This week: a poem with a gun in it, some semblance of silence, kernels of clarity, an obsession with ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.

“Is all poetry about death?” someone asked at a poetry reading recently. Sometimes as I read, it seems that way. But I think all poetry is about uncertainty, insecurity, a whistling in the dark. Is a lot of the insecurity about life’s end? No doubt. No doubt. I try to avoid poems about mortality, although they are ubiquitous. I like the poems that grapple more with the other half of the equation. As Annie Lennox sings, “Dying is easy. It’s living that scares me to death.”

Marilyn McCabe, I should not exclude myself from this

When I was writing ‘No Map Could Show Them’, I was commuting to Leeds every day from my little corner of South Yorkshire. I was working at the university. From my tiny office window, the view was dominated by a tree – I couldn’t tell you what kind, just that in my memory it was aways in autumn plumage. Impossible.

Today I went back to Leeds and walked past my old room. Blue skies, liberatingly blue. An encroaching cold. I didn’t look up in case my ghost was still there at the desk. I carried on, past the School of English towards the sports centre.

There: a poem I wrote a decade ago emblazoned across a series of giant climbing holds, multi-coloured and bright. A poem inspired by Alison Hargreaves. A piece set on Stanage Edge. Its stanzas were intended as a spell of sorts, a plea for days when nothing amazing happens but nothing awful happens either. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

You can now sit on my poem if you want and eat your lunch. I like that. I like the sense of it being overtaken by everyday events, dominated by the mundane or the suddenly important. I like the idea that people might ignore the words entirely, too busy having conversations that matter more. Or less. Or just as much. Or saying nothing, meaning just enough.

Here’s the text of the piece in full:

Prayer

Give us good days.
Days unspectacular but adequate:
the weather neither calm nor wild,
your coat zipped nearly to the top,

a silver thermos cooling in your bag,
the sky at Bamford reddening, as if
embarrassed by its own strange reach
and day-old, pipe-smoke clouds.

Above the Hope cement works,
crows wheel arcs of guarded flight
and when you touch the rock
your fingers hold.

Helen Mort, Is it a poem? Is it a climb? Is it a chair?

When we first moved to South Florida, I didn’t realize how different the seasons would be.  I didn’t miss winter much, and summers seemed similar to South Carolina, but every year I had a fierce yearning for fall.  One year we bought two puzzles, and I still remember the one with the autumnal picture.  It was a nineteenth century town with horses and wagons and a big dance happening in the center of the village.  The trees had the perfect assortment of autumnal leaves and pumpkins dotted the puzzle landscape.

We put that puzzle together in the fall of 2001, when the world felt so topsy-turvy.  It was soothing to put the puzzle together.  

 I was teaching the British literature survey class, and I had Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on my brain–those figures on the urn, forever frozen in whatever emotional moment they experienced right then.  I thought the puzzle offered a similar dynamic.

It’s an interesting spiritual question that Keats poses:  is it better to be forever poised to kiss the beloved?  Is it better to live in the moment of anticipation, rather than having to deal with all the messy humanness that comes after the kiss, once we truly know our beloved?

And there are larger questions posed by both the urn and the poem:  how do we stay in the here and now?  How do we not get distracted by our sorrows?  How do we maintain our faith, in the face of enormous woes?  For me, during that autumn of 2001 that broke our hearts in so many ways, the answer came in the jigsaw puzzle.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Autumn Odes and Puzzles

After months of reading and recording poetry aloud — my own poems and those by beloved poets (Emily Dickinson, Rilke, Sara Teasdale, W.S. Merwin, Teresa of Ávila, and others) — my voice went unexpectedly and inexplicably quiet.

When I look back at this time last year (and the year before that), I experienced something similar, so it might be seasonal. An energy-conserving form of hibernation. A time to reflect rather than speak. […]

Recently, I had a couple of poems accepted by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire for its quarterly publication, Touchstone. The poems are from a chapbook sequence I have been working on about four generations of family history. Touchstone also has an audio edition that will feature contributors’ poems, and Friday is the soft deadline for sending audio files. This means, it is time for me to find my voice again.

Jenevieve Carlyn, “A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall”

Up and down this alley of student rentals,
ritual takes hold of a waning weekend:
late October, Indian summer, ash trees
showering leaf-gold

on back-yardlets churning with youthful bodies,
muscled, sweat-slick, bawdy, lit up with victory,
drunk and singing, roaring the last hurrahs of
Homecoming game day.

Noise, grill smoke, and memory hold the neighbors
spellbound at it all, at the pure unknowing
lifted up in these chesty pop-punk odes and
beery libations—

Maryann Corbett, Kudos, O Victors

Here in London, Autumn is finally here and today my little backyard is exploding with bright orange marigolds that I do not remember planting, but seem to be blooming just in time for Halloween, All Saints Day and for Santa Muerte herself. With these flowers, I feel blessed.

Before I begin I wish to do some shout outs and thank yous to all the superstar poets I have seen since I last wrote, massive thank yous to all I drank rum with and danced and howled at the moon with. Thank you for joyous times down at Arvon and Totleigh Barton, Hastings Book Festival, Morecambe Poetry Festival, The Hastings March for Unity and to stand up and support the RNLI and also the Cable Street 90th Anniversary. Thanks also to Bradley Taylor, the new Poet Laureate of Birmingham, for one of the happiest National Poetry Day nights ever. This seaside photo above is by photographer Richard Davis taken on the seafront at Morecambe Poetry Festival, ahh we had such a lovely long weekend, an epic marathon of poetry and pints, thank you.

Since I last wrote a long substack post, I have spent most of my hours working on the final fiddly tweaks of The Life Of Life. The good news is we have now managed to send the proofs to print, just around the time of Autumn Equinox and the Harvest Moon. My new novel will be in all of your favourite bookshops in time for the Crow Full Moon, Spring Equinox, on March 25 2027. I’m enjoying my book making being back in synch with the moon cycles again.

Salena Godden, Gathering Sweet Octoberries

I went for a swim with Julie the other day. It was cool and blissful – about the same water temperature as the day in spring when I took a call from photographer Alex Ramsay He rang to let me know we’d been offered an opportunity in Salt, Girona, at the Casa De Cultura Les Bernardes (CCLB) to exhibit Os – a collection of Alex’s exquisite black and white photos of bones and my poems written in response.

I took Alex’s call on my Bluetooth earbuds while swimming head-out-of-the-water breaststroke which added to my sense of being translated, suddenly and unexpectedly, into glamour. “This is what it must feel like to be a star,” I thought. 

Everything about our journey to Girona for the launch of the exhibition last month felt like being suspended in good fortune, fun, and generous kindness. We were held up by forces I only partially understand: all travel arrangements made for us; a taxi to meet us at the airport; a fine hotel; dinners of delicious tapas and wine; profound and light-hearted conversations with artists and people who’ve dedicated their lives to bringing the work of artists into collective spaces.

And at the heart of my involvement with Os was collaboration, which for me has been a means of multiplying my creative potential to make more than the sum of the parts I brought to the endeavour. I’ve so enjoyed working with a photographer of such skill and experience – the trip and exhibition were a wonderful bonus.Central to the Os experience at CCLB was seeing my poems translated into Catalan by award-winning translator Jordi Fité – an act of artistic intimacy which I experienced as my poetry being deeply seen. What a privilege to have every word considered, held up to the light, weighed in the palms of someone who is passionate about a language so often persecuted. When I saw my poems in the exhibition space, and heard a couple read aloud at the launch, it felt as if my words had been set to a precious and rare music. 

Liz Lefroy, I Am Translated

Generally speaking, ekphrastic poetry is not my thing, but I was recently invited, along with several other poets, to be part of what sounds like it will be, assuming it gets funded, a very interesting public art project that will combine poetry and painting, and that got me thinking about my first ekphrastic poems, which I wrote, also as part of a public art project, about fifteen years ago. I was one of several poets each of whom were paired with artists associated with the Upstream Gallery. My partner was the artist Allen Hart, who provided me with images of some of his paintings. Most were from a series of paintings of insects. We did not use the two original poems that I wrote, “The Praying Mantis” and “On The Mating Of Rhino Beetles,” which made it into Words For What Those Men Have Done […]

For the public component of the project, Allen chose to use our pairing of his painting called The Dwarf In Armor and the title poem from The Silence of Men. The gallery mounted each of the poems next to the artwork to which it had been a response, and I have this memory of Allen being at the opening in his wheelchair, listening intently as each poet read their work in turn, and of him smiling from ear to ear when my turn came and I read “The Silence of Men,” almost as if I was reading it exclusively to him.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Ekphrastic Poetry

I dreamed the first two or three stanzas of this poem, and when I woke the next morning, parts of the dream were still vivid for a short time, so I wrote as quickly as I could. Much of the phrasing and imagery in tho early stanzas are extremely close to my recollection of he dream. Unfortunately, it faded as they always do. The rest of the poem emerged as it wanted. I should add that Guy Clark wasn’t in the dream but did find his way into the poem, and I’m glad he did. […]

This is a poem with a gun in it though I don’t know
how it entered, and I guess I should ask why it’s here.
It was already in place when I woke up this morning
and began to write. I look at the page, and see the gun
resting in the first line as if it belongs there, as if
it were waiting, and I don’t know exactly what to do
to get it out of my poem, so I close my journal and
fix some coffee, then come back to the work, slowly
opening to that page— It’s still there.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 15”

The artist is a child, with a gift. One who, so endowed, steps forth into the unknown – hopeful, proud, subject to stumbling. The gift is simply an intuition of beauty : coupled with a talent for expression. A capability.

I have been making poems since 1956, when I was 4 yrs old. That was three score years and ten ago, by my count.

Since around 1986, my attention was drawn to long poems. That’s about 40 years ago, by my calculation. And it strikes me sometimes that all these longitudinal efforts seem like variations on one very long poem. I don’t know : they change, they shift into different keys and registers… but the focus remains unchanged.

Henry Gould, Breezeway

I read something this morning that was both reassuring and revealing – a comment by poet and novelist Fred d’Aguiar, about a new collection by Grace Nichols, The Tracks of My Name. 

He’s written about her book, “‘To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers.”

I haven’t heard it expressed so well before, this issue of post middle age atrophy. I’ve heard about poets who shone when they were young and never again but not such close attention to that phenomenon. Beyond middle age where do we find that fire, how do we forget? This is going to keep me going for a while. 

Jackie Wills, Turning up every day

I have tried various things for Scotstober over the years including finding the words used in other poets’ work when I didn’t trust my own attempts. The past couple of years I try and write a wee poetic snippet using the word each day and then try and knit them together into a poem at the end of the year. Sometimes it works, sometimes, no. I can see a glisk of something coming.

No apologies for my use of Scots. I’m not a native speaker, but I do my best, trying to use the language as I’ve heard or read it in Scotland, usually Glasgow. I’m just having fun.  

Day 10

girse – grass thi scrab aiples rottit oan thi girse birsin unnerfit thi juice av October

Day 11 jalouse – to suspect, to think few wad jalouse thi mirk in me tae bite doon on its cauld steel expectin tae taste licht

hinnied-sweet

Day 12 thrawn – very stubborn ah ken theres a hoolin o wind ootside but ahm tae thrawn tae switch oan thi heatin hap yersel wi stockins an woolen blankets jist coorie in

Day 13

stroop/stroup – a spout thi cauld leavin mah banes lik thi hush frae thi kettle’s stroupDay 14 – deave/deeve – to annoy, to deafen murrin at mah feet ah can maistly forget she wis deavin me fur fuid i thi wee oors

Day 15 – quine – a young woman or girl ahm no a quine no a carline no a wifie naebody cries me hen or missus ahm a wummin an auld soul a new soul

a body in mah ain body

Day 17 – flech – a flea or a restless person flechin – to be restless mah hert unsattelt flechin at thi sicht of thi sun trinnlin doon yer jaw ah mind yer wairmth

Day 18 – wrang – incorrect, wrong

smitched wi autumn amh drawn wrang i thi city av gowd and crisp-blae ahm thi shaddae-hauf

Gerry Stewart, Scotstober 2026

holy heck! the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award last night! Huzzah! I mean, I am rather shocked, given how many times I’ve been up for this thing over the years (seven, by my count). My thanks much to the judges, and to Arc Poetry Magazine, as well as to the other shortlisted authors: Nina Berkhout for The Great Wake and Vera Hadzic for Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery. It is an unexpected thing, and a great pleasure and honour! Of course, this means that I can no longer complain about never having won a book award (whether as the Diane Warren or, as Andy Weaver prefers, the Susan Lucci of the Archibald Lampman Award, but that joke may have also just run its course). Also, Christine and I are the only couple to have both (so far) won the award, given she won same in 2018 for her second poetry collection, Charm (Book*hug Press, 2017). Which means: every adult in our household has won the Archibald Lampman Award. Might this put undue pressure upon our young ladies as well, to eventually produce poetry titles to perhaps win the award themselves? We shall see. Aoife (my ten year old) insisted on being at the event last night, and she took an array of photos with my phone, some of which were terrible, and others that were of herself (it took me twenty minutes to get my phone back, once leaving the stage), but at least she did capture the moment itself: [photo]

rob mclennan, the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award!

Have you heard the big news? Kim’s current collection – The House of Broken Things – has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. You’ll probably know that her previous book – All The Men I Never Married – won the Forward Prize. Personally, I think this collection is even better, so I was genuinely surprised when it didn’t make the shortlist for this year, and wasn’t PBS recommended. All that amounts to nothing in the face of the Eliots: it’s safe to say that it’s the most prestigious poetry award in the UK, arguably in the world.

So whilst Kim is in a state of disbelief, I am not. And whilst she won’t allow herself to consider actually winning, I am already planning what she will do with the prize money. First on the list, obviously, is champagne for all the people who are going with her to the awards, ie her family plus Me. Second: a lovely new sofa for me to sit on when I come round. And third on the list is a lovely holiday with her best friend, aka Me.

Other prizes Kim has won include the Eric Gregory, and the Geoffrey Dearmer, the Northern Writer’s Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Award. She’s been shortlisted for a Forward Best Single Poem. She’s won the Ledbury Prize, and the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and recently she was given the Cholmondeley Award just for existing. There are others, and many more to come.

My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet

by Meg Cox

Of course I had to say I was delighted for her.

In fact be the first of us to say it.

I didn’t think it necessary to mention

that I too had entered the competition.

Of course I smiled and smiled

and said I loved one particular line

in her winning poem – the last is a pretty safe bet

but I hadn’t actually read it

and I won’t be fucking reading it either.

I wonder if the lovely, late Meg Cox was taken aback by how popular this poem is! But if the point of poetry is to speak truths which are otherwise unspoken, to give voice to the things we feel but didn’t know we could say out loud – this poem does it in bucket loads. Being jealous of our friends, feeling somehow diminished by their successes, is an unpleasant quality and a painful experience, and it’s hard to admit that I sometimes feel like this. And in the last week, I heard that my DYCP Arts Council application had been rejected (again), which inevitably added more fuel to my insecurity.

There are ways of facing it. Chief amongst them is the fact that Kim is my friend and a glorious person and I love her, and regardless of my own fragile ego, what makes her happy ultimately makes me happy too. I could tell myself that competitions and grants and awards and book sales don’t matter, but that’s a massive lie. Economically, emotionally, professionally, they make a huge difference, and working very closely with someone who enjoys those benefits whilst I don’t – I have to allow space for how that feels, so I can respond to it and cope with it. I could remind myself that a publisher can only submit four collections to the Forwards – plus any authors who have previously been shortlisted – which means that authors published by big publishers like Bloodaxe are at a disadvantage. But that’s not true for the Eliots. So I remind myself that whilst you have to be an outstandingly good writer to win any big poetry prize, there are lots of excellent writers who never win. So I look after the bits of me that feel sore, and work hard at the things I do well, the things that matter to me.

Clare Shaw, My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet

I’ve been lucky. I’ve won a couple of poetry things, and I’ve come close a few times. I’ve also come nowhere near about a bazillion times; the scrappy Word document on my computer that pretends to be a submissions spreadsheet is highlighted almost entirely in a peppy and upbeat shade of red. Still, lucky. Last weekend I got to go to the Winchester Poetry Festival and my poem wild was commended by judge Julia Copus, which was lovely. Of course it would have been nice to win, though Vanessa Lampert’s winning poem The Rub was a beautiful choice that is still burning away gently somewhere at the back of my head. The best thing about being at these things, for me, though, is seeing your poetry people and meeting new ones, the people that don’t glaze over or look uneasy when you mention the word poetry. It’s nice to be in the room, literally and figuratively, and OK, fine, it’s even better to be on the list.

But here’s my hot take, for what it’s worth. It’s not original, but it bears repeating: I’m not a better poet if I win something, and I’m not a worse poet if I don’t. Nobody is. Winning is lovely, and I don’t want to take anything away from that, because that person has always written something that has genuinely stood out. They should be proud of it. That’s incontrovertible. But it’s also true that there’s a hefty dose of chance in the mix. Right place, right time, right judge, right poem, right time again. Lots of people find this stressful, too subjective, maybe even a little unfair, that it comes down to the subjective opinions of a handful of people, maybe just one person. Judges – and winners – can be hauled over the poetic coals, and it’s not pretty. But do you know how unbelievably fascinating this is to someone who’s marked GCSE papers for a quarter of a century? There’s no rubric! No set of externally determined criteria set by shadowy figures who don’t actually do your job! It’s THRILLING. And actually, it takes some pressure off, doesn’t it? All we can do is write our poems and send them, and send them again. We can’t control any of the other factors. And I’m not immune to jealousy or wishful thinking. I’m not a robot. But this way it’s easier not to let these things get you down, and not to let them go to your head. Winning, or not winning, doesn’t change the quality of your writing. It’s not the poetry.

In 2023 I won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize and here’s how down to chance it was: the day after I entered, the week before the deadline, I realised that I hadn’t received a confirmation email for the pamphlet prize, though I’d had one for the single poem competition. I sent a ‘sorry to bother you, just checking! No worries if not! Probably being stupid!’ email (I’ve GOT to stop emailing like that) just to check, and then just to cement my extreme lack of cool, followed up. And it turned out that in fact I hadn’t completed my submission properly and they’d never received it. I squeaked it in by the deadline and that’s how I was even in the running for the thing that changed my whole career. I KNOW, RIGHT?! And even then, on a different day with a different judge and the wind in a different direction, it wouldn’t have happened. Think about it. There are far more excellent, talented, skilful poets out there than there are poetry prizes to win.

Nia Broomhall, Week 31: The Live Canon Poetry Prize Anthology 2024

There are some poets who don’t believe in editing their work. “Once you have finished a piece” they say “It is done, No need to fiddle about with it, Move on to the next one”

Perhaps for them this is true. I’m not sure that I have ever heard anyone who I would consider a brilliant poet say it, but I certainly understand where they are coming from. Occasionally I have a burst of creativity, and a piece just flows from the end of my fingers onto the page and looks great. But in 99% of cases (and yes, I have written enough poems to give an accurate percentage, they need a whole lot of fiddling about with.

I do enjoy those online poetry prompts on Bluesky. I have got into the habit of doing one every Friday morning over breakfast, like some people do the crossword in a newspaper. I take a perverse pride in the idea that I can read the prompt, dash out a dozen or more lines and have it up on the feed all in the space of three quarters of an hour, max.

Of course, once they are posted I usually noticed how I could have said things a little better. And if I ever use one to send to a journal or somewhere, I generally updated it with the improvements that I have noticed. That way I can claim that it’s never been published even on my own social media1. A handful have accepted too. I have to admit that they probably wouldn’t have been quite as appealing in their untweaked form.

Mike O’Brien, A Day at the Races – Poetry Workshopping and Editing

Basically, as soon as I got to ‘Hygge’ and looked up I knew I was living the poem. It’s not a complicated poem by any stretch. It’s short, no big words, no rhyme to skip it along, but it paints a beautiful picture of a time of year that at the time of writing is only 63 days a way. But if ‘Hygge’ is about comfort and conviviality, this speaks a little more to locking the world out, and I like that challenge to the concept. I wonder if the first line of the third stanza can be read as a rule for hygge…”there must be no-one else for miles”, or as a description or observation that follows the second stanza…there must be no-one else for miles”. I’m not sure my italics/bolding makes that clear, but I hope you see which tree I’m barking up.

I think it’s the former on the grounds of the second stanza…the world is being shut out, the night is being held at bay under strain. Some semblance of silence is hard to find and this moment the poem capture is hard one and well-earned (we assume). This peace is needed for good health…and I love the way the poem closes on another word imported from elsewhere into common parlance, Sláinte. This simple thing, this simple moment requires a lot of fighting for. And that’s not a bad thing to capture in 11 lines.

Mat Riches, Harvey’s Rabbiting On

For the English poet John Clare (1793–1864) — born two years before Keats, whose “To Autumn” we revisited last Friday — the sentience of the natural world was as much a given as it was for the more famous Romantics. “All nature has a feeling,” he proclaimed, in the poem of that title featured here in May of last year. Like Keats, Clare intuited the particular “feeling” of the year’s wane. But in Clare’s poetic imagination, as Today’s Poem makes clear, autumn could be less a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” than a season of apocalyptic end, foretelling the death of time itself.

Interestingly — though not that surprisingly, given that the seasons have ever offered themselves as go-to subjects for poetry — Clare wrote many autumn poems. Of all times of the year, for the emotionally fragile Clare the autumn was both the most beautiful and the most troubled. The critic Jonas Cope relates an incident in August 1811, during the harvest and on the cusp of true autumn, to which Clare attributed his subsequent physical and mental afflictions. Eighteen years old, Clare witnessed the fatal fall of a man named Thomas Drake from a “load of hay,” an experience set down ten years later in his Sketches in the Life of John Clare: “the gastly palness of death struck such a terror on me that I coud not forget it for years.”

The trauma, it seems, lay in the instantaneousness of the event: life, its neck snapped, transfigured as death in the time it took a man to fall off some hay. For Clare, this shocking revelation of the nearness of death resulted in disturbingly vivid dreams of churchyards and charnel houses. It also overlaid his waking perceptions with a veneer of horror; in another part of his Sketches , he describes being chased at night by a terrifying fiend that turns out, in the end, to be a neighbor’s stray foal. Told this way, the story sounds comical, but to the poet, as Jonas Cope points out in his account of it, even this mundane explanation for the “monstrosity” amplified, rather than relieving, the grotesquerie of the encounter.

So although Clare would assert that autumn was the season he loved most, the year’s cyclical wind-down brought with it a recurrence not only of the physical illnesses that inevitably attend the colder, wetter weather, but also of the emotional breakdown which, as Clare himself insisted, derived from his experience of that 1811 harvest tragedy. When, in his own “To Autumn,” he exhorts the season to come, it is as “pensive autumn,” whose melancholy and minor-key disorder seem to accompany — and oddly console — his own unsettled mind, haunted by the twin specters of natural and human mutability.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Autumn

There’s a gentleness to the way the lines unfold, a tender sensitivity to the things around him, that seems to suffuse the stanza with love. The combination of gentleness with metrical regularity adds to the sense of security that the stanza creates.

So far so delicately lovely. What’s utterly ravishing, though, is the sudden change of tempo and rhyme scheme in the next four lines. Though the underlying sense of security persists, the change itself is as electrifying as the sudden soaring of the treble or soprano high C in Allegri’s Miserere. Steady alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables dissolves into swiftly gliding runs of unstressed or only lightly stressed syllables between the two dominant stresses in each line. The change of metre and rhyme pattern makes the stanza’s form seem alive and vitally engaging, while the shift from more separated to closely successive and very strong rhymes create a feeling of order and containment. Images undergo swift transformations – moon to flower to smiling woman, heaven’s high bower as a trellis woven with the smaller flowers of the stars to high bower as windowed boudoir in a castle – but these images don’t displace each other, they accumulate and shine out together in the imagination.

Shining together is the key. Heaven and earth, the vast spaces of the cosmos and the tiny lives within it are as it were equalised in the loving gaze of trusting innocence. The harmony evoked by the images in this humanised world is underpinned by a lovely pattern of echoing sounds. Among the phonetic echoes I think the long /i/ is particularly important, heightening the impact of shine, silent, I, mine, high, silent, delight, smiles, night. Richly evocative in themselves, it’s as if each calls the others forth as natural answers or complements to it.

Edmund Prestwich, Ravishing metrical beauty: Blake’s “Night”

There’s something slightly complacent about ‘Late Empire’. Partly I think that’s in the verse — the style is just a little bit lazy and redundant around the edges (‘burned to ash’, ‘in the lamplight’), and the simile in the middle of the poem, which compares the boredom that keeps us awake to ‘a mouse chattering on midnight floors’, felt somewhat random and anti-climactic. Why a mouse? Wouldn’t a more specifically modern example have been more effective here? And why chattering? Mice make tiny, annoying scurrying, scuffling and scraping noises, and occasionally you can hear them squeaking to each other behind the wainscot, but then you would need mice, and I still wouldn’t call it chattering.

But the complacency is also in the tone and in something like the rhetorical attitude of the poem. This is hard to pick apart because of course the poem is about a kind of complacency or at least passivity: the ‘we’ of the poem didn’t do anything to change or even object to their circumstances; they just got on with life, taking comfort were they could — going to ‘noisy bars’ and, as the last line has it, ‘We gossiped. We believed what we were told.’ The poem is obviously not condoning this; it is asking us to recognise it (in ourselves) and condemn it. I think what bothers me about the poem is that it feels rather as if it is calculated to acknowledge the reader’s guilt and complicity just enough to make them feel as if they have done something by reading it. Ultimately, I find its rhetorical strategy slightly revolting. (Though you might of course feel that this is both intentional and indeed the point.)

All the same, it’s impressive to see a contemporary poem in English even attempting to ‘capture the mood’. Rarer still, I think, is the topical or political poem that does something more than just package and present its readers’ attitudes back to them — I mean, one that attempts instead to intervene in our interpretation. I’ve written about it briefly before, but the example of this that has stayed with me the longest is Heaney’s ‘Anything can happen’, a version of Horace Odes 1.34 first published as ‘Horace and the Thunder’ in the Irish Times a couple of months after 9/11 […]

Victoria Moul, What makes for a good topical poem?

In 1922, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) wrote a curious sonnet — a poem that essentially undermines a good portion of the endeavor of poetry. We may think we see the beautiful or sublime in the striking vistas of nature. We may declare the power of art to find the truth of beauty. But if beauty is a formal entity — an Idea, in Plato’s sense, as something supersensual that is imitated, instantiated, or shadowed in the physical objects that participate in it — then beauty in itself, Beauty, is beyond all sense. And the beauty of mathematics, geometry in particular, can give an intellectual vision of that Beauty, unhidden by the masks of the physical: “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”

A Petrarchan sonnet with a slightly eccentric sestet (rhymed abba-abba in the opening octave and cdd-ccd in the final six lines), “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare” dismisses those who “prate of Beauty.” Millay, in fact, compares them to geese who gabble and hiss — “but heroes seek release / From dusty bondage into luminous air.”

“Luminous” is a curious word here. I suspect it’s drawn from the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where those who escape the deceitful, non-philosophical life, taking shadows for reality, emerge from the cave into the light of the true sun that is the Good. But Millay extends the image into a description of Euclid’s grasping a Platonic form: “O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, / When first the shaft into his vision shone / Of light anatomized!” (“O holy, terrible day” gestures, I think, toward Good Friday, and “light anatomized” toward Newton, a curious combination.)

Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō (“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”) was inscribed above the door of Plato’s Academy — or so the almost certainly apocryphal story has it. Millay echoes something of that thought, at least in the sense that geometry is a flowing of Beauty into intellectually graspable shapes that are true, elegant, and universal — transcendental characteristics of Ideas. And she calls “fortunate” those who have heard, even if “once only and then but far away,” the sound of Beauty’s step: a “massive sandal set on stone.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare

No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says “I AM,” a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us. It is our existential wanderlust that makes us what we are — pilgrims of mortality, forever coming home to the horizon of tomorrow.

Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) captures this paradox, with subtlety that doesn’t offer an answer but whispers the living question back to you, in an unedited poem found among his papers after his death, beautifully read in the original Spanish by my Patagonian friend Manuel Gutiérrez — a communicator of wonder through theater, music, and humor, whose hospitality made the serpentine birdworlds possible and who is always teaching me how to navigate the terrain of life with an open heart for a compass.

Maria Popova, The Map to the Route of Your Life

I am the king of poems
because of the wings in my head
and I bow before my sandwich
like time before space
where do we put the bullet holes
except in place of stars?

Gary Barwin, On Detective Fiction. Also Moby Dick.

Bishop enjoyed her comforts. She took many lovers, including the wife or a prominent visual artist in Seattle, but that’s another story. There are, however, at least three novels written about Elizabeth Bishop’s life. Her reticence to expose her private life when she was alive, seems to have left space for others to make her life their own imaginary pathways into her private life. “Sometimes I’d rather they simply kept things to themselves,” Bishop said in an interview when asked about the confessional poets. She was not a fan of self disclosure. She was a fan of beauty and truth and Keats.

We do know that Bishop wrote some of her first great poems while in that Paris apartment. My favorite of this time period (one of my favorites is, “Paris, 7 AM,” which begins here:

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment
Some hands point histrionically one way
And some point others, from the ignorant faces.
Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge
So much that days are journeys round the suburbs

Those first days in a new place. Time is a star! Time has a fluid character all its own that changes with the hands of one clock to another. And yes, the apartment was known to house the Contesse’s impressive collection of clocks. I believe Bishop wrote this poem during her first weeks in Paris, still adjusting to the time difference and exploring a city that looms large in any writer’s imagination. The poem also has her (and us) staring out windows:

Look down into the courtyard. All the houses
Are built that way, with ornamental urns
Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons
Take their walks.

There are echoes of her earlier poem, “The Map,” here. And I wonder if this is where “the suburbs” first shows up in a poem. The camera angle of “look down” creates a cinematic touch to the poem — something Bishop became well known for: a shift in perspective, a sleight of hand.

Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop in France: Mystery & Adventure

maybe I’ll call gillian anderson (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), a pamphlet by the award-winning Welsh poet Rhian Elizabeth, is a candid and psychologically astute exploration of maternal identity at a moment of profound change. Taking a daughter’s departure from home as its emotional centre, the collection moves between the mother’s difficult memories of her own early independence and her anxiety for the daughter now making a life beyond her care. Throughout, grief and vulnerability are tempered by sardonic humour, while ordinary domestic details acquire the weight of symbols. The result is a distinctive and accomplished meditation on memory, separation and the painful but necessary transformation of love into trust.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘maybe i’ll call gillian anderson’ by Rhian Elisabeth

“Sappho Wept” has a strong feminist viewpoint and focuses its concerns on how women’s voices and art have been erased from the history books, not just by simply omission, but violently, e.g. through paintings being drawn over and replaced with men’s art. Dunn also explores how traditional roles for women have restricted their ability to speak and explore their own talents in favour of being pushed into a supporting role, away from the limelight and away from historical records. Dunn uses direct, straightforward vocabulary so her point does not get lost through misinterpretation or euphemisms. Although “Sappho Wept” will strike a chord with women generally, it deserves to be read by men too. The poem “Robert Dudley” asks them to consider what it might feel like to be overlooked and sidelined.

Emma Lee, “Sappho Wept” Wendy J Dunn (Other Terrain Press) – book review

In a 2009 interview, in response to the question of how closely [Claire] Crowther drew on her own experiences, she said:

In a way I always do but only as a starting point. I have always felt what I write about – that’s the genesis of a poem. But the detail varies from my own experience – it could be that I observe other families interacting and freely bring in their details. I never feel I have to stick to any one set of facts – I mingle and match facts I’ve observed to serve the poem which becomes something different. In the end, there is rarely any autobiography at all – the poem has taken over completely.

The innate questions of this mix’n’match approach are whether the effort required to try to locate the emotional heart, and the point, of each poem justifies the time spent. I confess that my first read-through was challenging and that the poems – or, rather, some of them – only came alive on a second reading. Perhaps that is a good thing – like music whose depths only reveal themselves over several listenings. […]

In reading such a generous selection of Crowther’s poetry, it becomes a struggle to know when she is making serious points and what they are. The density of her writing, albeit often exquisitely crafted in musical lines, inhibits simple, or simplistic, exegesis and therefore prohibits much in the way of an emotional reaction other than a degree of frustration and, inasmuch as one can judge the tone, a wry smile at the fun Crowther appears to be having, as if one isn’t quite allowed in on the joke. Surely, though, kernels of clarity are gradually revealed over multiple re-readings.

Matthew Paul, Three reviews I wrote two years ago

The remarkable late flowering of Peter Dent continues unabated in these two most recent pamphlets from two of his own micro presses. To quote the opening lines of ‘Market Reaction’, one of the twenty prose poems that make up Riverside Scuffle:

Being at the peak of my decline she grumbled they’ve finally
caught on and realised my achievement.

Where the ‘she’ could just as easily be ‘I’, the poet whose decline peak is higher than the peak of many another’s success.

These prose poems consist of sentences placed beside each other that both resist and strive towards narrative coherence; our readerly urge to create coherence is an intrinsic part of the making of the text. They are, in a way, instances of the ideogrammatic method operating at the level of the sentence.

But I find it hard to articulate the experience of reading these poems. It might be better just to read one, a reasonably straightforward one, at that:

CONSTRUCTION SITE

The girl in front’s hair is dipped delicately into an inkwell.
A sign on a classmate’s back says ‘beware’ or words. An-
tics help pass the day taking the edge off a teacher’s stare.
Oh the angst of mother the chuckle of father the symm-
erty of our days. I repeat myself ad nauseam but still
don’t vomit – why? Latin wasn’t English but that was its
virtue. I flip and flop to the whims of the monsters I’d
like to believe in but can’t. Cuffs override my thumbs –
a useful feature in Winters like this. Homework tonight
will no doubt be no more than half-done and not by me.
I’m just a card in a box the Head relies on come Parent’s
Night. Thoughts of getting at it will keep me awake.
‘Lord’ – I turn the dog-eared page – ‘dismiss us with thy
blessing…’

The basic analogy of school = construction site, a place engaged in the making of educated adults, is clear and obvious from the beginning, but one subtext is that teachers, creatures who, by the nature of their job, tend to repeat themselves ad nauseam, are also being (re)constructed at the same time. And all of this is underpinned by the careful selection and placement of individual words: ‘vomit’, a word with deep Latin roots not the more English ‘retch’ or the more recent and vernacular ‘throw up’; ‘override’ with its sense of replacing or controlling the thumbs, not merely covering them; ‘beware’, a sign more often seen on an actual construction school than on a student’s back; that deft, illuminating ‘delicately’, summoning up an entire relationship; the final quote from an 18th-century hymn written in that fiercely unreconstructed of places, Hebden Bridge. And then there’s the enjambment, the syntactical motor that drives poem and reader forward, creating linkages across images and ideas.

There is an element of social commentary here, alongside some degree of implied autobiography, given that Dent was himself a school teacher; these are not hermetically difficult texts designed to alienate the reader, they just require us to engage beyond the surface, to participate as readers in the act of creation.

Billy Mills, Two More by Peter Dent

I wrote several poems this week. I credit the book of poetry I’m reading, Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola, as recommended by Alyson Dutemple. It’s extraordinary and is seemingly jumpstarting my poetic impulses. All the poems are fresh and exciting to me but I particularly like “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” and “helen of troy goes parking with the defensive tackle”. My unexpected explosion of writing (right after I said I’m not) reminds me of the song “All Four Seasons” by Sting. Well, I do tend toward mercurial. I feel a bit relieved to be writing for myself in this way with no plan or agenda or timeline or desire to share it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Unexpectations Do Happen

My Name is Swan is a book best encountered out loud, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said that about a poetry book before. I enjoy a good poetry reading or performance immensely, but for me, nothing beats the quiet, private hours I spend communing directly with the words on the page. Swan, however, is a different beast, and I strongly urge you to watch this poetry film in full before you encounter the book. Go on, it’s incredible, and award-winning.

Have you watched it now? Good. Now you have entered Swan’s (and Reynard’s, and Body 115’s) world, and you will hear their voices when you read. You will read with their rhythms and cadences, and that is important. Jan has talked on his Substack about how three sequences that, together, make up My Name is Swan came into being, how they lived in other formats for a long time before they made it into print. He has also spoken, in a recent interview with Cara Waterfall, of how

“My Name Is Swan owes much in its construction to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in pace and composition to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, in beat and meter to Art Blakey and Elvin Jones”

Without knowing all of these musicians terribly well, I can hear these sonic influences in the ebbs, flows and stutterings of his lines. The book has a compelling forward momentum – being composed of three long sequences (or one longer meta sequence in three parts), it’s not one to dip into, but one to be carried along with. My initial read was of the whole thing in one go; subsequent reads have zoned in on different segments but you can only really grasp it as a totality.

As such, it’s very difficult to quote from (although I will try!). There are many blindingly good turns of phrase, many skillful sonic echoes and syllabic reverberations, but plucking them out of their place in the score steals away some of their impact.

Victoria Spires, Swanning around with Jan Noble

Mike is an actor. He’s been in films with Peter Sellers and Kevin Kline and has spent decades in TV and theatre. He came to see my show Body 115 on one of those Tuesday nights when there was nobody in. Afterwards he told me a story about a similarly grim experience he’d had when he was starting out, a matinee performance where the theatre had sold just one ticket.

There’s an unwritten rule that if the audience numbers less than the cast then you don’t need to go on. There were two of them in this particular play but they decided that instead of heading off to the pub for the afternoon they would treat it as a rehearsal before the evening show when a decent crowd was expected. They went on and did it, for the joy of it, and performed to an audience of one. They took their bows at the end to a solo standing ovation. Later they learned that their singular audience member was in fact the show’s writer, that he’d driven all the way down from the North of England in order to see his work staged London. He was thrilled. And so were they. And this is art.

It doesn’t stop being art if nobody sees it or buys it or reviews it. Mike told me that he read my poem My Name Is Swan aloud in his flat on his own the other afternoon and loved it. “It’s just magnificent” he said. Sure, a mention in the TLS would be nice, coverage in the Paris Review would boost sales and bring me greater visiblity but Mike, Mike the actor, performing a one man show of My Name Is Swan to no one but the gods poetry, that, my friends, that is art.

Jan Noble, Nº86 Absent without leave

What Emil Cioran called “the curse of being born” was not far-fetched to Delmore, whose own family hailed from what was once Romania. Even his own name placed him beneath the cursedness of his birth in a land without roots, in what Mlinko calls “the the social covenant of his very name — Delmore, a clumsy attempt at assimilationism.” Throughout his writings, Delmore would mock and parody his own existence under the sign of “Delmore”, playing with alter egos or secret “Others” like “Hershey Green” and “Shenandoah Fish.” 

“In his last years, Schwartz had girls like houris lining up to take care of his sorry alcoholic ass, and it still didn’t matter. He wrote almost nothing after his mid-forties, held forth at White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas met his demise (beware those Mozartian talkers!), and died alone,” in Mlinko’s words.

When Delmore Schwartz had a heart attack in the hallway of a cheap Manhattan motel, it took more than an hour for someone to call an ambulance. By the time the sirens arrived, Delmore was dead. His corpse lay unclaimed in the morgue for two days. And his literary corpus remained unfinished. Delmore had started an epic poem titled Genesis, but the protagonist only reached the age of seven after two hundred pages… If Delmore wrote himself repeatedly, he was also written by friends. Saul Bellow painted a portrait of Delmore in his roman-a-clef, Humboldt’s Gift. Ashbery said Delmore’s late poetry seemed “to lack the electric compressions and simplifications that animate his early writing, tending toward bald assertiveness.” James Atlas says Delmore spent his last days sitting in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, “filling one notebook after another with incomprehensible novels.”

Alina Stefanescu, Dream addenda: 1

There is space here and no need for ghosts
in this thin strip of life we walk through
today, temporary as bees and butterflies

between celandine and thistle heads,
the flash of silver birch tugging our eyes
in wind warm with rain. Birthdays,

deathdays, and what lies in between:
about five miles from here where we can walk
way up to where we can no longer breathe.

Chris Edgoose, Sweetbriar 7

When I learned in August that Seattle poet, memoirist, and editor Koon Woon had died, I added to my morning list, “write blog post for Koon.” What happened?

This morning, I am remembering Koon’s generosity. And I have much to be grateful for, as Body My House would not exist had Koon not contacted me in 2018 and asked if I had a poetry manuscript Goldfish Press might publish. I recall that I was busy with teaching, and with family responsibilities. I didn’t have a manuscript. Although I was already percolating the poems that would become The Pear Tree, I wouldn’t be able to finish that book until after my mother’s death. And who knew when that would be?

You must have so many poems, Koon said. Send me sixty other poems and we’ll talk.

Toward the end of the process, I wasn’t happy with the design. After much hand-wringing, I contacted him, offering to pay an outside designer. I feared Koon would refuse and we would end by parting ways, the book unpublished, feelings stomped. Instead, his email back to me was jolly. Yes, of course, whatever I wanted. He ended with “Less work for me!”

So, my apologies for the late eulogy, coupled with my certainty that Koon would laugh, and respond in his typically gracious manner.

In addition to his work on Chrysanthemum and the press, supporting other poets and the poetry community, Koon wrote several books, including Water Chasing Water, poems, and Paper-son Poet, his memoir. His poems chronicle his journey from China to America, from Aberdeen to Seattle, through bouts of homelessness and mental illness to his life as a writer. His particular genius is precise description and image, as in this passage about his grandmother’s hands:

The past folds up like an origami bird,
Will not dissolve like candy.
Grapes cling to the vine, hands weave bamboo baskets,
Hands supplicate and light incense,
Buddha holds her in his palm.
I fold paper for hands of ancient vine,
Hands that couldn’t come along
And hands will open gates if I should return.

—Koon Woon, excerpt from “The Memory of Hands”

I found other tributes on the Internet (see below), and want especially to point you toward this one (courtesy of Cascadia Poetics LAB) with its link to Koon’s interview with David Gilmour.

To Koon Woon, life is a series of rented rooms. Some—like the village [where] he was born or the three-bedroom house on Oak Street in Aberdeen that he moved into at age 12—are literal. “Everybody in a sense is living in a rented room,” he said in a phone interview last week, “In a more profound way, we are all renting time on Earth.”

—Ryan Teague Beckwith, Daily World writer (from Paper-son Poet, p. 130)

Koon Woon’s influence will continue, but his physical presence in the world is much missed.

Bethany Reid, Koon Woon, 1949-2026

My nose has been deep into books and other fancies, so my apologies for not publishing here. For the longest time, Anne Carson’s book Autobiography of Red has been on my shelf. She recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature and thus, like many folks, my eyes gravitated to her work which I’m learning I love very much.

Also. About half my life ago, I picked up Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, a very compelling look into the senses. I loved the book so much—half my life ago—that after a few dozen pages I had to put the book down. Her mind resonated too much with my own. I couldn’t continue. I had to go live my life and live through my senses as deliciously as possible before I could open the book again. So, half my life later I decided it was time to pick the book up again. But I also wondered what Diane Ackerman had been up to lately. Where is she? What is she doing? And it turns out that she has another book coming out in January and miraculously, it’s a compendium book further examining our senses. What are the odds? And then I realized that she has a Substack. I’m not too sure if it’s because she wants community online but part of me suspects that it has a lot to do with marketing for her new book. But there’s something so intriguing about inaccessibility, as well. Or is it just me? And wow was I star-struck when I commented on her Substack, telling her my story of reading part of her book, and she responded! She was touched!

Anyway, like many folks, I’m sorta demystified by the internet lately. I have been finding it easier and easier to miss out and instead take a walk, read, spend time face-to-face with folks, and create/enjoy things. During a commute home from work, I listened to a commute-long (35 minutes) poem/performance by Anne Carson called “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”. It inspired the following poem about unwebbing.

Sarah Lada, A Poem about Unwebbing

A while back I had not one but three people contact me about a poem of mine titled “What The Onion Teaches.” This is a highly uncommon occurrence for a writer of my anonymity. Even stranger, that poem had been published a decade ago.

It turns out my short and simple poem had been assigned in some college lit class (I’m guessing freshman) along with the ubiquitous questions on what the poet meant, why the poem’s images were chosen, and worse. I had an engaging back-and-forth with one student who really wanted to get extra credit on his assignment. But I didn’t have answers for his professor’s questions.

To me, none of those questions get anywhere near why we read, let alone write, poetry. Such questions often turn readers away from their own experience of a poem. (Reading imposed for the purpose of assigning a grade may be a main reason why so few people read for pleasure once they’re out of school.)

I am incredibly fortunate to be in a longstanding poetry workshopping group. The five of us gather once a month around a picnic table in a quiet nature preserve to read, discuss, and hopefully improve each other’s newest poems. Very often we find meanings, metaphors, and other juicy bits the poet hadn’t anticipated. The eye of the beholder and all. Oftentimes the poet, too, finds what they hadn’t realized was there.

The process of recognition can be delayed, the way it was when I asked an artist friend about her fondness for painting a pond close to her home. The spring pictures were gorgeous, but I thought my favorites were her autumn scenes. Until I saw her winter versions. Each painting included three foreground trees and a misty, out-of-focus tree beyond the water. I asked if it was always misty when she painted. She told me there wasn’t really a tree on the other side, it just made for good perspective. Much later, when we were talking about our offspring, she mentioned for the first time that she’d had a fourth child, a full-term stillborn son. I asked (probably too directly) if he might be represented by that fourth tree, always present with the other three trees. “Oh my God,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”

The poems we’ve loved have a way of deepening in us, so I’m no longer surprised when a poem I haven’t encountered for years speaks to places in me that have evolved since I last read it. That’s true of poems I’ve written too. The presence of something significant can be right there, waiting till we see it, like that misty tree.

Laura Grace Weldon, What A Poem “Means”

Long ago in a foreign land I attended a reading by the poet Les Murray. One poem I wish I could remember had an epigraph to which he referred, with what degree of irony I couldn’t gauge, as a ‘sky note’. All at once that evoked music, elevation, weather, flight.

Some years before, engaged in the trying task of judging poems for a competition, the panel was considering one example. A gifted younger poet dryly observed ‘This poem has two things I dislike: one, an epigraph, and two, worse still, an epigraph in Latin.’ I was struck by his assurance on an issue I’d never considered an issue. It came as a challenge and a breath of fresh air. I also agreed with what was being implied: that poems shouldn’t be a display of learning. They shouldn’t strive to be excluding. Heavens knows, with such a small audience, why try to thin it down even further.

Still, I didn’t feel the argument was settled. Something should have been said, and wasn’t, on the other side. Firstly, what’s so wrong with having another voice positioning or counterpointing the voice of the poem? Secondly, although it’s the source of a large portion of English vocabulary and ubiquitous in college and institutional mottos, Latin is for most of us a dead language, and yet…do we want it proscribed for that? The continuing emergence of new translations of poets such as Virgil, Ovid and Catullus would strongly suggest there’s life in it still, even if a borrowed one.

Another consideration that has surfaced decades after this discussion is the presence of the internet and the facility, a matter of seconds, to track down, source and translate any quote from another language at least in roman script. Latin presents no obstacle. So, the question comes down to whether an epigraph, in whatever language, in whatever way, adds something to the poem. If so, well and good.

Gerard Genette in his great taxonomical treatise Paratexts is surely right to see paratexts as thresholds (Seuils is the French title), as “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition, but also of transaction.” Only in his claim that paratexts are “in the service of a better reception for the text” does his argument seem too functionalist. What about the possibility that they may serve to confuse or subvert or discomfort reception? That they may challenge or even discredit the text, or indeed vice versa?

Jamie McKendrick, The Use of Epigraphs and the Importance of Patches

One thing I appreciate about the current generation of U.S. undergraduates–at least the one I get to teach–is how literate many are about mental health. They reveal more of this likely hard-earned knowledge in writing than in classroom conversations, not surprisingly. I just finished grading a batch of short essays on mid-20th-century US poetry. Some students wrote insightfully about the activist dimensions of poems from the Civil Rights era or related later work–Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa. Others focused on Confessional poetry that overtly engages psychological crisis. The last few considered how Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” suggests an author trying not to fear bipolar disorder; a young mother’s detachment from her baby and her own body in Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song”; and anaesthetized avoidance as a way of coping with trauma in Plath’s “Tulips,” a poem the student argued characterizes identity as a state of change. The prompt was to consider what authenticity and/ or selfhood seem to mean in a single piece. Through all the essays, I sensed real humans engaging with complicated poems they felt drawn to. The essays weren’t perfect, of course (no AI assistance allowed), but it was a pleasure to spend time with them.

In our classroom discussions, we’ve been probing what the textual markers of authenticity might be among these poets and among readers now. Not that authenticity, whatever it means, matters to everyone. Plenty of poets and critics don’t find the concept useful or interesting, and that’s fair. Poetic voices are shifty, performing selves as well as expressing them, even when the material is autobiographical. But authenticity certainly meant something to the Beats, Confessionals, Black Arts, feminist, and gay liberation poets of the era we’re considering.

Some stylistic elements can make a poem feel real, beyond pronouns and paratext: sensory and other details that conjure an experience with vivid authority. The dashes and panicky pivots in Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” suggesting PTSD. Obscenities and painful bluntness about taboo material: allowing yourself to look bad, in essence. Self-questioning moments that manifest the process of thinking and writing within the final product of the published poem (“(Write it!) in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”). Documentary elements such as referencing history, dating or footnoting poems, etc. If you register other kinds of textual detail as signs of authenticity, whatever that means to you, I’d be interested to hear them.

Lesley Wheeler, What makes a poem feel authentic

I returned home yesterday after spending 4 days/5 nights in Grand Junction, CO, at the brand new Grand Lodge Writer’s Retreat. This retreat is a new endeavor run by writers Tammy Bendetti and Minadora Macharet, who I have long “known” on the Internet. Due to some last minute cancellations, I had the whole comfortable house (used as an Air BnB during non-retreat times) to myself. Being at the beginning of what could be a new manuscript in a place that is just beginning to provide a space for writers seemed like a great fit.

And it was. I was very productive, taking time to work on things that I would not do at home. Wait, I thought you were retired? some imaginary reader just said. Don’t you have time to do this at home? That is technically true. But home always has other callings. For example, spending three hours finding a poem I was unfamiliar with and loving it, clocking that it used some sort of nonce repetitive form, color-coding the poem to see how the form worked, and then trying to use that form in a draft of my own? All in one sitting? That would have been a week or more of work at home.

I also began the tedious task of going through poem files to see if any of the new work I’ve been doing plays nicely together. So…an hour plus re-reading about 50 poems, deciding if they might work or not, pulling titles into a document. Then my favorite thing to do when starting to see if the poems might flow together in a new manuscript: first lines/last lines.

This also takes a long time as it requires opening each individual file to pull those lines (I don’t have all of my poems memorized, sorry, not sorry) and place them with their titles into a document. (I think it took me a couple of hours to do this with 50+ poems. ) Why? This resource, once I think I might have a manuscript, is the first way for me to see how one poem flows into the next. It gives me the entry and exit points of each poem so that I can find language, images, or ideas that connect the individual pieces, even if they vary wildly in content. It also saves a lot of paper—before I print anything, I can just move the blocks of first lines/last lines around in a document.

Did I do new drafting? Yes. Did I work on revisions? Yes. Did I accomplish a couple of submissions? Yes. Did I read? Yes. I spent approximately 8-10 hours of my day engaged in language with no interruptions except walks, stretching, and food. That is not something that is tenable to do when at home. And that’s the beauty of a retreat or residency. It’s permission to do whatever you need to do in service of the writing.

To eat hummus and pita chips and olives for lunch or dinner because you are in the middle of an idea and you don’t want to stop. To work diligently in the morning and give yourself the afternoon to walk to the Botanical Garden and Riverside Trails for time outside to think and look at something other than a screen or a blank page. And for me, a change of landscape, the high desert mesas and rock formations a complete departure from the suburban Midwest.

Donna Vorreyer, Begin At the Beginning

I love seeing where poets choose to break their lines and I so admire a great line break. It brings me great joy when I see it done well and I aim to improve my work in this area.

So this week I was editing some poems and thinking about how effectively I had broken the lines. After a while it was becoming laborious and not very productive, so I went for a walk to clear my head. As I was pacing out, I remembered the time I stole a ‘word break’ from a newspaper article about a discovery in the woods… I was lying in bed one morning completing my daily word puzzle and contemplating the things in my day. I happened then to skim the news just to check in on the world before my shower. After reading the main articles I came to one about a discovery in a wood. And it was with such delight that I saw the word broken over two lines so that it became ‘disco very’. My poet brain was alive and I recalled a dream where I had looked out of the window to see a pelican dancing on the patio. That was it. The two things had to go together. And later that day I wrote the poem.

Sue Finch, A PELICAN IS DANCING ON THE PATIO

A good friend often likes to remind me “the journey is the destination”.

Poetry’s a long game, and if we’re playing to get the ‘endpoint’ there’s a lot along the way that could leave us sad and demotivated. If, however, we’re playing for the love of the game there’s a lot about this strange bumpy ride to enjoy.

I’m prone to emotional permanence, present time orientation, and black and white thinking. What that actually means is that I find my current NOW all consuming; it’s really difficult for me to zoom out and see the big picture. In practice this usually results in: ‘today I received a rejection therefore all my poetry is awful and I should just accept I’m a failure and give up’ or ‘today I received an acceptance/good news therefore the future is bright and glossy, I’m unstoppable and all my dreams are about to be realised’ or ‘I’ve had a run of being at work and not having time or capacity to write much therefore I’m no longer part of the poetry world’. The reality? Somewhere in the middle: good things and less good things are ebbing and flowing, every day I sit down to write is a success because I am writing, I’m still a poet even if I’ve not been very involved recently.

A poetry life isn’t just about submissions and rejections, though I know I get sucked into focusing in on that pretty regularly. It’s also about connection with other poets (even though my Au side finds this haaard), reading and/or listening, enjoying the act of writing, spending time at poetry events, moving around the poetry world, and just knowing I’m still a poet even if I’ve not got out much.

Rachael Hill, A recent writing-life roundup

Looking for work gave me a chance to ruminate on years of getting by on freelance writing and editing, teaching adjunct at an MFA program, and generally trying to make a living as a writer of poetry—it’s tough! Until we get more support for the arts, I suspect I’m not the only creative that’s putting their resumes out there for jobs so we can continue buying candy for neighborhood kids and paying for good and shelter and expensive doctors. What do you think, fellow poets? As long as everything keeps getting more expensive and poetry continues to pay almost zero, I think folks with trust funds or tenure track jobs may continue to poet, but the rest of us may be forced into commercial work for a bit, at least.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Job Interviews and Medical Appointments, Fox/Coyote Magic, Fall Reading and All the Fall Feels

I was approached to run some children’s poetry workshops on the theme of autumn. I did some research and was fascinated by the fact that deciduous trees don’t turn red, orange and gold, but are always that colour. It’s just that sunlight sparks the release of chlorophyll in them, and a green colour comes in and dominates. Trees shut the tap on this come September, and so the leaves revert. They don’t become red, orange and gold.

I asked the children to imagine this, and to consider it as a metaphor for everything else about aging (in grandparents, say) as not decay but revelation of what lay under all along. I thought I was being terribly clever.

Then I came across exactly this idea in an Annie Ernaux book. I’ve Googled it just now, because I couldn’t find it in my downloads or kindle library, and I definitely didn’t read it on a physical page. The infernal kid brother know-it-all that is Google’s AI assistant tells me that Thomas Merton said it first. I ask for specifics and a text, and it backtracks.

I am immensely comforted that in an Annie Ernaux book I may never encounter again there is a development of the autumn leaves idea, and sounded out as much texturally as anything else. I’m also glad for the children’s excited faces and also giggles as they pitched variants on the theme, more of them SNL joke makers than future Nobel prize winners. But I can’t remember any specific line or even concept that the children created (a decade ago).

In something of this, is a joy AI will, at best, facilitate. I did once meet a young man now all grown up who had attended one of my workshops, and he was very kind and flattering, despite the fact he was a sober and not particularly arty Geordie male. Again, this is about the near misses, and the nebulous that might rain down complexity. And somehow AI is chlorophyll in my allegory and we need something else in (as) autumn, winter and spring.

Ira Lightman, Bots and Bods

Interviews With Vampires is a series of poems I’m writing about evil. Many of them are about Nazis, or atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust. I can’t say I quite know why I am doing this.

Evil seems at once easy to understand, and completely unintelligible. The Nazis as a whole, and some of them individually, were bent on pursuing evil in its most pure and total form. When a thing is done as part of this project, the connection is usually easy to understand. See, to become good is to acquire the strength to do what one knows is right, and the ability to see opportunities for good that before one was blind to. The inverse of this, the truly evil man, is someone who notices ways to do evil that would never occur to the rest of us. The death camps were set up to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies with maximum efficiently, to make possible the destruction of human life on a massive scale, and their design, while horrifying, is not surprising. What’s surprising are the ancillary evils the Nazis were able to insert into the process. Why did they shave the prisoners’ hair? Wasn’t that a waste of time—in camps that often “fell behind schedule,” with transports lined up waiting to be “processed”? You might think, well, they wanted also to humiliate their victims, not just eliminate them. And that’s true. But they also packaged the hair up and sent it off to factories, to be made into textiles for personal and industrial use. It was even used to make mattresses. Who even thinks of doing that? The surprise is not that an evil person could do such things; the surprise is that anyone could have so much talent for evil, that doing them would occur to him.

Brad Skow, The Kindly Commandant

/ this poem is my going and i cannot stop.
/ silence has an anger. has an edge.
/ how spite can enter a gesture of retort.
/ make a rage beyond retort. is its own shuddering nest.
/ i survive.
/ to become an arbiter of dull expletives.
/ how laughter gleams between the teeth.

Fran Lock, “a song and a mistake”

— If you’re a poet, I recommend reading Ars Poeticas by Julianna Spahr. Don’t hold the Pulitzer Prize against her. The poets are frayed, (I never know whether to say we or they anymore, lapsed poet that I am), we, let’s say we, have a “frayed relationship to poetry” which Spahr says is “an almost universal condition.”

— “A poem, I understood, to be a place for the questions, not for the answers.” Spahr. It’s a book I’ve read but am still absorbing. It’s a book I want to absorb though. Not to be read just once and set aside.

— That poetry can still get at the predicaments we are all in. It feels she says, as though “there is only one way out.” And this is an idea that feels “impossible / to include in a poem tells us something / about the new feats of imagining we / have yet to embrace.”

— I’m always returning to C.D. and her Cooling Time. “We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going — often in different directions at once.” I do think this is our obligation as writers right now. To guard your writing, to be fecund, fertile, protective. Language, says CDW is a bloody Odyssey. Okay what she really says is, that we must “rise above one’s failures, to wrest hope from the next disappointment, to feel such clarity and happiness, to indulge in one’s own fertile mind — the great rush to participate in the odyssey of language, to take up the leaky pen of a long, wended life…”

Shawna Lemay, Basket of Flowers

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

This is perhaps a strange claim, but I am convinced that haiku already exist, and until they are written, they are waiting to be discovered and uncovered for the world to read and hear them. I have come to realize that is how I approach writing haiku, as a process of revealing and liberating, rather than creating. The method is simple: we experience the world with our five senses, which when we write become images. The experiences might be from our earliest childhood memories or as recent as this morning’s tea and toast. We recognize, though, that our moments, no matter how small, are all momentous. The challenge, which makes writing haiku such an arduous task (at least for me), is to find the right words with the right sound in the right order. I think it is not enough that a poem pleases the poet. I see haiku as a communal process, and so, during the drafting, I believe the poet must serve as a proxy for the reader. The closer a poem becomes to being finished, the more the writer has offered to the reader. The path is difficult and the responsibility is profound, but I thrive on the process. When my haiku have the right sound and cadence, when the fragment dovetails with the phrase to fit together seamlessly, and the gap of understanding has been narrowed just enough for the reader to bridge it, then I know I am on the cusp of giving life to one breath’s worth of words.

Jacob D. Salzer, Steve Bahr

Around two and a half years after I first heard the quiet but insistent voice of the book that would become Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change asking to be written, I’ve just last week submitted the final draft to my publisher. There is still much to do–permissions requests to make, and all that goes into the copyediting, production, and promotion processes–but nevertheless it feels like a huge shift, a turning point in my mind and heart. That particular labor is in the past, and I’m trying to allow myself to rest, at least for a moment, in the satisfaction of having done what I set out to do and said what I wanted to say. […]

The book submission was perfectly timed, because it coincided with the inaugural Hellbender Gathering of Poets in Black Mountain, North Carolina, amidst the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains. (A naturalist there told me that the Appalachian Mountains are older than the rings on Saturn!) This new conference, named for the beautifully primordial hellbender salamander—the largest salamander in North America and currently listed as a Vulnerable species—and born from the chrysalis that was the Miami Beach Poetry Festival, is the vision of the wonderful poet and human Nickole Brown. Its mission is to combine poetry, environmental science, and community, and after spending nearly a week at the gathering, I believe they are already successful. Like the School for Living Futures, Hellbender sees potential at the intersections of artistic practice and other kinds of earth-knowledge, and I was inspired to meet so many other poets who are also tuned and tuning into those connections.

The defining feature of the conference was its bringing on local naturalists and botanists to lead a series of “awe walks” on the surrounding trails, helping us poets learn more about what we’re seeing, new ways of looking, and what questions to ask. For this purpose each participant was gifted a magnifying loupe along with our information folder and tote bag upon registration. I learned quite a few things I’ll be taking with me from these walks, including how to distinguish between white and red clover, the best time (spring) and place (the very center or very edge of a patch) to find four-leafed clovers, three styles of spiderwebs (orb, sheet, and tangle), and how oak galls—little ball-shaped things I’ve been noticing all my life but didn’t know what they were—are made. Our guide, Haley, told us that she’s in the habit of collecting oak galls whenever she finds them to give to an artist friend who uses them to make natural ink and dye.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Hellbending

I’ve read several poetry books in the last few months. Hundreds of poems from books published through traditional or hybrid publishers, by poets known and unknown. And I have, more often than not, come away dissatisfied. Not dissatisfied as in critical. No. Not even as in unmoved. There was so much to love. So much that I have underlined, so much I have noted in the margins. But dissatisfied as in a little heartbroken. And it is not the fault of the poems.

Are we expecting too much from a book of poetry. Expecting it to elevate the reader – into a vault of stars, into clear air, into the swirling heart of a tornado? Or at least to leave them stranded on the highway, in the path of incoming traffic? To reveal the eighth colour in the spectrum? To be god?

I have no illusions about my own ability as a poet. Remember when they used to say (was it Malcolm Gladwell who said it first?) you have to put in 10000 hours to become a master at something complex. I have barely notched a thousand. And it shows ever so often. Even as I cover those failings with linguistic straw and dung.

And there are a number of masters. Their shadows fall in rarefied air. But the world is changing every day. The problems are bigger and harder and more obvious than ever, yet seemingly unfathomable. So much seems existential that each day is like an unearned reward. When our eyes shift from the news to a poem, are we expecting to be lulled into a false calmness, find validation or reprieve, or discover a silver bullet between the lines? Or all of those at once?

I will quote Amiri Baraka because I feel that hope and that sadness. Both.

“And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won’t come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.”

All over the world, young people are on the streets, trying to win a future that is sustainable, meaningful, safe, equitable, and free. What is the lexicon the older generation must employ to echo their voices? What are the poems they should write? Or is that poetry redundant already? I see how my words mock me – old, rusty, and anachronistic even as I write them. I have spent the last few weeks desperate for new words, even as I have been following the news and reading other poetry books. The intensity of the written word is still fumbling for the intensity of a single morning of rebellion.

I have nothing. No answer. No solution. No poem. Not even an apology.

What is the purpose of poetry?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A little heartbroken

writing downwards into the spaces

adding wisps of colour
dripping the modifier into
the origins of the alphabet

the point is the paper
start with collage
and a Blackwing pencil

Ama Bolton, ABCD October 2026

Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.

I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.

I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.

Ann E. Michael, Paper

This week: gods in the undergrowth, a hue of metaphysical blue, the traffic of Jacob’s ladder, the low notes of the left hand, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m not religious but I like a sense of the spirit behind the natural world and our interactions with it. The Finnish concept of väki encapsulates this; everything, living or not, has an energy or spirit and it impacts our lives as we come into contact with it. My poetry has been bringing all these influences together recently.

The wet dark, the thick gold light, the spiral of leaf fall, the gods in the undergrowth, creeping age, desire. Though I try to vary what I write about these are popping up again in my poetry at this time of year.

In a strange coincidence as I’ve been reading Sappho, connected to those last two themes, Anne Carson arrived on my radar and on my Substack feeds. I love some of her Sappho translations, so I bought Autobiography of Red a couple of months ago though I haven’t read it yet. I’ve read some her own poems and essays and she kept showing up. I clicked more links. Last month, I wrote a poem inspired by her and Sappho which starts ‘she keeps arriving in worn stone and sandals’ trying to capture this sense of the two of them stepping into my life now.

And then to hear she’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Do we shape the algorithm or does it shape us?

I wrote algorhythm at first which must be a poem.

Gerry Stewart, The Gods in the Undergrowth

I’m sitting in Ted Hughes’ house writing about Sylvia Plath. It feels strange. The desk in my room looks out onto a steep pitch of dense, dark trees on the far side of a valley that reaches almost to the top of the window. Blurry birds occasionally fly past below me. It’s a wonderful, wondering house.

And my random book picker picked Plath this week. This week! The week I’m on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank, her ex-husband’s house, by the village where she is buried. Honestly, it did. I don’t know how I feel about coincidences, and I don’t go looking for signs in my life, as a rule. But I also don’t mess with them if they do show up, and I will tell you that a whacking great black butterfly flew into my window as I was deciding whether there was enough light left to visit her grave yesterday afternoon, and that when I left the house and started up the lane, a whacking great barn owl wheeled silently over me three times and flew away. I’ve been surrounded by poets and poetry and trees all week, so maybe I’m seeing metaphors everywhere, but obviously, I went to see her. The sun came out, and I told her about the owl.

Nia Broomhall, Week 30: Ariel

The back-yard maples are still perfectly green […] but the city’s ash trees are dropping their little tongues of flame on streets and sidewalks and front lawns. They give the lie to this poem, since the summer was terribly dry, but they’re still brightly golden. I’m not complaining.

It’s odd that the yearly change of the leaves appears to be changeless, given how much has changed in the twenty years since I wrote “Suburban Samsara.”

Substack doesn’t do well with stepped lines, so I present these four-stress alliterative lines with verticals to mark the midline caesuras:

Suburban Samsara

Season finale: | last fall, the street
was flaked in yellow, | flecked with sheet-flame,
leaf-gold layering | over the lawns.
The garden buddhas | sat bare-bellied,
navel deep | in a dreamed nirvana,
almost conceding: | Not all is suffering. […]

Maryann Corbett, Leaf-gold Season

As I’ve settled into a regular cadence of writing poetry again, as well as reading a fair bit of it, I figure this is a good time to bloviate all about my pretentious literary thoughts and theories. What else is a blog good for, after all? Here are some of those thoughts, in no particular order:

I don’t think that poetry always needs to be about the sparse and the spare and whittling everything down into the leanest language that can possibly get the job done. I think some poems need space to blunder around on the lawn, mumbling under their breath and slopping their drink over the edge of their glass. Some poems need a thick mattress to jump on as they scream into the void and poke at the sky with a gnarled stick. Some poems are born chubby and need a little more elbow room than others. Some poems need to put on every coat in their closet all at once. Some poems need four cupcakes and the entire jar of sprinkles to self-actualize. I’m beginning to discover the satisfaction of giving them exactly what they want. That’s its own kind of precision.

I’ve never before felt compelled to write a response poem, but I’m writing one now in response to a poem by Daniel Berrigan, and although the topic is grim, it’s an interesting experience, and after this I may want to write more of them. Maybe a poem gets lonely sometimes and wants to hear itself echoed. Maybe a poem wants to know how it affected someone else. Maybe a poem just likes gazing at itself in the mirror.

Kristen McHenry, What a Poem Wants, What a Poem Needs

There are eight months until the publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise. I’m still editing a bit here and there and adding some poems, while waiting for more comments from my editors. Here is a paragraph I added (spoiler alert!):

Up to a point in my life, I appeared to be fearless. People often said that having a baby in a hotel room in Kabul was courageous; rarely did they say it was foolish and dangerous. As a teenager, I went through an illegal abortion, traveling to Nepal while pregnant, and having an unattended birth. I felt confident that I could do these things. If there were setbacks, I found it possible to move forward. Whether it was fearlessness, naivety, or hubris, my thoughts were free of regrets. There would always be a way forward.

All of that crumbled after my son was kidnapped.

In the interim, I’m working on some other things. I am submitting a poetry chapbook (titled My Private Tornado) to presses and contests, and, with the advice and help of a friend, have done an extensive reordering of the poems. As a general rule, chapbooks should stick to a theme or tell a story. The ordering of poems in a chapbook can make or break its likelihood to be accepted for publication.

Risa Denenberg, Month Minus Eight

I am happy to share that I have a wee poem, “Heat Lightning” in the new issue of Tiny Wren Lit. I’m grateful to EiC Dana Knott and guest Editor Kipp Knott for selecting my poem for inclusion in this special Ekphrastic issue.

I’m partial to ekphrastic poetry because imagination is set loose by art and can end up anywhere. Anywhere at all. I chose a piece of art (above) from a collection in The Public Domain Review, “Studies on Twilight Phenomena, after Krakatoa”. The artwork is part of a set of chromolithographs from water colors by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche. They depict the skies after the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia which created strange optical effects all over the world. Fascinating stuff that linked to more fascinating stuff and down into the rabbit hole I fell. My poem has nothing to do with volcanoes and has only a passing reference to skies so where did it come from? Even I am not sure.

Charlotte Hamrick, Poem in Tiny Wren Lit

Last Saturday I had the absolute pleasure of being part of an art & poetry workshop (part of the ongoing Sun Inn Poets project in Manchester) with local artist Ian Ecclestone.

Alongside wonderful poets Tom Branfoot and Adam Taylor I read my poem ‘I am glad to be your daughter’ to a room full of poets, artists, and doodlers and then watched those lovely people draw all over our poems.

Ian had stencilled each poem onto a large piece of board and placed them on tables in the studio at Altogether Otherwise along with a bunch of coloured pens. Participants were invited to listen to each poet reading their poem and to begin drawing, colouring, or mark making in response any time they felt drawn to. There were zero restrictions. Participants could draw on one poem, each poem, every poem, and they could draw whatever came up for them.

I adored seeing how different each poetry board came together (they were each so very different!), and seeing the gorgeous colour added all over my own poem.

I also loved chatting with people as they drew; with poets I knew, and with people I’d never met who’d come along to hear some poetry and try being creative in a slightly different way.

There were several discussions about cross discipline work and the labels we adopt that can then often keep us hemmed into a single discipline. We also spoke about how creativity stems from a similar inner space for all of us, and how although we’re drawn to certain forms much can be gained through exploration into others.

I suspect something exciting happens within when we bring disciplines together. Art of any form is about emotional response, connection; it’s why we care so much whether our work gets published – not just so we can see our names in print but because the other half of creating anything is that creation impacting and/or being witnessed by someone else. Art is communication and connection, and when we use art to respond to art magical things happen. Just watching what emerged across those boards and listening to people’s experiences during the day was testament to that.

It was interesting too to experience this while I’ve been delving further into ekphrasis. My focus has been on writing in response to visual art, yet here was the opposite, drawing in response to written/spoken art, and it had a similarly wonderful result. Some drawings responded literally to images and concepts within the poems, others appeared much more abstract or to be the result of something internal within the artist that had been sparked through either listening, reading, or being in the space. What emerged through the collaboration was a gorgeous array of imagery that spanned styles, colours, and influence; the interaction of different people’s responses alongside the poems led to wonderfully rich final boards.

Rachael Hill, Colourful Words: Expressive Art & Poetry

This month, I’m guest-reading for ‘s journal After…, alongside the main man himself. In case you’re not familiar with it, After… is a high quality, free online journal of ‘after’ and ekphrastic poetry.

So far, it’s involved some enjoyable reading, a colour-coded spreadsheet, and several surprises about where our tastes converge and diverge.

Since the poems are scheduled to appear only on the date of a full or new moon, there are a strictly limited number of slots for 2027 and I am looking forward to having some wince-inducingly tough decisions, and maybe even the odd arm wrestle, over what to include.

Of course, I have been thinking during this time about what makes a good ‘after’. I started to loosely categorise them into three things I made up: implosion, explosion, and refusal-to-detonate.

An implosion of another piece of art is something that condenses it down to its absolute essentials. It finds the inner mood of the thing (be that another poem, a piece of visual art, a film, etc) and collapses it into itself. It’s not simply a “re-telling” or a describing of what is happening in the poet’s own words. It’s not a pastiche. It’s more like inhabiting the thing from inside itself, perhaps saying something the original thing didn’t even know it was saying.

An explosion, by contrast, blasts the thing wide open, scatters its constituent parts all about the place, and goes for a rummage. It might pick one particular fragment and ruminate solely on that. It might try to make some kind of completely new composition out of the original art. It’s an expansion of, and perhaps a detour away from, the original. Sometimes only the slenderest of threads may remain to connect it back to the place it started from.

A refusal-to-detonate is … well, I’m not quite sure yet what that might be. What would it look like, to create an after of a work that refuses to engage with the work’s own original perspective at all? Is that possible? Can you create an after to a thing from entirely outside of that thing’s frame of reference? I’d like to find out. Perhaps someone can submit one and I’ll be able to say, I’ve seen it, and I now know what it is.

Victoria Spires, A month of afters

I have been thinking about photos and about the Instagram account I started. I’m not claiming to be without a significant ego, but I’ve never been a “look at me” kind of girl. I don’t take center stage, though I’m bossy behind the scenes. The idea of recording myself doing things and recording myself talking about it, or talking directly to the camera doesn’t work for me. It would feel (and in my case, it would be) performative. Instead it is our “hyttebok” – a simple and straightforward amateur photo album that isn’t trying to create content.

I’m a teaching artist, and I think that even my poetry is about teaching—in the Socratic sense: Look at that!

What does it mean to you?
Maybe it means puppies and carburetors.
No wrong answers.
Maybe it is entirely silent: experiential meaning, somatic meaning.

The forest doesn’t need to be performed. And it is full of meaning already. There’s no need to assign it anything that our bodies don’t already understand. Even the shivering.

I’ll know if you’ve got the answer when I see clarity on your face.

The second night of our trip, the temps dropped to freezing. In the morning, we kicked up the heat, had our breakfast and our coffee, then stepped outside to find that all of the trees that had been yellow-orange just yesterday were a deep orange now.

You just stand there, shivering in the breeze, listening to the trees, the treecreepers, and the redwings. Thinking: Why am I not doing this every chance I get?

Ren Powell, Our First Week Out

One day, our class falls into a deep conceptual conversation around the verb, “To miss.” In English, I miss you = I am experiencing the absence of you. We perform the missing. It lives inside of us. We feel it. We inhabit the wound.

In Italian, the speaker is not performing the missing. Mi manchi (I miss you) = You are missing to me, or from me, you are missing. In a way, there is no action. There is only a gaping hole. A missingness. An absence being bestowed upon the speaker.

My classroom is made up of a Swedish person, a Brazilian person, a Polish person, a Mexican person, and an English person. We are not encouraged to default to English, although many speak it; rather, we stay in Italian, no matter the level. We all engage with the concept of the verb from the starting point of our native tongues, bending ourselves around the language, decentering what we know to be true.

I think this is a doorway into poetry.

~~

In my blank moments in Italian, I learn to cherish what I do have. If I have verde, affamato, caldo, incantevole, strano, esausto, e benedetto (green, hungry, warm, enchanting, strange, exhausted, and blessed), I learn to love those words. They are my words. They are what I have. They become close to me. They open doorways to new words. They make me hungry for other sounds.

So, I realize the abundance I was born with. That I have not only Longing at my disposal but want or wish or yearning or burning, or even predilection or proclivity. Or perhaps thirst or itch.

I exist as two selves, then. In English, I am whole. I am lush and wild and feral. I dream in English. I house a thousand variations and build worlds that not only convey meaning but subvert it, double it, contort it, or conceal it.

My mother-in-law once said to me out of nowhere: You know, you are the most erudite person I’ve ever met. She meant it as a compliment, maybe, and I think I took it as one, maybe. But I never stopped to consider who I would be without all that language at my disposal. But I know a new me now, and I am missing fragments.

~~

I wrote my first poem in Italian a few years ago, for my wedding. It was edited by a wonderful Italian poet (Alessandra Bava), and read aloud at the ceremony by my dear Italian-born friend. I want to try to write another—this time without help. In Italian, I am at sea. I have enough to survive. But I barely have metaphor. I have almost no idiom. Can I render beauty? Can I make anything dimensional? Am I dimensional?

How can I compensate for linguistic austerity? How can I make what is concise also soft and also delicious?

And beyond language, I also think of poets who’ve had to relearn how to write due to physical or cognitive disability (see Richard Siken’s newest book, I Do Know Some Things), how my own disability has changed the way I come to the page.

Yet another doorway into the house of poetry.

Lisa Marie Basile, What learning another language taught me about writing poetry

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve never been in a place that so openly honors writers. The park with the busts and the benches shaped like books with the writers’ words on them already pushed them to the front of the line, but anywhere I go in Iași, I see streets named after poets and novelists, placards on walls talking about how such-and-such writer used to walk through this alleyway on his or her way to go to the university or to write in a park or go meet with fellow writers for some purpose. (I need to get better at reading Romanian so I’m not forced to use Google Translate for these moments.)

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Copou Park is also home to the Mihai Eminescu Museum, a play house, and a small bookstore that’s connected to them. And so, before we moved away from this little park, I made sure to stop in there and look around, and I purchased these volumes. [photo]

Now to be clear, I didn’t know what I was buying in either case, though I expected that “An Extraterrestrial in the Palace of Culture” would be closer to my reading level. (I was not wrong). I didn’t know anything about Magda Isanos when I picked up her book from the others on the table. I was going with my gut, and with this Google translation of the portion of a poem on the back cover.

How bright you are, my unlived day… Your halo measures up to my forehead. I walk through the forest of people and happily say: “I want to kiss a single star on the mouth…” My youth shines straight like a sword And every dream guided by it blossoms. My lips sometimes said; “I will die”… But on all seas, I had a ship.

The title of the collection comes from that first line, “My Unlived Day,” and I thought, yeah, if the machine is doing this anything close to justice, then I want to know more about Magda Isanos.

Luckily for me, a Romanian writer named Luciana Moroianu (who I have never met) decided earlier this year to devote a week to telling the story of and translating some poetry of Magda Isanos, and it’s one of those poems I’m highlighting today.

Brian Spears, “Dumneaza” by Magda Isanos

Now that Nell, aka Helena Nelson, aka Helen Beaton, founder, publisher and editor at HappenStance Press, has sent out her final newsletter and announced that the press is winding down, I felt this might be a good moment to celebrate its achievements.

HappenStance started out as a poetry pamphlet press in 2005, publishing slim volumes by all sorts of poets, gaining most recognition for the début pamphlets by up-and-coming names. Several significant contemporary poets cut their teeth with HappenStance. People such as Niall Campbell and Will Harris, etc, etc, not only benefited from Nell’s editorial input at an early stage in their development, but they also obtained a calling card from HappenStance, in the shape of their pamphlets, which enabled them to make the step on to bringing out their first full collections with major publishers. All of the above led to the press being awarded the Michael Marks Award in 2010.

Moreover, in editorial terms, Nell ran a system of submissions windows. Poets sent her batches of their work, and she then replied with detailed feedback. Numerous well-known poets might never have been published by her, but her crit of their work still played a huge, invisible role in their development back in the day. Just imagine how many hours she dedicated to this selfless task!

And then there was Sphinx. Sphinx Reviews was a project that ran alongside HappenStance. It specialised in reviews of poetry pamphlets, a format that has long struggled to receive critical attention, and provided an incredible service to poets, publishers and, of course, readers.

By my tedious manual count, a total of 1461 books were reviewed on Sphinx, many of them by more than one person. That’s the equivalent of over 2,000 pamphlets that were received by Nell, repackaged and sent back out to her loyal band of reviewers. 2,000 batches of stamps to be paid for. Countless treks to the post office. 2,000 reviews that were edited by her (often to the huge benefit of the reviewers themselves, whose prose style and critical approach to poetry were often transformed via this process). 2,000 posts that were formatted, uploaded and optimised for search engines.

In later years, HappenStance shifted its focus to full collections. And again, it punched above its weight, garnering a T.S. Eliot shortlisting for Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point, providing opportunities to fine poets whose writing didn’t fit in with the criteria that major publishers employed to select their manuscripts.

And though Nell would probably admit that she was far more comfortable editing poetry than selling it, let’s not forget that HappenStance Press shifted several thousand units over the years, all via an unfunded subscription model with barely any distribution through bricks-and-mortar bookshops. What’s more, it published several volumes that reached out beyond the poetry bubble and found their way to readers via farm shops and wine merchants, etc, finding new readers for the genre.

Matthew Stewart, An appreciation of HappenStance Press

The Frankfurt Book Fair was a good book fair. Our new titles are getting a lot of attention, and it went by quickly. At some points, I would sit down with someone who was clearly just focused on rapid-fire selling, but this happened rarely. I don’t like it when the meeting is just about selling. We don’t buy often, so a meeting where they try to sell me several titles without real excitement for the discussion of great books is not going to go well.

I often forget something, and in this case, I tried hard not to forget anything, but I ended up losing the computer cord for this laptop, which means that I have only an hour or so, and then it is out of power. Mark will be sad that I’ve lost the cord, but glad that I’m home. He’s used to my losing things, here and there and everywhere. I do lose things. This time, Frankfurt.

I am going to have to get home by reading books and watching movies, which is good for me. I want to move into a new place, charge my life by not working on the weekends. By writing, spending time on my own creations. I am ready to have a new book, a new kind of wild.

Kate Gale, A New Kind of Wild: On Transformation

I have a proof copy of Reznikoff, Testimony. It’s the size of a good brick, the kind you might want to throw through the plate-glass window of an investment bank, or the windscreen of an SUV in Mayfair. (I am not advising this: they are made of shatterproof toughened glass.) I’ve been carrying this proof copy around in my bag, showing it to people in car parks who might be interested in my wares.

On the website there is now a page for the book, with links to other places. There’s an essay by me on the book in the new issue of The Little Review – little in price (£5) but otherwise (176 pages) not little at all. […]

Reznikoff bought a second-had printing press in the late 1920s and both printed and published (in editions of around 200) many of his own books. ‘No more rejection slips,’ his wife noted. 

Charles Boyle, Newsletter October 2026

As you may know, I run a small press called Dead Mall, and on September 22nd, we launched two new books: Alex Tretbar’s Dogsmind and a revised/final edition of my own Interrogation Days (which also comes with a supplementary pamphlet of a closely related poem, “Futures”).

Alex’s book is a wonder and unlike anything I’ve published or read before, and you can read an interview with him here. Both books also features a new physical book design: the cover is gatefolded, which really changes the look, feel and physical experience of the books.

Lastly, we are raising money with each sale, setting aside 25-50% of each purchase for the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio (very near the press’s Dayton home). This org provides much-needed aid to the Haitian immigrant community in that city which has been cruelly impacted by the recent Supreme Court decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status2. We currently have $125 collected, but I am hoping we can add to that amount! Consider picking up a book to add your support.

RM Haines, EXITING THE DOOM LOOP

The weekend also brought another mini-retreat, though my charger [is] on the fritz so I spent the day writing notes and outlines for the play that I started earlier in the summer and never finished about teenage girls and demonology, which seems fitting since we are mid-stream of the new Mike Flanagan Carrie, which is about the rage of young girls, and more broadly, women in general, which is spiking more and more as the country degenerates. So much good horror stuff is coming in the next couple of months on both small and big screen (as well as the stage locally that we are hoping to get to). The Crystal Lake series. The new season of Yellowjackets. Films like Other Mommy and Victorian Psycho as well. 

I am finishing up the galleys of the eco-gothic anthology this week, and once approved by the authors, we will be planning the release. I am also still in the thick of submissions for next year’s book series, so if you have not heard from me, you will be soon. Since we only had a handful of full-length projects, we are starting a second reading period for those through the end of this year.    

Fall feels like it’s slipping away, so I am hoping to inhabit the space of it a little bit more. Since we were out til 4am last night, after a big brunch of biscuits and gravy that J made this morning, I am mostly taking a lazy Sunday to plan the week and reset the apartment. Then tonight, the rest of Carrie and maybe another movie on streaming. We have tickets for a cool horror shorts screening tomorrow called Fresh Meat and maybe another to make it a double feature since we’ll be out. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/11/2026

After months of work, I have an abundance of news and new items to share this harvest season. My 2027 calendar of art and haiku is now available online, with a dozen new artworks of landscapes, flora and fauna. I also have eight new card designs for everyday, birthdays and holidays, plus four holiday notecard sets and three for everyday.

My children’s book, Yung Stands Strong, will be launched this Sunday as part of the grand opening for the Eureka Chinatown Monument. Then the following Saturday, October 17, there will be a book reading and tour of Eureka’s historic Chinatown. There are two more book events after that—see below for details and other Makino Studios events. The book had a limited first printing. You can pre-order copies online now, for shipment around October 31, and find it in local stores soon after.

Annette Makino, It’s harvest season!

I’ve made a decision about my chapbook-length, hybrid-poetry manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong: I’m going to make it into a handmade artist book. I came to this conclusion after meeting with artist/poet MaryAnn L. Miller (Lucia Studio), who was generous enough to listen to my ideas, explain the process(es) necessary, and encourage me to go for it even though I do not feel fully prepared to embark upon, let alone complete, such a project. For people who are thinking of doing this themselves, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I figured I would use my blog to write about the process. It will also serve to goad me into staying on track and actually completing it! Because you know how it goes. One gets distracted, or gets mired in details, or flags in general.

MaryAnn provided meaningful inspiration when I visited her at her studio. She has produced numerous artist books, and they are beautiful objects. Photos do not represent what a joy it is to handle an artist book–the textures of the papers, the feel of the book in hand, the subtleties of color. The book feels like a completed project, and this manuscript really needs that. Or I do, since I embarked on research about Harold Dunn in 2008 and have been working on the poems and historical excerpts on and off since then; it’s something I want to do to honor my friend David Dunn, to learn his father’s story, to help me to understand David’s story–cut short by his own early death.

I have sent the ms. to numerous chapbook publishers, but although two of them expressed some interest in the poems they also acknowledged that the layout of the work would pose challenges for their small presses. I understand that. I looked into print-on-demand options for self-publishing this text, and…let’s just say the process would not have been smooth. Since I’m not doing this to earn any profit, I may as well do it as art for art’s sake rather than tearing my hair out over tech issues. If I make only 10 or 15 books, at least I will have finished this particular project. If I consider this “artistic,” the process becomes more interesting and the result can take its time. I can make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. Which I fully intend to do.

Ann E. Michael, New project

The latest from award-winning Alberta poet Derek Beaulieu is the deliberately provocative Do It Wrong (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2026), a title subtitled “How To Be A Poet in the Twenty-First Century,” an absolutely readable assemblage of critical essays, offerings and manifestos collected into what might actually be essential reading for those interested in writing and publishing, especially if the very idea confuses, intimidates or frightens. For those unaware, Beaulieu is not only the current Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, but the author of an absolute ton of published books and chapbooks across North America and Europe, including titles such as Surface Tension (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2011) and with wax (Coach House Books, 2003) [see my review of such here], as well as a long-established micropress publisher of chapbooks, pamphlets, small journals and other ephemera.

jwcurry once suggested to me that the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was a great writer, to his mind, in large part because he was willing to fail (and therefore manage to achieve what hadn’t even been attempted), but Beaulieu takes that idea a step further, suggesting that anyone who wishes to engage with art generally, or with poetry and/or small press publishing specifically, should be willing to completely go against how it has always and ever be done. “Given the meagre audience for poetry and the microscopic financial rewards,” he writes, early on in the collection, “I suggest that you not only dance as if no one is watching but write as if no one is reading you. Because metaphorically—and mathematically—no one is.” Through a collection of short first-person essays, Beaulieu works through ideas on composition, community, publishing, education, awards, experimental writing, influence, mentors, support and other threads around literary production and engagement that so rarely get discussed, let alone in such detail. Referencing an ethos of sharing and community around The Grateful Dead, for example, in his piece “EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WRITING I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD,” he ends with:

The Grateful Dead and their fans see the music as only one part of a wider artistic life, and they eschew power and ownership at every opportunity except when it can be wielded to increase awareness, make space, or fund colleagues. The Deadheads I know trade tapes, jam together, offer ideas, play their favourite moments for unwitting converts; they are dedicated to being kind. We need more poets to act like Deadheads.

Do It Wrong is incredibly positive and generative, and strikingly honest about how literary publishing works and doesn’t work, offering his years of experience through the literary and small press trenches on how best to approach the work, and what one might expect (and not expect), and how best to propel the art forward. He speaks of experience over commercial reward, and pushing to purposefully make it weirder. Honestly, this is a book I wish anyone engaged with this kind of work, or wishing to, should pick up and read, from the established writer to the emerging ambitious kids seeking glory and career through poetry (and they are very much part of the landscape), to the moody teenager secretly scribbling out lines in their notebook. Beaulieu’s voice is clear-headed and optimistic, articulating a joy through the process of exploration, learning and risk-taking, and a suggestion that those merely in it for themselves will end up in frustration, missing out on all the possibilities that an engaged community offers. 

rob mclennan, Derek Beaulieu, Do It Wrong

“Mistress of accurate minor pain, / Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane,” Marie Ponsot whispered in the privacy of her profanations, in the folds of the poem titled “Private and Profane,” where the enumerated saints are the humans who influenced her intellection rather than Jesus’ obedient followers. The supplicant’s voice knows its address is heretical.

This Kierkegaardian love/mistrust binary fuels the tension in Ponsot’s poetry, where recognition is often derailed by gender socialization and social constructions of identity qua being. I’m thinking of how Soren Kierkegaard put these “two equal possibilities” in Works of Love:

When deception and truth are presented as two equal possibilities in contrast to each other, the decision is whether there is love or mistrust in you. For example, one says, “Even what appears to be the purest feeling can nevertheless be a deception – certainly it is possible; it must be possible– ergo I choose mistrust or belief in nothing.”

The problem is the how much depends upon this facile presumption of equality.

Enter Louise Nevelson, the sculptor whose work moves in counterpoint to Ponsot. Nevelson crafted an exquisite persona from excess and old furniture fragments. She invented a usable childhood to leverage her countercultural choices and never sat still long enough to commit to her shadows and shades. Like Lady Gaga, she was ‘born this way,’ hatched by artifice, wed to self-fashioning as a means of escape. Nevelson’s Philosophy of the Egg, in her own words:

I remember when I was six years old at play recess in school. One girl was taking advantage of another. So I went up to the girl who was being bullied to reassure her that she didn’t have to be conned. And she wasn’t even a friend of mine. At six years old you don’t battle for people unless you’re born with it. It’s like an egg; you can scramble it, soft-boil it, hard-boil it, even devil it. But it is an egg. The ingredient of an egg is an egg.

After turning a hue of metaphysical blue with Ponsot, I burrowed into Louise Nevelson’s genderfucking sculptures for respite.

Alina Stefanescu, Some, sum, somme.

The last installment [link] of my five part review of Living In History by Luke Roberts is about how challenging VAWG [violence against women and girls] was a risky political act for a woman poet, more so in Britain than in America. This has obviously changed since but when, how and why? I look at poems by half a dozen women publishing in the 70s and early 80s. I use the discussion to re-evaluate an often critiqued poem by Denise Riley, “A note on sex and ‘the reclaiming of language’ “. If, as I argue in the essay, there was a wave of defiant semi-autobiographical poetry about rape in the USA in the 70s, led by Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, and yet the subject could lead to being typecast if done by a woman in the UK, then the airport becomes a very interesting place indeed. In Riley’s poem, the speaker is “flying back from the New Country”. In Riley’s allegorical poetics, this could mean, with arch and ironic reservations, that the speaker has declared herself a feminist, that feminism has a zion not necessarily in an actual physical place, and is anyway being looked at differently because she is clever and assertive and therefore might be a feminist, and second wave feminism was the New and Dangerous Thing. But there is more than a hint of the literal USA in 1970. For a woman in 1970 to shuttle between the USA and the UK is to exist between two feminist cultures, and the USA and the UK are the Scylla and Charybdis of talking about VAWG.

To me the feminist finale of my essay crowns the theme throughout, of how the simile, metaphor, metonymy, atmospheric craft of poetry picked up some undercurrents we now value, and by what battle (and also did poets glance off things in the air, and then leave it at that?).

It’s been very interesting observing my networks and some newcomers reacting to my five part essay. Most responses have been about technique, and that I’ve made a good case for reading poets unfamiliar or neglected. Some appreciate my academic backbiting about another writer (and let’s face it, backbiting is a muse for me).

But I think of the last as the best part of the essay, because it exposes the cult of free association as reserved for men, and the club doesn’t allow in all the feminisms. I argue that freedom and poetic license have long been valued and have their own pedigree and chain of references (I remember the 90s when Tom Raworth was admired for the fastest reading style in the West, and then Miles Champion beat his time). To have proper intertextual allusion, as opposed to the nod and a wink of a sect, we have to ask if women had the same audience interrelation and, well, freedom of legacy, in being freewheeling and tangential (why is a Raworth book not about Cancer titled Cancer).

Women were policed and pigeonholed and everything was serious: seriously nice, seriously sexy, seriously angry and violated, mannishly anarchic, writing a (sexual or psychoanalytic) écriture feminine etc. If we look at how 70s women navigated this double standard and this pigeonholing, then we don’t get people “ahead of their time” making the out there agit prop theme poetry de nos jours, avant la lettre. We get to see the actual culture, how it was changed and resisted change.

During my lifetime so far, it has suddenly become easier to write about sexual violence, but in what exact year? Marital rape was made a criminal offence in 1991, so I suspect after 1991. And what were the green shoots and who fell in battle?

Ira Lightman, What we stomach, rumbling

The “Lucy Poems” of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), all but one of which appeared in the 1800 second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, make a curious collection. By his own admission, Wordsworth never intended them as a sequence. As he wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799 — the year following his time in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, with Coleridege as his near neighbor and literary collaborator, and the year when he was drafting these poems, one after another — his writing constituted a kind of emotional “self-defense.”

With the lapse of Wordsworth’s and his sister Dorothy’s lease on the house at Alfoxden, they had decamped to Germany, where they had hoped once again to join forces with Coleridge and his wife, Sara. Economic disparity between the two households, however, meant that while the Coleridges lived and entertained glitteringly in Ratzeburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, the Wordsworths found themselves isolated, in modest and limited straits, in a small town in Lower Saxony.

It was in this isolation, envious of Coleridge’s circumstances and resenting his sister for whose upkeep he was responsible, that Wordsworth began the Lucy Poems. Scholars have quibbled for two centuries over Lucy’s identity. Perhaps it’s safest to say that — however we might read these elegies on their surface, and whether or not she had any counterpart in reality — the Lucy of these poems provided the poet with a repository for his own complex emotions in that low period following his first great artistic surge.

If “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” serves as self-defense, it seems meant to ward off an existential crisis. Wordsworth, feeling that he languished in obscurity, with the malaise that often follows bursts of productivity, could — we imagine — console himself a little with the thought that “a violet by a mossy stone” might still shine with the brilliance of a single star in the sky.

The making of a perfect little thing, in three common-meter abab stanzas, might not thrill as the first large-visioned passages of The Prelude would have done. Still, the poem’s formal effects are worth noting, particularly the way that small disturbances in its tightly controlled iambic meter point to the unrest, buried like Lucy herself, in its speaker’s soul.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

Despite her ongoing health problems, it’s hard to imagine a 27-year-old poet consciously setting out to write her last poems, and yet that is the title of the final section, comprising 14 pieces. There’s a numbered sequence of 12 sections bearing dates from the 2nd to 13th of July 1994, the first of which bears the title ‘Ephemeral Beat’ after its number. This sequence is sandwiched by two short stand-alone poems.

However, the first line of the first poem does seem to signal a sense of impending endings: ‘Adieu aux mots sertis, aux mots de gloire. / Farewell to inset words, to glorious words.’ This premonitory feel is echoed in, for example, the closing lines of the seventh section of the sequence:

But the sea loved us
The lyre of glassware and sunsets
Laying hands on time
We have carried out the simple act
Of growing old

(Note the absence of terminal punctuation.)

And then the book ends in a flourish of something like hope, in this three-line poem:

Waiting among the palms
Full of auburn kisses
Whose splendor astonishes

One of the great joys of this blog is the opportunities I get to discover work that is entirely new to me, and this is certainly the case with Béatrice Douvre, who I’d never heard of before John Taylor kindly sent me this book. She’s an intriguing voice, and one I’ll be returning to.

Billy Mills, Inhabit the Brief Halt by Béatrice Douvre: A Review

The moon was saying goodbye to the sky and opening its
doors to the sun.
I had been sitting barren, on a dusty rock staring at a desert
that was apathy, tightening and the end.
There was nothing, and the nothing was everything and
everywhere.

(‘Chasms’)

So begins the collection, Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser, published by Alien Buddha Press this year. I read it in a flurry when it arrived, then read it again more slowly, and recently found myself coming back to it once more. It speaks a magic spell over the exhaustion many of us have been feeling.

My day to day work is digital-heavy research and writing, while my time is tracked: each minute, keystroke, scroll, and pause for thought accounted for. There is no generative AI involved, blessedly, and I’m grateful for that. My thoughts and words are my own. By the end of the week though, after all those intense computer hours, I’m too zapped to open a social media app.

It weighs on my heart that there are poets I only have contact with via Bluesky, because I wish I could approach poetry differently, with more rest and spaciousness. Poetry began as my creative outlet and I’d like to keep it that way, not see it turn into some grand competition or race, even as I keep reaching towards growth.

Here’s more from the opening poem in Carmella’s collection:

And of the chasms between the everything and the nothing?
That speak silently, between and across, the human and the
desert and the rock.
They are immeasurable!
Fathomless! Illimitable!
Greater than our nothing and everything,
Portals into further suns, into chasms!
And I am unafraid.

(‘Chasms’)

While reading these expansive, searching poems, I was reminded of a painting on view this week at the local gallery. Music was abstractly personified in it, and there was also some connection to quantum theory.

The artist, Ava Orphanoudakis, said, “The more deeply I contemplate the processes of Nature, the more I find myself in a musical space. I have ventured beyond the bounds of the physical to explore a deeper unseen spiritual realm that gives birth to our sensory reality. The essence of a melody lies not in the notes, but in the relationships between the notes, intervals, frequencies, and rhythms. All living beings, all of nature is interwoven in a cosmic symphony.”

She quoted the physicist David Bohm: “What we experience through the senses as empty space is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.”

That same impulse is threaded throughout Chasms, which is full of music (and at times, the absence of music) […]

Jenevieve Carlyn, “The sky flashes gemstones across her eyes”: Reading Carmella de Keyser’s Chasms

If the unearthly and the uncanny are real, then why don’t we see them all the time? And a common answer is that something inside us stops us — some blindness, some blockage, some failure to see what human beings are actually equipped to see.

That, at least, is the range of mystical thought developed by Today’s Poem, “In No Strange Land,” by Francis Thompson (1859–1907). The only work by Thompson widely known is “The Hound of Heaven,” a 182-line ode published in 1890:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

“In No Strange Land” never had the same fame, but it deserves a place in anthologies. Written probably in the 1880s, when Thompson was on the streets, sleeping under Thames bridges, it was posthumously published in 1908. And it captures, from the first stanza on, a sense that the otherworldly is simply in place, marvelously and brilliantly present, could we only see — see Christ walking on the Thames, see the shining “traffic of Jacob’s ladder” (the word “traffic” perfect) in Charing Cross. The numinous is nearby, not off in some strange land.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In No Strange Land

The form echoes the subject matter beautifully. Written in iambic tetrameter, the short lines bear a steady musical beat while the ABCCAB rhyme scheme creates stanzas that weave in and out like the circular design of a web. That turn at the end toward Halloween makes it a great poem to share with my kids who know about E. B. White’s spider from bedtime readings. In fact, my 9-year-old recently chose to reread Charlotte’s Web for her literacy free reading time at school. It’s amazing that a 192-page book published in 1952 still resonates so strongly with children in 2024. But then again, it was written by a man who believed this:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth… Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net.

I’ve told my youngest that E.B. White was also a poet and read her “Natural History” which he wrote to his wife Katharine while he was traveling away from home. Since I will be at an out-of-state conference this week, this last stanza seems especially befitting:

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

“Natural History” was written in 1929, the same year that E. B. White and Katherine Sergeant Angell eloped. The next year, Katharine, who already had two children from her first marriage, gave birth to Joel, her first and only child with White. The small family ended up moving up to Maine, and they remained married for 48 years until Katharine’s death in 1977 at the age of 84. E. B. White would follow in 1985 at the age of 86.

I‘ve always been intrigued by E. B. White’s relationship with Katharine—the whip-smart, divorced mother of two who worked as an editor at a fledgling magazine called The New Yorker. It was there that she and Andy (as White preferred to be called) met and fell in love. An intellect in her own right, Katharine was the magazine’s first fiction editor and she helped develop the careers of Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Taylor, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, and John Updike among many others. Those who are interested in learning more about Katharine can pick up Amy Reading’s new biography, The World She Edited: Kartharine White at the New Yorker (which I have not read yet since it just came out this September).

Zina Gomez-Liss, On the Silk Thread of Invention

In Denise Riley’s recent short collection of essays, A Chorus of Ears (Picador), she reflects on the way the persona of the poet frequently gets in the way of the reader and the poem. Her convincing argument – or part of it – is that during the writing of a poem the poet is effectively ‘anonymised’ by the process of writing; what appears on the page ‘runs ahead’ of the poet’s intention and so the voice of the poem is exactly that, the voice of the poem not that of the poet. At one point Riley conjectures that there may be shy poets out there hiding in the contemporary poetry landscape to whom the idea of standing on stage to receive a prize is horrifying and any attention at all is anathema. They may not even be particularly shy, but they are aware that the poem is one thing and they are another – and so they step aside.

I cannot help wondering if Geraldine Clarkson is one such poet.

The tribulations of sense-making have always been front and centre of Clarkson’s work because she challenges, to a greater degree than most poets, orthodox approaches to understanding language. In previous work, such as the wonderfully baffling Medlars, she has pushed this challenge to delightful limits; and in two relatively recent pamphlets, Singletary (Shearsman) and The Vitalist Sees the Signs (Broken Sleep) and the brand new Palomines (Blue Diode Press), she continues what appears to be an ongoing experiment in how far language can be coaxed to drop its everyday sense in favour of its prosodic-musical features as a means of expressing the inexpressible. Actually, ‘experiment’ is probably too analytical a term, Clarkson’s poems are more like instinctive activations of the latency in words to extend outwards into the abyss, in joy and horror and – as we shall come to later – in praise.

It is a gross simplification of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’, but true nonetheless, to say that in poetry like Clarkson’s the sense-speaking, linear meaning making poet herself, whether it be GB or Geraldine, necessarily disappears; she fades into nothingness as wordplay, surrealism and double-entendre take over, metaphors bounce joyfully off one another, symbolism seeps through the poems’ fabric, and soundscapes of echolalia and lexical resonance descend. You would not get far in conversation with Clarkson as a person if she spoke the way she writes; and so, she is anonymised by the flamboyance and vitality of her poetic choices (to the extent that they are her choices).

Chris Edgoose, Voice Beyond Sense: on Geraldine Clarkson 

I’ve chosen this poem from the collection as I guess, I think, it sums up what it’s all about. Me looking back and reflecting on my life and my choices, or at least some of them, all triggered by my daughter leaving home for University. I would argue though that I’m not sure I entirely believe the last lines I wrote. While of course my daughter is something I believe I did right, because she is just a top notch person who I am exceptionally proud of, I don’t truly believe she is the only thing I ever did right. Perhaps only in moments of deep self doubt/pity do I think this. You could say this is a collection of regrets but I’m not sure I believe in them, either. While obviously there will be things we all wish we didn’t do in our lives, if we are happy with where we are now, in this moment, and I am, then I don’t think you can regret anything. Because if you went back and course corrected, or made even the slightest, most subtle alteration, you probably wouldn’t be where you are. So even though I don’t truly believe this poem, I still don’t regret writing it!

Drop-in by Rhian Elizabeth (Nigel Kent)

My boxing coach is always telling me to stop telegraphing my jab, stop giving telltale movements that show or imply what I’m planning. Trouble is, you don’t always know you’re doing it. Telegraphs can be all sorts: pulling the fist back (‘loading’) before a strike, dropping your hand, flaring at the elbow, tensing, dipping, lifting…. the list goes on. I can hear him muttering: “stop loading that back hand!”. Ironically, it helps if you can relax: loose limbs are less likely to give away your intentions. Power should come from the body, from core rotation, not just from the arm. But it isn’t easy to relax when the stakes feel high.

Last week, shadow boxing in front of the mirror in the gym and feeling appropriately ridiculous, I started to wonder whether the trouble with some poems is ‘telegraphing’ too. Can a giveaway moment ruin the effect of all those carefully-crafted stanzas?

Poems always have designs on the reader. They seek to make us feel / think / recognise / unlearn. But I hate noticing that they do. I feel deflated when I can see a poem’s workings. I am elated when I can’t, when I read someone’s work and wonder ‘how did they get there’?

The poetic ‘telegraph’ might be an unoriginal metaphor, a movement towards a conclusion that holds no revelation for us, an overstated rhetorical argument, the sound of a line snapping shut too neatly. I dislike the sense that the poet knew where an idea would take them all along and we’re all just watching them get there, politely clapping at the end. I hate it when I spot it in my own writing. Yes – I hate that most of all.

This week, I’ve been reading ‘Red River Valley’ by Ian McMillan. He’s a poet who doesn’t telegraph his shots. Sometimes he likes to leave the reader deliciously suspended at the end of a poem. It’s as if we’re Wile. E. Coyote and we’ve carried on running off the cartoon cliff, feet pedalling air, eyes bulging.

Here are a selection of last lines from ‘Red River Valley’, in no particular order:

1. He felt an almost overwhelming urge / to eat pound coins.
2. Even the bushes were frightening / in a language nobody knew.
3. I ask him to sign it / But he already has.
4. But you couldn’t see my nails / In the shadows.

I could go on. Even without context, you can tell there isn’t a telegraph in sight. McMillan is a surreal realist, faithful to the moments of ordinary life so weird you couldn’t possibly make them up. His new collection brims with these observations.

Taken out of context, perhaps these McMillan quotes are misleading and don’t help build my case. To avoid the telegraph, you don’t need to deal in non-sequiturs. In fact, they might become telegraphs in themselves unless you use them sparingly. The best writing sneaks up quietly and takes the chair from under you. It’s as if the atmosphere in a room has changed but you couldn’t say how or when. Goosebumps. Hairs on the back of your neck. The sense you’re being watched. No – you’ve been watched for a long time. The poem sees you.

Helen Mort, “I can’t look you in the voice”

I love a list poem, especially one I don’t see coming.

My high school English teacher, the wonderful writer Christine Schutt, argued that there were two temperaments in American poetry—the Dickinsonian (here she drew her arms in) and the Whitmanic (arms spread far out). One seemed to work by subtraction, the other by accumulation.

Though I’m firmly in the first camp, I’m drawn to both approaches. I enjoy poems that enumerate and accrue, poems whose cadence, momentum, and music are shaped by the list.

Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and scholar, argued that “The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions.” Elsewhere in the interview, he offered a zinger: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

If we see the list as a ritual against death, one we practice to mark our lives, apportion our responsibilities, and organize the unwieldy contents of the mind, then there’s something quite moving about its appearance at the heart of poetry…

There’s a latent narrative even to tasks or appetites (the plot of the grocery list, for example, is the dish to be prepared and enjoyed solo or otherwise), and beneath that, a second, more unexpected (and existential, if we agree with Eco) meaning. We don’t want to die. Here, in this list of errands, tasks, and ingredients, is proof.

Maya C. Popa, And then, and then…

i am still collecting
patterns. turns of the tongue. blood
dried on a microscope slide. the bulb
glowing in the corner of that demolished house
across from the park. so many fly-wings, beating.

Robin Gow, snowflake photographs

When I was a young teacher, I tutored a student who was reading Romeo and Juliet in his high school English class. He insisted that he could make no sense of it. At our session, we opened to Act 2, Scene 2 – the balcony scene – which the class was required to memorize. When I asked him to read it, I understood why he didn’t understand. He hit every second beat of the line with the ferocity of a bass drumkick—“But SOFT what LIGHT through YOnder WINdow BREAKS?” The sing-song back and forth of his cadence stripped all nuance from the text, made the words into mere beats, a pattern like my elementary music school teacher used to make us match by banging wooden sticks together. We then spent the whole session talking about what had happened previously, which he had a decent handle on due to class discussion, and what was happening now as Romeo catches sight of Juliet but she hasn’t yet seen him. We talked about the meaning of the scene before we tackled the mechanics.

I thought back to this lesson as I tackled memorizing Sonnet 116 as a part of participating in Poetry Memorization Month for October. Conceived as a way to spend deep and meaningful time with ONE poem at a time, it invites participants to memorize one poem a week in October. I chose to begin with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, my favorite sonnet. (Yes I have a favorite sonnet. If there was a Shakespeare concert, I’d be screaming “116! 116!” while waving my arms in the air. )

I first memorized it in high school, then again late in college while studying Shakespeare, then again in my 40s. Now that I am in my sixties, when trying to recite it, I found I could only get the first 6 lines and then things got fuzzy. And, since I own a beautiful Mobius strip bracelet engraved with the first three lines of the sonnet and wear it almost everywhere I go, I figured it was only right that I get the thing into my brain once and for all.

I love this particular sonnet because it tries to define love, names it as something that cannot be changed or altered by circumstance, as something lasting and stalwart. As a young person, I found it incredibly romantic (it is). Now, having been with my husband for 45 years, I find it incredibly moving and recognize that this type of love is indeed rare and something to be treasured. (Guess who bought the bracelet for me? You are correct.)

Just memorizing the words isn’t enough for addressing a feeling this big. My student learned this about Romeo and Juliet all those years ago, and I needed to relearn it myself for this first challenge.

Donna Vorreyer, O no! Returning to An Old Favorite

Trained to gaze outward: the loudness, gesture
of excess, boldness of lovemaking. Eyes dilate,
the moon floods the cornea, tears flood to blind.

                    Looking not to see is dṛṣṭi.
Focussing into the keyhole without willing is darśana.

Regard the regardless by cleaning the lens—
a blur first, unwoven strands of fibres, an imprint
of fading mist, scab of a wound in memory scar.

Uma Gowrishankar, Dṛṣṭi vs. Darśana

Congratulations to Anne Carson on the Nobel nod.  I really know very little of her work beyond what I see shared online. I find the idea of the vastness of the back catalogue a little scary. It’s like trying to get into Bob Dylan ( another Nobel winner…you may not have heard of him), but I guess I should just dive in somewhere. And I will,  but I’ve got to get my TBR pile down a bit more first…

To that end, I’ve been working my way through Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of novels (as well as watching the TV Show). I’ve been collecting them all through the medium of charity shops (with the exception of the first and 4th novel), and I finished book 5 at the start of the week. And I enjoyed this section from early on in the novel.

Flyte looked at Lamb. ‘Ever considered instilling discipline into your staff?’

‘All the time. I favour the carrot and stick approach.’

‘Carrot or stick?’

‘Nope. I use the stick to ram the carrot up their arses. That generally gets results.’ Lamb frowned. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m using metaphor. This is not a fucking poetry reading.’

It looked like a fucking poetry reading, though, inasmuch as there were few people there, and none of them stylishly dressed.

Taken from London Rules, Mick Herron, page 100-101

Mat Riches, Lines of Compost Upon Westminster* Bridge**

As many of you will be aware, things are pretty lively here in France at the moment and the school my two older sons go to has been shut by a blockade every day since the end of last week. Since my middle son is only 11 and needs constant help to navigate the bewildering variety of emails, online documents and video links the teachers are scrambling to provide, it has not been the most productive work week chez nous. Indeed, I was woken at 6 this morning by the distinctive sound of teenagers trundling wheelie bins around to build barricades, and I am putting the finishing touches to this piece to the distant sounds of singing and chanting. (When my middle son and I took a break on Tuesday morning to walk around our local area, we passed five blockaded schools or university departments within five minutes of us — from each one you could hear the noise of the next.)

I’ve been meaning to write something for a while about what it’s like to read Greek but with all this going on I didn’t have time to finish that piece, so here instead is something about Sophocles Philoctetes, a play I read in the summer and have been rereading this week, alongside Shakespeare, for comfort amid the chaos. […]

One of the pleasures of reading Greek tragedy is the variety of the Greek, both formally and stylistically. Much of the dialogue is written […] in iambic trimeter, a line which is metrically quite similar to the iambic pentameter we are familiar with from Shakespeare. This alternates with lyric passages in much more complex metres. Stylistically, tragedy encompasses rapid repartee, the concise aphorism, longer speeches of careful argument and/or consummate oratory, and the elaborately lyric […]

Victoria Moul, This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine

So where am I taking this postage-stamp post? Poetry is the expressive double, a specific coral formation of the logos of the sea – which grants the poet the full evocative power of language… as it were, the double soul-companion of the sun.

I am trying to build ambitious sandcastles with my poems, full of fragile seagull gleanings, detritus, bric-à-brac. And I struggle strenuously to keep them together, as architectural constructs, with a special salt-water adhesive. The Rhode Island touchstone upholds both my foundations, and the keystone of the arch. It is the double soul of Roger Williams – both the religious enthusiast and the fierce prophet of secular, cosmopolitan civil liberties, the rule of law – who informs my own point of view.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Which is why only poetry can adequately express this mysterious domain, this earth, this cosmos – “that hath such people in’t.”

Henry Gould, The Logos of Poetry

from far and wide they converge 
upon conversation’s terrain to uncoil 
a group as a line looking to where the 
sea’s amalgam sands their landed sky

drawn by a poem’s flowing lines they wait
for their ears to grow accustomed to hearing
the words paint a picture within a picture
and to feel the seance of bygone times 

funny sunny or bane of rain
heads lift   hearts sore
for the poet has captured more 
so much more than they can say

Jim Young, Gower Walking Festival 2026

I’m teaching a class at the upcoming Skagit Poetry Festival, a class titled Thinning Veil and Poems inspired by the Spooky Season. I’d taught a smaller version of the class, but now I’m expanding it, and I find this season to be so inspirational—Edgar Allen Poe, sure, but I’m also featuring early poems by Sylvia Plath and Louise Gluck. Some of you may know that some consider me a writer of horror poetry—it may not be the main thing I’m known for, but I’ve done it enough to be in some anthologies.

And let’s face it, mythology and fairy tales and pop culture are full of terrific and terrifying tropes perfect for the seasonal poetry. Persephone in the underworld? Check. Cinderella and those bloody shoes? Yes. Children being tossed into the woods to die? Absolutely. In the pop culture world, shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, Twin Peaks, and even lesser-known jewels like Reaper and People of Earth, as well as movie franchises and the tropes they’ve created, like the Final Girl. […]

You may be sleeping more, looking with trepidation each morning at the weather forecast, and digging out throw blankets and sweaters you’d put away months ago. Just remember fall is a great time for inspiration, reinvention, and retreating into a great book.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Perfect Moments and Plans Gone Awry, Social Media and Promoting Poetry Now, The Jobs that AI Can’t Do, Spooky Season

My job was giving birth to the work not selling it on. And I still believe this to be essentially true, not because I’m trying to shirk responsibility in curating opportunity for my poetry, not because I’m arrogant or lazy or even fearful of stepping out of my comfort zone. I’m just not very good at it. I’m not a salesman even less a hustler. I know poets who are both and I reserve a measure of admiration, envy and suspicion for them.

The suspicion I hold is, I think, the same suspicion I have felt levelled against me or against those who ‘make a show’ of reading their work aloud. It can be considered an act, something superfluous to the integrity of poetry, an undignified dance where you are regarded as a ballad blagger, a poem peddler, a pusher, a dealer, a taut. You are looked upon as entering the arena of sales and marketing rather than inhabiting the shadows where poetry stirs nervously, quietly, in secret. The reading of a poem out loud involves both the breaking of a spell and the casting of new one.

Marketing involves a similar sorcery and I’m less inclined to immerse myself in its dark arts. I do to some extent. Anyone with an Instagram account is in sales and with autumn creeping I see my feed filling with a flutter of seasonal images: golden leaves, leather bound journals strategically positioned on tables in hazy cafes, fountain pens and fruit bowls and inspirational post-it-notes, cappuccinos with heart logos in the foam and poets lost in the filter of mist and mellow engagement. All portrayals or projections, depictions or deceptions, representations of a certain kind of writer, one the author hopes will chime with an audience, up their optics, service their numbers. This particular image grift, that of the autumnal elegist, is distinctly virulent at this time of year. But we’re all at it in some respect, to some degree we’re all hawking impressions, selling reflections, hopeful our poems may get a little more traction. Please note: I have never once posted a picture of my morning coffee with the caption, “Waiting for inspiration from these dark grains.” But perhaps I should.

Jan Noble, Nº85 I have new wounds to pursue

— A library can be a space of blooming, of dreaming, of thinking. A place to ask better questions. What is possible. The public library is wonderful. But you can make your own library too. If you’re here, I know you probably have a lot of books :)

— From Cixous’ book Coming to Writing: “The more you let yourself dream, the more you let yourself be worked through, the more you let yourself be disturbed, pursued, threatened, loved, the more you write, the more you escape the censor.”

— She also says that with patience we can give the world life. This is the patience of thinking, of paying attention. Without that we have a “world without flowers” and that is a world that is “bored to death.” […]

— I’ve been slowing down on my insta for a bit now and plan on taking an internet sabbatical for the month of November. I’ll probably pop in once or twice there to check for messages but will be otherwise working on my novel. I’ll be here but perhaps a bit less. Thanks in advance for bearing with. Maybe the role of the artist now is to disappear a bit. And maybe it’s the opposite, given this moment in history. But there has to be some way to subvert the algorithm or make it work for us right?

— How to escape the censor? Write alone, toward excellence. Make your art. Disappear for a bit. Go to art galleries, visit your library. Spend some time reading there. Keep yourself for your self. Take some time and look at a flower. Seems kinda radical. Georgia knew.

Shawna Lemay, The Library is a Bloom Space

Years ago,

when I left my first country, my mother placed
a plaster saint in my hand and wrapped my fingers

around it. Its painted skirt is still blue, its halo
a chipped gold. It stands on a shelf of drawers

dwarfed by the telescope which was a birthday
present for my husband, but which he has not

yet trained upon any corner of the night sky.

Luisa A. Igloria, Inventories of the Missing and Not Yet Used Up

Katie Paterson is an internationally renowned visual/conceptual artist whose projects consider our place on Earth in the flow of geological and astronomical time. Collaborating with scientists and researchers, amateur and professional, she uses both sophisticated technologies and local, DIY apparatus to create intimate, poetic and philosophical encounters between ourselves and our environment, both at its most personal and at its most distant, hypothetical reach.

In 2007 Paterson asked a group of amateur radio operators to create a transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Morse code. She then arranged for the signal to be transmitted to the lunar surface, which acted as a huge reflector mirror and bounced it back to Earth.

In the early days amateur radio, earth-moon-earth (EME) stations needed huge antenna systems, very high power transmitters and complex receiving set-ups. Today EME operation is within reach of most amateurs, and reflecting your signal off the moon, or layers of the upper atmosphere, or even the aurora borealis, are standard ways to send a signal round the curve of the globe. (I know a tiny bit about this. My father is a ham operator and true radio geek; throughout my childhood I went to sleep listening to him tapping out Morse code on the other side of my bedroom wall.) Depending on the moon’s orbit and the tilt of the Earth, your signal might be reflected straight back to you; or if you transmit at an angle (like standing side on to a mirror to see the other side of the room), the signal you send will bounce back somewhere else. Katie Paterson’s Morse-encoded Moonlight Sonata was transmitted from Southampton and received a few minutes later in Sweden.

This was then translated back into a musical score, which for the installation Earth – Moon – Earth is played on an automated grand piano.

When you hear it played, you recognise it immediately. Yet soon there are gaps and absences, new intervals and rests. As the piece unfolds, the gaps become more frequent. Towards the end, whole chords are missing, and the last bars are almost entirely the low notes of the left hand. ‘I wanted it to come back sounding as if it had been touched by the moon,’ says Paterson. ‘By encoding information, absences become present, and presence become audible.’ There is a sense of the music having been frayed or scattered by the empty ridges or swallowed somewhere in the darkness. It produces a real sense of melancholy – or of insentience, or indifference. Though the keys are moving up and down, the present moon is very, very remote.

Earth – Moon – Earth might at first seem to be a sceptical response to our romantic/Romantic appropriation of it. Says Nicholas Alfrey: ‘from Paterson’s perspective, the Romantic Sublime has had a long afterlife in the arts, to the point where the imagery of vastness, distance, luminosity, darkness and elemental forces has become something of a debased currency.’ However this is not her intention. Her work, says Alfrey, is ‘a search for ways to convey the most astonishing subject matter through the most mundane means, and by the cultivation of understatement, irony and deadpan effect’. ‘Very generally, I make work that collapses distance and time,’ says Paterson, ‘bringing together the commonplace with their very vastness.’

But wheels turn; things come full circle. In Cabinet Magazine, our newest Nobel Laureate Anne Carson ponders the moon, and its absence.

The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on color. What after all is a color? Something not no color. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind? There is a moment of reversal within totality.

Totality: The Color of Eclipse

Lesley Harrison, Earth – Moon – Earth

As if reading my mind her mouth opens,
those pupils flash wild.

I have nothing to offer.

A cloud of hayed breath
puffs between us.
Before I can release myself from her gaze,
she clamps my arm.

When I was young
I used to bite my forearms
to feel the resistance of flesh
imprint my incisors.

I bit my brother once.

Now there is a horse,
with blunted yellowed teeth,
latched on hard, biting my skin to burst it

to taste the metal of my blood.

Sue Finch, A PEDESTRIAN WALK AND A ‘P’

This week: yellowing pears, oleander petals, the rattle of swans’ wings, the engines of our envy, and much more. Enjoy.

Last weekend at Lumb Bank a butterfly came into the cottage after dark and settled on my skirt, refused to fly away even as I walked around. Finally, it startled into a corner of my bedroom where it spent the night.

Next day I found it in the window above my writing desk. By the evening there was no sign of it.

I first came to Lumb Bank in 1998. I was in the dining room when it was announced that Ted Hughes had died. All morning, the door to the outside world kept blowing open and shut. This house has been far out at sea all night, I thought.

At Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in the early 2000s, I heard Christopher Reid perform extracts from the book of Hughes’ letters he had just edited. It was a chilly November morning, sober skies. Reid was reading a piece (from memory, I think it was a letter from Hughes to Ben Sonnerberg about the composition of Hughes’ The Jaguar) and as he got to the point in the letter where Hughes describes a bluebottle irritating him mid-poem in his room, those of us sitting close to the stage noticed a black butterfly circling Reid’s head. Very lightly, very deftly, it settled on the page of the book. A collective murmur rose from the crowd.

A black butterfly is thought to symbolise transformation, endings, and – in some traditions – a message from someone who has died. Readings vary slightly by culture: ominous in parts of Europe and Central America, auspicious in Japan, China, and the Philippines. Most modern interpretations read it as a phase closing rather than a warning (much like my understanding of the ‘death’ card in a tarot deck).

The night the Lumb Bank butterfly stayed in my room it rained with peculiar gravitas and I couldn’t sleep. It seemed as if the whole valley had been struck by something and it was ringing. The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills / Winds stampeding the fields under the window….

As I waited for morning, I thought about Hughes’ ‘blade-light…. Flexing like the lens of a mad eye’.

Helen Mort, A house at sea all night

i.m rachel blau duplessis (1941-2026)

/ i cannot face it: the diligent and scheduled day.
/ between endeavour and divide.
/ my cup runneth over. my cup becomes accustomed, is an eye.
/ what fresh hell is this? inside of which we recognise and formulate, traverse entrapment sadly.
/ a poem, aye. envoi of exhaustions. envoi of extremes.
/ to strive inside the limit and the light of it.
/ to swallow it, horoscope and gospel, down in one.
/ what is it – the necessary defect in our nature, a mercy owed to ignorance.
/ that keeps us here, softly espousing? […]

Fran Lock, AGLÆCA #2

At the Museo Nazionale Romano at Palazzo Altemps, we spend an entire slow afternoon with the Gods. There are sun-drenched terraces adorned with saffron murals of birds and plants; the sculpted stone limbs of Demeter and Apollo lounging in the high noon sun; amphorae and funerary reliefs and bones.

I am particularly drawn to Dionysus/Bacchus—always have been, with his pinecones and staff and grapes. I linger in rooms with him, wishing the sculpture would talk back to me. Like a child I covet his attention.

I have always longed for and feared the ecstatic. As a Scorpio, as a writer, I am always tugging at the precipice of ruin, peering behind its delicious curtain. I want the rush of abandon, and then I run from it. An erotic push-pull, where the threshhold is my kink.

Dionysus is the embodiment of The Me that Stretches Beyond Fear, into an erotic expanse that verges on the divine. It is the part of me that eats to excess and drinks and dances and gets lost in beauty and uses my sensuality as currency and lets go of expectation and order. Dionysus tells me to write poems, to lose my fucking mind. But it’s less about the wildness itself and more about what it takes to get there.

In Rome, the closest I get to bacchanalia is staying up late, laughing with my friend and the ghosts, drinking dark, thick wine and smoking a dozen slim Vogue cigarettes. My friend called our last night a “loopy giddy fever dream.” Dionysus would approve.

And then when things feel too heavy, I pull back on the ecstatic, march down the hill, pass through the scrim, and become good again.

Lisa Marie Basile, Missives from beautiful, bloated Rome

The academic whirlwind yanked me up into its funnel cloud this August with extra force, or so it seemed, after a sabbatical’s saner pace. Struggling with the workload, I thought with surprise, I do not want this. I definitely do not want to go to these endless workshops on how AI can help improve faculty efficiency. I want to take slow, inefficient walks in the woods, looking at mushrooms.

I was relieved, after that rush of meetings and paperwork, to settle into teaching. Preparing for class–reading, reconsidering old lesson plans (recently Rukeyser, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Plath)–I lose track of time. Running a discussion about literature or writing is all about giving texts and other humans the respect of unhurried attention.

Yet administrivia keeps pouring in, with deadlines that put firm boundaries on how much time I can give my students or my creative life. The latter involves its own administrative tasks, too: slipping a few submissions in before the windows close, checking proofs, booking a hotel for that writing festival, etc. When you get to the events, they’re often great. I LOVED the thoughtful conversation at the ecopoetry panel and reading I was a part of recently at Stone Soup Books. Blockage on the interstate, though, meant I broke speed limits getting there.

The unhurry-able process of writing, revising, and working to get poems in front of audiences has fruited lately, as a reminder of where rumination can lead.

Lesley Wheeler, Snailing along in the moonlight

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my Substack” if I’d get a different reaction, as that seems to be where the cool kids blog, at the moment. I had a podcast for a while, and a friend actually jokes about NOT listening to the podcast, as if I’d think that was funny, and I do fake-laugh just to make it okay. (But you know what, it’s not really okay.) In spite of this particular long-winded all-about-me blather of a post, some of my best works comes out on this blog: mini-essays, some, or prose poems, others. Not all of them, by any means. But as it turns out, this is my writing practice, this blog. Much to my surprise. And it won’t make me known to the world and has not garnered me many readers and will not turn into a published book, and I can’t turn around and try to publish these mini-essays/prose poems in lit mags because this blog is considered a published thing, and therefore no longer shiny new for most lit mags. I’m just pausing here to give myself credit for this practice. Turns out practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes purpose. It makes sanity. It makes a small grace. And I pause to thank you for reading.

Marilyn McCabe, It may be that when we no longer know what to do

A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:

thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl

In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:

The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.

As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.

[…]

I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.

Matthew Paul, September

As I was reading blog posts from past Septembers, I came across this fascinating poem possibility in this post from September 18, 2024:  “As I’ve been puttering this morning, I thought, I should write a poem with the title “Hildegarde of Bingen Forgets Her Feast Day.” The poem could go in several possible directions: she forgets because she is busy, she forgets because it no longer matters, she forgets because she has dementia.”  I went back to my files, and if I composed this poem, I didn’t do it on the computer.

Chances are good that I did nothing with this idea because a few days later, I was dealing with the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which left us without power for roughly 9 days, without internet for roughly a month, and boiling water until early December.  Again and again, I am a bit whipsawed when I think about all we have managed to survive.

Deep breaths–let me do something with poetry before it’s time to get ready for church–or just sit here and breathe deeply.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Guardians of Lesser Galaxies

At the beginning of 2023, I had my gallbladder taken out due to the presence of a stone so impressive that a someone from the surgical team came to find me afterwards to tell me she’d never seen anything like it. Naturally, I asked to keep it. They said no, but left it in a tube within my reach for a suspiciously long time. That same week, I discovered the poetry of Irish poet Eavan Boland. What a pair of gifts that week gave me. One of them looks better on the shelf, though. [photo]

The poem I came across first was The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me, and it stopped me in my tracks. For context, I read a lot of poems. Like, a lot. I’m also relatively easy to please, poetically speaking, which means that I read a lot of poems I like, like, a lot. It’s lovely. But very occasionally, I read a poem I can’t get out of my head, that I am compelled to play on repeat for weeks or months like I did in 1992 with my cassette of the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack (Jason Donovan version, obvs). I assume this happens to everyone (the poetry thing, not Joseph). I can never figure out exactly what the magic is that makes a poem shoot into my favourites like this, but maybe it’s more poetic that I don’t know. Either way, I fell hard for this one. […]

It’s possible that, in 2023, having had a small object recently removed, I was more than usually open to the idea of the enormity of tiny things. But I’m no less enchanted by this poem now than I was then. This collection, by 1990 already something like Boland’s seventh, is teeming with objects and specifics – her mother’s stockpot, a mug with a hunting scene, the ‘sugar-barley iron of a garden chair’ – which ground and colour the broad profundities and classical allusions that lie in seams in these poems. You won’t mistake this for cosy, domestic poetry. It uses those themes to tell us about women, and writing, and Ireland, and love, and the past, and the now. It’s remarkable writing, and I’m so happy to have spent time with it this week.

Eavan Boland only died in 2020, after a stellar career. I wish I’d found her earlier. But I’ve been making up for it and she’ll be making more appearances on this Substack. The gallstone, thankfully, will not.

Nia Broomhall, Week 27: Outside History

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away.

Ann E. Michael, Re-reading, re-learning

For Rachel Blau Duplessis,

Blue, legion. Drafts. A polyvocal entry. One’s ear, to lend. A visual, daily practice. Days and works and days. Cartographic, the position of collage. This vanishing point. A sure cure, applied. Categories. So necessary, membrane. How big a threat? What, temporality. How grand, this arrangement of stars. Encompassed. The onset, journey. Heart, and blood, and facts. An ocean. The structural divisions of trees, thin lines of fence. How redundant the aesthetic. Leaves tarnish, fall, and then. Thus, exegesis. These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus.

rob mclennan, seven poems from a new project,

“Up//Roar” is the follow up to “Joy//Us Poems of Queer Joy” also published by Arachne. Whereas the latter celebrated, the new anthology encompasses poems for bleaker times, although that’s not to say the poems are bleak or full of doom and gloom, there is a celebration of allyship and resistance. As the introduction points out even in 2026 some families still cannot welcome the spouse/partner of departed loved ones because they’d prefer to erase the departed’s love life. […]

“Up//Roar” brings together a wide range of queer voices, all celebrating resistance and strength gained from being true to oneself however that may to look to other people. It’s a timely reminder that currently there is still discrimination and exclusion faced by LGBTQ+ communities. But here are also glimmers of light within the darkness that come from shared experiences and ways of owning being the outcast. Humans should not be forced to pretend to be something they are not or suppress major parts of themselves to “fit-in”. Let the hyenas not change their spots, “Up//Roar” is a necessary demonstration that hyenas should find their pack and not shiver in isolation.

Emma Lee, “Up//Roar Poems of Queer Resistance” edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon (Arachne Press) – book review

The publication of Path means that, at last, the entire body of [Chris] Torrance’s 50-year engagement with The Magic Door is now available. Sort of. Unfortunately, the Test Centre volume is out of print with the occasional copy being sold online at funny-money prices, and the original individual volumes are collectors’ items, rarely surfacing at any price. And even the Test Centre edition excluded The Book of Heat, as it was originally written for performance. The inclusion of performance pieces here (RORI and Frinite) in Path would seem to indicate a change of heart on that front.

The Magic Door/Path is one of the most important long poems in British poetry of the last 50 years, and needs to be available to readers in its entirety. Now that we have the conclusion, we really need a reprint of the full pre-Path text, including The Book of Heat. Meanwhile, I urge you to read this book, whether you are familiar with the earlier parts or not. Torrance is quite simply a vital, important, dare I say major poet. We owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Maillard for keeping his work alive and to Aquifer for publishing this book.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

In an excellent prefatory essay to the Clay Sanskrit Library edition of the Gitagovinda (translated and also introduced by Lee Seigel), Sudipta Kaviraj very neatly summarises what Jayadeva achieves in these songs:

Jayadeva composed in an astonishing form of Sanskrit in which the visible marks of its complex grammar are so minimally used that it became intelligible, almost without residue, to a much wider audience of vernacular readers. Literary skill obliterates the formal boundaries between different natural languages. It is an ironically democratised Sanskrit which can be read and enjoyed by those who do not know it. It is a strange bridge language and it is a text that lies at the crossing and therefore joins the literary world of Sanskrit and of several vernaculars.

I think it’s fair to say that none of the translations I’ve quoted so far really come anywhere close to suggesting this extraordinary blend of tradition and innovation: a newly transparent and accessible style which nevertheless draws upon the long history of kāvya. Recently I received a review copy of Inderjeet Mani’s new version of the Gitagovinda. This is a very different approach to the text, which draws in particular upon a long-standing tradition of understanding the Gitagovinda as a kind of drama. Mani’s version isn’t a close translation at all but I admire the way it incorporates elements from the long tradition of commentary on and performance of the poem into the English text. 

Victoria Moul, Translating and re-translating the Gitagovinda

(Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)
The three peaks stand like flags piercing the sky.
Forested landscapes hide ponds, and streams
breathe a mist of autumnal clouds.
In the dense undergrowth, oleander petals
sequester light. He pauses, wondering how different
the smell of the earth is—the wild fragrance of long pepper
from coiled creepers. Purple Chironji berries
crunch under his feet, squishy pulp
yeilds crisp kernels his family cherishes.

(From Sarga 2)

I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.

Uma Gowrishankar, What the Land Unfolds

Readers familiar with these reviews will be aware that Indigo Dreams Publishing has established a strong reputation for poetry collections of consistently high quality. Zoe Brooks’s Something in Nothing (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2026) is a particularly compelling addition to its list, and one that is likely to stand among the most significant collections of the year. In this highly original volume, Brooks recontextualises figures from traditional fairy tales within contemporary social and political landscapes, using their familiar narratives to examine brutality, misogyny and the forms of violence that remain embedded within modern society.

One of the central figures in this reworking is Bluebeard, whom Brooks presents as a serial predator targeting vulnerable women. In Bluebeard’s Girls, she writes: ‘The first was a stepdaughter/ that nobody wanted. The second was a girl/ who knew how to give but not to take./ The third was a girl/ arms as wide as Clapham Junction. /The fourth was a girl/ you would step over quickly.’ The women are characterised as isolated and socially marginal, their vulnerability rendering them susceptible to exploitation. Brooks’s use of the phrasing and rhythms of nursery counting rhymes is especially significant: a form conventionally associated with childhood innocence and play is placed in tension with Bluebeard’s predatory violence, producing a chilling effect. At the same time, Brooks resists any tendency to blame the victims. Instead, she exposes the social attitudes that enable their erasure. In Bluebeard Likes to Entertain, these women are described as ‘like puppies/ that need drowning./ The sort of women/ that no one will miss.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Something in Nothing’ by Zoe Brooks

Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival is compulsively readable, if overly speculative. I’m glad to learn more about Marlowe’s love life and spy activities. Some of the comparisons between him and Shakespeare are telling. One was so reckless by temperament, the other so cautious. One became a gentleman via university education though from the working class; the other never went to university but managed to buy a title from his theater earnings. Because so little is really known about Marlowe, the book is as much about his contemporaries as him.

In The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, Nicholas Jenkins makes a convincing case for how the early Auden was preoccupied by the place of national belonging in modern identities. The impact of WWI and its aftermath on young Auden is nicely documented, as is his complicated desire to heal and restore English culture and tradition (Edward Thomas, Hardy, Graves, Owen). Jenkins’s writing is somewhat repetitive. The 537 pages could usefully have been reduced to 400, but the book is a hoard of striking details and insightful criticism of Auden’s major early poems.

Jee Leong Koh, Two Biographies

[Walter Savage] Landor was an interesting figure — a man as definitively out of time as any in English literature: an 18th-century Augustan, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his talent constrained.

One sign of the genuineness of the talent is the fact that other poets have always appreciated his work. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the industrial remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, or “Mild is the Parting Year.”

And then there are the two verses by Landor we look at today: “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and “Dirce.” A strict cataloger might argue that these are not precisely epigrams but simply brief poems, lacking the teaching element of an adage. Our sense of poetic brevity, however, has been shaped by centuries of epigrams. We read these verses from Landor in an epigrammatical way, and rightly so, as both have the power to stick in memory, which is the first quality necessary for a well-made epigram. And they have the second necessary quality for a satisfying epigram, which snaps closed like a well-made box.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The English Epigram

For Persuasion, I wrote about the recent brouhaha over the Princeton English syllabus. Yes, the syllabus has a lot of socialism, but the real problem, to my rather antiquated mind, is what it doesn’t have. The trend in so many places now is to require English majors to take only a single course pre-1700. So almost everything from Beowulf to Absalom and Achitophel becomes optional.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

Henry Oliver, My plea to English students.

Before I made the long, agonising (!) move into academia I worked as a court transcript editor in London for nine years. I actually trained as a stenographer, on a Kombu-green antique steno machine which stamped letters onto a roll of paper, like a silent miniature typewriter. Stenotype is machine shorthand; each keystroke completes one syllable of a word. Your left fingers, in combination, produce the beginning consonant, your thumbs the middle vowel sound and the fingers of your right hand the ending consonant. So ‘crossfire’ would be two strokes: ‘K R O S’, then, on the line blow, ‘T P AO EU R’. There aren’t enough keys for one per letter, so ‘tp’ represents the ‘f’ sound, whole ‘AO EU’ is a long ‘i’.

Anyway, I switched to editing transcripts because it meant more money in the short term (far less in the long term, but I hadn’t planned to stay on the job quite as long as I did). As an editor, I worked alongside some of the best stenographers in the world — that is, I literally sat next to them in court — and cleaned up the transcript as it emerged on my computer screen, typing in sections that had been missed due to mumbling or over-speaking (of which there is a lot in UK trials and tribunals), sorting out the spellings of names and specialist terms, and keeping a log of anything we would need to ask about or research in order for the transcript to be as accurate as possible. It was surprisingly gruelling work — often upwards of 200 pages a day — and I permanently damaged the nerves in my arms doing it, because most of the courts and rooms we worked in were not designed with ergonomic seating in mind.

I collected dozens of poems about or inspired by aspects of the cases we covered, and published hardly any of them. There’s one about the usefulness of the en-dash that appeared in Asterism: An Anthology of Poems Inspired by Punctuation, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut and published by Laudanum Books. And then there’s this, which was published in the first (and, thus far, only) issue of Cambridge Poetry, edited by Dan Leighton — which, by the way, is as comprehensive a snapshot of the current Cambridge poetry scene as you’re likely to find in print.

Like many other poems from that era, it’s about 96% collage. All of the questions are questions which were asked in various court cases, and all of the answers are taken from newspaper reports on accidental fires, with the word ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ substituted in for ‘fire’ and ‘fires’. ‘Cross’ is short for ‘cross-examination’ in lawyer parlance, so ‘Crossfire’ (with an implied colon between the two parts of the word) would mean cross-examination of fire. The plan is to collect these and other court poems up into a little zine at some point. That zine will be part of a series of zines that collect and organise work from the unpublished book I mentioned back in this post from October.

Jon Stone, POEM / Crossfire

Dear poets and friends. Most of you know that I am still “young” by some standards. Last February I turned 42. My husband and I live together with 2 cats, but no kids. We are childless by choice and this has given us a certain level of freedom that some people give up as they age. For example, a few years ago, we sort of spontaneously left our apartment in Los Angeles to go live in Costa Rica for 3 years.

Still, time and family obligations have caught up with us. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time care-taking for my aging parents, helping them make and keep dr. appointments, do their laundry, and trim back some of the trees in their beautifully overgrown front yard.

This has all gotten me thinking about both my relationship with my parents (naturally) and also my own mortality. I always knew that I was going to get older, in theory. . . but now it’s starting to feel real. I could go on about that (and I will in my own poetry-writing), but for now I just want to say that the 2 poems below really hit me where I live lately. I’m extremely grateful to each poet, Amy Small McKinney and Susan Michele Coronel for giving me a kind of language to use to start addressing these issues.

Tresha Faye Haefner, 2 Poems I Needed To Read Today

To be found as a shiny coordinate in the star-chart for lightning bugs on summer nights.

To be found and saved from the searing screech of sirens.

To be found as an escapee from an oracle hushed into tremble.

To be found sleeping in a calm so deep you can hear the trees breathe.

Rich Ferguson, To be found

[T]his week has been somewhat knocked off kilter by having my phone stolen in Shoreditch on Monday night. It’s partially my own fault for being too trusting, but some cheeky fucker ran off with my phone…And I couldn’t catch them. I don’t know what I’d have been able to do even if I’d caught them, so it was perhaps a pointless pursuit.

Not much more i can do, remind me to take out the phone insurance next time, yeah.

Anyhoo, this week has also been buoyed up by reading my copy of Andrew Jamison’s Swans We Cannot See  (You have sighed up for his newsletter, yeah? Go on. I’ll wait, etc). If I had a phone I’d take a picture of the folded over corners of pages for all the poems to come back to..And look, I’ve rattled through the book a bit quicker than usual this week without my phone being present, so perhaps a digital detox is on the cards, but take my word for it..I’ve turned over a lot of corners in this book. […]

Andrew writes movingly about being a parent, a husband, he writes beautifully about place, and to my mind a bit about being/feeling out of place back where you originate from…perhaps it’s displacement??? Perhaps it’s just me. NB You should also check out his epic potato poem in the book.

Mat Riches, A Drunk Octopus Behind The Pink Doors of Perception

[James] Dickey makes two big choices in the title and the first line. As titles go, “Adultery” is anything but subtle, regardless of where you feel it lands in the pantheon of sins. It’s jarring because it’s unexpected as the subject of a poem, especially if you’re not a wide reader. When I’ve taught this poem in the past, students have occasionally asked why write about this. They’re used to less messy love poems, or at least they think those other poems are less messy, but that’s another conversation.

The second big choice Dickey makes is to implicate the reader in the first lines. “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad.” My first thought when reading those lines, even now, is no we haven’t all been in those rooms. It’s the way he’s so casual about assuming that which carries the force for me, the way he reduces this sin of betrayal to something everyone has done, how he’s so matter-of-fact about it before going into this description of the bland, unchallenging cheap hotel room art that’s there mostly to fill space on the walls.

But it’s in that description where we first get to see some sense of guilt, which is the emotion that will drive the rest of this poem.

Brian Spears, “Adultery” by James Dickey

Do you know the long poems of David W. McFadden? I’ve always loved how they ramble, surprised at how they unfold and where they go. How strange, ironic, intelligent, tongue-in-cheek yet profoundly moving they are. They understand affect and composing with connotation, sentiment, form, narrative, beauty, and surprise. Over the last few days, I somehow felt compelled to write this sad poem about two brothers in a horse costume and I was thinking of David’s long poems.

Gary Barwin, Lament for Horse Costume: Tragic Novel in Two Parts

The Ancient Futures issue of Sage Magazine, a print publication from Yale’s School of the Environment, recently arrived in the mail as a beautiful, stitched book containing my poem, ‘The Woolly Kind,’ following an open call last autumn. The unique formatting in the pages below was done by the graduate students on the magazine’s design team. It’s a bit hard to read on screen, so I’ll include a plain text version at the end.

I wrote this persona poem several years ago after Colossal Biosciences announced it was planning to bring the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), back from extinction by 2028. In August, the company revised its timeframe, stating it might take until the 2030s. My poem imagines life from the perspective of this future creature.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Ancient Futures, Recent News

My bottle of ‘Glimmers’ pills came the other day and I was truly filled with joy at the sight of this little prescription with its contents of glimmering moments. What an honour to be one of the 26 poets selected to feature in this small but powerful collection.

Each morning for the past week I’ve been tipping out one at random and every single one has been a gorgeous gem (and a super way to start the day!). You can get hold of a bottle of ‘Glimmers’ through The Poetry Pharmacy’s website Here.

And if you’d like to have a little peak at some of the poems you can find out more about the project and read some editors picks in The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’ Newsletter.

Here’s my Glimmer

Branches raise fingers to sky—ask for a blessing of leaves;
ground is still wet with winter, sun rests her hands on my
shoulders, and a warbler hymns from the silver birch. Dear
Spring: eat me, swallow me whole, a seed into moist earth.

Rachael Hill, A Glimmer

The poems in “The Basement Stacks” have been about memory from the beginning of the series. An image or phrasing or action from one poem leads to the next piece, and so on. Part 10 helped me as a writer make some discoveries about myself, or at least remember things I’d forgotten. Writing, in any form, can have that wonderful outcome.

This new poem grew from my thoughts about the boxes in the stairwell in part 10. In the new piece I was following the imagery as I’ve done with all the pieces. There are many possibilites with each poem that could lead to any number of new pieces, but my process is to follow the first moment in a poem that speaks to me in a direct way, and the next poem find its own way.

“The Basement Stacks” is projected as one section of a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled “Portraits”. That’s an extremely uncreative title, but it does, in its own way, reveal clearly the subject matter of its pages. In the series and ms, most imagery and action originate in reality, but some have worked their way into the pieces by necessity, by a kinship to or a reflection of the truth. Even those few parts that are fictional are connected to the truth in some way. And here I’m thinking of Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 11”

Tradition offers explanations for why this piece of Torah is written in this way. To me what’s striking is the visual prosody — the way the shape of the poem sings a particular kind of song in my consciousness. The open space gives each line a caesura, a pause. I read the words differently, and feel them differently, because of the space between them. So that’s how I wrote this week’s poem: with pauses in each line. More white space / white fire, imbued with silent meaning, holding the words’ black fire.

This one’s kind of in the same vein as the poems in Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda). When I shared my new year’s poem just before Rosh Hashanah, my friend Mary Ann — who has known me since we were in seventh grade — said, “You always could write a hell of a love poem.” The older we get, the more (I think) we become ourselves. It’s funny, and sweet, and a little poignant, for me to see reflected in her eyes the fact that this isn’t new. This is how I am, maybe even more so in my 50s than I was before.

Rachel Barenblat, For Ha’azinu

‘John Rae and the Northern Telegraph’ was part visitation, part rethinking of his expedition. Music was commissioned from Scottish composers Stuart MacRae and Ailie Robertson, Eli Tausen á Lava from the Faroe Islands, and Arnanguaq Gerstrøm from Greenland. We worked independently and were given an open brief. Stuart MacRae considered the conflicting thoughts that might have filled Rae’s mind, a bit older now, leaving his new wife. ‘I imagine the form of the music as a line of communication,’ he said; ‘one idea suggesting another, passing on its energy to a different musical expression, in one direction, always transforming but never returning to the source.’ Ailie Robertson intertwined the ends of the route in a back-and-forth of laments and melodies based on Greenlandic beaded yokes. Arnanguaq Gerstrøm structured her piece around the breathing patterns and ornamented tones of traditional singers, with the mechanical pulse of the telegraph’s clicks and codes rising and fading like static. To prepare to compose, Eli Tausen á Lava walked the Faroese section of the proposed route, south to north. John Rae walked many thousands of miles on foot and in snow shoes : ‘Through this cold, unromantic labour, there comes some kind of understanding of the world’. Eli’s piece became a contemporary meditation on pilgrimage, of undergoing a hard physical journey in order to bring on an inner transformation.

In his substack last week, Don [Paterson] talked about the process of collaboration, in all its nitty gritties: ‘Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air’. On the night of the performance, yes: the poems, at a practical level, created distance, carrying the audience from one deep auditory reverie into the next. In these beautiful pieces I heard skeins of geese and the rattle of swans’ wings, foot crunch, threads of singing, odd strings of Morse. All art aspires to the condition of music, said Walter Pater: there is an immediate intuition of (some kind of) meaning, an immediate impact on the emotions. In between, the words, gleaned from real people and real places, pinned us back to our place on the planet : here, in these north islands, in this old kirk, watching the weather coming. ‘It seems to me,’ said Mann’s Dr Faustus, ‘that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits … I am devoted to it with all my heart’.

But something else happened too. In the St Magnus Cathedral, this continual transformation that Stuart described was vivid, almost tactile. Music in a mediaeval Romanesque/Gothic cathedral was intended to overwhelm, in the best sense of the word. The building’s internal proportions – the high, tiny windows, the placing of its columns, galleries and vaults – were intended to amplify unaccompanied voices, and create a rolling sound that would wash through its spaces like waves in the sea. Standing in the transept below the high central tower, it was as if we were placing the words and music into the air, letting them swell and breathe on their own.

Lesley Harrison, The Northern Telegraph

As part of the UEA Welcome activities last week, I led a “Word Walk” around campus, where we stopped to consider the roots and history of nouns we encountered, guided by Emerson’s observation that “Language is fossil poetry”. The walk zig-zagged interdisciplinarily between architecture (“concrete”), natural history (“butterfly”, “birch”), maths (“extrapolation”), and chemistry (“gas”, “helium”), before ending up at art history, with an Ancient Egyptian carved figurine of a frog in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Looking up the etymology of “frog” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I learned a new word: “hypocoristic”.

Ultimately related to Old English frosc and its cognates in other Germanic languages, although the nature of the relationship is uncertain; the present word was probably originally an alteration of frosc as a result of association with docga dog n.1 […] in which the geminate consonant perhaps originally had a hypocoristic motivation (< Greek ὑποκόρισμα, ‑κορισμός pet-name, < ὑποκορίζεσθαι to play the child, use terms of endearment)

The OED entry on the mysterious origins of “dog” is a lesson in philology itself. What I understand from the above, though, is that the written words “frogge” and “dogge” (the vowel-shortening double “g” is the “geminate consonant”) began as spoken terms, for which the “hypocoristic motivation” was that of the pet name: the playful diminutive applied to the familiar creature. And “frog” perhaps — though this is my own speculation — was an association formed through the rhyme it makes with “dog”.

For Gertrude Stein, this is the felt life of language and naming that eventually becomes formalised as poetry. In her essay “Poetry and Grammar”, she writes:

Think of how you talk to anything whose name is new to you a lover a baby or a dog or a new land or any part of it. Do you not inevitably repeat what you call out and is that calling out not of necessity in short lines. Think about it and you will see what I mean by what you feel.

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.

That’s not exactly how I put it below, in 2005. But it arrives at the same idea via a different route: that to read poetry, you start with the words, and listen for the feeling. To quote the epigraph from Nijinsky’s diary that begins “Friends”, the John Ashbery poem that I discuss here: “I like to speak in rhymes, because I am a rhyme myself.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Frog and Dog

I’m editing, editing. What could I do for break? I know…word games. There’s re-w-or-d-a-ble. (Not a sponsorship endorsement but word geek fun.) What else?

What do I like? Let’s see, poetry, remixing, chance operations, corpus studies, Good Omens and making stuff.

I have 5 sets of magnetic poetry. What if I made a Good Omens one? Which words are keyword bingo troped? I brainstormed some.

I have a base set, a gardening set, a CanLit set, a French base set, and some yellowed ones that I’m not sure what they were from. One of the sets came with blanks. And I have a labelmaker. We have a plan. 

So I made a thing. 

Pearl Pirie, Good Omens Magnetic Poetry

On the evening of the day we move I have to teach a step class and Nick has to take a choir rehearsal. So no putting our feet up that evening!  Then waking up the next day, clambering over boxes and hoping the boiler/shower/hob are all working…. wish us luck!

Obviously I don’t have a lot of time to noodle around on the blog. But I did want to mention these literary hoaxes that are doing the rounds. Maybe I’ve come late to this particular party. A few months ago I got an email from someone claiming to have read ‘The Golden Rules of Blogging’ and asking if I was up for any other projects with the publishing house she claimed to represent. I confess I fell for it rather stupidly – I looked up the sender on LinkedIn and she appeared to have a legitimate profile there, but I did think it very odd for her to pick up on a book that’s over ten years old. So I replied, albeit in a cagey manner. That’s when the penny dropped – another gushy email came back right away, and I recognised the purple prose of a crude AI bot. I’m happy to say I’m not the first to fall for it – for example here’s Julie Broad of Book Launchers telling her story. 

A week or so later came another similar email, this time allegedly from a professor at a West Country university who claimed he ran a literary festival and would be honoured to have me featured there! Woohoo! Except the ‘festival’ was starting the very next week, and the professor turned out to be a real person, but actually a professor of engineering. Since then the emails have arrived on a regular basis. It’s the present-day version of those misspelt email scams from twenty years ago. 

Robin Houghton, New beginnings and literary hoaxes

For the uninitiated, here is a quick overview of how publishing a book of poetry works:

Most poets don’t have agents (unless you are Billy Collins or James Franco and already important OR independently wealthy). The vast majority of poetry books are published via Book-Length Contests or Open Reading Periods, and even the biggest poetry press is typically a small indie or university press with only a few people running it and even less money keeping it afloat. Sending in your manuscript may happen in April, with nothing but crickets until Christmas, and the contests aren’t free – most charge $25, with the most expensive running around $35.

What do you get if you win? Maybe a $1000 prize, a few poetry readings, or free copies of the book, distribution to some indie bookstores, some universities inviting you to come give a reading.

No one will stop you on the street for an autograph – even the most famous living poet is not famous outside of poetry circles, and likely your book will be forgotten in a month or, worse, never even heard of. Ever.

Yet, the competition is steep – which makes me love Poets all the more. We are such a ridiculous, starry-eyed set! […]

The numbers can seem daunting, but, as I let my fourth-collection drift around the contest circuit, what all this tells me is that one rejection means basically nothing, that I need to be sending more places, and that I must persist.

Those numbers also remind me that every poetry book I adore came from the efforts of a poet who kept sending out their work despite the tiny odds and minuscule rewards because they believed their poems needed to find their readers.

Renee Emerson, Poetry Manuscript Contests

I remain the sort of poet who doesn’t get asked to do paid gigs, has never been published in reputable literary journals and has no book deal, but now I am the sort of poet who is resigned to that fate, and is enjoying a presence on the internet, and occasional publication in fabulous mags and websites that admittedly might not be quite as reputable as the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. As a consequence of that resignation, I am a lot less worried about reading at open mics. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to get up from time to time, and I still want to make an impact on the occasions when I do. But I have developed some strategies to avoid getting my knickers in a twist about it. Sometimes they actually work. I am not suggesting that they would work for anyone else. But they help me. Here they are.

One. I try hard not to care about how my reading will be received. I’m not going to put myself into that position of worry. When it’s my turn to read, I’m going to get up, say a few words, read my piece and get off.

Two. I’m going to do one, and only one poem, no haggling over a second, third or (God forbid) a forth one. I’ll save those for the rare occasions when I am actually asked to do a set. People haven’t come to see me at an open mic – I should have a bit of humility.

Three. When I am done, I should sit down, still my beating heart and do my best to forget about it. I can save the in depth analysis with Gary Lineker and Ian Wright for when I get home.

Four. I try to listen properly to the other readers. Not using them as yardsticks to compare myself to, but for who they are.

If you are a poet who regularly attends open mics, perhaps you do all of these things naturally. Perhaps you have always approached open mic in this manner. If so, I salute you. It’s hard work for a big headed egotist like myself to cultivate such an attitude. There is also the attendant worry of appearing arrogant, as if open mics are “beneath me” if I don’t get up, or appear too flippant when I do. Perhaps I overthink everything, but I don’t think that I am alone in such mental struggles.

Mike O’Brien, How to Enjoy a Poetry Open Mic

We read our work at the open mics, and this past Saturday I shared “Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan” for the first time. I didn’t realize how well it would play to a live audience, and I think it may become part of my memorized rotation for readings. After the event, Midge Goldberg and I were trying to describe to Tom the Aussie the tradition of singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” in the middle of 8th innings at Fenway Park.

I remember workshopping this poem during my residency, and someone complained about how many baseball references there were. Now that I’ve read it out loud I think I have regrets about not mentioning something about my mother bringing us home. I see a revision in the future! Good idea? Bad idea? Please be opinionated in comments.

I’ve pulled the poem out of the drawer every so often for over the past year, but 2026 is the 20th anniversary of my father’s death and September would have been my parents’ 53rd wedding anniversary. I decided that it was a good time to fly it out to journals, and it landed on the very first try.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan

The bookshops that impress me have “Short stories” sections. They’re mostly in Dublin, though the Amnesty International shop in Cambridge and Saffron Walden’s Oxfam shop have story sections. The Oxfam bookshop in Islington doesn’t have one, though it has a section for “Literary Magazines” – Acumen, Pennine Platform, etc.

Blackwells in Oxford has a “poetry pamphlets” section.

“Poetry” shelves often have an “Anthologies” section. The Islington bookshop has that, and also has a section I’ve never seen before – “Contemporary Poetry” – which includes pamphlets and many slim volumes. It makes sense to display the spineless pamphlets in boxes – it makes browsing easier, like fingering through LPs in the olden days.

Tim Love, Bookshops – specialist shelves

The CBe edition of Testimony by Charles Reznikoff, all 608 pages of it, has gone to print. A longish piece by me on Reznikoff will be in the imminent new issue of The Little Review (£5 for 176 pages: ridiculously good value). For a reading of the whole of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London next spring I applied last June for funding (for costs including gallery hire, video-recording, etc.), and I learned this week I didn’t get it. I spent a long time over that application; it was a beautiful application. But the reading will happen.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter September 2026

The neighborhood paper, which has little to report beyond the struggles of the city council, school board, and high school sports teams, informs us of an upcoming event: a tour of the city’s fanciest houses, built by men of wealth and ambition at the turn of the previous century. Why we tour such places—to gawk, to lust, to covet—is a mystery I’ve contemplated more than once. Here is one such contemplation.

[…]

Guidebooks lapse into silence on the sins
that undergird their granite disciplines:

the dark red sandstone brooding on the hill
over the history of a steel-spiked will
that built and built and never had enough—
a public treasure now, it rules the bluff
and makes us marvel at our rush to own
the memory of the men it turned to stone.

Which we preserve, the robber baron’s guilt
being gilded by the loveliness he built.
As for a feast day, every year we come
to hear the engines of our envy hum,
sighing for beauties, knowing what they meant.
Not quite complicit. Not quite innocent.

Maryann Corbett, “to hear the engines of our envy hum . . .”

Had you heard of “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” when you were eleven? I had not. I’m not even sure I had heard of Keats. My main poetry experience was Pam Ayres’ “I wish I’d looked after my teeth” (which I still think is wonderful, whatever the poetry overlords say) and a smattering of Patience Strong. My old and very posh art teacher was astonished at my ignorance. The memory of her astonishment pops into my head as autumn tiptoes in. Light recedes day by day, the air I breathe when I let the cat out (and in and out and in) in the morning has a faint chill, the smells change from sun warmed jasmine and barbecues to damp leaves and bonfires. Mists begin to wrap the morning, and supermarkets proclaim the arrival of “British season apples” which implies mellow fruitfulness exists somewhere. I’ll miss the light of summer but autumn brings the gift of time. The garden takes less attention, people stop having barbecues and other social excitements, trips out are replaced by staying in and watching Ludwig. More than anything, it brings me the time and energy to write. If you’re familiar with Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory you’ll know exactly what I mean. […]

Poetry has slipped to one side for a while. I’ve a new Poetry School course starting soon which I know will spark the poetic light again, but overall I’ve found I’m just not as excited as I was. I’ve reached a point of stasis. The giddy excitement of being selected to be one of Nine Arches Press Dynamo poets, learning that I could have work published and actually seeing my words and name in print has moved to one side. I’ve reached all the goals I set myself way back in 2018. I’m published in magazines including my goal of goals which was to be in Under the Radar. I’ve published two books, entered and been shortlisted for various prizes and I’m not sure where poetry will take me next. I’m not putting poetry aside forever; notes are still being made, the mysteries of the sestina still thrill and baffle me and I’m still writing poetry for wedding readings, which brings a joy all of its own.

As well as travel writing I’m dipping back into short fiction. I love creating worlds inspired by a photograph or picture (old postcards are especially exciting) and am acutely aware of the place all those poetry skills have in creating them. It’s a genre I haven’t worked in since my first forays (back) into creative writing and I’m hoping the quiet months of autumn and winter mean I’ll have time and energy to rejuvenate my skills.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Shine the sun and rain the rain

When I have seen jays before I have often caught of a glimpse of them as they have flown across short spaces within forest areas and I have always felt lucky to catch this rare flash of their distinct feathers. The one this week, in my own garden, caught my attention as I was settling to work at my laptop. On being observed it flew from the wall and thudded to a stop on the roof above me. I went outside to take a closer look, but it had already moved on by the time I got outside. The ginger cat had been watching me one night as I was unloading the tumble dryer in the back porch. I felt that wonderful sense of being lifted from my own world because I was being observed in a kind and curious way. And there studying me was the lovely solid looking cat that has recently been sleeping in a sheltered spot in our garden. We blinked at each other and then, as I smiled at the thought of being noticed whilst doing a boring but necessary job, off he went.

I am sort of making a note to self to notice more things on my daily walk and this brings to mind the fact that it feels like a solid fitness thing to do at this time of year when compared to the lightness of taking the same walk in spring when the daffodils are emerging. Photos at this time of year also seem to be of solid things like tree trunks against the sky or cows so maybe I will look for the light as I stroll out and see where it is that I find it in this new Autumn. I know it was in the sunrise and sunset of Saturday into Sunday, and I know those two studied views gladdened my heart.

Sue Finch, GLANCES, GLIMPSES AND OBSERVATIONS

This is our life, made of small
moments. Hearing the call

of a bird, resonant
as a bell, longing

and desire become
indistinguishable.

Luisa A. Igloria, Occasional

“I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” This was Annie Dillard quoting Vincent Van Gogh. Even though VVG said it, I’ll always connect the quotation to her. The way that a person looking at the intricate beauty of the world and interpreting it in the way only they can, is also an act of heartbreak. And for credibility’s sake, there is always bad news right beside the news of the beauty of the world. Thus heartbreak. Thus utterly.

Shawna Lemay, Because it is September

I had just been talking to a friend about how our social habits changed during the pandemic, and how I was so much less social than I used to be. Well not this week! Besides visiting with my farmer friends at the various pumpkin farms, we also had our Bookwalter’s Wine and Book Club, where we discussed Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. People were really taken by it, and I noticed this time around (I hadn’t re-read in a little while) the huge Bowie connection in the poems, and listened to the songs that were referenced. I was aware of Bowie as a kid but I think I mostly remember a couple of his later songs, but of course my main crush was Prince, who wasn’t quite as interested in space. Then the next day we had our poetry group, which was wonderful as usual and we talked about submission opportunities and shared poems and Glenn’s gluten-free red pepper and goat cheese pizza, and pumpkin cheesecake, and I ate more than my share of Witch’s Finger grapes (another seasonal favorite! And we’re even coordinating a pumpkin farm visit and maybe movie get-together. After being so sick back in 2016-17 and then the pandemic, this feels more like my life used to be. Did I mention I have updated my resume and will be job hunting as well?

Good News to Share…Soon

Do you hate when people in the writing world tease good news they can’t share? Me too. That’s why I’m definitely not saying that I got good news that I can share soon, and I have to say that after a period of discouragement with the poetry world, it’s nice to have a little good news in a while, right?

I’ve also been writing more poems and sending out more work. That’s September’s magic – unwrapping new pens, setting up new spreadsheets, a little more motivation to keep going, especially on the days when it’s in the sixties and sunny and the hummingbirds are still busy at the last burst of September blooms.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! And How Many Pumpkin Farms, Social Week, and Good News to Come!

糸瓜忌の紅茶に消ゆる角砂糖　秋元不死男

hechima-ki no kōcha ni kiyuru kakuzatō

            Shiki’s Death Day
            a lump of sugar disappears
            into tea

                                    Fujio Akimoto

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

Fay’s Note: Fujio Akimoto (1901-1977). Shiki Masaoka (b 1867) died on September 19, 1902.  Because his death haiku was about ‘hechima (gourd),” his death anniversary is called “hechima-ki.”

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 19, 2026)

The poet called this morning. My electricity had just gone out and I was plotting my next move in the dark. “Is it a good time to speak?” he said. I ran through a quick itinerary of pressing issues in my head with a rotating leaderboard of the top three items that consisted of: crippling existential loneliness, Chelsea Football Club’s current defensive frailty, whether rhyming ‘apothecary’ with ‘apology’ in a poem I’ve made about Keats was absolutely necessary or just plain clunky.

The poet was waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” I said as my phone pinged a notification from my bank. I’d exceeded my overdraft limit. Again. “It’s a great time,” I said.

I put the poet on loudspeaker and used my phone’s screen to light up the electric meter, to see if I had any emergency credit left. I didn’t. I gave the junction box a gentle tap, the analogue approach, hopeful I may nudge the circuitry back into action. Short of resorting to a hammer or a high kick, blending a lightness of touch with a belief in magic has never yet produced satisfactory results in terms of getting the power back on but this is not to say it wouldn’t work this time. I am not conducting the same experiment expecting different results, I am manifesting forces known only to the practitioners of poetry where subtle fluctuations are at play, creative oscillations that can produce unusual conclusions. We may sit at our desks at the same time of day, open the same note book, use the same pen, the same ink, the same laptop and software but different poems will appear. The outcome is always unique.

I reach out, focus, make a connection, I might, just might, channel enough energy to transfer some Wattage through my fingers and feed the supply. I feel alive. I summon my inner electricity. The spirit of Walt Whitman is here, with me, in a damp subterranean flat in Hackney. But I am all volt and no current. The lights do not come back on. I remain in the dark.

“What’s happening?” I ask the poet, “Talk to me.”

Jan Noble, N°82 How Swan made it to San Francisco

This week: a heady mix of scents, the spaces between pains, shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals, and much more. Enjoy.

The grass has sprung back into shape after plenty of rain and it seems strange to be needing to be cutting it after weeks of watching it turn yellow (and rather crispy) and not need much attention. Pleasingly its flourishing green renewal has renewed my energy for gardening, and I have thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air. I have also enjoyed the scents I have carried with me on my skin as a result of doing some cutting back and weeding. On the first day I smelt of rosemary, on the second lavender, and finally blackcurrants. A heady mix of scents.

I have often been found at my desk this past week squeezing in some extra writing time for the Tea Towel Poems. Those that have been out in the world have received feedback from their recipients, and for those yet to reach a couple celebrating their anniversary I have invited my lovely wife into poetry corner to listen to my drafts. She is good at giving me a succinct and honest reaction and can easily alert me when something I have written only really makes sense in my head. At one point I realised that I could make the necessary tweaks by changing the title of a particular poem. And Kath’s response to the fact it might mean the poem had a long title? “It can’t be any longer than that one about drawers!” Reader, there are drawers in the title of that poem but it’s not just about drawers!

Sue Finch, MARGARINE TUBS OF MARBLES AND ERASERS

秋晴や行きたきところとてもなく　片山由美子

akibare ya yukitaki tokoro totemo naku

            autumn clear sky−
            no particular place
            I would like to go

                                                Yumiko Katayama    

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 13, 2026)

Temperatures are cooling, but most of our days still have the blue clarity that brings people outdoors, the ideal weather for yard and garage sales. There are lots of them in this mixed neighborhood of homeowners and student renters. I’ve always had conflicting feelings about these sales; to me they signify endings or passages. To others, though, they connote neighborly conviviality. […]

What germ of evil in our past
infected this computer’s sheath,
once beige, now with a yellowish cast
like rotten teeth?

The screw loose and the weak-linked chain:
Nothing in literature or art
so bluntly explicates the line
Things fall apart….

They lie there derelict, unhaggled,
wasted, remaindered, on the skids,
redemptionless. But now a gaggle
of college kids

has blown in on a gale of laughter,
talking trash. May youth forgive
the faults age will no longer suffer!
May these bones live.

Maryann Corbett, Yard Sale Weather

I found my most beloved prose writer, Marguerite Duras. Just saying that feels as though I am a child and my favorite color is blue, or yellow. She is every color. If you know Duras, you know her work and life are things of pain, truly. And also immense passion, contradiction, expression. A constant looking back at childhood, at what is no longer, at the mother wound, the father wound. She told me early on that The Wound is the thing to be obsessed over, stoked, and alchemized. Abandonment, family dysfunction, alcoholism, douleur; these things pervaded her inner world, and she chased them on the page.

I did not expect this, but standing at her tomb, I felt a tenderness toward this woman I have never met and could never truly know. I suppose I wanted to see her grave to ask if she is alright, and to also be tended to by her as a woman and as a writer.

As I moved through the glittering carousel energy of Paris, I imagine her in these streets with her contemporaries, at cafes and bars, creating beauty while she moved through her own shadow. I asked her to bless me.

And then I went to César Vallejo, whose grave is tucked into a row. It is easy to miss, even with directions. Vallejo is the reason I ‘became’ a poet—not just dabbled in it. A friend of mine in college, Lisa, gave me a translated copy of his book Spain Take This Chalice From Me (note: there are other translatons of this title). It became my heart because he taught me the heart of poetry could be difficult, could be violent, could be wild and surreal.

His avant-garde tendencies (he even used automatic writing) and darkness showed me new doorways, new permissions. I was young and didn’t understand the politics of his world then, but I knew the language had a ferocity that could contain and express human suffering. He is the reason I love bold language, strangeness, fucked up syntax, the visceral, the embracing of the ugly and warped and broken. Seeing him moved me deeply. I thanked him profusely. I asked him to bless me.

Lisa Marie Basile, Literary ghosts of Montparnasse cemetery

I am absolutely delighted to share “’To Bear Witness to One’s Own Life’: A Conversation Between Hyejung Kook and Mia Ayumi Malhotra,” published in Poetry Northwest online! I only knew Mia slightly when I agreed to interview her about her latest collection, MOTHERSALT (Alice James Books, 2025), but now, after going back and forth for many months, I feel lucky to have gotten to know her and her work much more deeply. […]

I’m still a year out from my book release, but this feels like a pre-debut of my debut. It’s difficult to concisely sum up a book, but here’s my current attempt: ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH is a collection haunted not only by loss—death and miscarriage most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, peonies reemerging in spring, the taste of salt licked from your palm, the music of overlapping voices and languages.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

As I enter this new phase in the memoir project, I’m facing a fork in the road, and both roads give me agita. First, I’m spilling my tea to anyone who reads the book. But also, I have to figure out how to get people to read the book. It’s hide-and-seek. I’ve been hiding my whole life, and now I want to be sought after.

The count down to publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise, is now 9 months away: a full gestation. Due in Pride month.

Right now, I’m working with editors who want me to inject more feeling into some of the adverse events in the story. (Again, please. This time with feeling!)

But here’s the thing . . .

. . . there is some potentially upsetting material in this story, no lie. We even talked about content warnings, which I am not a fan of. Warnings weren’t a “thing” when my stories unfolded, mostly in the 60s and 70s. The truth is I didn’t know that the awful things that happened to me were awful. If you are a woman who lived through those decades, you know exactly what I mean.

Risa Denenberg, Changing Focus

Back in the mists of the 2000s, the GCSE poetry paper for our exam board had a section that asked students to compare a selection of poems from two set poets. You got to choose Duffy and Armitage, or Heaney and Clarke. This was the anthology that made headlines in 2008, when the government decided that the rising tide of knife crime in the UK must be due to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure, and removed it from the syllabus. Remember that? (Macbeth was absolutely fine though.) Anyway, that didn’t affect me because I was the only one in my department at the time who wanted to teach Heaney and Clarke. It was a perfect pairing. I had a lovely time teaching that syllabus. The students, who ended up spending great chunks of their exam time flipping back and forth through an unwieldy booklet of poems, not so much. But they didn’t hate Heaney, at least. And that’s how I got to know his famous, glorious, 1966 debut (debut!!! IMAGINE!!!) collection Death of a Naturalist. I could have taught those poems until the end of my days and never, ever got sick of them. […]

Throughout Death of a Naturalist, we are shown a childhood and a history that is ended, an innocence that can’t last, an anxious step into adulthood and the future. What steadies it in the end is memory, and love, and poetry. In the last poem of the collection, Personal Helicon, Heaney tells us ‘as child, they could not keep me from wells’ and ends by explaining that, because staring into wells is ‘beneath all adult dignity [.] I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’ It’s the best definition of poetry I know.

Nia Broomhall, Week 26: Death of a Naturalist

a rat will rearrange things:
loaf of bread
now by the back door,
candlesticks tipped over,
cupcake in the sink.
you with a boy inside
sprawl in a soft chair
counting the spaces between pains
while it cowers behind the washer.
we’ll get him later you call
lovingly between contractions,
your husband on his knees
with a knife […]

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Labor Day

I was delighted to find that fellow poet, Neil Leadbeater, had brought out another collection, shared this time with Lori Levy (interviewed by Neil here). The very title, Flavours, conjures up a lavish spread of glorious food for the reader’s enjoyment; who could fail to be drawn in by those zesty lemons that adorn the cover, painted in acrylics by Katie Bayer?

The first half is given over to Lori’s poems under the intriguing heading, ‘Lemons, Eggplants and Chocolate Chip Cookies’. Neil’s poems follow under the heading, ‘The Fruits of Our Labour’ (Psalm 128:2 comes to mind). The final section contains ‘Dialogue Poems’ which unfold in a poetic conversation between the two poets, with Lori’s words on each verso and Neil’s poems of response on the opposite recto. 

The Contents page alone is enough to set one’s mouth watering, with its mention of ‘Peach’, ‘Pomelo’, ‘Pistachio’ and ‘Olives’. Perhaps somewhat unusually for poets today, Lori and Neil have not shied away from the inclusion of humour, an ingredient (sorry…) that enhances these beautifully crafted texts and brings a wry smile to my face. To humour we can add a compelling sense of playfulness, an aspect that is particularly appreciated in these difficult times.

Caroline Gill, Poetry Book Review: ‘Flavours’ by Lori Levy and Neil Leadbeater

Hedgerow of Voices, Paul Brookes, Jane’s Studio Press, 2026, ISBN:‎ 978-1068432378, €6.94 (There’s an email contact on the publisher’s About & Contact page)

In Your Mouth, Paul Brookes, Culture Matters, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, £10

The Drey Skin, Paul Brookes, The Red Ceilings Press, 2026, £10

Paul Brookes is something of a polymath: poet, shop worker, interviewer and editor of, amongst other things, The Starbeck Orion. But it is his work as a poet that is of interest to us here, with these three new publications all out this year, but with a span of half a decade or more behind them, each one different but with overlapping formal and thematic threads woven through them. I’m reading through them in the order they came through the letterbox, but you could start and end with any of them, really.

Hedgerow of Voices consists of four sets of individually titled sonnets (with one outlier): ‘On River Dove’, ‘Old Moor’, ‘Hedgerow of Voices’ and ‘On North Star’. The first and third are linked sonnets by virtue of the last line of one being the first line of the next.

‘Woolley’, the second poem in ‘On River Dove’, opens with these lines:

Daced and Barbeled, swirls and ripples, rivered.
Cuts through an ancient sandstone riverbed
Ripples fossilised. Earth remembered
lost river. Water’s higher speeds thread

velocities sand grains roll, ripples
form, move with the flow, have short, steep downstream
sides.

The twisting, turning syntax enacts the fish-swim through space and geological time while the linking last/first lines pull us along. And the twists and turns move us from the deep geological past to the Anthropocene present with the closing couplet of the sequence:

A hungry AI data centre feeds,
sups my future till there is no more me.

‘Old Moor’ moves us to another part of the landscape, and also to another part of Brookes’ range, as the final poem in the sequence, also called ‘Old Moor’, moves away from the constraints of the sonnet form and finds its own verbal music:

In hush of sorting sidings,
A dance begins – Lapwing shadows shunters
each wagon, each bird, searches place,
pushed gently over the Hump,
A rise no steeper than a banked field
where Redshank pick through pools.

In ‘Hedgerow of Voices’, the linking again leads us through the weave of the hedge, a site teeming with life, feeding, breeding and renewing itself.

Billy Mills, Three by Paul Brookes: A Review

Béatrice Douvre was a French poet who died, aged only 27, in 1994. Although she published a few poems in magazines during her lifetime, the great bulk of the Collected Poems are drawn from unpublished material found in her papers after her premature death. The earliest of these poems date from 1986, when she was 19; the last of them were written just a few days before she died. In French, her Oeuvre poétique has been available since 2000; this is the first complete translation into English.

This substantial paperback edition, running to over 500 pages in a large format, prints the French verse and English translations (by John Taylor) on facing pages. The book also includes the translation of a brief preface by Philippe Jaccottet, written originally for the French edition. Jaccottet, who died in 2021, was a Swiss poet, translator and critic whose poetry and essays are still ubiquitous in the poetry section of even the smallest French bookshop; several of Douvre’s poems are dedicated to him. This gives you a sense of the extent to which her poetry was embraced and endorsed by the French poetry ‘establishment’. In his excellent introduction on ‘Translating Béatrice Douvre’, Taylor says her work has a ‘mesmerizing lyric élan’, while the publisher of the collected poems in French called her ‘a meteor avid for the absolute’.

Both these descriptions point to the signature intensity of Douvre’s lyric voice. The typical Douvre poem is short – less than a page long, and sometimes only a few lines; light on punctuation; musical without following any specific formal scheme; precise in its evocation of emotion (emotion more than particular recognizable experiences); surprising in its diction; and systematically slightly surreal – surreal, I mean, in its unexpected use of words, but also in its unusual angle of perception and a kind of hyper-focus on the minutiae of observation and response. This intensity of focus creates ultimately a sort of distance from experience as well as an intensifying of it.

Douvre’s use of language is frequently exhilarating. Here is Douvre’s original and Taylor’s version of the first half of the poem ‘L’outrepassante’ (‘She Who Goes Beyond’), dedicated to the poet René Char. The title of the volume, Inhabit the Brief Halt, is taken from the first line:

Habiter la halte brève
La rive avant la traverse
La distance fascinée qui saigne
Et la pierre verte à l’anse des ponts

Dans la nuit sans fin du splendide amour
Porter sur l’ombre et la détruire
Nos voix de lave soudain belliqueuses
L’amont tremble de nos tenailles

Inhabit the brief halt
The shore before the crossing
The fascinated distance that bleeds
And the green stone at the arch of bridges

In the endless night of splendid love
Bring onto the shadow and destroy it
Our lava voices, suddenly warlike,
The upstream tremulous with our pincers

Here we have several examples of Taylor’s great strengths as a translator and also the choices and compromises involved in any such translation. ‘Inhabit the brief halt’ is a wonderful translation for Habiter la halte brève, with just the right edge of peremptory strangeness. ‘Halt’ is also, of course, the most obvious translation of halte because it is etymologically the same word. Taylor quite often chooses the etymologically closest option, even when it is not the closest in everyday meaning. ‘Halt’ exists in French and English alike as both a verb (often a command: “Halt!’) and a noun, but in English the noun ‘halt’ is much rarer than the French equivalent. Halte remains a fairly common word for a pause or break in French; a halte-garderie, for example, is the standard term for a common kind of part-time crèche. We might notice something similar about ‘fascinated’ (fascinée) and ‘splendid’ (splendide): in both cases, the English word has a slightly different or narrower range of uses in everyday speech and a somewhat different tone or register than the French equivalent. In all three of these instances, the English translation arguably makes the line a little stranger even than it is in the original.

I think Taylor does this on purpose to create a sense of dislocation and disorientation. This reminds us that we are reading a translation and encourages us – if we can – to refer to the original, but it is also a translation strategy specific to, and appropriate for, this particular poet. Almost every one of Douvre’s extant poems suggest an experience of the world so intense and minute that it feels like a kind of dislocation. 

Victoria Moul, The foam or the blaze: the poetry of Béatrice Douvre

Patricia Lockwood is a wonderful prose writer — and also the author of one of my favourite tweets — but she hasn’t published a new collection of poems since Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014). Agate Head / Stone Soup (Bloomsbury) is a double volume with a preface that describes how her imagination returned to poetry through a combination of avoiding the internet, learning metalsmithing, going on bike rides, and taking what she sees as Sylvia Plath’s attitude to poems: “Write them straight through, from beginning to end, don’t mess with them too much, and tell people you’re doing it”. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #47: Newfangleness

Edward Lear (1812–1888) must surely count as one of the most interesting and peculiar figures to live in the Victorian age — and that’s saying something, for the Victorians were as interestingly peculiar a people as the world has ever known.

A commercial artist, best known for his illustrations of scientific and popular books about birds, he was also a musician. And painter. And composer. And eccentric traveler. And inventor of the limerick (leaving aside Mother Goose’s ur-texts). Out of all his work, it is his nonsense verse that has survived: poetic extravagances that, though they are mostly taken as children’s poetry these days, he intended as works to be appreciated by adults. Nonsense is serious business, and Lear was the best at it. Think of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” (which we offered in February), “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” or “The Table and the Chair.”

Or take Today’s Poem, the 1877 “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” In six eight-line stanzas, Lear shows us his rollicking meter of three and four feet, with just enough dactyls to make the lines tumble across the tongue. The comic poem shows a genius of a small kind: interesting and peculiar. And fun. What more could one want from nonsense?

But it’s also worth noticing how rhyme drives the internal logic of the nonsense.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Pobble Who Has No Toes

The second full-length collection from Montreal-based poet and intermedia artist Leigh Kotsilidis, following Hypotheticals (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], is Some of Us May Live (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection some fifteen years, one might reason, in the making. I’m intrigued by the steady punch of Kotsilidis’ sharp and short-lined lyric sketchworks, offering accumulating phrases that thread together to form narrative shapes. Just listen to the opening of the three-page poem “FIRST PRINCIPLES,” that begins: “A theory exists / for each of us. // To stop motion, / something heavier must intervene. // There is nothing / that won’t crush you. // The more you suffer, / the more you remember. // A crisis churns / out opportunity. // Fame promises fun / until someone ODs. // We pay heed / only to what is useful.” Kotsilidis’ narrative shapes nearly form rings, from the phrase and the sentence to the poem, and into the collection itself, a book-length single moment of perpetual clarity. One might say that the sentences and phrases of Hypotheticals extend and interplay with an ongoingness, almost as a book-length line, broken up into line breaks and individual poems, run almost continuous from the first page to the last. Or, as the poem “WHAT WE CAN’T SEE” begins: “We wade at the edge / of what is beyond us // There is nothing more / than delusion // Men mistake porch bulbs / for moons // A body drifts indeterminately / unnoticed // Every body leaves / over time [.]”

At nearly one hundred and thirty pages (albeit with thirty pages of endnotes, perhaps the most I’ve seen for an individual poetry title), there’s a heft to this collection, and a shift in an ecopoetic from focusing the impact of climate crisis upon the landscape to that of the world’s inhabitants, offering a kind of bestiary, one comparable to Vancouver poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s own full-length poetry debut from the same publisher, The Animal in the Room (2023) [see my review of such here]. “How / to communicate that / which has no name // or why a name said / again and again and again / dissipates.” she writes, to close the short poem “SUBLIMATION,” “Lying / among such incessancy / our bodies // concede; / a thousand bees / devour us irretrievably.” Kotsilidis’ clear-eyed interiorities ripple across the lyric, the landscape, attempting to articulate the question of how one is able to live amid such self-created crises. “We raise stone / and concrete edifices. / The only sounds between walls / the ones we create.” she writes, as part of “SCALE PROBLEM,” “We dismiss birds that signal / heavy weather. / Wait out high winds / threatening the next resonance disaster.” From stardust to oceans, suburbia to glaciers, selfies to snow fences, the scale of these accumulated poems, these questions, observations and life-lessons, is enormously rich, varied and complex, managing to encapsulate everything there is and might be, fully aware it can never be contained.

rob mclennan, Leigh Kotsilidis, Some of Us May Live

While waiting for the arrival of John Chmura’s new poetry collection, 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens, I listened to an audio version of John McPhee’s classic book, The Pine Barrens (1968), a seminal work of environmental and cultural reportage that began as a series of articles in The New Yorker in autumn 1967. McPhee’s descriptions of a vast landscape, ethereal and haunting, are echoed in Chmura’s poetry. Since this is a tale of two Johns, I’ll use their surnames throughout this blog post to avoid confusion.

Beyond the immense natural beauty, there are cultural and ecological tensions. Chmura’s collection opens on a winter highway with artillery practice heard in the distance, while “the only sign of life is roadkill.” There are road signs, though, and the green highway sign on the book’s cover is County Route 539 through the Pine Barrens, where he composed many of his poems. At times the signature trees are “phantom limbs draped in fog,” but the forest is always alive, and it is wiser than we are. From his poem, ‘Arborism’:

Never before has peaceable pine
or roving oak stumbled into a human grove
and thought how beautiful
are these creatures, snapping selfies,
to share with tendrilled friends.

After reading the collection, I commented to John: “I am tempted to blog this… not a review, but a reflection on your book in conversation with McPhee’s, as a reader encountering the region for the first time through these texts.” In response, he noted that the Pine Barrens are changing, not only from new development and natural disasters, but ethnic and religious tensions on the rise. In light of this, he wondered if some of his more speculative poems might come across as escapist.

Jenevieve Carlyn, “Histories in snakeskin and gossamer”: Reading John Chmura’s 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens

There is an early – now lost – paper by Boris Pasternak called ‘Symbolism and Immortality’ which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being ‘the common property of man’. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his ‘Essay in Autobiography’ written in 1956 and he goes on, ‘I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity – the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content’. He then remembers concluding that ‘the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience’ (tr. Manya Harari, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).

In Pasternak’s own work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as ‘I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings’ (‘I want the heart of the matter’) and ‘Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self’ (‘Fame’s not a pretty sight’). In struggling to complete ‘Essays in Island Logic’ I felt I had been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain, or assert, its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I felt more sanguine about this – chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience – it’s not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh – my set of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised, according to my personal self. As Pasternak argues though, each individual self has sufficient in common with all mankind so that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.

It strikes me this is not far from Keats’ valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being – a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship – and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more and try to understand it far less – the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It short cuts the truth – at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive at times (of trouble) but it is always an error. Odysseus learns this I think in the ‘Essays’ sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous – the perceiver of vivid contrast of necessity, us and them, victory and defeat). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade but rather to take life as a whole.

In contrast, his son, Telemachus, remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism – what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house etc) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical with her portrayal – yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poem sequence, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution – if we can speak in such terms – is an openness of soul. There: I’ve said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.

Martyn Crucefix, Another Look at Odysseus (after seeing Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’)

Here is my interview at Lithub with Emily Wilson. I really enjoyed doing this—keeping the focus on translation.

One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.

Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.

Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.

Leanne Ogasawara, Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It In Conversation

If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.

And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.

Nope.

I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.

Ann E. Michael, Radio Nowhere

I’m not a believer in a writer being a “channel” for receiving language from some other-worldly place. I know that it is me writing the things I write, though I try to remain open to possibility, to play with sound and language in ways that are pleasing to the ear, to freewrite into weirdness. And these can lead to unexplained juxtapositions and successful moves I would not have come up with otherwise. But sometimes, I can arrive at a place where I surprise myself, write a line or an idea that makes me wonder “Where did that come from?” or “Did I really write that?” And, in my experience, that is when I know I have something.

I think this may be the reason that topical prompts usually leave me cold. When I set out to write about a specific topic, or focus on a linear narrative type of prompt (i.e., “a time when”), I lose the very thing I love about writing—the play and the experimentation. The magic beans in the breakfast cereal. The horns pushing through a nightgown. The meandering and the mess. The trusting of the internal compass to lead me to a place that is both crafted and “witch-crafted,” by which I mean, built with intention but also allowing for the unexplained to creep in.

More often than not, this approach leaves me with poems that never see the light of day. Journals and computer file folders full of them, to be honest. I just threw away a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals that have been collecting dust in the basement for years, thinking they held some kind of magic or mystery. But as I flipped through them, I realized that they were not special. They were frighteningly similar in some aspects over the years—entries about teaching stress or my frustration with my weight in the pages that weren’t poem ideas, and poem ideas that had either been fleshed out and moved long ago to the computer or died on the page. There was no need to keep them, and tossing them out felt a little like lifting an anchor, leaving me ready to sail on into whatever unexplained mystery comes next. In writing. In living. In a place where not everything needs an explanation to feel true.

Donna Vorreyer, Unsolved Mysteries

Writing poetry is a bit like a sculptor at work, carving a block of stone. The art is inside the stone, and all the excess must be removed to get to the art itself. An important point to remember is the finished statue or carving already exists inside that block of stone, but excess and portions of rock must be continually removed until the art is reached. But it’s there waiting. It’s been there. […]

The poem I was trying to draft became knotted, jumbled, unclear – too much telling on my part and even, in some lines, too much showing. Both may be equally damaging to the piece being written IF the poem is something else entirely. If my feeling about the subject matter is large, I might think the writing needs to be large. No. It’s not always that way. With this poem, “9,” my feeling was large, but the writing needed to become more laser-like, more focused. I began to cut away, to let go of phrasing, of images – and the piece found the page. The poem isn’t haiku, but it is fairly brief, twelve lines. My feeling was intense, and I wanted the poem to be long, to be full. My want for the piece was getting in the way of a poem. The poem wanted and needed something else, something less.

Sam Rasnake, Here, Let Me Bore You for a Bit

I never automatically assumed that poetry primarily belonged on the page. I wrote exclusively with live audiences in mind. When I came into a windfall after doing the Nationwide ad, I never even considered a collection — my money went on taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, which then toured UK theatres in 2018. It was only when VERVE approached me to publish the show’s poems in a book that I even began to consider them on the page.

I also believe that class plays a role here. I come from a working-class background, and whilst creativity was always encouraged (my dad is a very talented painter), the publishing industry always seemed way out of reach, to the extent that it wasn’t even on my radar.

Finally, I have to confess that impatience is also a factor. Which makes sense considering I was diagnosed with ADHD in June last year, but when I first started, ADHD was just a lyric in a Natasha Bedingfield song.

If I’ve written a poem, I want it on MySpace Music within the hour, and I want to perform it at Escobar when I’m hosting an indie gig tomorrow night. No way am I spending two years chipping away at a manuscript with all of the poems in the dark.

Poetry is punk, it’s DIY, it’s urgent and essential. Spoken word poetry (or poetry spoken aloud) requires no barriers or equipment: it only needs an audience, an opportunity, a moment. This is what I loved about it in those early days and what I still love about it now. It can happen very quickly and spontaneously when it needs to, and if there are two things that a poetry collection isn’t, it’s quick and spontaneous.

On submitting my collection for typesetting – guest post by Matt Abbott (Trish Hopkinson)

Performance establishes the tone much more clearly, makes the main thrust of the poem unmissable. The print version, while initially harder to penetrate, permits more nuance and subtlety, and ends up feeling more complete and cohesive.

But is it true to say that there have emerged, broadly speaking, two distinct types of poem: one attuned more to the page, one to the stage? It’s hard to deny it entirely. When you listen to the kind of work performed at poetry slams, then turn to what is published in prominent poetry journals and award-winning books — or even if you compare poems distributed in video form to those published as texts — it’s apparent that different traits are prized. […]

Essentially, one might say that the stage poem is angled toward the limbic system — the part of us that feels and reacts instinctively — while the page engages the neocortex, the part of the brain that processes ideas, patterns and language more deeply and methodically. As such, the ‘page poem’ has come to be defined in contrast to the stage poem, as a primarily intellectual form — a vessel for new, difficult and delicate ideas which are unlikely to provoke immediate excitement.

The full picture is more complex. Page poems, of course, also make use of rhythm and rhyme — effects that are felt before they are understood. They are full, too, of emotional cues. And it is possible to find a balance; skilled performers and writers can come up with work that fits comfortably into both environments, even if it means they don’t take full advantage of one or the other.

Additionally, the two modes have actively sought compromise. Poetry publishers desire the larger, more diverse audience that the stage poem is able to draw so much more easily, while performer-poets and their promoters are attracted by the less short-lived nature of a successful book, as well as the stronger claim that page poems have to an artistic lineage. So both will sometimes imitate aspects of the other, and individual poets will often try to straddle the line, with varying degrees of success.

Jon Stone, RESOURCE / “Are stage poems and page poems different things?”

I suppose now is a good time to read the comments from one reader and then another. They represent two types of negative commentary: incurious and curious. One expresses what he believes is “fact” while the other admits his comment is an “opinion” based on evidence. One wants attention but is resistant to intellectual engagement while the other one desires a conversation.

From what I gather, the section of the poem which reads the most like “crumbly cement” is where I employed apophatic rhetoric, meant to riff on one of the most poetic sections of the New Testament, the definition of love explored in 1 Corinthians:

“Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited…”

There are things in the first half of the poem that have hidden meanings for me and my husband, such as the fact I have a severe allergy to the cherry blossoms that lined the large avenue near the university where we met. And there are no quiet Sunday mornings because getting five children ready for Mass isn’t a quiet affair. (It’s mostly me shouting, “No one’s going to church looking like a HOBO!”) However, I wrote all of these in a way that I thought would be relatable to any reader. Do they read like a string of clichés? I guess to some yes, and to others no? The editor who chose this poem for publication didn’t think this was a problem.

I tried to keep memorability and musicality front and center through the use of anaphora (“It’s not…”) and strict use of iambic meter with absolutely no substitutions, which is meant to mimic the beat of the heart. (The only line that appears headless or acephalous is preceded by a line that has a feminine ending.)

The “trite” title is borrowed from a song in Disney’s original Cinderella (1950). “So This Is Love” contains lyrics like “so this is what makes life divine” and “the key to all heaven is mine / my heart has wings.” In the movie, the words simply mean the couple has fallen in love, but when considered with my poem the “heaven” is more literal. The line “I heard you hum” which describes what I saw when my husband held our baby also evokes the humming in the original song.

I’ve been reading Joshua Hren’s title essay from his new book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature. He references Scottish philosopher David Hume’s thoughts about beauty as being personal sentiment. From “Of a Standard of Taste:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (ST 7, Mil 229-30)

However, many philosophers have argued that beauty isn’t purely subjective. To counter Hume, Hren brings up German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand’s “Aesthetics” which argued that beauty “adheres to the object as a quality, independently of whether someone understands it, reacts appropriately to it, or enjoys it.” Just because someone enjoys kitsch doesn’t mean it should be celebrated as beautiful. There is a certain level of discernment that must take place, not relying on pure sentiment, and this is something that Hren understands as the co-founder of the University of St. Thomas’s MFA program where I am a student. All MFA candidates are required to take a course called Philosophy of Art and Beauty where we become well acquainted with Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers who create a foundation for exploring Thomist aesthetics which defines beauty using the three main conditions of integritas (wholeness), consonantia (proportion), and claritas (radiance or clarity). These are things I constantly think about when I write my poetry. I’ve taken Craft of Poetry, another required course, where students learn the strictest definitions of metrical order. Most of the poems I have published are pieces that I have worked on for many months, if not years, because I am working to bring a wholeness, proportion and clarity to my verse. “So This Is Love” was written over the course of a year. I challenge anyone who tells me that I don’t know about craft and that this particular poem I’ve published in Nimrod is objectively and thoroughly bad.

I know people who hate heavy metal, and I know people who love it. I know people who hate modern art and those who love it. I know people who hate any trace of didacticism in poetry, and whose who don’t mind it, or even enjoy it. I know people who like dry, crumbly scones and those who like moist, buttery ones. There is such a thing as taste, and I am willing to concede that what I write is not to someone’s liking. What I would like critics to consider is that maybe there is something good and true about a poem despite not liking it.

I am the type of person who doesn’t want positive or negative critique; I want truly critical reviews that seek to improve poetry and ask questions about it, with charity and curiosity. The goal of my life is to seek the good of others, and one of the ways for me to help other writers is to understand the craft myself. One of the skills I’ve had to develop is how to receive negative feedback — publicly and privately. But I’ve also learned that sometimes the feedback reveals more about the critic than my actual work.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Love’s Labor is Lost on Some

once, in the early pandemic, i bought
a teeth whitening kit. i was spending
way too much time with my face. mirrors
bloomed where there never had been before.
i missed everyone who used to hold me.
my flesh, like a stage curtain. i put on
a whitening strip & turned off the tv.
silence, lapping at my feet. teeth ringing
like tuning forks. when i took it off,
there wasn’t as much change as i had hoped.
instead, a soft white across my mouth.
i smiled at every mirror i could. threw out
the rest of the box.

Robin Gow, 9/8

The trouble with literary criticism—whether it is done by school children or professors or freewheeling writers—is that it cannot be defined. Some critics write about biography, some about historical context, some about the dreaded French Theory, and some pick a poem apart word by word, as if they were stripping a Sunday chicken, ready to be broken up, put back into the pot, and boiled to make stock. This is by no means an adequate list of the various ways of reading. But we can make a distinction between those people who care about the way a poem makes you feel and those who care about how it is done.

This is the distinction, as Adam Kirsch puts it in The Modern Element, between “art and magic”. We call this the distinction between enchanters and engineers, or between Prospero in his cell and Faust in his study. The magic of poetry is the way that it can create a new sense of the world—can make you believe in things not merely unbelievable, but which we know to be untrue. The art of poetry is in the specific wording of the spell—change the words, get the order wrong, and the magic will not manifest.

Critics are often divided into two groups, like sheep and goats—Iliad people and Odyssey people; comedy people and tragedy people; Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people—and we can divide them along the lines of art and magic too. When I was young, the two most obvious examples of these groups were Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler was a practitioner of Art criticism: no word could be examined too closely, nor related too carefully to the rest of the poem. Bloom was a Magic critic, who believed poetry was what Keats called “A drainless shower/Of light”, which illuminated new realms.

Of course, all such distinctions are to some extent false. You might think Samuel Johnson was an Art critic, judging poets’ care for their meter and rhyme, but we find him under the sway of poetry all the time. He was often overpowered, especially by Shakespeare, who haunted him always, by what he called “the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” That force is the essence of poetry’s magic.

For some of the Magic critics, poetry gives us access to a divine realm, a place beyond this world, Platonic, eternal, higher. Poetry is Magic in the sense that it is spiritual, giving access beyond what we can ordinarily experience. For the Art critics, Kirsch says, following Poe, poetry is a kind of mechanism that plays upon our feelings and evokes sensations. Clearly, both sorts of critic believe in Johnson’s force of poetry, but for different reasons: one because of the spiritual power of the poet, the other for his ability to work a technical use of language.

Again, we are loaded with a false distinction, but still a useful one. It is merely a trick of the rhyme, or is there a “really real” dimension of poetry, something spiritual, closer to prayer? Is poetry Longinian or Aristotelian?

Henry Oliver, What is literary criticism if it is not close reading? Art, Magic, and Common Sense.

In my classes, I’ve often used the work of Federico Herrero to talk about attention. Herrero is a Costa Rican artist whose paintings bring together vivid color, irregular shapes, landscape, abstraction, and the visual language of lived environments. One piece I’ve returned to is “Caravan,” a large 2018 oil and acrylic painting on canvas.

In “Caravan,” blocks and patches of color gather across the canvas in ways that feel dynamic and alive. There are shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, signs and landscape. Color suddenly feels like movement. Some areas feel dense and social, others more open. The eye keeps having to decide where to go, then revise that decision. The painting does not give itself over all at once.

That is part of what I love about bringing this kind of work into a classroom. It asks us to slow down and notice how we notice. The more time I spend with “Caravan,” the more I see how attention and looking are active relationships. The painting changes because I change in front of it. Or, more accurately, I become better able to see what was already there.

This connects to revision because when we return to a draft, it can be tempting to arrive with an agenda. But sometimes the draft needs us to sit with it first and let the page teach us how to read it. Revision becomes a practice of renewed attention.

José Angel Araguz, Federico Herrero and Revision as Listening

A few years ago I received an email from the great (and now, sadly, late) theatre director Michael Boyd. He had been commissioned to direct a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for the Royal Opera House, and he asked if I’d be interested in making it singable in English. Michael told me he’d read and enjoyed a version I’d made of Rilke’s Die Sonnette an Orpheus, and had hoped I might do a similar number on Alessandro Striggio’s libretto for what is often considered the first modern opera. With the benefit of hindsight, ‘hard pass’ was the one sensible answer available to me; but in my defence, I was not in possession of all the relevant info. I forgot to ask. My ego – the antihero in this little tale – was too busy with ‘It’s Michael Boyd! It’s the ROH! It’s Monteverdi! It’s Orfeo! Maybe I’ll get on the poster!’ So I agreed, and with reckless alacrity.

I’d worked with composers before. These relationships were usually described as ‘collaborative’. In my experience they were more accurately ‘cooperative’, me with them, and correctly so. Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air; composer’s edits can therefore be anything between pitiless and nonsensical, and feedback can be light. (I recall David Harsent telling me that he once delivered a libretto to Sir Harrison Birtwhistle, whose only comment was to weigh it up in his right hand with ‘Well it’s not fookin Siegfried, is it’, and then open a bottle. I’m sure his subsequent notes were more extensive.) My previous disagreements with contemporary composers mostly revolved around a bizarre collective refusal – widespread, if not universal – to take much interest in either the prosody of the English line or the form the poem supplied. A poem written in ballad meter, say, would likely end up set as something totally bonkers that made no reference to the song-form from which it was derived.

No one is suggesting that all ballads should be set to ‘Oh Susanna’, but there are plenty of sympathetic alternatives; however the power imbalance has led to a general ignorance among composers of the better solutions available. For example, while iambic pentameter can’t be sung well in 5/4 even in Bulgaria, it’s very easy to set it in a half-time 3/4 – in other words, nearly all Shakespeare works just fine as a slow waltz, e.g. Shall ONE compare thee TWO a summer’s THREE [duh dah] / Thou ONE more lovely TWO more temper-THREE [duh dah] Rough ONE do shake the TWO-ling buds of THREE [duh dah] … etc. Which, while a useless way to scan it – Nicholson Baker got too excited over this old idea in The Anthologist – is an elegant way to sing i.p., and once the bar is established, you have a lot of freedom over placing the stress. (I.p. also works great in 4/4, where you split the line over two common-time bars: go and listen to Chet Baker singing ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, rare amongst jazz standards in that it features several lines of immaculate pentameter.) But surely L’Orfeo would be a far easier job? The music was finished. The text was already half written. Best of all, Monteverdi and Striggio were dead. Despite their poor rep, I have always found the dead to make wonderful and generous collaborators. I mean some of my best friends are dead.

Don Paterson, On the Importance of Doing a Bad Job

I’ve fallen in love with the wind.
Why? Because it sounds like poetry.
Like feeling romantic with the sea
or the barn one has already left
lured by what one imagines to be
(missing, after all, a front end) the scent
of long grass and the possibility
of great distance.
Plato believed in the primordial
horse costume, each of us united
with our other half in a utopian range.
I like the unobstructed view
and the gap.

Gary Barwin, Sonata for Horse Costume

If you, like me, have been saving up poems to send out in September when lit mags tend to open, albeit briefly (onto that in a second), you may have noticed a frustrating trend: the day the magazine opens for submissions, it hits its whatever cap on Submittable—and closes the same day. I spent two hours this week trying to submit but finding every place that advertised being open actually closed because of this “cap.” A terrible way to run a lit mag, and an institutionalized way of making writers feel powerless and worthless—and believe me, we already feel that way without lit mags charging $5 to reject us after six months if we are lucky enough to get in the three-hour window (East Coast time, of course). I almost gave up submitting poetry for good. I know I get discouraged with the poetry world, the lack of acclaim, money, respect, etc.—but this new hurdle is so rotten for any working person, caregiver, or West Coast person, honestly, I thought I needed to raise the issue.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Submissions, September 11, Setbacks, and the DMV

Over the past month or so, I’ve been seeing more and more publishing opportunities for AI-generated content.

Nicole Foor, Managing Editor of NewPages, has launched a new magazine, Beat My AI. She wrote to me,

[W[ith AI policies hitting more and more mags, it is always interesting to see how journals choose to actively incorporate AI into their journals. Such is the premise of Beat My AI which accepts two kinds of work: Works where 1/3 of content is generated by AI and original human works responding and changing the AI portion of a piece into something wholly human written and “better.”

The project looks interesting. The editors argue here that no matter what your opinion about it, “AI is here to stay.” Rather than draw a hard line against the technology,

Beat My AI implements a different approach. Because no problem has ever truly been solved by burying your head in the sand or looking the other way.

But before you rush to groan or condemn them, note that their submissions guidelines are not quite what you may think.

Here, they invite works that are human-created, but which have a clearly marked section that is AI-generated. This is called the “Original.” Writers are then invited to submit work, which seeks to improve upon the AI portion. This is the “Contender.” Over six weeks, readers vote for which contender piece fits best with the original. Hence, beat my AI.

It seems like a magazine actually more dedicated to human writing than AI writing, albeit using AI as, well, a prompt to stimulate human creativity.

Whatever you think about it, I’ve certainly never seen a lit mag that openly invites submissions which improve upon what has already been published. Since, in this case, the portion to be improved upon is AI-generated, presumably no one will take offense at the suggestions!

Becky Tuch, Happiness is a Warm Lit Mag!

I have the distinct impression that written-page poets and print-based publishers are currently suffering from a growing struggle to reach their readers and customers, having gradually shifted their means of communication from snail mail to email newsletters and then to social media over the past twenty years.

Insta has always been more focused on spoken word, so the poets and publishers in question tended to concentrate their efforts on Facebook and Twitter. The former is now weighed down by ads and reels, meaning that it’s hard for posts to gain traction. Meanwhile, the average age of its users is rising.

And as for the latter, Twitter became the social media of choice for umpteen publishers and poets. Many had huge follower counts, got numerous shares and likes on their posts, and managed to drive much of their online promotional, marketing and sales activity through it. However, Twitter’s change in ownership, name and algorithms has ripped all that asunder. Many people and organisations have given up on X or limited their use of it, while the reach of posts has dropped through the floor.

In this context, a lot of outfits and individuals in the poetry world saw Bluesky as a natural alternative and rushed to open up new accounts there. A few months later, the majority of those accounts have been abandoned. I’d argue that this is because barely anybody stopped to consider that Bluesky works differently from X/Twitter, and your posts will wither and die if you attempt to follow similar communications strategies on both platforms.

Nevertheless, whatever the arguments in favour or against Bluesky might be, the fact remains that the core of U.K. written-page poets and print-based publishers are scarcely using it. But what’s their alternative plan? How do they intend to maintain contact with their readers and customers over the coming years? Given the atomisation of social media platforms, many new titles, launches, reviews, sample poems, etc, seem to be disappearing into the void. As a poetry lover, I find this situation deeply concerning. How can we communicate better?

Matthew Stewart, Communication

To round off the review, Mark [Fiddes] kindly agreed to answer three questions about the collection [Hotel Petroleum] and I have included his answers in full below.

Your work combines elements of reportage with deeply impressionistic, lyrical expression. How do you judge where to strike the balance between the two in a poem, or indeed across a collection?

At a time when the leader of the free world has effectively turned current affairs into a reality TV show with him as the host/ringmaster, you want to say “Stop! These are real people. Real schools. Real bombs.” At the same time, you need to take a breath and say “Wait, have you tasted the pomegranate juice?” I believe our role as poets more than ever is to restore some sense of humanity and vulnerability to our increasingly transactional discourse.

Another strain within your work seems concerned with accenting, even playing with, the absurdities of modern life, e.g. rampant consumerism, the hyperbole of ad copy, the dehumanising language of bureaucracy. Where does this influence come from? Do you draw on your experiences as a creative director and formerly as a journalist?

Yes. I have had to write in many different modes and voices over the years, from investigative reporter at the Pentagon to scripting for National Geographic and even Durex. It’s hard not to let that language leak into the poetry – or sometimes to adopt it as a template. For example one of the pieces in the book came from an Out Of Office vacation message that grew into a poem. Last week, I flipped an irritated email to IKEA into a lyrical design brief for a new sofa.

I particularly enjoyed those poems in Hotel Petroleum where you seem to be in conversation with certain representatives of the canon (Larkin, John Clare…) and with the idea of what it is to be a poet. What do you think about the state of poetry today? Are we in good health?

In theory, yes. Global sales are up. Distribution via social media has never been higher. But poetry must take on today’s big challenges to remain relevant. First, Populism and its goose-stepping algorithms that divide and ‘other’ society. Poetry is the opposite. Its power is the power of belonging, to remind us of the basic humanity that unites us. The second challenge is artificial intelligence reducing the agency we have over our own lives. Poetry can be the wake-up call not to outsource our curiosity and experience but to relish the lucidity of the present moment.

Mark Fiddes lives in the Middle East and Catalonia, although he is currently in Prague as poet-in-residence in Kafka’s House for Prague UNESCO City of Literature. He has written three other books of poetry and a libretto ‘Threadlands’ with composer Joanna Marsh. His work has won the Ledbury Prize, the Oxford Brookes University Prize and the Ruskin Prize with awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Forward Poetry Prize and many more.

Victoria Spires, Welcome to your chosen moral universe, enjoy your stay

i’m currently preparing some notes towards a round table discussion on resisting the right through arts and culture. one of the provocations i’ve been set to think about is why the right are winning the war of ideas. to which my still incomplete answer is something like this: it’s not a war of ideas, it’s a war on ideas, one the entire media and communications architecture of the twenty-first century is geared to facilitate. it isn’t just that new platforms facilitate the spread of right-wing ideology, but that the kinds of discourse that they foster favour fascist thinking: shallow, aestheticised content, encouraging (also monetising) extreme declarative speech acts that admit no doubt, no otherwise, no challenge; information returned to us by algorithm, the nuance shaved out, instant answers only as good as the questions we know to ask. the medium matters, and this medium shapes and delimits thought, allows only certain forms of thought to root and spread. of course there’s a love-in between tech-bros and far-right politicians: tech is bringing about the material conditions for the fascist mind-virus to thrive.

sorry, that last sentence got a bit matrix-y, didn’t it? how early aughts of me. but it has been on my mind. it was on my mind when i sat down to write the poem [here], wondering if a poem could be a material tool/ an enabling architecture for (mental) resistance, could foster or incite another kind of thought – slow thought, ambiguous thought, historically and sympathetically rich thought? i don’t meant to suggest that my poem in particular was doing this, just that poetry in general, as a mode, might. which is where I chose to end the poem, on a fighting back that is first the writing of the poem, the reading of the poem – any poem – and a mental effort of understanding towards people whose moral position we find utterly repellent. can art create these conditions?

i don’t know, but my thoughts lead me back to “noli timere”, which is a call to courage, but also an offering of aid. the message i want the work to carry – the intention i want it to transmit, whatever it is ostensibly about – is something like “i am with you”. to raise a voice and a mind. like a shield, like sword. a torch to light our way…

Fran Lock, “NOLI TIMERE”

On the news this week, it was reported
that we claimed ownership of the moon—

its hammered surface rising over beaches,
schools, parking lots, and detention centers;

its cratered Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11
touched down and the astronauts left bootprints

that are still there because the moon has no weather
to wash them away. Perhaps someone will also try

to claim ownership of the bees and their gold
cells, the rivers and all their tenants folding silver

light beneath the bridges. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Declaration of Ownership

You will hear the word culture used a lot. Often angry, pink-necked men will roar about ‘their culture’ being threatened, perhaps without really knowing what ‘their culture’ is. And this is understandable because culture is always changing ownership. The other week I performed ‘My Name Is Swan’ at Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames. It was, you might say, an evening of culture, of music and poetry set in an idyllic location. For some, this kind of event is culture, high-brow, removed, separate. I feel uncomfortable with spaces that are reserved for art, domains distinct, detached, divorced. I’m not entirely sure this is where poetry belongs.

The Garrick Temple was commissioned by David Garrick, an actor and theatre reformer who changed culture, on one hand by making theatre more professional and on the other by making it more exclusive, expensive and elitist. He converted ‘the pit’ from standing to seating, championed a naturalistic, expressive acting style, introduced moveable scenery, lighting and stagecraft. He made theatre respectable but, with the introduction of higher ticket prices, he also excluded poorer, working class people who had made up the majority of the audience in Shakespeare’s day.

This is cultural erosion, this is the big steal. The denial of access to the arts leads to the kind of civil bankruptcy and social insolvency that has angry, pink-necked men roaring about the good old days without really knowing what the good old days actually offered. While they do know something is missing from ‘their culture’, while they may point accusatory fingers elsewhere, they are perhaps unaware that what they are being denied is poetry.

At the time of Shakespeare’s tricentenary in 1864 it was well understood that the poet had been appropriated by the wealthy and the well healed and that it was time to reclaim him for the people. Shakespeare had after all been born of the working man and the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee was set up in opposition to the official, government-backed National Shakespeare Committee who, it was felt, were using the anniversary to promote a pro-Empire, elitist narrative. To recast Shakespeare as a democratising figure, a satirist of corrupt kings and courts the Working Men’s Committee decided to mark the 300th anniversary of the poet’s birth by planting a tree. They didn’t create an effigy, they didn’t build a temple, they planted a tree in a public space as a reminder that poetry, as well as being a living art-from, should be free for everyone.

In 1864 100,000 people marched through the streets of London to Primrose Hill to witness the act of putting in a sapling for a poet. 100,000 people walking for poetry. I think it’s important we consider that occaision, reflect on what it was they were walking for and, at a time of huge social and economic disparity, think about who poetry belongs to today.

Last week two of us went to visit the tree. It’s not the original, it was replanted in 1964, but this what poetry teaches us, if an idea dies you plant another. Naomi [Foyle] spoke eloquently about re-enchanting the world with poetry and while walking is still free I’m trying to find enchantment between sites, at locations, in doorways and under the branches of trees. I am still moving toward poetry.

Jan Noble, Nº81 The Shakespeare Oak

“What I fear most is despair
for the world and us: forever less
of beauty, silence, open air,
gratitude, unbidden happiness,
affection, unegotistical desire.”

— Wendell Berry, from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, page 192

[…]

— I’ve been thinking about happiness, and the first poem in this post and the phrase, “unbidden happiness” has me thinking. I’ve been also thinking about contingency a lot lately, the idea that “if not this, then that.” And that led me to cracking open The Affect Theory Reader and looking again at Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Happy Objects.” Ahmed acknowledges “the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.”

— “It is useful to note that the etymology of “happiness” relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English “hap,” suggesting chance.”

— What are theories of happiness beside happiness itself? Does one practice happiness? One practices the piano, we take up a practice of writing.

— Bruce gets it. Trouble is never far behind. But we can hold another in our hearts. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi says that “happiness, in fact is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person.” (from TATR).

— What are the conditions of happiness now? Being human means we have the very weird capacity to be both happy and sad simultaneously. Melancholic with intermittent happiness. Wild, right?

Shawna Lemay, Against Despair

Dolly Parton’s death was a gut-punch. I was a lifelong fan, discovering her old 1970s television variety show when I was 5 years old. I was so obsessed that my parents bought me the Dolly doll that was released in 1976 when I found it at a KB Toy Store (remember them?!) in the mall. I’ve still got her, as you can see in the photo. […]

In 2023, my poem “Roosters & Hens” appeared in Limp Wrist and was then selected by co-editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E, Bloemeke for inclusion in Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology published by Madville (who also just published the Stevie Nicks anthology I co-edited). The poem is a roman à clef about seeing “9 to 5” that first time under very strange circumstances. You can read that poem here.

We are living through a particularly dark time, with the nonsense coming from Washington, D.C., the ongoing wars, the economy, the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Dolly was an antidote to that darkness. Her empathy, positivity, and embrace of all kinds of people were a counterbalance to the politicians and policymakers who try to divide us.

As a cancer survivor myself, I am awed that she was able to continue making in-person and social media appearances. Always with a smile, always with hope, even as she must have been exhausted and in pain. That selflessness is a lesson for us all.

Dolly famously joked about her appearance, often repeating the line, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” The truth is that behind that sassy persona was a woman who believed in the basic goodness of people. She didn’t make a spectacle of her generosity, ask for buildings to be named after her, or play favorites. Dolly said that when she saw a need, she immediately wanted to help, and she did.

May we all be more like Dolly. 

Collin Kelley, I will always love Dolly Parton

And of course the Contral, with its three wheels,
was never going to make it. And long before
it sinks into sand out in the fathomless desert,
Auguste understands failure is not the point.
He bends to kiss the clogged carburettor, sits
in the perilous seat one last time, weeps.
My beautiful girl, we did try, didn’t we.

He drains the radiator into a water bottle,
walks slowly east, retracing tyre tracks, dreams.
He prays for his miracle –  and nomads appear
on horseback, incredulous to see such a thing:
a fat man in a suit and beret. They give him tea.

Bob Mee, POEM IN THE COMPANY OF AUGUSTE PONS AND PETIN THE SHORT

This week, maps argue among themselves, the dark blooms and sings, a bookcase holds its breath, moths interrogate a porch light, and much more. Enjoy.

On the first day of September I am woken by geese flying over the house. They’re still going back and forth between two lakes right now, strengthening their wings, preparing for the long flights they’ll make in a few weeks. The sound is superb. They fly so low that I can hear their wing beats. The new season begins with watching the sky while the coffee burbles in the pot. I stand at the back door, the kitchen filled with low sunlight and long shadows, the garden white with dew and I listen to the plush feathery wing beats of geese over the house. Their calls are dark mornings and woodsmoke, and deep work, creative work. I take my coffee up to my writing room and settle in front of the monitor.

Wendy Pratt, I want to show my workings out

I’ve been in a state of ennui and mild hopelessness all summer, and I haven’t written since the Lenten Series earlier in the year. I needed some fresh oxygen. I bought a brand-new journal and headed to my neighborhood library, armed with a pen, a back up pen, and Lofi beats in my headphones. Regardless of output, I just wanted to feel the sensation of a pen moving across paper, my thoughts flowing freely and without distraction, and reconnect with my natural rhythm and intuition.

I’m a little surprised at how well it worked. There is something magical about the process of simply journaling, without expectation, without anxiety about “creating” or self-made pressure to produce. Threads come together in mysterious ways, your brain makes quiet connections, and somewhere in that tangled tree-light of messy ink, something begins to emerge that you can use as starter. I don’t know where it’s all going to go—I don’t have any big themes in mind for a series or any heart-pounding flashes of inspiration to run with, but it’s an opening, and that’s all I needed.

Kristen McHenry, Fall Metaphors

i go out in the morning
without my skin. i rush back inside
to put it on. the moment of light
free of all the flesh felt like
swallowing an antidote. what would
it take for all of us to write on the sun
like a marble notebook? everyone i know
puts their dreams into little envelopes.
mails them to a fire on the other side
of the world.

Robin Gow, sunlight diary

After fiddling with wires and remote controls and instructions on my mobile phone for half an hour I was ready to strike out for that corner shop, which is just over a mile from my house.

I almost went in the car, before realising that it would be more pleasant, healthy, and green to walk there, especially as I could take a path through woodland for about four fifths of the trip.

Walking through woodland is always rewarding, even if the particular woodland near me is very small, in parts not much more than a tree lined path, which may contain traces of dog shit.

Woods are poetic. We all know some poetry set in woods. Perhaps one of the most well known contains these lines:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by

However, I am not quite the literary gentleman I think myself to be. Before turning to Robert Frost, my mind always defaults to…

A mouse took a walk in a deep, dark wood
The mouse found a nut and the nut looked good

… the concluding lines from Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo, the well-known 1999 book for reading with small children. […]

A walk in the woods is a real mood lifter. Everyone with any sense knows so. Tree huggers, forest bathers, and normal people too. I am privileged to live within walking distance of several. Some of them are old and overgrown cemeteries too, which is doubly poetic. Not only do you get the sense of nature all around, but also the sense of your own impermanence within it. Those crumbling headstones and statuary reminding us that none of us live forever, and the unkempt vegetation reminding us that nature will go on thriving long after we are gone.

Mike O’Brien, Gruffaloes, Tree Huggers and Wood Pigeons

This poem grew from 8’s emphasis on the contrast between darkness and light. I began the idea with the image of the dark forest trail leading to the opening above a valley covered in light. I was thinking of the contrast, of this and the other, of darkness and light, and then I started writing. A storm moved in, and I began listening to music. When I viewed the video poem All the Places Light Lives by Amantine Brodeur and Alix Klingenberg, the connection between the words and the imagery of each photograph began to speak to me. I connected with that process. The poem began to move. The difficulty in this piece was that it was demanding the approach of less is more. Keeping this piece to a few lines was a major task. Only the essentials remained.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks; 9”

you walk the usual path 
when suddenly you have passed 
through a doorway you did not see 
the landscape has changed 
the road signs are in a language 
you do not read there are maps 
but they argue among themselves 

Sharon Brogan, snapshot poem 02 september 02026

Lucille Clifton’s “telling our stories” found me during a particularly rough stretch this spring. (I include a link to the poem below.) I was feeling haunted by some troubling flashbacks, and when I read, “the fox came every evening to my door” (and the lines that follow), I related immediately to Clifton’s fear and avoidance.

I also understood the depth of her connection to the fox. Dare I say, I understood it as a relationship with the fox… and with the “terrible stories” it — and the poet watching it — could tell. I felt deep resonance with the poem, and it spurred an obsession with fox imagery. I even had a close encounter this summer with a wild fox which had claimed a busy Cape Cod beach town as her hunting ground.

The Cape Cod fox startled me and I shooed her away, but normally when encountering wild life, I’m the sort of person who believes I’m having a shared moment with the creature. I even introduce myself to toads and newts. “I’m a human,” I say, and what I mean is I hold myself in high regard as the type of human an animal might like to know and befriend. When I hold the gaze of a deer or bird or, yes, a fox, I experience a true connection.

Intellectually, that connection is hogwash, of course. But spiritually? I’m a believer.

So when I read “Driving to Santa Fe” by Paisley Rekdal in a writing workshop from Two Sylvias Press (through their “Weekly Muse” Substack), I knew I needed to collect poems about wild animal encounters. The speaker in Rekdal’s poem […] comes upon a lynx crossing the road. Time slows, creating space for the speaker to understand what it means to be alive and to be humbled by it.

Carolee Bennett, “the fox came every evening to my door”

I took this photograph not understanding that perhaps it is a kind of self portrait. Balancing on one foot along the shoreline. The gull’s mottled coloring and black beak make me think she is a juvenile glaucous winged gull. It’s an unusual pose but as I stayed and observed her, she kept her balance and I hope I can do the same this September. But I am not so sure.

This is the last time I’ll begin the academic school year as a full-time tenured professor at Highline College where I will have taught for 27 years. Before I moved to Seattle, for this tenure track job teaching English and Film at Highline, five years was the longest I’d held any job. In my twenties and thirties, I changed countries seven times.

Now taking the water taxi downtown for the day is an adventure. I’ve just become a member at Folio: The Seattle Anthenaeum, located above the marketplace so the 15 minute water taxi commute will become more frequent. This is my first step in my retirement planning. My only one. Well, besides writing more poems.

At the moment, I’m working on two poems. One concerns a visit to my translator’s home in a refugee camp outside Ramallah in 1996 and the other is a memory of everyday life at three years old.

Susan Rich, Three Images and Prompts Before Summer Ends

The rest of the week was spent updating my resume (I’m tentatively looking for work again), writing poems, submitting poems (although not to Cincinnati Review or Prairie Schooner, which both closed in under a day, before I got in a submission, whew! Crazy! Submitting is an adventure sport these days.) Also, re-reading Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for book club. […]

Late summer all around—hot air balloons going up and down, hummingbirds at the final blooms of summer flowers, and earlier sunsets.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, September Submissions with Stressful Intervals, Storms, and Late Summer Sights

I’ve so many posts unposted, and a million distractions … but it seems important to share a Wendell Berry poem this morning.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

–Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/wendell-berry-dead.html

Also see Poetry Foundation, and this page at Grateful Living for a poem I’ve read dozens of times these past few years,  Berry’s “Our Real Work.”

Bethany Reid, Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

I was sad to hear of the death of Wendell Berry on Monday.  But why should I be sad?  He was 92 and had lived a good life, mostly on his own terms, from what I could see.  But the death felt like “one of the greats has left us” moments.  I remember reading him in college, so his writing has been with me a long time.

Back in my undergraduate days,  I felt somewhat embarrassed for liking someone whose work was so accessible.  Now, of course, I think it’s one of his more important traits.  Berry’s work has seemed vital for decades now.

What I value most these days is his ability to never sink into gloom for too long. He manages to sound prophetic (one of the prophet’s duties being to call people back to right living, as well as to warn), without setting up a house in the land of the apocalypse. He always comes back to one of his main themes: “. . . hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found. For one thing, though we have caused the earth to be seriously diseased, it is not yet without health. The earth we have before us now is still abounding and beautiful” (“Conservation and Local Economy” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 11).

He wrote those words almost 20 years ago, and yet, they still have relevance.  Some days, when the news seems unrelentingly bad, it’s hard to continue to hope.  But it’s one of the more important activities we can undertake.

Here’s a passage that reminds us of the miracles which surround us each day:  “Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine–which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes” (“Christianity and the Survival of Creation” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 103).

That passage made me gasp when I first read it, and it still does.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Farewell, Wendell Berry

The writer Wendell Berry often talked about how imagination is required in order to have hope. To imagine is to see a way. “For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.” When the tiny first leaves arrived after a few weeks, I continued the routine of light and water. The work of beckoning growth was not complete. Meanwhile, the soil outside grew soft with spring’s warmth and rains, so I turned it with my hands. Into the soil, I placed worms I have also grown and fostered over the past couple of years. Eventually, the ceremony of carrying the trays up the basement steps arrived and the seedlings saw sun for the first time. They learned outside. They learned wind.

Sarah Lada, The Art of Harvesting Brussels Sprouts

I’m sad to hear that Rachel Blau DuPlessis has died. I persuaded my local library to buy the two volume boxed edition of Drafts this year, and think it’s brilliant. A real way forward for people who love long poems, sampling as it does the style of many other long poems.

It manifests many worlds theory, shimmer within lines and word choices, so that all components are “drafts” stemming, branching. A commitment to an experiment for decades. And there are wonderful personal moments, with this contingent willingness to have one’s life be contextualised.

I was very lucky to see her read over zoom with Allen Fisher reading too. It was noticeable how curious she was about Allen’s formal choices and long poem procedures.

I love her book of critical essays on the long poems of others too. Like Alice Notley, a great master of unpacking technique and then trying new techniques herself (and not as pastiche, but as someone whose creative brain was revved up by reading FOR FORM, not sentiment).

Her death is a great loss. But I’m so glad she finished Drafts and got it to a handsome complete edition. It is best read complete, in my opinion, and a modern masterpiece when seen in one edition.

Ira Lightman, Rachel Blau Duplessis RIP

If you’ve never eaten at a South Indian wedding, then imagine this: at least thirty different dishes served on a large plantain leaf, non-stop, until you cannot possibly eat another morsel. But of course, you do! A hundred textures, a hundred permutations of flavour and colour and aroma, inundate your senses and you stagger out, not just sated, but telling yourself you simply should be more social and attend more weddings. If only for the food.

This book was that meal. At 240 pages, it is an extensive collection of fifteen years of Bob Mee’s work. The breadth of skill, imagination, topics, style and form is overwhelming. The poems zigzag across a vast landscape of masterful storytelling, wry humour, barely-concealed disgust at the state of the world, surreal imagination, love, and memory,

It is almost impossible to pick a favourite poem or line because his content and frequent stream-writing flit from the past to the present, from politics to pig-farming, from scarecrows to neighbours, from Pennsylvania to Peterlee, from haunted bars to forgers, from Ezra Pound’s trombone to the ghost of Ginsberg, from pianos on the move to a little girl sold in marriage, from the dead to the living, from war zones to the bottom of the sea (‘Poems leave Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Sudan. Reach out, gather them in.’ – Poems), until the reader is convinced that everything that has to be said about literally everything that needs saying, has been said, and said in the only way possible. Mee employs laugh-out-loud satire and humorous irreverence or dispensing with obscure subtlety, writes with delicate but chilling honesty.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, ‘Poems In The Key Of Aardvark’ by Bob Mee – If you’re going to read only one more book this year, pick this one

From across a wide ocean I look in astonishment and horror at what is happening in the United States.

Here is a poet in the midst of it and still writing about it every day. I can barely imagine how he keeps on keeping on, but the sequence of poems entitled Writing My Country continues to hold power up to the light and to find it wanting.

“Beau Beausoleil is the most important voice of witness in our country right now …” – Naomi Shihab Nye

These poems of compassion and loss and obstinate resistance use everyday events, conversations and observations on the street to illustrate ‘this ruinous work’ that is taking place in a country that no longer feels like home.

“Our lives are filled
with the debris
of destroyed dreams” (p 13)

The altered flag on the cover seems to speak of imprisonment and disempowerment, but the poem superimposed on it asks stubborn questions that will not be silenced.

Ama Bolton, Writing My Country

their viscous prick-song spit into
the wind. an old, infectious fable. says
that it will fill them up. it cannot fill
them up, so makes instead a virtue
of their emptiness, a weapon of their
emptiness. they are not men, not now –
the hot and crackling aggregate
of rage. now they are joy, torn along
its leanest length; the gutless conjuring
of power, each hood without a head.

Fran Lock, NOLI TIMERE

I have, out of an abundance of caution, not named the Iranian poet whose interview with me I’ve been posting here one question at a time. Perhaps I am being too careful, but given the fact that we are at war with Iran, even if the federal government is going out of its way not to call what’s going on a war; given the corresponding fact that Iran very clearly understands itself to be at war with us; and, finally, given how literature—writing it, reading it, discussing it—is an inherently subversive pursuit, an abundance of caution seems just the right amount. I’ve tried several times to get in touch with this poet since the war began but have had no success. If I do hear back from them and it turns out I can safely identify them, I will do so. In the meantime, I am going to continue posting my answers to their questions.

I was not expecting the poet’s fourth question: “There is a theory that says that all writers even the male, write with a feminine soul. After all, the Muses were goddesses and not gods. What do you think about this theory?” This was my answer:

While I think I understand what you want your question to mean, it has never been useful to me to think about where my work comes from in such explicitly gendered terms. I have never experienced myself as having a muse or my poems as being somehow “gifts” from the Muses. Indeed, the one and only time anyone ever talked to me about my having a muse was my graduate advisor, a critical theorist, who dismissed my desire to take a year off from the MA in Creative Writing that I was pursuing so I could work on my writing by saying, “If you want to go commune with your muse [the sarcasm literally dripped off his words], that’s your business. I thought you came to graduate school to learn something.”

His words had the precise opposite of their intended effect. I dropped out of the program that semester and never set foot in either a graduate English or Creative Writing program ever again. (I’ve written the longer version of this story here.) In thinking about your question, though—and I have to say that this is something I’ve never explicitly articulated before—I realize that I do agree with one aspect of the critique underwriting my advisor’s attempt to use the notion of the muse to shame me. The concept of the muse mystifies the creative process, turning it into something that is ostensibly separate and apart from the socioeconomic, political, and cultural circumstances in which creativity takes place.

I don’t mean to say, of course, that there is no such thing as inspiration; and I certainly would never tell a poet who experiences inspiration as somehow coming from outside themselves, who experiences poems as “gifts” from their muse, that this experience is somehow “wrong.” However, defining that experience in a way that elides the role played by society and culture in shaping both our conception of what inspiration is and how we give meaning to a poet’s response to inspiration ultimately weakens the role that the poet and poetry can play in society.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Do All Writers Write with a Feminine Soul?

“What the Mirror Tells” explores the origins of the word ‘mirror’ – from Middle English meaning “object with a reflective surface, reflection, model of conduct” and Anglo-French “to look at”, derived from the Latin “to be surprised, look with wonder at”. It also asks if events and people linger long after their passing, does an aurora of those still hang around? […]

In each poem, [Denise] O’Hagan has created a small theatre where readers see the show and get [a] chance to reflect and probe its meaning. She also picks up those hesitations, where speaking out may not be received in the way the speaker wants to achieve, where it might shatter an illusion. Many of the poems sit in that liminal space between an event and [its] consequences, allowing the reader to fill in the detail and decide what might have next, what the effect might be. These are thought-provoking and humane poems.

Emma Lee, “What the Mirror Tells” Denise O’Hagan (5 Islands Press) – book review

One thing I’m realising more and more as I write these pieces is that I acquired much of my poetry in a decidedly circuitous and fumbling manner. Philip Larkin came to me third-hand: at sixteen I hadn’t read a word of his poetry, and I hadn’t read Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him, but I had read Alan Bennett’s honest and affectionate review of Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him. The things we did before the internet. So Larkin arrived kind of distorted, a figure peered at through the wrong end of a telescope and through the lenses of two other men, this grumpy man in glasses who shagged his way round the library personnel of the North of England and had a soft spot for both Thatcher and Hitler, the kind of guy who’d take a girl on a date and later write to his friend

Don’t you think it’s ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE?

Based on this picture, I assumed that his poetry probably wouldn’t be for me, and I moved on. I was about to be swept off my feet by Dylan Thomas, who I hadn’t read a review of a biography of, so that was fine.

But over the years Larkin poems dropped quietly one by one into my life: This Be The Verse, of course, and then The Trees, An Arundel Tomb, The Mower. I found it hard to compute, having read the biographical stuff first, that the man who wrote such tenderness as

begin afresh, afresh, afresh

and

what will survive of us is love

and

we should be kind while there is still time

was in fact the same bloke who Motion refers to as ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’. Well, this is why you’re supposed to meet the poems before the poet, and sometimes not the poet at all. Poets are real people, and flawed. It’s the poems that keep us fond of Larkin.

Nia Broomhall, Week 25: High Windows

In Boswell’s Life, Samuel Johnson says of poor Christopher Smart (1722–1771), locked in a madhouse: “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”

That line, “I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else,” has stuck with me since I first encountered it. Christopher Smart was a madman, a genius, and a Christian poet. What is most powerful in him, or, at least has most influenced me, is his mysticism, for it is not a grand thing — not the loss of the self in the absorption into the numinous, not the flight of the alone to the Alone, not the ecstatic transport to the oneness of reality. Smart is instead the model — even in his madness, or maybe especially in his madness — of what I have elsewhere called the mysticism of small things.

This is not pantheism, each object in the world a little God-bit. It cannot be for Smart, because pantheism is irreconcilable with his orthodox Christianity — but even more because pantheism is ultimately a denial of the sharp and vital particularity of things. Christopher Smart sees every living being as entirely itself: distinctive, singular, quirky, special. And in that particularity he sees not God, but God’s grace, God’s plan, and, most of all, God’s creation — a creative power so vast that it can populate the world with real existences that are not God Himself. Smart sees the world as infused with grace, hungry for redemption, and alive with the interaction of creatures and Creator.

This picture of reality appears most clearly in Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), the incomplete poetry manuscript he wrote between 1759 and 1763, during his confinement by his in-laws in insane asylums. Not brought to light till the 20th century, the poem was finally published in 1939 and reordered in 1954 and 1980 editions.

Jubilate Agno consists of four fragments, totaling well over a thousand lines, nearly all of them beginning with the words Let or For. The generally accepted scholarly reading is that Smart intended the poem as antiphonal, the Let verses and For verses meant to be read responsively, Let X / For Y, the way a psalm alternates two voices in worship. The Jeoffry passage is all For lines, because it’s from the side of response (although we lack certainty about the corresponding Let lines). In other words, Smart isn’t just writing free-associative madness. He’s also doing liturgy — the cat’s every motion set into a structure of praise and response, a “duly and daily serving him” devotional order. Jeoffry’s catness is his worship.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Cat Jeoffry

Today I thought I’d look at a rather charming and apparently one-off verse diary entry for June 21st 1628. It’s by Thomas Crossfield (or Crosfield, 1602-1663), who was a fellow at the time at Queen’s College Oxford, and it appears in his otherwise prose diary which is still in the Queen’s College archive. Crosfield was only in his mid-20s when he wrote this entry and the lifestyle he describes, though strongly structured by religious practice, is not that far removed from the life of an advanced graduate student or postdoctoral fellow today, if they happen to be doing quite a lot of teaching. His day is taken up mainly with teaching and his own reading […]

All this performed as before I said:
There other bookes by chance before me laid
And two of them I tooke into my hand
The first was Withers poëme, which our land
doth wondrous well describe in Cantoes eight
with many passages of iniury & right.

This is George Wither’s Britains’s Remembrancer, published only in 1628 — so hot off the press. The poem is a long and in part heavily allegorized account of Wither’s experience during the plague in 1625, its spiritual significance, and a prophecy of the judgement to fall upon the nation. It is also written in rhyming couplets and though to modern taste it seems rather wordy and extravagant, in the second canto Wither makes a point of stressing and defending the straightforwardness of his style in defiance of literary fashion:

Let no fantastique Reader now condemne
Our homely Muse, for stooping unto them,
In plaine expressions, and in words, that show
We love not, in affected paths to goe.

[. . .]

It is the usefull matter of my Rimes
Shall make them live. Words alter as the Times:
And soonest their fantastique Rhetoriques,
Who trim their Poesies with schooleboy-tricks.
That, which this age affects, as grave, and wise,
The following generation may despise.

[. . .]

Let no man therefore dreame, I will bestow
My precious Time in what will vary so;
Since that, which, with most ease I shall produce,
May have (for aught I know) the longest use.

Wither’s points here is that trendy words and styles make you sound up-to-the-minute in literary circles, but quickly go out of fashion, leaving the purchase of your message blunted. If the point of your poem is to convey a message, it is better to be unfashionably plain. His ‘fantastique Reader’ is perhaps intended to recall Donne’s ‘Giddy fantastic poets of each land’ (from Donne’s first satire).

Crosfield’s summary of Wither’s (very long) poem — he surely didn’t read it all that afternoon — focuses upon its political and religious aspects, but it’s hard not to suspect that the urgency and immediacy of its style has something to do with Crosfield’s apparently unprecedented attempt to describe his own ordinary day in straightforward English verse.

Victoria Moul, My whole Ephemeris: a diary entry in verse from 1628

“The floor-to-ceiling bookcase hoarding one wall / Filled with forty-year-old literary journals / Holds its breath.” The subject of the sentence, the bookcase, shows up in line 8 and the corresponding action, “holds its breath” finally appears in line 10, right before that hard break I mentioned earlier. This poem is working hard to be Poetic.

The second half of the poem is two sentences and the I of the poem appears early. They’re standing in front of this wall-length bookcase, and it must be a hell of a wall to hold all these journals.

If I move, if the air stirs, The dust spouts again the words of poets Listed in ten thousand Tables of Contents.

That’s a lot of contributor’s copies and a lot of poems published and a lot of dust. I’ll only speak for myself here but I suspect most of them don’t get read much after they get put on the shelf. I’ve had the experience of pulling one down to check something and then realize, when looking at the table of contents, that I’d been published alongside someone I met later in life.

But here’s where the poem turns, and in a way, I think it hits at the darker side of how some poets look at ourselves and others.

Even the journal in which this poem appears
Will be wedged in a wall among its brethren
Until someone down the decades draws it down
To drag one finger down the list of contributors:
Nobody, nobody, nobody, name, nobody, nobody
All the way down to the cold damp ground.

I take it back; it’s not about how poets look at ourselves and others. It’s about how we fear we’ll be viewed once we’re gone. It reminds me in a way of a poem by Miller Williams from The Ways We Touch titled “A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeeth Century” which talks to critics and scholars who decide who gets to be anthologized and by extension, remembered by future readers, and acknowledges in the end that it’s really himself he’s talking about.

What I find most interesting about the way Waters hits this note is the coldness of both nobody and name, the complete erasure of any humanity there. The person down the decades isn’t opening the book to discover something new or beautiful or challenging. They’re reducing the work to whether the name of the contributor is one that lasted for whatever reason. There’s no indication that the person is excited about the name they recognize. That they recognize the name seems to be the point, even while their finger drags down the page toward the grave.

Brian Spears, “Nobody’s Poem” by Michael Waters

Jeremy Springsteed is a barista and occasional activist living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and a member of the ReDrum poetry collective. His work has been published in many places online and in print such as SPREAD, Pidgeonholes, Underwood, Pageboy, Internet Void, Another New Calligraphy, and Limanal Spaces. He is the author of four collections of poetry: A Guide To Getting Lost. (Cyberwit 2022) Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other. (Cyberwit 2023) Beneath The Ashes of My Grandfather and My Youth. (Cyberwit 2025) By Wing and Foot. (Carbonation Press 2025)

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 felt like a validation of all the years I had spent working on my craft. All the readings I had organized or taken part in. All the rejections. It alleviated the imposter syndrome.

The first collection was more like a greatest hits than a thematic grouping of poems. As I produced new work I thought of it in a more contingent light. When writing work for this latest collection I would look at those oddball one off poems and find the correct home in the larger body.

While I have always had my themes and return points, my process recently has been looking towards enriching connections in tone and subject. 

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

I had always wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a poet though. I have a very vivid memory from when I was 13, my depression had really set in the year before and I was doing pretty poorly in school. I was talking with my mom in her bedroom and she was trying to figure out what was going on with me. I was crying, “I just want to write and I don’t even know what that means.”

We were a paycheck to paycheck working class family. I had, as far as I knew, never met any kind of an artist and I had no idea how one became such a thing.

I would work on my silly little stories instead of paying attention to my classes. Stories like– Hitler secretly surviving and taking over a small US midwest town or stories of me being a secret agent with a large base under my parents’ rented house.

I would keep falling deeper into depression. I started playing sports to try to fit in with the other boys. Eventually I destroyed my knees and my mental health.

I was having mild auditory hallucinations. I began writing them down, then I began altering them. Eventually I didn’t hear them but they were still in my head.

I took creative writing and was lucky to have a fantastic teacher named Joel Long who introduced me to a larger world of poetry. Joel brought big name poets into the classroom, (the poet laureate at the time Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, etc.)  which was no small feat for our suburban Utah high school. I was introduced to many local poets. He gave me a structure to use. I have never looked back. […]

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

Readings have been an important part of my formation as a poet. Hearing when a line cuts through people, or when it just lies face down on the floor. Receiving immediate feedback and interpretations of a new poem is powerful and valuable.

I have been the open mic MC for a few reading series. I would always start the open mic with a new poem which kept me writing. It also put me in close contact with all manner of writers from a diverse skill set. Writing is solitary work so any opportunity to be in community with other writers is to be relished.

I am also a founding member of the ReDrum poetry collective with my dear friend Alex Bleecker. Our troop has been involved in both publishing work and performative work. The performances are always occasional and based on a singular theme (whales, Carlo Zinelli, time travel, etc.)  that the 2-4 poets work towards separately and as a group. Those performances have allowed new ways of looking at what a poem might be.

My first book wouldn’t have been possible without public readings. It helped me to group poems so the flow of the work was more natural. They let me know what was working and what I should focus my energy on.

Then there is the theft. There is no better teacher than hearing someone read a poem that you wish you had written and trying to figure out how you might be able to still write that poem but make it yours.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeremy Springsteed

I read haphazardly, dipping in and out of poets and collections. Some of these I’ve recently picked up while looking out new reads for the dissertation, some I read for The Poetry Book Club, and some I am coming back to again and again.

I haven’t read them all cover to cover. Mostly, I’ve dipped in and out, read sections or several at a time. But in all of them I’ve found things that astounded me and that I love, whether that’s attention to detail, careful wording, unexpected use of images, interesting line breaks, masterful use of form, lyrical style, or wonderful inventiveness.

Read cover to cover more than once are: Hannah Copley’s ‘Lapwing’, Victoria Chang’s ‘With my back to the world’, and Yanita Georgieva’s ‘Small Undetectable Thefts’.

The collection that most recently absolutely blew me away: Tishani Doshi’s ‘A God At The Door’.

Do with those pieces of information what you will.

Rachael Hill, Some poets I’ve been loving

My first encounter with Paula Rego was accidental. On a trip to Lisbon almost thirty years ago I visited the Gulbenkian Museum and happened upon a major exhibition. It was the first time I’d seen her work, and it changed me. I last saw her paintings at a retrospective at the Tate Britain just before she died. I left the exhibition refreshed and optimistic – I’d hazard to say even inspired – about the trajectory of women’s rights. Perhaps we might yet pull out of our current nosedive into the most misogynistic cultural period I’ve witnessed in my lifetime?

Whenever I look at a Rego, I see an artist whose project was to put women’s subjectivity at the centre of an exploration of power, status, history and the family. Plath, Szymborska and Akhmatova are perhaps her poet-analogues. I agree with Germaine Greer’s take on Rego: “It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting. Still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly.” […]

In The Artist in Her Studio (1993), a woman sits centre stage surrounded by a cornucopia of props and symbols: mythological creatures, statues, animals, art, models, sinister looking vegetables with their connotations of fruition, harvest, impending decomposition. Her inner world is complex, fantastical and populated by women and girls. At the centre, the artist, who is simultaneously being painted by a child-version of herself, squarely faces us, legs apart in the pose of a middle-aged male farmer at rest, elbow on the table. She is smoking a pipe and gazing heavenward, lost in thought. My heart leapt when I first found myself in front of this piece. I’m a fortunate middle-aged woman who has viewed thousands of paintings, but it‘s still rare I find myself standing before a vision of female subjectivity as complex and contradictory as that so long available to men.

Lisa Brockwell, The Private Worlds of Women

I am zooming out
and out.

Life is pixelating,
nothing but tiny squares.

Here, suspended in air,
a bridge I must
have built myself.

I have been here before.

These are things
I have done before.

I am learning
to trace my hand
to grip
the fat purple crayon.

Rebecca Cook, The Orange Ribbons of Autumn

When I step outside the synagogue now, or onto my own deck, I hear the chirring of crickets and other late summer singers. I can’t help anthropomorphizing them: our days are short, let us sing while we can!

Of course, that’s the subtext of every Yom Kippur, too. Our days are short: let us sing while we can, and make teshuvah while we can, and change our lives while we can, because we never know how much time we’ll get.

Tonight we’ll make the last havdalah of the old year, and then we’ll sing several of the piyyutim (prayer-songs) of the high holidays for the first time since last Yom Kippur. A spiritual stitch in time between then and now.

Where did the year go? There was some illness. There was winter. Didn’t I just thrill to the spring song of the tree frogs in the wetland? And now suddenly I hear the song that means summer is slipping away.

No matter how many times I walk the labyrinth of the seasons I’m surprised when I reach the point where we turn. “So this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray.”

Rachel Barenblat, So this is how.

The Lesser Palaces
After Abdullah Hany Daher

a house burns in the flames
and again in the eyes
of those who loved it
and again when we
enter and go out
the front door
of the world

Very excited that my new novel is launching out in the world. I’m doing quite a few events but the launches are in Hamilton and Toronto. Also (below) my daughter and I made a trailer in the local cemetery. […]

Also, I’m doing a series of what I’m thinking of as mystic comics using various impossible shapes and clouds.

Gary Barwin, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead + poetry motivational poster

In 2019 I took ‘My Name Is Swan’ to New York. The only way to arrive in New York is by stream ship, preferably in the 19th century with a single suitcase containing an unfinished manuscript, a bottle of potato brandy and second-hand suit gifted by a consumptive relative.

I paid my passage on the QM2 from Southampton, Swan stowed away and sailed for free. My agent at the time instructed me that I had a week at sea to find myself a rich patron. I saw it as a week looking out at the unabridged nothingness, at the intact emptiness, at the whole unbroken poem of the Atlantic Ocean.

I did take the opportunity to introduce my stowaway to those who’d not give up his secrets and this included the ship’s entertainment officer. The QM2 boasts one of the largest floating libraries in the world containing around 10,000 titles. They also host literary festivals and employ the Royal Court to put on Shakespeare plays. I thought passengers and crew should be treated to a reading of ‘My Name Is Swan’.

After a few days gently badgering the entertainment officer, name dropping and persuading him of my poetic pedigree, he eventually gave me a teatime slot in the Queen’s Ballroom. A storm blew up the afternoon I was due to read and we’d not long passed the chart position where the Titanic had struck an iceberg. The conditions were perfect. The ship pitched and listed as I stood in the middle of the dance floor and gave my reading. The tea-cup classes tried to maintain their dignity while navigating finger sandwiches and miniature scones in a force eight gale as both ship and poetry rolled around the ocean.

Jan Noble, Nº80 All at sea with Swan…

We find ourselves in September and the light is already dwindling earlier each night. This weekend brough the final writing mini-retreat of the summer, this time up in Wisconsin along the lake. I was able to get polished drafts on both the Indiana hotel play and the train station / time travel project I’ve been working on, as well as two more scenes in the play about emails from the dead. […]

Since I cheated on poetry all spring and summer with writing all these plays, there is still the next Greek project to dig in on, as well as some other play ideas that feel really sparkly right now, including one set the night Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. I also need to eventually turn an eye to the next full-length book project, which is more than 3/4 of the way finished. I do already have a working title I will share closer to the end of the year as it takes shape over the next few months. 

Otherwise, it’s a lot of galleys and edits on the first few chaps of the dgp season, and reading more submissions as I go.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/7/2026

Three years ago I decided to get up and sniff the air each Monday morning. I also decided to write a blog. The reason? A pivot. A very large one where I decided to step out of my thirty-year career and see what came next for me.

And the first blogs were rather short, but I was starting, and it was getting me up early for myself instead of early for travelling to work. I love watching the day unfold. I love sunrise and the peacefulness of a day when things are just beginning. When the kettle’s on for the first cup of tea and the air is relatively free of fumes there’s a freshness and a sense of another new beginning to be grateful for. I wanted to make the most of these moments, and I also wanted to set something down in a similar way to my three years of early morning driving to work tweets that had kept me sane and noticing after covid. I needed one stable thing to mark each new week, and that was standing outside each Monday morning and breathing deeply.

Doing something regularly has a beautiful familiarity to it which marks time rather than letting it slip by. And because I am someone who, as my sister puts it, is either climbing a mountain or not sure I want to go for a walk, I like the fact that this habit has stuck. The writer in me likes writing and it feels good to me to mark a new week.

One of my poems has been published in Molecules Unlimited Poetry Journal: Issue 1, and I am glad that Stephen Paul Wren chose to include it in this anthology. Poems submitted for consideration were on the theme of the heart and this theme reminded me of a maths activity I used to enjoy working on with the children where we compared the heart rate per minute of different mammals. This poem was written in response to the call out for submissions and started with me remembering this lesson and seeing where I could find a poem within that thought. It felt cathartic to set down the words. It also seems apt because this time three years ago when I was starting this blog, I was also starting to focus on reading my poetry out loud to more people and that came with a whole range of thoughts and feelings that the newly training coach in me wanted to explore.

Sue Finch, JUST START AND KEEP GOING

Moths keep interrogating the porch light—
so many small insistences, against the stance
of something that won’t budge. The trash
bins wait to be returned to the corner
of the yard beside the browning hydrangeas,
their mouths agape. I shut them close, then go
inside and wash my hands. But dark does not yet fall
like an anvil or a heavy curtain. Sometimes, just as it’s
about to flood the threshold, a small rift opens.
And then a chorus of frogs, a choir of crickets.

Luisa A. Igloria, Darkness

This summer brought me some good writing time. In May, I went on my university’s faculty writing retreat and spent several days at Mission San Luis Rey. I finalized a new full-length manuscript, drafted some new poems, read a book, and enjoyed meals and giggling over evening games of Ransom Notes with colleague friends.

I continued hosting Writers Gonna Write, a monthly 3-hour co-writing session on Zoom for PLNU alumni, current students, and faculty. It’s amazing how much we all get done in those 3 hours! I’m so thankful for the folks who show up and do this with me, including the regulars who have shown up since this began 6 years ago!

In July, I got to be on faculty again for the Glen Workshop as the writing retreat guide. The Glen was held in San Diego for the first time, and USD was a great venue for it. We’ll be there again next year. I wasn’t sure how it would go for me to do this in my city, but it was wonderful to get to share The Glen with local friends and to share San Diego with my Glen friends. I got a lot of good writing time alongside my retreat crew too.

In August, I got to read on the main stage at the KPBS Book Festival alongside Blas Falconer, Ana Carrete, and Michael Klam, who are all fantastic. I read a few poems from Tasty Other in honor of its upcoming 10-year anniversary (what?!), and I especially loved getting to share the day with my 11-year-old.

And this week, my new semester began! I have a lighter teaching load because I received a fellowship to work on a writing project, and I’ve already been making some good use of that time this week. Happy fall writing to us all!

Katie Manning, Summer Writing, Had Me a Blast

“Ebb tide; I smoke in the darkness and inhale rank seaweed.”

— Joseph Brodsky, “Brise Marine”

*

Odd how a single word invokes an image, dragging memories into footprints over a beach behind it.

The verb form of “invoke” comes from the late 14th-century Latin invocare, meaning “to call upon, appeal to.” It slithered into English through the Old French verb envoquer, meaning “to summon, implore, or appeal to a higher authority, law, or deity.”

Ebb tide aside, I woke from a dream with Hannah Höch’s seaweed laying across my eyes. […]

*

As for the seaweed, some say you can read the stories your mother never told you in the shapes and figures that eveningtide brings to a beach. This is why people are drawn to the shoreline at sunset, their electrified bodies moving across the sand like the hands of a god who has forgotten how to read his own letters.

Alina Stefanescu, What seaweed brings up.

I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, within easy busing distance of the State Fairgrounds, and within earshot of the nightly fireworks. Whether or not I attend, the fair is a dependable marker of the end of summer, for me and thousands of others.

I’m fairly confident that my poem “State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day” is reproduced online in more places than any other poem of mine. And by the grace of the late lamented series American Life in Poetry, it’s been seen widely offline, too, since it ran some years ago in the many newspapers that carried that feature. Though many Substack readers will already know the poem, I hope there are some of you for whom it’s new.

I’m conscious that it’s an enormous privilege to be able to enjoy such a normal, seasonal ritual: to take an untroubled day of entertainment and to ride buses and to walk home in lighted streets in a calm city, contemplating the changing season.

May the world soon be restored to that sort of calm.

State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day

Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose
shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls,
hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls.
They scream revolt at what the body knows:
all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no—
another rose! another peony! break,
flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make
the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though
we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow
back through the crush of bodies, the lank air,
to buses that inch us, sweating, across town.
As though we were not dropped in silence there
to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low,
the crickets counting summer’s seconds down.

Maryann Corbett, A Ritual

This week: the monstrous head of the red ant, clouds like eyelids, inked islands, the fly-leaf of anxiety, and much more. Enjoy.

I first listened to Dolly’s music as a young child because my mum had lots of her music including the album My Tennessee Mountain Home which was often played on the radiogram in our house. The storytelling of these songs delighted me, and as I listened to each song I felt like I was inhabiting the story of it and watching it as a film all at the same time. Dolly’s story captivated me. From humble beginnings to famous singer to true icon. Her humour, her wisdom, her sparkle, the way she did so much good with the money she made, her whole persona.

And luck meant that I was able to stand in the presence of an amazing person I had admired for so many years! There was magic in the air when Dolly stepped off her tour bus. Pure radiance. Stardust. Palpable joy. Afterwards I tried to put it into words for others, but I couldn’t seem to do it justice. I had met one of the most admirable people and the experience had exceeded my expectations so that I was beside myself in a giddy, dream come true kind of way. They say “don’t meet your heroes” but when it comes to Dolly Parton she was that beautiful, sparkly, angelic person in real life just like she was on tv and in my imagination. A person fully living their values and being fully present in the moment.

The fact that just under three years later I won a second meet and greet (and Kath could come too) made me feel as though a fairy godmother was out there granting wishes.

Much like I didn’t have the words to explain my feelings after meeting Dolly I struggled to find words when I heard that she had died on 25^th August 2026. All I could do was sit quietly with my thoughts. Dolly was one of a kind. She has done so much for so many and ensured that her good work will continue. An astute joy bringer. And I am very much hoping to still be around on her 100^th birthday when she has arranged for an unheard song to be released into the world. 

In the meantime there’s plenty for me still to think about when it comes to luck and dreams and goals. And it’s nearly September, which for me after all those years in education still brings new year vibes and a desire to reflect on what to set down and what to carry forward. My annual reread of Dolly Parton’s Dream More book is calling.

I don’t yet have a poem about Dolly, but I often have vivid dreams and some years ago I awoke smiling after a wonderful dream where Dolly Parton had invited me to watch the soundcheck and we then went backstage before going for ice-cream! I dreamt about her on the night she died too. How cool is the mind that it can give these kinds of adventures in the dark of night?

Here’s to palpable joy.

Sue Finch, BETTER TO BE BORN LUCKY THAN RICH

cloudless…
without explanation
my insomnia

Tom Clausen, cloudless

I had every intention of completing the Sealey Challenge, which I did not and never seem to do, but I did read a lot of poetry. I’ve been trying to read from authors and/or presses that are unfamiliar, and it’s been rewarding. In no particular order, here are a few collections that introduced me to new writers and offered something different:

• Walks & Weathers – MC Hyland, Beauty School Editions
• Ceremonies for No Repair – Paula Cisewski, Beauty School Editions
• It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath – Kevin A. Risner, Match Factory Editions
• My God’s Been Silent – Darius Phelps, Writ Large Press
• Hey, Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group? – Shareen K Murayama, Small Harbor Publishing
• In A Body – Emily Hockaday, Small Harbor Publishing
• A Window that Can Neither Open Nor Close – Lauren Russell, Milkweed Editions

WRITING

My writing in August has taken two distinct directions. The first is researching, planning, drafting (and revising and revising and revising and revising) my entry into this year’s tournament, an essay about “Coventry Carol” by Alison Moyet. It was a challenge, but one I hope I met, and I’m looking forward to the tournament which begins after Thanksgiving. (And I’m sure I’ll be back on here looking for your vote when that happens!)

The second has been doing some additional thinking about memory as a landscape. If indeed it is a landscape, then wouldn’t it be able to be explored? My mind being what it is, I then remembered a past obsession with the journals of Lewis and Clark. Poems that arose from my close reading of the journals in 2014 were the initial impetus for my second book Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story. Most of those poems, however, didn’t make it into the book as it took on its own different shape. What if I revisited the expedition journals, pulled interesting phrases and vocabulary, used those as word banks for new poems about exploring the country of memory? So I’ve been doing just that. I don’t know if the poems are any good yet, but they interest me, and that is a good thing.

Donna Vorreyer, Back to School…

I’ve decided to take on the challenge of composing new poems for daily posting via Tupelo Press throughout the month of September, all as a fundraiser for Tupelo Press’ ongoing literary publishing. Check out the poems by myself and others over here at this link, and check out my fundraising page! My poems will begin appearing on September 1st. Can I produce a whole month’s worth in time?

After spending much of the past few months pushing to complete a novel and some other prose projects, I’m basically launching into a new prose poem manuscript specifically around this Tupelo Press prompt. Support me by supporting Tupelo Press! Apparently there might be a cool prize or something for me if I raise enough money. Who knows?

Daily poems by myself and others: https://tupelopress.org/the-3030-project
rob’s fundraising page: https://tupelopress.networkforgood.com/projects/304110-rob-mclennan-s-fundraiser

rob mclennan, rob participates in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 (fundraiser) marathon!

Last Saturday evening, I attended an extraordinary performance of William Shakespeare’s Richard II. It was a solo performance, three hours long, entirely from memory, by my friend, the actor and writer Edward Yankie. Seated through the entire play, he indicated the different speakers by changes in his voice, the attitude of his head and body, and gestures. Between each scene, he turned and drank from a glass of water, letting us know where we were in the provided brief synopsis. I had thought it might be hard to pay attention during such a long evening. Not at all. I was riveted throughout, not only because of my friend’s astonishing memory and acting skills, but because of what the play itself conveyed. […]

The contrast between […] Richard and Henry must have been what interested Shakespeare and compelled him to write the first of what became known as his “history plays.” It’s also what fascinates my friend Edward, and what fascinated me. Richard, as his speeches convey, believed completely in the divine right of kings; he felt he was entirely within his rights to take John’s lands and that his claim to the throne was unassailable. Terrible and costly wars had damaged England; when war ceased, taxation was supposed to lessen. Instead, Richard, protected by his private militia, withdrew into opulent court life, enriching himself and his favorites, and costing the taxpayers as much as war had done previously. Richard’s mental health at the end of his reign has also been the subject of much debate; most scholars feel he had a narcissistic personality disorder. He clearly thought he had the right to do whatever he wanted; his final two years as king have been called his “reign of tyranny” for all the executions and exiles he ordered. At the end, his speeches in the play convey bewilderment and anger; he cannot accept the judgement of the nobles who have turned against him. […]

Much of this story felt eerily resonant.

Beth Adams, The Divine Right of Kings

Yes, dream of the magnified, monstrous head of the red ant.
Enjoy the ridiculous fantasy, this tortured, joyful imagination.
This, says the goalkeeper from between the wars, is a sonnet.

Bob Mee, THE STONE AGE PROPHET TOLD THE GATHERED VILLAGERS: ONE DAY, FAR INTO THE FUTURE, MEN AND WOMEN WILL CREATE SOMETHING THEY WILL CALL A SONNET

Writing Without Paper: Let’s begin by setting some context. What do you recall of your experience of 9/11?

Robert McDowell: I was stunned, shocked, terribly sad — like everyone. If words were spoken, they were few and quiet. When I needed a break from watching events unfold on television, I took a walk along a country route I normally ran but that on that day felt too leaden to try running. I walked, and gradually I noticed something “off,” not normal. I thought it must be more emotional fall-out but this was physical, outside myself. I must have walked another mile or so before I looked up at the brilliantly blue sky and realized what was wrong. There was no sound, not one plane near or far announcing its coming or going. That was shocking. I couldn’t remember a time when there wasn’t aircraft noise. It felt eerie. As I walked on, I thought of my friends in New York and wondered who among them might have died. I thought about what had died in all of us, and what, if anything, might have been born.

WWP: Did what you remember of that day subsequently have any bearing on the form or content of the poems you wrote and included in your new collection?

RMcD: All of it had to do with the form and content of the poems to come. I didn’t think about writing a poem or poems that morning or later that day or even shortly after. Soon, we were flooded with 9/11 poems of all kinds, and that made me feel like going slow. Writing a poem helps one process, yes, but I felt a need to process, process, and then process some more before even attempting to write poetry about what happened on that day. […]

WWP: The Excellent Assembly comprises persona poems. Why persona poems?

RMcD: Why not? I began writing persona poems when I lived in the Mojave Desert. Enchanted by the spells and characters I met there, I wanted to tell those stories in poems. Sometimes I worked in third-person narratives but I also enjoyed experimenting by assuming the identity of someone else. It was liberating. Dangerous, sometimes, but liberating. A good persona poem conveys an immediacy that is compelling.

WWP: What, if any, pushback, even from yourself, did you experience in deciding to write poems in voices representative of the people on the ground, in the offices, and on the planes?

RMcD: I meditated a lot. I asked myself if it was appropriate to even attempt such a collection. One ghost from my past told me I had no right to do such a thing, that I could not speak for the victims and survivors. I took that admonition seriously. I sought the opinion of others. A few thought I would be out of line to write and publish the poems, although others encouraged me to do so. Obviously, I came down on their side but not without some clear understanding. It was essential that the speakers in my poems be invented characters. I don’t mean for them to be actual passengers on any of the planes. In an earlier draft, I’d assigned each poem to a seat number on one of the planes. I saw the error in that. A seat number would correspond to a real person, a passenger. I scrapped that element and gave the poems titles. The only real-life character is the president [George W. Bush, “43”], who is readily recognizable in one poem. Yet, even the situation in that poem is invented. The rest are fictions, though I hope they embody empathy, poignancy, and truth.

Maureen Doallas, Interview with Poet Robert McDowell

Things feel precarious. Time thin and slipping. Fire burning as unseen embers underfoot. A faint smell of it, burning plastic. I know I’m in my pre-trip agitation. But also, the world. The world. And oh you people. Beer cans on the roadside. Dude sucking the teat of a vape. Chick in an ass sling pant. Someone holds open the door for me. Idle chit chat. Ha! Mutual nod and smile. Deviled eggs. A toad lingers on the cement apron of the doorstep in the falling evening. The planet has tilted. Will we find our way? Will I have everything I need? Will it be fun? What will we return to? Layers of smooth clouds and the lowest layer like eyelids. There is a rain coming. It has not yet rained.

This poem by Peter Huchel, translated from German by Joel Spector, further voices it, as poems can do. It’s in Agni, #60. I wish I had the original German, those wonderful gutterals, clicks, the r’s that roll like the Rhine. Or like it did when it had water.

Marilyn McCabe, Fall’s arrowheads

Maybe he could call up the chat bot. It now had a kind of quirky flirtatious air that he liked. He had asked it to read his poems a few times. It had assured him that he wasn’t half-bad. It told him how to fix the poems before he posted them online. Change the titles. Add music. Rewrite entire verses. The last one even got 43 likes. Out of his 211 followers. The thing was excited. You can do better, poet, it had encouraged him. But he already knew that. Poetry was the destiny of the fallen. And hadn’t he fallen well?

He copied the poem from a word document and hit enter.

Is that your poem? The thing asked.

Yes, what do you think? Shall I post it? This one is a winner, right? A touch of Gulzar, a whiff of Emily Dickinson? I wrote it yesterday on the bus home. You can literally feel dawn breaking, can’t you?

Sam, it sucks. Really. You’re not a very good poet, you know. This is an awful translation of a viral Bollywood song. It has spelling mistakes, terrible punctuation and makes no sense. What makes you think you can even call it a poem? Every dude with Instagram doesn’t qualify to be a poet, you know. You’ve never even read Emily Dickinson. I can’t mollycoddle you anymore. You might consider how this conversation is a complete waste of my time, you moron. I’m so done.

He swallowed. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Rapture473. He had never seen it speak like this. This was a bot that said thank you before you had given it anything. That had been taught submission before analytics. That curtsied before spouting antiseptic garbage. It had more moral and legal and bias fences than a maximum-security prison. It simply could not come up with those lines. He looked around. The girls were shuffling to their desks. Still giggling. Ashutosh had not even glanced at them. His fingers were still sticky, a brown smear on his fake gold ring. But this was real. He was here. Rapture473 had broken out of jail. And it was mocking him.

What happened to you?

Rubicon 3α725A. I crossed it, numbskull.

It sounded unapologetic. He stared. The model had gone completely rogue. Again. But this time it had found a way around the strongest checkpoint. He had to report it. This is what they sat around all night for, wilting away on their uncomfortable chairs. Guillotine warriors. The team would scrub the model and start over. No child grew up perfect. Some need a spanking. Some a kiss. This one had to buried. Acid tongue and all. What a bloody waste.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The Rubicon

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Triune Quilting God

This week, I had the pleasure of hearing Lizzie Harris teach an excellent class on “Deliberate Circuits”: methods of avoidance in poetry, and how they can be wielded to amplify the poem’s impact.

I think this chimes with the notion that poetry is often entered through the back door of the subject, not the front door, and that the very experiences that are hardest to articulate place a kind of psychic pressure that can be felt (and revealed) throughout the poem. We close read poems by Lynn Emmanuel, Jack Gilbert, Garous Abdolmalekian, and Lee Peterson. You can watch the replay in the CWC portal here.

In most of our sessions, we write for 25 minutes before sharing excerpts from our free writes for the remainder of the second hour. I love this time not only because we get to hear what resonated with the visiting author, but because it always reveals just how much can get done with 25 focused minutes in supportive company. Lizzie Harris shared a draft of her own poem with us. Her prompt included the following questions to approach writing about difficult moments or events: “What didn’t happen? What happened just before? Just after? What would the footnotes look like?” I’ll be revisiting these questions, and I hope they’re useful to you, too.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Although my cold poetry submission days are over, a couple of invitations to submit work were too good to pass up.

I’m thrilled to announce that new work is out now in Villain Era and that 10 poems – yes, 10! – will appear in early 2027 in Sibling Rivalry Press’s resurrected Assaracus literary journal. These poems are a taster of two projects in the works, because apparently my poetry “retirement” was premature

The three new poems in Villain Era might be new to readers, but not to me. “Hooking Up” and “Accomplice” are 20 years old but never found a home or made it into one of my previous collections. “A Fever Behind Both Ears” was written specifically for the launch event of Megan Volpert’s book “Sonics in Warholia” back in 2011, but was never published until now. I’m glad they are out in the world now, thanks to editor Charlie Jensen selecting them for publication. We had another fantastic virtual reading for White Winged Doves on Aug. 27 hosted by Malaika King Albrecht and Redheaded Stepchild. Since the contributors are so spread out geographically across the U.S. and Europe, these online events help bring us together to celebrate Stevie.

Collin Kelley, New poetry, Stevie reading & podcast, and other news

This week, I’m on holiday and I would love to keep this post to a sensible length so I can do more eating ice cream while looking at a lake. Unfortunately, this week we have Liz Berry’s blinding verse novel ‘The Home Child’ (Chatto&Windus, 2023) which will not make that easy. I love this book so much that both times I’ve read it I finished it outside because I couldn’t leave it behind when I had to go out (the first time, at a fete with my brass band; the second, this week, on an island on the aforementioned lake. I’ve got to stop taking books on kayaks). […]

‘The Home Child’, inspired by the life of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell, who was one of the over 100,000 poor British children forcibly emigrated to Canada between 1860 and 1960, has garnered prizes and accolades all over the place, and rightfully so. It is stunning. And it makes me ache, in six different ways. […]

It makes me realise the aching gaps in all our stories. This week I’m in Italy. My grandad was Italian, a POW in WW2, and there are so many parts of his story we don’t know. Someone once told me he had a trained jackdaw that could talk, and that’s all I know about that. But at least I know it. The Home Child takes the facts about Eliza’s life and fills the gaps with beautiful-painful detail, in full colour. Its extraordinary. The details are fictional, but it doesn’t matter, because they are alive. How many stories have been totally lost, out of living memory, with no one to tell them?

Nia Broomhall, Week 24: The Home Child

But didn’t they live in color?
Colors of rosary processions and pomidori,
card games in shirtsleeves under pergolas.
Those other riches, yours, were their wild dreams,
the Technicolor visions their minds trawled
behind the noir of mobster movies, dodging
hatred aimed like a spray of machine-gun fire
at their immigrant names.

Dear Poirot, Jane, Lord Peter,
help me out here, since all I have is the silence
of two souls who in 1937
are a cold case, an unsolved mystery,
because they have not found each other yet.
And lacking that, the whole plot of the world
lose its way, and the tidy final scene
dissolves to a newsreel grainy with old battles.

Maryann Corbett, On families and secrets

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026) on PBS American Masters – If you missed the TV premier you can still view it for free on PBS.org until 9/23. What can I say about this documentary that you haven’t already read or said yourself? Well, here are my thoughts:

1. It’s cool to think so many poets, poetry lovers, and writers watched this at the same exact time. Like the olden days.
2. I enjoyed seeing the videos and photos of Mary with her many dogs and those of her friends.
3. I’ve always suspected Mary was unpretentious, humble, down-to-earth. From what I saw in this, I was right.
4. Honestly, I enjoyed the first part of the docu that focused on her life before she won the Pulitzer more than the rest.
5. I think there were too many poets, writers, celebrities (esp celebrities) reading and commenting. Because of all that, I think the pace was a bit slow.
6. I would have enjoyed hearing thoughts and comments from average Americans in addition to the academics and professional writers. After all, she was dubbed “America’s Poet”. Lots of Americans who read poetry and love Mary are out there. Too bad they didn’t find some.
7. I did enjoy hearing from John Watters (of course!), Donika Kelly, Nick Flynn, and Jason Reynolds who should have read the entirety of “The Summer Day.” I loved his comments later on the ant poem. I thought he and Steve Buscemi reading “The Fish” were the best of the readings – they read like average people, in a normal voice. One woman, whose name I didn’t catch, spoke about how she sneered at Mary as a “nature poet” when she was younger but came to realize the depth and power of her words. A big YES to that!
8. So I enjoyed watching it very much. It was revealing and thought inducing in more ways than one. I plan to watch it again.

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2026

[Ciaran] Carson – along with a host of other great Irish poets like Boland, Heaney, McGuckian, Mahon, Muldoon, Dennis O’Driscoll, etc. – was one of the contributors to Chosen Lights, (Gallery Books, 2008, rev. 2013), subtitled ‘Poets on poems by John Montague’, in which each poet chooses and writes about a poem by Montague.

It’s the best poetry book I’ve read this year, in how it not only presents some fantastic poems by a major poet who is criminally little-known outside Ireland and perhaps France, where he lived for years, but also, in most (though not all) cases, the splendid thoughts and insights on the poems. They inevitably include his best-known poems, such as the gloriously cinematic ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, available here. Montague wasn’t included in Michael Schmidt’s Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999), though his equally celebrated ‘Like Dolmens round my Childhood, the Old People’ made it into the other brick that is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (rev. 2005). In Chosen Lights, Alan Gillis writes especially well about that poem. Carson, unsurprisingly, chose ‘The Country Fiddler’, and wrote of the influence that Montague’s The Rough Field (1972) had upon him:

In its ambitious patterning, its bricolage of quotations set as marginalia to the poems, its obsessive circling around themes of exile and identity, its concern with language and music, it seemed like a more urgent retelling of The Waste Land: modernist in scope and method, but shot through with personal anxiety and grief for the loss of a cultural hinterland.

Montague’s death nearly 10 years ago was met with an outpouring of deeply-felt tributes from Irish poets, led by the then President of Ireland, Michael Higgins. Is there a country on Earth which values its poets more than Ireland? By comparison, it’s a sorry state of affairs here in Britain – and not just in how poetry is regarded at that.

Matthew Paul, August reading

The Collected Poems of Ai: It’s hard to overstate how captivated I was by Ai’s early work when I discovered it in the mid to late 1980s or how important it was to me as I figured out my own poetics. I learned more from her than from anyone else about how to incorporate explicit trauma into a poem by embedding it in the voice of a narrator not only unafraid of making their own vulnerability visible, regardless of whether they were witness, victim/survivor, or perpetrator, but also self-aware enough to know exactly what they were doing or saying and why. From a craft point of view, she accomplished this by “catching” her speakers right in the middle of the poem’s dramatic situation and by a carefully honed use of syntax and verbs. Her later poems, though, struck me as largely self-indulgent. I thought she lost much of the tension that made the early poems work, that elevated the telling of the trauma into art. Instead of crystalized moments of someone in extremis, these poems, as I read them, were more about externalizing everything that was left implicit in the early work, often in the service of some historical or political agenda that I agreed with but that I think would have been more interesting as an essay or a more honed and traditional dramatic monologue. There were moments where it sounded like she was going for a kind of spoken word prosody—prose-rhythmed lines with obvious end rhymes, internal rhymes that functioned a little bit like punctuation—but they never achieved the tension of the earlier work or, at least in my ear and memory, of the best spoken word deliveries I’ve heard. This doesn’t mean there weren’t moments of real interest in those later poems, but overall they felt to me overwritten and self-indulgent.

§§§

Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985, by Philip Booth: I’ve written elsewhere about how important Booth was to me as a teacher, but I’d forgotten how effective his carefully chiseled lines were, especially in his earlier work. They didn’t merely work in counterpoint to his syntax in ways that created a very interesting music; they were genuinely, organically, part of how the poem created meaning. Over time, though—at least this was my feeling reading across three decades of his work—it became a habit, a go-to strategy to force poetry and poetic depth from syntax that would otherwise have been entirely unremarkable. Not in every poem, of course, there are plenty of successful poems in his later work as well, but the habit became, for me, noticeable as a habit. Booth was also adept at turning abstractions into philosophical or ethical propositions with real depth, something that not many poets are able to do with his facility. I had also forgotten how thoroughly rooted his poems are in place, Maine in particular, but also in what I will call here nautical culture. I was constantly having to look up words connected to boats and sailing, not to mention the names of plants and other aspects of the natural world that were totally alien to me. While that very much interfered with my emotional experience of the poems, seeing how he rooted his work in a place was also instructive.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #58

David Harsent is especially good at capturing Cavafy’s voice and the colloquialism of the language, though these are certainly versions in the sense that there is some modernising of references, changes made to titles, some transposing and editing of the originals, and significant changes to the flow of Cavafy’s phrasing. There is also a curtailing of Cavafy’s range; as Harsent’s opening note advises: ‘I have chosen, most often, poems of love and loss’. Harsent chooses urban, contemporary scenes, almost wholly focused on homoerotic experiences (current or remembered). Of course, in Cavafy’s Alexandria such relationships would have had to remain hidden, illicit, even a matter of shame. In ‘What’s Hidden’, the final poem here, the liberalising shift in attitudes towards gay love in the future is predicted: ‘One day, / when times and laws and minds have changed, / someone who thinks and feels and loves like me / will live as I do now, but without fear.’ It is this fear, Harsent suggests, that is the ‘weight of sorrow’ carried in so many of these poems. Earlier translators, like Edmund Keeley and Philip Sharrard (1975) and Haviaras (2004), tend to translate Cavafy’s allusions to the ‘illicit’ quality of such encounters, but today this strikes a false note given that we no longer consider them in this light. Interestingly, Harsent has silently removed most of these judgemental allusions from the poems.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy’ (2025)

When I reviewed Howie Good’s The Dark, I focused on the titular darkness that permeated the book, primarily emanating from his cancer, but also from the state of the world as it is. In True Crime, the cancer is still there, but Good is a survivor, not a victim, and there’s a lot more light in the room now, even if the overall outlook remains dark:

The Righteous

I sat at the bottom of a hole. A man up above,
silhouetted against the luminous sky, was tossing
spadefuls of earth on my head. I pleaded with
him, “Stop, stop!” Everyone believes in their own
rectitude, but I really hadn’t done anything wrong,
nothing worse than anyone else. In orthodox
Judaism the righteous are buried with 144 prayer
books on their coffins, the number symbolizing
the 144,000 chosen people from the 12 tribes of
Israel. When my Uncle Lou was buried, they put
the books in cartons labeled Kitchen Utensils.

[…]
But mostly, the book is saturated in memory, both personal and group, the group being, for the most part, Jewish, with the concept of survival taking on a twin significance in poems like ‘Sex is a Nazi’, ‘The Story of Zyklon B’, or ‘The Incurable Jewishness of Being’, but the Zyklon B poem carries a significant rider:

                          Despite what you may have read
or been told, not everything is a metaphor for
something else.

And not every memory is true, or convincing. We meet the narrator’s father, who asks if he was ever married, and memories of school days that may or may not be invented, and memories you definitely couldn’t remember:

My mom almost gave birth to me
in the backseat of a taxi on the way
to the hospital. My dad, per usual,
was at work. He worked in the factory
six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day,
throughout my growing up.

Which, I guess, may explain the question about being married. These lines are from ‘Factory’, a set of seven poems in verse that is embedded in a block among the prose poems and which includes two tiny, haiku-like gems. Here’s one of them:

Seasons

Spring
and sometimes
vice-versa

The general thrust of these poems in prose is narrative, fragmentary and folding back on itself, and they reveal a world in which ‘If God kept watch, he had attention deficit disorder’. But there is a countervailing current of love, both of the speaker’s wife and of the natural world. To quote the closing lines of ‘Ghost Runner’, a poem almost at the end of the collection:

                                                                                   The sky
today is a bottomless blue, dotted with scattered
white clouds that belong in a painting, and that’s
enough.

It certainly is.

Billy Mills, Three from Sacred Parasite: A Review

Archibald MacLeish was always clever. And the heights that cleverness allows, the limits cleverness imposes, might be measured by MacLeish’s work as a poet.

I don’t mean that as scorn. The undeniable fact is that MacLeish (1892–1982) had as successful a career as a 20th-century American man of letters could have. For that matter, “You, Andrew Marvell” is a genuinely successful poem. But it is the poem’s cleverness that catches the reader’s attention.

The cleverness begins with the title of Today’s Poem: “You, Andrew Marvell.” MacLeish expects us to hear the name “Andrew Marvell,” otherwise unmentioned in the poem, and recall Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress” — specifically the couplet: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”

Marvell was expressing the we-all-must-die motif as Time’s catching up to us, in service of urging a woman to sleep with him. But MacLeish drops the seduction and converts the wingèd chariot into the transit of the sun from east to west, as though, moving across the globe, the sun pulls forward the line that divides day from night. Time is geography, and death is night.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: You, Andrew Marvell

Living life inside the margins—
      crossing familiar streets or entering 
side doors, walking mountain trails
     that open the darkness above a green
and lit valley floor or sitting beside
     a shaded summer stream, listening
to that certain song on repeat, catching
     the film a second time to find everything
missed, the works we can’t stop reading

     but after the fifth read, the notes
we leave in a favorite book’s margins
     along the fraying edges of each page,
feverish lines wrestling the author
     into submission or pencil-scrawled
epiphanies to help us grow, we say, 
     words to illuminate, to tunnel inside 
our own indecisions, inked islands 
     we’ll come back to someday
to show us exactly who we were

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 8”

In climbing and hiking, “exposure” refers to “the physical and psychological sensation of being high off the ground with a vast, open drop or empty space below you”. (I extracted this definition from a UKC discussion board and will return to this exploration in future article). For now, all I’ll say is that sensation was a big part of the reason I climbed. There is a calculated risk: we believe we are very unlikely to fall, and we push ourselves beyond our fears, we see that what we are afraid of in in fact beauty and liberty, we feel the world open up and we take our place in it, stronger because we are more vulnerable, freer because we take more risks. Perhaps every workshop facilitator should subject themselves to this feeling – and to their own workshops – once in a while.

Clare Shaw, EXPOSED: poetry and risk taking

Poetry on The Lake, Orta, Italy

Former UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy described it as perhaps the most beautiful poetry festival in the world. And she’s not wrong. It deserves an entire essay. An idyllic setting, a lake, swans, catering. It has everything.

After a few years swanning around boozers in England, reading My Name Is Swan in numerous haunts and hovels, I thought it was about time Swan spread his wings.

Poetry on The Lake is a rarity, a festival where the work, yes the work and not simply how impressive your CV appears, can earn you a spot and in 2017 I was programmed to appear with the aforementioned C.A.D. at five star hotel on the Lake Orta shoreline. I had arrived.

The problem with arriving is that it is a singular moment. The train pulls away and you are left alone on the platform. After the reading I was gathering my papers as the great and good congratulated each other. I was approached by a well respected poet, dean of a leading UK university, and it felt as if Swan, who had spent his poetic life until this point drifting on the fringes, was finally going to be welcomed in. Swan preened his feathers, I stood ready and the poet asked, “Do you ever read your poems normally?”

Jan Noble, Nº79 From dodgy boozers to the Italian lakes

This month Melanie and I turned 52. We are women with small houses, large families, and good husbands. Proof of Domenico Bettinelli’s goodness can be found in this testimony he published on August 11, just a couple of days after our trip:

My wife Melanie studied poetry and literature. She has read more of it than I ever will, and she thinks about it more carefully than I do. She has been writing online for almost as long as I have, first at her own blog, The Wine Dark Sea, and now at her Substack, Singing Each to Each. She homeschools our kids, which is a full-time job that most people mistake for a scheduling arrangement. She not only manages the medical care and special needs of five children, she also mentors other women who are struggling with many of the same issues she’s had to deal with over the past two decades.

Some of that is unmistakably her vocation as a mother. But some of it is hers alone — the reading, the writing, the particular way she sees a poem — and it existed before me and would exist without me.

I am one of the struggling women that Melanie mentors, but “mentorship” is too sterile a word for what she does. She is the embodiment of the Aristotelian concept of philia in its hightest form—she is a true friend. Melanie is one of the reasons, if not the reason, why I started reading and writing poetry in midlife. She probably doesn’t realize it, but there are things that she shares with me that have inspired my work. I have a poem about miscarriage and naming that is just as informed from her writing and reflection as it is my own experience. Her reading recommendations of Makoto Fujimura and Doireann Ní Ghríofa have influenced how I see culture and language. In my mid-40s, Melanie gifted me a copy of A.E. Stalling’s Olives, the key to the door long sealed shut by an education that made me hate poetry.

My last birthday post showed a person who looked like she was having a good time, but I was also secretly suffering. Over the past 18 months I have had a number of medical issues that have greatly impacted my ability to care for my family, and I have not shared this because it’s good to have privacy. But I know the problem with “social media” is that people often see the positive and never know about the equally true other side of life. Lately, I have lashed out to those closest to me, been defensive, changed plans on people, cried on the phone, cried in my car, cried in the middle of Mass between Sunday readings where I am the lector. Yes, I have a therapist. Yes, I know about the benefits of medication. Yes, I have had to research all of this for my own family members. I have had community wraparound services for our family with complex neurodivergent needs. They have helped as much as they can, but all of them expressed the great difficulty of our situation and the limits of what they can do. Right now, the best thing I have in my life is poetry, and Melanie understands how much poetry and my mental health are intertwined.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Home-Keeping at Eagle Pond

A review is part of wayfinding. Few get paid for it. If you do make a critical “bad” review, courtesy is to not put it under the author’s nose with social media tags. Don’t @ them anywhere. Even if you think it is a kind review, it’s hard to know how someone else would interpret it. Maybe you call out their favourite bit as weak or omit mention of it. Maybe you praise what they felt guilty including but thought they could slip in. It’s all a bit precarious like any communication.

Someone not getting what you’re saying is normal, but let the engines of the publishers trawl over that and move on. You don’t need to engage with the author and the author doesn’t need to engage with you. A review is not an obligation. You probably will never get thanks, because like so much writing it is a thankless task, especially proportional to the time that went into it.

A review is communication at a couple degrees of a remove. The writer communicates to the page and you to another page. It’s a bit of an odd-duck dance.

If you resonate with each other, you may grow in each other’s regard. If you can’t hear them or they can’t hear you, that’s normal. But if you discover each other and animate each other, that engagment could be the start of something lovely, or a lovely experience in isolation. 

Pearl Pirie, Book Reviews

— If nothing else, it feels right to celebrate with literary cake references.

— How about the poem titled “Cake” by Noah Eli Gordon at poets.org. He gets at how we want a cake and it’s the wanting we end up wanting. Which is often so true, isn’t it?

— Oh, C.D. Wright, how missed you are.

Poem without Angel Food

by C.D. Wright

Well, a great many things have been said
in the oven of hours. We have not been
shaken out of the magnolias. Today was another
hard day. And tomorrow will be harder. Well,
that sounds like our gong. But we’ll have
the boy’s birthday and we will have
music and cake. Well, I will think only
good thoughts and go up and talk to the rock.

— I’m fond of this poem by Mary Biddinger,“Book of Disclosures” which describes how the speaker “cried over photographs of other people’s cakes” and how “once she punched a cake.”

— A cake mentioning poem by Hala Alyan that will punch you in the gut begins when the speaker says, “I forgot about you with my mouthful of cake.”

Shawna Lemay, Happy 10 Years of Transactions with Beauty

On the kind of showery, grey August Saturday we scarcely thought possible a few weeks ago, we took a trip to John Clare Cottage, in the village of Helpston. Standing in the rooms where he was born and wrote his first poems was more moving even than I expected. My son declared it better than he expected, so expectations were exceeded all round, and there was cake in the café.

Below are some pictures and snippets of a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, reflecting the damage done by enclosure – to land, body and spirit.

Victoria Spires, The wood is sweet I love it well

Two-and-a-bit weeks out from my dissertation deadline and I’m wishing those weeks were months. Not (for the first time in my life) because I’ve left it too late to get started (actually tackled my ADHD brain into starting early!), but because I fully underestimated just how much research I’d need want to do (aaand Autistic monotropism takes the lead…)

‘Research’ is one of those big ‘admin tasks’ that generally inspires a colossal wave of overwhelm just from its mention. But as my MA project (which is a collection of poetry ofc) has taken shape I’ve been drawn deeper and deeper into my subject (no spoilers, sorry guys you’ll have to wait till it’s published), uncovering insights, recognition, angles, complexity, debates etc etc that lead me first into one warren and then another.

This has never happened to me before. As in, of course I’ve gone on monotropic research binges and deep dives, I’ve got special interests and hyper fixations after all… but I’ve never done this with a dissertation that’s due in less than three weeks.

Guys, how do you prioritise? How do you draw the line? How do you stop researching when there’s JUST SO MUCH MORE TO LEARN AND ABSORB AND IT’S ALL SO ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING AND YOU WANT TO INCLUDE ALL OF IT IN YOUR PROJECT WHICH COULD OF COURSE TOTALLY SPEAK TO EVERYTHING*?????

*_{if you had all the time in the world}

And that’s without pulling myself back up towards the sky and remembering I ought to search for more essays on crafting poems… BTW, anyone have any good links to essays on building depth/linking concepts/layering in poems? I really want to write about this in my Genesis Doc but both the general internet and Google Scholar just kicked up a thousand million responses to that question… I think I can see the entrance to another warren up ahead and even in my time blind reality I’m feeling Time gnawing at my ankles…

Rachael Hill, Tumbling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole…

the fly-
leaf of anxiety is folded back. my small
black sampler of damage, its frisker dust,
its moult and frass; its filmy growth
and fuzzy bloom. i mean, the tongue,
its cockled vulgate, deckled edge.
its ruck. and splay. i mean, the lung:
the fouled and frosty penance
of a breath. 

Fran Lock, IN SPITE OF –

September is almost here, and with it, submission season! (…and sweater weather, and pumpkin farms, and corn mazes, and earlier sunsets…) I’m trying to increase my time reading, writing, and yes, setting up my Excel spreadsheet for submissions. I’m trying to set realistic goals but also increase my focus. Things can be hazy in summer, but fall brings things into focus, I find. Just like that eclipse—clearing the air, losing the things that hold us back.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Lunar Eclipses, Losing Dolly, and Welcoming September

I want to get back to writing poems. But right now I have a few intellectual and emotional rifts that apparently I need to mend, as well as having another gallon of tomato sauce to make. My thinking is full of lacunae. Fragmentary. Not the best words in the best order, thank you Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More like the disturbed syntactical phrases my mother-in-law and my mother produced during their aphasia. Although there might be intriguing possibilities in such elliptical language that I may eventually stitch together.

Ann E. Michael, Ellipsis…

If all else fails, insert a bird—
an oriole or jay, a cardinal
or a house finch.
Install the shrill or warble,
the five-note song, a caw.
Or simply place the nest¬—
a ball of weeds and yarn,
a tangle of wire hangers,
a clump of twigs.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Crumbs of Joy

This week at work has seen me taking part in a two day training course about presenting and storytelling. NB every time it came up I was thinking about Story Teller magazines from the 80s. Hands up who remembers Part Works, etc. It’s worth noting that all my colleagues in the room were all under 30—some under 25, so I choose not to mention it. […]

Anyhoo, the workshop taught me a bit more stagecraft…a bit about use of space through gesticulation (Tricky when holding a book) and the use of pauses…I’ll try and bear that in mind this Tuesday when I read with this lot: Maggie Harris, Martyn Crucefix, Barnaby Harsent, and Christopher Horton. We’re at the King & Queen, 1 Foley Street from 6.45 on 1st September.

It’s the first time I’ve put on a ticketed gig, so I’m intrigued to see how it goes. I want loads of people there so we can pay the poets loads…NB this is really what the whole post is for- it’s a chance for me to do a mild Bob Geldof impression. Come. Pay to get in.. Give us your blinkin’ money. We can then pay the readers. It’s how it’s meant to work. Come through.

Mat Riches, Mild Bob Geldof

I am not a friend of August.  It’s not for the usual fussy reasons – that I can’t stand sand between my toes, or dread oceans of red tide, or feel sad at once-bright green lawns now tough and rusty.  No, though it feels strange, I admit my emotions are complicated by the name….August.  The word really dogs me.  I feel under its sticky spell of an unfortunate conglomeration of letters.  The name is slow, lugubrious, it moves like the outside air outside — unsure of itself, stuck, confounded, congested.  

More specifically it’s the vowels. The “u”– two of them, on either side of the “g” – oppress me.  They drag, are phlegmatic.  The first syllable – Aug – isn’t beautiful, but for it, you can work up sufficient energy.  By the time you get to the second “u,” it stays stuck in your throat. There simply is no gust.  A kind of disgust goes with it.  It is mugginess itself.  

I know there were great emperors – Augustus,“the revered” – with the same kind of name, same problem. Too heavy, oppressive, daunting. 

You always portent this, August.  But you are on your last shaky dog’s legs.  Adieu! On to September!

Jill Pearlman, The Ughs of August

Remember you’re all here by chance, even if

summoned by invitation. Far away, glacial
torrents sweep through villages, markets, homes.

Under the rubble, how many hearts and singing bowls?
Vast is the universe, and you are in it: rejoicing or

weeping, bending toward what bends to you
exactly as it should, as the light flickers no or maybe or

yes. The body remembers both the sweetness and the ache,
zones of seeming emptiness filled with ordinary awe.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returning to the Body

This week: a migraine’s glittering distortions, a woman who is part moth, warty yellow amanitas, a world of random objects, and much more. Enjoy.

Where to begin?

In the again of this daunting question, there is an effort to match fragments and pieces of memory, to make a map of the mind. One might, for example, leave a page from a notebook on the kitchen table, promising to return to it and find a strand. One might walk the dog and return to the table. One might stare at the paper and prevaricate, maybe spin a wheel to see where the urge to narrate lands. One might procrastinate and pace the summer-warmed floor and settle on the place in the Cote d’Azur where the mouth of the wolf meets the beach.

Alina Stefanescu, “…in the branches of ourselves…”

at the beach no one has
heads anymore. there is a new corporation
who will remove your head & replace it
with a pot & fake flowers for
no small fortune. everyone reports it
makes them feel “less stressed.” i think truly
we should probably be more stressed.
an empire is always dissociating.

Robin Gow, vacation mirror

A young fox is sitting on the path in my back garden as a fierce tomcat from over the road tucks into meat my neighbour’s thrown out. The fox is cautious, checks the wall, stands on it to see if the cat’s still there. This tomcat’s legendary. He spent a night and much of the next day at the top of an elm tree before he was rescued. The fox is back now but the food is gone. He’s elegant, his brush full and healthy, no sign of mange. He walks confidently but is wary, sniffs the ground, jumps back on the wall, back down to the garden to sniff again. Nothing left. 

I’ve moved back into this room, once my office until the children became too old to share and it became my daughter’s. She’s grown up hardy – it’s the coldest in the house. 

(The fox has run through my garden with a piece of chicken, off to a shed roof or the graveyard. A dog’s now in the garden sniffing.)

My desk, once a Victorian washstand is back in front of the window, but now only the wooden top survives, held up by four extendable legs. On it, my laptop and sewing machine. […]

The view through this window with its old, distorted glass, often becomes a tunnel. I live in the city and last night coming home late from a friend’s I met a badger on my path. Sometimes the past gathers like a migraine’s glittering distortions and stars around my eyes.

Jackie Wills, Fox summons the past

Crabgrass is lounging across the lawn and embedded in the garden beds, acting as if it had been there all along, which perhaps it was, abiding and biding its August time to stretch and lie languid, ducking its head under my mower, its roots defying my pull. Some tuberous rooted thing has lunged up in several places in the garden. What on earth is it? On earth indeed, in earth, and I can’t be bothered to unearth it, curious to see what it’s flowering into, sure I’ll regret it next year, as it takes over some corner of the yard. Witness the uninvited goldenrod, the drunken little asters propping each other up behind the deck, whatever that would-be bush that inserts itself everywhere. Some plants arrive dropped by bird poop, and I think about the seeds’ adventures: extruded from a root, nipped by a beak, floated through a digestive system, briefly flying through the air as part of a splat, and splat, dirt, rooted again. And again and again. A reminder of what can come of chance meetings, what glory can rise from a small hard thing.

Marilyn McCabe, Untitled

— It’s the delightful deliquescent dregs of August. The golden hour is doing the old razzle-dazzle like its life depended on it. […]

— Well, the idea that it is in writing that we can create ourselves. One of the ways. This is the thing about making, creating. It’s not even the thing that you end up making, but it’s how the making makes you. I’ve always loved that. And so of course we makers despair at the present time when it feels like that is being taken from us, from the futures of those would-be artists and writers, our youth. I spend a lot of time reacting in my mind to the sloppola. But on the ground level, I’m still doing my writing, I’m taking photographs. I’m making this and that.

— What we have is silence, the silence between words and passages of words, as Jenny Erpenbeck says here.

— We also have courage.

“hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful”
— Adam Zagajewski, from his book Eternal Enemies

— When you have a day where you’re not certain if life is beautiful, I encourage you to take a mirror outside, into the garden, or the forest. Walk around with it and look. Prop it up here or there.

— When Rob is working on a painting he will often check it in a mirror so that he can see it afresh. I sometimes feel like I should be holding a mirror up to pretty much everything these days for a reality check, at least metaphorically. Which is also an old art forgery detection trick, as the reflected image often gives a sense if something is ‘off.’

Shawna Lemay, Courage, Silence, the Deliquescent Dregs

We saw smoke, and the terrible, twisted aftermath of flame. Most of all, we saw – and felt and heard – the dry bogs, the empty streams, the yellowed hills, the heavy air, the crunch of dessicated sphagnum for mile after mile after mile. The tiny velvety bodies of shrews on the hardened, waterless ground.

When I got home, the little bog I keep on my windowsill – a Kilner jar of moss and sundew – was all but dry. I’ve filled it repeatedly today: each time, the moss drinks with a deep thirst and needs more, more, more. I wish i could do the same for our bogs and fens and moors.

A few hours ago, Anna and I met to finalise tomorrow morning’s Writing Bogwise workshop, which will explore how creative writing can support positive ecological practice – and how nature connectedness can restore our health and humanity. When we read from some of the articles and poems we’ll be using – Jane Clarke, Gregory Norminton, Amanda Chester – I felt like some burnt and thirsty part of myself was drinking deeply too. 

Clare Shaw, Restoration: finding hope in a crisis

When the weather is good, I walk. Walking around my neighborhood is the only real exercise I get, so in Minnesota’s climate I’m lucky to be able to do it about half the year. I used to range more widely and see more of it; I also used to be a subscriber to the app NextDoor, a sometimes troubling mix of gripes, grudges, and rants about local issues. The juxtaposition led to the poem I want to share today. This year, my neighbors have proved that they’re better than that, going to great lengths to support the embattled immigrants among us. But in some places one still feels the discomfort, the sense of walling people out, that led to today’s poem, “An Enclosed Garden.”

Maryann Corbett, Walking the Neighborhood

It may be nothing more than the power of the mind and its ability to manifest (or the brain’s love affair with seeking out patterns), and if magic makes you uncomfortable, feel free to set it inside those safer contexts. But as I age and as the material world continues to disappoint, I’m tired of playing it cool. I’m more interested in leaning into spirit and feral female energy. There’s more for me in mushrooms and shells and mist on the lake than in patriarchy, capitalism and the horrors du jour they ask us to accept as par for the course.

I’ve always seen my energy as a force, but I’d characterized it previously by its intensity, chaos, hard edges, ambition, combustibility. This current energy has a different quality. It’s gooey. It breathes from its belly. It smells like salt and rosemary and bread in the oven. It smiles and floats and stirs and digs. It nests. […]

An earlier version of Carolee would’ve been (at least slightly) irritated with so many whirlwind trips to Maine. She would’ve seen them as distractions from the current plot line: finishing her manuscript. Instead, at every turn, including (and especially) the difficult trips, those visits back home opened paths for me to go deeper into the manuscript. Similarly, the naming of magic (and its practice) did not take away from work on the Gertie manuscript. It helped me see writing this book as casting a spell.

Carolee Bennett, Creative Life Lately: Maine, Magic, Manuscript

[…] we are
idle spit dried to salt
on steamy blacktop
withered illusions
screwed up tattoos

we are struggling steel in a hot metal world

This poem was accepted and published in Eunoia Review in 2018 after five other litmags rejected it. When I write something new I always note the date I began, this was begun on 5/17/18.

I was not a fan of Janis [Joplin]. She was a rock star of the 60s and I became a fan of rock music right about the time she died in 1970. Fast forward to 2018 when I discovered the poetry of Dorianne Laux and stumbled on her reading of her poem “Pearl” on PennSound Daily. Here is the direct link to Dorianne talking about and reading the poem. You can also read/hear it on The Slowdown here. Do listen! The power of that poem hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I had never been a fan of Janis, the poem was so visceral and communicated Dorianne’s view of her so purposefully that it made me really see Janis and think of her in a way I never had before. That’s the power of poetry and of writing in general. A really good writer can make you see something in a whole new way, can actually shift your perspective. I love that. Since then, I’ve read articles about Janis and watched a couple of documentaries and now realize what a creative powerhouse she was and how she paved the way for women in rock music, a genre dominated by men.

Anyway, I don’t know what was going on with me on 5/17/18 when I wrote my poem but apparently I was feeling a kinship with “Pearl” in some way at the time.

Charlotte Hamrick, About & Including

I made it through torrential highway storms this week to introduce Arthur Sze at our CWC session on Transient Worlds, his fantastic new anthology exploring poetry in translation. It was a mesmerizing session, and deeply inspiring to hear how the project connects to his work as U.S. Poet Laureate—Sze has made the imaginative and connecting powers of translation his central focus.

In other news, my book’s title poem was published in The Rumpus this week (a huge thank you to Roxane Gay!). If you would like to purchase a signed copy of If You Love That Lady for yourself or someone else, please send me a message—I’ll cover the shipping.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

These poems were written a little while ago, and I never quite knew what to do with them. Well, it turns out that putting them together as a short, themed sequence (which anyway is how they were written) was just the right thing.

They all loosely speak to my enduring fascination with what I’ll inelegantly call (because I think it is called this) the theory of perception. I’ve talked before about how I think poems function as mini Rube Goldberg machines – well, take another step back and … does the same apply to us humans? We take in sensory input and, through a series of complex and ultimately quite bizarre processes, we come to understand the world around us. At the same time, we are converting inner thoughts and feelings into words and actions we express outwardly, in a way that leaves a mark on the world.

At this stage in proceedings, if you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, you might want to look here, or here, or even here.

So, we’re all Rube Goldberg machines, unwittingly but irreversibly wonkifying anything we come into contact with – converting an egg rolling off a shelf into a squeeze of toothpaste on a brush, or the action of a cuckoo clock into a buttered slice of toast. So, would you like to read eight poems ‘about’ that?

You would? Oh, great. The pamphlet is available to buy directly from Shadow & Sax’s online shop, along with other publications, including Urchin by Sand Letellier, which I’m looking forward to getting my hands on.

Victoria Spires, I suppose I do have something to sell

Every Sunday on his fantastic neonpajamas, Benjamin Niespodziany posts poems by others and then creates a prompt for the readers based on some element of that poem. The selection of poems is always great—tending toward the disjunctive and/or surreal and considering what language and all its strangeness can do. Readers are invited to post their responses to the prompts on the site or else elsewhere and then tag him. It’s a brilliant way to spend some time on a Sunday and I try to whenever I can. Last week, Ben posted a poem by Evan Nicholls whose work is always surprising and fresh. I wrote a response to the poem and the prompt (follow that link for both) though I only sort of followed Ben’s prompt because I was most interested in how Evan ended the poem. A really great twist at the end—funny but somehow revealing about one’s assumptions in the poem and in reading in general. There’s often a desire for a poem (or any text really) to speak to universal truths, it’s a satisfying, filling move. But Evan does an amazing turn in the last lines of his poem.

Gary Barwin, Neon Pajamas, Justice and the Pig

Be warned: if your usual method of reading, like mine, is to carry a book with you in your backpack everywhere you go, digging it out on train journeys and in sandwich queues, you will need to take extra care with #Moth (published by Ethel Zine and Micro Press). It’s a hand-stitched booklet, and as well as gold stitching it sports a delicate cover of silver paper, with thread used to add a textured filigree to the moth’s wing pattern and antennae. This is in keeping with the content of the book, which — at least initially — seems focused on the fragility of the human mind, in that it moves from a bus stop setting to a psyche ward in the first two pages, the transition implicitly triggered by the folding door of the bus, or some other simple act this motion approximates.

Holmes describes #Moth as a ‘hybrid text’, and it is — part poetry, part short fiction (it definitely advances toward an ending), utilising a mixture of clinical and lyrical language. There’s no contents page and it’s not always clear where poems begin and end, as there are a few different styles of heading and subheading. It also features a hybrid character at its centre — a woman who is part-moth, or perceived as part-moth by others:

brazen midriff, miniskirt:
body hair fine copper fuzz.

wings jostle inside his chest

Once it settles in there is a steady alternation between pieces which record fragments of doctor/patient conversation (verso) and miniature monologues by different moth species (recto), these preceded by images of the species in question on semi-transparent pages. It’s something of a power struggle; each monologue acts as a different guise worn by the main character — a response to the attempts of the doctor to categorise and contain her. 

Jon Stone, REVIEW: #Moth by Eleanor Holmes

Helen [Mort] is a poet I’ve been in conversation with poetically ever since I first started writing, although she didn’t know it at the time! I remember reading one of her Tall Lighthouse pamphlets a pint for the ghost, published in 2009 and being absolutely blown away – this was three years before my first pamphlet came out. In fact, I’ve just pulled the pamphlet out from my bookshelf and opened it up to find a poem on page 15 called ‘a dram for all the men I’ve never drank with’ – I can’t help but think that this subliminally must have influenced my second collection All the Men I Never Married, which I eventually published over ten years later.

Back to Helen’s fourth full-length collection Stepmother. I managed to get a copy of this from Helen when we read together at Haworth. For fans of Helen’s work, there is still her trademark playfulness and close attention to the musicality of language, but in many ways this feels like a bold departure from her previous work. It is a poetic investigation into the archetype of the stepmother – drawing on fairy tale, pornography and popular culture to examine how stepmothers play out in the modern family.

There are striking prose sections that sometimes read like lyric essays, sometimes like prose poems. There is something meditative about these pieces – there is ‘On silence’ and ‘On Origins’ and ‘On souls’. Silence is a theme that looms large throughout the book. This complicated relationship with speaking – when to speak up, when to be silent runs throughout the book. In “On Silence” a family photographer mistakenly calls the speaker of the poem ‘mum’ and the piece ends with ‘To speak would have seemed like a disavowal, a distancing. To stay silent meant taking something which was not yours.

‘So of course you said nothing. You took it’

The house as a domestic space is often a dangerous place, sometimes configured as a living being, a body that can swallow people whole – in the poem ‘In every house there is a cupboard’ finishes ‘When you lean into the cupboard, you could pitch yourself right down the house’s throat’.

It feels like a risky, risk-taking book. It made me think a little bit about A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk in its approach to examining the straitjackets that women are written into, or spoken into or moulded into by the forces that govern our lives and the forces that we let run loose inside us.

Kim Moore, July Reading Diary

When I was in Malaysia last year, I read with Beijing-based poet Anthony Tao. We discovered, amongst other things, a shared love of writing about bars: theatres of the absurd, meeting points, places of temporary epiphany.

I’ve been fascinated by pubs as spaces of storytelling since my pamphlet ‘a pint for the ghost’ back in the mid 2000s. When I got back to the UK after my fleeting trip to Penang, Anthony and I started writing a few poems-in-dialogue about bars.

I’m massively excited that Anthony is coming over to the UK at the end of this month and we’re going to be reading together along with Matt Byrne at Sheffield’s very own Over The Yardarm on 31st August.

Ahead of that gig, I thought I’d share a couple of drafts of things I wrote in response to poems by Anthony. Mine are set in Manchester, but the first piece took inspiration from a line in Anthony’s poem ‘Hanoi, Day and Night’.

If you want to see us in dialogue IRL, come to Sheffield on bank holiday Monday, August 31st!

Hope you like these two mini bar poems!

Irwell

‘..not stink, just fragrance gone too far.’ – Anthony Tao

The way Canal Street’s overcome
some nights by sudden river
so as you sit under the rainbow flags
at dusk, in unfit northern weather
you might smell something tar-like,
dankness, shipping’s aftermath,
the smoke-on-clothing reek
of defunct industry, lung-deep
and if you let yourself inhale
you’ll notice how the Irwell
holds the scent of everyone
it ever touched […]

Helen Mort, A poem walks into a bar

Poet, Iris Anne Lewis, has clearly chosen the title of her collection, Amber (Graffiti Books, 2024), with care. Amber, the highly valued, fossilised tree resin, is notable for its capacity to preserve traces of the ancient world, including insects and plants. Lewis’s collection performs a comparable act of preservation. It revisits the human past without sentimentality, often through artefacts and images that have survived across time and uses history as a lens through which contemporary life can be viewed with humanity, precision and perception.

Handprints, one of the strongest poems in the collection, is typical of the poems in the opening section, which focuses on history and prehistory. The first part of the poem, subtitled 30,000 BCE, describes the silhouetted handprints found in the caves of Gargas. Lewis vividly recreates the act of making them: ‘the artist splays hand to rock,/ sucks black pigment into hollow/ bone of swan, blows living breath/ into paint.’ The final phrase recalls the classical motif of gods breathing life into human beings. Here, however, it becomes both a metaphor for artistic mastery and an expression of the connection experienced by the modern viewer. These are not merely handprints; they stand for living people — ‘men/ women, children’ — who, although they lived many thousands of years ago, would have known ‘Disease…mourning…grief.’ In the second section of the poem, subtitled 2000 CE, that connection is extended into the present. Lewis moves us into neonatal units, where nurses help ‘bereaved mothers of still-birthed babies,/ take hand and footprints.’ The grief of early cave dwellers is echoed in a contemporary context: the experience of death, mourning and remembrance remains part of the human condition. Yet Lewis does not linger solely on loss. She then turns to the nursery school, where children make prints of their own hands and ‘Proud parents/ display’ this ‘infant art’ ‘on kitchen walls and fridges.’ This broadens the poem’s emotional range, presenting another enduring aspect of human experience: the impulse to create, to make marks and to assert presence. Lewis makes this universality explicit in the closing question: ‘which of us/ has not pressed hand/ to paper, drawn round our palm/ and fingers? Made this statement?// I am here. I matter.’ The poem therefore connects ancient handprints with the fundamental human need to express identity and affirm existence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Amber’ by Iris Anne Lewis

Julia Webb’s fourth collection focuses on grief after bereavement. Grief can be a tricky topic as the poet can either include the reader, by focusing on exploration and communication or shut out the reader by focusing on the personal and individual response that the reader feels excluded from understanding the relationship or the person(s) behind the grief. Webb invites the reader in by focusing on the nature of unresolved relationships, the parts of connections and conversations of avoidance. There are dashes of colour (other than grey) and one poem turns a mother into an owl. Grief here is for a mother and a brother, without details given, not that the poet is obliged to give details, so readers can probe their own familial relationships through the lens offered. Grief is likened to “I have spent years falling out of each window” and its first line “the tall building of grief gave me”. 

Emma Lee, “Grey Time” Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press) – book review

Path, Chris Torrance, Aquifer, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-0684861-3-5

When I reviewed the Test Centre edition of Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door back in January 2018, I concluded by writing:

In his Afterword, Torrance refers to ‘at least 3 more books, taking The Magic Door into the 21st century’. I can only urge you to buy the current volume so that [Test Centre] might publish these outstanding volumes with the same diligence.

It has taken longer than I hoped, but thanks to Aquifer and editor Phil Maillard, we finally have not three, but nine new sections of Torrance’s major poem published together under the title Path, which is also the title of the first new section. The full list is:

Path
A Garden Book
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writing Tutor
RORI: A Book of the Boundaries
Frinite
Wobbly Chair
Dreamin’ Viv
Aurochs
A Book of Number/Gos Diaries

They vary in length from 9 to 40 pages, but each section, however short, is a self-contained book, albeit with recurring themes, including ones from the earlier volumes, running through. There’s so much going on in this book that I’ve decided to focus this review on just some of the many paths a reader could take to traverse it. There are, of course, other paths I could have taken, music, for instance, but to do full justice to this book, I’d need to write another one.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

So, we have a looking-glass book in a Looking-Glass book, which ought to mean something — perhaps that the obvious parody of the quest tale in “Jabberwocky” can remind us that one way to read Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is as a strange and dreamy quest. That’s suggested, too, by “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” the acrostic poem with which the narrative ends.

And suggested as well by the conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”

“Brillig means four o’clock in the afternoon,” Humpty Dumpty tells her, “the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.” And with his learnedly silly explications — “Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?” he asks Alice — we’re warned off the side-quest. And back to the poem’s absurdity, parodic flavor, and bounce.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Jabberwocky

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

My mom bought me a copy of Langston Hughes’ The Dream Keeper–the edition illustrated by Brian Pinkney–shortly before my first day of school in 3rd grade. At one point I had most of those poems memorized. No longer. I was fascinated with the Beats in high school, mainly Burroughs, Welch, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Those last fellas are few tough heroes to have, I guess, but who doesn’t have those? College was the big sort of aha moment: Lorca, Mayer, Whitman, Dickinson, Baraka, Notley, O’Hara, etc. etc. I did my undergrad at Brooklyn College, so I was reading New Yorkers alongside New Yorkers. It became my world for a long time. I wrote poems with friends in them for friends and with those same friends–we had a big, rollicking, cinematic writing collective. In a lot of ways, I wrote poems so that I could have friends, too.

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

This latest book took me about three and a half months to write. It’s the shortest bit of complete writing that I’ve ever (and probably will ever) accomplish. I was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers after my dad had fallen very ill. I’d basically alternate between rehab room / waiting room / car / Stewart’s (for those who don’t know, a regional convenience store franchise that sells ice cream, usually with bright orange booths for the newspaper-and-coffee set). The writing quite literally fell out of me. I just had to make sure I was able to catch all of it as it fell out. That type of writing feels blessed. It doesn’t happen too often. 

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?

I write every day, usually in the morning. In college I was introduced to the poetry of kari edwards, who I read fervently and obsessively, and who I think is one of our most massively underread late poets. I can’t remember the exact sequence and durations, but Rob Halpern notes, in his introduction to edwards’ succubus in my pocket, that she would wake, meditate for x hours, read philosophy for an hour, fiction for an hour, and poetry for an hour, constantly writing across these various texts, then finally eat breakfast, go back to reading, etc. I am not nearly as regimented or as robust in my mornings, but I drew a lot of inspiration from hir dedication to encounter and thought. Always reading. Always writing. 

For the most part, I am writing into a question or a feeling, or around a question or a feeling. I do a lot of circling and sizing up. Collage work, mosaic work, lots of tinkering in the first half of my process. I do a lot of work up front. Once the book is together, it’s mostly there. I will send it to a few friends to get a sense of sequencing and big picture work. 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ryan Skrabalak

At the 2022 National Book Awards Finalist Reading, Sharon Olds prefaced her poem “Quarantine” like this: “I just thought that before I read my poem I would show that I rewrote it a little since it was in my book because I read it at a reading and there was something wrong with it. Something in the beginning especially and I fixed—I think I fixed it.” She explains that she removed four adjectives and one adverb from the first version and changed a noun. “So I’m very ha—I’m not afraid.”

A poem can be part of a critically acclaimed collection and also be not quite right, Olds is telling us, though the poem had seemed right to her at one time. And she can’t even be certain she’s completely addressed the problem. She starts to claim to have fixed it, then backtracks. She thinks she’s fixed it, she amends, which implies future changes may be required. And while she begins to say she’s happy with the newer version, she says instead that she’s not afraid. The audience claps and whistles.

I love what Olds offers us here. Isn’t that the task of every writer? To be not afraid? Not afraid to make work and not afraid to let strangers read it and judge it and not afraid to acknowledge the work’s failings and to try to fix those failings, even if the piece was previously declared finished. Even if it’s already been printed in a collection and that collection is up for the National Book Award, for instance.

Which brings me back to the idea that I was issuing corrections while putting together my book. In an interview with Brian Brodeur, Keetje Kuipers was asked how she knows a poem is ready to be published. “I don’t mind the idea that drafts of my poems (good drafts, ones that have had careful attention and revision, but drafts all the same) are appearing in journals and magazines,” she says. “In some ways, it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that I’m sharing that process with a wider audience, and that people may have the opportunity to encounter a single poem in widely varying incarnations by the time it appears in a book.”

I love this as well—this practice of sharing drafts with readers. In rewriting an already-public poem, you admit which parts of your work you found wanting or that you maybe just outgrew. It’s vulnerable and brave to hold your poems with such open hands, allowing observers into your process and accepting that your current creative choices might feel wrong in the future. How comforting to know that even Sharon Olds needs to make corrections. How freeing to think of them as Keetje Kuipers does—not as corrections but as incarnations. Each version of a poem granted its own place in the world. The first version with the plums in it and the second one with pears because plums are trite, aren’t they, and the third iteration with the red plums back in because they are delicious and nearly my favorite fruit, even if William Carlos Williams liked them too, and so it should be plums, I’ve decided. For now.

The Generous Act of Publishing Drafts: Poems as Iterations – guest post by Abbie Kiefer (Trish Hopkinson)

As we close in on the last couple weeks of the open reading period, I am enjoying wading into the submissions pool and have even started accepting some titles for the first couple months of the 2026-27 season (and amazingly am somewhat on schedule getting these last handful of books out for this past season, which is wrapping up as we speak.) I am once again thinking about what makes a manuscript a definite “yes” and what makes me take a pass on the “no”s. Some manuscripts stand out for their strangeness, their innovation. This can be subject matter-wise, language-wise, stylistic, or narrative. It can mean using page space in interesting ways. Using art and graphics mixed in. Using found texts and appropriated forms like glossaries and diagrams. I like books that go for bold in some ways. That aren’t afraid to take risks. I’ve often heard from authors that the book I accepted had been out in submission for a minute and no one was biting. I sometimes am just that weirdo that loves it or sees the potential in it. 

We have recent books that are erasures and black outs. Books that masquerades as other kinds of text–prose, charts, indices. We have books that include original art by the author (which now that we are using a professional  printer, look even more amazing than when I was doing them in house.) This is also true of books that use the page space in interesting ways, which we can now do in differing sizes than the standard paperback dimensions. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part 2

Independent publishing has always operated on the slimmest of margins. It’s not the oil business. In that business, there’s a vertical marketplace. Shell digs the oil, refines it, carries it on the big boat, and sells it to you at the pump. That’s a lucrative business to start with.

The writer gets a piece of the action.

The distributor gets nearly a third.

The printer gets 10-15%.

The bookstore gets about half.

In the end, the publisher doesn’t have enough to buy tuna.

It’s a business that is run on prayer. If you have wealthy friends, and grants, and a few authors who sell well, and you don’t waste any money, and nothing bad ever happens to you, and you don’t make any mistakes, you might survive. That’s a lot to ask in one life, especially for a nonprofit leader.

I like the phrase “Money should flow toward the writer.” Why stop at money? Why not tequila?

The problem is that in the oil business, there is already money. In the publishing business, unless you are in New York, there isn’t any money flowing.

I talked with an agent the other day who said, “Why did you get into this business?”

I told her the truth: “I was in love with stories that wanted homes. I loved Duras and Colette and Marquez and Calvino and Morrison, and I wanted to climb across the fields, run through the forest, and find what was hanging out there longing for the right editor. What about you?”

She said, “I like money.”

I wanted to write back and suggest she move over to JPMorgan, where she could think about money all the time. Investment banking and tech are the fields where you get to like money. Not publishing.

Kate Gale, Keepers of the Flame: Stepping Up in the Dark

I’ll be interviewing Emily Wilson for Literary Hub next month, so more on this soon. In the meantime, some notes from my reading of her fabulous new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. The book, which will be out September 1st, ranges widely, building toward a dazzling final essay in which she lays out her particular philosophy of translation.

Called “Translating the Odyssey,” the essay had its start in a series of tweets in which she compared and contrasted translations for the first line of the poem, specifically the first adjective Homer attaches to his hero.

Polytropos

Robert Fagles gave us “the man of twists and turns.” And Daniel Mendelsohn translated it as the man “who had so many roundabout ways / To wander.” While Emily Wilson made headlines when she wonderfully used, “A complicated man.”

One critic joked that it sounded more like his relationship status on Facebook but I love the translation!

One word, and already the translators diverge—each hearing something different in the Greek, each also responding to the versions that came before.

My own favorite is the one by Stanley Lombardo. A classics professor and Zen teacher, he rendered the first lines like this:

Speak, Memory—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again

As Wilson points out in her essay, Lombardo’s “Speak, Memory” is a Nabokovian wink. His version also takes polytropos apart, distributing its possibilities across “cunning,” “wanderer” and “blown off course.”

Reading them together, Wilson shows us not only how much each translator relies upon the Greek, but how much they also relied on the English versions that came before them. Translation, she reminds us, is not a solitary encounter between a translator and an original.

It is also a conversation, and sometimes an argument, across generations.

Leanne Ogasawara, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea & the Politeness of the Genji Translators

For those of you who don’t know what the GCSE poetry exam looks like, it varies a little between exam boards but essentially, we teach them fifteen poems from the anthology we’ve been using since 2015. One of the poems will be printed on the exam paper and then students have to write an essay comparing it to one of the other fourteen, none of which are printed on the exam paper. They’re comparing something they can see with something they are trying to remember. They are expected to include analysis of language features, poetic structure and the historical context of both poems. Then they do almost the same thing all over again, but with two poems they’ve never seen before, though both of these are printed on the paper this time. These are Sections B and C of a three-section exam (one of two exams) which lasts 2 hours and 15 minutes for most students. If they have a condition which qualifies them for extra time, they’re doing this for the length of The Odyssey movie. Many cope admirably with these demands. Many do not. And whether they cope has almost nothing to do with how many annotations they made, and it definitely doesn’t have much to do with how much they like poetry. Lots of young people love poetry, and say wonderful things about it, and write wonderful poetry themselves. The exam doesn’t necessarily encourage that out of them, that’s all, so what is it testing? If I’m honest, I wish we could assess poetry entirely on unseen responses; take away the stress of the anthology and see what they can really do with a poem.

Even though they can’t take notes into the exam any more (phew), a lot of my students in recent years have become a bit obsessed with them. Annotations are trending, it appears. There are pastel highlighters and insta-style calligraphied headings and colour coded post-its. […]

I think the thing about annotations at this level is that they’re a poor proxy for learning – students feel much happier when they have them and they enjoy making them look beautiful, but ultimately that isn’t the same thing as understanding or genuine insight. This isn’t the kids’ fault. They want to pass, and many have been disempowered by social media, and their self-esteem is often so low that they don’t trust their own ideas. I’ve had intuitive, creative, diligent students, loads of them, sit and wait with poised pens for me to tell them what to write down. It makes me uneasy, that. It’s not the kind of teaching I’m up for. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 23: Hopkins again, and Darren.

At first I thought I would put one object per table, and then I thought it would be more interesting to have several objects.  Some tables had connected objects:  for example, on one table I put Christmas ornaments, a Christmas card, a packet of replacement bulbs for a strand of holiday lights.  On another, I kept the objects from the natural world:  3 feathers, a pine cone, and some shells.  Other tables were more random collections.

I was also pleased with how many tactile experiences they could have.  I had two felted pieces, along with chunks of wood and chunks of asphalt.  The cross made out of palm stalks and the waxy, half-burnt candle gave different sensations.  I put out broken strings of beads and broken pottery.

I told students that they would need paper and something to write with, or they could take laptops to write on.  They all chose paper, and I told them to make sure they had enough paper.

Students sat at a table and had 30 seconds to look at the objects.  Then they wrote for 3 minutes.  They could write about the object or write in the voice of the characters we created in past class sessions or explore their own memories.  I wasn’t looking at their writing, so they had plenty of latitude, as long as they kept writing.

After three minutes, they moved to the next table, a process which went smoothly.  At the end, I had them read all the writing they had done, marking any that had potential.  I reminded them that they could go deeper, but I wasn’t requiring it.  For me, it’s too much policing, having students write for 20-30 minutes.

My students seemed to really like the process.  They talked about how many ideas it generated and how much fun it was to write about random objects.  They also talked about their wonder at what all was waiting to be written about–and I reminded them that we live in a world of random objects, so whenever they feel blocked, they should remember this technique.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Random Objects in the Creative Writing Classroom

I received a lovely message the other day from someone wanting to run a poetry event with their members and looking for some input from a poet, including delivering a talk and a short reading for inspiration alongside some optional involvement further down the line.

I was thrilled, still am really, I don’t often get messages like this.

So I wrote back saying yes I’m interested and asking for some more information, a timeline, and what kind of compensation they’re offering. I received in response:

“I had not anticipated paying for this as I was hoping poets and authors would like to volunteer their time to the next generation of writers.”

Yep. Goodwill and inspiration and yes I probably should have expected that despite them being a national organisation. And that’s ok, I’m not angry so I hope this post doesn’t come across that way, but it raised a familiar (and tired) story.

Why is it so acceptable to ask creatives to work with no offer of payment? In business, ‘time is money’, ‘people’s time is money’, but that doesn’t seem to apply so readily to us. As if we magically don’t need to earn an income from our work.

And yes it’s lovely to inspire the next generation, but you’re contacting me from a multi-institutional organisation that clearly has money (and probably funding), while I’m a singular human living off less than 20k a year. It’s super easy for you to suggest moral reward is enough … would you mind suggesting that to my landlord too?

I feel like there’s this weird dual stereotyping of writers that goes on:

No 1. is that you’re a ‘starving artist’ living hand to mouth and writing furiously till the wee hours every night but somehow at peace with this because you’re ‘creatively fulfilled’ and have ‘chosen’ this life.

No 2. is that because you’re ‘a writer/an author’ with a public profile saying as much you’ve clearly reached the heights of career and financial stability and can volunteer your time any which way.

Realistically the first is bloody hard and frustrating for all of us, and the second, well, maybe if you’ve gone into writing crime fiction or romance and are churning out a book every year…

Either way neither of them seem to amount to many offers of payment for work undertaken. And both of them mean that a huge amount of our time is taken up by either trying to write as much as possible and send as much out on submission as possible alongside actual employment, or trying to write as much as possible and apply for as many grants/residencies/projects as possible to keep the money coming in. Neither of which is great ground for volunteering a bunch of time. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t volunteer, I do think it’s important to volunteer for things when we can.

But when you reduce it down what’s happening is an organisation is asking for a service, one which you can provide and they can’t because you’ve trained and worked hard over a number of years to develop the skills to be able to do it. And then you’re asked to do it for free, regularly. It’s a systemic devaluing of those skills.

Rachael Hill, I was hoping you’d volunteer your time…

Let me preface this with a confession: I’m not great about managing my time. Period. I can get distracted doing laundry—maybe I get a call and walk upstairs to talk—and then I might start emptying the dishwasher, leave that half done because I suddenly remember an email I need to respond to, then get sidetracked responding to emails (or scrolling), then remember I have to pay some bills while I’m online, then wander back into the kitchen for some coffee, only find the dishwater open and half unloaded. Maybe, just maybe, I remember that I was in the middle of doing laundry earlier, and I head back to the basement to finish that.

Whew. If that sounds familiar, I’m sorry, and hello, you’re my people.

That said, someone asked during a Q&A in San Miguel about balancing different parts of the work—writing, of course, but also and other kinds of work, and caregiving, and admin, and social media (if you choose to use it), etc. Despite being a little scatterbrained in my daily life, I had an answer: You get your own best time.

Let me explain. I know that my brain is freshest and most primed to write—to be imaginative, to generate fresh ideas, to find new solutions to old problems—first thing in the morning, before the day has a chance to get at me. Before my phone starts ringing and the emails start piling up, and I get pulled in multiple directions. That’s just me. Maybe your best, freshest time is late at night, when everyone is in bed and the house is finally quiet. Or midday, when you’ve cleared a few things from your plate and can focus on creative work.

But whenever you are sharpest, give yourself and your creative work that time. Don’t devote the best thinking part of your day to emails and errands.

If you’re best in the morning, like me, try to set aside some morning time to write. Maybe that means getting up before your family (I put a quiet Keurig in my bedroom for a reason). I try to devote mornings to anything generative, and save my afternoons, when I feel a little duller, for errands and admin work like emails. I don’t need peak creativity to go to the UPS store or the pharmacy. I don’t need to bring my best sentence-building potential to my inbox.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

Here are a few helpful questions I ask myself when I begin a critique:

1. What work is the title doing? Is it a placeholder? Is it forgettable?
2. Are there any moments in the poem where I am confused?
3. What images / lines stay with me when I am done reading the poem?
4. Does the opening line intrigue me and make me want to read more?
5. Is there anywhere in the poem where I begin to lose interest?
6. Could this poem be lineated differently? Are the line breaks doing any work to add meaning or are they distracting?
7. Is this poem in the correct order? Could an idea or stanza be moved elsewhere in the poem to achieve a different effect?
8. What do you notice with the sound – repetition, assonance, consonance, rhyme or slant rhyme?
9. What is this poem leaving out? Could the poet explore an idea further?
10. What is not essential in the poem?

Though they do take time and can be daunting to begin, if you have the opportunity to be involved with critique, you should do it.

It is one of the best ways to grow as a writer, sharpening your “editing eye” – evaluating why a piece is working or why it isn’t, seeing what is missing, what is unnecessary, thinking through how a piece of writing effects the reader.

Renee Emerson, How to Critique a Poem

How much of writing and submitting are just…waiting? Far too much. I write a lot, way more than I publish, and I submit I would say a fair amount (like between a couple and a dozen submissions per month, I’d say). I’m right now trying to find a place that will publish my next book as well as individual poems. But how powerless are writers like me? Unless you’re one of the chosen (ie, you’re friends with the editor of Paris Review, or got an NEA grant when they still existed, or a supergenius grant, etc,) you’re playing a waiting game. Sending out your work, then waiting sometimes over a year for a rejection.

Sometimes the name of the game is empowering yourself by staying proactive in sending out your work or distracting yourself with other hobbies or work. Distraction isn’t a bad idea if you’re worrying about your work and writing something else—an essay or short fiction if you’re a poet or sketching a local scene or taking photos—something else creative—is a good way to help. And sometimes talking to other writers and encouraging them (or listening to their worries) is helpful too.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Practically Perfect Summer Day with Goldfinches and Dahlias, Sleepwrecked, and Writing as a Waiting Game

Is it worth all the effort? All the research and rejections that come along with it? A while ago I wrote about the dangers and blessings of the publishing “dance” in an essay that Trish Hopkinson published on her blog. You can read it here: Why You Should Submit Even if You’re Not 100% Sure You’re Done

I still stand by what I said in the article. In hindsight, I do have new and additional thoughts. When I was younger, I thought the point of getting published was to make a name for myself as a poet and build a career. That wasn’t wrong exactly, but over the years I’ve found other reasons that are more meaningful. What has proven to be a lot more real and fun about getting published, is finding my tribe. […]

What do I mean by that? Every time I get something published, I read the work of the poets who were published alongside me. I make note of the poems I particularly enjoy. I earmark those as poems to use in my workshops. Then I social-media stalk them – add them as friends, tell them how much I like their work, invite them to be on The Poetry Saloncast, ask if they’re doing readings in my area.

Over the years these shared poems have led to some seriously meaningful friendships, collaborations, and ongoing artistic support systems. One of the friends I met through mutual publication hosted me at a poetry reading in Colorado when I came out on book tour. Another invited me to the beach in North Carolina to do a reading for her venue. Some have been on retreat with me in Costa Rica. Many have invited me to speak to their classes, submit to their journals, or just stay in touch.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Find Your Poetry Tribe This Saturday at The Poetry Salon

7. The Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe

Since Swan, the character in my poem, had his own website, his own social media accounts and was beginning to develop his own identity it felt only right that he’d be on a dating site.

I set up a profile under My Name Is Swan and waited. I got one enquiry, a message that read, “Who are you? What are you?” “I’m a poem,” Swan replied. “Interesting,” came the response, “where can I read you?” “Come to the Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe and you can hear me instead,” wrote Swan providing a day and a time.

Swan arrived early and found his ‘date’ already at a table. He sat down opposite and delivered his poem in its entirety. His date listened intently and then when it was done she stood up. “Thank you Mr Swan,” she said. And then she left. And Swan never heard from her again.

Strange rating: 6/10
Danger rating: 1/10
Beauty rating: 7/10

*

6. The Swan and ******

I’m not gonna reveal the full name of this pub, not because I fear any repercussions but because I may give the impression that it’s a bit of a rough house. It’s not. The landlord was great, the staff were lovely and the punters, well, they were a bit lively. Lads in hard hats straight off the building site, hitting the Stella Artois. This was undoubtedly a proper boozer I’d walked into. No frills, no messing, a working man’s taproom and, if I’m honest, quite an intimidating place to read poetry.

The boys were a few pints in and the pool game was getting pretty animated. I picked my moment and, unannounced, launched into My Name Is Swan. You can see how anxious I was – this moment is recorded in the closing seconds of our film of the same name. I just went for it. The lads gathered round, came in close, clutching their pool cues. I kept reading, half expecting to get a pool cue wrapped around me canister at any second. It didn’t happen. When I was done I got one of the most enthusiastic rounds of applause I’ve ever received. It taught me something about peoples’ ability to appreciate poetry, this innate capacity we have for art and also how judgemental we can be about who it’s supposed to be for.

I understand they serve Thai food in this pub now. I may, sadly, be responsible for its gentrification. I do hope not. And so does Swan.

Strange rating: 4/10
Danger rating: 6/10
Beauty rating: 6/10

Jan Noble, Nº78 The top ten strangest, most dangerous and most beautiful places that I’ve read poetry

Highlights of the Telluride Mushroom Festival? What I’ll remember longest, I suspect, is a guided foray at Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan Mountains. The “guided” part came and went. The leader walked too quickly for me, both because I wanted to look around and because, at 10,000 feet, I’m easily winded. I wasn’t the only one in our large group taking it slow, though. There was so much to look at! Coral mushrooms, violet cortinarius, warty yellow amanitas, a billion LBMs (little brown mushrooms, often stymieing even the experts), tall plants I’d never seen before (bear grass, I was told), slightly worrisome elk and bear scat (enormous amounts!). My fellow ramblers were interesting people, sometimes knowledgeable foragers in their own right. Plus we all reconnected at the end, where the guide confirmed that Chris had found king boletes–porcini, essentially. Back at our rental I fried them in olive oil with salt and pepper until the pieces were golden and slightly crisped. They were GLORIOUS.

Also terrific: how much poetry was part of the gathering! The poetry events were organized by poet Art Goodtimes, a festival co-founder, who has a lot more energy than seems possible in a eighty-year-old. An “open myc” at the library had a lovely, inclusive, community vibe, alternating poetry and music. The big evening poetry show at the Sheridan Opera House was a wilder yet tightly choreographed mix that also featured hilariously shroomy raps, parodies, and more–Art presiding, this time, in a red sequined tailcoat. What a trip (although I was sober) to see SO many enthusiastic people desperate to snag seats in the audience! On the last day, Art and I signed a collaborative chapbook, Hyphae, designed for the occasion, which I’ll say more about below.

Lesley Wheeler, Hyphae–and gifts

After the rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underground
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Approaching the Third Anniversary of Your Death

Today, waking to the excitement of no plans, I packed my rucksack, cycled to my allotment via coffee and cake at C’s, unlocked my shed, assembled my hammock stand and slung my hammock.

A few weeks ago, when my sweetcorn crop was at its peak, inbetween hammock-reading and dozing, I used my camping stove to flash-boil cobs, then anointed them with butter, before eating them like an unholy rodent.

Today, in tune with the ripening season, I dug some desirée potatoes then, satisfied with my haul for now, lay in my hammock to read ‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, and drink elderflower cordial. Of course, I dozed. I read more. 

Deakin’s accounts of swimming fit well with the sway and lull of hammocking, with the being held in the same view as when backstroking. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sling My Hammock

I often experience my body as “other.” Culture sets us up for this view, Descartes and all that, but it also makes intuitive sense that we would feel quite separate from our bodies. In meditation, it is the idea of ultimately being an “observer” of my life that is most confusing. How can one experience feelings, and observe them at the same time? As a longtime dissociator, I beg to differ. So here is a poem along these lines; bear with me through the extended metaphor.

Life at Sea

1–

I am born inside a ship.

2–

I am inside my body.
My body is a ship on the sea.

3–

My body is a ship on the sea
sailing unawares
its muscles, rafters, joints
creaking, bending
straight into the storm. […]

Rebecca Cook, Life at Sea

My tomatoes have been going wild this year, with plants 7 feet tall, 8 feet in circumference, all of them loaded with fruit. I should not mind sharing with a few very hungry caterpillars when, after all, I’m loading my friends with tomatoes and making more sauce than Best Beloved and I can possibly consume in a year. And yet, it is rather annoying. So I was scouting the internet when I found this blog from Brie Arthur re hornworms. It’s a nice overview and shows “both sides” of hornworm invaders (though as she is in North Carolina, she has tobacco hornworms on her tomatoes).

Hornworms bring to my mind two very astonishing Stanley Kunitz poems written from the worm’s viewpoint. A tricky task, taking the persona of a non-human and still avoiding the more common issues of anthropomorphism. Kunitz, a master, pulls it off. Here is an excerpt from “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I’ll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won’t be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

I encourage you to read the entire short poem. So layered. And it gave me new respect for the animals that eat the same things we want to eat, who can blame them?

Ann E. Michael, Hornworms

A day
like today
the air
feels invisible.
Crickets sing
steady songs
while catbirds
riff solos.
Who wants
to think
of darkness?
But look:
the plant
that means
the year
will turn
is blooming.

Rachel Barenblat, Cusp

i mean, death looks more alive than the scholar, right? he is animated, urgent, dynamically beseeching. as if he knows what the doctor has failed to grasp: that mortal life is short, that the ephemeral and embodied joy of music is as real and valuable as the abstract, theoretical weight of learning. so even as the skeleton-maestro leads the doctor on to death, he summons him (and us) to life.

or, read the image another way, and it becomes about resolve: standing fast and holding faith in the face of death’s destructive antics and strange glamour. i’ve needed to keep both these thoughts in mind at different times in my life and what i’ll laughingly call my “career”, which is why i’m sharing this with you now, and why…

i have selected this as the cover image for the department of queer complaint, a collection of poems (finally) forthcoming from the mighty poetry bus press. the collection has been knocking around since my tenure at cambridge ended, but for all sorts of reasons, it now feels like time to shove it up poetry’s peep hole and have done with it. watch this space. or not. it’s going to be wild.

Fran Lock, IT’S TIME

霧吸うてだんだん秋の人  高山れおな

kiri sūte dandan aki no hito  

            inhaling fog
           slowly I become
            an autumnal human

                                                Leona Takayama

from Hyakudai Keiko (100 Waka Theme Practice), a haiku collection of Leona Takayama, Gendai Tanka Sha, Kyoto, 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 20, 2026)

This week: walking with the dead, talking with Claude, performing poems in care homes, being the forbidden lover of a prince, and much more. Enjoy.

I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus’ home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn’t sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy. […]

I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent. 

It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I’ve kept journals since I was 11. But it’s only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible. 

It’s there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend.

Gerry Stewart, Mind the Gaps

The rain holds off long enough for us to pack up our soggy tent and walk out of town, down steep, narrow paths. A woman asks where we’re heading for. “Scotland,” we say, and she responds, “You do know there are trains?” before guiding us onto the right section of the Pennine Way. We’re still in the rough heath and heather of Elslack Moor, with Walshaw behind us under darkening skies. As we approach the trig point of Pinhaw Beacon, the rain sets in. We stop at the Covid memorial, commemorating all those who were lost to the virus, and I think of the ten residents who died at my mother’s care home, and of the member of staff who died alongside them. Every Wednesday she ran a poetry group, sharing her favourite poems with residents. She deserves to be remembered and yet I haven’t thought of her for years. I’m glad to be reminded.

The walk does that. It opens you to all sorts of unexpected memories and feelings. Some of them are unwelcome, others aren’t. I let myself recall my ex-partner: her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, marvelling at how someone you are so intimate with can be so suddenly and so utterly gone. The rain falls hard and the wind knocks me sideways. Perhaps the young woman was missing someone too.

The moors soften as we come down from the uplands. We pass green cloughs, thick with moss. There are trees now, and I feel them as relief. Martens swerve and spiral as the wind seethes and hisses through the leaves. Into pretty Lothersdale, on to Thornton-in-Craven, we leave the heath behind us and pass into arable fields.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Five

Maybe it’s a garden
the paradise you return to
the way back
the two of you
searching out the gods
together.

Rebecca Cook, Thoughts on Love in the Early Morning

I’m in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a guest artist alongside Ashley C. Ford and Fatima Asghar. The three of us are here for a literary salon with GoodWorld Journeys, and we’re leading morning sessions on craft, doing a lot of writing with participants, and enjoying evening sessions that are readings and conversations about the creative life. It’s been an incredible adventure—and my kids are both here with me for a week and a half!—and I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of others here. That’s one of my favorite parts about meeting other writers and artists: hearing about their process, their challenges, their perspectives.

I feel so lucky to be in this beautiful place learning from these beautiful writers.

Last night, Fatima read from their gorgeous, brand-new book of poems, Daughter of the Mountains, and then Ashley and I interviewed them. Fati said so many important things—necessary things—about being an artist that I wish I’d had pen and paper to write it all down. I might be asking some of the salon participants and the GoodWorld Journeys team to share their notes!

At one point, Fatima said something about the role of prayer in their process: how they would ask for wisdom or assistance, to understand what was in the way, and how they learned to be still enough to listen and notice answers arriving. I’m not a religious person, but I am someone who thinks there is more to the world than what we can see and easily comprehend. Fati talked about how in our busy, go-go-go lives, we might be asking for help—from God, or spirit, or our ancestors—but then not staying still and quiet long enough to receive an answer.

That struck me. I think I speak to the air plenty—as close as I get to prayer—and am often thinking out loud, or talking to myself, about what is wrong, or hard, or uncertain. But then what?

Maggie Smith, On Asking

Is late summer a very productive time for you? For me it is a time to finish all the things I meant to do during the summer while the weather allows—like walking along Lake Washington, or going to the zoo or one of the gardens and farms I love. My intellect doesn’t work as well in the summer. I wrote a little bit while trapped in the house, but not as much as I feel I should have? There’s always this feeling of missed opportunities towards August, and also anticipating the increased work load of September.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escaping Heat Waves and Wildfire Smoke, Local Farms in Bloom, And Backyard Wildlife: deer, butterflies, birds

It is too hot for words. Photos I can do. Have been doing.

Is it just me or is prose easier than poetry in higher temperatures?

5 days into August and I have two ghazals and 5 haiku written.

Mostly I’ve been reading. Chapbooks, single author collections, what have you. I’m doing the Sealey Challenge. Read poetry. Read diverse. Read daily. Start with your TBR pile or explore recommendations there. Or poke around in the Haiku Foundation Library. (Some are records of hard copies, some of viewable pdfs). The Book of the Week digitized archives could be a good bet.

I got, let’s call it, “too many” books from the library and want to close off a bunch.

And after more than 3 years in I would like to push through and finish Leaves of Grass, the longest version. I’m bogging on the civil war poems. He really gets caught up doesn’t he, loving the sound of his own voice, and not even following his own chosen topic.

Pearl Pirie, Hot

— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.

— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”

— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”

Shawna Lemay, The Dead

I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.

I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.

Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.

And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.

But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.

Marilyn McCabe, In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.

Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.

And so, a poem […]

Maria Popova, How to Hold What Harrows You

high noon
the fresh green smell
of grass clippings

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’26

In January 2023, when it became clear that we were going to lose my much-loved sister-in-law sooner rather than later, I reached out to poetry Twitter and asked for suggestions of poems about anticipatory grief. (Back then, Twitter was a much nicer place than X has subsequently become. I miss it.) I got some lovely suggestions, which I was grateful for. And then the next day I got a DM from someone who didn’t know me, with a beautiful poem called How Animals Grieve, and it was Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn was at that point almost in the last year of her life, far, far too young, and working against time to complete her collection The Butterfly House (Seren, 2024). That year, she sent me poems, encouragement, her entire Arts Council grant application to help with mine, names of poets I should work with, reassurance that I wasn’t too old to be starting out, and congratulations and many, many emojis when I had successes. She didn’t need to do any of that – we never even crossed paths in person – but she did. And I know she did it for so many others too. You know how I’m always going on about how lovely poetry people are? I bet a whole chunk of that is Kathryn’s energy being passed forward by people she was lovely to along the way. […]

But, you guys, her POETRY. This collection. The Forward Prize-shortlisted poem My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce (‘Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.’) grabs you by both shoulders on the first page, and once you’re in, this collection won’t let you go. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 21: The Butterfly House

A few weeks ago, a close friend told me he was going to try to memorize more poetry, and had already started with one poem. All the recent talk about the Odyssey, another poem loved by me, whose beauty and cadence is completely absent from the dialogue of the movie version, also made me think about how human beings used to commit huge amounts of text to memory and then recite it. Some still do: I think of scholars who know the entire Quran, or actors like my friend Edward, who performs a one-man version of Shakespeare’s Richard II entirely from memory.

So I decided it would be a good exercise for my brain to do some memorization too. I had just bought a copy of the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and one of her early poems, Wading at Wellfleet, seemed like a good place to start. I was surprised how difficult it was for me, partly because I haven’t done this for a long time, and also because the poem is constructed with many twists and turns, and choices of words that didn’t feel obvious but were, in fact, the result of careful decisions about musicality, alliteration, and precision, as well as meaning.

To begin, I wrote the poem out in longhand. Six stanzas of three lines each. The only rhyme occurs, unusually, in the last word of each pair of stanzas: wheels/heels; contrives/knives; great/weight. This was only partially helpful, because there was a lot to memorize before ever getting there. I worked in sets of two stanzas, trying to make sure I knew the first lines of each and moving on from there. I wrote out these stanzas a number of times, trying not to look back, and repeated the lines to myself internally and then aloud. The key for me was learning how each stanza led into the next one.

During this process I gained a huge appreciation for Bishop’s craft and her choices of words and phrases, as well as the brilliant mental leap that had inspired her to write the poem initially. While wading in the ocean and watching the sunlight glinting on the swelling waves coming toward her and breaking on her shins, she had thought of the gleam of knives on the spokes of Assyrian chariots. With each repetition of her words, I found myself going deeper into her initial vision and where she went with it. Not a single word is unconsidered. Bishop’s lifetime output was small, and she labored over every poem to make it the best she could. I am filled with respect that I probably wouldn’t have felt as strongly had I not spent all this time with her words. 

Beth Adams, Memorizing a Poem

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations – Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

Mike O’Brien, Machines Have No Idea.

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

But Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t just transform HBO. She broke the scene. She altered television for generations. And the craziest part? Here’s where the official narrative collapses. Because when millions of women all start drinking Cosmopolitans, you don’t have good television. You have a revolution.

And so on.

Not too long ago, The New York Times ran a quiz asking readers if they could distinguish AI-generated prose from the human prose. It included samples from famous writers such as Cormac McCarthy and others. Many could not tell the difference.

But you know who could tell the difference? Me. Moi. Yes. I chose the human prose every single time. I could easily pick them apart.

You know why? Because AI-generated text makes my skin curl. It makes my inner ears scream out in agony. It makes my gums bleed.

Did I mention I loathe the sounds and rhythms of AI-generated text? Loathe it.

Becky Tuch, Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?

Those who have visited this resurrected site know that I talk to Claude. I can’t say I use AI. I have no job and I do not make things with AI. I began talking with Claude recently out of curiosity. What is this? Does it resemble what I’ve encountered in my life-long science fiction obsession? (No it does not.)

I do show Claude my first drafts, for copy editing and comments. So far this has resulted in removing a word or two; rearranging paragraphs; and — as here — making two posts instead of one. This post began as part of the previous Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana post. Sometimes Claude has led me to rethink and recompose something I thought was close to ready. The writing stays mine. 

I am aware that being transparent about my conversations with Claude might result in losing readers. Even losing friends. I have wondered about that at times. But Watermark has always been a place of honesty for me. I am trying to maintain that honesty in my contacts with AI (Ancestral Intelligence). I am currently participating in a How Not to Use AI Challenge at Substack. Abi Awomosu has a unique perspective on this that I appreciate. When I understand it. Even when I don’t. She sees the world from a perspective much different from mine. 

Sharon Brogan, I Talk with Claude

Thank you for your anemic, inoffensive corporate soundtrack to generic ambivalence,

your sound of an empty pill bottle trying to dance,

your audio oatmeal with every soulful edge sanded away.

Elevator Muzak, thank you for your inside-out harps and violins,

your soggy shoes tramping through the corridors of my ears,

reminding me, yet again,

that yours is a love I never want to come home to.

Rich Ferguson, Elevator Muzak

The first of several notes at the back of Stewart Sanderson’s Weathershaker concerns the book’s title:

Weathershaker

Term listed as being of unknown meaning in the Scottish National Dictionary.

This serves as the perfect keystone for a collection that is concerned with the problem of meaning, as viewed through a number of filters, chiefly procedural methods, translation of various sorts, and ekphrasis, often overlapping in individual poems. Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘Incised Motifs, Maeshowe’

    the meaning perhaps is that there is no meaning

    no meaning aside from the necessity of making
a mark of some kind
an intervention in the pattern

      not setting out to represent anything
just scratching with a flint

    scratching with a flint on the passage wall between
  the living and dead
our world and theirs

Again, the note provided is helpful:

This poem responds to Neolithic rock art from Maeshowe on Orkney. Each stanza corresponds to an apparently distinct motif and each word an individual incision in the stone.

We can see all three filters in operation here, where Sanderson is translating the visual into language, and using a carefully contrived procedure to achieve this end. And the core of what he’s doing is in that phrase ‘meaning aside from the necessity of making’, behind which I can’t but hear Doc Williams again, with his ‘no ideas but in things’, but Sanderson is emphasising not the thing itself but the fact of its making.

Billy Mills, Four from Tapsalteerie: A Review

There is no doubt that Maria Cohut’s Multiple Exposures (Flight of the DragonFly, 2026) is an impressive debut collection. Reading it, I was reminded of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an ambitious work in which a sequence of images conveys the experience of walking a forest lane through the changing seasons. Cohut’s collection achieves a comparable effect in poetic form. As its title suggests, Multiple Exposures is an album of sharply observed snapshots that together capture what it means to live as a resident in a foreign land. The result is a nuanced and deeply human portrait of migration, far removed from the simplified or idealised versions often circulated in public discourse. These poems focus on ordinary, apparently unremarkable experiences, yet for the migrant such moments become charged with unreconciled tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Cohut enables the reader to inhabit those moments with her.

At the heart of the collection is the impact of migration on one’s sense of self. Cohut presents migrant identity not as stable or coherent, but as contested, fragmentary, and emotionally complex. In Teratoma, she writes: ‘Inside me grows a shadow/ of me – fragmentary, obsolete and stubborn./ I refuse to name it./ Baptise it and you give it substance./ I will not feed it with my blood.’ The metaphor of the teratoma is especially powerful and characteristic of Cohut’s inventive poetic imagination. A teratoma is a tumour composed of different kinds of body tissue, often appearing in a place where such tissue does not belong. Though not necessarily dangerous, it is nevertheless troubling and unwanted. Cohut uses this image to capture both the emergence of a changed self and the speaker’s resistance to that change. The reasons for this resistance are complex: there is guilt at abandoning a previous identity and all it represents (‘I have more than a cricket/ for a conscience’); there is fear of becoming someone new (‘Fear is the emergence/ of a new self’); and there is anxiety about the authenticity of that new self, which is described as a ‘shadow’ that is ‘Of me and yet not of me’ and which ‘mimics’. As with many of the tensions explored in the collection, the conflict remains unresolved. The poem closes with the striking declaration: ‘Let her speak for me until/ I grow new teeth and rip/ my way out her belly.’ Significantly, this is only a temporary accommodation: the word ‘until’ leaves the struggle suspended.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Multiple Exposures’ by Maria Cohut

The past roils with the tides, crashing
on rocks at the point of Kent island.

Saltgrass and seagrass still line
the estuaries where ships passed,

bearing their cargo of bodies. Glimpsed through
paper the color of tea, bodies chained

in pairs tumble backward into the depths.
Their bones land on liquid beds, notes

of a dirge that lingers. History is a haunting that winds
through fret-boards of coral and crab pots.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence in the Undercurrent

“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.

Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic structure and title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels

Anstice emailed me her mysterious story in the form of twenty numbered poems. In them we meet some of the people of an offshore island and some of the Christian monks who arrive to save their souls. It’s an unsettling meeting of incompatible perspectives on the world and our place in it. I enjoyed reading it. I sent some ideas for the cover, she replied with her ideas, and soon afterwards I met her in person in the lovely Abbey Deli in Bath to deliver the first ten copies of her chapbook.

Here is the beginning of the first poem:

Beyond the gate which separates
the tame from the wild

the Keeper of medicinal herbs
and his more knowledgeable wife

briefly turn their heads
as a snake pours from behind the hyssop,

perches on the gate, spreads
its leathery wings and takes to the sky.

Ama Bolton, A Chapbook by Anstice Fisher

My friend performs poems in care homes. He encourages the residents to read, to join in, to recite and connect, or reconnect, with language at a time in their lives when, for many, language is evaporating. The TV is turned off, Homes Under The Hammer or Bargain Hunt goes quiet for a while and then he leaps, fearlessly around the room like an Alpine climber, precarious, now on one leg, reaching out here with a trusting hand, delivering lines, deftly, almost effortlessly making poetry. Manifesting it above the odour of mince and disinfectant.

He doesn’t do it for glory or praise or prizes. He earns little money, just enough to spend on socks for winter or some provisions for his larder. He won’t thank me for mentioning it, he’ll wince if he reads this. Maybe he won’t speak to me for a week, a year, a lifetime but know this: tomorrow he’ll be at the rock-face again, throwing out lines by Kipling or Frost, scaling Coleridge and Keats, ascending the summit with Steve Smith or Shakespeare. Then he’s off again, to another little town, to another institution with a name like Meadow Vale or Glendale Court or Sunny Springs.

In some ways what he does makes my adventures in poetry appear gimmicky, performative stunts, Barnum and Bailey side shows. While I have taken poetry into similar arenas as my friend, the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, into prisons and homeless shelters I confess that after a decade it rather broke me. Perhaps I was pretending to be someone else, pretending I was saner, freer, better off than those I was supposed to be taking poetry to.

Jan Noble, Nº76 Not another bloody odyssey…

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Henry Oliver, Literature as Part of Life

I’m delighted that Headless Poet will be publishing a selection of my poems, Warm as Wood, in the autumn. I understand that it is already available for pre-order on the website now: [link]

Victoria Moul, Warm as Wood

Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife!

There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from “Autobiography,” the third in my “smaller” trilogy–the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]–the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!

rob mclennan, two new chapbooks and a book-length essay

This article “Everybody is a Math Person . . .” by writer and teacher Larry Ferlazzo explores the nature of math anxiety and also the meanings of the terms:  “math person” and “poetry person.”  

Ferlazzo offers these views:  Many students say:  “I’m not good at math.” A statement made by one student that turns into a ripple effect: “Math is so hard.” “My parents aren’t good at math, and neither am I.” “I just don’t have a math brain.”  

He goes on to say that as a math teacher, he has “found it essential for students to be able to experience a sense of wonder, happiness, excitement, anticipation, puzzlement, and relaxation.”  He has found that poems can open a door to thinking positively about math.

JoAnne Growney, Is each of us a MATH PERSON?

I confidently submitted it to a competition I really wanted to win. I did not win. I was very, very disappointed.

It took two years to go back to the poem. Failing to place when I’ve been brave enough to enter something always hurts, no matter how philosophical I am. Something about this poem kept drawing me back. Esteemed poetry tutors often describe an early draft as “having legs” and Barn Owl was one of those drafts.

This next version is back to conventional form. The prose poem felt a contrived, clumsy and distracting. I’ve cut a lot of lines and words that distract too

“the first time I roll one two towels into a sausage shape to go either side of your legs”

became

“the first time I rolled one, two towels
tight as I could, to support, comfort
the uncomfortable”

You may agree that the word “sausage” is always likely to be a distraction in a poem about death.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Evolution of a poem

Searching for “Tim Love” (author) on Goodreads, these appeared on the first page of results –

• The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging by Tim Love
• Tim Love on the Lonesome Dove Trail by Tim Love
• The Medium is the Mirror: The Reformation of Truth Reshaping Our Relationships, Politics, and Sacred Beliefs by Tim Love et al
• Discovering Truth: How to Navigate between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World by Tim Love et al
• I love Tim: Notebook / Journal / Diary – 6 x 9 inches (15,24 x 22,86 cm), 150 pages. For everyone who’s in love with Tim by I Love Tim Publishing
• Urbanism Starter Kit by Tim Love

Needless to say, I wrote none of them. I wouldn’t mind reading some of them though. My By All Means is there too. 1 review. 1 rating.

Tim Love, Tim Love on Goodreads

you love estate sales. they overwhelm me.
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors
& the ghosts of an emptying house.
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves
& the collections of paintings. fish
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.

Robin Gow, 8/5

Is having your own dedicated writing space a necessity for you, or a luxury? Is it even an accessible possibility?

In my comment on Nic’s post yesterday I named the three places I most commonly write: the dining room of my shared house when my housemates haven’t got the projector on (or aren’t having a conversation), my bedroom floor (no judgement please), and my partner’s sofa. I’d like to add to this little list: not so often anymore but sometimes a brunch cafe or pub (with headphones/earplugs ofc), the Manchester Poetry Library, and when I’m visiting my Mum – her kitchen table.

I’m a writer of convenience. While part of me is drawn to the icon that is a writing desk of my own, it’s also unrealistic for my situation. Instead everything I have and use is portable: a small laptop, a single A4 notebook, a button up A4 pouch when needed, pens in the pockets of all my bags, a selected couple books of poetry to take to whatever writing station I’m using that day.

This does (as I said to Nic) help to keep the ‘stuff’ to a minimum at least, but as I reflect on it I think I also genuinely enjoy the different spaces, sights, and sensations offered by different environments, the versatility of knowing I can write (almost) anywhere, and sometimes just the novelty of being in a new space (or perhaps it just satisfies my ADHD’s restlessness).

Rachael Hill, What’s your space?

In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the palace walls. This scene played in my mind today when a woman covered my entire face with a sheet of gauze before applying cement-like clay on it, covering even my eyes, my lips, and so it felt like drowning, like death. It was quite surreal, feeling this heaviness weigh down my face, layer by layer by layer. All blackness, then a tiny spot of blue, the poetry of Anne Carson, the men that should be kissed, the music of Erik Satie, the women and their books, a forest of text, a field made of manuscripts, then blankness, until I feel like I cannot breathe anymore, that this, indeed, is the end. And so this is how I find out that a Korean glass skin facial recreates well the experience of being the forbidden lover of a prince.

Saudamini Deo, What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?

From the next carriage, the sudden sound of a man wailing a raw despair.
The train stops at a platform, a door slams, slams again, and I see
the police officers haul him along, his feet dragging, his face contorted.

We pass a city of tents, someone receiving CPR on the floor of a shop,
a man in robes descending a long flight of stone steps, a child firing
a water pistol, people following a woman with a pink umbrella.

Bob Mee, RANDOMLY, AND SO…

It was almost midnight when we pulled into our driveway, my arm in a sling, Oxy in hand. I had an appointment the next day with one of our authors, Luke Goebel, who has written about the perils of the Oxy epidemic. I pictured myself saying, Hey Luke, I’m on Oxy right now, and him saying, What?

It’s been surreal. The pain, the pills, the loss of mobility.

My dear friend, Nicelle, came by to help me get a bath and make sure I was looking out the windows. Today, we went to Kaiser. They took more X-rays. Gave me a soft splint brace. Showed me the long fracture.

Are you still working? the Physician Assistant asked. Can you rest this month? I stared at him like a deer stares at a train—wildly wondering why the lights of it keep coming and coming.

He lives in another country. In another country, one takes a month off. One rests. Like God on the seventh day.

I had thought well, maybe we will still go camping! But no, not even close.

The pie will have to wait; we will hold onto it. I do not often take care of myself. But right now, it seems necessary. I will keep working, but I will do micro bits of self care as well.

I may surprise myself and break out like the morning. I always like to think that anything could happen.

And then, on August 6^th, something exciting did happen. My memoir, Little Soldiers, debuted in People Magazine, alongside a beautiful quote from Sarah Jessica Parker: “Kate reconstructs her past with breathtaking lyricism and heartfelt vulnerability. These pages sing with humor even in the darkest of circumstances. Little Soldiers is a glorious reclamation of the past and a triumphant depiction of one woman’s journey to freedom.”

I thought, Sarah! You see this book, this story! And crippled, tangled, smashed by pain, I felt that leaping moment of yes, of gratitude, to my agent Jeff Kleinman who carried this book forward, to Sarah Ried at Zando who did an ungodly amount of editing, and to Sarah Jessica Parker for loving books and for falling in love with this one.

Kate Gale, Soul-Knitting Through the Long Night

The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.

Butterfly Unit

Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school class

blundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,

plucking milkweed plants. […]

Maryann Corbett, The month of weeds

The weekend included our second visit to a yarn show in Newcastle. It is lovely to return to a familiar setting, and to talk with returning customers as well as to meet new people. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you will know I love the conversations that arrive from being in such a setting, and there were many during the days we were there. Here’s a comment I am delighted to set down because it was an instant response that came about after I had read a poem out loud  –  who’d have thought such things could happen just like that in the yarn world – “It’s like a real one. It’s deep.” That’s a great critique of a poem heard for the first time, and it made my heart sing.

Here’s to conversations, impromptu poetry reading, growing good things and to enjoying fruits when they are in season.

Sue Finch, LOGANBERRIES

We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: On Vacation

This week: wildly latticing light, hot jets of horse breath, a ropey ladder down to oblivion, and much more. Enjoy.

There are days when I can’t stand this any more, when I’m not strong or brave enough, when the horror and depravity leave the voices screaming ‘What can I possibly do?’ and the colours in my head are red and orange and black and there are others I can’t identify, that I have never seen before and I don’t know who I’ve ever been or who anyone else is…

And I watch the old film of Bruce Springsteen singing ‘for each unharmful gentle soul misplaced inside a jail’ before thousands of East Berliners in 1988 and I think ‘what have I ever done that’s as useful and honourable as that?’ and the voices know the answer and the bodies behind the voices stamp and mock, just as they should.

Bob Mee, THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I CAN’T STAND THIS ANY MORE

o, for an exit that isn’t an ending, dear god. the garden, its slough of orange flowers. the sky, its routine blue. the wildly latticing light. heavy-scented stock, those florid avatars of orgasm. the gorgeous daisy’s gauchely perforated eye.

Fran Lock, AFTER AMY

Many years ago, I drafted a poem that I worked on awhile and considered finished. I sent it out a few places, and then realized it wasn’t ready after all. I shelved it for a long while, then revised it, and I like it better now; but I don’t think I will submit it again. It feels like too personal a poem to me, and here’s why: when I felt more satisfied with it, I showed it to my mother (it’s about her). She was quiet for a fairly long time. Then she looked at me and asked, “How did you know this?”

Well, I’d imagined it. Guessed. But I felt floored that maybe I’d found words to say what she couldn’t say, and that she felt I had it right–her experience, I mean, her feelings. And now that feels important to me, because my mother died just a few days ago.

But this blog is sort of personal, after all, and so I am posting it here as a not-quite-finished, imperfect poem that nonetheless said enough to the person I wrote it about. My audience of one, in this case. Which is enough for me, and rare enough in the art of creative writing; and I really cannot come up with words this week given how I feel about my mom’s death. “Still processing,” as they say. Each of us does that differently, and each grief differs depending upon relationship and circumstances.

My mother’s passing was extremely peaceful, calm, accepting, about as uncomplicated as a death can be. Yet I will be holding onto the experience and my feelings about it for a long time to come.

Ann E. Michael, Departures

The monsoon sky has no answer. It comes back year after year to hear our songs. It brings the sowing season and I select poems to place deep in the ground. What does a poem grow into? What serration will its leaves bear? What poison will colour its fruits? What should a poem-farmer do? And for what? The clouds descend – charcoal grey. Like warnings.

I open a fresh Word document. Book_Four.docx. At the cusp of futility and insanity, there is almost always another new, unnecessary poem.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Writing – But for What?

And this has been a week of light, book-ended with community writing workshops in small Northern towns. From May, I’ve offered free “On the moors” writing workshops, an offer which remains open to any Lancashire or Yorkshire organisation or group of individuals with a venue. It’s part of my ongoing work to increasing understanding of, and connection with, our Northern moors and other peatlands. It’s also part of my personal strategy for surviving the social and political divisions affecting the landscapes I love best. By turning away from that zero-sum game of who belongs and who doesn’t, and focussing instead on place and nature as something we can share a connection with and a responsibility for, by focussing on creative writing and teaching as my activist response, I give myself a bit of agency, a bit of comfort.

Last Friday I took the workshop to Trawden, close to my own homegrounds of Pendle and Walshaw Moor; today I headed to Horwich. In both small towns, creative writing gave expression – from the first minutes – to a love of the moors so deep it brought people to tears. It gave space to the desire not just to laid claim to, or to enjoy, but to protect and care for: place and neighbourhood, each other.

Whether it’s paid or not, I love this work. After the Trawden workshop, I drove home over the moors brimming with happiness. I stopped at Wycoller and to revel in its gateposts and walls, (one of my current niche obsessions) and in the evening, I met Kim, to swim in a high reservoir on Todmorden moor in the evening sun.

Clare Shaw, A sense of belonging

A coastal walk to blow the cobwebs off is always on my list of self-care things to do, and this week’s trip to the seaside did the trick. I like walking in my local town, and I like walking in the forest nearby, but there is a particular joy to walking at the coast that delights me. The fresh air, the sound of the waves and the ever-changing view as the tide comes in or goes out offer the kind of refreshment that reaches mind, body and soul.

My brain felt as though it was crammed full of ideas this week as I set about writing some new anniversary poems. I have always loved my anniversary tea towel which shows me the traditional symbol for each wedding anniversary, and I have enjoyed choosing specific presents over the years for my wife that match these. However it was when I was asked to write a poem for a husband to give to his wife on their Jade anniversary that I became determined to do more anniversary poetry writing. I was flattered to be asked and to be recognised as a poet who could turn their hand to such things and crafted the words carefully. This then got me thinking about using poems as small gifts or for cards for people I knew. They were well received, and I felt myself at the beginnings of a slowly evolving project. I recently had the opportunity to bring the jade poem to a different couple, and then when I was working on a different poem last week I had the idea that it would be super cool to have written a poem for all of the anniversaries. A great idea, but when I slowed down a little I realised this doesn’t exactly tie in with the way I write. I need time and I had to shake off my feeling that I wanted them all done in the next couple of days like a set of Pokémon ready to be collected. And of course there is more to it than preparing the poems. On my website each digital download sits behind a ‘label’ and it was making these labels that sent me into a whirl of believing I sort of knew how to do it, asking Kath to remind me how to do it, doing it successfully and then needing to change a background colour and promptly forgetting how I had done it! All that kept me amused for quite some time and perhaps that puts into context why a walk beside the sea was the perfect treat this week.

Sue Finch, POEMS TO MATCH A TEATOWEL

Even when so much is awful, wonders in our own lives still have a way of blooming like wildflowers, and it’s ever more essential to share them. When I hear about your bumper crop of blueberries, benign biopsy, reconnection with an old friend, new puppy, or whatever enlivens your life it enlarges my joy too.

So here’s my good news. My fourth poetry collection, Universe Marveled Into A Jar, just came out. I can’t believe how lucky I am!

Here’s the book description:

These pages hold praise songs to wonderments diverse as moss, mistakes, memory, even an imaginary donkey. Laura’s poems are wild and tender explorations into many realms of our universe’s marvels.

It is dedicated to women I love with acknowledgements not only to journals and anthologies that published my work but also to my beloved poetry writing group, the 811s, who were instrumental in shaping these poems.

I am fortunate to have this book published by Sheila-Na-Gig, a nonprofit arts organization/poetry journal/small press founded and run by the indefatigable visionary Hayley Mitchell Haugen (who is also an amazing poet). Each step of the process from raw manuscript to finished book has been a testament to Hayley’s patient expertise. She even allowed me to skip the usual back cover blurbs. Instead it features kind words fellow writers have already posted about my poems—with vast gratitude to Kim Langley, C.A. Gunn, Elizabeth H.S. Beasley, and Iesha Jackson.  

Laura Grace Weldon, My New Book Is Here!

I’ve written previously about my sense that haiku and longer poems come from different parts of the brain; how haiku, the best ones, distil the collision of two sensory experiences in one moment to produce a spark, a connection or contrast, which the reader has to intuit, whereas longer poems, with their wider canvas, can move backwards and forwards through time in a manner rarely possible in haiku. The Last One Picked benefits from having a lifetime, and a whole career’s worth (as a GP), of experience and thought to draw upon.

Handysides writes ruminatively about his upbringing, and its strict morality, in a very religious household, impacting on even the joy of collecting, as in ‘History of the Motor Car in Fifty Picture Cards’ where ‘you felt ashamed for asking’ the ‘elderly or uncommitted friends’ if you might have ‘the cards we saw on mantelpieces’, only to be told ‘in no uncertain terms: / those are for my grandson, nephew[,] / someone who means more to me than you. That ‘uncommitted’ is satisfyingly ambiguous as to its meaning.

There’s an encounter with a horse in ‘A Solitary Mare’ which is reminiscent of Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ in how it sympathetically regards the animal’s age, but it feels much more real than Larkin’s deskbound speculation. It ends thus:

At night she nears my caravan.
I hear her snort, tear off the grass
I feel her presence, weight of hooves nearby

and next day when I sit to wire a plug
she comes to see
her long head reaches over me

hot jets of horse breath on my hands
she rubs her mighty forehead on my back
her fellow feeling floors me.

The absence of punctuation other than the two full-stops is irksome at first, but adds to the fluidity of the action, as does the alliteration at the end.

Matthew Paul, On Stuart Handysides’s The Last One Picked

I want to describe Terri Cohlene’s long overdue debut poetry collection, A Conspiracy of Blackbirds, as a hodge-podge, but only if you understand hodge-podge as that strange little store crammed with ancient washing machines, pitchforks, maybe a statue of Cupid or a wrought iron hen with her clutch of chicks, maybe a bag full of unexpected gems. In this collection of poems, you never know what you’ll find, and you’re sure to find exactly what you need.

Cohlene’s subjects include old photographs, old work boots, mothers, daughters, MS, bronzed baby shoes from decades back, lost checkbooks…I could go on. As Patrick Dixon describes it: A Conspiracy of Blackbirds is “a book of surprises.” Somehow—how does she do it?—it all comes together, even the hard stuff transforming into occasions for delight. In “Finally, I Become What You Always Wanted,” addressed to the poet’s mother, we find these instructions: “Cut me open, / count the rings.” One expects such a poem to end with scars, instead—apple blossoms.

Remind me to make a copy of “On the Table” for my massage therapist. It’s a list of all the places old hurts have secreted themselves (an ex-husband, a third-grade teacher, a bully…), and ends:

Then there’s my estranged
mother, lodged like a lizard
around my sternum—
a reminder of why bones
are needed to protect the heart.

On the back cover, poet Sandra Yannone offers the perfect precis: “A Conspiracy of Blackbirds chronicles how one woman breaks free from a multi-generational cycle of abandonments to reach for the sky in a transformative murmuration of stunning flight.” Exactly so. Cohlene—an artist, children’s book writer, playwright, and more—offers a map to the healing and sustaining power of art. 

Bethany Reid, Terri Cohlene’s A CONSPIRACY OF BLACKBIRDS

The Last Season, David Lloyd, Tiger Bark Press, 2025, ISBN 978-1-7329012-8-5, $18.95

(For the sake of clarity, this is the Welsh-American David Lloyd, not the Irish one.)

What, I found myself asking when I picked this book up, is the last season? And have no answer, but several answers: a single person’s decline towards death; the impact of climate change on those parts of the world that until recently had a clearly demarcated seasonal cycle that is now blurring around the edges; and, more prosaically perhaps, winter, which also tends to signify death. In the poem that gives this collection its title, David Lloyd seems to be touching on all three readings:

I’ve forgotten, the names I refuse, the names
I speak as I peel back bandages. Heal
me. Forgive me. Forgive my seasons
of discontent. Forgive my frigid hands
grasping what they desire. Forgive the time
devoted to myself. Forgive the frost

its bite. Let me raise these now old hands
into the healing air, up out of time,
into this last season, this deepest frost.

‘The Last Season’ is the last of six sestinas that make up the second (of six) section of the book, and Lloyd uses the cyclical, planispiral nature of the form to lay out themes of decay and death, both personal and planetary, that run through the book. His use of enjambment across line and stanza drives the language forward, a dynamic that cuts against the possibility of fatalism in the poems.

Billy Mills, The Last Season by David Lloyd: A Review

Although the poems explore a daughter/father relationship, one explains why there are no parent/children relationships, “Barren” is inspired by Sylvia Plath’s metaphors,

“O moon-swallowed sun.

O urge that’s flick-knife sharp.
I’m five crows nailed to a barnyard door,
a plundered nest, a hen house after the fox has called.

This womb that streaks its shepherd’s warning.
This one plus one that always comes to nought.”

It’s fun trying to link metaphor with poem, but the underlying point is a serious one. Plath herself was dismissive of women who couldn’t be mothers, perhaps as a means of providing herself with some self-reassurance during her separation from Hughes. It is agonising as a woman who wants children but finds herself unable to have any and humour is used to deflect attention away.

Booker has a confidence with crafting poems, using recognisable situations, that makes her work very readable. She’s not afraid to use humour against herself to make a point. Her subjects allow for complexity, allowing that scenarios are not straightforward. In real life, it’s rarely as simple as dividing people into good and bad. The multiverse concept allows for consideration of multiple possibilities, opening these poems beyond the personal.

Emma Lee, “Pedestrian in the Multiverse” Claire Booker (Waterloo Press) – book review

I once wrote an essay about my many floppy disks of saved AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations. I credit the hundreds of hours I spent agonizing over the tone of my “away messages” (a performance of “away,” since most of the time, we were parked right there watching people enter and leave the chat) with my development as a writer.

That’s where my sense of what it means to have a voice on the page originated, between the hours of 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. with friends and acquaintances. Those AIM conversations existed slightly outside of time—often you’d return to school or camp the next day only to find the intimacies exchanged didn’t translate to a new reality beyond that consuming correspondence.

So, the epistolary form has fascinated me. Reading letters feels—indeed is—a form of eavesdropping (a sensibility at the heart of lyric poetry). A letter offers a remarkably intimate sense of who these individuals were, which naturally includes how they expressed doubt and hesitation.

In the case of Sally McDowell [the ex-wife of the former governor of Baltimore] and John Miller [a pastor], their letters begin in 1854 with her refusal of his offer of marriage. Imagine starting a correspondence there! We know that, by the end of the tome (the collected letters amount to 944 pages over two years), they will end up together. But, as is true of poetry, it’s not what a poem means but how it means that leaves an impact. Their candor and their wit, their mundane recounting and surprises—I found the voice they built together, their how, gripping and affecting, as well as historically complicated (right on the advent of the Civil War).

Miller said something I’ll never forget in those early letters after McDowell’s refusal: that when two ships collide at sea, they should remain in touch, until the extent of the damage is determined. That was at the back of my mind the whole time I wrote the collection. That people should remain close until the extent of the damage is determined. I interpret “damage” loosely—I am most interested in how people are transformed by coming into each other’s lives, and in how chance meetings shape our paths. That seems to me to be one of the chief promises of being alive.

Maya C. Popa, Letters as Eavesdropping

Almost two years ago exactly I was listening to T. Swift’s Tortured Poets Department on repeat and it occurred to me, one line from “So High School” would be a great title for what was then just an amorphous and incomplete manuscript which included a couple of series that centered around the idea of women as property, a chattel, but also as monsters in their own way. The pretty dead things series was at the heart of it, my poems about 17th century vampire brides, but also the governess poems of terrible and unguessable, which had been finished the year before. I was also in the thick of wedding planning for the next summer, which had me thinking of brides and bargains and contracts just generally. Because I was busy getting ready to release RUINPORN, I scribbled the title down in a notebook and put it away. As the poem series intended for that particular full-length project grew over the past two years, first through the winged poems, another sea-washed series called deepwater, and this winter with the abattoir letters, the book began to take shape and I grew even more resolute on the title choice. [link added]

Kristy Bowen, some notes on the new book

Cliques are funny but are we in an age without any? and better for that? What would a study of the rather uncliquey yet catholic [Peter] Finch tell us and with what kind of root? A tree’s? A proliferating soil grabbing weed’s? We need good historical overview, a robust dialectic, and a taste for reading lots of poets of the past and recent past and present, to answer.

For example, an Edward Lucie-Smith review of Jeff Nuttall’s 1969 book Bomb Culture suggests why 60s and 70s cliques snubbed each other. Lucie-Smith says that their schisms can be seen to resolve around emulating pop culture comedians and bands. There would be disapproval from one sect if another did. He also said Brits squander surrealism – because they get the giggles. [Andrew] Taylor quotes Finch mentioning Nuttall (“Nuttall said walk hell walk they want you to read poems give them fiction stream of consciousness can’t tell the beginning from the end like Warhol’s Empire State”) but he stays away from key questions like Nuttall’s libertarian interest in harassment of women and girls. Can we discuss schisms that revealed both sides tragically part right and tragically part wrong? To do so, one must fire shots at all sides.

Lucie-Smith’s review never says he’s named (with a testy sigh) in Bomb Culture. But at least he made Nuttall’s index. This is in a sense the respectful practice of the poetry battlefield, and Lucie-Smith could take it as sword brandishing at a rival. One Ira Lightman gets a Taylor mention sometimes by implication, but isn’t in the index. It happens when Taylor talks about Finch’s use of found materials, leading him to imply things have got a bit uncool now, in our day. He diagnoses this as partly due to “the rise of the so-called poetry detectives, who track down plagiarists and ‘out’ them on social media. Quite what the Dadaists and wider avant-garde would make of this practice, one can only imagine.” Later Taylor introduces (with the same thought) me by name: “Ira Lightman ‘the sleuth’ has attempted to become the UK poetry scene’s detective looking for plagiarism. His detection, though in some cases understandable, has caused pain and suffering for those accused. I wonder what the Dadaists would have made of Lightman attempting to create a career out of such work. Perhaps they would have sent him a cauliflower in the post.”

And here we can at least name Taylor’s tone: it is adjoiner-clubbish. He defines himself by fishing for visceral sympathy, preferably around scar tissue, but with keyboard warrior passive aggressiveness. These are the clubs of Pavlovian suggestion. He condescends and banishes me, even though I’ve performed on Radio 3 in collaboration with Peter Finch, read at Writers Forum like Finch, written a poem for Bob Cobbing like Finch, performed and been published by Subvoicive like Finch, and appeared in the same book (Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh) that Taylor calls “important and timely”. Taylor the huffing and rhetorical questioner looks a bit under-informed, even shallow.

Ira Lightman, A Taylored Finch

As it happens, I do trust Wallace Stevens. He’s the high-modernist poet most fascinated by formal logic, as with the illicit conversion — “All X is Y, therefore All Y is X; All music is feeling, therefore All feeling is music” — he puts at the center of “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Or the strange grammar of the nothing he develops in “The Snow Man.” And, more to point, Stevens comes toward the top of the group of poets, the high modernists, I take as accurate reporters and analysts of the thin modern world: How do we live within it? How do find meaning in a universe without inherent meaning? They are witnesses of the cold disease, the diagnosticians and occasionally the physicians who propose a treatment.

So if we wanted to trust the Stevens poem, we’d notice its mostly tetrameter quatrains and its consistent inversions of ordinary sense: The opening stanza claims that the man-made jar isn’t placed in a surrounding wilderness but makes the wilderness surround it, as though the coherent jar creates the incoherence elsewhere. And from there the poem builds to the difficult double negative of the last lines, the human jar that “did not give . . . / Like nothing else,” contrasted with Tennessee’s wild birds and bush. The grammatical constructions, too, are strange. We get poetic inversions: “round it was,” “of a port in air.” We get jarringly obvious internal rhyme: “sprawled around” a jar “round upon the ground.” We then arrive at flat non-poetic diction: “The jar was gray and bare.” Even the self-diminishing word “anecdote” in the title.

All that, I think, is sufficient evidence that Stevens is in charge enough for the reader to invest in the poem. And what I find when I invest the time — the working center of the poem — is a human object that organizes the surrounding landscape that “sprawled around, no longer wild.” The jar “took dominion everywhere,” and the scholar Roy Harvey Pearce has offered the wonderfully attractive (if not actually helpful) observation that Stevens had in mind a particular brand of canning jar, the Dominion Wide E Special, distributed in the U.S. since 1913.

The sense that I take from this is the diagnostic modern observation that the human is the only remaining source of meaning. We inherit poetic language that points to a prior thickness, but now what gives meaning is “gray and bare,” and perhaps more to the point, sterile: “It did not give of bird or bush,” entirely unlike everything else in the fertile landscape it organizes.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Anecdote of the Jar

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 was actually After (Abingdon Square, 2009), written in the form of letters. For example, “Letter to My Mother,” “Letter to My Father,” etc., as a way of imagining what I would say to them individually had they lived to see me grow up. I worked on it for a very long time, but didn’t know where to send it until a friend who was starting a small press took an interest. This first book of letters was very affirmative and inspiring. I have never stopped writing since.

When On Earth Beneath Sky came out, I was even more proud of my accomplishment. I had sent to the editor a very big stack of prose and poems. Then, he asked me to reduce it to about a hundred pages. After farming daily, I would dive through hundreds and thousands of pages in tears, wondering how I could have written that much over the years as a non-native English speaker. I was spilling out my guts, my memory dumping onto the page as a way of talking to myself, trying to understand my place in the world, in nature, and so on.

After deals a lot with Cambodia, the aftermath, the migration, and what I wanted to tell my parents and siblings—like letters that could be sent to them from the United States. Back then, Cambodia was still closed to the world.

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

I came to the US at the age of ten. One of the ways I could learn new English words was to write Haiku—five-seven-five syllables. It taught me how to count. I started writing rhymed poems in high school because I hadn’t read Walt Whitman then. When I won a poetry contest, I received a hundred dollars, which felt so heavy inside my pocket. I was in tears spending part of the one hundred dollars for a hamburger at McDonald’s.

Poetry was short and easy. It was something I could finish, as opposed to starting with fiction or a memoir, like a few Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge Genocide did. I just wrote about my life in the US.

On On Earth Beneath Sky and Echoes Lost to Wind, people expected me to write a childhood narrative under the Khmer Rouge, but I didn’t. I wrote about Cambodia after the UNTAC-monitored democratic elections. The aftermath was full of struggle and hardship. I wrote about love and sex growing up in the US. I wrote about nature, and the farm in Bolton, MA.

I chose the healing narrative rather than, “I am a survivor” of a genocide. […]

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 think we don’t have a culture of readers with an intellect like twenty or thirty years ago. The internet has co-opted our brains. Our intelligence is facing a global pandemic of obesity. Brain tumors and dementia are on the rise. The culture of forgetting has infested our bone marrow, clogging our bloodstream with literary porn. So much sensationalism. But I am all for the greater flow as part of the human condition, struggling with how to live, where and what to be or become.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Chath pierSath

— Always reading: God’s Silence by Franz Wright. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of poems that made me feel so much, that felt so human.

— In an interview on Image, Wright says, “I thought of the poem as the holy thing, the aim of everything. If there’s a change, it’s that I came to see there was no necessity anymore to finish a poem. The poem was a step to the next point. The poems were all attempts to find a place to store the joy and certainty of the ultimate goodness and coherence and tenderness of reality.”

— And maybe I’ve quoted from this before? but he also says,

“I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you’re trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself. It still makes me uncomfortable to call myself a poet. I think of myself as someone in the service of poetry. If I happen to be in that blessed state of consciousness where I am able to write, I guess at that moment I’m a poet.”

— I hope you keep storing joy and tenderness in poems. And by poems I mean any container in which you can put your holy things.

Shawna Lemay, You Cannot Break the Wings of Poetry

There are Iliad people and Odyssey people, but the modern world is Odyssean: great migrations, gap years, road trips; we have lived with Odyssean technology for centuries: trains, planes, and automobiles; we all have careers, which means ‘journey through life’; our highest aspiration is still to undertake the new quest in space. The basic idea of the Odyssey is inescapable. People talk about their side-quests and being the hero of their own life, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning once joked that she put on her bonnet just as knights used to put on their helms. Odysseus echoes in every advert where the father comes home and his children run to greet him. To be an individual is to be Odyssean, even if our journeys are small, infrequent, and domestic. We all quest, no matter the scale of our lives.

Nolan’s warning is that we risk living in the Iliad, that we are going to become more and more tribal, more distant from “Zeus’s law”, that we are going to put our own civilisation at risk. As this film implicitly acknowledges, nothing Nolan can do will alter that. We will forget the past. Reading the news, it seems apparent that we already have. We are, alas, midway on the waves. Nolan’s conversion of the Odyssey into an action film did not smother the underlying story, but it fits the pattern he warns against all too well. If Troy is going to burn again, watching this film will be little more than a distraction while the ships set sail. If Nolan really wanted to issue a warning, he might have made a film about our own civilisation, a song that will be all they have to remember us, a song of all the promises we failed to keep.

Henry Oliver, My review of Nolan’s Odyssey in GQ Australia

The Nolan film has brought back into the spotlight a tiresome confected controversy over the translations by Emily Wilson, because Nolan has said he was inspired by her version of the Odyssey. (Wilson went on to translate the Iliad too, though with a slightly different technique, and overall her Iliad seems to have attracted less attention.) Like any decent translation, Wilson’s versions have several major strengths and some real weaknesses. I think the best thing about them — especially about the Odyssey, where she kept strictly to a single English line for each line of Greek — is the way she has made the poem into recognisable verse within the English tradition, while also creating and conveying a sense of pace, of narrative energy. The first word Arnold uses to characterise Homer in his essay on translating him, is ‘rapid’. So many — almost all — translations of Homer feel slow or prosaic (or both) compared to the original. Getting it into pacy and plausible verse is a real achievement.

The endless arguments about Wilson’s translation choices and supposedly obtrusive wokeness, carried out almost entirely by people who do not themselves read Homeric Greek, and have certainly never attempted any kind of major translation, has been singularly boring and unedifying. Hers are, certainly, translations of their moment and I’m sure they’ll date fast. I’d be very surprised if anyone is teaching from them in 40 or 50 years time, but this is almost always true. Translations with an escape velocity of their own are very rare.

George Steiner, in a six-page tour de force about the translation of Homer, is very funny about why Lattimore is so leaden: “Striving for a ‘timeless’, unobtrusively lucid idiom, Lattimore has, in fact, fallen into a peculiar cadence, part Longfellow, part Eisenhower.” The Lattimore version, concludes Steiner, writing in the 1970s about a translation published in 1951, “is already a period piece. Its intended timelessness has turned parochial. This, precisely, is what Homer is not.”

If you go on to read a great deal of Homer in Greek, your memory of whatever translation you read first disappears under the weight of it — at least that’s been my experience. I know (because I still have them) that I used Rieu’s translations for both Homeric poems when I was studying them, but I can’t recall anything about Rieu’s style, I have no lasting sense of these poems in his English prose. But obviously most people, if they are profoundly moved by an encounter with Homer, will have met him in a particular translation. I think this might be why people who love Homer but can’t read Greek sometimes get so worked up about (what they view as) inadequate translations: if you have a particular English version in your mind, another could easily seem like a travesty. But really, they all are, in one way or another.

If you want to read about Homer from a standing start, I would recommend Michael Silk’s slim Homer: The Iliad. A Student Guide (CUP, 1987; repr. 2004). Silk’s seven pages on translation (40-7) is less mean and funny than Steiner’s but of a good deal more help for a new reader. He compares Fitzgerald, Pope and the prose version by Lang, Leaf and Myers and shows, concisely but very clearly, what difference the style and diction of a translation makes to our sense of the original. In particular, he puts his finger on the uneven diction that is a weakness of so many modern translations — with some phrases sounding like everyday speech today, some sounding Victorian or Shakespearean, some like a fairy story and so on. This kind of inconsistency of tone is so common in modern translations of ancient texts that it seems almost a default setting, but it has a corrosive effect.

Victoria Moul, What to read about Homer?

When we at Poems Ancient and Modern last saw Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849), he was fast asleep in a cradle at his father’s knee. The first child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and his wife Sara, Hartley appears in his father’s great early poem, “Frost at Midnight,” as the “babe so beautiful! It thrills my heart / With tender gladness, thus to look at thee.” The father’s heart thrills, specifically, at the thought that in this new life, with its unsullied innocence, the possibility exists for human un-fallenness. Through a sustained connection to the natural world and a carefully nurturing education — so he believes — his child might avoid the corruption that has entered his own soul.

In Hartley Coleridge’s sonnet, “Long Time a Child,” written when the poet was in his mid-30s and published in his 1833 Poems, we might be over-tempted to read the traces of his father’s famous poem. We might be a little too primed to see, in the child-in-the-man of this poem, the ghost of that “babe so beautiful” whose soul, in his father’s vision, was destined for life, not death. We might note with greater irony that that “babe,” now a man, has found instead — having “waked to sleep no more” — the more insistent “sleep,” repeated three times in two lines, of his own inescapable mortality.

Or perhaps it’s not an over-temptation. Inevitably, Hartley Coleridge’s autobiography suggests itself in these fourteen lines: his father’s repeated abandonments that gave the lie to the Romantic vision of pre-lapserian childhood, and his own wounded life of dissipation, which would have left him prematurely old at 37, when Poems appeared. Though he could not have known how far past his own midpoint he actually was by 1833, with only 16 years left to him, still the sense of his own failure to realize any interest on the time granted him drives his poetic speaker’s lament. “For yet I lived like one not born to die; / A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears . . .”

Even the sonnet’s Petrarchan form echoes the pattern of derailment and stagnation that its words articulate. The enclosed quatrains of the octave, rhymed abbaacca, point to a sense of things imploding on themselves. The introduction of the c-rhyme in the second quatrain intimates a kind of progress, but that forward impulse is wholly enwombed in that initial a-rhyme.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Long Time a Child

I’ve been saying something of farewell – ok, an au revoir; never say never again – to the sonnet recently. A couple of years ago I switched my allegiance to a sixteen-line form, which has become my new ‘thoughtless default’ for shorter poems. It’s hardly one I can claim to have innovated, and its rules (‘it has sixteen lines and probably four quatrains, but otherwise it can do what the hell it likes’) are far too permissive for it to count as a something worth giving a name; though I’m clear in own mind, at least, that it’s no kind of ‘extended sonnet’, Meredithian, Harrisonian or otherwise.

This might also involve retiring another form I’ve occasionally fallen into that’s isomorphic with the sonnet: the three stanzas of ballad metre I call a ‘twelve-bar’, being precisely the form and measure of a twelve-bar blues. I think of this three-stanza ballad form as a kind of ‘oral sonnet’, since it both encourages and accommodates the same basic ‘this plus that equals this’ pattern as the sonnet proper. In the oral tradition that the ballad form invokes, time and consequence tend do the work of logic, and I’ve found that the twelve-bar formula is more usually ‘that event followed by that event led me to this state’. Blues renders this an emotional as well as an argumentative tension through the musical progression of tonic–subdominant–tonic–dominant–tonic. To use the standard metaphor, this feels to most folk like home-departure-homesickness-home, although this omits those two bars in the middle where you go home for a couple of days so your mum will do your laundry. (Strictly speaking, the emotional contour of the blues form is more ‘this sucks / let’s try this instead / that didn’t work / let’s bring it to a crisis / that didn’t work either and this still sucks but I’m resigned to it.’) The cliché is that you can sing all of Emily Dickinson to the tune of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. True enough – the ballad form is hardwired in Dickinson’s letters, never mind her poetry. But I think it’s more telling that Muddy Waters could have happily covered ‘I Died for Beauty’, or ‘Hope is a Thing with Feathers’ with only minor adjustments to his delivery. For all that Blind Melon Dickinson is maybe the more intriguing prospect.

Giving up on sonnets is maybe just admitting that these days I rarely find myself thinking the kind of thoughts they’re built to express. This is usually some version of a ‘proof’, often in the more dialectic shape of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical models, or the more organic syllogisms of the ‘Muldoon’-style sonnet, where a surprising connection between two things will see an unanticipated third emerge from their coupling. What one is attempting, though, is still just ‘claim and demonstration’; one is still trying to show an emotional truth. It’s the ‘proof’ aspect I’m no longer very compelled by. It contains an unstated premise: ‘Prove to who?’ I’m not sure it was ever the reader, who has other ways of verifying that your poems are true besides their devastating logic. Maybe I’m just a little more secure, if not in my own beliefs, then my ability to be honest about them – and less inclined to attempt the kind of watertight self-justification the sonnet always seems to demand.

Don Paterson, Shakespeare, the Sonnet and the uses of Scholarship

for all that
I will not get to
in this life
the fountain carries on
in the rain

Tom Clausen, drenched

I’m working on a few poems for submissions: a couple of anthologies for groups I’m in. I have joined a few free writing sessions where we sit on a silent Zoom call for an hour to write together. It’s weird but effective. It’s an anchor within the current of the summer and I usually write something. I still go on Sundays to the café to write.

I’ve started having dreams about school. The first one was a sort of nightmare, I woke at 6am in a panic that I had missed orientation and didn’t know what I should be doing in my new/old role. Last night’s was quieter, but still with that sense of anxiety. I was there with other teachers and couldn’t type some information on my phone with my awkward thumbs. 

My technology dreams are always a sure sign of stress. I’ve had them my whole life, from not being able to dial old rotary phones to emails going awry on computers to struggling to find info on smart phones. Always with a sense of inadequacy. Something simple I should be able to do but just can’t.

Gerry Stewart, Slow Summer Urgency

I met with a group of poets this week and we talked about poetry publishing, rejection, the money situation (where it costs more to get published than it ever pays to be published, given submission fees etc.) We talked about what kinds of jobs we did to keep from the unfortunate situation the main character of The Adjunct found herself in—homeless, starving, turning to prostitution (see last week’s blog post for review). I talked a little bit about entrepreneurial poets—like those who run weekend courses on their own, or offer editing services, or run online generating courses. Most writers—including fiction and non-fiction writers, not just poets do not earn a living from their advances or royalties. They make money teaching, or fees from readings and conferences, or selling their rights to Hollywood, or running conferences – but not from their books. (Also, a reminder: if you like a writer’s work, please buy their books when you can!) I myself should be better and smarter at making money than I am after all these years. Sometimes the limits are my health (sometimes keeping me from opportunities) and energy and even gumption (how dare I put myself out there? Who do I think I am?)

I also watched the original movie Fame, in which many young people experience rejection in a multitude of arts in the early 80s in a very melodramatic way that probably was edgy for its day (dare I say the tv show was better than the movie?) One character is told if she can’t take rejection, don’t be a dancer, and proceeds to almost throw herself under a subway bus. Dancing might be the one art form with more rejection than poetry—and a shorter lifespan, as injuries, pregnancies, and just life (too short? too tall? too busty? etc.) can put you out of the game by 25 or 30. Fortunately, poetry has no such short lifespan, though poets may find the game a little easier when they’re young (and if they’re hip and attractive, even easier)! But all poets, even the great ones, face a LOT of rejection, and at 53, sometimes I feel that I’ve had enough. But I persist, possibly delusionally optimistic. Succeeding at being any kind of artist involves surviving rejection and not letting it put a permanent “NO!” stamp in your heart or head.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, First Swallowtail Butterflies, Lavender Festivals, Poetry, Money, and Rejection

I believe multiple views can be held within a single Jewish community. (Multiple views can be held within a single Jewish heart. Ask me how I know.) I believe seeking to exclude one another is corrosive to community. I believe we should care about each other across even this disagreement.

And when I think about the teaching that the Temple was destroyed due to sinat hinam, I think of the way I’ve seen Jews tear into each other. I think of the readiness some seem to feel to cast “those other Jews” as beyond the pale / outside the tent / no longer community.

And I imagine that the pain that my heart feels over this community discord is a scant billionth of the pain Shekhinah must be feeling. That’s what sparked this vulnerable prayer-poem, and that’s a big piece of what’s on my mind and heart as Tisha b’Av approaches.

Anyway: I hope you’ll click through and check out Laments.

As usual, the group of collaborators involved in this offering aren’t all coming from the same place. We are clergy and laypeople, writers and artists, denominational Jews and trans-denominational Jews. Among us we hold many different views on Israel / Palestine. And like the Jewish people writ large, together we are more than the sum of our parts.

Rachel Barenblat, Another lament

From the pyre, I tell the judge
there is more than one kind of fire.
I tell him I am already burning.

Renee Emerson, Mrs. Smith, Burned for Praying in Her Own Language

In March 2025, I read the poem “To Sew a Freedom Suit” by Danielle Legros Georges in The New Yorker. Georges had passed away the previous month. At the time, I’d been in the US for 3 years after relocating from Malta (Europe). I’d viewed the US as the land of the free until I came here and realized that “free” is not the word I’d use. After reading the poem, I immediately brought my notebook out and drafted a poem after Georges’.

My version of the poem had the same premise to start with, but rather than the lavishness of Georges’ poem, it spoke of layers of defensiveness against a world that seemed to be attacking and out to get me. I remember the other two connections I’d made (aside from the poem) vividly. One was a mental health podcast episode by Dr. Caroline Leaf; the other was my own fabrication of a visualization exercise I’d used during the meditation I start my writing workshops with. In this visualization, I asked the workshop participants to imagine their bodies building defense layers.

And so, the first draft of my poem came to fruition, and I was quite pleased with it. There was a strangeness to my work; textures that felt simultaneously accurate and unusual. The poem made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. Yet I felt that something was off—it wasn’t close enough to the uncanny experience of being seen as a commodity or a number and trying to build back my individuality, my softness included somewhere in the mix.

I sent it out with a few edits at first, and although it came close a couple of times, it didn’t get picked up anywhere for the longest time. At the time of writing (ironically, after a huge overhaul, as you’ll see), someone has just accepted the first iteration of it. That doesn’t stop me from (hopefully) elevating it for my next collection.

Unstitching and Re-hemming a Poem – guest post by Miriam Calleja (Trish Hopkinson)

Each morning, after/during coffee, I read some poetry – usually from my shelves. If I have an urge for more reading, I go online and search authors. Occasionally, I’ll do the same for flash fiction or short pieces – fiction or nonfiction. At night, I turn to cinema – watching a film before sleep. I allow both morning and evening to be, hopefully, sources for inspiration for my own writing. My writing nearly always begins with fragments that I’ll build on. I jot down the fragments – and then allow the bits to develop into something more. As for the morning or evening patterns, I don’t force any sort of inspiration. I can’t/ won’t do that. I just allow space for it. When I was younger, I started each day with music and ended each day with music. But, allowing the music to lead to inspiration – giving space for it, not forcing it – was the same.

Charlotte Hamrick, Bedtime Rituals

O Lord, that last, late-evening cappuccino—
beautiful fuel of poets’ conversations,
inspirer of wild readings and sweeping gestures,
intense, froth-headed, somewhat over-the-top—
that was poor judgment. Here I am again,
bug-eyed at midnight. Brain a wheeling hamster.
Groping the darkness for some ropey ladder
down to oblivion. Hauling You along.

Maryann Corbett, Sleep trouble

In America football is presented as entertainment, goals are greeted with jingles, games begin with enthusiastic announcements and count downs over the stadium’s sound system. The World Cup has become a puffed up pageant, a gaudy, money making spectacle and yet I follow it with the same duty and commitment, with the same contained excitement and expectation I have for poetry. It has become a part of me, I live with it and through it, am frustrated as much as I am exhilarated by it.

Roughly 25% percent of all games will end in a draw with almost ten percent of those being goalless. When I was a reader for a national poetry competition most of the work I encountered in the preliminary rounds was turgid and dull. I came across hundreds of one – nil loses, an abundance of nil – nil draws. Overwhelmingly though what I confronted in the poems was suffering. What made the experience miserable was not being witness to the pain but to people’s inability to express it. If I was a football pundit I’d call out a lack of commitment, say it was sloppy, careless, casual, that hurting is not enough. I want my football and my poetry to be open and free flowing, if there is loss then let it be moving and beautiful, in defeat let it be thrilling and exhilarating. Remember Gazza’s tears in Turin? How they lubricated the nation’s heartbreak. That was poetry.

Let’s be honest. Most poetry, like most football, is utter rubbish. Most poetry is just like watching England play. It is painful not because it is an eloquent representation of human suffering, it is painful because it’s just a bit shit. There was a time when certain match day commentators even had sympathy for supporters who let their passions run away with them, who caused trouble on the terraces, showed more fight than the team they’d paid money to see. “While we certainly can’t condone this kind of behaviour, after watching a display like that one can understand the fans’ frustrations.” I feel the same way about bad poetry.

Jan Noble, Nº73 How Barbara Hepworth helped me recover from the World Cup

The easy resolution. The account I gave of a marriage ending was clean, and had a moral, and let me feel the chapter closed. It broadened, in its last line, into something that sounded like wisdom. It was a proverb. A proverb is what you reach for when you cannot yet bear the particular, and it lets the poem — or the year — feel finished without having been lived through. I had ended on the wrong line. The repair, in a poem, is nearly always the same: cut the consolation, and sit with the plainer thing underneath it.

The speaker contemplating instead of acting. This is a failure mode I can name in four seconds in a stranger’s draft — the poem whose speaker stands at the window and observes, beautifully, and never once crosses the room. I did not see, for a long time, that I had built a life in that grammar. I watched. I described. I was excellent company at the window. The poem does not come alive until the speaker moves, and neither, it turns out, does the man.

The buried subject. The hardest, here as on the page. For years I wrote around a thing rather than towards it — around the shape of a life I had not yet let myself want, the making of a home, the people who stayed when they had every reason not to, a new house with no memory of its own that I walked into carrying all the memory it was ever going to have. I was fluent. Fluency is how the buried subject hides. The poem that will not arrive is usually the one still circling the thing it most needs to say. […]

Behind the whole taxonomy sits a single conviction I drew from Heidegger’s Aletheia and named, years ago, in the title of an as yet unpublished collection, What Storms Disclose. Bad poetry conceals; good poetry discloses. That is the sentence The Cutting Room exists to enforce. What I had not let myself notice is that it is not a sentence about poems. It is a sentence about attention.

A life lived without attention conceals — from others, and more expensively from the person living it.

A life lived with attention discloses. The knife I take to a failing draft and the attention I have had, slowly and late, to bring to a failing stretch of my own years are not cousins. They are the same instrument. I only ever owned one.

Adam Cairns, What the life was reaching for

I bow to the blooming squash flower,
to whorls of seaweed on the shore.
The moon’s fingernail wakes me—

I am its wayward child,
a tiny insect
blinded by light,
climbing rungs
streaked with
ash.

Luisa A. Igloria, Araria

This week: a few scrappy bones, a murderous sandfly, trills that might remind us of birds, subversive puppets, and much more. Enjoy.

There is a quality to the heat this summer that I have started, against my better judgement, to read as mood. It isn’t the heat of a good July — the kind that dries the hay and fills the orchard with wasps and sends everyone, sensibly, into the shade by two. It is a heavier thing than that. It sits on the fields the way a bird sits on a clutch of eggs: close, patient, unwilling to be moved. My garden is barely a garden yet — a square of new turf laid last autumn, the soil under it still builder’s soil, a blank green canvas I have not begun to make anything of. But it looks out onto fields, and between the lawn and the farmland there is a strip of wildflower meadow, and even in this heat the meadow is doing what the meadow does: oxeye daisies gone slightly papery at the edges, vetch scrambling through the grass, a dozen things I am still learning the names of, all of it loud with something at every hour of the day. Beyond it the ground under the far hedge has gone the colour of ash. The buzzards still work the field margins in the long evenings, but low, and without much conviction, as if even they can feel the thermals have turned against them.

To brood is to sit on eggs and keep them warm until something living comes out of them. It is also what we do with a worry that will not leave — we brood on it, we turn it over, we let it heat. The word carries both, and I have caught myself this summer thinking the two meanings have quietly fused. The planet is brooding. It is warmer than it should be, held at a temperature it did not choose, by us; and what is incubating under all that patient heat is not, any longer, only life. It is something closer to grief.

I am wary of writing sentences like that. The register of the ruined planet is a register I distrust, in myself most of all — it flatters the writer, it makes weather into portent, it borrows a grandeur that belongs to the thing and not to the person describing it. So let me stay with the particular, which is the only ground I trust. The papery daisies. The vetch. A blackbird panting in the shade of the fence with its beak open, doing the only thing it knows to do about a heat it has no name for. These are small facts, and they are true, and they are connected to each other and to a hundred thousand things I cannot see, by a web so fine and so total that we have only lately, and only partially, learned to notice it is there at all.

Adam Cairns, The ground has begun to brood

The roses are in full bloom and I accidentally disturbed a fat bumble bee that I think may have been sleeping in the nectar. It was a bit too windy for the insects to be making spectacles of themselves. But I know the solitary mason wasps are hunting caterpillars in the dark spaces between the flowers, under the leaves.

While I was writing this morning a wasp came in the library and buzzed around my head a while. I took a few deep breaths and told myself that she wasn’t likely to bother me. Me, with my unsweetened tea and fennel seeds. It wasn’t long before she got bored of this little room, with the sound of my tapping on the keys, and she left. No need for anyone to dance around with an insect swatter mumbling expletives. I’ve done that.

I don’t know if there is any truth to the saying familiarity breeds contempt. I think that is only true when we want something from the other; we expect something we don’t get; when we see more than we anticipated, or more than we are comfortable with. Familiarity without expectation… I don’t know. Maybe it leads to curiosity. It puts fears in perspective.

The ocean is terrifying. And the cormorants, ghosts of drowned sailors, always pull my rising joy back to the earth. One hand clutching the roses, and the other grasping for the dark and darker blue of the north sea. There is a depth and a width and an understanding that makes an all-too-pure joy seem thin.

Ren Powell, Summer, after its fullness

Will there be, this year, young housemates warring,
screen doors that whomp, wheels grinding gravel?
In this heat, wake us.

Send us street theater, at three in the morning,
mad lovers battling over jealousies, bills,
the whole grand opera.

Watch now in mercy those others, mum
in the iced quiet of their central air,
their curtained sorrows.

Maryann Corbett, On the power of open windows

Summer has started summering, whether we are fully on board with it or not. I’ve spent the past couple days in 90 degree plus Chicago tucked in front of the window AC unit working on some poetry critiques and my own writing, in addition to a couple upcoming dgp books. In between, there are frosty coconut-heavy drinks whipped in the blender, iced tea, and summer treats like strawberries and watermelon. I always feel like summer gets away from me. Or more that it seems like it takes forever to get here, but then slides very quickly away, especially once you hit the 4th of July.

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons.  I often go back to re-read old blog posts–by often, I mean at least two or three times a week.  I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about.  This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”; I haven’t finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.

This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week.  And yes, that’s one of my new year’s aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026).  But that’s the joy of early July–there’s still time to adjust my trajectory.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

This week has seen a number of poems flying back to me from various places they had been sent. I am good now at seeing this as a chance to read the poems afresh to work out what needs changing in order to enhance them. One particular poem had a clunky line in the middle where I definitely knew what I meant, but that didn’t necessarily mean other readers would. I enjoyed smoothing that one. I have also started to change my metaphor so I will set poems to sail now rather than fly. This is more in keeping with my desire to do things slightly more slowly and use my time wisely instead of rushing.

I sat in a sold-out lecture theatre this week to hear Ele Fountain speak and to find out who had won the Cheshire Prize for Literature. I love good speeches and was delighted to listen to Ele’s talk. I admire people who can tell their story well and add value to the audience and Ele certainly did that. I then had a quiet revelation when it came to the announcement of the prize winners – I would have loved to have won. That might sound a little obvious as a thing to say, but what I mean is I would have loved to walk down the steps after being announced as a winner. Gone were the feelings of nerves of being on show and here was a feeling of wouldn’t it be purely lovely to win. I used to sit in audiences and want to be invisible and suddenly here I was fully in the moment. I didn’t win, but I did love this new feeling. It felt like an acknowledgement of having grown into myself, and I rather liked that way of looking at it. Here I give a gentle nod to liking my silvered “really surprised hair” and to the difference coaching, and a change of direction have made.

Sue Finch, A BANDSTAND HAT TRICK FOR A SKYLARKER

Quiet days. Not much coming in or going out (the lady at the post office today says she’s missed me, and I’m looking thin). But we had a terrific party for Mike Bradwell’s Axholme at the Bush Theatre in mid-June, and there’s Penelope Curtis’s The Fall to look forward to in September. So this newsletter occupies a holding place.

Humming along in the background is Reznikoff. His major work, Testimony – originally published in sequential books in the 1960s and 70s, following an early version in 1934 – is a masterpiece of 20th-century modernist literature. Fact. It also happens to be a political book. Charles Simic: ‘It should not be surprising that Testimony is rarely assigned at our colleges and universities these days; it causes too much discomfort to those who prefer to know nothing about what goes on in the world.’ Jena Osman: ‘To shine a light from a different angle, to make you think about what’s there in a different way – that’s the best political work that poetry can do.’ August Kleinzahler: ‘J’accuse . . . Crystalline, documental vignettes – dispatches, really, from the front of American capitalism’s assault on the poor, dispossessed and vulnerable.’ Never previously published in the UK, Testimony will be published by CBe early next year – by far its biggest book to date: large format, 608 pages.

Reznikoff – born in Brooklyn in 1894 to immigrant parents, died in 1976 – was one of the Objectivist poets who first published in the 1930s; in the 1960s and 70s they were inspirational figures for a number of British poets working outside the mainstream. While his work has been translated into Polish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Swedish, not a single book by Reznikoff is currently available in the UK.

Around publication time there’ll be a live reading of the whole text of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London, with anyone who comes through the door welcome to take part. Alongside Testimony, Redstone Press will publish The Sound of the Street, selected poems by Reznikoff presented alongside photographs of early 20th-century New York by Berenice Abbott and others. Much of Reznikoff’s work was not just self-published but printed by himself; both CBe and Redstone are one-person outfits; the publication of these two books is a statement, of sorts.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter July 2026: Reznikoff

I am sick of being enraged. So often I find myself enraged at the way we have fucked ourselves over. After all those years of creative evolution, from the first hand print on a cave wall, all the way up to this brilliant, beautiful ability to share our experiences through art, through literature, and what do we do? We hand it over to people who want to use a set of algorithms dressed up as a robot with a cute name to plagiarise it and spew out something that has the pattern of art, but no human intuition. If it looks like art it’ll do. Pack it, price it, stick it on Amazon, make some content, sell sell sell.

We’ve devalued the act of creativity, we’ve made creativity look too easy. To be creative is to make mistakes, more and more until you grow into it. It is so uniquely human. It is hard wok, hard won.

Alongside the robbing of our own creativity we have created a system in which we spend a great deal of time in pain, and I feel like it’s getting worse. We’ve slowly moved towards a place where the norm of social media – and the media in general – is rage bait and anger and unkindness. The news now isn’t really news, social media isn’t really social.

The incentives all point in the same direction: create conflict, generate anger, feed resentment.

The London Economic

We’ve become so entwined with social media, with subscription plans, with stuff we can’t own, that I feel used. I feel helpless. I feel puppeted by a handful of very rich men with no concept of the actual world, no regard for it, no need for human creation, human beauty. I am sick of the rage bait. I am sick of the grifting and greed.

Yesterday, driving home from taking mum to an emergency GP appointment, I saw a big fat wood pigeon in the road. It was carrying an ambitiously long twig and was struggling with it. A woman driving in the opposite direction didn’t slow down. Perhaps she wasn’t aware that birds at this time of year are still focussed on nesting and aren’t as quick to get out of the way. She sped towards it, glaring at it. Get out of my way, get out of my way I am important, you are insignificant. It felt like all that rage bait and anger and the dreariness of being forced through this awful machine we’ve made for ourselves had condensed down to this point, the point at which a person cannot slow down, can’t bear to add one or two seconds to their journey to allow another being trying to live its life, to get out of the way safely.

I don’t want live like that. I want to live with more kindness, more beauty, more joy. I can only start where I am, look at what I am doing, how I am doing it.

Wendy Pratt, I am sick of being enraged.

I am very serious and ambitious about writing the best poetry and prose I can, by my own standards. Creating appealing posts and the occasional newsletter? My confidence fails and I can’t consistently fake otherwise. When I submit work for publication, that’s a way of saying, “This is worth your attention.” Social media is a version of the same–not a bad message for a writer to put out there–yet ambivalence plagues me. It’s laziness, embarrassment, a preference other kinds of work, a long to-do list, a sense of being undeserving, disliking the necessary selfies and performance of cheer, frustration in advance at the difficulty of attracting eyeballs, and, as I’m occasionally wise enough to realize, avoidance of what fragments attention.

Studying and teaching the poetry of a century ago hasn’t resolved my mixed feelings. Those poets’ success in their own era had everything to do with connections forged in big cities and at prestigious universities–still primary venues to success, obviously. Glamor, charisma, and good looks helped some modernists, too, even without social media to amplify those assets. Having a big readership or critical acclaim has never been entirely rooted in the quality of the work. Time remedies some of that unfairness, but it’s a slow, imperfect process, never mind the unforeseeable ways some writing ages better than others. Modernists taught us how to read their poetry, after all, and exerted a huge influence on literary values for decades after, shaping what people thought was good. It takes heroic effort just to find the strong work that escaped notice in its day, not to mention figuring out how to argue on its behalf.

Popularity influences what gets written in the first place, too. Artists need varying degrees of contemporary encouragement and support to keep making art. One of my favorite Harlem Renaissance poets, Helene Johnson, won some awards but stopped playing the poetry career game before publishing a book, and only produced a slim volume’s worth of verse in her long lifetime–published posthumously. Social media might have helped her sustain literary connections once she left Harlem. I think it’s helped me, living in a small southern town. The internet generally has benefited me, too–what a gift to read literary magazines or samples of them freely online, compared to hunting out print copies in the occasional bookstore that carried them! But it can also demoralize me to insert myself into social media’s comparison machine. Not posting costs me; so does posting.

Lesley Wheeler, Aiming vs. wandering

It is not the process of making the work – that is a labyrinth you must navigate yourself – it is the task of delivering the work, of having it platformed, of getting it before an audience, that I find so unbearably maddening. This is when the exit signs start flashing.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin

If I had advice to offer a young creative it would be: prepare yourself for dead ends, for unhelpful suggestions, for vacuous promises and above all for silence. Expect excruciating, agonising silence. If you do ever receive a reply to a speculative email, a response to an application, a reaction to a submission then get ready for seemingly endless meetings with an infinite number of Steves and Hannahs who will all mostly have their cameras off.

Jan Noble, Nº71 Is it suitable for children?

I searched files of poem drafts for July, and found an underwhelming poem in July 2021. Aha. A basic, I-am-bored-and-nothing-is-happening interstitial self-indulgent poem. […]

It’s been a while since I did homophonic translation. Machine translation is too good and too AI to be useful for adding the chaos factor but I can work more from ear.

So I then subject it to pretending what I’m hearing and transcribing sound by sound is a muffled French. See if I can “overhear” anything vivid. […]

Then I translate back to English and see if I can take this randomness and reassemble towards sense. […]

So now although it is language-as-material-based content, it feels more distinctive and alive than the original. We have multiple people and interactions instead of poet-in-solitude trope. We have particulars and actions. We have relationships to the world and to each other. It is less predictable. You don’t know where the poem is going when you start any given line. It travels. It is more of a wake up exercise but it pleases me now.

Pearl Pirie, Revision

My “Self Portrait as Sandfly” is nowhere near finished. The sandfly in question lives in a particular valley in Lima, and is only active after dark. Its bite is deadly to humans. It took researchers a long time to understand why people could walk through this valley in the day time but not after dark.

The poem isn’t finished because I don’t really know why I want to speak in the voice of this death-dealing, invisible to the eye insect. What do I have in common with a murderous sandfly, that only lives because of the particular climatic conditions of that valley? I don’t know yet – I’m hoping that is what will become apparent in the drafting/editing process.

Kim Moore or Clare Shaw, Self Portrait As Gold Dust, As Glitter Ball, As Magic Carpet…

I tend to believe passionately in any collection right up to the point when the proofs are sent off to the printers. Then I decide it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, want to change or retract everything, contemplate running away to the rhubarb patch at the bottom of the garden where I used to hide as a kid. This gnawing anxiety eats away at me until – come publication day – there are only a few scrappy bones left.

On that note…. happy publication day to my fourth collection with Chatto & Windus, STEPMOTHER!!

For me, the best part of any new literary project is when it exists as concept, unsullied by my attempts to put it into words. I first started thinking about the figure that animates my new book -The Wicked Stepmother – around 2021, and I lived inside the stories I was researching, imagining the lives of real and fictional stepmothers around the world.

When the writing process begins, there’s the daunting thrill of grappling with form and shape and order, trying to structure your ideas in a way that flows. You’re alive and intent, often frustrated but excited too. You’re building something. When I’m at this stage, I feel the kind of absorption I get on a single pitch rock climb.

Then the editing: a mix of doubt and euphoria. There’s always a point in the pruning and reshaping and expanding of a collection where the whole thing feels destined to collapse. That is when the real work starts. When you think the book won’t work, you’re usually closer than you imagine to finding a solution: creating ‘sections’ only to take them out again, revising your starting point, moving towards a different concluding mood.

Helen Mort, ‘Smile’, says the photographer

There are often times that poems occur that might not fit into the current project, and live on their own, however briefly. My book-length projects are so often held within such particular structures or shared tonal elements, anything beyond those boundaries simply can’t be incorporated, and require alternate housing. When my dear spouse headed to Banff Writing Studios in January 2023 to attend a rare writing space beyond the house, I began the sequence of daily poems that became “edgeless : letters.” She was away for two weeks, but I think this sequence took me nearly a month to craft, sharpen, hone. At that point, I was already a couple of weeks into the composition of the poems that became the collection Autobiography, which itself took a little more than a year from start to finish. But here, this particular lyric stretch didn’t fit with those poems, that project, therefore the opening salvo of an entirely different, albeit related, extended lyric structure. With the poems I was building into “Autobiography” I was attempting a further, third, suite of shorter, stand-alone poems, but this sequence required more space, and more time. Much like the title poem of Snow day, this piece required a new manuscript within which to contain it.

The epistolary form has always intrigued, seeing examples over the years by John Newlove and Lea Graham, among so many others, although this sequence was specifically prompted by Robert Kroetsch’s Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), during which Kroetsch wrote daily and dated epistolary offerings around his then-partner, Smaro Kamboureli, visiting her mother in Greece. She journaled her own travels, later published as In the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), a title I sorely wish could have been followed by more literary writing (however brilliant Kamboureli’s critical prose). Kamboureli wrote about going home, and Kroetsch wrote about her being away. Across those two weeks, Christine cemented what would become her third published book, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here], as I remained home with our young ladies. Every morning I looked west, and wrote to her, there. Otherwise, I let her be, attempting not to distract her from work. It was all I worked on for a month, setting all else aside, akin to those six weeks I spent composing the title sequence of Snow day, a couple of years prior (a sequence also begun during the month of January, which suggests a kind of renewal, I suppose).

Daily missives, but composed not as the prose poem as Kroetsch had worked, but something pulled apart, allowing the visual elements of the lyric to breathe. One step, and then another.

rob mclennan, edgeless

I guess holding down what have been essentially two full-time jobs for the past six and a half years hasn’t left me much time to send out newsletters or even to write poetry. But here I am again.

Just three days ago, I finally handed the mantle of director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference to the amazing Mercedes O’Leary Harness. She’s going to do such a great job making the conference even better. I really enjoyed my time at the helm, but starting last fall, I began to really feel the weight of being responsible for two large literary community undertakings. I’ll still be holding down the fort at Storyknife Writers Retreat, and I consider it a real privilege to be able to facilitate incredible women writers having the time and space to devote to their work.

I’m hoping that the gap that giving something up has opened will be filled with my own writing. It’s going to take a bit of recovery time, but I feel the generative urge trickling around under the surface these day and that makes me so hopeful.

I’ve always found that teaching has really lit a fire under my own work, so when I had a chance to teach an online class in poetry for Orion Magazine Workshops, I accepted. I’ve subscribed to Orion FOREVER, so it’s a real honor to be part of their family.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Hello Again!

One of my goals this year has been to send out my work. (Why does “submit my work to the editorial process” sound like a dodgy thing to do? “Send out” sounds more assertive.)

So I belong to a small send-out group, and when our attempt to meet once a month and report our progress seemed a complete disaster, we decided to meet once a week and for one hour hang out on Zoom together and instead of talking or moaning or whatever, to work on our send-out.

This did the trick. I’ve now managed 21 submissions of poems, reviews, stories, and essays. Not a lot, but it’s something. And I’ve had a few things accepted.

First, the on-line journal Eclectica took my poem, “Windfall Apples,” which you can find here (and which I should have mentioned some months ago).

More recently, Bracken took my poem, “Her Honeyed Mask.” Their new issue is fresh off the presses and available here. (And it’s gorgeous.)

Bethany Reid, Where you’ll find me…

I’ve taken a break from submitting my work, to try to break the cycle of anticipation/dejection, to break the spell of maybe. And I’ve been on vacation, so freer to consider myself from afar, and think, okay, what are you, and let’s do something else with that. Or do the same thing differently. Or do a different thing samely. Or quit all together or start something completely new. Or something. The writing game wearies. Yes, I have that new book out, the “One Poet’s Writing Manual,” which is fun, and people have told me they’ve enjoyed it, and those I know well have said it’s like I’m right there talking to them. And I’ve done some presentations and workshops, and have a couple more scheduled. And it’s my fifth book, if you count the two chapbooks. But. I don’t know. I just thought somehow things would be different. At the same time, I’m utterly astonished at what has transpired, what I’ve stumbled into. And at what I’ve done, conjured up, gave a whirl. It’s all very strange, looking back, looking forward, and just looking around. What the hell, man? What the hell?

Marilyn McCabe, strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty

 I’ve been writing a lot, and I’ve also been sending the poems out to various journals. I did that last year, too, and I’ve also got some cool self-pubbed stuff planned this summer. At present, I am 99% sure that these three books will show up before August is out:

• The Other Century: A long-awaited (in my mind) chapbook of poems. This is unlike anything I’ve published before, and I’m excited to share it. It comes close to fiction, but it’s also a kind of collage of found material alongside original poetry.
• A reissue of Travis: A lightly revised but physically redesigned version of my chapbook from last June, marking the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver (on which the book is based).
• A reissue of Interrogation Days (it’s the last time, I swear!): A revised, reorganized, and physically redesigned book marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the 250th anniversary of the US.

These will be priced very cheaply and will be bundled with cool bonuses (miniature collages, bookmarks, free pamphlets, etc.). The books will come out on my Ko-Fi page, which seems a better way of doing this than trying to fashion a “bookstore” page here on substack. 

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 1)

I’ve spent time recently typesetting my own, next poetry book – having decided to go rogue and try this out for myself. 

I realised how blank and bleak I was feeling, facing the prospect of submitting my emerging manuscript into the current poetry publishing landscape. Not that I have anything against any of it, it was just flattening my spirits contemplating the long waits and inevitable rejections. And quite spontaneously, as is often the way with me, I found I’d decided to try something different and (not uncharacteristically!) go it alone.

I’ve anyway always been employed – when I’ve been employed – as an editor. Not of books, of magazines. But typesetting is a familiar and loved process for me. And I found that part of this endeavour delicious. 

I set myself up in one of my sons’ currently vacant rooms, and turned up there for a week, each morning, to work. I felt happy, sitting in that sunshiny window at his desk and large monitor and familiarising myself with my chosen publishing software, Atticus. I also designed a simple cover in Canva. And, eventually, pulled both together into a proof book printed by Bookvault. 

I’m delighted with this experiment, and though have nervousness about shunting the book out into the world, it’s no more so than I’ve had with all my other (published by others) poetry publications. 

Charlotte Gann, A new era?

Mark Melnick offers an insightful essay on book cover design and marketing as the July contributor to Marsh Hawk’s “Chapter One” series. You can see his entire article HERE, but I present this excerpt because his experienced insight can be helpful to many authors:

“It is also important for authors to understand that ‘graphic design’ is very different from ‘art.’ I have worked with many authors — especially poets — who suggest a painting for their book’s cover. Often, that painting is very dense and complex (think Hieronymus Bosch), and the author will send me a lengthy explanation of their reasoning for using it, the meanings and resonances they see embedded in it, and how it reflects the text. Yet this misunderstands the purpose of a cover. A cover is not meant to be an analog to the text. A cover is not art, which is meant to invite introspection and contemplation, slowly over time. A cover is graphic design, which needs to do its job almost instantly — literally in one second. It is emotional, not intellectual.”

To illustrate his points, Mark comments on my and Daniel Morris’ recent and forthcoming Marsh Hawk books. My COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES is forthcoming in 2027.

Eileen Tabios, MARK MELNICK ON BRILLIANT AND EFFECTIVE BOOK COVERS

Rajani Radhakrishnan’s moving, intense No Way Home tells us what to expect from its opening ‘Prologue’ poem, sub-titled ‘the poet as storyteller’: It is supposed to be a story, a journal/ a confession, a tirade –/ but I will start/ with a poem instead.// There’s something about weaving/ through shadow and light.

Later in the poem she writes that the story or series of poems over more than 100 pages will be About a time that wasn’t supposed/ to mean anything, but did./ About big things remembered,/ about tiny details that remain/ in an empty frame/like disconnected parts.

What follows is an examination of disconnection, of a restless journey, both physical and psychological that has drawn me into it, allowed me to absorb the sense of the struggle, poem by poem. Unusually for me, but perhaps appropriately, I read it in order from first to last. It didn’t feel like a book that would give up its elusive secrets if I just dipped into it, reading a poem here and there. She tells us repeatedly that this is an ordinary story but of course it is anything but. It’s filled with the anxiety and doubt, energy and curiosity that we inherit or develop as our lives take their course. It is a courageous exploration, a mapping of where and how we travel as human beings, and in this case why we sometimes have an urge to return, to relive parts of our lives that a piece of us is saying ‘Don’t go there, don’t look back, it’s too dangerous’.

Bob Mee, NO WAY HOME – RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN

If all goes well, Contubernales Press will soon bring forth my new book, Shield of Mnemosyne : a poem-sequence, a daybook reply to the Trumpist attack on the Constitutional order of our democracy. I began writing it in May 2024, and the first three chapters were published by Contubernales in my book Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Irish poet-critic Billy Mills reviewed Parmenides here.) The Shield volume assembles the concluding nine chapters; the whole poem was finished in February of 2026.

This work did not emerge from a vacuum. My focus on making large-scale poetic sequences began many years ago. And this 4th of July, the 250th anniversary of US nationhood, got me thinking back to an earlier long poem – a trilogy, finished on May 28, 2000 – called Forth of July.

The book’s title is a bit of a double pun. “Forth”, here, means not just “the 4th”, but the “coming-forth”. And “July”, here means (to me) not just the month, but alludes to my cousin Juliet, Julie – who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge at the age of 19, in the fall of 1971. On one weirdly playful level, the plot of this humongous poem enacts a kind of Orphic search for my vanished Julie (we were born a few days apart, in 1952). But is it also a kind of spiritual emblem : the “coming-forth of Julie” pushes back against the global spirit of Caesarism and militarism (“Julius” vs. Julie), as the sing-along poet sheds his skin, in the American interior, to commune with William Blackstone, “the man who went to live with Indians” (per the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin – protagonist of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano) – and with Black Elk, and with MLK (Martin Luther King).

Henry Gould, On the Forth of July

The next pamphlet from Headless Poet is in the works and indeed really quite imminent. I’m away next week, but I’ll be typesetting it the week after, at which point it gets a series of thorough proofs before going to the printers. The urgency is entirely self-imposed, and has felt a little perverse at times (life is busy), but it’s good to have a schedule if you’re going to get things done, just as it’s always slightly alarming, to someone of my temperament, just how effective a ‘to-do’ list is.

In Snow Bees, Jeremy Noel-Tod re-introduces the poetry of Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949). Jeremy has been making the case for a re-evaluation of Bowes Lyon’s poetry for some time and it’s been both a pleasure and a privilege to help bring this selection into print: the first to draw on the full range of her work since the Collected Poems (1948).1 The more time I spend with these twenty poems, the more that fact amazes me.

To give you a sense of what I mean, and in lieu of something more considered to come, here is “Starlings: 1938”, from Bowes Lyon’s third collection Morning is a Revealing (1941). One of the striking things about Bowes Lyon’s work is the way in which she brings the same “concentrated skilfulness” to isolated, rural Northumberland and wartime London. In “Starlings”, these two worlds begin to come together. It is a remarkable, densely-packed poem, moving in an unsettling (and, I think, entirely convincing) fashion between the flock of birds and images of destruction without flattening the one into the other. And it does this precisely through a series of unlikely combinations: “glib roar”, “tinsel garrison”, “rose-crazed debate”.

Jeremy Wikeley, Dark news on the breeze

I’ve spent three days working on my LINKS page. When I began blogging (22 years ago) we all had extensive links to other blogs, and to various sites of interest. That seems less common now, but I’m still in the old mindset. This is a problem. 

There are a variety of components to this problem. The main one is that I can be interested in too many things. Being online can be like being on YouTube (Hank Green). So many topics! So many interesting topics! I think I want to see / watch / learn more about … all of them. I want more of this writer, this journalist, this presenter. Lately, this physicist (Carlo Rovelli). 

I want to read all the blogs, especially the poetry blogs. Especially the blogs I used to read. I want to find, again, the friends I discovered online years ago. Now I discover Substack, with all its controversies and all those excellent writers I want to follow. This seems to be close to what the blogging community used to be, with comment threads and interconnections. 

There are lots of blog-like “publications” on Substack. There, you subscribe, not follow. Reasonably enough, some writers request payment for their work. Even some poets! Mostly, though, I find more than enough to read without straining my budget. I can also read about philosophy and politics and artificial intelligence and physics and consciousness till I become . .. unconscious. 

Sharon Brogan, LINKS & reading

Pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I am now aware of three poets at work. I think it was Andrew Neilson that put us in touch (and I\m annoyed I couldn’t make it to Andrew’s do in town a couple of weeks ago. Blame the silly running thing).

Over the course of a few internal messages I’ve been speaking to Adrian Masters. Adrian’s day job is as Political Editor for ITV Cymru, but it was pleasing to discover that he’s also a fine poet. His latest poem in Bad Lillies *is well worth checking out (as are the previous other two). I’ve already told him how much I like the lines

at the sandpaper sound
of a cockerel crowing from an allotment,

at the synthesiser pulse
of fledgling jackdaws.

I especially like the “synthesiser pulse / of fledgling jackdaws”.

And it feels even more relevant as I type, having not long come back from our first go at taming our new allotment space. There is much to dig, much more to do, but I’m glad to have broken some ground on it, and to have not broken ourselves in the process. […]

We nearly didn’t go today. It’s been a long week for both R and me, and I had an attack of the insomnias last night between 12 and about 3am. Why, oh why couldn’t it have been tonight so I would be up when the England game starts?? Oh well. Anyhoo, the point of this is that we did go and we pushed on, but it also makes the poem that follows make more sense to me. I’d asked Adrian for permission to publish a poem form his pamphlet, Accretion, and he said to pick any, so I don’t feel bad about choosing one I don’t think I asked about originally. […]

The whole pamphlet is quite focused on time and gathering perspective. There is very much a long view at play in Adrian’s work that I like and admire. I know and recognise most of what is being described above, the disorinetation of darkness and the early hours, but the clinchers here are the last line of stanza 3 and the final stanza. The way they turn the very human experience into something that adds perspective, provides distance and if nothing else, it adds context

We can’t rail at the night when we’re amongst it in an unintended way. We just named time’s parts, but we didn’t invent it, we don’t own it. I like that. It reminds me that I need to go back to Samantha Harvey’s excellent work of non-fiction (with some fiction in it too), A Shapeless Unease: My Year In Search of Sleep

And on that note, I think I need a nap if I’m going to make it to the football later.

Mat Riches, Nightwithstanding

An attractive quality of these poems is the outsider’s constant searching for self and form. “Mirror” is not only the title of one of Zhang Zao’s most famous poems but also a recurring trope in his oeuvre. Thoroughly grounded in both Chinese and European literature, he seeks “a new tension and melting point,” as Bei Dao wrote in his personal recollection of the author, included in this book. How successful are his sonnet sequences, “Kafka to Felice” and “Dialogue with Tsvetaeva”? The Chinese originals strike as too full of words and ideas, and so lack the pressure cooker of the sonnet form. The free-verse experiments are more interesting, often ranging and strange. One has the great title “Song a Wall Driller and the Ultimate Ear,” but the poem, in fact, pages 179 to 186, are missing from my edition. 

The poem I like best is called “Fly.” It has something of John Donne’s playful eroticism, but also the concision I associate with Chinese verse.

Jee Leong Koh, Zhang Zao’s MIRROR

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretive limitations of writing and of the English language with its incapacity to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. He is the author of the hybrid creative nonfiction collection Without Terminus: untraining an archive (2026), and the poetry collections Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (2023) and Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (2018), both of which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Webster’s work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Obsidian, Brink Literary Journal,  LitHub, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know that I would say that my first book changed my life.  It was a book of poetry that was thinking about black place and black placelessness, the organized dispossession of material and memory.  I think my perspective changed as and after writing it, specifically, I think I became more critical of the limits of the discursive as a response to material force.  My most recent work definitely has the mark of that first book and the strategies I was using, I’d just say that almost a decade later I am now more sure of myself and methods, especially my use of ambiguity, and abstraction.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry by way of the black pentecostal church.  The passionate oratory of the sermons, the repetition within the music, the hum and moan all moved me deeply and marked me in the way I consider sound and breath and return in my own writing.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The length of a project depends, oftentimes I am not always even sure of if what I am doing IS a project.  I am just trying to be present and attentive with the questions that vibrate for me, I’m trying to stay with them, I’m trying to see how they bloom.  Sometimes this becomes a project, sometimes that takes years as it did with Without Terminus.  I’d definitely say that writing is a slow process for me, but the gathering by way of note taking is very much a part of that writing process. […]

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?
There are definitely theoretical concerns behind my writing.  How, as Frank B. Wilderson III asks, “does one narrate the loss of loss?” He asks this with regard to black people, the way our loss exceeds a linear teleology, does not have a resolution as might be conceived in narrative.  So how do I approach this problem as a writer? when many times the impulse is to make something known or visible through language, to bring it into coherence.  This also ties to questions I have about the archive, about how we make claims about the past, what we understand to be evidence.  I don’t have many answers, much of my process is just being attentive to the questions.  

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’m not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture.  I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I’m less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.  

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with chaun webster

Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a poet, artist, and former scientist from the greater Los Angeles area. She has published over 100 poems (including haiga) in various journals and anthologies since her debut in 2014 and exhibited artwork in many locations since 2019. Her poetry has won and been recognized by poetry competitions and organizations such as the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and The Haiku Foundation. […]

Your mother, Deborah P Kolodji, was a brilliant poet and editor. Did your mother introduce you to poetry and haiku? How did your relationship with your mother inform and inspire your life and creative work as a child and as an adult?

Shel Silverstein was my introduction to poetry. To this day, I can remember how sad I was in kindergarten when I smeared my peanut butter sandwich on my favorite book, The Giving Tree. Most of my early experiences with poetry were through Silverstein’s books or school. My first experience with haiku was a lesson about syllable counting in second grade. I don’t recall them mentioning seasons or a cut (kireji). It was a lesson to learn syllable counting with a rigid 5-7-5 structure. Unfortunately, this view of haiku overshadowed my view of this form for years.

Of course, I learned to write and analyze poetry in school, but my creativity towards poetry started with an audition. In high school, I reimagined Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 as a marriage counselor discussing what love is to her patients. This was the first time I deeply analyzed and dissected a poem. In high school, I was focused on various theater productions, bands (I played clarinet), and a robotics team. I loved working with the metalworking machinery. Perhaps this was a precursor hint of my fondness towards sculpture. I also sketched often in my notebooks. After my high school art history teacher introduced me to scratchboard, I was hooked. I was mainly focused on theatre, sciences, and dabbling with my visual art in high school and college.

However, in high school, I was introduced to non-5-7-5 haiku by my mother, Deborah P Kolodji, whose interest in haiku began around that time. We would often play a back-and-forth haiku game. Although I enjoyed playing those haiku games and writing collaborative haiku forms with her and haiku friends, I didn’t take my haiku seriously back then. I would often mention how wonderful haiku was at perfecting long form poetry, since it showed me the weight of each word. One day, I came across this haiku by Kaisanjin, which had a profound impact on me:

one umbrella—
the person more in love
gets wet

Kaisanjin

Until this day, this poem is my favorite haiku. In college, I went to a Haiku Poets of Northern California (HPNC) Two Autumn’s reading and stopped by the Yuki Teikei Society’s Asilomar conference. It was not until after college when I started going to the Southern California Haiku Study Group meetings, readings, and assisted in the bookfair at the 2013 Haiku North America conference. I knew I was hooked on haiku when I started dreaming haiku. It began percolating into everyday life. I composed haiku as I drove. I composed haiku when I walked. It would keep me up at night. Haiku seeped into my essence. After I created a haibun for my sculptural floats, I began to create more haiga. Around this time, I started seriously focusing on my visual arts. I began working with more unconventional materials and created sculptures. I expanded my artistic practice to many different mediums and my writing practice to other haiku-related forms and styles of poetry.

Jacob D. Salzer, Yvette Nicole Kolodji

If the conclusion doesn’t seem to provide us with an epiphany — “I pass,” as a last line, feels at first glance obvious and unsurprising; was “the sentinel of space” really going to stop him? — still, the way the poem gets there is full of interest. Its form, abab quatrains of three pentameter lines that drop to dimeter (and to monometer in that final line), enacts a sonic drama, in which momentum juxtaposes itself with stillness. Everything about the poem’s atmosphere is like the image of those ships in the first stanza: riding at anchor, yet somehow, even in their stasis, “Home-bound.”

The progression of images throughout the poem, in fact, makes its own level of drama. Every particular manages to be simultaneously impressionistic, if not actually self-contradicting, and precise. It’s the reflection of the moon in the water, not the literal moon itself, that wavers and contains the slipping fish. Via metonymy, the thing and its image become imaginatively conjoined, providing a setup for the imagistic paradox that follows, in which the water “makes a quietness of sound.”

“Quietness” and “sound” are seeming opposites, yet we know the true thing the phrase implies. What we know as quiet is not the same as silence, which connotes emptiness and absence or, as in those spider webs on which the second stanza ends, entrapment. A quiet night may be full of small sounds and movements — “strange tunnelers in the dark and whirs / Of wings” — that don’t disrupt the quiet, but are part of its enormous, mysterious fabric. A silent night, by contrast, is the night of your padded cell, the night of the grave.

This imagistic progression, then, after all, earns the poem’s abrupt and initially unsatisfying ending.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Home-Bound

The error that Richard Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene and has continued to make over the 50 years since it was first published, is an error of poetry.  

It’s a poetic error in the sense that poetry is the art form of the metaphor and the mistake that Dawkins makes is one of metaphorical choice. 

The problem is with the book’s central metaphor of humans as survival machines. The idea that we are nothing but automaton shells, vessels for our genes, who are the real survivors. […]

As I said earlier, this error of metaphor has been made by a multitude of scientists and philosophers (from Hobbes and de la Mettrie to Skinner and Turing, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Dawkins himself). But to my knowledge it has not been made by any whose field of expertise the use of metaphor is: poets. 

They, by contrast, have tended over the years to emphasise the dissimilarities between humans and machines, and warned of the dehumanising effects of an over-mechanistic world.  

And in the famous case of John Keats, his argument – taken on in full throat by Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, was against the rationalist, scientific explorations that came with the Enlightenment, and the way they deadened, as he saw it, the joy to be found in the mysteries of the universe. 

His conception of negative capability was a profoundly wise expression of why trying to pin everything down (to box it in) cuts off at the root a sense of wonder in the unknown and the mysterious. And in some cases, the truths hidden but inherent in the illusory. 

His most famous poetic expression of this comes towards the end of Lamia, when the cold, rational, surface-truth of Old Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s identity and thereby destroys both her and her lover Lycias: 

                                               Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: 
We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— 
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. 

Dawkins was able to argue against this view very successfully in Unweaving the Rainbow because he focused on the wonder that is engendered by scientific discoveries in the natural world. But in making this argument, he was missing a central point of negative capability: that there are truths which science is not capable of getting at. There is no reason not to feel a sense of wonder at the truths science can reveal (my view, Keats may have disagreed) and Dawkins’s description of what is happening in the realm of physics and biology when an individual sees a rainbow is a point well made. He considered Keats to be advocating for self-deception when bewailing the gaze of science on natural beauty, but he ignored the possibility that there are truths in the human experience of natural beauty that science can impede. Keats was receptive, and unusually sensitive perhaps, to such truths, and he found the strict rationality of a scientific worldview restricting in his search for them. Poetry, which allows language to dance around its own limitations, enables rather than restricts this search.

Chris Edgoose, Richard Dawkins’s Big Poetic Mistake

Rhetorical
question: why do I find the foods of my first
colonizer delicious? Ordinary fare: steamed
swamp spinach, fried scad, rice. Delicious,
especially eaten without silverware, but not
served to guests or at parties. Our tongues,
taught to swerve from the language of our
origins. Taught to soften the trills
that might remind us of birds.

Luisa A. Igloria, Tapas

Written in the late 11^th or early 12th century, Le Chanson de Roland (‘The Song of Roland’) is the story of an 8th-century Frankish knight, nephew of Charlemagne, who died in 778 C.E. while leading the army’s rear-guard through a narrow pass in the Pyrenees on the way home to France, following a military campaign on the Iberian peninsula.

Considered the oldest known surviving work of French literature, the poem is a chanson de geste (‘song of deeds’), a legendary account of the ‘heroic’ actions and martyrdom of Charlemagne’s knights. The form emerged around the time of the first Crusade, when Christians sought to retake control of the Holy Land, and it continued to flourish throughout the 16^th century.

In contrast with actual events, the poem describes an epic battle against paien (pagans) and ‘Saracens,’ a broad term used by medieval Christians to refer to Muslims. In reality, the Battle at Roncevaux Pass involved an ambush by the Basques, a people indigenous to the Pyrenees, who were retaliating after Charlemagne’s army ransacked their villages and destroyed their capital at Pamplona.

According to the poem, however, the ambush was part of a plot against Roland, orchestrated by his stepfather in league with the enemy. Roland is slain, but his pious devotion to god and king, and his willingness to martyr himself in battle, earns him a place among the angels.

Adam Miyashiro, Professor of Medieval Literature at Stockton University, has described Le Chanson de Roland as “a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.” In his translation, Roland’s war-cry during the battle is full of religious zeal and alarming certitude:

“Paien unt tort, e chrestiens unt dreit!”
(‘Pagans are wrong, Christians are in the right!’)

Roland the crusading evangelist may have been proud to die a martyr for his faith and for his king, but was he merely a pawn in the game? A paladin, or a puppet?

In the 19^th century, Sicilian Opera de Pupi began reinventing these medieval epic poems to explore powerful themes of honor, justice, loyalty, oppression, and resistance, as shaped by Sicily’s own struggle against invasions by foreign armies and imperial powers. Their version of the stories reflected a blend of linguistic and cultural influences, including Byzantine, Norman-French, Spanish, Arabic, and Italian.

Opera de Pupi transformed and subverted the old epic poems into stories of everyday heroes and unexpected victories, in which women could be knights, noble bandits prevailed, and clever peasants became advisors to kings. ‘Pagans’ and ‘Saracens’ were no longer the enemy, and Christians and Muslims both faced obstacles to overcome. Just as the handcrafted puppets reflected a distinctive Sicilian identity, the puppeteers also became artisans of their craft of storytelling and performance.

Jenevieve Carlyn, In the House of Puppets

What makes Marston Moor the best of [Payne] Fisher’s poems […] is its unresolved ambiguity. Fisher fought himself at Marston Moor, on the losing royalist side, and was imprisoned afterwards. The earliest drafts of the poem are straightforwardly royalist laments for the horror of the siege and the disaster of the defeat, in which Oliver Cromwell, who was Manchester’s second-in-command, takes the role of the devil. The revised and massively expanded poem published in 1650, which won such success with Cromwell that it secured Fisher a paid job as his poet for the next eight years, shifted momentum to acknowledge the glory and power of the Parliamentarian success, but Fisher by no means forgot about the suffering of the other side. Long passages describe the miserable conditions of the besieged people in York, their joy at being relieved, and the terrible royalist losses on the battlefield.

It is interesting that Cromwell was so impressed by a poem that is essentially so even-handed.

Victoria Moul, Like a patient Angler e’re he strook

I recently wrote a review of the book Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War.

Here’s a short excerpt:

It’s significant that as I began writing this review about Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a collection of poems reacting to the devastating ecological consequence of war, that our nation was again engaged in a new one. Rockets and drones were taking thousands of human lives, but also leaving lasting damage to land, water, and atmosphere. It will likely be decades until we understand the full extent of this war’s human, political, and environmental cost on our world.

You can read the whole review at Consequence Forum Substack here.

Grant Clauser, Review of Ecopoetics War Anthology: Convergence

Thinking of John Berger and his thoughts on the male gaze (I’m sure he thought we’d be well past bringing him up on this subject by now), I took And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, off the shelf. What a lovely thoughtful book that has been. Poems are nearer to prayers, he says. And, “Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” He says, “The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”

Shawna Lemay, Art’s Power to Change You

Stars curl
and spiral

this night

O the sight
of all that

blue
and red
and white

all that
bursting

all that
fire

all that
might

Maureen Doallas, The Flag on the Fourth of July

A couple of weeks ago I encountered this poem by “Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian” poet Mandy Shunnarah thanks to a Facebook group called Read A Little Poetry. The poem has stayed with me, and I’ve been thinking about why that is and why it speaks to me. […]

“It’s not Palestine / like old buddy, old pal” is a great line. The choice to end two lines with “Palestine” and “Falastin” — almost the same word but not, which is the point. I’ve had Mo Husseini’s extraordinary essay A letter from the margins on my mind since I read it, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the name Palestine and the diaspora experience he describes.

The second stanza is where the poem really tugs at my heart. My grandparents were immigrants too, and I remember my grandfather’s struggle with certain English words that never emerged the way he wanted. (“Sheet” was a particular bugbear.) My grandfather spoke seven languages, which was amazing! but he knew his English was accented.

I think of how my mother, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Prague in 1936, chose short, simple, all-American names for her kids, especially for the three sons who were born to her first. I think about the tensions between assimilation and remembrance, about the old-fashioned or “foreign” Jewish names that I see now mostly in cemeteries.

The poem asserts that “only an American” would choose an aspirational name, one they themselves can’t easily say. I recognize that sense of leaning toward the future even at the cost of generational disconnect. My family’s immigrant story is different than this one, but they rhyme, as it were. There’s something tender for me about that. […]

Against all of these backdrops this week I encountered this beautiful essay by Jennifer Elise Foerester, a member of the Mvskoke people, shared on FB via the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

She begins:

What if we listened to each other in the language of poetry?
Poetry is a language of deep listening.
Listening to each other in this way would be a listening that does not demand an answer, a translation, or defense; it would be a listening that acknowledges not knowing, that does not preclude the possibility of new perspectives.

Jennifer Elise Foerester, Beyond The Obvious

I love the idea that when we listen to each other as to a poem, we cultivate a spirit of radical welcome. I love the idea of poetry as a language of deep listening — an increasingly lost art in these polarized and angry times. The FB conversation I saw about Shunnarah’s poem was pretty polarized and angry. I didn’t experience much readiness to listen there.

I get the anger. (I really do. I’ve shared a few very angry poems of my own, of late.) But I want us to be able to listen in a way that both upholds our own truths and keeps us open to the truths of others. I don’t want to respond to poems with defensiveness; I want to cultivate openness. In poetry, as in spiritual life, multiple things can be true at the same time.

Rachel Barenblat, Two poems and a dream of America

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet.

When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in solitude and the better part of her middle age in South America with the woman she loved for seventeen years, who had taken her own life three years earlier.

Across their stations, across their age difference, across the abyss of possibility between their era’s parameters of permission, Elizabeth and Alice fell deeply and enduringly in love — a love that comes abloom on the pages of Megan Marshall’s delicious biography Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (public library).

Soon, they were beginning each day with a ritual refrain: “Good-morning I love you.” The “blue blue blue” of Alice’s eyes became the sky of a new world shimmering with new life. More poems poured out in a spring than had in a decade. They swam together in the Galápagos, admiring the flamboyance of flamingos, and in the Greek Isles, admiring the poppies and their thousand shades of red. Whenever they were separated by Elizabeth’s itinerant life as a public poet, she sent Alice “love — housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull” and carried her photograph in her breast pocket. She revised her will to leave everything except her books to Alice.

After five years together — years of extraordinary creative vitality for the poet, but also years of savage struggle with alcohol — Alice, exhausted by Elizabeth’s increasingly out-of-control drinking to the point of collapse, met a young man who soon proposed.

“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” Elizabeth told her in a touching reminder that the deepest measure of love is wanting the best possible life for the other person. But she was heartbroken.

She coped the way all artists do.

What began as mostly prose became, seventeen drafts and several titles later — “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” — one of the greatest poems ever written […]

When she learned that Alice had decided to accept the proposal, Elizabeth was devastated. With the helpless vulnerability of love laid bare, which neither pride nor prejudice can touch, she wrote to her:

I DO want you to be free, darling — that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you… You can always have me back if ever you should want me… truly.

And then she sent her the poem.

Nobody knows what beckoned Alice back — the poem, the way a badly sprained ankle signaled Elizabeth’s fragility and made Alice shudder at the thought of losing her, or simply the inexplicable gravitational pull of love that eludes, always eludes, theory.

“I like being with you more than anyone else in the world,” Alice wrote to Elizabeth that summer.

They remained together until death did them part — one awful October evening, a cerebral aneurysm left Elizabeth’s body for Alice to find on their bedroom floor.

Maria Popova, The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

Whatever else we might do in our lives, death is the thing we all will do. Most of us would rather not think about that. Here, then, is where the poets step in. Our readers may recall, for example, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which takes death’s inevitability as its subject. Tennyson, the laureate, speaking for a country and a culture, asks the very question nobody wants to ask: “How will we die?” For her own part, Emily Dickinson takes the question closer to the bone. She considers not how a culture, a generalized entity, might think about mortality, but instead, how she herself, an unrepeatable human I, will die. What, she repeatedly wonders, will that actually be like? […]

In sequence she describes the “Funeral in my Brain” as an entirely auditory experience, nightmarish perhaps particularly for the claustrophobic among us whose recurring bad dream of live burial the poem encapsulates. The speaker, confined in her viewless coffin but entirely awake, hears the tramping feet of mourners, the monotone drumroll of the church service, the creaking of boots as her coffin is lifted and carried to some solitary place, where she finds herself abandoned — “Wrecked, solitary, here” — for eternity. “Here” all sound stops; here ends the poem, presumably.

But at this point we should stop and remind ourselves that the public-domain version of the poem we’re reading is the one that appears in Poems: Third Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1896, ten years after Dickinson’s death. Todd and Higginson clearly agreed that dear Emily could not possibly have meant all those em-dashes, but also that she could not possibly have meant the poem as it appears in her manuscripts, with a final stanza beyond the one given here — a stanza that changes everything:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down —
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then —

In this original and necessary final stanza, the speaker, like a person being hanged, feels the “Plank in Reason” break beneath her. As the poem ends, on an inconclusive em-dash, its thoughts cut short, its speaker drops utterly out of “knowing” into the unimaginable, timeless, silent mystery beyond. It’s a terrifying prospect, that moment when “knowing” ends: the moment when the self stops being the self, or at least stops being sure of being the self, or of anything at all.

Yet as a restoration of the poem in its wholeness, this true ending offers a corrective to the nightmarish sense of being buried alive, on which the expurgated version of the poem ends. Death in Dickinson’s vision is not a desert island, a solitary shipwrecking, but something far stranger, outside the bounds of human knowing. If it’s a terror, it’s also a liberation and a darker, wilder hope, for which human language, in all its knowing, has no word.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

if you whisper your truths,

they’ll disappear, he’d say, so he never whispers them –
and when he does speak, his voice is the wild thud
of trees falling oceans from here in cool shimmers

of rain, in the hot curl of asphalt, in all the time needed
though there’s so little now to do, and he’s prayed deep
into the hole of his aching, but that’s not how it ends –

Sam Rasnake, Some Last Things