It might be pressed into more regular use in an emergency, for an old, infirm or indigent relative. (A ‘houseless aunt’ is not a ‘homeless’ one; no family member would ever be allowed to sink so low.) Its role was heavily self-signalling. To keep a room like this was only a ‘symbol’ of working-class propriety and dignity from a middle-class perspective; from that of its keepers, it was merely evidence of it.

There was always a touch of the music hall in Tony’s work, and he could rarely resist a punning title. The good room may have been described as a ‘study’; as a child, I remember the word connoting more silence than learning, or indeed books. But in this case, the word also tells us what took place there, and indeed what’s taking place now: the poem itself is a study – of working-class mores, aspirations and contradictions, in particular the two-edged gift of Harrison’s own education. (Harrison, like Heaney, never used a word without being fully conscious of its etymology: L. studere – to be diligent, eager, zealous; PIE (s)teu– push, thrust, knock, beat. Best … best … best.)

This study’s made even quieter by the presence of the family dead. Two are named. There’s the awful sketch of the brief cousin: the poet’s aunt, silent in her shock; the whispered conference of the women of the house, as they pass the cheap plastic mirror before the baby’s mouth. The other is Harrison’s famous Uncle Joe, who also features in poems like ‘Heredity’: ‘How you became a poet’s a mystery! / Wherever did you get your talent from?’ / I say I had two uncles Joe and Harry / one was a stammerer, the other dumb. Joe’s word was presumably a good one when he finally got to it: he d-d-d-ds his way not to dumb but the delicate decorative art of the damascener. Elsewhere, Harrison ties Joe to that great lisper, Demosthenes, who cured himself by declaiming his speeches with his mouth full of pebbles. Tongue-tied speech was Harrison’s inheritance. His early theme was the pursuit of the eloquence that would unknot it.

Don Paterson, Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’

I am a voracious reader. Non fiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, fiction, give them all to me, let me go about my day always with the internal narratives of other writers in my head. Audio books, hard backs, paperbacks. Stacked on every table, in every nook. I keep highlighters, pens and book marks in every room, and I live in fear of one day losing the will to read. It happened once, years ago, during a bout of depression. That was when I discovered poetry, because I could no longer find refuge in reading novels, my concentration sparked to nothing every time I tried to read. Instead, in the haven of the local library, tucked away on a bottom shelf I found a short form emotional defibrillation in the form of Jackie Kay, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Collette Bryce, Katrina Porteus. An awakening occurred, a new literary genre to sink into.

Wendy Pratt, I deface my books because I am in conversation with them.

Yesterday went well.  That’s my best case brain talking.  My worst case brain says that they were overwhelmed and mystified at how what we did constitutes poem writing.

I left all the samples in the office, but we created some fascinating poems.  I gave them my document of abandoned lines, which had space above and below to add lines of their own.  Here’s an example, the first page of the document:—-
In a past time, you’d have been Magellan

I watch you solder bits to a motherboard

This body, a country with no maps

Some days the backyard garden explodes

I keep the quilts made by a spinster aunt.

—–

I have 15 pages, so they have plenty of lines to choose from.  I had them write companion lines and then cut the pages into strips.  And then we did a lot of experiments.

First we chose 6 strips at random and turned them over.  We asked ourselves, how did they work together?  We had the option to add more lines from our collection of strips.  We could create more lines.  We could rearrange.

I had also rearranged the tables so that we had several tables with long sheets of paper on them.  I had them put the strips they weren’t going to use on those sheets of paper–ideally, everyone would put at least one strip on each strip of long paper.

Everyone had a long sheet of paper with strips, and we spent 15 minutes arranging the strips into something resembling a poem.  I read a few out loud.  I thought they worked as poems, but my students seemed more hesitant.

I do realize that one reason why I think they work is that the abandoned lines are my lines, so in some sense, they do work well together.  I also realize that I have more training in doing reading without insisting on some external meeting; I did confess to my students that I like having a clear meaning, which these poems may not always have.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Surrealistic Poem Generating in Creative Writing Class

Nine of us from Bath Writers and Artists met last Saturday at The Hive Community Centre in Peasedown St John for a second session of making books. This time we focussed on the simple pamphlet stitch and variations on the theme. […]

My sculptural book is made from a willow twig, hemp yarn, and one of my ten-word poems written in walnut ink on paper dyed with willow strippings. Is it a book? It’s a book if I say it’s a book!

Dear willow
you keep our secrets
in your hollow
heart

Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry

I used to use Michael Burkard’s “A Sideways Suicide” on exams in poetry courses. I liked the way it required students to let go of the literal and lean on other ways of knowing, of accessing feeling: music, movement, repetition. I think it’s another one of my answering machine poems; I know assorted lines and phrases have been part of my internal jukebox, a device with neither discernible controls nor logic nor yankable plug for almost twenty-five years. The first time I deployed it on an unsuspecting class it was probably 2004 or 2005, and this went on for ten years or so, until one particular group took it on themselves to inquire after my well-being the next week. I was, I assured them, just fine. (I am, I assure you, just fine.)

Still, I have been mesmerized by this poem for twenty-five years, so take from that what you will, I guess. I’ve always understood it as an assertion of selfhood, a kind of unbarbaric yawp. Where Whitman hollers his celebration of self from sea to shining sea, Burkard pulls an Irish goodbye and ambles off into the evening: I imagine him taking the alleyways because they are more interesting, taking a circuitous stroll on his way to “you.” Who is the you? It’s someone he loves, or loved; it’s someone he has some connection with, or had; it’s someone he wants to connect with now, but can’t. Why not? Who knows. Sometimes that’s just the way things go. We fall out or fall away; we absent ourselves out of stupidity or self-preservation; sometimes we simply die.

I think I have the text right, but I had to track this one down online and found it, egads, on a Livejournal. There was at least one typo I was sure of and a second I am pretty sure needed my correction (‘feel’ to ‘feed’ in line four). If anyone has Ruby for Grief to hand, I’d be pleased to be corrected as needed. I thought I still had a copy, but when the first line came back to me while I was drifting off to sleep and I went to the bookcase, I saw that it was missing and immediately remembered why: I lent it to my favourite student in 2017 or so. I think he may have been in that welfare-check section—I remember he took my intro course—but I’d given it to him to read later on, when he got into the MFA where Burkard was teaching.

This kid was an incredibly talented young writer; he’d never even read poetry, wasn’t even an English major, and he advanced a decade in about eighteen months of formal study. He’d also clearly never felt he had a home before he had poems. He reminded me, as our favourites always do, of me. I think he also made off with my copy of Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign, but when he came back to visit during his second semester he brought me Bruce Smith’s Devotions.

That was the last time I saw him. He died by suicide in the spring of his second year. Typing this now knocks the wind out of me. It’s something an author, an asshole, would say.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Sideways Suicide” by Michael Burkard

A long prose poem, “I Believe That the Conspiracy Theory Exists”, reads like a manifesto, an early stanza asserts,

“I believe that as Black artists we are the warriors and caretakers of our mutual cultures and heritages. I do not view either you or myself as soldiers. Soldiers fight wars and once you start fighting you must always defend yourself. I do not see myself as defensive but I do see myself as maintaining a close watch on what I am, a Black woman of art.”

The poem ends,

“I believe that to be passive is to wrap the mind in defeat.

I believe that the simple coming together, the drawing on words, the debate vocally, the rage and the laughter, is vital for us, so that we may consider where we are and where we are going based on where we have been. For without all of these we may just start to believe all that is said about us.”

This manifesto posits that it’s important for artists to be true to their own voices, their own heritage and history, not sugar-coating justifiable anger and trauma to satisfy artist patrons or funding bodies. Otherwise there’s a risk you hand the agenda to your oppressors and let them write your history for you, burying your voice. It’s a good manifesto to get behind.

The last section is a transcript of the “Mary Seacole Libretto”. I’ve not quoted from it here, but it’s good to be reminded that SuAndi is a polymath in love with words and stories, eager to raise voices of those who have not been heard.

Emma Lee, “Leaning Against Time” SuAndi (Carcanet) – book review

Back in 2019, I was asked to review a book of poems by Steven Sher called Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies. Sher is a Brooklyn-born, Orthodox Jew who has been living in Jerusalem since 2012, and the poems in this book embody a profoundly nationalist, Orthodox Jewish commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. More than that, though, it is a book that demonizes the Palestinians and at least implicitly denies any claim they might have to the land as theirs. Sher’s politics when it comes to Israel, in other words—and this is how I put it in the review—are “precisely antithetical to my own.” This made the review difficult to write, not because I have a problem arguing against politics such as his, but because I wanted to make sure that when I wrote that I think the book fails overall, despite the presence of some truly beautiful and moving poems, I was talking about a failure within the poetry itself, not just my political disagreement with the author.

The review was published in the Summer 2022 issue of American Book Review, but I wrote it, obviously, before the eleven-day war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May of 2021, before Israel’s Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 (which targeted Islamic Jihad in Gaza), and before the current, genocidal war that Israel has been waging in Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023. Looking back at Sher’s book now, it’s frightening how prophetic some of the poems have turned out to be, in particular “Bombing Gaza,” a cynical reworking of Abraham’s negotiation with God over the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23-32). Sher’s speaker in that poem bargains with a voice that has the power to decimate Gaza—God’s? The Israeli government’s?—for the lives of the people who live there. However, because we already know the outcome of the Biblical story—God ultimately destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no way not to read into the poem the prediction that Gaza deserves to be destroyed for the same reason, ie, that it would be impossible to find at least ten righteous people who live there. (If you’d like to read the review for yourself, you can do so here).

I started thinking about this book again because it happened to be at the top of a stack that I was moving from one place to another, and I was reminded of a poem from the book that I didn’t write about in my review, the one that opens the collection, “Looking East From Mt. Scopus.” In this poem, Sher’s speaker watches three Palestinian boys herding their goats towards home and bears witness as one of the boys, the oldest, who is “not yet a teen,” beats nearly, if not actually to death the black goat he’s been carrying on his shoulders. 

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Poetry Versus Propaganda

After I lost two friends this year, I made a vow to try to live a bigger life—I feared the pandemic had made me shrink not just my daily routines but my goals and dreams too, that my circles had shrunk and shrunk. The impact of that has maybe made my health a little worse—you may have noticed I’ve been struggling since August first with one thing, then another, and bam, I wound up in the hospital last week with life-threatening stuff. If I ignore my body and try to push through, I inevitably pay a price—but I said yes to maybe too much and as a result had to miss several things—readings with friends, a residency, celebrations—I had really looked forward to and had to dial down all my activities for at least two weeks. Living with MS AND a primary immune system problem AND a bleeding disorder—all things that prove challenging on their own—can be like playing a video game where, when you beat or evade one boss, you just end up downed by another you weren’t even looking for. As a result, I am reevaluating how much I say yes to, and the life goals that are really worth fighting for. Is it worth it to say yes to travel if I’m sick for weeks afterwards, or socializing if I pick up a virus every time I go in public? I don’t want to live in fear, but I also don’t want to be stupid. I am just a writer, which is not a super high-risk job, but I still have to be careful what I say yes and no to. I’m still trying to figure out a balance in the health vs everything else in my life. As we get into the wetter, colder months, or “the big dark” as they say out here, I’m going to try to dial down a bit, spend some more time reading and writing, not pushing my body quite as hard. I have already ordered pens – don’t new pens feel more necessary in fall?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! Pumpkin Season Arrives Along with Early Sunsets, Supermoons, Health Stuff and Missed Opportunities

I am trying to come to terms with my ordinariness, my essential unexceptionalism. Here on the downhill slope, all those me’s that could have been will not be. Turns out I am not all that brilliant, not wildly geniusly creative, not shining leadership material. All the glory I dared to imagine, and all the glory I did not dare to desire, turns out, looks like what my life has looked like. And what is still to come probably looks pretty much like what has been. In a good way. Ish. Illusion. Delusion. Potato potahto. Fortunately there were thought traps I did not fall into — I didn’t think my feminine wiles would get me anywhere, and I didn’t think that life unfolded in certain ways, controllable by prayer or voodoo, crossed fingers, predictable by cards, signs, saying rabbit rabbit. Well, maybe I kind of believed in the rabbit rabbit thing. And I still skip cracks in the sidewalk now and then. But then there are those other illusions one must shed — sometimes in the face of new science (wait, CAN I drink red wine, or not? I can’t keep track), sometimes in the face of history unfolding (so the United States IS still a “republic” only “if we can keep it”). Fortunately, I’m curious and I can tolerate shifts in thinking. This has been one aspect of my slow maturation. I now see very little black and white. I am now interested in the gray areas. The dove, mackeral, fog, the dusky shades of which are innumerable in this life, and how they ease across each other, those tones and hues. Which perhaps suggests I’m a bit of a genius after all… Here is a poem by Elizabeth Hazen that considers the necessary reconsiderations.

Marilyn McCabe, mass of heat, but without flame. All these years

See how much longer it takes to effect peace than war.
Some could infer that this warrants
legions of peace,
factories churning out precision kindness,
ships carrying angels,
an array of little boats, perhaps?

Here, it is Dussehra and we are celebrating victories:
the goddess, read goodness,
overcoming the devil, read evil.
Language leaves nothing to chance.
She stands over him, her tiger at her heels.
An emblem of gender, of power, of a kind of justice.
Soft marigold garlands circle her neck.
Nothing is lost between the lines.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The sky in the dock

As a necessity, I like to have an escape plan. If I have to leave Los Angeles, I am ready, but I would prefer not to. I like my home. If I depart Los Angeles, I won’t be able to take my chickens. It doesn’t work to have chickens and dogs in the same vehicle. But escape is on the mind.

As I often do in times of turmoil, I turn to poetry. I recently read The Octopus Museum, a book of poems by Brenda Shaughnessy, a collection exploring feminism and the fears we have for our families, our communities, our countries—the daily crises facing the American people. Although it came out in 2019, its poems continue to resound.

I think about the octopus. They, too, have an escape plan. They have three hearts and nine brains. They are highly intelligent and can figure out how to get in and out of aquariums, how to unscrew lids. As a defense mechanism, they can drop an arm, and because their arms are filled with neurons, they can grow a new one from memory. But the octopus is also capable of learning to play, of communicating across the divide.

A mother octopus also sacrifices herself for her children. After the young octopi are born in their den, the mother spends her energy and time guarding her kids and ensuring they receive enough oxygen. During this process, she starves herself, and eventually, she dies.

I like to think that there is a future for our country that doesn’t require fleeing, but also doesn’t require dying for our children. One where we can live like the octopus: shrewd, wary, with our brains and hearts working together.

In the closing poem of The Octopus Museum, the family at the center of the collection is escaping. While the parents are carrying food and water, the daughter of the family is carrying both her parents and her brother, who is in a wheelchair. I reflect on my own family. Sometimes, my son is carrying our whole family on his head, and we are topsy-turvy, but he keeps walking straight. Sometimes, my daughter is carrying us, keeping the course. Sometimes, it’s me, trying to walk ahead and search for joy in the darkness. But we continue to walk.

I will not forget my escape plan, but I do not want to leave. I imagine a future where we learn to communicate and listen, to be resourceful, to plan ahead for the moments where we must envision and pursue new ways of living. I hold onto the idea of growing new tentacles. Fierce and tender, wild and imaginative. We Americans need to be a country where our many hearts beat to the drums of a shared music, unite for a shared purpose. May we be blessed, safe, grow arms, hold hands. May we survive.

Kate Gale, Escaping An Empire: What the Octopus Teaches Us About Survival

Years ago, stumbling
into a museum in Cambridge, I found a mutton
bone doll in a display case: swaddled in rags,
face sketched in with a charcoal stick and
I thought— a child cradled this in her arms.
Cooed to it, perhaps clutched it to her chest
in her garrett bed as she peered into the night
through slats in the roof, the future’s
skeleton not even glimmering yet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Mutton Bone Doll

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

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

spiral notebook
these random jottings in this bit
of galaxy

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

spiral notebook
recording my small part
of the galaxy

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

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

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

spiral journal my bit of the galaxy

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

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

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

Annette Makino, How a haiku is hatched

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Frank McMahon (Nigel Kent)

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

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

Sue Finch, WATCHING THE JOKER ALONE

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

Salt

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

Paul Tobin, AN OCEAN ABOVE OUR HEADS

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Elul poem for 2025

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

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

Ian Gibbins, DEADEYE

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

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Another New Poetry Video

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

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

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

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

james mcconachie, Sticks and Stones

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Commissioned sights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | proofing

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

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

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

Henry Gould, A New Book of Poetry

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, September reading and other news

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

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

Man getting out of cab.

COMMENTARY

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

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

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

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

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

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

[οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾷστον] ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας / ἐξευρεῖν

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

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

Victoria Moul, Finding the door of words: on originality

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Old-School Chill

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Allyn Wells, Two Stories and a Genocide

Wishbone, war bone, water bone.

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

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

Etched into those bones:

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

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

Rich Ferguson, One Nation, Underground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristen McHenry, Hearts on Fire: Discovering Jesuit Poets

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, everything breaks

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Autumn of Life

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

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

Mat Riches, Telephone call for unpredictable sands

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

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

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

poetry
as production
line

for an age now
art
outsourced

tiny fingers
sharp reflexes
good for such work

space
grows
in the library

as if a fire burnt
as if green things

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

Billy Mills, Two from Shearsman: A Review

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, The Middle-Distance Poem: An Elegy

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

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

Anthony Wilson, This is writing!

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

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

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

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

José Angel Araguz, two bits of good news

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Charlie Kirk and not being Gaslit by History

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Guild” by Edward Hirsch

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Points of view

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

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

Why do I point this out?

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

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

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

Kati Mohr, This Trust

一生に打つ一億字天の川　堀田季何

isshō ni utsu ichioku ji amanogawa

            in a lifetime we type

            one hundred million letters

            the Milky Way

                                                Kika Hotta

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Secret Prerequisite

there is a small boat waiting. in the middle

of the page. where a poem begins. and goes

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

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

how every line would beat a distinct pulse of love.

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

believing it’s a nest of grenades.

Rich Ferguson, The Inner Workings Revisited

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Love Songs

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

PF Anderson, Sunslant

The ziplock of summer fruit is emptied.

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Summer Zipped

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Chaos Gardening

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

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

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

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

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

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

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

Anthony Wilson, There was a door

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, Louise Glück: a poet of precision

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

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

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I See Myself Home

the shrivelled plums
showing the summer sunshine
their deep blue hearts

Jim Young [no title]

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

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

Jem Wikeley, Some reviews I didn’t write

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

Robin Gow, street sweeper

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

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

Rilke wrote about
living the questions

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

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

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

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Not Knowing

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

blue note scale model of her heart

David McKee
whiptail 7

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

Julie Mellor, Blue

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Blue

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, How love sustains us

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

TEXACO and
ESSO

ESSO and
BP

BP and
SHELL

the common
smell

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

in each other.

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

Edmund Prestwich, Imtiaz Dharker, Shadow Reader – review

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

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

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

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

Promenadology

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

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

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

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

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

(from ‘Phenology’)

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

Billy Mills, August 2025: A SoundEye Review Special

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

Lesley Harrison, Writing the Last Word

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, Michael Freiling

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

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

rob mclennan, Grace Nissan, The Utopians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Crane, 20 years since Katrina

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2025

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

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

Ruth Lexton, The Reckoning of Salt

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

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

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

Roy Marshall, Light Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, COBWEBS BLOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Ceremonial

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Chimney swifts on Labour Day

次の世のしづけさにある黄菊かな　浅井一志

tsugi no yo no shizukesa ni aru kigiku kana

            in the tranquility

            of the next world

            yellow chrysanthemums…

                                                            Hitoshi Asai 

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

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

This week: the ludokinetic poem, the transparent eyeball, traveling on motherless roads, constructing a witch, and much more. Enjoy.

In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he notes that there is “a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own” because “we have been expected upon this earth.” Our ancestors knew of our coming. As such, just like all previous generations, we possess what Benjamin calls a “weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.” In other words, although we are not super heroes or gods—not capital m Messiahs with the power to redeem the past, present, or future with grand utopian visions or Paradise on earth—our small, contingent acts can disrupt the version of time that appears linear or inevitable. If we were glitter nail polish, the base color might be our ordinary positionality in the flow of time–our genetics, our culture, our place–and the glitter would be our power to change the course of history. […]

After many months now of watching the genocide of civilians in Gaza, of praying, of gathering money to support the large family of my friend Mahmoud who sends harrowing videos and photos of the devastation and violence there every day, of calling my Senators to demand a ceasefire, peace and justice there have started to feel, for many, like a lost cause. It boggles the mind and confounds my spirit that people can see and know about the thousands of lives lost—many of them children—and not be spurred to outrage. And for me at least, the lost causness doesn’t feel limited to just Gaza, but has leaked a sense of lostness out beyond its edges into everything else. As my friend Cassie […] recently wrote on her fantastic newsletter, “My scientific proposal is that the genocide in Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 caused the luck to run out in the world.”

As a result of this lost-cause feeling, this luckless feeling, I’m looking for ways to spend more time and energy and heart resisting this particular part of the death machine. A local friend and I are going to be gathering folks who want to organize locally, I’m going to start joining Mothers for Ceasefire at their Wednesday morning demonstrations in downtown Durham, and I’m imagining ways that poetry might be an avenue of resistance here in my own little circle of messianic influence. My idea (still nascent) is that I would print up a series of cards, little broadsides, with poems about Gaza and by Palestinian poets, and the flip side of the card would have links to donate to aid organizations and numbers to call our State Representatives. I would put stacks of these in places around town—coffee shops, vintage stores, yoga studios, maybe therapy offices.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Time

People are starving
and we argue about
who’s more at fault.
Measles is roaring
back to life. Every
day is Tisha b’Av now.
Which means every day
a seed of hope
is planted.
Every day, a runway.
Every day we get up
from the floor,
brush off mourning’s
ashes and begin again
like our ancestors
in the wilderness
who every year
would dig their graves
expecting to die
and wake to discover
another chance.

 A seed of hope / is planted. Tradition holds that moshiach / the messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av — the seeds of redemption growing in the soil of our darkest day.

Every day, a runway. Tisha b’Av begins the seven-week runway toward the Days of Awe and the Jewish new year. 

Like our ancestors.  See Rashi on Taanit 30b:12:1.

This poem was inspired by a conversation after the first session of Seven Habits of Highly Evolved People, the pre-high-holiday class I’m co-teaching with R. David Markus this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Every day

When I think of what helps in these times, I often think of music. My impulse is to go somewhere beautiful—the woods, the water—and play music. One of the things the cantor sang was a Hebrew chant of the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd.”) I’m not a religious person—not believing in lords and such— but these words were powerful in their imagery (“I shall not want,” “lie down in green pastures.” “…leadeth me beside the still waters.”)

When I have a chance in the waiting room, I’ve been making little visual pieces to have the centring effect of making something. Of creating some little beauty. Of making marks to somehow speak to the world. They don’t respond per se to the emotional weight of the moment excepting that making marks, but being “cautiously optimistic” about things is always helpful. At home, I type out some figures on a typewriter and load the scans into the computer which I bring to the hospital. I’ve called them Typewriter Rituals because making them is a small ritual.

Gary Barwin, typewriter rituals in the ICU

When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column [in The Guardian]. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem. Its sound and its shape.

Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment). This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’ [by John Masefield]. You can read it here […]

Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have it too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our toddler in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words yet, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say.

Jem Wikeley, The Long Trick

A little bit of fun for mid-August — two of the poems that I most enjoying saying to my own children (whether they like it or not). Both of these are very cheering I find at trying moments. The first is by Alfred Noyes, now probably known only for his (fantastic) ‘The Highwayman’, which is still widely available as an illustrated picture book. Years ago, I said ‘The Highwayman’ to both the older boys, then perhaps 7 and 5, while perched on the lower bunk at bed time; I got all the way through to the end, enjoying it greatly myself, and was quite pleased that they were still listening. After I finished, there was a pause, before the younger of them burst out “but it’s sad!” and started to cry, and the elder leaned over the edge of the top bunk to remark censoriously, “I really don’t think that was appropriate for us, Mummy”. (You have been warned.)

I’m not sure ‘The New Duckling’ is entirely appropriate either but it’s very funny […]

My second suggestion, Charles Causley’s ‘Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast’ is a great favourite of the children and I have never got bored of saying it. The final stanza is particularly delicious.

Victoria Moul, Two poems to learn so that you can say them to your children for your own amusement

These hot, humid summer days I’ve been waiting for fall. And then I feel guilty about it, because of that whole be-here-now stuff, that whole life-is-short-enjoy-it-while-you-can stuff. That whole climate-change-this-may-be-the-new-normal stuff… I try to spend some time each day (usually in the cooler hours) in that living-in-the-present stuff. But then it gets hot, and I get whiny. But all those hyphenated points above are so true, dammit. And life is so damn uncertain. So now I’m working on enjoying being a hot thing that lies on the couch feeling hot. If the couch has a breeze, I can almost pull it off, that gratitude business. It’s worth a try, even if I fall back in to whineland. I woke up the other day thinking, dang, I was going to start working on my upper body strength — a little weight lifting every day. I did it for a while, but that was…well…a while ago. That’s okay, I told myself. Today is a new day. You can always start today. I appreciated my generous self for that thought. As Nina Simone sang, “It’s a new life for me, yeah.”

I admire this Stafford poem for its challenge to the new day, the new life, the new yeah. It’s a tape-it-over-the-desk poem. We all need a few of those.

Marilyn McCabe, When you turn around, starting here, lift this

distant thunder
white curtains billow
in the dusk

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’25

A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.

To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.

It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.

Jon Stone, Taper #14 / The Whisky Shop

Recently, when typing up notes from my journals, I found quotes I captured while watching an Indigo Girls documentary (as one does). It’s full of testimony about how writing and singing allowed them to create — and re-create — themselves.

Emily, one of the Indigo Girls, also talks about the pressures and joys of performing and says this:

I’ve had nights where I was sad, didn’t feel like playing, and by the end of the night I’m just healed, just washed over with that energy of togetherness.

That energy of togetherness. YES.

I’m a loner. Deep, deep, deep in my bones. So the level to which I’ve discovered, nurtured and delighted in writing community has been one of the biggest surprises of my life.

Like… y’all: I’m still writing — inspired! healed! — every damn day because of writing community. Jill Crammond. Sarah Freligh. Woman Words. The Albany open mic scene over the years. The Madwomen in the Attic workshops. Second Best Witches Writing Group. The fairly new but growing Ass in Chair Collective. And others. I’m so grateful.

In art, togetherness really does provide more than camaraderie. It’s energy-giving. It’s momentum-building. It’s cheerleading.

It’s also accountability. For example, after a verrrrrry long break from submitting to journals, I’m back at it. Slowly. Surely. It’s 100% thanks to writing pals who tell me, when I can’t see it myself, that my work is worth making and needs to be out there.

These are the vibes: It’s selfish to hoard your creativity.

Carolee Bennett, Writing Community and the “Energy of Togetherness”

These days, instead of sitting down to write, I go straight to the basement and make art. Today, I completed the third in a series of season-themed encaustics with poems embedded in them. I altered an old poem to fit the photo:

The fabric of spring I wanted to write a sentence with verdant, wanted to use the word lush, wanted it fragrant in word only. wanted it wordy, wanted to roll in the word green, needed the stains of the word grass on the knees of the word jeans, but all day the wind shook the japanese cherries and yesterday’s blossoms have popped like a piñatafull of confetti, blanketing the word lawn with the word pink, a magic shag carpet. I listen for its breath, small jean genie, must of earth behind my ears, rolling,wordless, in the new-woven fabric of spring.

And that brings me to the point of this post. When I lost my job last June, I intended to finish writing a children’s book, work on the rest of a novel, and find a publisher for my full-length poetry manuscript, Words with Friends. I finally accomplished one of those goals.

Today, I’m able to share that my poetry book will be published by Meat for Tea Press! I’m so freakin’ excited!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Waxing Poetic

I was
        a young mother when someone guided my thumb  
to the hollow atop my newborn’s head, to feel the space 
        between the bones of the skull where they 
had not knit together yet. Even now, I still turn 
        toward the idea of an opening, some keyhole 
through which I can thread my undimmed longing. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Fontanel

Our days are filled like this, with conversations and songs and silence, and with questions like, “If you were a chip, what kind of chip would you be? What kind of chip would you like to be?” Which reminds me of a voice note question my partner asked me – what does your mind do when you’re walking? She knows how the inside of my mind is usually ten cinema screens competing for who can be the loudest or brightest or fastest or most bizarre…I notice that, somewhere in between footsteps and breath and retelling each other The Lord of the Rings, the noise has all but stopped.

And Niamh sings to me again, something they have created from the best lines we’ve spoken, about mountains and not giving up. They apologise that it doesn’t rhyme, and I say that the journey doesn’t rhyme – every day is unknowable. And then I consider that perhaps our footsteps are a sort of rhyme, and that each day, in its different textures and forms, has a series of small repetitions – chance encounters with Flor and Florus, Ken and Ali, the Belgians…how each different day echoes with blackberries and the way everything sparkles in sunlight after rain, and wrens and stonechats, oaks, beech.

Today began in Grasmere, in rain which switched in a moment to sunshine, and strong wind, until I gave up on my coat and let myself be drenched then dried. We walked over Hause Gap, and by Grisedale Tarn, black and grey and slapping at its shores, and down Grisedale Beck into Patterdale. All lividly beautiful, the world startled and bright in its rain and sunlight, but the best part of the day was the extra three miles to Brotherswater Inn via Hartsop, and how the poem of the journey rang loudly with harebells and bracken, hawkbit and tormentil and dandelion, yarrow and dock, thistle and nettle and clover, foxglove and wild thyme, so we were singing and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather.

Clare Shaw, Coast-to-Coast: Day 4

sun-striped path
the forest’s outbreath
fills our lungs

[…]

Today is sunny, but through the weekend, the clouds hung on till afternoon, and I was chilly enough to wear a wool sweater. Here on the Northern California coast, we have entered the month of Fogust. In our cool and damp micro-clime, so perfect for redwoods, locals are amazed by the temperature if it reaches 70 degrees.

Annette Makino, Sizzling summer haiku

I have spent a delightful morning pondering Bruce Springsteen–we are almost to the 50th (gasp!) anniversary of the release of the Born to Run album.  Born in the U.S.A. was my Springsteen entry point in the late summer of 1984, and then I got Born to Run later that autumn, in November.  I liked it alright, but I don’t think that any other Springsteen album has captured my heart and imagination like Born in the U.S.A.

On the NPR program Fresh Air, I listened to this interview with Peter Ames Carlin, which explored the making of Born to Run–a fascinating glimpse of the creative process.  Before I listened to that interview, I read Peter McWhorter’s piece in The Washington Post (hopefully a gift essay to read throughout the ages) about the Springsteen playlist that he listened to seven times–that’s all of Born to Run, plus eleven songs:  “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” and “New York City Serenade.”

By listening to the playlist seven times, he gained a new appreciation for Springsteen, particularly the poetry of Springsteen.  He has some interesting insights about poetry and the 21st century person:  “My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poetry of the Playlist, for Reviewers and for Students

I was listening to Mimi Klavarti yesterday. I was cutting my hedge, she was talking on the excellent Poems We Made Along The Way podcast. She was talking about writing constraints, and how they can help to open up creativity rather than constrict it. Have a listen (and to the back catalogue – they’re all great). I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, but I’m going with a self-imposed time constraint. I hope to finish this in the time it takes me to roast a chicken for dinner.

Ok, the chicken is the oven. We have an hour and 20 mins…go.

First, a quick update. Flo and I went to Norfolk for our annual shindig in Worstead. I was asked to read a few poems from CtD one evening round a campfire. It was lovely to be asked. It reiterated how nerve-wracking it is to read to family and friends. Being a bit pissed and it being dark didn’t help. My reading also set three others off reading too, so here’s to next year’s official poetry circle at the Worstead Festival. […]

Earlier in the week I’d been made aware of a series of readings by a new poetry collective called Femina Culpa. The three ladies behind it were reading round London and one such reading included a reading at Bethlem Museum of the Mind which is just down the road from me.   My friend Ellie works at Bethlem, and I can’t not attend a poetry event that is that close to home.

All three readers read amazing tales and stories of women from the past and how they’ve suffered mental illness issues/made to suffer because of this. Check out Emma McKervey, Linda McKenna and Milena Williamson.

Mat Riches, A Chicken in the lighthouse

As artists, how do we want to spend the time and energy we have left? My energy is not what it was, I’ll be honest. And my time on this earth dwindles, as it does for us all. I’m at that surprising “experiencing ageism” time of life. I’m at that “being overlooked for the grants and awards and even minor recognitions” time of my writing life. It was probably going to happen anyway, but the 2020s hasn’t been kind (or generous) to many creatives, has it? I don’t even know what to advise myself these days so I certainly can’t dole out any advice to any of you. Keep trying? Stay weird, seems evergreen. I sort of want to just stop hustling or imagining what I could do as a side gig next. Is my time better spent writing obscure Canadian non-bestsellers and just staying home more? Probably? I feel like if I haven’t started a Substack by now, I missed the boat on that one, plus I don’t think I can write in Substack voice. I’m too small, too unimportant, too insignifcant (don’t worry, these have always been goals of mine) and too tired of that particular kind of hustle to garner any great subscription income.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Visual Literacy

What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.

In later years I studied art
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.

Ann E. Michael, Heaven, hell, & halos

I’ve also been questioning things like—should I even still be writing poetry, or is it time I give up on it and try something else? Should I spend my time doing paying work instead? It feels sort of futile to write poetry in today’s political environment—rampantly anti-academic, anti-art, anti-peace-tolerance-environmental-safety and pro guns, business and everything evil and destructive. It feels like no one is listening, even with much bigger platforms than mine. Maybe, I wonder, I should take up filmmaking. Maybe I should leave America for the adventure of exploring another country, another country, which might be more friendly to the arts (which seems like almost any country at this point). I could take up working at the local pumpkin farm (though heavy lifting would be out). I could sell makeup again. This may be a normal part of getting older. I can’t tell as I’ve never been this old before! Maybe things will make more sense when I can get more than an hour or so of sleep a night. I’ll check in with you next week.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Moons, Insomnia, Ends of Summer Gardens in Bloom, and Writing Questions at Midlife

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO

In the month that I begin my Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, it feels right to use a quote from the man himself.

The truth is, I am a chronic self doubter. There is no fixing it. It is part of the strangeness of my brain. The only way of living with it is noticing it, embracing it, and doing the thing anyway.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a mentee about what was blocking their work, why they couldn’t get further on with their writing. They’d had a series of rejections, one after the other, and were doubling the validity of their work. This is something I recognise in myself. I go through periods of feeling like I might have fluked my entire career, that every time someone has validated my work it is because they either felt sorry for me or had made a mistake. Sometimes I imagine that the mistake they made is my fault, because I have given the impression that I am intelligent and competent and talented when I am very clearly not. It is like I have an entire other person inside me that is always telling me how shit I am, and I am never quite sure if they are telling the truth. […]

So far in my Folger Fellowship I have been deep diving the archives and attending seminars and meetings where I inevitably feel like a sore thumb. Most of my colleagues are American, a lot of them are academics. but Oh, the joy of hearing all the projects, the mental stimulation of being around people who are striving to explore so many different perspectives. It is the most creatively nourishing thing I have been involved with. the more I interact, the quieter the self doubt voice is, which tells me that this is a good fit. The confidence in the project is coming not from the validation of the achievement, but from the quality of the work; my work, other fellows work. It’s quite an astounding thing.

And so this is what I am carrying with me into August, and beyond. I will not fear an opportunity that may lead to greatness. I will not let the negative self talk put the fear in me. I will not let the fear [of] not deserving greatness, stop me from reaching for greatness.

Wendy Pratt, August Mantra: Be Not Afraid of Greatness

Hills recline in the distance
smudged by a hand working in pastel,
soft and slow the line where mountains meet violet 

and clouds lay back smoking fiery pipes.
Village, I am wordless.

At a nearby campsite, a grill is about to be lit,
about to blister some sausage.  Blister until
twigs catch, vines chatter in the flames
like gossips with nothing on their minds.

Jill Pearlman, Before the Fire, Dusk

I’m intrigued by this new collection, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), a poetry title that provides a complexity of literary response to “the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health,” and the precarity through which we currently live. “whereupon I join Lear and his Fool / on the blasted heath,” writes London, Ontario-based writer and speaker Jennifer Wenn, in the poem “Fire and Flood,” “and while the erstwhile king howls / at the gale and deluge I cower, / uselessly, / looking for a sign, [.]” There are multiple pieces echoing Wenn’s particular sentiment, seeking a sign or marker of hope through the gloom, with other pieces that rage their appropriate rage through the storm, or even a spiraling into a dark swirl of hopelessness. As Toronto-based poet,editor and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi begins the poem “Movement XVI”: “that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just / find construction cones scattered. I take out the trash and who / knows maybe I’m resistant to pesticide. some relief comes in / the form of needles. I’m defeated by numbers. It simply won’t / happen.”” Sometimes the only way to respond to a crisis is to write through it, providing a clarity of thought and potential action, and this collection, put together as the result of a public call, provides an assemblage of first-person lyric narratives by some two dozen Canadian poets that shake to the roots of mental health and climate concern, providing both observational comfort and clarity to their sharpness. The collection includes contributions by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammmadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton and Gary Barwin. There’s a precarity to these lyrics, these lines, one that writes directly into crisis […]

rob mclennan, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

The Dark, Howie Good, illustrations by Marcel Herms, Sacred Parasite, 2025, ISBN: 978-3-910822-11-5, ISBN: 978-3-910822-13-9, €20.00 […]

I’m a cancer survivor – for now, anyway.
Every three months, I must have blood drawn,
and my chest scanned, to determine if any

cancer cells have migrated, nomads in search
of grass and water.
(from ‘The C Word’)

These lines from somewhere near the middle of Howie Good’s The Dark serve as a keystone to the set of poems in verse and prose that surround them, a deep personal darkness. As the closing lines of the opening poem, ‘Subterranean Cancer Blues’ (with a hat-tip to Bob Dylan) spells out, the cancer patient acquires ‘the kind of knowledge that now/holds my eyes open to the dark.’

But the dark is not simply personal, or tied to present circumstances, as is seen in poems like ‘Elon Musk at Auschwitz’, in which the tech gobshite claims a kind of faux Jewishness, ‘Unholy Land’, whose title speaks for itself, or this:

Night of the Following Day

The person I went to sleep as wasn’t the same person I woke up as, half-drowned in sweat after traveling on motherless roads all night, seeing plants and animals bombed into submission, families forced to dig their own graves at gunpoint, tears evaporate on contact with the air, and only for me to arrive some six hours later back where I started but feeling barely present, like I was still miles and miles away from the redwing blackbird on the black branch.

For a poet living through personal and global extremes, the dark is not a metaphor, it’s a simple fact: ‘You stare into the dark for just so long before the dark begins staring back.’ It’s impossible in a short review  to do justice to how Good receives that stare in these extraordinary short texts. You just have to read them.

Billy Mills, Six for the Pocket: A Small Pamphlets Review

Alice M. Fay (p. 1912-24, etc.), was a poet and illustrator from New York. She published her first book of poetry The Realm of Fancy: Poems & Pictures in 1912, and was featured in numerous ‘little magazines’ of the 1920s, including Rhythmus (edited by Oscar Williams) and Pegasus (edited by W.H. Lench). Other than this, little is known of her life.

into air—
the scent of a violet sings!

Both Fay’s drawings and verse are comprised of accomplished line-work and subtle, suggestive forms, drawn from the ephemerality of the natural world. ‘Where’, for instance, is a delicate micro-treatise on poetics, in which the scent of flowers and vanishing smoke are compared to the songs of the singer: i.e. the poetry of the world is to be found in the invisible and ephemeral, rather than the visible and permanent. Echoing this, in ‘Near Crete’ the sound of the waves become poet: “whispering tales… of ships that come no more.” Again the image arrives and then disappears. Poetry: always vanishing.

serene as the mountains—
thy love

Fay’s work also has feminist and queer undertones. In ‘Beyond’, for instance, Fay seeks a world “untenanted by men,” i.e. beyond patriarchy: “beyond the veil of future’s mystery.” In ‘All This Is Thy Love To Me’ Fay appears to be addressing another woman, and their “love” is described in terms that would have dominantly been read as “feminine” at that time (fair, calm, mysterious, angelic). Furthermore, as neither poet nor lover have textually definite genders, the subject-positions of the poem are left open to suggestion, able to be occupied by readers of any gender and sexuality.

Dick Whyte, Alice M. Fay – 5 Short Poems (1912-24)

I much admired Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, Faber, published earlier this year. As in several of Pascale Petit’s collections, this contains work which very skilfully, and with a marvellous ear for musical cadence , transforms the pain of sexual abuse into beautiful poetry. Each of the 21 poems in the first section, Still Lifes, responds to a different still life painting by painters from the 1600s onwards to Bonnard. The second part, a response to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ felt less successful, as it employs Seventeenth Century language in a manner verging on parody. The third section contains 22 poems after types of crystals and gemstones, as refracted through Rimbaud’s Illuminations as translated by Wyatt Mason, and are, for me, the most successful in the book, because the prose-poem form allows Scott to give fuller vent to his gift for articulating emotion through vivid and sensuous imagery and language, as in this extract from ‘Emerald’:

    The field is a body. Wild grass rippling over breasts and muscles, the jut of a hipbone. Some of the grass is trampled down into mud like a battlefield – screams catch the air. Some of the grass is spread over little hillocks like shallow graves. Some of the grass is cut into a bit, desire lines and goat paths, leading to all the places you ever dreamed of going but didn’t.

As I discovered from listening to his interview with Peter Kenny in Series 5, Episode 10 of the ever-excellent Planet Poetry podcast, here, Scott talks very thoughtfully and eloquently about his craft.

I’ve also been knee-deep in the poems of Wisława Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and collected in Map, Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2015, for the poetry book club I’m part of. My jury is still out thus far, but then it’s a heftily daunting tome.

Matthew Paul, July reading

“Hexentanz” (literally ‘witches’ dance’) has an epigraph from Mary Wigman a dancer in 1926, “But, after all, isn’t a bit of witch hidden in every female?”

“To be inside language – the body as prayer,
as incantation, a strike of lightning.
To be earthed and barefoot
to be creature; muscle and cells.
To fly: to know space beneath you.

And who needs music when you have breath,
when you are the daughter to the Mother of Sighs?”

Dancing has often been linked to sinful behaviour and the devil. Here it’s a prayer to understand the power of a woman’s body, to inhabit it free from society’s rules and regulations. Here, dancing is both a connection to earth and an ability to fly and it doesn’t even require music. Breathing has a rhythm, that’s all that’s needed. […]

Helen Ivory in “Constructing a Witch” explores the witch archetype and how woman, particularly those who don’t conform to society’s expectations, are cast as inferior, and pushed to society’s edges. An exploration that includes how patriarchal structures ignore the needs of women, left in ignorance about their own bodies because menstruation and menopause make them “too difficult” for medicine to study.

Emma Lee, “Constructing a Witch” Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe) – book review

The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):

Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)

[…]

The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’.  O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).

O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).

Martyn Crucefix, Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!

The promise was
graceful, writing a book made up of leaves
(birch, catalpa, magnolia, maple);
made up of leaves and love and hands and words
choked out in last breaths exhaled in dark nights,
made up of whispers woven together
from the humid tenderness of two dear
embodied beings tangling their breath.

PF Anderson, Once upon a time there was a promise

The encouragement to Tell It Slant! has become popular among many CW lecturers and workshop leaders over the last few years, seemingly as a natural extension of the old favourite, Show, Don’t Tell!, but what does it actually mean?

Well, it refers to an approach to writing that veers away from dealing with stuff head-on. Its inherent attraction lies in the opportunity it provides for the poet to explore new perspectives and fresh takes on seemingly tired subjects by coming at them via unusual angles, often omitting bits that would be obvious if treated directly, thus intriguing and challenging the reader. As such, its use is widely seen to be lending the poem extra gravitas and depth.

However, there are also consequent risks in its deployment. One is the accusation that the poet is being wilfully obtuse, frustrating the reader, playing a pointless game by holding back information, the absence of which creates the false impression of extra layers to the poem that actually don’t exist. And another is its tempting propensity for enabling emotional shortcuts that skirt round the potential core of the poem.

From my perspective, Tell It Slant! is useful as a weapon in a creative armoury. However, its overuse in contemporary poetry as an all-encompassing method leads poets down a blind alley, causing many poems to fizzle out before they can take their reader on a journey. And for my money, that journey is where poetic truth is found.

Matthew Stewart, Telling It Slant

I have experienced some great times in the company of poets. Mostly, poets on their own, having a drink or a chat. Obviously, there is joy in experiencing a ‘good’ reading or book launch.

I am glad for anyone who has ‘a community’, whether this consists of one other weirdo who writes poems, or a group who gather regularly to do something communal, or people who move in circles where they feel supported and connected and perhaps mutually celebrated and facilitated.

I don’t feel particularly connected myself, but never set out to be, and am not sure I want or need to be, and it has always been a ‘bonus’ rather than a central aspect of my writing and publishing and (occasional) teaching that their are individuals whom I know and like who do the same thing, and I hope they are well and flourishing ‘out there’ somewhere. […]

Why do people communicate online as if I am privy to backstories and assumptions about themselves and others that I have no knowledge of? I believe issues and people are complex, but encounter anger and simplicity all the time on the internet, and it leaves me none the wiser. Where is the poetry in this? […]

What if, when I check out substack etc, I find there are poets and publishers attacking poets and publishers? What if there are personal battles being conducted online that are disturbing and polarising, and watching them unfold might become as addictive an unproductive as watching car crashes, or as unfulfilling and spiritually nourishing as listening to gossip?

Roy Marshall, ‘Poetry is about community.’

Many magazines these days offer writers a chance to get feedback on their submitted work for an additional cost. The cost typically ranges from $25- $40. When I posted my series about scammy lit mags, almost all of them had one thing in common: They offered feedback to writers who paid for it. However, many reputable magazines offer this option too. So, should you go for it? If so, whom should you trust?

Firstly, I want to talk about why this is happening, a trend that seems to be recent, as I do not recall so many journals offering this option ten or more years ago. Costs of running a lit mag, as we all know, can be high. Many editors seem to be taking on editing/consulting work as a way to offset those rising fees.

It also seems to be a response to a workforce that is ever more precarious. Few and far between are the stable academic jobs for writers. Meanwhile the professional competition is stiffer than ever. Writers don’t just have MFAs; they have PhDs. There are more people seeking careers related to writing, and fewer secure opportunities, than ever before.

So we hustle. Any writer/editor who does not have a full-time job is likely making a living from piecing together a variety of income streams. Teaching. Consulting. Website development. Copywriting. Editing. And so on. Very few lit mag editors are able to make their living solely as magazine editors.

I provide this bit of context because when I first began to consider this trend of editors offering feedback, it got me worried. How can they possibly have time to read submissions, I wondered, if they’re also consulting on particular submissions in great detail? Why would editors think they are the ones who know what’s best for a particular work and a particular writer? Shouldn’t their focus be on their magazines?

Then I took a step back and looked at the larger picture. No, I realized. Sadly, the majority of editors cannot afford to be solely focused on their magazines because that work does not pay. With that in mind, I came around to viewing these additional editorial offerings as a good thing. The workforce for writers is grinding indeed (and most lit mag editors are also writers.) Anything anyone can do to honestly and ethically sustain oneself in this environment is commendable.

Becky Tuch, Q: Should you pay for editorial feedback from lit mag editors?

A lavish and wonderful celebration of connections between mathematics and the arts is the annual international BRIDGES, Mathematics and the Arts Conference.  This year’s conference took place last month (July, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands) and one of its special events was a poetry reading.  

Information about the poets and sample poems are available here at the website of Sarah Glaz (mathematician-poet and coordinator of the BRIDGES readings).  Below I have included one of these very special poems:

View no Fiery Night        by Marian Christie 

No
one
went to   
the tower
to vie with the foe.
Fretting, worn, we rove in night fog ––
the ring, the theft, the vow forgotten. Hovering high
over the town, the frightening wyvern, whirr of her winging interwoven with fire.

First published in Christie’s collection Sky, Earth, Other (Penteract Press, 2024).  Note that this is a Fibonacci poem — with the syllable counts for the lines following the Fibonacci numbers.  ALSO, each line is formed from letters found in the English words for the Fibonacci numbers up to the line count — one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one; Christie uses the term “sequential lipogram” to describe this pattern.

For lots more wonderful stuff by Marian Christie, you may visit her blog, Poetry and Mathematics. 

JoAnne Growney, Celebrating Poetry at 2025 BRIDGES Conference

Of course, it is still summer. Another month or more of summer. Please, let us make no mistake about that! But why is it that as soon as the calendar turns a page over to August, the sense of new socks and homemade soup come back to the front in my mind.

But I’m not there yet. There are still manuscripts to edit, a garden to care for, and a 15th Anniversary Poets on the Coast to finish planning. And what a POTC it will be!

Kelli Russell Agodon and I began this retreat for women poets because we felt that we could create a poetry community based on generosity and abundance —of writing prompts, of snacks, and poetry gifts. Fifteen years later, it looks like we were right. Women who began committing to their writing, to themselves, have gone on to publish their first books, earn MFA’s, become poet laureates, and even win a National Book Award. Sure, these capable women might not have “needed” Poets on the Coast to begin their journeys, but I like to think we helped at least in small measure.

Susan Rich, What I Did (Am Doing) On My Summer Vacation

I feel like every year at this point in the summer, I start thinking about fall and musing endlessly about how much I am going to get done. It’s harder this year to feel hopeful and productive in a nation under siege by idiots, but I am trying to hang in there, writing silly little poems that feel like they can save my soul a little and grinding at the grind that keeps the gears rolling. 

Mostly, I am pushing through toward a little trip up to Wisconsin end of this week. We’re visiting family for a day up at the campgrond where my grandmother used to keep her RV, the site of most of my childhood summer memories. I have been back occasionally since (my aunt & uncle had their place parked there for decades, and now so do my older cousins on my dad’s side) but haven’t really been in about a decade. The beach nearby we used to go to is gone now and replaced by a boat launch, but the air, last time we were there, was much the same. I could almost smell the Coppertone and the rubber of pink innertubes. 

This week has bought some rejections and at least once acceptance, plus a new poem in Fantastic Other from winged. I am finding, now that I am submitting work more regularly, that my rejection/acceptance rate is still about the same. 4:12, so about 1/3, which isn’t terrible, but has remained pretty consistent from other times when I was submitting a lot of work into the wilds (though it waxes and wanes depending on the competitiveness and/or age of the journal (I do like submitting to brand new publications, or at least new to me, so that rate is sometimes a little higher.) 

Right now, I am sending out a mix of different projects, including the Iphigenia poems as I compile them into the book, winged, another little oceanic series, some early pieces from the midnight garden, plus fragments from the sci-fi-ish series I finished up earlier this year.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/11/2025

I saw her smile.
Sitting alone on a green park bench.

As if she was dreaming a happy poem.
(But what is that?)
Or had found the right words for something
more desperate, more evil, more macabre.
Or had remembered a woolly line from a poem that
was fully formed in the middle of the night
but had vanished with its commas before the sun.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The poem at 16:00 on a random Thursday

A trip to Manchester for Liz Gibson’s book launch resulted in me receiving a new description of my hair. Wait for it… “anti-gravity hair”. A chance encounter whilst queuing for tea and cake meant a man took the opportunity to tell me he liked my anti-gravity hair. I am adding that description to “You always have really surprised hair,” and they both make me chuckle.

The book launch was a delight from start to finish. I have always loved liz’s poetry and to have a whole collection to enjoy is celebratory. It was wonderful to hear them read by the author and I love the additional immersion in words this brings. The evening included guest readers and an interview with the artist who designed the cover for ‘A Love the Weight of An Animal’. A perfect way to launch this well written collection.

I am the ‘Silver Branch’ featured writer this month for Black Bough so I thought I would share a poem from the ones celebrated there…

Sue Finch – August 2025 | Mysite

It’s a prose poem to celebrate the fact I love prose poems and that Kath recently exclaimed, “You mean there are poets who write whole books of prose poems?” 

GOING TO THE CAVES

I am in a long queue for the cave tour. Stalagmites and stalactites are promised. I fear tightness, and more than that, being trapped. The guide tells us that we will see crystals the like of which we’ve never seen before. Then he warns us that there are times when it smells like multi-storey car park stairwells and sometimes all the torches fail. When I look at him, he reaches into his pocket. Here, he says, as if reading my mind, if you can’t get out, take one of these. He offers me a circular, chalky-white tablet which I accept as he nods. It will kill you painlessly, almost instantly. I follow him, wondering if I will swallow the pill.

Sue Finch, EVENING SUN

Why do I keep scrolling when it so often leaves me feeling disheartened or disgusted or in despair?

Because in the scroll I keep discovering new voices saying things I want and need to hear. Because that’s how I often see words from writers who always give me comfort. Because through it I have found kindred spirits in places geographically far from me, and those connections matter and count. (Physical proximity does not guarantee honesty or transparency or an ability to know who someone is. Believe me on that one.) Because it is often in disembodied digital spaces that I find knowledge and understanding I might not acquire through print books or my IRL relationships and activities. Because our online world is its own kind of real. The idea of cutting myself entirely off from it feels like the equivalent of fantasizing about living off-grid in a secluded forest cabin: Sounds kinda dreamy, but I know that I would not last a winter in such a place. Because inside the cacophony of the trivial, the mundane, the hucksterish, the phony, the ridiculous, and the fear-mongering voices, there are others telling truths that build a fire in the cold.

In response to one of my questions, a writer/friend tells me: “Everything feels fluid right now. And a bit unreal. We can just check in on the voices that feel authentic and know that we’re OK.”

Another offers: “I am a big believer in retreat. Sometimes it’s exactly what we need.” She then points me to Andrea Gibson’s “Instead of Depression,” and tears rise at, “Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go/to heal…”

Another (or maybe one of these, it is easy to get lost in the bread crumb trails) points me to Elizabeth Kleinfeld, whose recent words in “Grieving My Beautiful Before” knocked the wind out of me:

The grief I felt for my old life hit me. I kind of put off grieving for it by pretending I was going to get back to it, but now that I’m practicing radical acceptance, I realize I can’t get back to it. I can only build a great new life, which leaves me free to grieve that old life. It is knocking the wind out of me.

I trust these voices.

(I still have trust. I refuse to lose trust. That’s a choice I’m making.) […]

Don’t we all, like Whitman, contain multitudes? Aren’t we all sometimes the person running the stop sign and sometimes the person getting hit and sometimes the person recording from the sidewalk and sometimes the person stopping to call 911? Aren’t we all sometimes the tide rushing in and sometimes the waves ebbing in retreat and sometimes the swimmer not waving but drowning and sometimes the person floating on their back, letting the water hold them, because they need a reprieve from kicking?

Rita Ott Ramstad, Letting the salty flood wash over me

seagulls laughing all day long
two smooth stones in my pocket

Kati Mohr, A Touch of Teal, No, Blue

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Reading in shade

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, July Paper Boat

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

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People

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

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

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

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

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

I fell off my meditation cushion
like theology without underpinning.

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

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

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

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

Oh Big Blue

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

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

Salena Godden, Roaring 20s Radio: book recommendations

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, The poetic tweet

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, The Blue Door in our Dreams

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

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

Ama Bolton, Poet as Naturalist

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

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

Bob Mee, PERMANENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, pressure change and distant noise

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Twinklings and twinges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

grant

a star

its anger

earn

a range

garner

aster

Luisa A. Igloria, Inside the word stranger

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

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

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

Karen Solie, What Did You See?

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

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

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

Tim Love, The 3 Ds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, July Listopia

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, If you say it’s okay

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Gale, Swimming Upstream, Running Uphill: On Belonging

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Reading Day, Happy Places

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

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

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

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

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

Tresha Faye Haefner, Once in Florence

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Tsvetaeva in the margins.

like home or history
the body is shrapnel
a fragment

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

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

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

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

a deep hole opens in my shadow—

a black umbrella turned to ash.

the breath of one risen from the dead climbs out.

Grant Hackett [no title]