This week: a lion-faced serpent god, the preserved body of a billionaire, memories of tap dancing, a brown-paper-bag existence, and much more. Enjoy.

The first bird I hear as I wake this morning is a wood pigeon; the promise of spring in its echoing tones. In the damp morning the cheerful chorusing of many birds is welcoming the day, and the air brings the scent of rosemary and twigs.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a beaver in a muddy puddle. I say it is a capybara sitting in the mud at Chester Zoo. I photographed it during a visit back in 2015 and the photo came to mind this week after a conversation with a wonderful friend.

Part of our conversation centred around the importance of being able to sit with someone when they are in the emotional equivalent of a muddy puddle. I loved the analogy… being alongside the person, acknowledging that it is indeed a swampy place, sitting with their thoughts and feelings for a while without rushing them to get out, without offering to try to solve it… bringing presence not solutions… simply being there with them in that muddy puddle.

I love a metaphor and after our chat I spent some time thinking about the times I have sat in muddy puddles of my own as well as the times I have meandered off my path to sit with others in their puddles. Those puddles have held a lot. Times of pondering, times of deep thinking, time to respect the need to be still for a while, times of silence, time to figure out the feelings and what is needed right now.

Sue Finch, SITTING IN THE MUD

At one point yesterday morning, a sea turtle patrol truck drove down the beach away from the sunrise, with one young worker guy hanging out the window taking pictures.  I assume that the workers get to see a beach sunrise every morning.  The fact that one of them went to such an effort to get a picture made me happy.

I’ve said before, and I’ll continue to remind myself that the human capacity for wonder makes me think that humans may survive after all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Beach Sunrises

Recently, I enjoyed/endured a string of late nights (I’ll only do it for poetry), first in New York, where I heard extraordinary poets including Richard Siken, Ilya Kaminsky, and Ocean Vuong, and then in Chicago, where I heard debut writers including I.S. Jones and Noa Micaela Fields. I love the mix of improvisation and preparation that goes into introducing a poem—I learn as much about the poet from those candid moments as I do from the work itself.

This week, I attended a wonderful dinner for the National Poetry Series, which does invaluable work in support of poets, and had the pleasure of sitting alongside three former teachers: Deborah Landau, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Meghan O’Rourke. Fifteen years after my MFA, it feels especially meaningful to find myself working alongside them and still learning from them.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Recently, I posted about some poems of mine published in Creative Writing Department’s Print Journal. They were a set of seven pieces, all of similar style, called “Rat Heart Nebula.” Below, I’m sharing three more sections of it, rounding out the set to ten. I am eventually going to collect all these in a chapbook, but I’m not sure how many of them there will end up being. They are extremely fun to write. […]

Monstrous child of Sophia in the Gnostic cosmology, Yaldabaoth is the lion-faced serpent god who created our insane world. It does not matter if you think about this or not when reading.

R.M. Haines, BLUETOOTH SPEAKER YALDABAOTH

This is “Cupid and Psyche” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) by Jacopo del Sellaio, from about 1473. Fifteen scenes from the same story are merged together, Psyche appearing 11 times. A tree in the foreground of one scene may form the background of another.

Time goes left-to-right along the lower part of the painting. Higher up, more liberties are taken. This style is called ‘continuous narrative’ – because, I suppose, there are no dividing lines between the different scenes/times.

I think it’s an idea that’s sometimes replicated in poetry, the same phrase representing a cause in one moment of time, and an effect in another. Recall and foreboding are intermixed with the present.

Tim Love, Continuous narrative

After the art gallery I had
skin tags removed
at my dermatologist’s office.
where I bought the most expensive
cosmetic I have ever bought.
I decided not to feel guilty about it–
my birthday was in two weeks.

This was the day after
the day I’d had
two poetry groups
back to back
where I wrote
poems
as vigorously
as a Baptist pastor
can preach
hell fire.

Rebecca Cook, The Sound of The Ocean

A gorgeous day as I rode the waves of a county road up from the river and into the glacial-carved bays and fjords of this county, rising into the air to crest a blind hill, easing past the slower vessels, a horse and buggy, a man in a flat brimmed hat pushing a bike, all sparkling in spring sun and new leaves pattering in the wind. Arrived lakeside, a park spread like its own picnic. A windsurfer coursed the chop of the dark blue lake. And I entered the community of food-bringers, of neighbors and friends, mostly strangers to me, chatting, no real laughter yet, as people assembled in slow spurts, some signing the guest book, some leafing through the photo albums, some pausing to hug hard the bereaved. I’ve done this a few too many times in the past six months. A spate of funerals and memorials. This one for a man I’d only known as a towheaded boy flinging himself around the yard, pausing briefly to pee in the bushes, too busy to bother with the niceties of a bathroom, or settling beside his tiny little sister to smooch or tickle. His mother, my friend. After we wailed together briefly, struck senseless by the simple devastation of her loss, broke apart to hold each other at arm’s length, enjoying seeing ourselves much unchanged after all this time. “He grew up to be a nice person,” she assured me, knowing I’d been a stranger to him, as we do not live near each other and had drifted apart. I will never know. Sudden death or slow, predicted or out of the blue, the shock of it remains much the same. Wait a minute, we wake to realize, day after day. Wait a minute.

Here is a poem by the ancient Japanese writer Isumi Shikibu, as translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani.

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

Marilyn McCabe, into empty sky

What I am referring to here is my long, missed diagnosis of OCD.

I have found myself fully tethered to Larry, so I resist forming bonds with anyone. It’s too painful. I don’t want to lose someone else. Yet I want a witness. We all do.

There is a feeling of duty and obligation to ensuring his work stays out there, so his presence stays…present. I want people to see my love for him. I want people to keep loving him and appreciating his work. Yet I am in a loop. Often, I cannot leave my apartment. It takes me awhile to detach myself from him as I am convinced he is with me (his ashes are in my apartment).

Via repetitive tasks, and mind-numbing repetition and panic, I do things that provide a false sense of comfort that life is moving on without him. Since he died, I’ve been legacy building. Because he was a poet and so prolific, such a talented writer, a beautiful soul. Because I love him and my connection to him is through poetry.

And if I repeat myself through these posts it is because I am re-processing, meta-processing, or processing things for the first time now, with some—albeit very little—distance. It’s only been 15 months.

The book I am working on of his, for example, had to be pulled apart and re-laid out. All 800 pages of it (long story which I will detail another time). So after I painstakingly worked through thousands of pages of his hard copy poems to get them organized, labeled, edited, and collection into an 800-page volume of never-seen-before poems, I had to read them all again, reliving each love poem, each drawing, each haiku.

And my algorithm feeds me more grief, I feel more grief, feel guilty for not feeling more grief. On repeat. Constantly in grief mode.

And then there is the very accurate notion in grief that we don’t experience just the one loss, it is loss over and over. Every time you hear, see, or feel something that triggers you, you miss your person and your brain has to adjust and say to you: “Remember? They are not here anymore.”

It is looping loss upon loss.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, To play with catastrophe.

The grammar of archives, of our accounting—
     more than just the language of the incident report

Dalamhati— grief of the deepest kind, 
from the Malay root for interior, something seated
      in the liver or the heart

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Luisa A. Igloria, Souls on Board

i asked myself what i thought grief was. i used to know. or else, i used to think i knew, when i was young and young-in-grief, when grief felt as immediate and instinctive as arousal. when i thought i could name it; could call it by any single name. i thought that grief was an absence and an urgency. which it is, but not only this. it is also an accretion, a thickening in time and texture. grief has a taste, a colour and a shape, is shaping – reshaping – my attachments to others, to the world, to the body, to the “self”. yes, it is reshaping still. against the implied trajectory contained within much of western thought, that says beyond its immediate moment, your grief will diminish or fade. i used to dread this as betrayal and failure; found ways to – as i saw it – keep my grief alive and livid, insisted upon it as an ethics: that which we owe to the dead. silly girl, grief does not diminish. grief, if we allow it, is intimate, metabolic, and slow. grief is transformative. that is, as it transforms us, grief also transforms: from the emptying distress of acute personal hurt, to a rich and weighty way of being with. i think we are looking at healing through the wrong end of the telescope. perhaps we are using the wrong word altogether. supposing the aim was to acclimatise? suppose we sought not to reduce, but to deepen? to lean into this deepening.

Fran Lock, ON MEMORY #2

(Art unburnt in the pyre—a Cornell box carousel.
The chorus of little birds in the yard, psychopomp
for our cat’s last breath rising like smoke. Tears
I’ve kept close, waiting to share them with you.)

Lori Witzel, Smoke

Tom Sastry has published one pamphlet and three collections. Carol Ann Duffy said he “makes friendships and love affairs new and strange” and Hera Lindsay Bird call him “a magician of deadpan”. His poems have appeared in The Guardian and Poetry Review. His latest book is Life Expectancy Begins to Fall is described by Jonathan Edwards as “the most important – and certainly the most entertaining – book about the end of the world I’ve yet found”. Tom himself describes it as the perfect birthday present for someone with a sense of humour about their mortality.

The title poem – a sequence of six titled poems, each consisting of six couplets – is at the core of the book. It is linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and government decisions.

The collection is also a short master class on making titles work:

• How to tell the apocalypse is happening when you get all your news from Instagram
• Navigating the Peri-Apocalypse with Radical Self-Care
• The preserved body of a billionaire slowly defrosts in a devastated world

[…]

As I was preparing this post, Tom wrote to me: ‘You can be pessimistic about the drift of world-historical events and still hopeful about human nature and human connection. You can be hopeful about what might happen next week or about the reception of your friend’s new book.  There’s no link between optimism and virtue or between pessimism and cynicism. So that’s really the moral centre of the book – the belief that an age of pessimism doesn’t condemn us to live mean lives. We can live well as pessimists.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Life expectancy begins to fall – poems

Big workday today for me. And an exercise in joy. One of the greatest happiness an author can experience in the process of creating a book is receiving the first “proof” from the book designer, assuming you have a brilliant and conscientious designer, which I do in Mark Melnick who I recommend. Today I’ll be proofing my 2027 book COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES which, to my relief, pulls off one of my most ambitious literary structures to date. That is, I first wrote a novel. Then I had one of the novel’s characters create a poetry collection. Both are featured in CDB.

It was an arduous process over the past 3-4 years to create CDB. I first wrote another novel that wasn’t good enough (yet) to leave my files where it’s shelved as a “trunk novel.” I wrote a second novel, and from that novel birthed CDB. Literally a poet-novelist I am. From my Author’s Note, you’ll see that CDB has something for every type of literary reader.

The featured doll by my manuscript is the avatar for my novel’s primary protagonist, Kris–an orphan, a spy, a lethal killer, former head of the C I A, a community organizer, and a lover. He’s stared at me in my writing studio for the years it took me to create this book. He’s been ensconced over my computer to encourage–and pressure–me to finish this project. I look forward to the day I can present the actual book before his nose and hear him say, “I told you so!”

And someday I hope you will read CDB, which critiques Empire by going right to its root source: Sargon of Akkad, known for his conquests of Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (last image). He’s been identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire.

And yet this is also a rom-com. So: something for everyone.

Eileen Tabios, PRE-RELEASE NOTES: COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES

As I’ve been getting ready to get a final version of my next collection, MARRY | KISS |KILL together and issue it this summer, I’ve been thinking about my own experiences with self-publishing my work (at least the full-length projects, but this applies to chapbooks as well)  and how that might be of interest to other poets if they are considering doing the same in this age of dwindling publishers, slashed funding, and general upheaval in the arts. 

While I spent many years waffling over the logistics and benefits of self-publishing, there were many benefits once I took the plunge. One was more control over timelines and design (including books, like GRANATA above, with an art element, not always welcomed by other presses)  Another benefit is a greater share of the list price. This happens in a time when poets, even publishing with traditional presses, often share the brunt of promotion anyway for any collection, so that was nothing new under the sun. I also was producing work at a steady clip, impossible to publish all of them with the press that had issued my last three books. I also did not want to go through the work and expense of entering manuscripts in open reading periods and spendy contests, having already played that game earlier in my career. I was also in a great place to make it happen, having my own imprint and book design experience, as well as an existing audience for my work this many books and years in.

When I was initially contemplating self-publication in the early aughts, it was still very much a no-no if you wanted to be taken seriously and be seen with legitimacy (though I wonder how much of this was just the poets I was in community with.) Other communities had different ideas about it. There were spoken word poets who regularly issued their own work to sell at readings. The zine makers I knew regularly published their own editions of new work. When I started DGP, the first trial chapbook was my own, and when that went well, I moved on to publishing other authors. As time went on, there were more chapbooks and zines, but I still entrusted other presses with my full-length manuscripts. While I loved the presses and editors I worked with, it became steadily apparent over the years that traditional publishing, while nice, was not always ideal. My first publisher issued one book and accepted a second, but shuttered before it bore fruit. Ditto with another I later published with–same situation, one book released and another in-progress and abandoned when the publisher closed (I later issued this one myself, first as an e-book and now in print.) Other books closed out the print run after a decade (I have a handful of copies of these, but they are only available direct from me now.) 

Since 2021 or so, I’ve been happily typing and designing away since, issuing 1-2 projects each year on my own, usually available to all, though there are also some Patreon-only offerings.  But there are a few misconceptions I have often come across that bear mentioning when discussing self-publishing your poetry. that seemed fruitful to discuss.

Kristy Bowen, Self Publishing Myths Dispelled

To found the publishing company New Directions, James Laughlin invested $100,000 of his family’s wealth (about $2 million today) into the company. While he ran New Directions, James Laughlin lived on family property in a large country house in Connecticut. He lived off his investments in the stock market, as well as his generational wealth. Over time, he kept investing his family’s money.

I like New Directions; it’s a revered press. But Red Hen Press has no family money. Last night I was at a dinner, and someone said, I would never want to work at a nonprofit. Too unstable.

I know what you mean. It is too unstable.

There are many things I don’t understand. Can I make it from Point A to Point B? Why is Point B always so far away?

For me, Point B is the amount of money I need to raise for Red Hen to make it to the end of the fiscal year, June 30^th.

In this struggle, people might care, but no one is coming to save me. Despite some incredible ongoing donors, no one can guarantee the survival of Red Hen; few people have been able to connect me with new foundations, donors, or sources of income.

When I was in my fifties, considering the path of James Laughlin, I looked into the stock market. I didn’t put any money into it then or since, but I did look into it. It was another thing I didn’t quite know enough about. What exactly was the stock market doing over there? What was it up to?

We recently decided to sell some of our personal books that we didn’t need. I said to Mark, if you had a tiny amount of money, what would you do with it? Savings account? Stock market? Get a car that won’t break down?

I started without generational wealth. I did not have any investment income. Out of the cult, I had nothing. Later, I was earning wages teaching, writing, and speaking. Then, I started a publishing company. That’s when everything shifted.

I thought that publishing was an enterprise worth saving; that the building of literary culture was an enterprise worth keeping. I still hold this belief, still say this to myself, but maintaining the physical reality is harder. Nonprofit publishing in the U.S. comes from a small batch of people who decide to build literary culture. Most of them are writers. Those without pre-existing wealth often give up their own literary lives and are written out of the story.

My goal this fiscal year is to get Red Hen fiscally healthy. My other goal is to get myself an additional job so that I can be fiscally healthy. To be fiscally literate and stable, I need to make a living, and I am going to figure it out. I am going to carry Red Hen forward.

Kate Gale, What We Know, What We Weather, What We Climb

Starting a poetry press was always going to be an education, but I didn’t expect to be learning quite so fast. Headless Poet is dedicated to the art of the introduction: you can read about the idea here, and an interview with Victoria Moul, editor of our first pamphlet, here. The response so far has been really encouraging, and there’s a lot more to look forward to.

One question, rather obvious in retrospect, which has been preoccupying me recently: how exactly does one go about promoting poetry that has been (in the words of my mission statement) buried by time? Time isn’t the easiest material to shift. Come to think about it, how do you market poetry at all? Perhaps you just keep writing blogs. That was always the original plan.

Today, Headless Poet publishes Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong. Alex is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both from Carcanet Press. He has also previously selected from the work of Victorian writers A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell. When I first approached Alex last year, I didn’t have a particular writer in mind: he brings such a deep reading of and appreciation for the poetry of the era that we might have gone in any number of directions. But soon as he mentioned Hood, I knew it would have to be him.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) hasn’t so much been buried by time as dismembered and deposited in various places — known for the odd anthology piece, but rarely read as a whole. I Remember, I Remember might be familiar to some (and it is a far stranger poem than it seems) but it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the sheer exuberance of Hood’s comic verse or the astonishing, sing-song social criticism of poems like The Song of the Shirt. And yet: Hood was also a contemporary of Keats and Shelley, and could write a sonnet with the lyric intensity of either of them.

Jeremy Wikeley, New to Headless Poet: Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected & introduced by Alex Wong

What I loved […]

was the man, out of place like the rest,
telling a bawdy story of standing

at the urinal many weddings ago,
when something drifted from his inner coat pocket

as he stood pissing beside an editor —
his poem, having escaped confinement,
landed in the froth.

The gentle man, already zipped up,
delicately picked the page up by its corner

and published it.

Jill Pearlman, Wedding Miracles

There is an actual Lake Isle of Innisfree. The note that accompanies the photograph says, “It is difficult to imagine scraping a living on the unpromising terrain of this island.” (Wikimedia Commons)

For most of the poem’s twelve lines, that place does exist, shining and almost reachable, in the evocative liquid sounds of its hexameter lines, dropping to tetrameter at the end of the first two abab quatrains, and resolving in pentameter in the poem’s last line. There’s a quality in these longer lines of, simultaneously, languor and urgency: the timelessness of the place, the exiled speaker’s haste to get there.

But can such a place exist? This poem, despite its maker’s dyspeptic later opinion of it, saves itself from the poisoning of nostalgia in its last lines. This Innisfree is real, more real even than the physical islet in the actual Irish lake — but only in one man’s “deep heart’s core,” where he carries the memory, which has become his own creation. It exists, but nowhere in external reality. You might want to arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, but you can’t get there from here.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Ricky Monahan Brown, taken from his recent pamphlet, Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).

The piece I’ve chosen is titled ‘Drawer’, so its significance within the manuscript as a whole is pretty clear. I don’t tend to be a fan of poems that use the passive voice a lot, nor of poems that don’t contain any main verbs. However, those two devices are actually used to terrific effect here, holding back narrative details that the reader is allowed to fill in, such as the identity of the protagonists. Meanwhile, progressively tweaked repetition is clearly a driving force, used deftly, moving us forward without any punctuation towards the poem’s emotional core. 

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

Anthony Barnett is a kind of one-man cultural institution, poet, editor, publisher, translator, musician and scholar. He has published, amongst others, the original Collected Poems by Jeremy Prynne, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Collected Poems and Translations. He has also co-edited and published the journal Snow lit rev since 2013.

The first two volumes here display something of his range as a translator. ‘Whoever Has Found a Horseshoe’ is significant for being a rare unrhymed poem by Osip Mandelstam; it’s also his longest poem. Subtitled ‘A Pindaric fragment’, it reads to me, in Barnett’s version at least, as a meditation on the difficulty of art, of making things that are not, to echo David Jones, valued for being utile.

Barnett presents the poem’s ten parts one per verso page, each with a facing recto page illustrative drawing by Lucy Rose Cunningham, drawings which strike me as being integral, not decorative. The opening section, facing a drawing of a tree, presents a view of woodland as raw material:

We may face the forest and say:
Here is a forest with ship masts and timbers:
The pink-tinged pines
Freed from the weight of their clumps to their crowns
Should groan in a gale

Straight away, the utilitarian is undercut by the aesthetic; nobody will build a ship from a drawing of a tree, and for the shipwright, that ‘pink-tinged’ is entirely superfluous.

The fourth section addresses the difficulty of art, specifically the art of poetry:

Where shall we start?
Everything sways and splits,
Similes quiver in the air

While the next section addresses its value:

Thrice blessed whoever enshrines a name in a song,—
A song graced with a name
Outshines those that are not—

The penultimate section revolves around the title line:

So
Whoever has found a horseshoe blows away the dust,
Buffs it up with wool
Until it shines.
Then
Hangs it over the door,
To rest,
No striking sparks on flint again.

The polished horseshoe hung over the door has transcended its utilitarian origins to become, in its own small way, a work of art, of the impulse to make things over for no end beyond the pleasure it gives. The final section emphasises the poet’s identification with the finder, the trouvère, whose words are like objects dug from the earth.

In an afterword, Barnett describes the process of translation, this being his fifth version of the Horseshoe poem. He describes it as still potentially not finished, but it’s hard to imagine how he would come up with a more enjoyable version.

Billy Mills, A Basket of Barnetts

Mekyle Ali Qadir is a Pakistani poet currently pursuing his Master’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. His writing explores the negotiation of culture and ethnicity he enacts in his life as an immigrant from Pakistan. Writing in both English and Urdu, his emerging work explores South Asian cultural traditions, migrant identity, mysticism, and intertextual art. […]

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?

My writing is probably too theoretical. I’m very occupied with intercultural knowledges, negotiating my home traditions with Western modernity. My writing interrogates the assumptions that come with intercultural dialogues, especially in a place like Canada with all its performative multiculturalism rhetoric. I draw much of my inspiration from postcolonial thinkers who challenge hegemonic and Imperialist epistemologies, especially Edward Said, Fanon, Cesaire, Iqbal, and Shariati. I’m just regurgitating their words and adding personal anecdotes along the way. Aside from that, though I don’t count it as a “theoretical concern,” my writing is steeped in mystical thought and teachings. As I repeat throughout my answers, the Sufi traditions give me inspiration beyond these great thinkers. Mystical inspiration doesn’t work in the question-answer structure because it’s beyond language so it’s hard to say what questions I answer when I write through this inspiration. But a tangible result of it is a keen sense of empathy that pushes beyond personal and cultural barriers and lets me capture intense personal and social experiences.

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 there’s more creative writers operating at multiple levels of culture than we tend to acknowledge because they don’t call their work ‘creative’ even though it is. I think writers always find themselves in strange ‘moments’ in history, but now especially their work has been threatened by AI and slowly, their value is starting to be remembered in the wake of AI’s disappointing capabilities. I also think writers should see their work beyond its political impact. It’s a result of Eurocentric reductionism that writers are encouraged to think only in terms of political, material ends. I don’t think all writing is or should be political, though you can stretch definitions to fit your argument as much as you want. There are truths that transcend that, which all writing, but especially poetry, can uncover. I guess that’s what writers should be chasing after, to unveil Maya and reach the Gha’ib. […]

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I see what he means I guess, but I don’t like to think of it that way. Writing for me is one form of art that has to coexist with others. The creatives I admire most are creative in multiple ways, it’s only now that we’re siloing ourselves into discrete ‘disciplines’. I like to draw and play music, both of which make their way into my writing. Poetry is a mathematical activity, sometimes a scientific one. Poetry for me is tied to my religious expression concurrently with all of these other forms. Defining poetry through delimitations leads to dead ends, I think.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mekyle Ali Qadir

The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year
that friends forgot what affection felt like.
The sky above them grew so tight-fisted
that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop.
The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears
was the only water anyone could find.
If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent,
it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief.
I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved,
each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish.
The orchard and the mountain, both were bare:
locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts!

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: A Noble Man Suffers With The Victims of a Famine

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing a couple of different books about Homer and his “afterlife” — the myriad ways in which the Iliad and the Odyssey stand behind and within so much of our literature but also off at an angle to it. Texts can be both foundational and also irreducibly strange and distant. (The Bible is another good example of this.) Very few people can read Homeric Greek, let alone with real ease and pleasure. But at the same time more people, I would guess, know something of the Homeric myths than any other classical work. Stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey are a popular basis for children’s picture books and early readers as well as the fashionable mythological kind of fantasy aimed at older children and teenagers. This just isn’t true in the same way of the story of the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses (though those poems incorporate Homeric material, of course), and even less so of, say, Herodotus, Livy or Lucan. Homer occupies a peculiar cultural space: both almost entirely unread (in Greek) and at the same time familiar, friendly, even cosy perhaps, in a way that is unlike most other “classics”.

Victoria Moul, Bifold authority: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

In the years since his death, no age of English poetry has been without its tributes to Shakespeare. Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” written in 1616, the year Shakespeare died, graced the prefactory material in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and John Milton’s “On Shakespeare. 1630” appeared in the 1632 Second Folio — which is praise from a pair of poets hard to match. And on the tradition goes to the 21st century with, for example, Wendy Cope’s lighthearted 2016 “Shakespeare at School.”

The centuries between saw plenty of work in this line, but, curiously, only Today’s Poem, “Shakespeare,” seems much anthologized — a sonnet written in his twenties, which appeared in his first collection, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, in 1849.

I haven’t managed to decide what I think of [Matthew] Arnold’s poetry. His reputation declined in the 20th century, partly with the rise of awareness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but the 1939 study of Arnold by Lionel Trilling, a critic I admire, took the poetry seriously, as I have grown to suspect we must. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we have looked previously at only two of his poems, “Dover Beach” and the strangely constructed “Growing Old.” And I find, in my teaching and lecturing, that “Dover Beach” comes easily to mind, easily to hand as a way to convey the sense of something lost in the rise of modernity — something that large swathes of 19th- and 20th-century artists felt.

The argument of the poem is that Shakespeare stands alone, and the tremendous opening line, expressing that thought — “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” — is probably why the poem joined the standards of English verse.

(A test I use for literary reference is whether P.G. Wodehouse would use it for comedy, with an expectation that his readers wouldn’t scratch their heads. And sure enough, it appears in such stories as “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald”: “At imitating a hen laying an egg he was admittedly a master. His fame in that one respect had spread all over the West-end of London. ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free,’ was the verdict of London’s gilded youth on Archibald Mulliner when considered purely in the light of a man who could imitate a hen laying an egg. ‘Mulliner,’ they said to one another, ‘may be a pretty total loss in many ways, but he can imitate a hen laying an egg.’”)

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Shakespeare

In “Material Witness” Edward Ragg turns his forensic eye towards material details often overlooked or taken for granted, e.g. rock formations, coral reefs, bower birds, an old photo, and what these artefacts might show or reveal. The specific details of a small starting point widens out to a relationship, family history or connection to the natural world, giving an universal appeal to a personal starting point.

In “The Tap Dancer”, a photo of a dancer “with a Nazi stamp on the back” is revealed to be the poem’s speaker’s mother.

“My father recalled bright-faced GIs breakfasting.
So enthusiastically polite. How they’d throw kids
sweets from their jeeps (candy they called them)
before most girls and boys knew to brush their teeth.
My father wept for those pearl toothed men until
his death. My mother remembered tap dancing
and often said: I was always so lucky, so lucky.”

The poem shows the different attitudes towards the war. The father remembering candy thrown at children from soldiers facing going to war. For him, the war is a tragedy of these men who never returned. The mother, the girl in the photo, focuses on memories of tap dancing. She is not being flippant, however, as she considers herself fortunate to survive. Her attitude is one of fortitude and survival. The war is something she’s put behind her.

Emma Lee, “Material Witness” Edward Ragg (Cinnamon Press) – book review

Taken as a whole, Mountains that See in the Dark is a striking collection in which the austerity of the desert becomes a means of exploring emotional depth, endurance, and renewal. [Regine] Ebner’s imagist precision allows her to distil large truths into brief, resonant poems, revealing a world in which beauty and hardship are inseparable, and in which hope persists even in the harshest conditions. The collection confirms her as a poet of remarkable economy and insight, one whose work transforms the physical landscape into a profound meditation on what it means to survive, to love, and to begin again.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Mountains that See in the Dark’

I was having one of those dumb human hissy fits wherein one believes she will never again encounter another example of a beloved thing, i.e. a poem that seems to have been written specifically for her, when, lo and behold, Bob Hicok’s latest, Breathe, appeared unbidden in my mailbox last Saturday, courtesy of one of those remarkable human treasures, i.e. a friend who doesn’t actually know what is wrong with you yet seems to know the cure. These are the third and fourth Bob Hicok poems to appear in this publication, so I guess it qualifies now as a Bob Hicok appreciation vehicle, and that’s fine with me, especially since Breathe contains its own Gerald Stern appreciation vehicle in “A little wave of my hand goodbye,” my own love of that poet being decidedly well–established. Ideally those warblings have also made Gerald Stern one of your favourite poets, but just in case: “Logic” felt to me like a perfect Hicok poem, one you need not possess any particular poetic affection/affliction to appreciate.

Vanessa Stauffer, Two poems by Bob Hicok

I love the specificity of the blue tits, Lookout Hill (the one in Greenwich?), wild thyme, the Sphinx moth, the evening primroses, the turtledoves – it’s exemplary in how these are deployed without seeming in any way fake or outlandish.

I love, too, how ‘a rich lentil stew’ will replace ‘the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse’ (and not just because I haven’t eaten meat since 1982). My 1978 edition of the Collins Concise English Dictionary gives ‘leavings’ as an alternative for ‘leftovers’, but I suspect it’s an anachronism now – I wonder if it’s still used in Wombwell/Barnsley where Sue is from, though despite the places’ close proximity, my Sheffield-native wife Lyn says she’s never heard it. Either way, it looks and sounds just right, doesn’t it? When I attended ‘Poetry from Art sessions at Tate Modern from 2008 to c.2014, Pascale Petit exhorted participants to ‘use all the senses’, and that’s certainly what Sue did in this poem.

Above all, I adore how Sue ends the poem so beautifully, with ‘the crooning turtledoves’ – one of our most extinction-threatened bird species – and invites us readers to hear their song instead of the tomcats on their night-time prowl.

Matthew Paul, On Sue Riley’s ‘Cats’ Meat Man’

14 May is #dylanday, a day to remember Dylan Thomas. I am posting this as part of a Facebook celebration initiated by Lidia Chiarelli of Immagine e Poesia. 

Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at The Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May 1953.

Please find below some lines from my poem in memory of the poet. My poem was first published in Places within Reach (2006), an anthology from Indigo Dreams Press, edited by Ronnie Goodyer.

Tycoch

Tall rows of rainbow tulips line these ways
where poets, lovers, dreamers stoop to gaze
upon the mirror of the pool. A sudden spark
shakes up the surface like a burning coal.
We jump, and vow to leave before the night
sweeps down from Kilvey Hill: a rook in flight
spreads shadows on the bay and bares its soul.
We climb the hill where ponies used to roam
and reach at last the red, red walls of home.

Caroline Gill, 14 May is #dylanday

I promised a review of Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poetica, which, as the title promises, is a lot of poems about poetry—kind of a slim volume, not that many poems, and an unexpected large chunk of prose in the middle, talking about attending antifascist rallies where violence breaks out, being threatened by the ex of a friend with gun violence at her workplace and consequently going to the shooting range and thinking about a bulletproof vest—probably the most interesting part of the book. Juliana is seven years older than me but still in my age group (Gen X), started blogging and such around the same time I did, lived a large part of her life in Ohio (which I also did), and she’s a feminist who struggles with what that means. She also has some privileges—a lot of famous writer friends and a steady paying fancy academic job—that I don’t have, which she makes pretty clear in her acknowledgements, all ten pages of them (!). Is it worth reading? Probably. Is the best book of poetry I read in the last year? Absolutely not. (I would give it to Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal, such a searing book about dying of ALS, or Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic, such an intensely intelligent meditation on mushrooms and death. I think the people that choose the Pulitzer Prize are probably picking friends from their own cohort of academics, not reading too far outside their comfort zones, and boy, do they love poems about poetry. (Remember Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets also had a lot of poetry talk, though her style is pretty different than Spahr’s.) I absolutely adored Marie Howe’s Pulitzer winning New and Selected Poems, which had a totally different flavor, which won the year before, so I guess it just varies by year. If I was a judge, I would have probably fought for a different book, but no one has asked me yet, LOL.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Personality and Poetry, Hummingbirds and Goldfinches and Butterflies, Surviving Root Canals, and Melancholy Seasons

This sort of critique has been around forever: https://themagialipoetryshow.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-pool-of-poetic-mediocrity. I recall such chat when I was 20 years old and all poetry was print; there was much to-do about whether being a poet associated with a university was the only way to be taken seriously or at any rate recognized at all. There were complaints that celebrities got books published while excellent un-famous writers struggled, waiting for rejections by SASE*. Poets often complained of cliques, of infighting and pettiness. There was a certain railing against mediocre free verse and “overly-confessional” poetry; writers threw barbs at those deemed too political or not political enough, or too feminist or not feminist enough, or writing that was deemed too formal for contemporary times. Recognition was a term I heard often in the 1980s. It was what mattered, apparently. Needless to say, I did not attain it. I think, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.

Author Ali Whitelock’s points are not all off the mark, in fact; who has not suffered through listening to some embarrassingly bad (well, we have to learn somehow) or, worse yet, egotistical/narcissistic readers at open mikes? All I can say for myself is that when I was starting out I recognized my work was not brilliant–but I needed the practice and tried not to overstay my welcome on stage. Even as a featured reader, I tended not to fill the time allotted. Granted, it helps that I don’t write epics! But I’ve heard these criticisms of open mike readings and about gate-keeping literary magazine editors for decades, and also the charge that poets are aiming more for recognition (today read: “likes”) than for highly-crafted work. And also the claim that there’s a sudden proliferation of “half-arsed poetry” in the world. Nope. Not sudden or new.

Whitelock’s essay is likely meant to be a bit provocative. Otherwise why use such freighted language, or make sarcastic remarks like “Poetry, as we all know, is competitive…”? And her bullet points about how to know when you’ve achieved a poem worth publishing–Eh. Not objective or even particularly actionable, and what if the writer really feels that her mediocre poem meets those points, even if few others agree? Taste, after all, is personal. However, I do like what she says about writing poems: “The poem itself – and the process whereby it is achieved – is the reward. Not the likes, not the prizes, not the comments – true, false or otherwise.” I’m definitely into the process. “Likes” on social media are nice, I suppose, but they tend not to mean much.

Ann E. Michael, Complaints, critiques

A poem that disappears. A poem you can hold. In this self-interview, writer and artist Josh Medsker opens up about his evolving practice and the intimate, tactile world of his Container Poems—art objects built around a single emotional or thematic thread. As he puts it, each one is “an art object built around a theme — every element of the piece supports that theme,” a definition that becomes richer the deeper you go into his process.

What makes this conversation especially compelling is how it mirrors the work itself: personal, reflective, and rooted in relationship. Medsker traces the surprising connections between his Disappearing Poems and these new physical pieces, exploring how ephemerality and permanence can answer the same artistic question from opposite directions.

This guest post dives into the origins of the project, the emotional labor behind each object, and the way making physical containers has reshaped his understanding of what a poem is—not just text, but an experience.

Trish Hopkinson, Inside the Box: A Self-Interview with Josh Medsker on Container Poems

Prose, a punch in the face, a feather in the armpit, a snake that sticks its tail in one of its ears so it doesn’t hear too much music. I want my prose to be as tricksterish, as surprising, as osmotic as is my experience of the world, not just from A to B, but all points between and also those points that are not on that line. I want my prose to be as quicksilver as a mind and as tawdry or broke, as rich and as broken, as plain spoken or baroque. A passage of prose could be a various as what might happen from morning until night. I wish my prose to be as vivid and changeable as weather, as a drive through a city, sometimes with your eyes closed, sometimes with everyone else’s eyes closed.

Gary Barwin, Prose like a feather in face, a snake in the armpit

Two fairly different haiku of mine, both published by Tinywords over the last few days. I consider myself blessed with good fortune! That sort of thing doesn’t happen often with my poems and there are often long periods when I get nothing but rejections. That’s good too though – all part of the process. And polishing them up to send them out is also a necessary part of it too. I’m always learning new things, about the craft and myself, which is what keeps me interested.

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

Some of my early poems (in books now out of print, in online magazines that have disappeared into the ether) contended with my feelings about the general rebelliousness of our then-college-age children. Those feelings are now part of the deep past, but I can easily recall the self-questioning of that time, which lies behind this poem and others like it. […]

What business did I have
aiming the star-eyed young at physics departments,
at nights in mountain observatories
listening for beings who might not even have breath,
when all I want from the night
is whatever the psalmist heard, that shout of glory?

I know this much: the cosmos
is flying apart. The old drift off the signal.
The children have reached lightspeed.
The galaxies move away
in search of work in a more exciting city.

Maryann Corbett, Failing Astronomy

I’m sitting in a Bentley on Brick Lane eating a bagel from a brown paper bag. I’ve always been more of a brown paper bag kind of a guy than a Bentley man. You’d probably say I live a brown paper bag life. I would reply that you’re more likely to find poetry in a brown paper bag than in a Bentley. I may be wrong. I’m generally wrong. Sometimes I actually like being wrong. I think that’s my problem. I try to convince myself that wrong is where the art is. Isn’t that where you’ll find it? At the wrong side of town. In the wrong bar. At the wrong time. With the wrong people.

We’ve just been sitting in the right kind of place with the right kind of people. All of the beautiful, young and buzzing, hip and hopeful East London creatives. This place even has a sober open mic night. I’m sober but the idea of a sober open mic night brings me out in hives. Is that wrong? “Ya know what?” I say to Rob, “If there’s anything that’d make me want to pick up a drink, it’d probably be going to a sober open mic night.” And I know that’s wrong.

What I’m doing right know feels wrong. Rob has ‘got me in a room’ with a guy who might be able to help me navigate away from a brown paper bag existence and I’m pitching (I think I’m pitching) a poetry project. I’m pitching a poetry project to a guy who’s also done everything wrong but ended up with a Bentley. I need to qualify this: There’s a difference here between wrong and bad. He’s not done bad things (I try hard not to do bad things too). What I mean is wrong, as in being told “there’s no way that’ll work” and trying it or hearing “Oh, you can’t do it like that” and doing it.

Wrong is e.e. cummings dropping his caps, is Joyce abandoning commas and fullstops in a novel, is Kit Marlowe busting free from tight rhymes into blank verse then passing the mic over to Shakespeare. OK so Marlowe did a bunch of bad things too but all that other shit is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s good. It’s wrong and it keeps poetry alive and vital. It’s wrong to break the rules. But it isn’t bad.

Jan Noble, Nº64 What the hell is wrong with you?

I’m not a natural runner, but I have become a habitual one. I like the almost weekly feeling of surprise I experience when I turn up at 9am to the start of a run (not a race) with 100s of other participants. Finishing, however, is never a surprise because I’ve made that my only goal. Were I more of a risk-taker, more hare and less tortoise (to borrow from Aesop), I might run faster earlier, but then I might have to give up (so my thinking goes) and nap en route. As soon as I reach the home stretch, especially when I can see the finish flag, I feel confident and pick up speed. 

I’ve had several other finish lines to cross this week. These finishes have included the usual ones for teaching sessions at work; a printing deadline for the 2nd edition of a poetry collection I’ve edited for a friend (more on this soon); my own poetry submission for a collaborative exhibition in Girona in the autumn (more on this soon); a mid-May aim to get sweet corn planted in the new badger-proof section of my allotment (more on this now): [photo]

This flurry of finishes has been satisfying but also perturbing- maybe my motivation levels are shallow, and it’s only a deadline which results in completion?

But reflecting further on what I’ve learned from all those Parkruns leads me to think a little differently. I had, after all, to do the first 199 in order to complete the 200th. Slow and steady. The sight of the finish each time has been the measurement I need to judge the equation between the resources at my disposal and the task in hand. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sprint to the Finish

 I don’t think my desk or study has been messier. I keep meaning to tidy it up, make a plan, figure out what to do with the accumulation of books. And I will but I wonder if subconsciously the books that are piling up are an encouragement, a comfort. There are all these amazing books still being written that I am excited to read. I feel like I need to read them! So the books are shoring me up a little against despair.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Just Title This Random Notes and See What Happens

this desire to just be
alone
with all these poems
swept away again and again 
by the bigger poem of my life

Tom Clausen, matrix

Little Woolden stole my heart. Follow the sat nav, and it might take you through a network of uneven roads, their surfaces alarmingly cambered by the old bog which sinks below them, or up a small, rough track, to an unmarked space for around 6 cars, and a burnt-out portaloo. Or walk there from Caddishead Library, down the dusty Old Moss Road, through wide open landscapes of wheat, low hills on the far horizon.

This is Greater Manchester, and the city centre is just ten miles away, but it feels like a different country. Directions to some of the smaller flashes, or areas of restored bog might read like follow the road through the estate, down the cul-de-sac, park up by the old folk’s home and take the path on your left. I’d walk down paths only trodden by dog walkers and find myself transported from the sort of depressed Northern towns I grew up in, to a sea of cotton grass, or a stretch of shimmering water where you might hear a nightingale sing.

I think magic comes in many forms. Waking to a snowy day, falling in love, stars. When I started my residency in 2021, I realized that Lancashire was full of secret doors, tucked down cul-de-sacs, next to schools, nursing homes, takeaways, off the main road, round the back of the estate. Gateways and tracks too often go unnoticed, but if you pass through them, you enter a different world and you leave transformed.

These words are taken from an audio trail I wrote as part of my efforts to open those secret doors so that more people can enter. Because if you’ve heard of Wigan in the last week, it’s probably because 24 of the 25 council seats up for election were taken by Reform. If you’ve heard of Leigh in recent years, it might be the murder of Brianna Ghey. And in coming weeks, the old cotton-and-coal town of Ashton-in-Makerfield will be the site of frantic campaigning and speculation as Andy Burnham seeks election in a local struggle that might decide the next PM.

But my concern is not party politics: it’s the bog. The bogs held my grief and my fear, and the surface of the flashes shone with hope. Call me obsessed, call me naïve (I’ve been called a whole lot worse) but if everyone felt a connection with the live green singing world around them, many of our divisions would melt away. As part of my residency, I took groups of young carers, asylum seekers, schools groups, onto those bogs. For a short time, what mattered most was how the ground shook when we jumped on it together, how the sky told the story of our loss, whether we had biscuits. How a stick could be a wand, how stones were precious.

When we connect with the land around us, we belong. When we listen to a bird, we are still, we are together, the environment is present to us in a living, singing form. It matters, and we matter within it. When you are digging, or cooking, or carrying a heavy load, difference melts away. When you are picking litter, or planting cottongrass, you start to see the land, and it sees you. When we are outside, or in the warm shared spaces after walking or work, there is air and light enough for all our stories.

The work of connecting everyone to our land is slow, sometimes so slow it looks like nothing. It looks like a cup of tea outside, or shared food. It looks like walking slowly so someone can catch up. It looks like teenagers swimming in Pennington Flash on a hot day. It looks like what we need to do, regardless of whatever we see it as success. It looks like light on the water. It looks like hope.

Clare Shaw, BOGS AGAINST FASCISM

after the rain
sunshine dripping
from the fig tree

Jim Young [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, What Poetry Can and Cannot Do:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Mellor, It all seems to be about trees …

I can stay in my chair

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

Rachel Barenblat, Listen

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Participating Joyfully in the Sorrows of the World

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, UNDER A BLANKET

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Winter bongos

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, How come, Maecenas?

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, January Reading Diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, The Matter with Wales: Two Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maureen Doallas, Joseph Bathanti’s ‘Concertina’

squeaky snow
nothing more to say
to myself

Tom Clausen, antler shed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, Eavan Boland’s Eurydice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties

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

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

There are flowers that don’t recognize boundaries.

Luisa A. Igloria, Everyday Ciphers

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

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

Mat Riches, Harry the Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Neilson, Auden’s ‘Imaginary Friends’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this argument only goes so far. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a link to Rochallyi’s complete article.

JoAnne Growney, Vector Poetry

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

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

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

Crimminy.

There has to be a better way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Skow, Walther Funk Interviewed at Nuremberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, Tell me, train-sound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m coming with you,” Eli would say.

“No, you’re not. You have to stay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “Elegy for Richard”

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, February update

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

“Jayanta Mahapatra never did anything worthwhile’

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the abattoir letters

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

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

Sometimes in sleep, you see your other half.

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

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

before all those broken mirrors ago.

Rich Ferguson, Somewhere in the World

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Weather and Writing Prompts

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

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

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

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

Robin Gow, dog toy

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Unlovely drafts

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

Sarah Lada, Vernalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

how every line would beat a distinct pulse of love.

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

believing it’s a nest of grenades.

Rich Ferguson, The Inner Workings Revisited

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Love Songs

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

PF Anderson, Sunslant

The ziplock of summer fruit is emptied.

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Summer Zipped

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Chaos Gardening

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

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

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

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

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

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

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

Anthony Wilson, There was a door

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, Louise Glück: a poet of precision

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

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

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I See Myself Home

the shrivelled plums
showing the summer sunshine
their deep blue hearts

Jim Young [no title]

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

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

Jem Wikeley, Some reviews I didn’t write

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

Robin Gow, street sweeper

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

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

Rilke wrote about
living the questions

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

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

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

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Not Knowing

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

blue note scale model of her heart

David McKee
whiptail 7

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

Julie Mellor, Blue

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Blue

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, How love sustains us

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

TEXACO and
ESSO

ESSO and
BP

BP and
SHELL

the common
smell

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

in each other.

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

Edmund Prestwich, Imtiaz Dharker, Shadow Reader – review

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

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

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

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

Promenadology

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

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

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

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

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

(from ‘Phenology’)

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

Billy Mills, August 2025: A SoundEye Review Special

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

Lesley Harrison, Writing the Last Word

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, Michael Freiling

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

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

rob mclennan, Grace Nissan, The Utopians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Crane, 20 years since Katrina

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2025

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

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

Ruth Lexton, The Reckoning of Salt

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

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

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

Roy Marshall, Light Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, COBWEBS BLOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Ceremonial

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Chimney swifts on Labour Day

次の世のしづけさにある黄菊かな　浅井一志

tsugi no yo no shizukesa ni aru kigiku kana

            in the tranquility

            of the next world

            yellow chrysanthemums…

                                                            Hitoshi Asai 

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

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

This week: industrious bees, birds made of text, the rhizodont, International Pineapple Day, and much more. Enjoy.

Despite being long removed from my teenage years, I still think of summer as a time of transition or growth. You return to school in the fall to find out who got taller, weirder, or cooler; what new experiences people had, or friends they made or lost. This summer, I’ve decided instead of discovering something new, I would reclaim something lost. And so, after 28 years, since I first left home for college, I have picked up my flute again.

Through high school, despite knowing that I had no long-term musical ambitions, I was quite serious about it and performed with the local college flute choir until I graduated. (I even have a flute performance to thank for connecting me with my now husband.) I am not sure exactly why I stopped playing, other than my singular focus and obsession with becoming a writer. But, as I remember it, I put my flute away after my senior year ended, and it sat in its case, moving with me from city to city and home to home for decades. Ocassionally, my parents or in-laws would ask if I ever planned to play again, and I have always thought that I would, perhaps in some old lady orchestra. Yet still, my flute sat on the bottom shelf in the basement.

And then, earlier this spring, I had the opportunity to see contemporary dance legend Twyla Tharp’s newest work, which is set to music from Philip Glass that features the flute extensively. I left the performance wondering—what did my middle-aged brain remember, and could I be nearing a tipping point where, if I don’t start to reclaim what it remembers, I might lose it completely?

And so, a few weeks later, on a night when I had the house completely to myself and thus could embarrass myself privately, I went down to the basement and dug out my flute and all the sheet music I could find. Nervously, I assembled my flute and brought it to my lips, which to my great surprise instinctively formed an embouchure. I then gathered my yoga breath and put my fingers where I thought they might go to play a D. And what do you know? It made the sound I remembered, vibrato and all.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Who will you be at the end of the summer?

I’m trying out my boundaries and saying yes to more opportunities. Who knows, maybe I’ll even teach again? I don’t want to live my life in fear anymore, especially when the world is so uncertain around us. I can’t wave a magic wand and make everything better, but I can stop letting fear make my decisions.

So, I am starting a new class on essay writing, and I may try to put together a manuscript of essays. I may even try my hand at YA fiction after many years of avoiding it.

It starts inside us. If we are afraid of everything, we will not act in the way that’s probably the best for our lives. And our lives are so short! If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been talking about the deaths of two friends in the last year. It made me realize that no matter how safe, how good, how many right things you do, you really can’t protect yourself, and in that case, why not: write the authentic truth about your life? Venture further out into areas that might not be exactly the best for your disability or food allergies but might be an excellent way to connect with a new community of writers? Why not try walking a little further every day in the lavender farm (or your local trail,) because maybe right now is the best my body will ever be? Why not stand up to bullies in politics, or befriend someone who is a little different form you, or read whatever books you like no matter who says they’re okay/appropriate? If I am a poet, why can’t I also write essays or fiction? Lots of my writer friends do this already. This made me think about the cages we put ourselves into, the prisons that are our routines or relationships that hurt us or a country that doesn’t value us, or people that don’t treat us with respect. Why not reach farther, try a little bit harder, face more risk?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New poems in Flare, Upcoming Appearances: Nature Writing Conference, Not Being Fearful, More Lavender and Hummingbirds

i tell my doctor that i don’t want him
recording any more information about me
being trans. i think of a running bible of
my body. what kinds of notes has he taken
over the years? did he note
when i first grew a full beard? did he record
the times i came in a dress & the times
i did not. i look up diy hormones.
one website has a list of rituals.
go out to the forest & perform one & feel
nothing has changed. what level of belief
do you need for a gender ritual to take?

Robin Gow, 6/29

Michigan “writer, editor, educator, dancer, and, more importantly, learner” Leigh Sugar’s full-length poetry debut is Freeland (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), a collection that opens with the information that “Freeland, Michigan is home to the Saginaw Correctional Facility, a Michigan state prison.” Framed as “an impossible love story,” Freeland “examines the unbreakable bond between the author and an incarcerated writer.” As the press release continues: “Drawing critical connections between personal and family history, the Jewish diaspora, and the racial imaginary of whiteness, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.”

I’m intrigued by the narrative tensions that Sugar achieves, layering multiple story-elements across carved, crafted lines, allowing the multiple narrative threads an interplay, writing on loss, love, grief and language, wrapping in threads of family story, poetics and how best one might articulate across such potentially vast distances. As she writes as part of the extended sequence “FREELAND: AN ERASURE”: “Not even Eliot or Pound approach the melancholy weapon oof the punitive form. // In profile, I separate from this justice. // Tattoo economy pens my skin into a letter. // Dear anyone.” Freeland exists as an interesting counterpoint to other contemporary literary titles that have explored the prison system, whether Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng writing her father through the poetry collection Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here], Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen’s This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2017), or the collaborative study between photographer Deborah Luster and the late American poet C.D. Wright, One Big Self: an investigation (Lost Roads, 2003; Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007) [see my review of such here]. Sugar centres her specifics around the abstract of human space and interaction, connection and disconnection, composing a lyric of deeply-crafted lines that braid lived experience, whether by the narrator or her “beloved,” across a poetics around human connection, even and especially amid such punitive disruption. “A smile,” she writes, to open the poem “REPRESSION,” “when the officer commands I stop // touching you. The space between shame // and pleasure shorter than the scythe- // shaped stretch of shoulder // revealed when my shirtsleeve slips off // the me whose swift hands leave your neck to right the slip // then return to my own lap. I sag, // guilty, still, still under the camera.”

rob mclennan, Leigh Sugar, Freeland

I can’t think of two busy places that are more different. Even in the crowded, electric areas of Tokyo, even in Shibuya with its famous scramble, there was a sort of order, a vibe that was polite and even hushed in the train stations and on the streets. Nashville, on the other hand, was a cacophony. Neon signs announcing celebrity bars flanked both sides of Broadway. Each one had a band playing and, although I’m sure the bands could be distinctly heard inside the bars, outside on the sidewalk, it was an assault of drums and chords. Every inch of real estate around the Country Hall of Fame and the Ryman was filled with restaurants and retail stores, and there were apartment complexes with more retail spaces under construction everywhere we turned.

It made me consider how some words embody different meanings. Both of these places are tourist destinations and therefore are busy. Synonyms for busy fall into both negative and positive connotations. Negative? Strenuous, hectic, tiring, swarming, teeming. More positive? Energetic, active, lively, bustling, vibrant, buzzy. A few that could be either?Astir, thronging, eventful, crowded. (I just re-read what I wrote up above, and —order, vibe and hushed versus cacophony and assault — it’s pretty clear which experience of busy I preferred.) But even the most accurate words sometimes aren’t enough.

This is part of the difficulty of writing about a place that you do not claim as your own. Your biases come through in language, even when you are trying to simply convey, perhaps, a narrative or a description that struck you in your travels. I have traveled a lot, and well-meaning people always say, “It must give you so much to write about!” Not really. I find that I struggle to write in a meaningful way about travel much of the time. I started three pieces of writing while in Japan and decided to do what I do at home—let something in my surroundings serve as an entry point to a bigger idea or theme rather than to write directly about the experience of traveling. We’ll see how it works.

Donna Vorreyer, travelogue, part 2

A couple of weeks ago I did a reading with Peter Kenny at at Arundel Arts Junction, a lovely eclectic event which also included a comic improv act, jazz for keyboard and sax, a photography presentation and more – it’s all happening in Arundel, people!

Peter and I are doing another joint reading at In-Words this coming Tuesday 24th June from 7.30 at West Greenwich Library, together with fellow Telltale Poet Sarah Barnsley. As well as reading our poems we’ll also be chatting & taking questions about Telltale Press. It’s free, and there are refreshments – come if you can!

Yesterday I was reading in the home of a very good friend. She basically asked me to come and talk about the book, and read a few poems, for a group of her friends. Susan’s enthusiasm and unwavering support for my work are both astonishing. So there I was with a small group of women, telling them a bit about the book, reading some of the poems and answering questions. It was a lovely intimate event. And I sold ten books! Much gratitude to Susan.

Robin Houghton, Book promo: readings, reviews, articles… plus other stuff

Bradford Literature Festival is my favourite festival. It’s immense – massive enough to have its own road signs – but at the same time it makes Bradford into a friendly literature village, where everyone knows everyone, including some of the biggest brightest stars in literature. Plus they have the best Green Room with the best buffet, and a free-to-passholders restaurant with the greatest curry and jugs of lassi.

The first time I worked at the festival, I sat in that restaurant filling my face and chatting to a lovely friendly woman. Eventually, I asked her name, and what she was doing at the festival – to my mortification she turned out to be the festival founder and director, Syima Aslam. Hundreds of events across the city, and an education and outreach programme running throughout the year – but she still has the time and grace to chat.

All of which is to say, that when they invite me to run discussion panels, I always agree.

Clare Shaw, Did The Great Gatsby change your life?

Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing. […]

On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures.

Matthew Paul, May and June reading

Sarah Imrisek and I exhibited an interactive video work (BIRD FICTION) at the recent Hamilton Arts Week. I wrote music and poems and Sarah worked her visual and programming wizardry and made a very cool and beautiful projection that responded to the audience’s hand movements.

Our installation also included the video that I’m sharing here. It takes a text about Hamilton, Ontario that I’ve posted below and turns it into the flight of flying birds—the birds are made of text. If you don’t want to watch the entire thing, you can watch a bit and then skip forward to past halfway where the way the birds are made of text changes.

Gary Barwin, THE SKY ABOVE HAMILTON, ONTARIO WAS EMPTY

Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.

I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.

It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.

Beverley Bie Brahic, California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025

All lines of the poem arrive, perfect in itself
except that it needs to be written. The gestalt
in a swift and complete vision. Start. Where.
So many words crowd the mouth. Also tongue-tied.

Jill Pearlman, USHA

All poets/writers periodically hit a moment where things stall: you finish something, a poem, a novel, a piece of writing that’s taken as much energy as you can give it, and you sit back and it feels as if there’s no more to be done, nothing else to be dragged out of the mind and body and put into words.

When it happens to me, as it just has, I tend to read, explore the work of others more than usual, or just get on with life – the stuff without which I couldn’t write anything useful anyway. […]

The meadow is full of wild flowers, so I’ve kept the mowing to a minimum, just a strip by the blackberry hedge bordering the woods where the family can put their tents when they want to camp there. We also have a young male deer who has taken to using the cover as a suitable place to rest. Unfortunately, his self-preservation instincts mean if he spots us he jumps up and tears off in, it seems, any old direction, bounding through the pens where the bees and hens live. Still, he’s welcome for as long as he chooses to stay. As usual, there are always a host of jobs to do in the woods now the bluebells and orchids are over. The hide/ tree house needs to be repaired after some stray miscreants had fun trying to wreck it but I need one of my son-in-laws’ help with that. So much to do!

Apart from that, oh yes, poetry. I read a couple of dull books by what the Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski called, in his poem Potato Thief, ‘cardboard cut-out poets’. Saarikoski interests me because he made enough noise to be famous young, was both a radical, political participant and a chameleon-like figure who played both the hero and anti-hero as he drank and partied his way through four marriages, and perhaps inevitably, died young. I suppose I admire poets who are confident enough socially to try to make a difference. I can only attempt to make a small difference, through the writing of poetry, given that I struggle more and more these days to speak when faced by groups of people (football excepted, but the vocal stuff I indulge in then is more often than not confined to howls of blue-and-white-striped dismay at the latest crazy, wrong, anti-Albion decision by an official…)

I also enjoyed a short poem called Temptation by the Romanian poet Nina Cassian in my ‘anthology of the moment’ from 2010, The Ecco Anthology Of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris of Words Without Borders. It’s fulfilling to explore its 500-plus pages and follow up on the poets I like. I have an anthology of Romanian poetry but Cassian isn’t in there, so I shall go off in search of more of her work.

Writing poems will come again, but not yet.

Bob Mee, OK, SO WHAT NOW?

I’ve had a mighty struggle this past few weeks to do even a minimum of writing (determined to catch up this week…we will see, and, after that, to begin blogging again). Reading obsessively about dementia, getting lost in political news…these things do not seem especially helpful to me.

On the other hand, reading poetry, and reading and listening to poets and creatives about their work is one of my go-to solaces. So here are two things. The first was shared by my good friend Francine, and I’m amazed at the prescience of this 2011 interview with Bill Moyers, who died last week at age 91. Though the news is dire, it’s good to know that such people have been walking this trail before us. It gives me hope.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/27/rip_bill_moyers

I’m also reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön — given to me by my friend Therese — and I highly recommend it.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. (p. 7)

By “concretize,” I think the author means, don’t grasp, don’t turn it into thoughts or anything you can hold on to. Let it be as amorphous as it is. Just be with all of it.

The third source is the incomparable PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA from Poetry Unbound. Clicking on his name should take you straight to his most recent substack. Here are a few lines toward the end of Dunya Mikhail’s poem, which Padraig shares in full:

I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm…

I don’t know why either, but when I’m outside, walking, at 6 a.m., I listen for them just the same.

Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading

This morning, I was walking and texting a friend who has been mostly homebound recovering from hip replacement surgery.  We talked about 19th century writers who wrote in bed and wondered how they could do that.  We talked about 19th century approaches to dental care.

But most important, we talked about the best ways to remain human in an age of AI and how to create projects for students that keep them embodied–and to create assignments that are more cheating resistant.  I talked about Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and got the idea of having students compare them to Thoreau’s Walden Pond journal.  I want them also to keep a journal to see what it’s like and then write about it all.

It was a good text exchange.  Of course, we’re looking forward to a time when we can meet face to face, but that’s not this summer.  I think it’s funny that we were texting about 19th century writers who kept painstaking journals.  There might be a seed of a poem there.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sunrise Walks and Texts and Teaching Ideas

The ‘rhizodont’ which provides the title for Katrina Porteous’ fourth collection (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) is not some niche root-canal dental work, but a large predatory species of fish, which became extinct 310 million years ago. It’s thought to be the first creature to transition from water to land and hence the ancestor of all four-limbed vertebrates (including humans). The poems here are divided into two superficially very separate books (titled ‘Carboniferous’ and ‘Invisible Everywhere’) but what Porteous insists holds them together is her exploration of this notion of transition. As ‘#rhizodont’ puts it, ‘We’re all on a journey’, and the ambition of this book touches upon transformations various: geological, natural, industrial, cultural (and linguistic) and technological. There can be no faulting the ambition of this and there are many fine poems, though Porteous insists on Notes explaining a great deal of what she is doing/writing about which gives the whole a rather teacherly quality that will divide her readership. […]

The longer ‘Carboniferous’ section is loosely glued together by a geographical journey from the former coalmining communities of East Durham, moving up the Northumberland coast to Holy Island. This is familiar territory, important to Porteous’ earlier collections, and she again writes well (with great local knowledge) of the geological conditions that have eventually given rise to the important fishing and mining industries (and cultural communities) in the area. Both industries are now in decline and in ‘A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge’, while the older folk still use ‘old words’ (like stobbie, skyemmie, and gowdspink), the younger generation ‘checks in with Insta before school’. This also illustrates Porteous’ belief that the post-war generations’ transition ‘from analogue to digital technologies’ is a particularly dividing and challenging shift such that ‘the analogue island we lived on’, will seem as incomprehensible as ‘Latin and Greek’ to future generations (‘Hermeneutics’).

Martyn Crucefix, Katrina Porteous’ most recent Bloodaxe collection, ‘Rhizodont’, reviewed.

I think sometimes about how every “period” we perceive in history was a bunch of people’s present. How this period we are in will be parsed by some future historians who will be able to see a larger trajectory of time and circumstance that we cannot see, we here, inside this moving vessel of the present-that-will-be-history. Already people are positing just how we ended up here, in these situations we find ourselves in. But we cannot see what happens next, so can only understand the story up until now. Some of us will die without seeing how the next bit transpires — whenever it is, that next bit. We may not even understand it’s happening until afterward. When we look around and think wow, that was a wild ride. But we’ll, of course, also be caught up in the present of that present, unable to see how that unfolds. Here in this present, it scares me to read about other period in history and how long it takes them to shift to something else. Or I suppose it depends on the nature of the “something else.” Things could get worse. Things could get better. Only that bastard, time, will tell.

The thing is: we’re all in this together, we present-dwellers. I have a photo of my mother in Africa. The tour bus has gotten mired in mud or something, and she and the guides and some of the other old ladies on the trip are all muscling the bus, trying to rock it from its spot. It cracks me up, this photo. But it’s spot on. One minute we’re sitting all faced forward, stewing in our juices, and the next we’ve tumbled out to shove, we strangers and friends and enemies and fellow travelers. I wish we were all shoving in the same direction, though. That’s what I wish.

I found this wonderful poem on the recent issue of 2 Rivers. I love its quirky perspective, how the poem plays with the situation it describes, and enlarges it to encompass the whole world of life.

Marilyn McCabe, into a bottomless future, a cold ocean of absolute unknowing.

The opening anaphora — “Always” — commits the poem to a time beyond time, a claim of futurity. In the second stanza, the “But” seems to undo this commitment by suggesting we can never really speak to anyone except ourselves. Words, as Bachmann sees them, are useless communicative vessels. Or else: they are things which taste doubly, as sound itself does a thing to the mind.

Reading this poem for sound rather than meaning, I thought of the Greek word diaspon, which is short for diapason chordon (“through all the strings”). Diaspon refers to harmony, or a harmonious combination of notes, and it draws meaning from the Pythagorean system, which holds that the world is a piece of harmony in which man is the full chord.

John Dryden used this word in the first stanza of “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”:

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

After providing his song with seven stanzas, Dryden concludes it with a “Grand Chorus” that binds heaven and earth, or the visible and invisible, through chorale. The poem dresses up as religiosity but I think what it does is closer to the spiritual, or that metaphysical plane Dryden occupied. The “Grand Chorus” allows sounds to interpenetrate one another, diluting the sensed distance between one and “an other” in that “last and dreadful hour,” when time itself (that “hour”) “shall devour” “this crumbling pageant”:

The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

Italic mine. How are we “tuned” towards making music that separates the seen from the felt? How is a poem “tuned”, so to speak, in order to articulate particular images or structure its desires through the deployment of rhetoric?

Alina Stefanescu, “It tastes of both.”

In Odes 4.2, Horace contrasts his small-scale, precise literary style with the grandeur of Pindar — one version of many similar statements in Latin literature of this period (also in Virgil and Propertius, for instance) about the choice between the grand style of epic and panegyric and the smaller or narrower style of elegy, lyric and epigram, associated particularly with Callimachus.

In the middle of Odes 4.2, Horace describes himself as a ‘Matine bee’:

Multa Dircaeum levat aura cycnum,
tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos
nubium tractus; ego apis Matinae
more modoque

grata carpentis thyma per laborem
plurimum circa nemus uvidique
Tiburis ripas operosa parvus
carmina fingo.
(25-32)

A great gale lifts up the Dircean swan,
O Antonius, whenever he makes for the lofty
tracts of clouds: but I, after the custom and manner
of the Matine bee,

gathering the welcome thyme by constant
labour about the grove and the banks
of the watery Tiber, though small, I craft
highly-wrought songs.

Horace’s meticulous bee is contrasted with the ‘full-flood’ style of Pindar — and of Iulus Antonius, the younger poet he’s addressing. (Although because the poem opens with a famously impressive imitation of the grand Pindaric style, Horace’s supposed disavowal is really an example of having your cake and eating it too: showing that he could do Pindaric style if he wanted to.)

Odes 4.2 was one of the single best-known Horatian odes in the seventeenth century, printed in every edition of Pindar as well as of Horace, and it is cited in pretty much every discussion, no matter how basic, of literary style. Marvell’s Garden and Hortus date probably from the mid-1650s, just exactly the time at which Cowley was writing his Pindariques and Pindaric form in both English and Latin was the height of fashion. Indeed, Cowley’s Pindaric Odes contains a partial translation of Odes 4.2. Here is Cowley’s version of the relevant passage of Odes 4.2, which he — like Marvell — makes the end of his poem (though in Horace it comes in the middle):

How th’obsequious Wind, and swelling Ayr
The Theban Swan [i.e. Pindar] does upwards bear
Into the walks of Clouds, where he does play,
And with extended Wings opens his liquid way.
Whilst, alas, my tim’erous Muse
Unambitious tracts pursues;
Does with weak unballast wings,
About the mossy Brooks and Springs;
About the Trees new-blossom’ed Heads,
About the Gardens painted Beds,
About the Fields and flowery Meads,
And all inferior beauteous theings
Like the laborious Bee,
For little drops of Honey flee,
And there with Humble Sweets contents her Industrie.

This is such a famous passage that any poem ending with the ‘industrious bee’, as Marvell’s does — a phrase in fact very close to Cowley’s ‘laborious’ — immediately recalls Horace’s poem. This matters I think for two reasons that are often underplayed in discussions of Marvell’s poem. First, because the bee stands for the poet, and a poet adopting one particular style over another; and secondly, because Horace’s poem is specifically and explicitly about how to choose a style for political praise.

Victoria Moul, Who planted Marvell’s garden?

Last week I attended a candelight memorial for slain legislative leader, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, at the Minnesota State Capitol, in St. Paul. The next day I started working on an elegy in her honor, and began thinking about the etymologies of her first and last names : “honeybee” and “gardener”. Which reminded me of one of Osip Mandelstam’s most famous poems, written in 1920… and so my elegy grew into a kind of widderruf of Mandelstam echoes.

Henry Gould, Melissa Hortman : in Memoriam

The bee is here. The spider.
The thicket is alive, and crawling.
Green with jewelweed to salve 
rashes from the thicket’s
poison ivy. Green with prickly
horsenettle, coarse pokeberry,
the brilliant, twining nightshade:
        thickets sweat poisons
        as well as fruits.

Ann E. Michael, Blackberries

Sometimes the world seems like a dark circle within a dark circle within a dark circle forever and ever, amen. I think I have a story hunger. Stories that will make sense of the things I know.

Saturday I ran on the beach. Every beach run is a memento mori. I don’t know how to explain why it makes me feel calm. The beating of the waves. The screaming birds. The dead jellyfish, birds, crabs, fish.

And the absurdity! Saturday, a pineapple was left by the tide.

Funny that being that close to all the death, brings me back to life.

Ren Powell, Story Hunger

I had no idea it was International Pineapple Day until Kate mentioned it in her LinkedIn post and I loved the serendipity of the fact there was a poem on my desk with pineapples in it. I took this along to share, and I must say that being described as “The Perfect Guest”, was a wonderful comment to tuck safely in my confidence pocket. If I hadn’t had a poem I would have taken a tin of pineapple from the cupboard and celebrated that, but the poem was just the thing for a poet coach to take along. Kate and I had a wonderful chat about poetry and coaching and it put an extra sparkle into my Friday.

The poem was on my desk because Louise Longson had invited me to be one of her guests for her poetry event ‘Last Saturday’. This invite also widened my knowledge of celebration/commemoration days and I chose to follow up on the following themes that Louise mentioned when writing to me: World Sand Dune Day, Insect Week, Armed Forces Celebration Day and Pride. It felt good to put together poems to match the different themes and try them out together in a zoom room.

Sue Finch, A GREEN CARNATION

The main activity of the day was a game of Musical Inks. We had brought our brushes from last month, various inks and large sheets of paper. We splotched and doodled (and danced) until the music stopped. We passed our sheet to the person on our left, and began again. A wonderful exercise in spontaneity and non-attachment. I love making rhythmical marks to music. When twelve large sheets had been passed around the table we had a break for lunch, which was sumptuous and exotic as usual. […]

Then the inks and brushes were packed away and we went to work with white emulsion, blanking out parts of our own and other people’s sheets. Lastly we added to our own sheets a few more marks made with sticks, grass, feathers and so on. We’ll bring books made from these sheets to our next meeting, on July 19th.

On the way home, Jane and I stopped at the Somerset Rural Life Museum to see the current exhibition, entitled Tractored by Beetles: six artists display works inspired by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Fugitives’ dedicated to the National Landscapes of the UK. It’s on until Sept 14th; do see it if you can. I love Fiona Hingston‘s work Petiole, a response to a particular woodland close to her home. I’d seen this work before, in her studio during Art Weeks. The way it was displayed in the SRLM, the archive boxes covering a table isolated in the middle of the room, gave the work the space it needed.

Ama Bolton, ABCD June 2025

What are we trying to capture in our writing? A snapshot of the moment or something of the feeling connected to an event? I ask because on finishing the piece on peat-gathering I remembered an early comment from the poet Robert Minhinnick. ‘Even in your bad poems, there’s still the grit in the wash.’ It was kind, forgiving criticism to three underwhelming poems that I proffered to him on a writing retreat in the north of Scotland. A poem potentially having grit in the wash seems a lovely idea. The expression comes from the time of handwashing clothes, when you added grit to the water and lather so that its abrasiveness would help the removal of mud or stubborn grime. The phrase taps into something else a poet might capture or preserve: not the snapshot or the view or the observable but, instead, the texture of the moment. Writing, in this gesture, becomes an attempt to make some past world touchable again.

Niall Campbell, On Writing for the Hands

Many journals, even those that charge submission fees, have fee-free (and even deadline-free) options for reviews. Quite a few will send you a selection from their list of books they’d like to have reviewed. Once you’ve proven yourself to a journal, you might become one of their regular review-writers, a position that definitely improves your visibility. In my experience, journals will respond sooner to a review submission, since they want to secure a review of a new book ahead of others. Some journals even pay for reviews.

Believe it or not, writing reviews is – yes – fun. Or, it should be. To keep it fun for me, I choose books that I enjoy. I want my review to convey that enjoyment to the reader, not turn them off from reading the book. I look at reviewing as a way to open the book for people who might enjoy it, not turn them off. I avoid the negative review whenever possible. […]

The type of review I usually write is one I call “the exploratory review.” As I wrote in “Erica Goss’s Guide to Writing Poetry Book Reviews,” this type of review “combines elements of narrative, description, and exposition. In the exploratory review, the book leads the way instead of the reviewer.” (You can get the guide free with a subscription to Sticks & Stones, which is also free.)

As critic David Ulin puts it, “In the best reviews, the book is just a starting point, which is not an argument for self-indulgence but for its opposite: the deep dive, the conversation on which all literature (and yes, book reviews are a form of literature, or should be) depends.” 

For more on these topics, see my blog post, How I Review a Poetry Collection.

I also wrote an article for the 2/3/24 issue of Funds for Writers: Expand Your Writing Practice With Book Reviews.

Happy reviewing!

Erica Goss, How to Become a Poetry Book Reviewer

I come to you on the other side of frantic and chaotic wedding planning. On the other side of a few weeks of daily poem writing feverishly to deal with the stresses of that, on a micro level, and the world around us on a macro level. While both the poems and the wedding celebration worked out well (even despite the extreme heat that forced us, very last minute, inside a bar/banquet hall for our woodland whimsigoth vibe picnic) this week has been about resetting, cleaning a chaotic apartment, and trying to get my ducks forever in a row on projects and layouts, as well as charting a path forward through the rest of the summer in terms of timelines.

And since it’s summer officially now, that only means that spooky season, the high holy months of September-November, are right around the corner. which I have many delights planned in the form of New Orleans vampire brides and dystopian robot women. But there is still some spooky left for summer in the form of cursed coastal towns and sideshow horrors in some upcoming e-zine action, so watch for those…

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I’m hoping to get a load of new drafts out of this break – it does seem to be a time when I get lots done, so fingers-crossed the notes, and scraps turn into something. I’d like 10 -15 new ideas drafted, but let’s see. Writing has to sit alongside just relaxing, reading, consuming Efes, swimming, snoozing, eating, consuming Efes, etc.

I saw Robin Houghton, Sarah Barnsley and Peter Kenny read at West Greenwich Library on Tuesday. All were excellent. it was lovely to see Robin again, and to put bodies to the voices and emails of Peter and Sarah (Thanks again to Sarah for her kind words about CtD in The Frogmore Papers).

I have to say a massive thank you to Kevin Scully and the crowd at Cowden Pound for having me three to read on Thursday just gone. It was a joy to read in such a lovely pub, with such a lovely crowd. The open mic part of the ending was exceptionally strong, and Kevin is a wonderful host. Note to self, if you want to sell books please remember to tell the audience you’ve brought some with you before the end of the reading…**Slaps forehead**

Mat Riches, I could do with an OOO (out of office)

I’m happy to (tentatively) report that my writing mojo has (shakily) returned. Maybe I needed the fallow time during the week I was bed-bound with my back to think, just think, without writing it all down. In the past week I’ve started reading and writing from Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy and started participating in Kathy Fish’s Flash Extravaganza workshop. So far, I’ve done one or the other every day.

June has been a month of changes and challenges for me, not all on the positive side, either. Reading, music, and, yes, TV have pushed me through it.

Charlotte Hamrick, June Listopia 2025

I realise I’ve not been posting many haiku recently, although I’m just about to submit some of mine to the British Haiku Society’s journal, Blithe Spirit. Contributors have also been asked to select a summer poem from the journal’s archive and I’ve chosen this one by by Matthew Paul:

BHS vol 63, Aug 1996

almost anonymous
yellow ladybird
in sun-dried grass

I love the quiet simplicity of this poem, especially the word ‘anonymous’, which seems to suggest, both ‘unnamed’ and ‘overlooked’ – as insects often are, unless we come into direct contact with them.

Around five years ago, reading Matthew Paul’s collection, The Lammas Lands (Snapshot Press, 2015) inspired me to keep having a go at haiku (they were a diversion from writing more mainstream poetry at the time). Then Presence published a haiku of mine and I was bitten by the bug. Haiku took over, or rather my way of living altered slightly, and haiku became a big part of that.

My way of living has recently altered again. After Easter I took what seemed to be the momentous decision to retire. I handed in my notice – one month was the requirement – and suddenly, freedom. More time for dog walks, banjo practice, reading, writing, drawing, gardening, yoga etc. These are all things I was doing while I was working, so really there’s not much change, but I have more time now, and can do stuff in greater depth. That’s what’s been so satisfying, being able to take my time and do things properly. We’ve even fitted a couple of camping weekends in.

Julie Mellor, Summer poems

What does a “metabolically literate” poetics look like in this time of deforestation, of plastic islands, of melting ice caps and wayward storms? How can we, as writers, readers, breathers, enlist the help of the four winds, which seem, at times, to have turned against us with their tornados and hurricanes, raging at our immaturity, our hubris, our willful illiteracy? This is a question I want to conspire around with you, with other poets, with the trees themselves. A question to breathe with rather than to answer. But from my explorations, I suspect this poetry is a poetry tuned into the breath, a poetry that moves like a steady wave, that doesn’t rush to declare itself, but that listens, and speaks, and then listens again. It is a poetry that may happen further from the click of the keyboard and the glow of the screen, and closer to the lungs, the trees, our shared body. A brave and humble poetics that–like the young heroes who find themselves at the house of the North Wind—is willing to offer itself in order to receive.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tree Conspiracy

i will know it
    outside the dream
when it comes
    behind the calm
because it breathes

Grant Hackett [no title]

When my dad was entering what we now know, but didn’t then, were the last months of his life, we spent much time travelling between Scarborough and Hull for chemo appointments. I’d drive, my dad would talk. The further down the cancer route we got, the more his memories returned to the family farm, the route to the town, stories of what it was to live on the land and off the land and with the land. Stories from his own childhood. He himself, though he had run a small holding of his own, had not farmed since his mid teens when he’d left the family farm to become a Rington’s tea van driver. The narrative was so strong though, the stories like tethers that brought him back; the pull to place like the magnetic forces that bring geese back to their home grounds.

When the operation that he had ran into complications, and he was intubated and unconscious and we talked to him in the hope of calling him back, it was to the land and the work that still needed to be done – the apples ripening, the chicken houses in need of fixing, the sun pooling on the stone bench next to his fish pond awaiting his return there for his morning coffee. But we couldn’t bring him back.

When I wrote about it, later, in my poetry collection, I wrote of him being called back to a childhood in which he had to bring the cows in. I created a version of him that was too busy with farm chores to leave off and return to us. My mum, when she talked of him in the beginning of that most long and dark road through grief, talked of him as the tawny owl in the field that called and called and received no answer.

I wonder if he heard us, through the fog of induced coma, if he knew we were there, holding his hands, when the life support was switched off and he drifted away from us to wherever it was. When I think of those moments now, it is as an observer. As if I was taking notes on my own life experience, ready to create this new narrative, this continuation of a family narrative so attached to place. In fact, here I am, creating the narrative of this time, shaping and re-shaping and feeling the pull of something like home, but a home that has never really been.

When we came back from Thirsk and I dropped my mum off to their small holding and my dad’s grave in the field; the grave that he had specifically asked for, and which had been a nightmare of logistics, the last crazy dad request of his life, the last risk taken, the last fuck you to any sense of normalcy, I returned with a sense of peace and with a sense of gratitude for the stories, the history I get to travel on with.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: My Dad’s Last Days Spent Dreaming of the Family Farm

“The people of Israel, Gaza, and Iran are human beings. No one deserves to live under constant rocket, missile, and drone fire.” These are words from Standing Together / עומדים ביחד / نقف معًا that landed deeply in my heart. “This is not a football game. This is real life, and entire worlds are being shattered day after day.” How much more can our hearts take? And what can we do?

Standing Together is raising funds to bring bomb shelters to underserved Bedouin communities in the south of Israel. NATAL provides trauma support in Israel. The PCRF feeds and supports children in Gaza, and the Sameer Project provides food, shelter, and medical aid. And United4Iran has a fund for survivors of the Iran-Israel war, and their work is well-respected.

Giving tzedakah is meaningful, and in Jewish tradition all are commanded to give tzedakah, even we who receive tzedakah ourselves. But I know what I can afford to donate barely touches the ocean of need. Primarily what I feel able to do is internal. I pray for peace. I extend support to the human beings I know, and I try to extend compassion to the ones I don’t know. […]

I keep coming back to the Amichai poem about turning the swords not only into plowshares but into musical instruments, which I have on a poster on the wall in my office. As difficult as it might be to hammer an instrument of war into an instrument of music, I think it might be more difficult to hammer and reshape the human heart into one that truly beats for justice and for peace. 

Rachel Barenblat, The Best We Can Be: Korah 5785 / 2025

On the eve of his execution in 1896,
he wrote a long poem which his sisters smuggled
out of his cell in a cocinilla: fourteen stanzas,
each with five lines. He called it his last
farewell— Mi último adiós. We had to memorize
at least half of it. It was so hot, and we
were tired of memorizing, so we thought
of going to the corner store to buy more
snacks. With a dramatic flourish, I called out, “Mi
último adiós!”— which made my mother and aunt,
making dinner in the kitchen, drop whatever they
were holding and shriek— Take that back,
take it back, don’t you ever say that again!

Luisa A. Igloria, Very Superstitious

my favourite dream
blossoms falling and falling 
on our riverboat 

Jim Young [no title]

This week: sea glass, lilacs, lapwings, catkins, and much more. Enjoy.

The gradual thawing of ice at the lake’s edge. The sudden appearance of snowbells under the protection of the evergreen hedges. The return of the lapwings. I don’t want to miss these things I’ve either not known or have taken for granted. It’s a kind of greed, I suppose. And isn’t all greed tinged with the fear of loss?

In Romania, I was told that the storks had just returned and were building their nests on top of the streetlights. Fruit trees were newly in bloom. But I can’t imagine things any other way because “today” a robin sings in the beech tree outside the hotel window, storks nest on top of street lights, white blossoms open among the white snowflakes, and all the while a bonfire burns in the hotel’s courtyard. It’s a smell that makes me both sleepy and nervous. The wind shifts. Sparks fly. My clothes will smell like comfort and destruction for the remainder of the trip.

Ren Powell, Belonging Away from Home

I attended a reading in Seattle and ran into an old friend, Seattle poet Esther Altshul Helfgott. Among many other accomplishments, Esther founded the “It’s About Time Writer’s Reading Series,” which meets monthly in Ballard and is now in its 35^th year. I’ve known her for decades. As she has two books navigating Alzheimer’s disease with her husband, Abe, I told her what was going on at my house. She reached into her bag and took out a copy of this book. She also told me I needed a therapist and a support group.

Listening to Mozart is, in the words of Michael Dylan Welch, “a bouquet of short poems [that radiate] the sharp and sad fragrance of loss.” They were written after Abe’s death, and reading them helped me imagine moving through the stages of grief I’ve been stuck in—anger and denial—and begin to break through to something else.

I don’t agree
with Bishop in One Art—
that loss
is no disaster
she means the opposite—
loss is all disaster

These tanka-like meditations are as much about acceptance as they are about loss, and they helped me to remember that someday this will be over, and I’ll have three daughters who have lost their father. They reminded me that some day I, too, will have to deal with his loss.

when I
awoke this morning
I thought your
funeral was today—
it was three years ago

The poems are about loss, but they are riddled with hope. As time moves on and the poems continue, Helfgott begins to put her life with Abe, and after Abe, into perspective. Cleaning house, going to the bookstore, walking her dog.

a leaf falls
I watch
you pick it up
you disappear

What I’ve been working through is the realization that the man I married has been gone for a while, for long enough that I’ve found it difficult to remember that guy I held hands with, walked on beaches with, adopted three daughters with, stood on sidelines of countless soccer games with…the man who taught college English for 40 years, the man who retiled our kitchen, built a writing cabin for me in our back yard, built tables and beds…took care of every possible home repair. Up until a day or so ago, it seemed impossible to see that man as also this one. Withdrawn from me, secretive, never finishing a project, forgetting ingredients in favorite recipes, getting into one car accident after another… […]

Esther’s poems helped me begin the journey back to my right mind. These poems and many phone conversations with patient friends, and (finally) a therapist.

Bethany Reid, Esther Altshul Helfgott: Listening to Mozart

Three and a half years ago I moved here from a shady garden, with deep fertile soil, rather damp, rather acid, and I’ve had to adjust to something very different here. It turns out that this garden is, as Culpeper might have put it, ‘under the dominion of Mercury’. Mercury’s plants tend to do well here, for reasons I don’t yet fully understand. The soil is good to heavy, but with a lot of stones in it, not just builders’ rubble and hard core, though there’s plenty of that, but ‘coal measures’ – layers of mudstones and limestone shale above the seams of coal that defined this area until fifty years ago. There is sun, some fertility, but not too much, shelter from the prevailing winds, and enough rain, which they like. As herbs, they tend to be nervines, picking up magnesium from the soil, and therefore good for the nervous system, the brain, memory, coughs and, often, digestion. This garden loves lily of the valley, southernwood, elecampane, lavender, fennel and winter savory, and they thrive here, where many of them struggled in my previous garden.

It is easy to see why they are ascribed to Mercury – the intelligent, volatile, lively and ingenious god of language, communication and creativity – the god of the mind. Mercury has a difficult persona – as a god, he’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, notorious liar, ingenious, dangerously fluent and persuasive, and frankly, about as endearing as Dominic Cummings. And yet. He is the trusted messenger of the gods, the guardian of travellers, protector of herds and herdsmen. His dual personality reflects what was discovered about the planet through history. It is closest to the sun, and the fastest mover – the Assyrians called it ‘the jumping star’ and the Greeks called it ‘Stilbon’ the sparkling star, because of its flashy volatility. It was seen only at evening and morning, which meant that for a long while there was uncertainty about whether it was even one planet or two so Mayans represented it as twin owls one for morning and one for evening. The metal called after him is anomalous, a metal that rolls around on a flat surface like a ball, that divides and rejoins like water, a liquid that isn’t wet. It’s not surprising, then, that when alchemy was extensively studied, Mercury became associated with the process of transition and transformation, forming a triad with the sun and moon. Sun herbs like marigolds and rosemary and moon herbs like mugwort and vervain do well in this garden too. […]

Moving to ‘the dominion of Mercury’ sparked new relationships with the earth, with my neighbours, and with the unfamiliar reaches of myself – and a lot of new poems. Look for bats, ghosts, foxes, druids, rivers, music and herbs. The book is due out in March 2026, and I’m excited about it.

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Dominion of Mercury

Dead flowers mix with the soil and
become other things: fruits, fragrant
flowers, a bird. Ephemeral things.
When love runs out, it becomes a
poem. A forever being. A trellis of
quiet words peering into the water.

Like tree rings, a poem cut open
can tell you its age. Meaning grows
inside it, in concentric circles. Each
measuring the growing distance
between poem and poet. Poet and
love. What if we had another hour?
Another month? Another way?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if we had another hour?

Dryden said that Virgil’s Georgics was ‘the best poem, by the best poet’. Although it’s sometimes known just by its most famous and ‘poetic’ passages — the praise of Italy; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice — the Georgics is a wide-ranging didactic poem about the raising of crops and animals (georgica means farming), about the land of Italy and about man’s relationship to labor, toil, that does not romanticise its theme: passages deal with how to test soil for acidity and how deep to plant seedlings, with winter starvation and plague in livestock as well as sex, spring and the beauty and bounty of nature. The tone of its political message is notoriously ambiguous. If you’ve never tried to read it, and you don’t read Latin, Dryden’s own translation is still a pretty good place to start. […]

There are many aspects to Virgil’s remarkable style, but one of them is the way in which he uses mostly ordinary words in a particularly full and precise way. This is what the English literary critic Donald Davie called ‘purity of diction’, and it’s particularly crucial to Virgil’s ability to make the description even of detailed technical material beautiful, moving and memorable. Such precise use of words which are unremarkable in themselves may reanimate expressions or metaphors which have otherwise gone ‘dead’, flat in the language. In this passage, for instance, Virgil begins his catalogue of modes of propagation with a list of plants and trees known for their tendency to proliferate without assistance — whether by self-seeding, by suckers sprung from the tree’s base, or, in these three lines, apparently spontaneously:

Pullulat ab radice aliis densissima silva,
ut cerasis ulmisque; etiam Parnasia laurus
parva sub ingenti matris se subicit umbra.

In other cases, a very dense wood springs up from their roots —
As, for instance, the cherry and the elm; the Parnassian laurel, too,
When it’s small shelters in its mother’s mighty shade.

The detail of densissima sylva at first seems conventional – woodland is often dense, dark, deep or thick in Latin just as in English – but here the obvious phrase gathers specific meaning: woodlands composed of trees which reproduce themselves by suckers from the base are particularly dense because the young trees come up, by definition, very close to their parents. The obvious word seems suddenly meaningful. Robert Frost reanimates the same cliché of ‘deep’ woods, albeit in a very different way, in the well-known poem ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’. His woods are by the end of the poem ‘deep’ with a sense of personal significance: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep’ (13-16).

This opening passage of Georgics 2 is also typical of Virgil in the precision of its description. The willow seems to ‘whiten’ (canentia . . . salicta) with a ‘grey-green leaf’ (glauca . . . fronde) because the underside of the leaf is more white or silver in colour, and willow leaves are so long and light that the underside is frequently revealed. (Dryden does not attempt to capture this concise precision: he has simply ‘grey’. Day Lewis has the more accurate, but very wordy, ‘the pale willow that shows a silver-blue leaf’.) We could compare Frost again – one of the strongest English rivals to Virgil as a poet of the trees – with a comparably precise description: ‘When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees’ (Birches, 1-2).

Victoria Moul, Mild brook-willow, and the bending broom

April is April-ing, which means it rushes past and then boom! suddenly it’s spring for real, despite dips and rises in temperature. I open the window in the dining room. I close it. Wear coats when I really need a jacket and jackets when I probably should have worn a coat. Chicago is tricky this time of year, and I could need both in the span of a few hours. 

I’ve been catching up on some new releases for dgp and finishing my decisions on upcoming books for fall. If all goes well, I will have everything in line before we open up for the next reading period in June, which seems impossible that it’s here again. I’ve also started something new writing-wise and finished up the last series, though it still needs a little work. Since the world feels chaotic and precarious I decided to bring WILD(ISH) into the world sooner rather than later (part of it is who knows what will be happening in July and also I fear raised printing prices driving up the cost per copy. This may also affect even the printing I do at home, though so far, ink and paper are still costing me about the same, but only time will tell. I raised prices slightly on chaps and other shop goods last year, but I may have to do it again. Postage is also a bear that may need to be revisited (i still end up eating some of the cost on larger orders and author costs typically.)As everything gets more expensive even the luxuries I allow make me wince…theater tickets, tattoo deposits, occasional dresses and vintage housewares from Ebay. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/19/2025

my hands cry out all night in their sleep
dawn rises
a hole in its palm

Grant Hackett [no title]

Last weekend, LitHub published a piece by novelist Viet Than Nguyen titled “Most American Literature is the Literature of Empire.” The essay is about as good a statement as you’re going to get about literature and politics from a writer of Nguyen’s fame, and it touches precisely on the contradictions that literary people are often at pains to rationalize and ignore. […]

I think the key insight of Nguyen’s essay is that the same contradiction exposed by Palestine is being further exacerbated by the likelihood of Trump’s defunding of soft power institutions. That is, real historical forces are coming to bear on literary culture in ways that insist on waking us up to material, economic factors. And we fail this moment when we allow the focus on Trump, and what may come in the future, to distract from what Palestine has revealed—and to see the common link here. Once the mask has started to come loose, and we see the violence behind it, does an honest person rush to put the mask back in place again? No, surely not. What does it mean, then, when the Trump admin proceeds to fully tear the mask off? We sure as hell don’t salute him, but we’d be fools to imagine we could simply set things back to “normal.” And so, this moment puts an end to world-structuring illusions that have held US society together for decades, and its hegemonic literary culture is no exception.

With things so radically in question, all the lines are being redrawn. And this is why I keep pointing to counterculture—that that is what we should desire for ourselves and our art. Divest from the dying institutional culture, with its imperial ties, and find new psychic energy with which to endure within whatever is coming our way. (Hats off to the many of you who have already done so, or who were never invested in the first place, and to those of you who have educated me along the way.) As I’ve said in this series before, I take it almost as an article of faith that imagination, liberation, and the truth depend on one another. One thing we are denied by institutional, neoliberal poetic culture is a sense of truth: a sense of being informed and autonomous makers of our own culture—we’re always rationalizing shit and shaking hands with the wrong people. And in turn, this makes one less free as an artist, and it makes one less free to speak the truth at a time when the very conditions for truth are being annihilated by fascists.

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 3)

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

My questions or concerns have emerged really out of my professional/institutional backgrounds, which include the art world and academia. Elizabeth was really concerned with the media-technological intersections between the commercial art world and the USAmerican war machine; drones became a kind of figure for that acute anxiety, but also defanged self-disgust in a sense of complicity. Now, I am thinking more about grief, on an individual level but also on a social level. Covid happened and f*cked us all up in ways that we are still only just beginning to recognize, let alone understand. The ongoing genocide in Palestine has revealed many things about the West and the US, including just how tight the chokehold that the executive branch of government has on the academic and cultural institutions that we, as writers and artists and scholars, have tried very hard to be a part of, actually is. Grief feels really close, and closer still the more it is held at bay. There is so much more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now. […]

What are you currently working on?

Right now I am working on a book about grief. It’s also about certainty. It hasn’t really happened on purpose, but whenever I start writing it’s like this kind of elliptical return. It’s also heavily influenced by my very conflicted but somewhat obsessive reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I’m very curious about ways in which philosophers, misguidedly and dogmatically, try to make their readers feel better about how impossible it is to know anything about anything or anyone with any certainty. Philosophy is supposed to be something like therapy, you know? But it fails, and often leads us down worse rabbit holes with more distressing questions, or accusations. I miss my parents and I feel like time stopped when I lost them. But it didn’t for anyone else. I don’t know what to do with that, so I’m writing about it.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Louise Akers

It’s taken me a long time to assemble my second collection of longer-form poems into a coherent state, eight years since my first. I’m delighted to say that it will be published this June, by a new, Derbyshire-based publisher, Crooked Spire Press.

Crooked Spire Press has been founded by Tim Fellows, the editor of the online journal The Fig Tree, here. I am immensely grateful to Tim, not least for his patience. I should mention here that next Saturday will see the in-person launch, in Doncaster, of the first Fig Tree annual anthology (edited by Tim), details of which are on the Fig Tree website, here.

I’m also very grateful to the members of the fortnightly workshop group I’m part of, the Collective, whose comments on drafts of a good number of the poems in the book have been very helpful.

Matthew Paul, The Last Corinthians

My poem “In That Moment of Change,” which I wrote in memory of my friend Ronny, who was murdered by her husband in 2021, was published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement in The Evolving Gaze, an issue of their quarterly publication devoted to questions of manhood and masculinity. They’ve gathered an impressive range of work, in terms of country of origin, age, gender, and more. It’s a publication definitely worth a look on its own merits. My poem is on page 93.

§§§

Back in 2021, I took part in Queensbound, poet KC Trommer’s audio project for bringing poetry into public spaces, both online and in the physical world. The concept is simple. Each poet chose a subway stop in Queens, NY and incorporated it into a poem that they then recorded for inclusion on the site. My stop was Elmhurst Avenue on the R line. If you go to the Queensbound website, you can listen to my poem by clicking on the station, or you can listen on Soundcloud, or—and here is why I am telling you about this now—you can check out the Queensbound podcast, which recently went live. My poem is in the third episode, but I hope you will consider checking out all the episodes.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #39

Endgame is the play for our time. It is about the end of the world, where one man rules everything, although there is no apparent reason why he is obeyed. It’s a play about the absurdity of life. A play about a world ending in disaster. One man controlling the planet from his chair. […]

Last week, our family went to The Groundlings, a sketch comedy theater in the heart of West Hollywood. We saw the Sunday sketches and went to dinner. It was great being a family going to the theater together again. We haven’t done it for a bit. The pandemic threw us off our game. Some of our best family experiences have been at the theater. It takes a community to make theater. To come to the theater. To make art. To make change.

At the theater, we reflect on our humanity. We question the world we live in—and our own interpretation of the world—in a way that isn’t always asked of you when you go to the movies. Many movies are designed to entertain you, and really thoughtful ones will ask you to question something about the way you live, but a play is like entering another zeitgeist. Through the intimate performances required of plays, we see ourselves walking in the world differently. A play provokes.

[In Endgame,] Beckett explores our need as humans to be in a cycle of dominance. We look to someone to be the boss, someone to fetch and carry. Even when it doesn’t make sense anymore, we continue.

Beckett recognizes how we get caught in absurd cycles that we keep repeating. When we become paralyzed by these cycles, we can’t change the game. On a personal level, a community level, a national level, he’s right.

Kate Gale, Nothing Funnier Than Unhappiness: On Cycles of Absurdity

The scent of burial spices in my nose,
the last of the death wrappings unbound,
I leave this grave.

The weather, with its wintry insistence,
does not deter me, a daffodil
bulb who has known the earth’s protection.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Good Friday Creations

Throughout his portrayal of the seasons there is this indomitable force of life. Consequently, spring is conveyed as an eruption (‘vivid with/ life erupting’) and in summer he describes it as a ‘unifying fire// that drives all that flows/ burns gloriously.’ The use of the image of ‘burning’ is interesting as this fire is not destructive. It reminds me of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in Dylan Thomas poem of the same name. However, unlike in Thomas’ poem, the force of creation, that makes things grow, does not also bring about their demise. It is unquenchable. It is the force that generates regular renewal: ‘the earth renews/ from this detritus/ which is a process/ (part of the process). Autumn, therefore, in a later poem is portrayed as a time of ‘abscission’, a time of adaptation to survive. In an era of universal pessimism about the fate of the natural world, this is an interesting and positive rebuttal.

This, however, is not to say that Mills does not criticise humankind for its effect on the environment. In the section entitled Uncertain Songs, he states: ‘the world is broken/ because we broke it/ unthinkingly’ and we ‘cannot adjust/ cannot return’. We may have sealed our fate with our destructive actions, but the earth will survive. His anger at this is palpable in the poem ‘burn it all’ which explores the criminal waste of materialism. This is not the natural fire that drives life that we met in section 1. This is fire in the hands of humankind: it is the fire of materialism that will result in the destruction of human life on earth. Mills is critical of such simplistic approaches to living. As he states in can you see how it is, ‘the world is many & simple/ in its complexity/ & delicate oh so delicate oh so delicate// which is its strength & we/ are not the thing itself/ not what we think ourselves.’ The paradoxes of simple complexity and delicate strength seem to suggest that experience defies understanding and explanation. Uncertainty, therefore, must be a part of the human condition. A factor exacerbated by the limitations of language.  In speaking is difficult Mills describes language as ‘a system of difficulties/ which we live in mostly// & the world indifferent/ & large evades is/ which is at it is/ & all we have is this/ difficult & silent speech.’ Language is all we have and yet it is limited as a tool of understanding: it fails to get beneath the surface of our experience and in those final words there appears to be an acceptance of the fact. As he says in ‘long poem with no name, ‘language gets us nowhere.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘a book of sounds’ by Billy Mills

I’m not much the Easter celebrator, but I do appreciate this day. The sun shines across my desk, starburst daffodils shimmy in the wind out in the garden – I don’t have the heart to cut them to bring indoors – and I’m enjoying the last cup of morning coffee in my bright yellow mug. These things are celebration enough before the start of another wild work week. These things offer me joy.

On the occasion I’ve received a monetary prize in exchange for poetry, I’ve rolled it into fancy kitchenware; Le Creuset in Caribbean Blue, namely. It began with a big, blue sound pot that I named Angus after the wild fiddler of Scottish band, Shooglenifty, with whom Bruce and I kitchen partied at the campground after concert hours for the days of StanFest in Canso, Nova Scotia. Good time, that. Bruce had a few good eye rolls at me, at the pot, and its name before even he gave into calling it Angus.

That said, I’m wildly happy and grateful to learn that not 1, but a batch of 10 poems, has been accepted by Edutainment Night Publishing for publication in the fall. Just enough time to ponder what to add next to the turquoise kitchen.

Kersten Christianson, Easter & the Golden Eggs of Writing

Today, April 17, is International Haiku Poetry Day, which falls in the middle of National Poetry Month. As it happens, I have four upcoming public events focused on poetry and art: a haiku festival, an art opening, a poetry reading and an open studios weekend. […]

The 23rd annual ukiaHaiku Festival takes place on Sunday, April 27, 2-4 p.m. at the Grace Hudson Museum’s Wild Gardens in Ukiah, CA. I’m honored to be the keynote speaker this year, a cool twist for a Ukiah High grad! The organizers write, “Join us to celebrate Ukiah’s palindrome with readings of past haiku contest winners from various local luminaries followed by an all-ages open mic for those who wish to read a haiku of their choosing.” It’s free and open to the public. I’ll have a Makino Studios table with some books, calendars, prints and cards.

Annette Makino, A haikupalooza for Haiku Poetry Day

It seems appropriate, on International Haiku Day, to thank Ian Storr for all his hard work and commitment to the form. Ian has edited Presence for quite some time, around 12 years I believe. I started sending work to him in lockdown and he kindly published my first haiku. It’s fair to say that if Ian hadn’t shown an interest in my work I might not have pursued writing haiku much further than a lockdown diversion. As it is, he’s been a great support, twice forwarding haibun of mine to Red Moon Press in the US, which they have subsequently included in their anthologies. Two and a half years ago, Ian gave me the chance to become reviews’ editor at Presence. What an opportunity that was! I’ve probably read around 90 publications since then, mainly chapbooks, and have been amazed at the inventiveness that’s out there, especially, but not exclusively, from US writers. Ian is now stepping down from his role, and a lovely team from the Edinburgh Haiku Circle are taking over – more good fortune! I’m looking forward to working with the new team, but in the meantime, I want to wish Ian all the very best and thank him for the many hours he has given to the magazine and the writers whose work he has supported.

Julie Mellor, Presence

While Frogpond is keeping me busy, I couldn’t let 2025 go by without a third year of Haiku Girl Summer. I adore running this journal!

As with the past two years, the journal starts on June 1st and ends on September 1st. (I used September 1st as a surprise bonus post for the past two years, but that caused confusion last year, so now I’m just making it an official part of the run.

In order to have poems ready for June 1st, submissions open on May 15th. I can’t wait to see your summer haiku and senryu!

I enjoyed the different perspectives that the guest editors brought to the journal last year. Although I haven’t set up a formal sign-up system yet, I would love to work with guest editors again. If you’re interested in taking part, you can reach me at allyson@allysonwhipple.com.

Please note that I have updated the guidelines for 2025, including a change to the submission period. Please review the updated guidelines here: https://haikugirlsummer.substack.com/p/submission-information

Allyson Whipple, Haiku Girl Summer Returns Soon!

I began Day 2 of the conference with “Eyes Wide: Exploring the Extended Ekphrastic” (Tess Taylor, Victoria Chang, Tyree Daye, Dean Rader, Allison Rollins). This panel was a high point for me, as it featured five excellent poets who also write ekphrastic poetry. Victoria Chang was commissioned by the MOMA to write poetry in response to the art of Agnes Martin. The result, With My Back to the World, is a collection of elliptical, mysterious poems that seem to fit the cool detachment of Martin’s art. As Chang said, “Being looked at is good for a work of art.”

I was most impressed with Dean Rader’s presentation about the creation of his book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. Twombly was “famously inscrutable,” his art often consisting of scribbles, erasures, graffiti, and collage. Yet from this art, Rader was able to create a series of moving, deeply personal poems. Here are the first lines from “Unfinished Unending Journey:” “In the middle of our life, / we never know it is the middle. // It terrifies my son the sea has no center and no end.”

The second panel of the second day, “From Dusk till Dawn: Exploring Nocturnes & Aubades”(Amy Ash, Amorak Huey, Curtis L. Crisler, Tatiana Johnson-Boria, Kevin McKelvey) was unexpectedly generative for me. I’d been working on a poem that took place on an early winter evening. As I listened to the panelists, I realized that this poem was a nocturne. This nudged me in a new direction, allowing me a fresh perspective. The aubade and nocturne offer opportunities for innovation, drama and possibility; they are emotionally evocative; they can function like Richard Hugo’s triggering town.

Erica Goss, Tell the World You’re a Writer: AWP 2025, Part 2

Every so often I come across a book that sets itself apart and draws me in. So it is with Robert Seatter’s slim 2021 collection The House Of Everything. I should say what follows is more a personal response than a literary analysis of each of the thirty-odd poems that form the whole. In short, it has absorbed me now for most of the past week, which is good enough evidence that it’s the best poetry book I’ve happened upon this year.

I already had Seatter’s early collections, travelling to the fish orchards (2002) and On the Beach with Chet Baker (2006), both published, as is The House of Everything by the excellent Seren Press, so I thought it would be interesting to see, when I came across it on the publisher’s website, what he was writing now.

The sub-title is Poems inspired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, so it’s right to explain that the work is the result of his stint there as poet-in-residence. Soane’s house, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Holborn tube station, should you wish to visit, is preserved as a national treasure, free to enter, where room after room contains a sometimes startling, often bonkers collection of artefacts that the man himself, a wealthy architect, gathered together and lived around up to his death in 1837.

Seatter pays homage to Soane, giving footnotes to poems that work as background explanations. Sometimes this kind of thing clutters or detracts from a poem but in this case the note usually adds to it, as with the tight nine-line poem Sarcophagus. It helped to know that Soane paid £2,000 in 1824 for the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of Seti I, which had been deemed too expensive for the British Museum. This is now the centre piece of Soane’s ‘sepulchral chamber’. Seatter understands the object is in exile but concentrates on giving it a dreamlike quality that is a subtle alternative to the predictable moral argument – Like a boat left in a room/ waiting for a door to let in a river,/ for a current and for a paddle.

Bob Mee, THE HOUSE OF EVERYTHING, by ROBERT SEATTER

Last August I submitted a manuscript to an open call by the independent press, ELJ Editions. Five micro chapbooks were selected to be included in one volume and mine was one. To say I was happily surprised is an understatement! The entire process with ELJ Editions has been a pleasure. Many thanks to Editor Diane Gottlieb and Founder & Publisher Ariana D. Den Bleyker.

I’m pleased that preorders are now available here. My chapbook, Offset Melodies, is all prose, consisting of micro and flash creative nonfiction and autofiction. I’m excited to be published with four phenomenal women writers: Kim Steutermann Rogers, Ronita Chattopadhyay, Kristina Tabor, and Janet Murie.

This is only the second time I’ve submitted to a chapbook call because, well, if I were ever to have a book, I wanted it to be with a publisher that means something to me. Over the years I’ve had poetry and prose published several times with ELJ Edition journals Emerge Literary Journal and Scissors and Spackle and it was always a positive experience. Also, to be honest, being in a volume with other writers is a bit of a safety net for me. I’m a little nervous.

Charlotte Hamrick, Preorders Open for My 1st Prose Chapbook

This week I was supposed to run a book club for poetry month, record a poetry tutorial for Writer’s Digest, and a bunch of other things, but instead, I was sick in bed with a combination sinus/stomach flu bug, which I strongly do not recommend (if I look like I lost weight in the pic above, I did—from three solid days of being constantly sick and another day of liquid diet. Super fun! Like Ozempic without the cost Lol!) And every day I was in bed, outside the sky was blue, the flowers all jumped into bloom at once (cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, and lilacs generally do NOT bloom at the same time in our area, but the late spring really messed up the bloom cycle). So that was a bummer. It was not covid or the official flu (according to tests) but there are a lot of bugs going around, the doctor said, so just be aware.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy (and Hoppy) Easter, New Poems Up at The Normal School, and a Week of Being Sick (During Beautiful Weather)

I love the presence I have when I’m on vacation. I’m a wandering eye, a drinker of the world, alert, sometimes hyperalert, just on the edge of anxious often, which does serve to sharpen the senses. Waft of subway here and a hint of someone’s cherry vape, and a bit of lilac on the wind; the thrum of human life: engines, mostly, and conversation, its ocean swells when it’s in a language I understand only with focus and concentration. What the wind is doing that very moment: agitating a dry lavender frond hanging from a rooftop garden awaiting the warmth of spring. Nothing is at stake and everything is: the day, what I make of it. Rilke wrote , “Maybe we’re only here to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate….” Immediacy. I love poems that grab me by the immediacy.

It’s what I admired about this poem by Keetje Kuipers. Although here it is about the destruction the narrator wants to undertake, that is, in the immediate future. It’s the details of that destruction and its ostensible reasoning that captured me: “cut down tree after living tree just to get rid of the green,” the narrator snarls, but it is so clearly born of pain, the awful crashing about we want to do out of pain. The poem is so present with it, hyperattentive to it. Burn the whole fucking world down. That’s the only way to avoid pain.

It seems odd to me that this poem appeals to me in the wake of my pleasant vacation. But the world and I are on edge. The green, the green. The sere, the sere. We can hardly bear it.

Marilyn McCabe, let’s turn on every incandescent bulb, each burner

O holidays of promised liberation:
One towards an earthly land,
One to a place promised 
posthumously.
In our hands, 
Questions: 
Which way now, 
How to mind the gap, 
Is home home? Exile exile?  
Do the two meet as two seas that
clash and shamble towards each other?

Jill Pearlman, Festive Earworm

— I’ve been reading The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. Rituals stabilize life, he says, and he quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who says rituals are “temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” He talks about how things can be stabilizing points, a table, a chair. But today, things are consumed, taking away the mode of lingering. He talks about how smartphones are not things because “lingering” is “impossible.” There is a “restlessness inherent in the apparatus [that] makes it a non-thing.” We are compelled compulsively by our phones. “They consume us.”

— “Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things…” (Byung-Chul Han).

— “Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.” (BCH) Digital communication is disembodied, but “rituals are processes of embodiment.”

— Rituals bring about resonances in a community and without them we lose “accord.” “Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of communication is a crisis of resonance.” The digital sphere is an echo chamber where we hear mainly our own bullshit. (My word not his). If you’re interested in reading more about this book, there’s a really good rundown here.

— The digital sphere is horizontal, when what people crave is the vertical or deep engagement. As artists we are all about the vertical. I can’t help but think about how we all keep being fed this stuff we don’t really want. AI, the annoying stuff the algorithm pukes up, the smoothening out of our seeing via AI, the theft of our work and our words.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist: Rituals and Alignment

No ghost deserves to be shaped into a developmental arc that explains why the selves we abandoned led to the self we perform, a construction so fragile that it requires countless defensive structures to sustain, protect, and coddle.

Perhaps the idea of ‘self-esteem’ has always tasted a bit silly to me, an unsustainable Americanism that resembles our lifestyles in order to brush away the thought of what Ingeborg Bachmann and Joyelle McSweeney have poemed as our deathstyles.

Aesthetics of closure aside, a part of us dies but it does not disappear, does not vanish beneath the earth but remains and hovers in this insubstantial form that Jacques Derrida dragged into hauntology, and revisited in his elegies as well as his writings on friendship.

Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
sea

In a 1923 piece titled “Faites les Jeux” (published in Les feuilles libres, no. 32), Tristan Tzara said that he wrote to destroy the feeling that pushed him to write, a sensation that was too personal, too loud, due relentless at a time when he was actively pursuing his longtime dream of abandoning personality, and not existing as a person. This desire to be “apersonal” (as contrasted with the desire to be “a person”) also appears in the poem “Wire Dance March,” as well as early Dada, which hallows Tzara’s decision (ostensibly made by mother) to ensure that he would never fight in a war. Love sends its sons to Switzerland and then expresses surprise when they wind up in Germany. In early Dada, Tzara’s sense of himself as “a deserter” is never mentioned. Only later would the poet explore this particular shade of his absence.

Alina Stefanescu, Blacktops.

When you come to Amsterdam because of a single sloth graffiti, you almost get the feeling that life is not about what you want, but what you do with what you have.

as if stones
could be
impressed
by us living
things

Kati Mohr, Butterfly House

Last night via Zoom I attended the triple launch of books by Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger. I’ve already read the Sastry and McDermott books. I’ve not read Laurie Bolger’s book yet. Sastry is deadpan/gloomy and Bolger’s anything but. I liked some of hers the most, so I’m looking forward to reading her. McDermott (who writes for Eastenders and the stage!) read mostly about his father’s death during covid.

The readers inserted little extra words here and there, and often didn’t respect the inter-word spaces of the text. Sometimes in a line with spaces they paused where there wasn’t a space. This all makes sense to me – some layout features are for the eye only, and I can understand why there might be “stage” versions of “page” poems.

Tim Love, Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

It delights me that the American Mathematical society links math and poetry by sponsoring a student poetry contest each year.   AMS recently announced this year’s winners (along with videos of the winning poems) — and I offer samples of the winning poems (from college, high school, and middle school students) below:

     from “Proof”  by Emilynne Newsom, Harvey Mudd College

          There’s a practice you will see in math.
          It is a way of showing what is true.
          In steady step-by-step it lays a path
          from what you know to what you seek to prove.    (Find the rest here.)

     from “Homeric Simile … ”  by Samanyu Ganesh, The Westminster Schools

          Just as the sea otters grasp each others’ paws
          whilst sleeping, latently
          basking in the stillness of their moonlit sanctuary, drifting
          assuredly      . . .       (Find the rest of this poem here.)     

    from “forever”    by Nora McKinstry, Edmond Heights, K-12     

          a mobius strip is a never ending loop a
          forever-going cycle of one small strip
          but still it goes on and on
          impossible to stop but easily created . . .        (Find the rest here.)  

The winners page also lists students who earned “honorable mention” and offers information and poetry from prior contests.

JoAnne Growney, AMS Contest-winning Student Mathy Poems

Andy Fogle interviewed me for Salvation South, and did such an amazing job with this longform interview—we talk Southern denialism, the limit of guilt and shame, the call and response of literature, anger versus the truest emotion, and more.

Salvation South also ran six new poems of mine, including four new Ars Poeticas (yes, I’ve been writing a lot of these for an Ars | Ours project), and two new love poems.

And! There’s a new episode of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast Slush Pile, featuring three of my poems, and the editors’ live process of discussing the poems and selecting them for publication. It is a VERY generous discussion, and left me feeling rather abashed and seen and like my cup had been filled all the way up to the very brim, so if you ever receive a request to be featured on the Slush Pile, I hope you say yes without trepidation (and considerably less anxiety than I did, ha). It was really beautiful to hear my poems read by others, and talked through. Such care and generosity, and I learned a lot about my own work in the process. So many thank yous to Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, and Lillie Volpe.

Han VanderHart, Painted Bride Quarterly Podcast, Salvation South Interview+Poems, Of Poetry Podcast, Moist Poetry’s Summer Riot Open Call

“Naming the Trees” demonstrates a sense of compassion and respect for the woods of Ness Owen’s homeland and the craft of the poems inspired by them. That’s not to say they are full of sentiment and awe of natural beauty. They also tackle the frustration and anger at the impact of commercial interests which act against the wishes of locals and without respect for the woods by people who do not have to face the consequences of their destructive plans or live with the ongoing impact. The poems capture that sense of injustice without ranting, but by showing how humans and nature interact, the importance of the connection with the natural world and respect lie at the core of countering the climate emergency. Disconnection is dangerous. “Naming the Trees” shows how to heal that breakage.

Emma Lee, “Naming the Trees” Ness Owen (Arachne Press) – book review

mayflies dead on the streets of Selma
mayflies dead on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
David and I are there to remember
to pay our respects, to see
but everywhere we look
the streets and sidewalks are covered
with drifts of mayfly carcasses
heaps of translucent white wings
uncountable numbers of corpses

Jason Crane, POEM: mayflies

Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience — in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery — amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

But despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal — the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.

The loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.

The loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.

The loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.

The loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.

The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.

The loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.

Maria Popova, 3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

i want the world to shrink to the size
of a coffee cup. to be able to reach
for every kind of bird i need. i don’t want
to stand at a gas station & fit my prayers
beneath my tongue. i don’t want
to look for gods in neon signs.

Robin Gow, new car

The New Orleans Poetry Festival itself was terrific, rich with different kinds of programming: short “lagniappe” readings, a panel about cool poet laureate projects, performance poetry happenings, a lively little book fair, good food nearby (no L.A. downtown concrete wasteland here!), and much more. I gave a reading with Tupelo poets and spoke on a great panel with the theme “Sacred and Somatic.” I finally met in person several poets whose work I’ve admired from a distance, and glimpsed the amazing Harryette Mullen, although I was too shy to say hello. People said kind things about my book, its snazzy cover, and my new mushroom-print dress. I had dinner with a beloved former student who told me that during a difficult period of his life, I’d made him feel seen, taken seriously as a person and poet. Again: lucky and nourishing convergences.

Yet life has NOT been all shimmer. On the way home, achy and tired, I contemplated the absurdity of flying to New Orleans while coping with the sudden and ferocious bout of sciatica that descended several days before, totally randomly–I was just in the process of sitting down when something twisted. I was nearly immobilized for a few days, then when things loosened up just a little, I got on a plane. I made the right choice, I think, but I was in pain most of the time, and pain makes events and conversations hazy. I liked my unfancy B&B in part because of the fridge and microwave, so after cutting out early from evening readings, I could lie on the floor alternately icing and heating my piriformis. I have been so carefully preventing contagious illness on this book tour through masking plus a swallowing a color-wheel of immune supplements, but I forgot that bodies can give out in a myriad of ways.

Again, I’m glad I went–better to be in pain while pleasantly distracted than in pain bored at home–and very grateful for so many kindnesses from the universe. Yet I’m a little down. Pain taxes a person’s energy all by itself, of course. The Guggenheim rejected me again. I’m behind on everything. I’ve been so looking forward to next week’s Madrid conference, but have had little time to anticipate and prep, and I wonder how much stamina I’ll have for sightseeing. The sciatica IS getting better, by slow degrees, but I’ve mislaid my momentum. Maybe it’s in the side pocket of my dirty suitcase?

Lesley Wheeler, Shimmer, steam, somatic, sciatica

Old magnolia: gaps just the right size
for my dangling legs, a branch to rest a book on.

The seaglass blue of sky over hills
like an embrace from the horizon.

Limestone painted pink at twilight,
rosemary between my fingers.

The light of Shabbat candles
after a brief whiff of struck match.

Singing the alto note in a chord,
holding and held.

*

For my birthday last month one of my nieces gave me a deck of illustrated cards depicting untranslatable words. I drew a card this morning: querencia.

“Describes a place where we feel safe, a ‘home’ (which doesn’t literally have to be where we live) from where we draw our strength and inspiration. In bullfighting, a bull may stake out a querencia in a part of the ring where he will gather his energies before another charge.”

Shabbat. Jerusalem. Harmony. A particular quality of sky. A tree that was chopped down decades ago.

Where are these places for you?

Rachel Barenblat, Querencia

My great aunt Inez never married, and taught American history in a high school in Endicott, New York, all her life. She loved words, music, and art, and could recite many poems and speeches by heart. Whenever she visited, I would sit with her in her favorite chair and she’d read to me, and tell me stories about the poems or prose and their writers. Sometimes we looked at art books, and often she’d set up her easel in her bedroom and work on a painting during an extended holiday stay with my grandparents and us; I was learning to play the piano and she’d often ask me to play for her as she read or painted.

When I was 9, Aunt Inez gave me a book of poems that she had written out, in her firm Palmer Method handwriting, or clipped from magazines. It was perhaps a peculiar gift for a nine-year-old, but she had seen me pretty clearly from the beginning. She’d be pleased to know that I’ve carried that book around with me ever since.

This morning I opened the book to see if Paul Revere’s ride was in it. It wasn’t, but there were others by Longfellow, Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emily Dickinson. I had followed her instructions and added to them: in the back, written or typed out by me, were adolescent favorites: Frost, Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings.

Today I stopped on the page where Whitman’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was affixed, with ancient glue stains that looked like blood, and my great-aunt’s note at the bottom: [image]

“The ship is the union, the prize is victory”, she wrote, meaning that the prize was the preservation of the Union, at a very high cost.

Beth Adams, Paul Revere and Me

I’ve been thinking about the word brutal and cruel a lot, reading the news. Brutal has appeared a lot, cruel, I think, has been more rare this past week, though I’ve seen it in other weeks. I’m wondering how I hear each of them, what overtones each has. I looked in the dictionary, and both come from Latin words, the one, says my quick check online dictionary ‘dull, stupid,’ but also ‘characterized by an absence of reasoning or intelligence,’ hence its use for animals or beasts (about, not to be unfair to animals) whose brains we know little, to date). Cruel is from crudus, ‘raw, rough’ (think ‘crudities’). And cruel is defined as ‘willfully causing pain or suffering or (and?) feeling no concern about it.’ So which would one choose to use, if one were a journalist writing about the current political news? Why does ‘brutal’ feel more banal and ‘cruel’ more thought-burdened, to me? How do other people reading the one and the other?

Beverley Bie Brahic, Saturday 19 April 2025, Paris (Easter Weekend)

How many squares does it take
to fill the round mouth, reshape
it into another loud
box? Blocks
stacked
on
blocks,
square teeth
delineate boundaries
of ideas that don’t fit,
grinding them down into grit.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 501: Harm Not With Words #NaPoWriMo

Each year on her birthday, which is also the anniversary of her death, I make sure to remember her in a way that is more than just the daily thoughts about her that I have. Writing her birthday poem, exploring the passage of time, exploring grief as an instinctive reaction to death is one way that I do that.

The experience of this loss has changed me as a person, has gifted me a different way of looking at the world.

Today her birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday. I can hear kids in the village having an eater egg hunt. It is joyful. This is as it should be.

Risen

Today I wish to roll back the stone
and bring out of the tomb a fifteen-year-old version
of the baby I buried.

All will be undone. A miracle.
The rose petals rising like mist from the earth-hole,
her white coffin suddenly empty,
the pine box held up to the crowd for effect.

The grave will no longer feel familiar,
the toys binned, no longer holding
the reverence of votives to the dead.
The plot will be vacated. Someone else
can kneel there now. […]

Wendy Pratt, Poem for my daughter on what would have been her fifteenth birthday

At first, I thought Solmaz’s brilliant poem was, like my little outburst above, a list of responses to illness or distress. Then I realised it’s concerned with something deeper – it’s about the messages we give to ourselves – the ways in which we find ourselves wanting; in which we blame ourselves; in which we seek a perfection which isn’t only impossible, but is also deeply flawed – shaped as it is by the corrupting forces of commodification, profit, reputation, ego.

It’s a hard thing to write a poem consisting totally of questions, and to maintain a momentum. But this poem is actually held together by the questions – they are its form, the scaffold and its engine, the force – even the violence – of the poem. And there’s great variation and contrast within them: some questions are wryly ironic; some wildly and humorously exaggerated; some painful, confronting, disturbing. Some reflect, for example, the huge pressure that the “you” of the poem is under – the reader, the poet, or a universal “you”, trying to hold back the ocean with a glass door. Some reflect intimacy and insight, compassion – “Made peace/ with your mother?” “Have you finally stopped/ shoulding all over yourself?”

Clare Shaw, Reflections on ‘Self-Care” by Solmaz Sharif

I went to the allotment yesterday and began work, but the rain has cancelled my plans to return. I always thank the rain however it comes. Everything has suddenly greened as a result; the lawn, the tiny buds on the trees. Last weekend the Easter witches came, so my daughter was making wands and wreaths out of pussy willow catkins which I used to decorate the door after the kids had gone. Safe to say spring is properly here.

GloPoWriMo three weeks in and I’m still going strong here. I’m not able to write a whole poem every day, but every day I’m turning up at the page and trying to write something. 

Some of the poems I’ve written I really like, but I often feel that about poems early on. They feel so fresh and right, but then I put them aside for a bit and when I go back to them, they feel forced or they’re trying too hard to be clever. So I work on them a bit and put them aside for longer, then work on them a bit more until I feel they’re done. Then I put them aside for even longer and come back to them with a totally different eye. 

It feels strange to go back and read poems I fell in love with years ago. They aren’t the same beasts or maybe I’m not. Sometimes I still love them and they still have a rightness about them. Other times they clash and just don’t work or strut too much with their own poetic-ness. My writing style has changed in many ways over time, but it’s more that I have changed.

Poetry for me is very much what I want to say right now: my emotions, my obsessions, what I’m looking at and thinking about now. Years down the line I may not see things that way anymore, but the poem is a snapshot of that moment, now gone. And like my teenage journals and blurry pre-digital photos I won’t get rid of them just because they’re cringe-worthy or not who I am now. I love how they show my growth and development. But, as Billy Connelly said, pay attention because it’s all going to change tomorrow.

Gerry Stewart, The Poetry of Who I am Now

My region’s been unusually low on rainfall the past 18 months, but this year April showers seem almost to be compensating…my veg patch is mud. Weeding and more sowing will just have to wait. I walk around the neighborhood and my yard and the woods, squelching through muck and stopping now and again to upend a rock or rotten log and see who’s active now. Lots of worms and arthropods, the occasional spider, many ants.

In such moist circumstances, we get fungi; I’ve been enjoying Lesley Wheeler’s new book, Mycocosmic, which I’ve read twice now–once for content and sound, once to learn more from the poems’ craft structures, all the while fascinated by the science of fungus, which she incorporates into many of these poems. It’s a richly rewarding book, sometimes sorrowful, always intelligent, full of insightful poetry. The collection includes some poems that feel like spells, chants, divinations that suggest there are always imaginative methods for coping with anger, unfairness, and loss. Exploring the vein of how interconnected the natural world is, and the human world (with other humans and with the Earth) feels so vital to me, and Wheeler’s book pivots on this vitality. Look at the way Harry Humes threaded through my life, for example, in small but meaningful ways. The same goes for Lesley and for so many other people with whom I’ve shared intersections, interweavings, and connections over the years. That butterfly effect of influence. (Now that I think of it–Harry Humes has a book with that title: The Butterfly Effect). Or are those networks mycelial, as Lesley Wheeler suggests?

Ann E. Michael, Mud & connections

A nurse
attaches a device to the tip of your finger.
Another threads a clear liquid into your
vein. What day is it? You count with her
backward from ten and wind up in some
backforest where you’ll sink without
resistance into the moss. How much
time were you there? You were opened
like a book, cut into a cross-section,
made porous as a sheet of cheese. Now
your hip bone sings like a flute.

Luisa A. Igloria, Machine Shop for Humans

All over the northern hemisphere, it seems, spring has sprung, bringing a new crop of words to the poetry blogs this week: takatalvi, the quadrille, dindsenchas, reclamă, A.S.M.R., and more. Enjoy!

Spring has come early to Finland. The snow is melted and the city is full of dust from the grit they use on the roads. Finns and those non-Finns who have been here for a while are suspicious, knowing it’s too early to get our hopes up. That takatalvi is always a possibility, the Finnish return to winter. Takatalvi means a return to winter: a sudden dump of snow or the temps dropping to twenty below zero just when the weather seems to turn towards spring. True spring when you can actually pack your shovels, snow boots and gloves away is always late here, well into April usually.

I should be writing about the light returning as my poems are usually seasonal, but I’m still writing my strange, half-love poems. I’m ignoring a lot of ‘shoulds’ which is a slight worry, but also very liberating. Nothing vital is being ignored with my kids and my job and whatever else they put me in charge of. I am carving out very specific times where I just don’t, unless I want to. And that feels good.

I’m writing again thankfully. Of all the things that slipped away this winter that worried me. I have a pile of unread books I know I will get back to, the dust bunnies will wait, but there was a definite sense of lack in being unable to find a way into writing. So I’m thankful for the rush of hormones or whatever is driving these weird poems. 

Gerry Stewart, The Shoulds of Spring

I can feel myself gearing up for April now. I’ve not written any new poems for about six months or so now, although I’ve been steadily reading and filling myself up with poetry. I’m now at the state where I’d quite like to sit down and write. It’s like a full feeling, perhaps how a glass that is almost to the brim with water would feel, if a glass could have feelings. Or it’s like teetering on the edge of a very long drop that you know once you go, you will be falling for a long time and it will be fine, but you are putting off going.

I’m hovering on that edge now. Or I’m holding myself perfectly still, so I don’t spill over the edges of myself.

Kim Moore, Writing in and through motherhood

How will a poet sit on the edge
of his soul and peer into guilt
and shame and ugliness?

What will proximity do
to language? Can verbs
overcome weakness of spirit?

Or will every attempt
at truth end as another
poem about the moon?

***

Quadrille: The quadrille is a 44-word poem with no rules about meter or rhyme.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, 44 words are plenty

I find that writing creatively comes in waves and winter tends to be a fallow time. If I’m not writing poetry, then I like to be reading it: going back to old favourites and finding new inspiration. It has been a real delight lately to encounter new poetry on Substack as well as dipping into the wealth of literary magazines online. But there is nothing quite the same as immersing oneself in a poetry collection. It is in the gathered poems of a collection that the voice, tone and style of the poet — what makes their writing theirs — truly flourishes. It’s the reading equivalent of listening to an album all the way through rather than highlights on a Spotify playlist. You can listen to “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac on its own but the brilliance of the track is best heard as part of Rumours.

Virginia Woolf’s essay on reading looks at ways to read different genres and for poetry she posits “one must be in a rash, extreme, a generous state of mind…” Poems may be brief, but often their very brevity requires of the reader more focus, more concentration of intellect, more power of imagination. As Woolf suggests, there is an “exaltation and intensity” to reading poetry because more than any other written form we are required to bring our own interpretation to the page. In a collection, we must do this time and time again, considering not only the meanings of one poem but the possible connections across a range of poems. This is why, I think, that reading a collection of poetry requires returning many times — and therein also lies the reward. […]

I love reading fiction and I consume narrative of some kind on a daily basis. But I have to admit, it’s not like that with reading poetry. I can’t just pick up a collection any time and get stuck in. Even individual poems that I come across on Substack or elsewhere, if I really want to take them in, I have to read them and then come back to them. Even though they may be shorter, it takes longer because this type of reading is not purely about consumption. It’s slow reading, an art in itself and one that is making a comeback in our fast-paced times.

Ruth Lexton, “a generous state of mind”: diving into poetry

At winter solstice, nature’s new year,
the one plants honor, I become
Queen of the Night, with pages,
blank or inscribed, for courtiers
who urge me to exile the to-do list,
intention’s nagging inversion.
I visit the day only to restock
my supply of wine and chocolate.

My rule ends at the equinox,
when Queen Persephone returns
from below, living green takes over,
I become servant, day-worker,
watering, feeding, trimming plants,
attendant to the majesty of growth.

Ellen Roberts Young, A Poem for the Change of Seasons

Maurice Scully’s deep understanding of Irish poetry informs his own practice as a writer. Unlike the English pastoral tradition, which, as I have argued elsewhere, is essentially a poetry of empire, of the land as owned object, this tradition is one of the land as living world. From the 8^th century haiku-like lyrics of intense perception to the onomastics of the Metrical Dindshenchas, medieval Irish nature poetry concerned itself with the stubborn actuality of things and of the odd relationship between those things and the words used to name them. These lines from Scully’s 5 Freedoms of Movement (Etruscan Books, 2002, originally Galloping Dog 1987) illustrate the point I am trying to make:

persistent undersound of a river. hardness.
table facing a square window inset in a deep white wall.
the four places. & more. the head of a narrow angular stairs.
sometimes an animal passes. brown white black.
a fly sometimes in the sunlight.
sometimes a man.

When Scully writes like this, the most fruitful comparison available is with the earliest Irish lyrics. The sheer concreteness of the writing mirrors the desire to present what is with minimal interference from the vanity of the writing ego. The world is not presented as a stage set for the acting out of some human drama but as a complex system of which the human domain is just one part. Or, to quote again

a large brain & a long childhood
leaves branches water (where was I?)
with all the ornate figurations in meta- this & that
(branches) climbing while the truth dwindling in proportion
to the glare of the accentuated frill will. well.
many mouths moving. no wonder nobody with any sense.

Wary of theory, this is a poetry of learning to live with and in the world, not of explaining and improving on it.

Billy Mills, Sustainable Poetry

birds breeze over
happy            wander
between root and tendril

spirited song thickly moist
green             and fresh
seeding a sanctuary

for a long sweet spring

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): Spring Soak

I’m currently working with the novelist and poet Anna Chilvers to curate “The Book of Bogs”, which will be published by Little Toller and Blue Moose Books this September. It’s an incredible book, with poetry, short stories and more from 30 incredible writers, including Alys Fowler, Pascale Petit, Robert McFarlane, David Morley, Patti Smith – and of course, Kim Moore.

Kim has already treated you to a snippet of the short story she has written for the book, along with a description of the process which gave rise to it. In her article “Where do ideas come from anyway?” Kim writes about finding the idea for her story in an old notebook. In writing my lyric essay for the anthology, the biggest challenge was narrowing the ideas down … because I’m writing about my love for Walshaw Moor, and for moss, and peatland – and like Seamus Heaney’s bog, that love feels bottomless; it has no horizons.

On Sunday, Anna Chilvers and I will be running “Bog Bodies: A Creative Encounter” online from 10-30-12.30. We’re probably all familiar with the ancient bodies found in the bog in state of stunning preservation due to the chemical qualities of peat. But there are other bodies in the bogs and on the moors, just as fascinating. In this Sunday’s workshop we’ll focus on tardigrades (otherwise known as moss pigs or water bears) and the billions of tiny, other-worldly creatures of the bog; alongside Lindow and Tollund Man.

Clare Shaw, Land: a Love Story

I haven’t been writing many haiku lately, but I had a lovely time making this artist’s book last week in a workshop run by Sam Jackman who kindly provided all the hand printed paper for the covers as well as guiding us all through the process.

Admittedly, I did try and fit in every technique she showed us, and there are a few things I’d do differently next time, but I could see it would be an excellent way of presenting haiku and I’m hoping to combine the two disciplines when I get time. Could be a nice project for the summer holidays. Counting down already and it’s not even Easter yet!

Julie Mellor, A book without words

If my body were a basket,
I’d like it willow please —
flexible, ultra-strong
and weeping
comes for free.
[…]

M.E. is a wildly fluctuating condition (for me at least). Some weeks I almost forget it. Others I cannot get out of bed, cannot read. Most weeks are somewhere in the middle. 

Kathryn Anna Marshall, If my body were a basket

More than a decade ago I wrote a book explicitly about the apocalypse. Or maybe it was a book about different kinds of apocalypses instead of any specific one. There were vague dangers, nuclear bombs, underground houses, and zombie attacks for sure, all the stuff of dramatic end-times scenarios. Really, I was just watching a little bit too much Supernatural and the central series “apocalypse theory: a reader” just sort of formed out of it. I enjoyed reading these poems during a slew of readings in the summer of 2013. A couple years later, the book was done and was scooped up by a press who had published my work before. The next couple years had a lot going on, including finishing SEX & VIOLENCE and it finding a home at BLP, the loss of my mother, lots of work-related drama and happenings. By the time the press shut down, which I wasn’t sure was what was happening because I was frankly afraid to ask, so much was going down. In 2018 and 2019, I was barely hanging on to my mental health by a string, and then in 2020, there was covid. By then SEX & VIOLENCE was in the world and I just decided to issue an electronic version of that older book and move on (and actually, it was easy since most design work had already been done on the interior.)  It’s worth a read and fun little bit of imagined endings. What I didn’t know was that I would keep writing about it. 

In early 2018, during a sprint of daily writings I wrote a steampunk-ish series called ordinary planet, in which climate change and massive floods produced a futuristic alternative planet world very unkind to women, whose choice was domesticity or pretending to be mystics fortune tellers (inspired by the famous Fox Sisters, of course). In 2019, when I was gifted some time and reading gig at the Field Museum, I wrote extinction event,  a series about extinction as a gathering, like a gala, that no one wanted invitations for. The poems that arose during covid could also be considered in a similar vein. Bloom, the most autobiographical series of our time under lockdowns, but later the strangeness of existing in that world just reemerging,  with the plague letters. Similarly, when I wrote unreal city, inspired by Eliot’s The Wasteland,  in late 2021/early 2022, the end times felt like they, themselves, were ending. These series were scattered across different book projects–AUTOMAGIC (ordinary planet), COLLAPSOLOGIES (bloom and the plague letters), ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MONSTER ( extinction event.) Each book, with the exception of COLLAPSOLOGIES, which also has an apocalyptic feel overall, with its own subject matter and thematic concerns. 

I did not set out for RUINPORN to be so bleak, but it happened. the Eliot-inspired series kicked it off, in a time where it felt like we were all white knuckling our way through life. Or maybe it was just me, with job stresses followed by job changes (good ones, but scary at first). With more loss after my dad passed in 2022. I literally intended that to be my last book with that apocalyptic feel. I was ready to move on, to be kinder in my view of the world and its future, but the events of the last 5 months or so have me reconsidering. I am not sure what to make of the world in poems, but it’s showing up in a strange way in the new, more sci-fi poems I’ve been writing to go with a set of collages I actually finished in 2023 but wanted to revisit. 

Kristy Bowen, unhappy endings

あさつてはないかも知れず雲雀の巣　矢島渚男

asatte wa nai kamo shirezu hibari no su

            there may be

            no day after tomorrow

            a skylark’s nest

                                                Nagisao Yajima

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 22, 2025)

isolate – From the Latin, insulare, to make into an island

I – sol – ate
I am solo
since the positive Covid test
have made myself an island
plotted my time
as a map of solitude
coordinated myself to a pattern of rest

Liz Lefroy, I Isolate

On Sunday 15 March I learned the British government was considering a compulsory quarantine. The next day I emailed the owner of the campsite asking if I could arrive early. He replied immediately. I booked a flight, transferred money, packed, agonised over which poetry books to take to my ‘desert island’ near The Hague. I flew to Schiphol on the Wednesday. The local buses already had the area near the driver closed off with white-red plastic.

Here are two poems about that first lockdown: […]

Six months of safety in a static caravan,
waking to birdsong each morning,
shielded from the sun by the golden elm.
I walked my daily rounds on the grass lanes.

Forsythia, tulips, narcissi, rhododendron,
pyracantha, salvia, rock rose, asters:
the seasons’ steady markers. From a distance
I waved to neighbours finally arriving.

Fokkina McDonnell, Saved by bankruptcy

Just back from a walk along the beach at Pevensey, part of the newly-established ‘England Coastal Path’. Sunny days at this time of year are so precious, aren’t they?

Now I’m about to get down to some work, mostly to do with the forthcoming book (ahem! did I mention that before?) which is now put to bed and being printed as I write. One of the last jobs was to decide on the cover image, which I’m very pleased with, and will talk about that in a future post. The Lewes launch is arranged – I’m sharing the gig with Peter Kenny who’ll be reading from his not-one-but-two pamphlets that came out in 2024. The original plan was to have the launch event on the official launch date, which is of course May 1st. But for various reasons it’s a week later. Close enough! Being a modest type (well, let’s just say I find it cringeworthy to do too much self-promo) I’ve engaged some help with promotion… more on that in a future post too, no doubt. Meanwhile I’ve made a Mayday Diaries landing page. And one of my wonderful blurbers, Rory Waterman, recently gave the book a glowing endorsement on Bluesky. Gulp!

Robin Houghton, New book stuff, and other Spring shenanigans

In January I traveled to Book Tree in Kirkland to attend a celebration for the launch of the Western Washington Poetry Network. It’s been around for at least a year or two, but this was the official “big deal” launch. Representatives from almost every writing group and open mike from Vancouver, Washington, to Bellingham to Duvall were there. There were cookies and wine. It was raucous good fun.

I was asked to speak about our poetry group—the only showing (so far) from Mukilteo—and, in part because I’m not sure we want new members, I talked instead about this blog. I told them how many poetry books I read in 2024, and how many book reviews. I invited people to take a look. I promised to promote WWPN.

And, as a result, I was handed several books by local poets. Like I needed more poetry books! (Of course I did.)

Bethany Reid, Western Washington Poetry Network

Look at me!
I am an idiot, I am farce, I am a smoker or “Furniste”
Look at me!
I am ugly, my face lacks expression, I am short.
I am like all of you! (1)

(1) I wanted to advertise myself a little.

In Romanian, an advertisement is called “reclamă”— and there is always a bit of excitement for me when translating Tzara’s Dada years, when his French was still hypercoagulated with Romanian verbs and idioms.

reclame

1. inflection of reclamă (“advertisement”):
   1. nominative/accusative indefinite plural
   2. genitive indefinite singular

reclame

1. third-person singular/plural subjunctive of reclama (“to report”)

Obviously, Tristan Tzara (and Dada) was deeply invested in revealing the dishonesty of newspapers and media, where what got reported was often a scandal that distracted the miserable veterans or citizens of industrial capitalism from the numbing boredom of their factory-driven lives. And so perhaps the “report” that tangles with the “advertisement” amuses me, even as it sashays through my imagination, straight into the unfinished parts of Benjamin’s Arcades, where I look for traces of Tzara’s footsteps in the Zurich-Berlin-Paris pipeline of the early 20th century.

Alina Stefanescu, Tzara boots.

I’ve written before about my impatience with the default ‘surrealism-lite’ of a lot of contemporary poetry in English — especially the kind that gets published in big poetry magazines — but overall I am persuaded here. I find the poem very American, slightly irritating and rather successful. The final couplet in particular is both aurally delicious — marlstone and mud-rich; air / everywhere — and genuinely funny. Wit is quite uncommon in poetry of this kind so I really appreciated that.

The poem also has a sense of history. [Natalie] Shapero is obviously aware, and assumes that we too are aware, of the very ancient link between the appearance of a comet and social upheaval — most often they are taken to portend war and plague, though sometimes change of other kinds. The comet seen in the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC is widely reported in ancient sources, and included by Shakespeare too — as Calpurnia says to Caesar on the morning of his death, ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’ (II.ii).

Victoria Moul, How to watch the war: three poetic comets

In the first weeks of this year, I participated in a virtual poetry workshop with Anita Skeen. It was so useful to me that I signed up for another workshop, this one on writing the prose poem, with mixed-media artist and poet Lorette Luzajic. She is the editor of an online prose-poetry lit journal, The Mackinaw.

In this workshop, I’m returning to a form I learned early in my writing practice. My friend and mentor David Dunn may have introduced me to prose poems, I cannot recall anymore; but I do know he was writing them in 1980 and that some of the poems in our collaborative chapbook The Swan King are either prose poems or on the verge of being prose poems. Prose poetry was then considered a “new” form and was (& in some quarters, remains) controversial among poets and critics. It sounds self-conflicting: if it is prose, how can it be poetry?

In the decades since I was very new to poetry, reading everything I could find of contemporary work and experimenting all over the place, the prose poem has been much written-about in literary forums and academia and is–mostly–on pretty sturdy footing as a “form” of poetry. I never completely stopped writing prose poems, and a few appear in most of my books. I’ve been writing so many sad lyrical-narrative poems since 2018, however, that I haven’t spent much time really playing with poetry, and play is a huge part of creative thinking. So Lorette Luzajic’s workshop, which gives us a chance to experiment and play, appealed to me.

The workshop has got me thinking about versions and expansions of the form, turned up some exciting new poets to read, and offered amusing prompts that have moved me into ekphrastic, surrealistic, dream-based, and pop-culture themed poems. I have found some surprises in my own work, which is always a reviving feeling.

Ann E. Michael, Prose/poetry

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

I wrote my first book (Rhombus and Oval) in Buenos Aires, under the influence of a certain poetic mixture of narrative, non-fiction and fantastical literature. It is a very Latin American book that happens to be written in English. It “changed my life” in the sense that my identity was already that of a writer, specifically a poet, because I’d published things in magazines, and was an editor and translator of books, and above all, was an obsessive reader (which can make you believe you are the writer of everything you read). But now I had a book to my name. I’m very fond of it but not overly attached. Many people I knew in Argentina thought about the “work” more than specific books, and I think that I always have, too. A book reflects a certain moment in time, and if you keep writing books, you will have a work. There’s no need to become anguished over creating a great monumental worldchanging text as some people do, thus blocking themselves from creating. Probably most masterpieces are created by accident, in the sense of emerging from intentional artistic decisions at a moment that could not have been anticipated.

I’ve never cared too much about genre divisions, and love writing that moves freely between poetry and essay, incorporating visual elements and music. I’m now making songs with poetic lyrics, experimenting with conceptual art, playing with rhythm . . . My most recent book Taal is explicitly musical. “Taal” refers to the rhythmic cycle in Indian music. But it also refers to Gabriela Mistral’s book Tala, which plays on the Spanish meaning of the word talar, to cut down a tree, and furthermore is a nod to the Chilean poet’s interest in India.

The difference between the first book and now? I’m an older person, with more experiences, happy and otherwise. And I’m in Chile, and don’t think of leaving—I consider myself to be a Chilean-Indian diaspora-noneoftheabove poet, in deep engagement with local sounds, speech patterns, folkloric traditions and history.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jessica Sequeira (rob mclennan)

The collection tells a story. It opens a portal. It began as a painting in acrylic I did 10 years ago: [click through to view] As time went on, I wrote the poems included in this volume. […]

Each poem is a brief reminiscence, isolated in time and creator of nostalgia. Senses subtly overwhelm experiences. There is an intense longing, a wave over the sands. Then all is wiped out. The first poem of the collection, before we met is a visual impression of first love. The second poem, discarded objects of a love affair deals with the acceptance of the loss of love. What is left behind is a canvass of objects that add to the memory of what might have been. the tango dancer recalls the memory of hope, abruptly cut in the last poem, drip petals. One is left with a deep feeling of longing about something that does not exist any longer, one surfs on the mane of memory.

A drop-in by M.C. Gardner (Nigel Kent)

who taught us
to want to keep each other
both like birds & like bulbs?
hold me not in the mouth
but in the woodwork. i want to be
shaped by your hands. breathe only
when you cut the heart, an eye
in the middle of the wood
for us to look at each other through.

Robin Gow, lovespoon

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a poet. “I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone,” he would write about his father in a poem, not realizing he was writing about himself.

Berryman tried to medicate his deepening depression with alcohol and religion, but writing remained his most effective salve. He wrote like the rest of us draw breath — lungfuls of language and feeling to keep himself alive: ten poetry collections, numerous essays, thousands of letters, and a long biography of his favorite writer.

Maria Popova, How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons of Creative Work

The collection “Exit Strategy” explores how a surviving partner might navigate an afterlife, one that has to adjust to a major loss, while trying to make sense of that loss and respond to bereavement. The poems are a thoughtful, crafted response. Different forms suggest differing approaches, some are a slab of words on the page, others expansive, using the page’s white space to suggest hesitancy and exploration. This is new territory. Artworks seem to suggest a map, but the wanderer has to decide on a route, interpret the symbols and explore what they might mean in this new landscape no one can prepare for.

Emma Lee, “Exit Strategy” Patrick Wright (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

Epitaph
—: After Joseph Rocco :—
by Dick Whyte

for your multifaceted
role in death
make your peace
giant—
the earth has teeth
sharper
than any dead bug

Dick Whyte, Joseph Rocco – 4 Very Short Poems (1929-1930)

My aunt who took antidepressants, forgot them on a business trip, and had a seizure while driving and killed a stranger. She began drinking. My aunt, who is dead now.

My aunt who married a man who murdered her child. She lives. And I don’t know how she has the strength. And I will never know, because we are solitary wasps, all of us. If there are no threats between us, there are threats surrounding us. Internalized.

We each chew the stationary that desperate letters were written on. Spit out the mass to seal the entrance to each little cell.

Yes, there are prison stories I haven’t told you.

I had an uncle who married a witch. Then he disappeared. Like his father who disappeared. But that is another story.

What I am circling here is that there are all kinds of deaths. And renewals. Sometimes I believe we are fated to repeat history because that is what humans do. It doesn’t matter who raises you or how closely your DNA is related, your story will be eerily similar to someone else’s hidden story. Because that is a fact of nature: the recirculation, the renaissance of what came before. And whether that is the glory or the shame, is a matter of perspective. Whether the lapwings come two and two again, or whether they’ll find a safer place this year, it is a form of the imperfect repetition.

I believe in blowing up our lives now and then. I believe in writing more than one story.

Ren Powell, A Routine Blow-Up

I enjoyed Jeanette Burton’s beautifully produced pamphlet, Ostriches, subtitled ‘Ten Poems about My Dad’, published by Candlestick Press and available here. Burton carefully, and wittily, writes affectionate portraits of her father without tipping into dull sentimentality. At their best, her poems – ‘such as the flamboyantly titled ‘Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun’ and ‘Poem in which I recount the finding of my dad’s love letter to my mum in the style of a Ronnie Corbett monologue’ – speed along with a giddy mixture of whimsical silliness, acute observation and pride. It might be tempting to suggest that some of her more stream-of-consciousness poems could do with some vigorous pruning, but I reckon that would deaden the sheer exuberant flow of her poetry. 

Matthew Paul, March reading

I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.

To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for” (Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.

She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”

Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).

I have no sweet story of meeting her or of a connection between us except for one very particular one (just for me). I realized it only when Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem lead me back to the bookshelf: June Jordan and I share the same birthday, although I was born several decades later. This moment I’m struggling to write the kind of political poetry I wrote when I was still a human rights worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Gaza. June Jordan is the poet I need right now.

“Poem About My Rights” feels as if it was written in 2025, everything she mentions still true today. Listen to this poem in her on voice right here.

Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now

I have, finally, completed a draft of the manuscript of poems that emerged from a daily writing practice I sustained from New Year’s eve 2019 until the first week of 2021. It’s taken me four years to sort through, hone, and revise the material, and I am very happy with the result. Some of the poems have been published. “Sunset,” for example, appeared in the lovely journal humana obscura; “The People of Gaza Keep Dying,” appeared on New Verse News, and “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…” was published in Michael Broder’s Second Coming series—on, ironically enough, February 4, 2025. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications like Poets of Queens 2, The Scene, and the literary journal published by the International Human Rights Arts Movement.

During the initial stage of this project, I set myself only one constraint: that while I did not care how little I wrote on any given day, I would not write beyond the limit of that day’s page in the Lechtturm1917 page-a-day planner I’d bought. Once I was ready to start sorting, honing, and revising, though, I increased those constraints to three:

• I would work on the poems only in the order of their composition;
• If it turned out that the way to make a particular day’s writing work as a poem was to combine it with material from another day’s output, I would only take that other material from something else I’d written in the same month; and,
• In terms of content, while I would allow myself to go as far back into the past as I wanted/needed, I would not introduce anything into a poem that happened after the original day, or if that were not possible, the original month of composition. I made two exceptions to this last constraint, “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” and “In That Moment of Change.”

I wrote the poem that became “The People in Gaza Keep Dying” in January 2020 in response to the experience of reviewing Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies, by Steven Sher. Sher’s book is a deeply racist, proudly anti-Palestinian, Orthodox Jewish justification of the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel and to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish nation state. Particularly disturbing is a poem called “Bombing Gaza” that, in light of the devastation Israel has wrought there since October 2023, could be called prophetic.

Before October 2023, I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to focus the poem. Once Israel began to bring Sher’s “Bombing Gaza” to life, however, it felt irresponsible not to connect the poem explicitly to current events. I decided to give the poem a title that would do this work instead of changing the text of the poem itself.

The detail I added to “In That Moment Of Change” is its dedication to the memory of my friend Veronica McGinley, who was murdered by her husband in April 2021. At that time, the poem had still not fully taken shape. It fills me with a deep, deep sadness that she will never read it, which is why I am dedicating this book to her.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #38

Naivëte, like a broken clock, gets it right twice daily. 
Jews and Muslims are cousins, are family, I hear 
in Morocco, from the taxi driver, the be-scarved woman 

guarding a blue synagogue. Even though they should be 
cranky, be-swearing food and drink; even as it’s Ramadan, 
and the driver in baseball cap careens in his springy red taxi.
God gives us strength.  Of Jews they smile, they glow.

Jill Pearlman, The Shared Overlap of Skullcaps

I am currently assisting with editing the next Sidhe Press anthology. The theme for this one is Grief and the submissions have come from a wide range of angles. All poems carry the poet’s unique view, but here there is something specifically tender about the words that are set down for us to read. Taking that first read of someone’s writing is a privilege and a joy, and editing always has me eager to see the poems that are sent in for consideration.  Having said that there is a need to take things slowly and give each poem its own space in time.

There is a wonderful tingle when certain lines from a poem continue to echo in my head after reading, and I love that feeling of resonance. There are also always poems that are very good in their own right but don’t fit the arc of the anthology as it forms. These have to be let go, but I know they will find their actual home somewhere else. I had heard this from editors before and having experienced it myself I can see more clearly now what they were referring to. Parts have to fit the whole so that the poems weave themselves into the whole journey of the book and make that arc. Some poems talk to each other along the way.

Sue Finch, A POCKETFUL OF TYRE VALVE COVER THINGS

Wikipedia describes ASMR as a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli. The nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial, with strong anecdotal evidence to support the phenomenon but little or no scientific explanation or verified data. It has become a recent internet phenomenon. Online discussion groups such as the Society of Sensationalists formed in 2008 on Yahoo! and The Unnamed Feeling blog created in 2010 by Andrew MacMuiris aim to provide a community for learning more about the sensation by sharing ideas and personal experiences. Some earlier names for ASMR in these discussion groups included attention induced head orgasm, attention induced euphoria, and attention induced observant euphoria.

It’s interesting that these titles draw attention to the ‘paying of attention’ and, inevitably perhaps, my own thoughts about it revolve around poetry and its effects: the familiar defamiliarised, the frisson of the uncanny, Emily Dickinson talking about poems taking the top of your head off. ASMR seems linked to a particular quality of attention-giving which yields a rippling of pleasure, close to the erotic, but not the same as that. It is powerful yet undramatic; it is most common in quiet moments of observation. It seems to come when there are no goal-directed intentions in the attention-giving. It is also in a neutral sense ‘bestial’, an animal shiver, like hackles rising, but not out of anger. It’s surely something reaching far back into our ancient past, linking body and mind, yielding pleasure, rooted in a mode of being pre-dating language and conceptualisation. That interests me a great deal. Poetry is language deployed to circumvent the limits of language; these days I take that as a given. Yves Bonnefoy says: “poetry was not made to mean, but to restore words to their full intensity, their integral capacity to designate fundamental things in our relationships with ourselves and others, here and now, amid those chances that one should never, as Mallarmé did, dream of abolishing” (2012 PN Review interview with Chris Miller. Even if just considered as metaphor, perhaps ASMR is what poetry taps into, invokes, rehearses, re-discovers.

Martyn Crucefix, Back in the A.S.M.R.

But the mystics are right too.
When we’re fully here, God
is in this place.

When I’m paying
continuous partial attention
to three different news apps

or biting back responses
to someone wrong on Facebook
I’m not really here.

But last night my son
danced with his double bass
and the headlines all fell away.

Rachel Barenblat, Here

— I’d honestly not heard of Etel Adnan before reading a post last year on my favourite poetry blog by Devin Kelley titled Ordinary Plots. Who knows what rock I live under :) I ended up underlining half of The Spring Flowers Own which begins:

“The morning after
my death
we will sit in cafes
but I will not
be there
I will not be”

— “flowers do not grow on rifles” she says. And, “flowers triumph / over the human race / their tragedies are / short-lived.” And:

“It is not because spring
is too beautiful
that we’ll not write what
happens in the dark.”

— I was feeling rather worn out this morning and came upon a reel on Instagram by Sheniz and it gave me a real feeling of uplift — this reminder of the importance of colour.

— “Enemies are energizing but that fuel is short-lasting.” C.D. Wright said that. Flowers are also energizing. Planning your garden is energizing. This year, I plan on putting in extra dahlias and hollyhocks so I can give more away. Already imagining the random acts of flowers that I’ll be able to do.

Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes: On Flowers, Mostly

When I was in first grade, I used to have
recurring dreams in which I hovered a few inches
above a sheet which turned into a quiet billowing

sea. I don’t have them anymore, only the images
fixed in memory. But I recognize the attitude:
listening for a hush that isn’t complete

silence— filled instead with insinuations
of sound and movement. Isn’t this too
a kind of reading, and the rippling a kind

of poetry? Yes, I think these are some forms
that help us. Or spirits, if that’s how you want
to name them. Dreams, for sure. But there’s

got to be something in you which knew it wanted
to turn its face in that direction, which wanted
to follow. How else could we have gotten here?

Luisa A. Igloria, Dreamwriting

In all the stuff on this blog, I’m thinking about poetry. Even when writing about Nirvana, I was thinking about poems and popularity and the way that obscurity can be an advantage. I was thinking about an underground for poetry, and how the idea of “indie” given to us by the 90s really cross-pollinated with literary culture and “indie publishing.” Because the hollowing out of the term “indie” and its contradictions matters for poetry too. Just as “indie” has long since become a mere algorithm and a fashion in the music world, many “indie” presses and bookstores prove to be highly de-pendent on corporate and state partnerships. A big difference, though, is that poetry has nowhere near the commercial appeal of music: a poet can’t “sell out” in the same way, because nobody is really buying.

And that is part of the problem. In this cordoned off, non-commercial little world of poetry and its “community” and the “independence” it so values, everything gets rationalized and excused, and you can get very deluded about your position. You can end up thinking all poetry is on the same side, inherently against the status quo, and sanctified by its being “non-profit.” This is often aligned with the view that poetry and its culture is somehow spiritual and immaterial, “a noble calling,” and that the political economics of it all is just a troublesome afterthought. I’ve called this view “literary exceptionalism,” and the problem isn’t just that it leads to an insular culture of boring poetry, bad politics, and exploitation; it’s also that it makes it hard to have any real sense of one’s position as an artist—and as such, “independence” ceases to be a material fact. It becomes “indie” as mere vibes, style, aesthetics.

And these are two things I’m always rattling on about: 1) literary exceptionalism is bogus and has no material analysis, and 2) independent literary culture—a counterculture for literature—is defined by how it relates to material factors. My idea of independent literary culture is one whose grounding principles draw a material line, not merely an aesthetic one, against the bullshit constituting establishment literary culture. To achieve this, one has to see the forces shaping the field of poetry and how these fit into the larger political-economic picture—and also how one fits into these, or against these, oneself. And for poets, in addition to broad factors like class itself, the unique conditioning forces include the state, the neoliberalized university (with its culture of professionalism and scarcity), and sources of centralized wealth (as given directly by entities like Amazon and as funneled through foundations and non-profits). Literary entities aligned with these things constitute, in varying degrees, the establishment forces—or at least those who have ceased to actively oppose the establishment.

In the last 35 years or so, there has been a massive blurring between this establishment—with its resources and infrastructure—and the ideology of “indie” within poetry. Everything has been disoriented. Where once it was absolutely clear where the establishment centers were and who was on their side in poetry—”Official Verse Culture” was institutionally and aesthetically distinct from the various schools of oppositional poetics, and the latter mostly lacked the resources of the former—now virtually every way of writing poetry has some foothold in the establishment.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no.1)

Goodbye tombstones. Goodbye minus signs.

Goodbye to the summer storm that became a winter of unsolvable arithmetic.

Hello wings. Hello honeycombs.

Hello murmurs emerging from the underground full-throated as a high school battle of the bands.

It’s early morning. I’m too sleepy to remember much that happened before this moment.

I’m too awake to release us from any promises of a dream.

Rich Ferguson, Hello, Goodbye

This season’s live session was all about growth. Growing your writing, pruning your writing to help it grow, identifying places where growth was being impeded. The session was lively: it’s good to give space, and be in a space, in which writers feel safe enough to express their fears, and one of the topics that came up, a topic that almost always comes up, is the fear of being left behind.

As we worked through exercises aimed at identifying what we wanted to write about rather than what we felt we should be writing about. One of the recurring blocks I see writers struggling with is feelings around the pressure to conform, keep up, replicate ‘successful’ writing and writers, all of which end up being a block to authenticity. The talk turned towards feelings of being irrelevant. The feeling of not really being listened to, not really being counted, not being classed as an emerging writer, because all the awards, all the attention, all the references to emergence in the writing community is aimed towards younger writers.

So much of what is happening, particularly in poetry, seems very non traditional in terms of style. But this is how literature evolves. Poetry is not a static art form, it is an evolving art form. Boundaries are always being pushed. I say this a lot, but it’s worth staying again – good writing never goes out of fashion, and authenticity is the path to good writing. Replicating a writing style because you have seen that style win competitions will lead to dissatisfaction because eventually that writing, that writer, won’t progress, they won’t grow.

Wendy Pratt, Growth Session: Older Writers Emerge Too

Let us be skunk cabbage, robed in red with our sisters.
Let us be spring peepers singing multiplicities.
Let us be river rocks guiding the bright breasts of fish and fowl.
Let us be symphony, whirlwind, and egg tooth
piercing the membrane, quietly cracking speckled shells.

Sarah Lada, Awe, A-W-E

Woke up feeling dread, like an important task was left undone, or some big issue was going to have to be faced. The smoke from the neighbor’s chimney writhed like a live thing, a fish desperate to escape the line, twisting, straining first in one direction, then the opposite. Temps have dropped, in the way of spring here, first one thing then another. I am a puddle of self-pity one minute, glorying in snowdrops the next. We’re weeks past the spring forward but still in transition. The new the new. The news the news. Yesterday I went to a store I rarely visit, and sat staring at the back of Dave’s apartment building. Later Bob said, I can’t believe Dave is just gone. Yes, I said. I know. But turns out he was talking about another Dave. Another type of gone. So many things seem unbelievable. So many things I thought would be different are not what I thought. I have wanted many things and sometimes it passed, the wanting, sometimes not. Sometimes I got what I wanted. Sometimes I got something else not looked for. And sometimes that resolved the unmet want. Sometimes it didn’t. Tulip and iris greens are shoving up, and the swamp is bruised with burgeoning skunk cabbage. We may get some snow. I wonder if I shouldn’t have bothered to get up today at all. But I did. I did.

Marilyn McCabe, Time to clean because I’m sick of keeping things

Worked on this version of Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem this morning.

Ode to a Suit

Morning, and you lie
on a chair, waiting
for my airs, my graces,
my tenderness,
my hope, my body
to inhabit yours,
I step off the boat
of sleep, leave it
rocking behind me,
fill your sleeves,
set foot
in your empty legs,
the embrace
of your unwavering faith,
go into the street,
into poetry […]

Roy Marshall, Ode to a Suit

This week: painful radiance, a bear-shaped shadow, the sound of the axe, a single brahminy kite, and much more. Enjoy.

The dawn rouses so many creatures.
Watchful, they emerge from burrows.
If one sneezes, they scurry into shadow.
It’s us that award names to the nameless.
Our responsibilities stretch wide and far.

And in the freezing wilderness of Wonderland
Alice clutches at the last straws of light.
Her mother has no idea where she is.
A dog with gravestone eyes lies at her feet.
The Mad Hatter is long gone, presumed dead.
The Cheshire Cat plays the saxophone, alone.

Bob Mee, VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS

On the bus today, I watched a little boy in a stroller, whose mother was ruffling his abundant black hair. He turned his head and looked up at her with such a beatific smile, and she looked down at him the same way — a sort of Madonna and child moment — and I thought of what was going on in Washington and how little it had to do with that, with these most basic ways in which we are human. And of course, it has everything to do with it, if you are one of the unlucky ones caught in the crosshairs, like countless mothers and children in the world’s war zones, or those who fear deportation or persecution.

I’m not watching the news or reading it today. That’s a choice. We can actually limit the extent to which we allow ourselves to be invaded by negativity, threats and pronouncements that may or may not be acted upon, and the resulting stress and spiraling worry they create. I am not advocating putting one’s head in the sand, or failing to name, protest, and resist all the wrongs that we can. However, the period we’re entering is going to be rough and invasive, and our first responsibility is to ourselves and those around us: to be as strong mentally and physically as possible, and to remember and celebrate our own humanity in the face of a darkness in which it’s so easy to become lost.

My primary job, as I see it, is to be a person who carries, communicates, and encourages hope, joy, creativity, and a positive lifeforce — in spite of everything. And this IS a job – it takes work. What helps? Using my senses to pay attention, because there is almost always something life-giving to notice, like the mother and child on the bus today. There is color. There is music. There are words. There’s the smell of food being prepared, or flowers in a supermarket display. There is the cold of winter on my cheeks, and the warmth of the distant sun which can still be felt even in sub-zero temperatures. There’s the taste of coffee, salt, lemons, chocolate. We miss so much when we’re wrapped up in ourselves and our worries — and our screens — and we have to train ourselves to turn back to the actual world, which is right there, existing, waiting to be noticed — full of sorrows, yes, but also full of beauty, joy, and simplicity.

Beth Adams, How to Survive

Remember Spring my love,
hold tight with me.

Look how the snowdrop
umbrellas lime-green down there.

Remember Spring my love,
hold on.

Let me show you sunrise
clementine the sky.

Sue Finch, WHAT WAS I THINKING?

This week I received my PLR statement and it informs me that thousands of strangers have taken time to borrow my books from their local libraries. I am immensely moved by this and grateful. I had no idea. Thank you. 

Here’s a picture of a happy day, this day in January in 2022, when the paperback was in the big window of the flagship store of Foyles on Charing Cross Road. This was a huge moment for me, I recall, I was very excited about it. I have never been in a big shop window before, and this is a particular favourite bookshop I love to visit all the time, especially as a baby poet when I worked and partied in Soho every night. 

I always said ‘one day I will be in that window’ and back then this seemed like a big dream of a thing to say out loud. It was something I really fought for and believed though. I look back and love the punky baby poet who starved and fought for me.

I have to salute her. She, who is not me now. I think about that, how we have to thank our past self. The person who writes the first draft of the book may grow to feel differently about things than the person who signs the published article. The poet that started this WAITING FOR GODDEN blog all those years ago isn’t me now. We are all complex, multi-layered and messy human beings, and all of the eras of you being a human being get you to this place, which is always in the here and now.

I am inside these thoughts and memories and also in the here and now, January 2025, I’m in hibernation and buried in the darkness of January tasks, it is a sad mixture of death and taxes, virus and sickness, bereavement and deadlines, sorrow and bewilderment. 

Salena Godden, Blue January 2025

the plant by my front door
blooms purple every spring
grown from a cutting
from my mother’s garden
who grew it from a cutting
from her mother’s garden
long ago i forgot its name
but never its provenance

Dick Whyte, Nina Catherine Howe – Meditation (1926)

After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog that contains no commentary. That poem was Tollund, by Seamus Heaney. I felt I took a risk in not saying anything about it – I thought readers would be able to join the dots between political events across the pond and Heaney’s description of ‘low ground, […] swart water, […] thick grass/ Hallucinatory and familiar’ which culminate in the self-reflexivity of his final lines, where his group (of friends? family?) stand:

More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad
Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:
And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

Everything in that stanza fulfils what Heaney sets out in my favourite of his essays, ‘The Government of the Tongue‘:

In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

I find it poignant to read it again today, not least because of the person who now occupies the White House, but also because Heaney prefaces his remarks with one of his grittier sentences: ‘Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.’ Again, the links to current events are there to see in plain sight.

The good news is that he does not stop there:

Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.

When you think of hope, what do you think of? I was asked this at about 11.00 on New Year’s Eve, and, introvert that I am, I went blank and have only thought of the answer now: the power of the imagination to strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life – even though no poem has ever stopped a tank.

Anthony Wilson, Ourselves again (again?)

Knee-deep in reflected gold, I wait
for news. Recently, there’s been nothing
but the wish to hang on. Overcome
by the shedding of everything familiar,
 
there’s nothing left; hope’s been and gone. News
will come, and the river will stop running;
everything familiar will be shed,
and each part will fall to meet its gold reflection.

Karen Macfarlane, 6 TIMES (II)

We need to be careful with money. Go easy with food. Cuba is cut off from American banks. We have the money we came with.

But in Matanzas, our room is quiet, except for a bird singing. Tomorrow or the next day, we will swim in the Saturn cave, go to the Coral Beach, and we will see about writing.

I am blessed. Today, a man named Amed drove us here in a classic red ‘57 Chevy.

Despite the struggles of an isolated country, Cuba has light, magic, and music. Where we are sleeping has high ceilings, a blanket, nice towels, and in the morning, there will be Cuban coffee on the rooftop.

Tomorrow, we will swim, and then we will go to the coffee shop in the town square, and we will write!

I am ready for swimming. Writing. Cuban coffee. Cuban music.

In this adventure, I will polish this book, so it shines in the dark.

Kate Gale, I Can Sing for You: Our Adventure in Cuba

That we may escape this American psych ward; this red, white, and blue panic room; big-moneyed brotopia speaking in sieg heils and high-fives. This hot-wired joyride of a truly hot mess; PSA for DOA; all-night fear factory where vindictiveness hosts an open bar. This fork-tongued freedom machine; autonomous vehicle steered by the unseen hands of autocracy; this bad-rappin’ nation where the words ICE ICE baby take on chilling new meaning. This Guernica aneurysm; babel-mouthed alphabet of scrambled belonging. This burn church; this scorched land; this scorched psyche, a Rorschach posing the question, What’s next? 

Rich Ferguson, Red, White, and Blue Panic Room

To live in a city of over ten million people, one bird in the formless murmuration, is to normalize erasure. How easily you stop hearing the noise – of people, of traffic, of need, of despair, of failure, of persuasion; stop seeing movement as individual action: not this person walking, not even that one running for a bus, not a car in a rush hour crawl, not a street dog marking corners and gates and curbs as its own, not the woman with two children, on a rickety scooter, doing a school run. Instead, they all merge into one still background: you disconnect from the city and walk between rickshaws and bikes, sidestepping footpath vendors and the sleeping homeless, brushing shoulders with shoulders and awnings and nameless hurry, comfortable with your thoughts, comfortable in your square of earth, ring of sky, wall-less silo, comfortable in your alone.

Here, in the city, poetry is birthed in imagined silences. On grey canvases. In the belch of trucks. In the queues. In the lifts. In the waiting. In the contrary being. In the pulse of a time that is both tomorrow and yesterday – the long monsoon days both relief and rhythm, the scorching summer both mundane and midwife, the muse as temperamental as the moon, the mind as unwilling as morning.

A single brahminy kite draws slow, taunting arcs over the frenzy. Loneliness, you learn, has nothing to do with the crowds. Clouds have nothing to do with ascent. Peace has nothing to do with chaos. The city, like the word, like the birds, like the night, like the solitude of the moving sky, is within you.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Imagined silences

It’s freezing cold again:
we leave the hot water tap on as a thin
drizzle. All morning, I have felt
the sort of heaviness that sometimes
remains, even after a long bout
of crying. I listen to a livestream
where the panelists speak of ways
we might lift each other up when we
feel like that. One of them says,
hard as it seems, we must laugh
together, even be silly. Feed each
other, come together, hold
each other up. We can still burn
bright as the burning hills. We
can burn even brighter.

Luisa A. Igloria, Monday

I was playing around with the idea of titling a post, “What Will You Inaugurate this Year?” The idea came via my brilliant friend and piano teacher, Susan, who recently told me, Your year—your next 4 years—do not belong to any politician, they belong to you. Following this advice, however, is one of those “easier said than done” things (as a lot seems, lately).

And, as for the lofty title. I find I haven’t the heart to give anyone inspiring advice, not today. To keep it simple, a better title—maybe for my intentions this whole year—is simply, “What Bethany Is Reading Now.”

Of course I have been reading (reading has been my life-line!), but I’ve been too distracted to share on the blog. The main distraction: my 84-year-old husband fell off a ladder and down our front steps. (Throughout a hospital stay, follow up appointments, etc., he has insisted he is fine. No, he has not gotten rid of the ladders.)

Meanwhile…I had earlier committed to several local poets to review their books. Leaving aside large concepts (suggested by Latinate words such as inaugurate), spending some time on poetry sounds good.

Bethany Reid, Taking Leave, poems by Mary Ellen Talley

A friend sends me haiku most days, under the rule that I don’t comment on them because I do that for a living and it can wear me out–it’s a pleasure to just watch them float by. One of the latest was addressed to a black widow living near his bed, informing it that he wouldn’t yet oust the spider into single-degree temperatures. I did comment on that one, remarking that I would not be so compassionate, and then we had a brief conversation about feeling tender-hearted lately. It’s the cruelty of the world, we agreed.

The term is in full swing–W&L starts early so I’ve been teaching for more than two weeks now–and I feel the same way about the students in my introductory poetry workshop, whose first poem drafts I’m writing responses to today. Gentle, Lesley. People are fragile.

I feel some kindness beaming back at me, too, from other people. A former student is teaching Poetry’s Possible Worlds at a military academy (!) and just sent me the loveliest response paper his own student had written about it, commenting that I made myself vulnerable in the book and it touched her, made her feel connected. And then there’s kindness from the universe: a new poem came to me, which hasn’t happened much lately. A good EMDR session made my tense muscles feel softer, as if I am beginning to release that braced feeling I’ve experienced for as long as I can remember.

Lesley Wheeler, Tender and furious

i love that the word “hives”
for the rashes on my skin
is the same as that
of a thrumming hornet body.
i run my fingers
across the raised flesh.
never the same. sometimes
a bracelet. sometimes
just one like an angry lonely star.
my body rejects this world
so it maps others.
says, “here is where
our treasure is buried.”

Robin Gow, hives

A couple days ago, J and I were talking about Dead Poets’ Society, which, to many people’s surprise is not a movie I am enamored with (in a similar vein, I prefer Mona Lisa Smiles so much more.)  Once it was on video, I  remember our sophomore year teacher rolling in the VCR TV on its cart and having us watch it, though I’m pretty sure I had already been writing poetry (or maybe quotes should be around the “poetry” part ) for a year. Since the end of freshman year when we were charged with writing them. I don’t remember what models were give us. Whitman? Dickinson? Frost?  Either way I wrote a bunch–about flamingos, kittens, unrequited high school love. I wrote them out on notebook pages, on pen pal stationery, in the blue lockable diary a cousin gave me for my 14th birthday. They may have rhymed, but it got much worse later on in college. Beyond some Poe in Junior high, I wasn’t that familiar with poetry in general, so its no wonder I was clueless those first couple years. But I was also writing lots of other things–papers on UFO’s, essays on the 1st Amendment that won prizes, flawless 5 paragraph essays, a term paper on Shakespeare’s women, newspaper editorials on environmental issues. And I was reading–still lots of horror and some romance. I still have those early poems, what I’m guessing was most of them in a folder somewhere, though I threw a lot of things away a while back, mostly things that already exist in book form. But I kept all those early fledgling drafts, mostly for my own amusement. 

Kristy Bowen, true north

Sunday morning was cold, and clear. I headed to the theater to help strike the Panto set. The day after a long process is something like the day after a binge. I walked up a narrow space between two office buildings and nearly stumbled on a little ceramic angel, sleeping, head rested on folded arms propped up by a ceramic tree stump. All around him were off-season rhododendron bushes and empty bottles: cheap whiskey, dark beer. He was sleeping. Passed out, maybe.

Is there a word for looking back on an earlier time in your life, not with a sense of loss and longing, but with an objectivity that has your mind bouncing between shame and pity for your former self? Compassion may be years away, but I am learning to stay in the difficult spaces when I stumble upon them: face-to-face with memories that are mine, but that haven’t been polished by my rumination—that haven’t been made familiar. That is what it means to tame something, isn’t it? To be made familiar to it. Can these memories, tucked into my being like parasites, tame me?

Will they break me?

Ren Powell, A Beautiful Life Story has More than One POV

I’ve lost count of how many pieces I’ve read about the powers of going local, connecting with community, continuing to create, not letting them steal our joy and attention, not letting them live rent-free in our heads, not letting them destroy our humanity, etc. and I appreciate the sentiments and where they’re coming from, I really truly do, but…enough, already. It feels a little too much like 2017 resistance to me, if that makes any sense. Like, it all sounds good, and there’s good in doing those things, for sure, but is it really going to do what we hope it will? Any more than our protests and postcards and phone calls and donations have? Does it acknowledge what’s really happening?

Reading these pieces has begun to make me feel not OK (because I really don’t want to go back to 2017 in any way), so I’ve mostly stopped doing that. I seem to have joined a church, despite my atheism, primarily because of their community-based activism and because it’s nice to meet with other folks once a week who share my values and learn new things about organizations doing good work in our city and just sit with it all for an hour in a safe, loving space. (The pastor says my atheism does not disqualify me for membership, so I don’t feel I’m there under false pretenses.) I start volunteering with the library this week and I’m learning how to get involved involved in the church’s projects. I’m greatly limiting my time with social and other media.1 I’m focusing on the day I’m in. I’m reaching out to my people. I’m doing my best to put healthy things in my body and to move said body. I’ve deep-cleaned our house and I’m back in therapy for support with my personal stuff.

These are all good things and I will continue to do them. And I’m still not really OK. Some of that is because I’m in the midst of a personal firestorm—and isn’t that true of many of us? We are still navigating all the hard personal things we always have, but we’re doing it on a foundation that is not what we’ve long known it to be. And yes, sure, the shifting has now been going on for a long time, but it’s suddenly accelerated and there’s just no denying what’s been happening any more.

I’m coming here just to say: We’re not OK. It’s not OK. Something has died or is dying and I don’t know much about grief but I do know that denial is the one sure-fire thing we can do to prolong it and make it hurt even more than it already does. I’m doing the thing writers are often advised to do: I’m writing the kind of thing I want to read. I don’t want cheerleaders right now. I don’t want false hope or platitudes. Don’t you dare tell me that this is all for the best in the long run, or part of God’s plan, or that we’re lucky to have had what we had for as long as we did. Don’t tell me that the country is rotten from the core and it all needs to burn down anyway. There are parts I love. There are ideals I love, as far short of reaching them as we have always been. And even if I can’t name exactly what it is, I know that something precious died this week. (And for the love of anything holy, don’t you dare tell me that it hasn’t. Don’t you even think about gaslighting me that way.) I need to mourn with those who are also mourning, and I want space for all the feelings that come with loss: anger, depression, sadness. I want to rage against the dying of the light. Don’t rush me and those who are feeling as I am to some false kind of feeling better. I’m holding out for the real deal, and the only way to get there is through.

Rita Ott Ramstad, I’m not here to comfort or inspire

Some will look for a way out, an end to history; 
the woman who swallowed pills,
was rushed to the ER with an inked note
pinned to her sad, sallow blouse: 

DO NOT RESUSCITATE if Donald Trump wins.  
That was November, 2016. My doctor-friend had 
his orders: she won; she doesn’t have to relive 
the second debacle. […]

No reason to leave this beautiful world just yet.  
The deep processes of awareness unfinished.
The blanks & pits & recommitment. 
Painful radiance will survive. 

Jill Pearlman, ER & DJT

To the Little British Girl

on Gardener’s World who grew her first garden this year. Your tour of the garden was just what my tired and sad eyes needed this morning. Walking the garden in your pink wellies, you proudly showed the dahlias you grew from seed, the roses you rescued from black spot, tending them with care and fresh compost, the tomatoes (toe-mah-toes) and peppers bursting with life, and everything you declared as “lovely”. Little British girl, you are lovelier than the loveliest flower. Your delight is contagious and a reminder to observe the small things, to nurture the broken things, to share the beautiful things, when we can. Your corner wildflower patch feeds the bees and butterflies just as you, little girl, have fed me this morning. Stay wild, little girl. Stay safe in your lovely garden.

[…]

My garden today is under snow! New Orleans is forecasted to get 4-6 inches and it is coming down hard and fast as I write this. Since I moved here in 1978 we’ve had four previous snows but nothing compared to the forecast for today. The city is shut down including all the interstate highways coming in. It should be interesting and it’s certainly pretty but, oh, I’m worried about my garden.

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): To the Little British Girl

I’ve now posted for 100 weeks in a row!

I’m seeing quite a few writer and poet friends arriving on substack from other platforms, hoping to build an audience here. It might be nice, on this 100 post milestone, to talk about what I’ve learned along the way. […]

There are all sorts of different writers on substack and all sots of different models for writers posting on substack. You have to find the one for you. […] My hot take here is to write what you are already writing. It is far more enjoyable than trying to be what you are not. Substack is a stall for your wares, or a museum for your writing artefacts. It’s another way for you to connect to people, your readers. It does not have to be a whole new fangled sparkly version of yourself, it just needs to be your passion. Look at what is important to you and write about that. I can see the irony in my saying this and then doing a ‘how to write on substack’ post.

Wendy Pratt, 100 weeks of posting on substack

Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical wobbling often made him have to take his seat again; but the humour and mischievous twinkle were as powerful as ever. Over the years, I have to admit it took me a while to really come to appreciate his work; I think I did not really ‘get’ the force of his brevity, his precision. If you have not seen it yet, do watch the brilliant, moving, inspiring BBC programme about him, his life and work here.

Martyn Crucefix, RIP Michael Longley

I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:

Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.

The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.

The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.

Matthew Paul, January reading (2)

The longer poems and sequences based on [Elaine] Randell’s social work experience (‘Along the Landings’, a late addition to the ‘Beyond All Other’ section, and many poems from Faulty Mothering and The Meaning of Things) also show an Objectivist influence, I think, but this time it’s the documentary poems of Charles Reznikoff that I sense behind them. However, she makes the method her own, partly because the documents she’s working with (I imagine a combination of case notes and memory) grow out of her personal experience but largely because she has grown completely into her own voice:

The boy looks at me for a long time studying me;
he says he knows why I have come today.
“It’s about the baby;
he’s cute” he says.
The boy’s long white thin arms are like glass
His face his face his face is totally opened to me.
Is the baby dead now, he asks.
I tell him so.

The almost flat tone, the complete refusal of melodrama, is so perfectly undercut by that gut-wrenching ‘His face his face his face’ in a moment of genuine emotion. And yet, there is always hope, as in these lines from ‘For Andrew and Beatrice’, one of a number of epithalamia that appear in the uncollected poems, which also serve as an instance of the interplay between the human and natural worlds that is another thread running through this book:

We watch as two become constant against the ever changing sky.
Our hearts look up as skylarks greet your steps together.
They, knowing more
radiate their song, soaring evermore in tune.

In her introduction to the 1987 North and South edition of her first prose collection, Gut Reaction, Randell wrote that the pieces in the book were a kind of record of 10 years working in childcare and mental health, and that the pieces are factually accurate apart from the removal of ‘identifying attributes’. She goes on:

The humour, courage, conflict and pain contained in the lives described is clear. The reader may be disturbed by the realities of the facts.

These prose pieces, and the ones that follow in the ‘Prose from The Meaning of Things’ and ‘Uncollected Prose’ sections defy easy categorisation; they are not fiction, not prose poems, not journalism. In a sense, they are like pages from the documents that the poems grew out of. And, as with the poems, Randell avoids the perils of anecdote; these are not neat little stories that point towards the snap closure of an easy moral, she has too much respect for the people she’s writing about for that.

Billy Mills, Collected Poems and Prose by Elaine Randell: A Review

The more you read of Swinburne’s poems to other poets, the more the relationship to Catullus emerges as a kind of model. Here for instance is the end of his poem for François Villon, who died in the mid-fifteenth century, addressed once again as a poetic ‘brother’ across the ages:

Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
      Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother’s name.

When I read Catullus at university — memorably, we were supposed to prepare every one of the 108 short poems for our first tutorial, just a week into term — our prescribed edition still left some passages decorously unannotated and untranslated. Of course there’s nothing like a blank space in a translation to send readers straight to the original, suddenly filled with enthusaism for a spot of unseen translation.5 I was amused to find in my edition of Swinburne that — presumably in imitation of this practice — he does the same thing in the one of his Villon translations. Here is the seventh stanza of Villon’s ‘Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière’ (‘The Complaint of the Fair Armouress’), as she enumerates the physical beauties she has now lost:

Ces gentes espaules menues,
Ces bras longs et ces mains tretisses ;
Petitz tetins, hanches charnues,
Eslevées, propres, faictisses
A tenir amoureuses lysses ;
Ces larges reins, ce sadinet,
Assis sur grosses fermes cuysses,
Dedans son joly jardinet?

And here is Swinburne’s translation, as it teasingly appears in my (admittedly pretty ancient) edition:

The shapely slender shoulders small,
Long arms, hands wrought in glorious wise,
Round little breasts, the hips withal
High, full of flesh, not scant of size,
Fit for all amorous masteries;
** *** ****, *** *** ***** **** ***
****** ***** ** **** **** *****
** * **** ****** ** **** *****?

I love the way this asterixed-out version retains the punctuation and indicates the length of the missing words, so you can have a go at guessing what they might be! (Even if you don’t have a French dictionary to hand, you’ll no doubt have realised that the lines describe the woman’s genitalia.) I’m afraid I know nothing about the textual history of Swinburne’s verse, and my edition is an old one — but presumably he did actually write these lines, which have then been suggestively censored, just like so many school editions of Catullus down the years.

Victoria Moul, Swinburne, Catullus and expurgating Villon

Chopping kindling from
a knotty block … in each stick,
a part of its shape.

James W. Hackett (Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson, Kodansha International, 1996)

The Yorks/ Lancs Haiku group met online yesterday for the first meeting of the year. The theme was ‘winter’ and there are so many good winter-themed haiku that it seemed to take me ages to select one to share with the group. In the end, I went with the above. It’s probably more heavily punctuated than is the fashion these days, plus the syllable count is 5-7-5, although unlike many poems that adhere to this, it doesn’t appear forced. I like it because it encompasses a complete idea – much harder to do, I think, than to juxtapose two images. It’s onomatopoeic too – I can hear the sound of the axe striking. Much of what I read these days is quite minimalist, even by haiku standards, so I’d almost forgotten how much I like these type of poems (fuller, more rounded somehow). So, I’m sharing it again here, in the hope that you like it as much as I do.

Julie Mellor, Winter …

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

Most of my poems have written themselves, honestly. From the beginning it has flowed easily. I didn’t choose this shit, it chose me. I am just a monkey mouthpiece for the ghosts.

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?

Oh no, no notes besides maybe an idea or a vignette. I will write myself a note or an email to remember for later. An example is last night my son turned in his sleep and said “read it.” I wonder what book he wanted read to him? There is a poem there I will have to sit down and write. Once I open up to the subconscious, I just let it go out and direct it a bit and maybe fix a word later. Most of my poems are first and final drafts. I don’t agonize over them at all. They are better when they are allowed to just spring out and splat!

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?

With the last two books I had an idea what I wanted to do from the beginning. Sapphires on the Graves was going to be a book of prose poems with very little punctuation and a cyclical and surreal feel. 500 Hidden Teeth began as a project where I was going to write 500 separate poems in one-line sentences. As the book progressed the sentences began to connect and waver and connect again and many of the sentences ended up as groups that could be seen as poems. Yet, my intent is that each sentence is still a poem and the whole book is one large poem. I like the last description best. […]

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?

Shit. Like I said I am here for the harpies and the shadows and the veins. I only tell what I have heard in trance. My job is to go into that broken avalanche of ribs and bring out spells and ash. I strive for magic. I strive for honesty. In that place it is all one water.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Scott Ferry

A secondhand bookshop here is selling recent issues of the TLS, North, Magma and Poetry Review for a quid. The’ve all been going for a long time. The TLS (weekly) has one poem and a few reviews. The others are leading UK poetry magazines with articles and reviews. I’ve not read them for a year or so. I found them all a worthwhile read.

• The Times Literary Supplement (a tabloid newspaper) has reviews that always include some adverse criticism. The other mags’ reviews tend to avoid saying negative things.
• Magma’s issues vary according to the guest editor(s) and theme. I read the Physics issue, which wasn’t one of the best. They get 5,000 submissions/issue.
• The North has so much in it that there’s bound to be something to like. They have guest editors. They’ve rejected me the last few times I’ve tried. Decades ago, I used to have more luck – have they changed or have I?
• Poetry Review is the Poetry Society’s magazine. If poetry is going to try to distance itself from prose, then the poems in recent Poetry Reviews show the way. Hit’n’miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn’t like were the discussions, interviews and joint reviews – too much waffle and mutual praise. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned essays?

Tim Love, Magma, North, TLS, Poetry Review

A few years ago I was contacted out of the blue by Michelle Moloney King, the founder of Beir Bua Press. She had read some of my blog posts on mathematical forms in poetry, and offered to publish them as a book. The result was From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry, which was released in autumn 2021, with stunning cover art by Moloney King herself.

Following the closure of Beir Bua Press in 2023 the book is no longer available in print, so I am now making it freely available in downloadable form. I’ve posted the Introduction below, followed by pdf versions of each of the chapters (including an additional chapter on geometrical forms). Enjoy!

Marian Christie, From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry

Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) — who, early in his career, was a math teacher — died just a few weeks ago.  Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work.  My first mention of Holden’s work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 — and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.  

Two of Holden’s mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me — Strange Attractors,  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).

JoAnne Growney, Poet and Math Teacher Passes On

I’m not going to be all evangelical about handwriting vs typing. I have terrible, almost illegible handwriting, but I do both, although it’s probably more typing than handwriting nowadays. However, I still like to make notes for poems and works on paper with a fountain pen. I’d take a photo of my main pen (only because is came up in conversation at work this week), but a) I can’t lay my hands on it now, and b) there’s a purring cat next to me that can’t be moved. I think you’ll survive. It’s hardly a vintage one.

I mention this mainly because I read this interesting article earlier in the week about the apparent decline in hand-writing, or at least wonders if we are…

It’s an interesting, c. 15 min read. The passage below was one that stood out

“When we focus on making a physical object, or on playing a musical instrument, our concentration level is mainly self-directed,” the sociologist Richard Sennett argues. The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. This form of “situated cognition”, as Sennett calls it, takes time to develop. It also forces us to slow down, as we see when we study people who make things by hand. “Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labour,” Sennett told American Craft magazine. “Making is thinking.”

I’m mainly using this as an excuse to post a poem of my own this week. I’ve not got round to asking anyone for permission.

The poem is called Unlimited Texts. It’s taken from Collecting the Data (Copies left, folks…get ’em white they’re hot, etc).

Unlimited Texts, V19, 25.03.23

What does your scrawl even look like these days?
No more chits or kites dropped. No more post-its
hidden in lunchboxes, or weakly glued
to flyleaves. No more doodles by the phone.
We’re pointing fingers and thumbs here and there
to jab and send, send and jab, send and jab:
Get bread. Love you…We need milk. XXX.
I want this written down.

Mat Riches, Hand Wri(ti)ng(ing)

I had a dream in which I was writing the Psalms in uncial script in walnut ink with a reed pen. I had already made ink from black walnuts fallen from a tree in the Bishop’s Palace Garden in Wells. Jane had recently given me some reed pens harvested on the Somerset Levels. I’m using these and a couple of steel-nib dip-pens to write a brief erasure of each of the 150 Psalms, one per page on heavy handmade paper. I’ve progressed as far as no 28. The writing improves as it goes on! […]

drawing with smoke
ten words
found in a puddle

like a magpie
looking for shiny things
in St Cuthbert’s Gospel

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2025

This has been a busy week: I got a crown in my front teeth (sorely needed,) tore my rotator cuff (a first for me,) got new glasses, and did my first live in-person reading in a very long time with three other lovely poets at the brand new reading series at J. Bookwalter’s Winery (fourth Thursday every month, includes features and an open mic, plus wine!)

The reading was Erika Wright, Catherine Broadwall, Michelle Schaefer, and myself, as the featured readers, with John Campos as MC, and a very civilized open mic afterwards. There must have been fifty people in the audience, and I didn’t know many of them, but did get a see a few familiar faces, and met a lot of new ones. It seems there is, after all, an interest in poetry in Woodinville! Catherine, who has two books already, and I both sold multiple copies of our books (which seems miraculous these days) and the energy in the room (as you will be able to tell in the video) was just joyful and energetic. It was such a relief after the relentless bad news (I’ve been trying to avoid it, but it is difficult to avoid it all) to have a moment like this of happiness and wine and friendship and, um, dare I say community?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, New Glasses, Changes Coming and Looking to the Future

In three out of four ways
  this is normal rain
    and all its bombs
      raindrops.
 
But I’m pulled as Yeats predicted.
  Holding on for dear, dear life.
 
Deaf to the need for the sure untrue,
  the caught-on-a-tide, the do-not-do
 
of Lao Tzu, the impossibility
  of joining minds with a family
    sinking in an ancient
      boat.
 
When the word comes down
  for opinion forming,
    pressure applied
      to vote

it’s not the politician in my soul
  I fear as I scratch out my x
    but the imperfect rhymes
      of the poet.

Chris Edgoose, A Political

In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”

What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.

So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.

Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.

I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.

Ann E. Michael, Curriculum vitae

As artists, I think right now there is the inclination to just disappear for a while. And that’s understandable. But also: Shine. Do your work. Share it when it feels good to do so. Put your energy in the right places for you. Go where the love is. Take up space. There’s no one right way to do things. But I do think we have to insist on our presence. We deserve to exist and we make the world a better place. We’re even good for the freaking economy.

Keep making your art, and writing your books. Each thing you make is a lamp.

I re-read Li-Young Lee’s words on writing a poem:

“A poem is a lamp, and it’s got just enough oil to last for you to write the poem down. And when that oil is gone, the lamp disappears, and you can’t translate it to the next poem. There’s just enough oil there to guide your way through that poem — that’s it. The next one you start from scratch.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Shine with Strange Courage

The wonders of modern marketing means the word Epicurean brings an instant association with food and that unique scent of fancy delis which in many ways is an ideal backdrop for thoughts around happiness. Steer your mind from delicious cheeses and odd things in pretty jars for a moment. I’ve discovered something else about Epicurius. Amongst his many concepts and theories is one that seems particularly prescient in the age of social media – a content life can be best attained when one seeks to live without being known.

This idea is often misconstrued as seeking to live in isolation. It can be better described as seeking to live without craving the validation of strangers – a direct contrast to our modern cult of celebrity, influencers and the lure of the like. Understanding that the drive to appeal to whims of those who do not know me can only cause anxiety puts the pull and power of social media into sharp relief. Using this media to gather support for that which I cherish is a risk and one that needs to be handled with care. I am not advocating the abandonment of the internet, or the abandonment of open mics, live readings and performance. I am suggesting that perhaps this is not the way for every poet to be. Of course, publication houses need a writer who is marketable and being an engaging, likeable person who can sparkle at will (however much that exhausts them) makes it much easier to sell books, which is a pretty essential part of being a publishing house.

Despite this economic necessity, a swift glance through the works said publishing houses share shows there are those who do not follow this path and are just as loved and cherished. The pull for external validation has diluted both work and pleasure in equal measure and seeking to shoehorn myself into being someone who sparkles means a detrimental diversion of energy. In a world where everything, from what we grow in our gardens, to our favourite pet to what we’ve had for tea is so very public, making the decision to seek to live unnoticed, to live free from the validation of strangers feels like a kind of freedom.

Connection with others is important to our wellbeing, but contrary to the nature of our ever homogenised world this connection looks different for everyone. Platforms like Substack, where one can choose to sparkle or not, where one can have 20 subscribers or 20 million and still publish are helpful, if used with care. The pull of the like is still there, the articles about how to make your fortune still create the feeling that there’s something else to be done other than enjoying writing, but if those of us who need to can just hold fast to the essence of building a community of like minded readers, of people who know us, then this platform can offer way to connect without sacrificing authenticity. Now I just need to be brave enough not to sparkle and quell the need to see those little hearts light up.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, No need to sparkle, no need to hurry, no need to be anyone but oneself

I saw the sign early,
walking by flashlight, startled
by my bear shaped shadow.
In the summer, I scrambled up the rock face
to gather berries. In the fall,
I fight the urge to hibernate.

We will comment on the coldness
of this winter. I struggle
to stay awake. In my sewing
basket, a small ball of yarn.

I think of my grandmother
who knitted socks of all sizes,
her form of resistance.
I prefer scarves. I have always chosen
long lines: poetry or code or check out line,
a chain to connect us all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem Made of Abandoned Lines

This week: notes on self-preservation, walking through fire, soundlessly mouthing the syllables for “beloved”, the gunpowder plot, the intimacies of the woods, and much more. Enjoy.

Last night, I dreamt that I had swept under a radiator in an area of the house where I hadn’t cleaned since we moved here. I got on the floor to look under it before sweeping, and I saw a partially eaten apple. It wasn’t even brown; it was a perfect red apple.

According to an online dream dictionary, “To dream about a partially eaten apple means that you’re blinded by something and you can’t see the bigger picture of an important matter. Start looking with your own eyes.”

*   *.  *

I had one cigarette left when I went to bed last night. My big plan was to smoke a celebratory cigarette in the morning and quit. It’s not that I expected the planet would be saved by a moderate Democrat who refused to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people and the need for a national healthcare system. It was simply a step in a better direction for most marginalized groups, including women.

Instead, I woke up, smoked my cigarette while crying, and bought two packs at 7-Eleven while my husband was walking the dog.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Feeling Blue?

How To Make An America

• 1 part genocide
• 1 part slavery
• 1 part apartheid
• 1 part supremacy

Heat for 400 years
in a pressure cooker,
until the steam
escapes the valve.
Then, holding
the cooker at arm’s length,
carry it to a bombed-out
hospital or school,
set it in the foyer,
take 20 paces back,
wait.

Jason Crane, POEM: How To Make An America

Your voice, imagine it—held in a conch shell, or in the damp cold breath of an unformed wish.

What would it take to speak despite a cut throat, or with lungs fully soaked and drowning?

This is where we meet, then—this place where there’s no air, soundlessly mouthing the syllables for “beloved” since we’ve long forgotten our names.

Lori Witzel, Calling

ELECTION 2024, MORNING AFTER

When even a giant duck-shaped cloud can’t lift my despair
I remind myself to take the farthest distant view.

If gravitational force were a billionth of its strength stronger
the universe would have collapsed after the big bang.

If attraction between electrons and atomic nuclei were too strong,
atoms couldn’t bond and molecules couldn’t form.

Truly, anything in this marvel of existence,
in your marvel of a lifetime, is possible.

I know every civilization eventually falls but damn, it’s hard
to watch its own citizens knock down the pillars supporting it.

Laura Grace Weldon, Distractions For The Time Being

I meant to show up today to do a blog-review/appreciation of Ada Limón’s 2011 collection of poems, Sharks in the River. It felt like appropriate reading for this week. (And, indeed, it is.) A woman of color, our national poet laureate.

The problem being, I can’t seem to pull a review together.

Time is not the issue. I am at a 4-day writing retreat on Hood Canal, staying in a cottage at the lip of a cove. Each day I wake early and watch the sun come up. I take at least two long walks during the day and see mergansers, grebes, buffleheads, harbor seals. We have a resident great blue heron, and a resident kingfisher. (When I walk, I think of it as going out to see my kingfisher, and he almost always is there, briefly holding still for me to admire him, then chittering across the water.) I feel awash in gratitude for the consolations of nature. I mess around with my writing, too (not really getting much done), and in the evenings I eat wonderful food and talk with like-minded friends — poets, all. For the most part, we are trying to take a break from politics. But sometimes a fragment slips in, like those intrusive thoughts one gets while meditating, and we gently push it away. Later.

(To take a look at the belted kingfisher, visit All About Birds at Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)

Meanwhile, this arrived via email from The Nation, the closing paragraph of a bid to subscribe. Which I may do when I’m feeling a little better. Anyway, it’s a paragraph I have shared with a number of friends, and I think you may need to hear it too.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

What an excellent and timely reminder.

Bethany Reid, When Artists Go to Work

Last night found us at a short film screening with a company J has started doing some marketing work for in addition to DJ-ing work. It was about alcoholism and accountability, and fit very well into their mission of making films that have weighty subject matter examined in new ways.  All along and all the way home, I was thinking about art and its role in this terrible, terrible, world that is also, quite deceptively very beautiful sometimes. About power and change, and how art is a statement whether it has a clear cut message or no. 

It’s been easy to feel, and I know it’s not just me, that as creatives, what we create does not do much beyond, at its most basic level, distract. Or at its best, entertain. Maybe it’s just me as a poet. and a very specific poetry related thing. During Covid, and after, even though I was writing steadily as the year ended, it felt very much for naught. Like, who cares about poems when the refrigerator trucks are lining up to haul away the bodies because there are too many to store?

Kristy Bowen, words and witchery

Because this week withered the apple in my rib cage, I place a spiral basket on the table and ask everyone to fill its emptiness. People dead-fish through their backpacks and pockets: no jug of mums or crusty loaves, no newsprint or candles. Instead a leather bifold and Do-Not-Disturb sign in French. Outside a high window, trees shake their brilliant heads; in here we can only harvest a plastic snake plant. Some slap their stillness into the basket or lob it from two yards down. A notebook silenced by an elastic band. Blunt pencil whose dinosaur eraser bares its teeth. Medication for an emergency that has loomed for years. That most beloved, a glitter-cased cellphone. Why do they trust each other, trust me? I don’t trust them with my trembling hands. For me, it’s the same old skull with shadow eyeholes. Men boast about assaulting women as other men assaulted me, again and again. Beyond the glass, leaves brown as I watch them. Now write, I say, and the poets lean in.

Lesley Wheeler, Shaky & a still life

I posted a couple of days ago on social media that I’m not quite to “You could make this place beautiful” yet. I believe it, and that hasn’t changed. I’m glad to see that some people are in that headspace and heartspace already, sharing “Good Bones.” I know I’ll get there. I always get there, and I have to get there, frankly, in order to parent and write and live. But today I’m here, in another poem from Goldenrod, “How Dark the Beginning.”

Sending love to wherever you are, and thinking about what you might be carrying. Sending love, which is more powerful than anything we’re up against. I still believe that. […]

We talk so much of  light, please
let me speak on behalf

of  the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark

the beginning of a day is.

Maggie Smith, A Poem for This Day

If you think it’s all small stuff, you are living the calm, protected life of the American middle or upper class. Watching only certain news stations. Unaware that for many people in this country, and in countries with less money or endless wars, there are problems that exceed “small stuff.”

We have a saying at Red Hen: We are measured by how we walk through fire.  During the easy times of a marriage, a family, an organization, a community, or a nation, you don’t know who possesses resilience. 

You know when you are walking through fire.  Who stays the course.  Who keeps walking.  

In the end, I was irritated by the idea that “it’s all small stuff,” because I was moving mountains. I felt that the obstacles in my life making publishing and literary culture work—the raising of funds for diverse books, the partnerships, the distribution of books, the business itself—all of it felt like Everest, and I couldn’t bear to have my work reduced to anthills.

If I had any idea how hard it was to build literary culture in a city like Los Angeles, to find support and allies, I would never have started Red Hen. But now, I am all in. It is not small stuff.  

I am not alone. I have a team of warriors who believe in books and stories, which are more important than ever. Every day, we come to our work believing that we will find more allies to publish change-making, world-shaping books, authors like Afaa Weaver, Douglas Manuel, Amber Flame, and Kristen Millares Young. 

We who work to change the world see our lives in grand terms. We are building castles, running up mountains. We are, as they say, “at play in the fields of the Lord.” For me, that means we are doing the work of making room for the voices on the margins, for untold stories; we’re saying, yes, yes, I will build a bookshelf, and a bookstore, and lift your story into the world. We arc and grand and sing and wonder here at the end of the world, hoping to keep it all going, sundered from dark, ready for wild.

Kate Gale, How We Walk Through Fire

Today was another hard day.  And tomorrow
will be harder.  Well, we will eat thick soups
with large spoons. Hazard a guess which
swooping shadows are birds, which one leaves.
I once pressed gingkos between pages for the future, 
the other day I saw a girl with a gingko necklace.

Jill Pearlman, After Angel Food

I love November. The intimacies of the woods revealed through nude branches. I glimpse folds and swells, intriguing vales and outcroppings I hadn’t seen before as I zoom by in the car. Love the smells of damp soil, rotting wood, mushrooms, and the acrid scents of plants I’m cutting down in the garden. The creak of limb on limb with wind through the trees, and the foot’s crunch crunch through the leaves. The transition is over, summer is gone, winter not quite here. This is its own fecund time of settling. For me it’s a time of ideas, of breathing, of signs and divinations. A chunk of rainbow the other day, hefty and pale, missing its arc, but present in all its ROYGBIV against the dark billow of cloud.

Here is a stunning poem by Lucie Brock-Broido. In my panoply of poetry gods who know how to deliver a reading, she’s right up there. I viscerally remember her reading, how she tasted each word, savored the vowels, licked the consonants, allowed the silences. It was a masterwork, how she read. So give this some time as you allow its unfolding. Give each word its due. And the silence.

It occurs to me the day too deserves such attention, the hour, the moment. As much as we can give. “Finished world”? No. Not yet.

Marilyn McCabe, In the clot of darkness that falls on the land. In the thrice-ploughed field, picked

“Every woman adores a Fascist,  
The boot in the face, the brute  
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
                            “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath

Every woman adores a Fascist.
Turns out men do too.
But we imagine the boot
on someone else’s face,
a face that doesn’t look
like ours, the face that arrives
to take our jobs and steal
our factories, while laughing
at us in a foreign language.

No God but capitalism,
the new religion, fascism disguised
as businessman, always male,
always taking what is not his.

Brute heart, not enough stakes
to keep you dead. 
We thought we had vanquished
your kind permanently last century
or was it the hundred years before?

As our attics crash into our basements,
what soft rains will come now?
The fire next time,
the ashes of incinerated bodies,
the seas rising on a tide
of melted glaciers.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sylvia Plath’s Wisdom

Singers need to sing, dancers need to dance, poets and writers need to write, artists need to paint and draw — and we need to do this on a regular basis, with focus and concentration. It’s so easy to let life intervene, and of course, sometimes it has to. But when we’re able to maintain a practice, day after day, week after week, then we can make progress, even if it’s in very small increments.

Our practice is a big part of what sustains us, through the good times in life and the difficult ones. And our practice is what helps us sustain others, whether through our creative work or just by being better balanced and more fulfilled human beings. Sometimes we need to jump-start our practice, and sometimes we need to do a housecleaning, or to take stock and rethink what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. That comes with this territory.

But we can’t let ourselves be de-railed by negativity or the endless opportunities for distraction, even as our hearts are filled with strong emotions from outrage to anxiety to compassion and grief. Today, I’ll work on some more art, and I’ll also play my flute for half an hour, and do some cooking. Over the weekend, I made bread for the first time in a long while. Winter’s coming. We need sustenance in all its forms.

Beth Adams, Maintaining One’s Practice…notes on self-preservation

Around 11:30pm last night, my rage arrived. I’m sure it had everything to do with the fact that earlier in the evening, I read some new poems and discussed the process with a lovely group of undergraduate students. (Like, WOW: a young people wanted to spend their Friday evening, the week of our evil election, discussing poetry.) It was so great to be with them. They brought apple cider and cookies and a bag of tangerines for us to snack on.

Just before I left, I called over four black students who had attended and asked brilliant questions all evening. I told those young women to huddle up. We put our heads together. “I think y’all know what I’m about to say,” I said. They nodded. I asked them to take care of themselves and each other. “This country isn’t looking out for us. But it definitely ain’t looking out for y’all.” I said a few more things that I won’t share here because, frankly, I don’t know y’all like that. Those four beautiful brilliant black women were like “mmhmm, got it, message received.” We hugged and parted ways.

It does… something… to a person to have to have a conversation like that with young people. America, I will never forgive you for making that conversation necessary once again. I spent much of my evening writing and reading, a desperate bid to keep my heartbreak and rage at bay. But it’s here now. It’s here.

And before you comment on this post: don’t worry, I am fully committed to lively long well and richly. Every day that I’m alive and working and breathing, I hope my life feels like a jagged shiv in the side of America’s neck.

Saeed Jones, RIP, “WE.”

Aquaman is battling the red-orange fire trolls who are vomiting lava, while Randy Rainbow dances in a pink satin dress singing MAGADU. It’s surreal. I close my eyes. I whisper to myself, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening,” over and over. It’s raining as I fall asleep.

What if the fire trolls are not as bad as they’re drawn? Who is telling the story, anyway?

PF Anderson, Election Day

This is no holiday, but the neighbor at the end of the street
has unfurled the largest flag across her front porch—

it looks so smug, especially the red and white parts
above the flower boxes, an idea of self made

even more visible for its refusal to remember certain
truths in history. Which is to say, the archive
is full of instances when light was reflected, refracted;

polarized, diffracted, scattered. But also transmitted,
as the world is still filled with light-emitting bodies.

Luisa A. Igloria, On the Behavior of Light

As I continue to process and work to understand what’s happening, I keep thinking about something I learned long ago that helped me make the decision to choose a small life: Saying no is always a way of saying yes. We all have finite resources, and knowing what we won’t use them on is as important as knowing what we will. It’s OK to limit, as much as possible, all those tiring things from my life.

If I am not having to use my resources to repair what it takes me to fight causes that are lost before they begin, it gives me more ability to say yes to fight for causes I can win. It means I can nurture relationships and care for those I love (and the people they love); be a good steward of the things that are mine to protect; carefully curate the people and information sources I allow into my sphere; make art; speak truth; pursue health; be kind to everyone I encounter; and cultivate joy for myself and others. I will still be tired, but I hope the right kind of tired.

And look, I—like all of us—am a work in progress. I am imperfect in doing all the things I listed in the last paragraph, and I can hardly bear to go back and read many things I wrote in the aftermath of 2016. There was so much I didn’t yet know or understand then, and it may well be that 8 years from now I will think back to this time and wonder how I could still be so naive and wrong about so many things. But this is what feels right today. We all, always, have the right to change our minds when we get new information.

Rita Ott Ramstad, I am tired

The only thing I know for sure is I am still a writer, so I will write and submit and keep trying to encourage people to read, and specifically read short stories and poetry. I’m supposed to do a class visit soon. Right before the election, the site Poetry Out Loud posted my poem, “Spellcaster,” which is from my latest manuscript which I am now looking for a publisher for. […]

The whole place collapses,
a series of chandeliers made
of glass and ice. Off she goes.

Blackberries and currants in her pockets.
Roses blooming in her footpaths.
Wouldn’t you rather be the girl
that casts her own spells?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Doing Terrible? Me too! Setbacks in Physical and Mental Health, How to Move Forward (with Typewriters and Poems)

[A]fter a feast of a bring-and-share lunch, Kari unpacked the treasures she’d brought to show us. Boxes built to contain beach finds, delicate fish-skin bowls, a big book covered in fish-leather and another about ash trees with pop-up birds and end-papers printed from slices of tree, a book about sea-swimming and another about fish, a paper pulp cast of a seaweed frond and a giant hanging leather sculpture. Her work combines imagination, artistry and fine craftsmanship in many media. We were enthralled. As Bron said, “Difficult to sum it up, but she’s expert in many different departments: fish skin tanning, handmade paper, woodcut printing, bookbinding, botanical printing, Norwegian mythology, and all of that combines to make her large enticing books so interesting.” She is very much more than just a bookbinder. But, come to think of it, that could be said of all of us around the table. […]

hand stitching over the lines
with silver words
from the ashes to the new growth

she went down at night
got into the River Parrett
but shadows enhance the work

don’t set off with an idea
ask for the skin
printed with squid ink

harvest the reeds in autumn
lord of the gallows
god of the hanged

Ama Bolton, ABCD 9th November

A topical piece this week, because Tuesday was of course . . . Guy Fawkes’ Night! On the 5th of November each year Britain celebrates the foiling of a 400-year-old terrorist plot by setting light to things and blowing them up. There’s something undeniably odd but also psychologically satisfying about this, and I suppose the celebration has endured so long partly because it neatly acknowledges the illicit thrill of mass destruction under the guise of commemorating its avoidance. […]

The Gunpowder Plot is also the source of one of the few surviving bits of political epigram in ordinary English culture, the English rhyme: Remember, remember, the 5th of November / Gunpowder, treason & plot. / I see no reason / Why Gunpowder treason / Should ever be forgot.3 At the time, and for a good century or so afterwards, the plot prompted an absolute flood of poetry. Some of the most original verse responses are the earliest ones. One of my personal favourites is a truly barn-storming long Latin ode by Andrew Melville, an uncompromising elder statesman of the Scottish Reformation. The way he uses long lyric forms for political polemic and invective is not at all classical — for a rough analogy, imagine something like a crown of sonnets devoted to the most topical kind of political invective. This kind of thing is characteristic of the fashionable poetics of the second half of the sixteenth century, but probably already seemed a bit dated (Melville, born in 1545, turned 60 in the year of the Gunpowder Plot.)

I don’t read much good verse invective these days, but Melville had a real flair for it. His long poem — 108 lines and 27 stanzas — is dramatically sophisticated, filled with both direct speech and rhetorical questions. But strikingly, it does not recount or even allude to the foiling of the plot itself — assuming reasonably enough that everyone knows all that already — or the prosecution and execution of those held responsible for it. All of the sinister triumphalism of the poem is that of the plotters themselves. 

Victoria Moul, Remember, remember the 5th of November

The cat, words above its head, the shadow and marks on the wall. I’ve felt ambushed a little by November, perhaps in a good way, mostly in an ambivalent way. And the scratchiness, discomfort of William Kentridge’s image, a photo I took two Novembers ago, seems the only way to express this November feeling. 

The library books, the gym, the swimming pool, the sewing, picking tomatoes (still – outside) are ways of accommodating the scratchiness, of mitigating it. And it hasn’t been cold, not too grim, a little, but there are months when old festivals make sense and I wish I hadn’t closed the curtains, that I’d stood next to a bonfire reflected in all the windows around a village green, watched wood burn to ash. 

Yes, November’s got to me but there’s a lot to do and more in the world to focus on when it comes to feeling. 

Jackie Wills, November’s got me

On Thursday, I was a guest poet in the University of North Dakota’s Virtual Speaker Series. I read a variety of my poems and talked about my process of learning (over and over again) to let myself write what I need to write without letting my worries or anything else hold me back. Even via Zoom, they were such a lovely audience and had great questions. I’m grateful to Patrick Henry for inviting me and teaching my work in his class!

Yesterday afternoon, I got to be a guest speaker at the International Memoir Writers Association monthly gathering. I talked about and read from my chapbook 28,065 Nights, answered questions about chapbooks and about how poetry and memoir intersect, and ended with a writing exercise (that got me writing too!). I was honored to be invited to share with this group of kind writers.

Another thing that lifted me away from post-election despair was this: I filled in for a friend’s American Literature class on Friday, and he had assigned readings from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. Re-reading these texts and discussing 19th century women’s rights with a room of college students (all brilliant women) felt so important, and I think it fired me up to face whatever comes next.

Katie Manning, Election Week Poetry Events

i could be
the sacrificial bull who is made beautiful
just before the harvest. we picked
the persimmons. we gathered
chestnuts. it is too late for most kinds
of holiness. instead, we have the meat room
& the knife that is not sharp enough.

Robin Gow, 11/7

Apologies for not having blogged for quite a while but after taking up the guitar five years ago, I decided I wanted a new challenge. So, I went out and bought a banjo. That was back in February and increasingly, I spend my spare time practising. Like my guitar playing, I have no great ambition, but I thought I’d post this haibun about it (first published in Presence, issue 79). Hopefully, it goes some way towards explaining where I’m at with my music – and by extension, my writing!
So, here goes:

The Hal Leonard Method Book 1

I buy a copy off eBay and when it arrives, pages 1-9 are creased. After that though, the book is pristine. Whoever owned it before me stopped at Clementine, the tragic song of a miner’s daughter drowned in a stream. The image of her ruby lips, visible just above the water, haunts me.

old banjo
the clawhammer tunes
it already knows

I’ll never be able to play bluegrass like Earl Scruggs or sing like Evie Ladin, but when I put the strap of my Goodtime Leader over my shoulder, feel the smooth finish of the rock maple neck, pick each steel string to check the tuning …

oh my darling
every journey
starts with a journey

Julie Mellor, Banjo time!

It was Adrienne Rich who first reintroduced the poet Muriel Rukeyser to me, and to many readers in What is Found There in the early 1990’s. My paperback edition is dated 1993. My copy is marked in three different colors of ink.

The poet today must be twice-born. She must have begun as a poet, she must have understood the suffering of the world as political, and have gone through politics, and on the other side of politics she must be reborn as a poet (Rich 21).

While Rich is likely talking about herself in this package, this could refer to Rukeyser as well. In 1996, the poet Jan Freeman’s, fabulous Paris Press, reissued The Life of Poetry—which Rich had referenced over a dozen times in What Is Found There. I love this story of a poetry friendship across generations. Rukeyser and Rich met in New York—Rich, maybe in her twenties, Rukeyser, perhaps in her forties.

“In many ways, ” writes Adrienne Rich in her Introduction (A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Revised), “Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time – and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: the connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country’s psychic geography.”

Rukeyser was jailed in Washington D.C. for protesting the Viet Nam war. In addition to many volumes of poetry, she published a biography of the physicist Williard Gibbs (which I’ve just started), several children’s books, translations, 3 plays, a novel, and in 1957 produced a film, All the Way Home. […]

I think a lot these days about a life well lived. Is it possible to make a positive difference in the world and have a fulfilling personal life and write, too?

It seems Muriel Rukeyser may be the poet we need the most in this moment.

Susan Rich, The Stellar Life and Then, Rebirth of Muriel Rukeyser—And More!

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

I like the idea that good poems–and poetry collections­–clarify the question, even if they don’t answer the question. Plus, reading a preachy collection can feel abrasive, for me. It’s a fine balance of wanting poems that provide solace and some answers, but not too many.

Current questions for me are: How do we slow down and why can’t we? How do we stay as present as possible? How do we contribute to a less violent world? How do we not sink into despair?

The questions evolve with each poem.

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 they do have a role, but that doesn’t mean that all writers fulfill that role. It feels hypocritical to me, to do otherwise, as in, to believe in the power of words (to whatever extent) and not speak to larger cultural moments that need attention, advocacy, and change. This doesn’t mean that all writers need to write about the exact same thing at the exact same time, as much as use their voice to advocate for pressing issues that affect everyone.

For example, I’m inspired by writers like those in the Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG), who have spoken openly and advocated for a return of hostages and an immediate ceasefire in Palestine.

I think writers have a duty to choose what matters to them and express it. We can’t have opinions about everything, sure, but we can acknowledge violence where we see it, always.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allie Rigby

Stevie Nicks – the witchy, rock and roll goddess who carved out a 50+ year career with Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist – continues to delight and intrigue music fans. From her sold-out tours to provocative new music, Nicks remains a vital force and beloved figure in the pantheon of rock and pop culture. As the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, she’s set records and broken barriers. Her number one hit “Dreams” helped make “Rumours” one of the best-selling albums of all time, its legacy enduring across generations.

Nicks is also a poet at heart, with many of her most famous songs beginning as handwritten verses in her notebooks, which she occasionally shares with fans. Her music continues to captivate new audiences with ethereal ballads and powerful rock anthems, striking a chord with all ages and becoming the soundtrack for viral videos and memes across social media. Her candid reflections on love, addiction, and the music industry’s ups and downs continue to cement her status as a cultural icon. […]

While we love platform boots, swirly shawls and messy affairs, we want to see poems that go beyond the headlines to explore how she has personally influenced you as a poet. Absolutely NO rewrites or reinterpretations of the Stevie Nicks song catalog. There is a reason “Dreams,” “Edge of Seventeen,” and “Stand Back” are iconic—there’s no need to mess with perfection. 

Collin Kelley, Submissions open for “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology”

16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence first came to my attention a few years ago via social media, and I’ve experimented with various things over the years – I think one year I posted one poem a day on my blog from my sequence “How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping”, (from my first collection The Art of Falling). This sequence explores my own experience of domestic violence.

We’ve had an an amazing time designing a programme of events featuring writers that I believe put transformational social change at the heart of their creative and writing practice. All of the events are free and there is a mix of in-person events, online only events and two hybrid events.

I am really excited that on the 25th November I’ll be reading alongside Laura Bates. This event will be hosted by Malika Booker. Anyone that knows my work knows that Laura was hugely influential when writing my PhD thesis and the two books that came out of my thesis (All the Men I Never Married and Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism). This is a hybrid event – there are limited tickets available in person so if you are planning to come, you should book soon.

There have been times this year when it feels as if we are in a landscape of violence, and I’m taken over by a the feeling of hopelessness. There has been so many of those flashpoints of hopelessness this year, that feeling of being overwhelmed and as if nothing you do matters. I felt that landscape of violence closing around me, as if was not just the ground I walked upon, as if violence was in the air. But that is not true – there are good people in the world, despite all the stories we hear to make us feel as if this is not true. It’s times like this that I want to surround myself with people I love and writers I admire whose work burns with urgency, who dare to believe that poetry, and writing can change something, if not everything.

Kim Moore, 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

The 7th was the anniversary of the launch. I’ll not go back over that again, but you can read about it here. I will re-iterate how grateful I am to everyone involved in getting the book out there: friends, family, editors, typesetters, fellow poets , publishers, readers, people that have been to readings in the last year (often there is crossover between these groups – they aren’t always discrete, or discreet for that matter).

I’ve not really been keeping track (and I should), but I’ve sold a good 90 or so copies here. I think Red Squirrel have done similar (Subs to check), so I’m happy as a lamb in a field of new grass. I’ve read on the same bill as a Carpenters Tribute act, at an open mic with a death metal singer (last Saturday), and a host of excellent poets. I’ve been paid to read once or twice. I’ve definitely not broken even on any of those occasions, but I’m lucky enough for that not to be a major issue. I certainly understand how it could be for others, and that unpaid gigs that can’t cover transport costs (as a bare minimum) are not great. Would that the work of arts funding or punters that want to pay to watch poets/buy books was greater than it is now, but let’s not get into that now.

Anyhoo, happy birthday to Collecting the Data. There are copies left if you want one. Here’s to whatever comes next. I’ve certainly enjoyed reading from you, and to now mixing in newer poems. I think there are only 2 poems from CtD that haven’t been read live yet.

Mat Riches, Celebrating the Data

I recently returned from a week in Mallorca. It was our first proper holiday in about seven years, so I was ready for it. Partly we were there to visit family who live on the island, partly we’d decided to just step out of life for a week, reset, do nothing but soak up sun and listen to audio books, walk, eat, drink. It worked a treat. I have come back refreshed, with a clearer perspective on some of the things I was finding exhausting before I went, and how I need to work with my creative brain and all its strangeness, and my fluctuating energy levels, rather than trying desperately to fight it. […]

We walked around Palma, ate tapas on sunny terraces. I did not have data roaming, so could only access my internet in the hotel via their free wifi. It meant I finally severed ties to TikTok, it meant I couldn’t check emails, or compare myself to other writers on social media, or plan and plot what I should be doing. I found myself writing short stories in the scrappy notebook I’d brought with me. I found myself sketching daily, I even joined a life drawing class and sank into that delicious space of creativity that is absolutely key to my happiness, my survival.

As the week progressed I could feel the anxieties rising away from me. Breaks like this, where you do absolutely nothing – not catching up, not planning, not decluttering, are absolutely key to assessing your life. They are so hard to come by, so hard won. I wanted to make this break work. On the plane journey home I began thinking about parts of my working life that had become unmanageable, and how there had been a habit formed of a continuation of ‘putting fires out’ rather than addressing why the fires kept starting. I began setting up some new systems of working.

Wendy Pratt, What I Brought Back from Mallorca – adapting my practice to suit my chaotic brain

The four volumes of The Collected Prose cost £50 each. Volume One is the best: it’s packed with brilliant literary journalism, witty and precise in its judgements, not yet weighed down by fame and respectability. Running up to 1928, it also includes various suggestive comments about the country Eliot left, aged 26, in 1914. Here are a few.

[Americans] like to be told that they are a race of commercial buccaneers. It gives them something easily escaped from, moreover, when they wish to reject America.

“In Memory of Henry James” (1918)

The idea of “escape” here — in a tribute to Henry James, the American novelist who settled in England — echoes the famous claim that Eliot would make the following year in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

Poetry is […] is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

We might say that one of the personal qualities Eliot was trying to “escape” in his poetry at this time was being American: Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922) are notable for how they exchange the claustrophobic Boston of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) for a haunted London. In an unpublished prose poem, “The Engine” (1915), written as Eliot crossed the Atlantic to see his family after marrying an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, he imagines the other passengers as a cubist nightmare of “commercial bucaneers”:

Flat faces of American business men lay along the tiers of chairs in one plane, broken only by the salient of a brown cigar and the red angle of a six-penny magazine.

The speaker of the poem then retires to his cabin to think about the ship sinking.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #24: Blurb, Dope, Boost

Since 2012 I’ve done a complete list of books read in the year. I generally have add demographics of writers to make me conscious of who I read so I don’t read all old dead white American men but include in my view everyone else.That desire got a wrinkle when reading fan fiction since it is like old usenet days where people have handles not visible identities for gender or nation or any other marker. I think that’s good. It prevents me from getting fixated on ratios or quotas. I want to read not just current books but voices from the 1800s and before to balance my filters. I like to read works in translation to inform my perspectives. I want to read not only poetry that I default to, but memoirs, science, history, novels to inform that project that is Build Self. I want to include easy reads and hard stretch reads. 

Pearl Pirie, Fav reads 2024

This volume features selected poems and writings from 1999 – 2024, which covers ten collections of work, by Paul Robert Mullen. Critic Robert Sheppard provides an introduction which quotes Lutz Seiler talking about Paul Bowles, “You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.” Sheppard goes on, “This seems an apt way of talking about the poems of Paul Robert Mullen, where what he calls ‘a lifetime between two covers’ is transmuted into a song, a song that is intensely personal, though not necessarily flagrantly autobiographical, or where autobiography has become song, a distant echo of fact. Mullen no longer tells the story: he offers us that condensed sound, that song, that story of the sound of the poem.” He reassures readers that this “does not mean that a writer keeps on writing the same poem over and over”. It’s a chunky book, helpfully split into 10 sections and best read by dipping in and out. Mullen favours the sparse, minimalist approach which gives readers space to absorb and think.

Emma Lee, “it’s all come down to this: a retrospective” Paul Robert Mullen (The Broken Spine) – book review

Alt text says this week’s photo is: a book on a colourful blanket. I say it is My Humming Bird Father by Pascale Petit on a hexiflat blanket made from left over wool from a vast array of projects and designs by my lovely wife. I loved spreading out the reading of this book over a week and finding different places in which to read it. I saved the final hour of reading for a sunny courtyard in Bakewell while Kath was teaching a knitting workshop at a yarn festival. It felt good to finish reading in the open air. It never ceases to amaze me that I see a film of the book in my head as I read, and I loved watching this one unfold. There is a poetry to the prose of the storytelling here and the images are strong as the story reveals itself.

This week I am particularly glad for social media and the community of people I have connected with there. Without it I might have missed the fact that Todmorden Literature Festival was bringing together Pascale Petit, Joelle Taylor and Andrew McMillan. All three are poets whose work I love, and all three have recently published prose books. I swear when I checked the location on my phone before booking tickets it was an hour away, but it was actually an hour and a half. Not sure what happened there, but it was a lovely drive to a wonderful town for the perfect immersion in time and space for thinking, listening and laughter. It felt like being part of a conversation even though we were listening in.

Such very different books and so much to whet the appetite for reading. I love listening to the process writers use to get the words set down, and it resonated with me when the authors talked about the difference between editing and redrafting novels compared to poetry. One of the things I love about poetry is that to redraft it you can read it from beginning to end in a short space of time and sense how it works as a whole. The contrast of doing this when working on a novel had us laughing at the very thought. It also reminded us that writing each day might be particularly useful for a novel to ensure the characters were not left hanging and the plot went in the direction the author wanted.

Sue Finch, POETRY AND PROSE

Rob Taylor: The opening poems in Crushed Wild Mint establish parallels between prayer, ceremony and poetry. For instance, from “Nearshore Prayer” (one of four poems in the book with “prayer” in their title):

This is a prayer that extends
in the direction of the ocean:

it is not a story; nothing 
is apocryphal in prayer 

Do you consider poetry to be a form of prayer? A poetry book a form of ceremony?

Jess Housty: I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving.

RT: Yes, that’s so well put. I think of poetry books as spaces of (usually non-religious) communion, though we rarely talk about them as such. Connected to this, in “Bowing to Yarrow (1),” you write about “the directionality of prayer,” which “is moving all around us and through time,” so that a prayer given by an ancestor to a licorice fern or a cedar is returned to you anew by the plant in the present day. 

I think something similar about poems—that they are not simply given to the reader by the writer, but co-created with the reader, then they are passed on to others and the process begins again. What is given is always traveling out and returning. I’m curious, now that Crushed Wild Mint has been published, how you think of your poems moving through the world. What is their directionality? How do you hope they might come back to you, or the generations that follow?

JH: I love this. I learn different complexities of my own poems when they’re reflected back to me by readers who are generous enough to share with me what they felt when they read my words. People who take in Crushed Wild Mint from a distance pull out themes and ideas I can’t always easily see when I’m so close to my own writing. The most surprising part of offering a book to the world is realizing that there is no final iteration—there’s always a chance that the light will refract in some unexpected way for someone, or that a new echo will bounce off the walls of the valley causing me to see and hear and feel my own words in a deeper way. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable knowing that I can’t control how my writing lives in the imaginations of others and to trust that this brings unpredictable nuance and richness to the practice of poetry. When I take a deep breath and trust that the world will be tender, it feels incredibly liberating to think of poems as conversations.

Rob Taylor, A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty

oh to be eclipsed
to meet another poet
who outshines me
to climb another step
to the stars

Jim Young, oh to

Some mornings I wake to a golden, slanted light filtered through dense fog. It softens outlines, blurs the houses on my street, and mutes the noises of my neighborhood.

This is when I feel my mother’s presence. I release my tears to the foggy air. 

I’ve learned some new things about grieving. For example, sudden attacks of heartache are called “grief bubbles.” When I hear that term, I think of myself as a kid, ignoring my mother who is telling me that the bubble I’m blowing will pop and cover my face in sticky goo. It does indeed pop, and I spend the next thirty minutes scrubbing pink gum off my cheeks, pulling it out of my eyelashes, and combing it from my hair. 

I see my mother as a young woman, handing me a washcloth to get the last bits of gum from my face.

Erica Goss, Bubbles, bacon and rainbows: the hard work of grief

scuffing through
fallen leaves
breathing November

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: November ’24

This week, inclement weather kept many poets inside, blogging furiously. Some common themes include the winter itself; great poets and poems; and songs as poetry and vice versa. Enjoy and share.

Ideas rise out of the night
like gravestones

I let my fingers trail across
the top of each one

Ideas disappear behind me
like generations, call out

Don’t look back.
Begin, begin again.

Bob Mee, POETRY DOESN’T MATTER

I’ve just been choosing a favourite winter poem to share with the Yorks/ Lancs haiku society, who meet monthly via Zoom. So many to choose from. In the end I went for this poignant haiku by Bill Kenney who is sadly no longer with us:

winter passes
a few minor revisions
to my death poem

(from tap dancing in my socks, Red Moon Press, 2022)

I love the interiority of this poem. Winter, especially when it’s as cold as it is here today, turns us inward. But there’s a casual tone to ‘a few minor revisions’ which prevents the poem from being maudlin. Juxtaposing that matter-of-fact second line with the shock of ‘my death poem’ in the final line increases the impact. Winter passes, and, we realise, so will the poet. When I reviewed this book I said that I felt, despite his passing, the poet’s voice remained with us, and I think that still holds true.

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

No one. No one can enter the same river twice. But- No.

And what if you come to the river and cannot find it? A snow-covered field, smudged clean across the landscape, rises as mountains in the familiar distance.

Is there any reason to dig your boot into the white? Scraping and scattering the powder into the wind, down to the milk-glass ice of someone’s childhood.

you can circle back
to the splintered edge of reeds
you can slip under
the looking glass no one sees
the current rushing your ears

Ren Powell, When the River Shouldn’t Be Entered

Yesterday I put my waterproofs on and my walking boots on and the cat looked about the house for the dog because these were my dog walking clothes and this is a routine that has not yet faded from our lives. The cat loved the dog. Now the dog has died I am moved up in his hierarchy of love and he shows me affection in a way that he hasn’t before. Then I set out with my binoculars, up through the village sleeping under its thin skin of frost, up the old village road, now a path growth thick with yew and hawthorn and hazel and ash, feeling the missing weight of the dog at my side. I cross the busy bypass, and then up again, climbing higher, taking the old coast road that leads, eventually, to a bronze age burial mound in which a significant bronze age skeleton was found. I do not visit this place today. Instead I walk between the holiday parks where I know the gorse is beginning to bloom. And I say hello to the Jacob’s sheep in the field, and the rooks on the frozen ruts and the light that pours through a perfect blue sky over the rim of the Wolds and into the valley still white with frost. I pass the old farms and falling down dry stone walls and the moments of life and change caught in the stone work there, and greet the donkey on my way back down, having come in a loop along the cliff tops, and I stop to touch the soft yellow petals of the gorse, some frozen, some fresh and silk-like. I gather a small handful, like gathering sunshine and when I return home, and put the heating on, and warm my numb face with a warm flannel, I boil water and steep the petals to make the most glorious yellow infusion, and I sot in the peace of the life I live and read my book, and drink my gorse tea and eat my little blueberry cake and know myself again.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from the Coast in Winter

seeing the limbs that fell last night—
angry winds
wild chimes

Grant Hackett [no title]

This weather fills me with a strange, pent-up energy. I keep going to the window to view the same scene: white sky, white driveway, bits of chopped-up tree, piles of branches encased in ice. It’s weirdly beautiful. Every now and then, I hear the swooshing sound of the kid next door sledding down the street.

Forced inside and unable to leave, I turn to literature for comfort, and especially to poetry. I decided to re-read Denise Levertov’s 1984 collection, Breathing the Water, and found to my surprise and delight, several ekphrastic (art-inspired) poems in a section called “Spinoffs.” In the Notes section, Levertov writes of “Spinoffs:” “These ‘span off’ from photographs by Peter McAfee Brown when I was preparing to write an introduction to his work for a forthcoming publication.” I love the way these poems begin: “Much happens when we’re not there,” (“Window-Blind”); “Everything was very delicately striped,” (“The Spy”); “The wind behind the window moves the leaves” (“Embrasure”). Even though I can’t view the photographs, the poems paint a picture in my mind.

Ekphrasis is one of my most-trusted sources of inspiration. Today, faced with a full-blown case of cabin fever and lacking any real inspiration, I unexpectedly find it in a random book of poems. “Spinoffs” contains so many exquisite lines: “light / awestruck again at its own destiny,” from “Athanor,” is an example.

Erica Goss, Where Do Poems Come From?

in chill morning sun
grass sparkles; banks of purple
lift above the sea;
oystercatcher’s distant call:
remember this was the dream

Sue Ibrahim [no title]

It’s January. If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, it’s the time of year when the barometer’s mercury mirrors our own faith, and a slow exasperation sets in. We’re so soft, and it is so cold. We need sun, and the sky is a shield. Some days, I’d like nothing more than to bury my head in a lap and be told a story. No one sits still long enough.

The heart is, as usual, bewildered by the gap between itself and life. It is so sure of what it wants, and so unsure of the path towards it. This, friends, is when we float. Tip backwards in the water, and let go. Or, if you’ve arrived here by boat, put down the oars and stop paddling upstream.

In “Aesthetic Theory,” Theodor Adorno writes that “in a state of redemption, everything will be just as it is and yet wholly different.” We needn’t wait until it warms to be redeemed. What is one thing your heart knows to be true? And another? And another? What would a path based on those present truths alone look like?

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

“Aren’t we a creative little bunch?” my daughter, Grace, asked one day last week, looking around the room we were hanging out in. It was our third day of being mostly housebound, kept inside by bitter cold and high winds. Outside, the world was covered in a hard scrim of icy snow. Inside, our small home was a warm, cluttered mess of books, paint, thread, laptops, cookbooks, and paper.

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess we are.”

“And yet, none of us has been able to monetize our creativity,” she said, laughing.

“Nope,” I said cheerfully, thinking of all the things each of us has made in recent months, just for ourselves or to give as gifts, just because we want to.

“Aren’t we lucky?” I added.

Go big or go home, some like to say. More and more, my response is to go home. My response is to go small.

It might be something about living through my 50’s. Or about living through the past ten or so years of shifts in the United States or through the invention of modern social media. But something, or everything, has me understanding in ways I didn’t earlier in life that we are all just specks, pinpoints of light among billions in the universe of space and time. 

If this is a bit disconcerting–and it is, if, like me, you’ve labored long within a culture that tells you not only that, if you just work hard enough, you can do and be anything, but also that you should do and be something big–something important, something meaningful, something that distinguishes you from others–it can also be freeing:  

It can mean that we don’t have to find or live out a great purpose. We can simply live our small lives the best we can alongside other, similar beings. It doesn’t mean we don’t or can’t or won’t or shouldn’t care for others and the places we live, but it means we don’t have to do that caring in big, unique, changing-the-world ways. It means we can recognize and be OK with the idea that we are all just passing through, and the things we do and make and love will pass with us when we’re gone.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Let’s go small together

It’s mid-January as I walk around my backyard and contemplate our situation. Half of the yard is paved with concrete squares the color of old blood as though all feet who walked here dripped like the steps of Jesus to the cross. The other half snakes with the roots of my 45+ year old Magnolia tree (I say mine; it is no human’s)  interspersed with slabs of rock layed with our own hands many years ago. It is my labyrinth-like path for walking and thinking. Today I’m thinking about nuns and monks who choose a cloistered life away from the clamor of the world, its wars and brutalities. How their days are simmered down to the essence of life, giving attention to the smallest details and holding them close. As I walk the perimeters of my backyard, I notice the smallest details of this day. The smell of the crisp winter air, how it chills my nostrils and clears my head, the rustle of the wind in the bamboo speaking it’s wisdom if I’ll only listen, the flick of a squirrel’s tail telling me he wants more peanuts, please, to warm his belly. The fallow of winter holds me in an unwanted hug, holds me in this moment and says Be!

Charlotte Hamrick. Winter’s Unwanted Hug

Last week I fastened my doors against the bitterly cold weather and retreated indoors with a pile of poetry books and my notepad. I was putting the finishing touches to my poetry workshop plans, reading through my extensive poetry library and deciding on a few more poems to bring into my workshop at The Make Space on Saturday, 27 January. I was particularly thinking about poems that write the seasons, choosing poems that might sit well together and which might inspire someone to write. This is my favourite part of preparing for a workshop, since it’s time devoted entirely to poetry, and I’m looking forward to running the workshop next week and reading how different writers respond to my writing exercises and prompts.

Poetry workshops are where I developed my writing and where I learned about a wide range of poets and poetry styles. I’ve been lucky enough to have been taught by some amazing writers over the years and I like to think that I’ve stolen the best bits of advice from each and woven them into my own workshops. This year marks the tenth anniversary of my first solo-authored publication The Misplaced House, published by the small press tall-lighthouse, and I would never have achieved this ambition, and published three more poetry books, it hadn’t been for my time in many different workshops.

Josephine Corcoran, Last call for my January workshop

The other day, I read a Facebook post from a poet who had a long career in academia.  He had done a search to see where he was cited in the academic work of others, and I did a Google Scholar search on myself.  I have done very little academic writing that has been published, so I wasn’t expecting to find as much as I did.

I was surprised to find references to my poems and various books where my poems have been published (and there aren’t many since most of my poems have been published in journals).  I had forgotten about some of those publications or maybe it would be more correct to say that many of those publications happened so many decades ago that those publications aren’t foremost in my mind. […]

The Google Scholar search also revealed a thank you in the acknowledgements section of a student’s MA Thesis; she got the idea that would become the thesis in my Victorian Lit class.  I remembered her letting me know that she was including that language, but in the passage of years, I had forgotten.  I got a small thrill remembering how the ideas in one class rippled across years and types of writing.  Delightful!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, What a Google Scholar Search Reveals

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 kind of shrink from monolithic singularities like “the writer” or “larger culture.” Writers. Cultures. Roles. We need writers and writing in so many different ways. It’s kind of like asking what is the current role of the scientist. We’d never ask or answer that singularly, or at least I wouldn’t. We need scientists to do science, in myriad ways toward myriad ends. We need writers to write, in myriad ways toward myriad ends.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa Olstein

Stephen’s Payne’s not only an excellent poet but also an excellent critic. And by extension, his new poetry blog promises to be excellent too.

Given his scientific background, a lazy reader might be tempted to describe Payne’s approach as forensic and thorough, but that would ignore his honed sensitivity. For instance, the first post on his blog is packed with both emotional and technical insight into Billy Collin’s poetry. You can read it by following this link.

Matthew Stewart, Stephen Payne’s new poetry blog

Sunday’s reading in Canterbury went as well as it could. I think I just about made my petrol money back, and it was a long drive back after the gig, but I enjoyed reading to the good folks of Save As Writers . I spent a while working out how to sell books and take money via my phone. I now have an app for that. I didn’t think to take change, but I think we got by for the 3 sales I made…Note to self…CASH STILL EXISTS.

My thanks to Luigi and Gary for having me there, to the readers at the open mic and my old mucker Paul for taking me for a pint before and after…

And, whisper it quietly, but I wrote a draft of a poem today…Holy shit…

Mat Riches, Cindycation

So, one fun thing to look forward to is a brief writer’s residency in the Palm Desert—I’ve already started packing mini-sunscreens! In the unfun time before that, though, I’m applying for some unfun medical stuff, doing my taxes, and applying for the NEA Grant. The medical stuff is discouraging, and taxes are never fun, but doing the NEA prep work actually led me to an interesting discovery of new genre descriptions.

So, while I was working on my project description, I came upon a discussion that some of you might find interesting. There is a term that describes science fiction that has an optimistic outlook on both social and environmental issues called SolarPunk, and a type of science fiction that looks through the lens of mythological characters called MythPunk, My next manuscript, besides having poems on plagues and disability, actually has both SolarPunk and MythPunk aspects. I’m tired of writing futuristic dystopias that come true (see: Field Guide to the End of the World, published in 2016, and see how many things I uncannily described in advance! Eerie!) The next manuscript does deal with difficult issues—like disability, and our four-year plague, and the environmental crises—I’m not into denial, but more thinking about how the path to better things happens.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Cold Snaps, Planning Ahead, and SolarPunk and MythPunk

Stafford had a late start as a poet — his first major collection was published when he was 48. And then the poems that had been writing themselves in him all his life came pouring out, spare and stunning. Within eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United Staes.

The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Complement with Viktor Frankl, writing shortly after his release from the concentration camps, on saying “yes” to life in spite of everything and Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Barbara Ras’s kindred poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Hannah Emerson’s cosmic howl of yes yes yes.

Maria Popova, Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective

It’s impossible to pin down what makes the first three lines of Marvell’s ‘The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers’ such a magical fusion of tenderness, delicacy and radiant energy. It’s something to do with the degree to which different beauties of the writing breathe life into each other.

One such beauty is the sheer lightness and sophisticated simplicity of the poet’s metrical, phonetic and syntactical fingering. Sounds and rhythmic contours melt into or swell out of each other smoothly, and the metre is handled in a way that gives a clear impact to tiny shifts of metrical weight. Such sensitivity in the writing creates a heightened receptiveness in the reader. I myself, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, find my imagination playing delightedly around every syllable and the spaces between them, picking up multiple suggestions whose life is in their movement, the way they twine round each other without crystallising into fixity.

Edmund Prestwich, Marvell, The Picture of Little T C in a Prospect of Flowers

Kenneth Patchen (1911–72) is not a writer familiar to many British readers, even obsessive poetry readers, but he was important to Katy Evans-Bush in her teens – which is an age at which writers can be very important – and he was important to her again during that recent period of Covid lockdowns, lock-outs, lock-ups, cock-ups. The above photo (courtesy K E-B) shows in a nutshell, or a sweetie-box, the kindling process that led to her new collection, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle. For that process spelled out, go to the page for her book on the CBe website and download the extract that gives you K E-B’s preface, and a note on Joe Hill, and a couple of the poems; and then, having got that far, buy the book. Which is officially published early in February.

Charles Boyle, Kenneth Patchen rides again

Perhaps one of the signs of a great poem is that you can love it when you’re eight and then fall in love with it again fifty-some years later: the same words. I know there are many incredible poems by Dickinson but the words that we bring into our bodies as children, the incantation and the exclamation (!) remains with us through the decades.

But what I really want to tell you about is: as an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, my bus stop was the one situated right after the Dickinson homestead. In good weather, I would often get off in front of her large mustard-colored estate, hoping that the rarefied air would drift my way.

In those days the house was used as a residence for some very lucky Amherst College professor. For a few months in the summer, it would be open to the public but that was it. I remember one Tuesday in July braving the front door and finding my way to Dickinson’s bedroom, her tiny white dress hanging off the edge of the door.

Afterwards, there was lemonade and a plate of ginger cookies served in the garden. I didn’t quite approve of the festive atmosphere. To me, Dickinson was all spirit.

Susan Rich, I Am Nobody, Who Are You?

For the non-poets who do music

single = broadside 

EP = chapbook

LP= trade collection of poetry

box set = collected works

compilation = anthology or selected works 

track on spotify: set piece at mic

vinyl = letterpress 

Pearl Pirie, translations of distribution

One of the themes in this collection is that of passing time – metronomic time, chronological time, ageing, memory, and changing social attitudes. Several of the poems in the ‘New Blues’ section refer to some or all of these aspects. All Blues illustrates the ways in which the ageing writer’s concentration is distracted from the empty page while appreciating the rhythm section of Davis’ band; Time Lordchronicles the drummer’s gig day routine; Wilko at The Railway reprises the stage act from 40 years before; and The Shape of Jazz to Come muses on how quickly innovation becomes history. But the poem I’m going to talk about here, the title of which explicitly signposts this theme, is Jazz at The Royal – Now and Then. […]

Although the piece is written from an individual perspective, I’ve used the collective first person ‘we’ rather than the individual ‘I’ in the poem to reflect the idea that live music is rarely listened to alone but in a group, whether in a concert hall, club or cocktail lounge.  

I’ve chosen a three-line stanza form and eschewed the use of end-rhymes, though in this piece it could easily have been six-line stanzas. I wanted the space. This allows more freedom within a fairly standard framework, in the same way that a jazz piece from the mainstream era is structured around an eight-bar form allowing for a certain improvisation within each chorus.

Drop-in by Adrian Green (Nigel Kent)

And then he finds himself singing. What a glorious moment, that hum in the throat, a bit hoarse, at first, perhaps, starting partway in the middle of the song, maybe, at the words that have tangled in thought. “…the brilliant love songs of my other religion.” His “other religion.” Is his first Judaism and his second poetry, or is it the reverse? The cantor’s plaintive offerings? Or the lyric of word and silence, of rhythm and image? Doesn’t matter. It is the urge to move breath through the body, to open the throat and the mouth to song, a melody into the wind.

In the cold and dark isn’t all art a singing? What hymns from Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel, the inner city, the parched field, the rainforest, the ice cap? 

Some days I’m that scarecrow, wind-shifted, restless, almost as if I’m dancing. And the crows aren’t sure, so they dance too — in case this is a party, this is a disco, this is a fooling around.

Marilyn McCabe, Life During Wartime

Gray leads the reader through a series of close readings of songs from these three albums and some fine tracks recorded during the Shot of Love sessions but not released until later. He teases out biblical sources and the influence of Blake and highlights the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the music and lyrics. He’s particularly good on one of those unreleased tracks, ‘Angelina’, a song that is Christian without the preaching and which, through its opening out to the world of Egyptian myth, allows for a degree of religious doubt, as well as being a link back to Rolling Thunder and Desire.

This links nicely with the chapter on ‘Jokerman’, probably the best released song of the early- and mid-1980s. Here Gray focuses on the trickster figure of the Jokerman, drawing on both Jungian understandings of myth and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Both have the effect of calling into question the unique divinity of Christ by placing him in the context of a line of sacrificial god figures that runs through the mythology of the Middle East. References to Graves also signal a return to the notion of the female muse figure as key to the making of poetry and song; the male poet is, in Graves’ poetic programme, doomed to failure if they turn to a male god for inspiration.

Interestingly, in his exegesis of the image of Hercules, born with a snake in both of his fists, Gray overlooks an echo of a more modern trickster figure who was also born in a hurricane, Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The line in that song ‘I was crowned with a spike right through my head’ links Jack to the Christ figure and I can’t but wonder if Dylan had the Rolling Stones track in mind here.

Billy Mills, Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan – Vol. 2 Yonder Comes Sin: Dylan’s Gospel Period And All of His 1980s Work (The 50th Anniversary Series), Michael Gray: A Review

The music of Jumble Hole Clough is, as Robinson describes it, ‘influenced by the landscape, industrial remains and experiences around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire.’ The end result is a distinctive musical world that seems to combine these elements with elements of his own dream-life and other flotsam and jetsam dredged from his subconscious. (His previous trilogy of albums dealt explicitly with dreams, but you get the feeling they’re an important part of much of his work). The dream-like quality of the music is no coincidence, I think. The area in question has, itself, the feeling of being some sort of humongous surrealist installation: the place names, the strange rock formations, a deserted radar station, an obelisk on top of a hill with a dark windowless staircase inside (overlooking the site of a former asylum), right down to the way the present is built on the wreckage of a past, the exact purpose of which, though industrial, is often not immediately obvious. And when we humans inhabit a place, our memories become embedded in the land. When they do, the landscape becomes a kind of external collective unconscious, full of archaeology the meaning of which is perhaps forgotten or, at best, half-understood: a kind of ‘jumble hole’, if you like (although the place, Jumble Hole Clough, really does exist). The associations we pull from it – waking, ancestral dreams – bear analogy with the dream-worlds we pull from our own subconscious minds and are, in turn, filed away there to re-emerge as future dreams. We talk about inhabiting an environment (environs – surroundings) but, in fact, we are, ourselves, part of the environment. We are, psychically and physically, part of the landscape, just as we don’t live on the Earth but, just like its rocks, are a part of the earth (and our thoughts, the fleeting electrical discharges in our minds, are no less part of it than lightning). This album – despite a brief field-recording made in Sevilla and the odd day-trip out – is, in a very real way, a rendition of a spirit of place.

Dominic Rivron, A Pennine Danse Macabre

“Smoked Frames” does a good job of squaring up to self-discovery being about the negatives, not just the feel-good memories, and about loss whether through bereavement or friendship, and that the hardships are worth it. From self-knowledge, there can be personal growth and authentic relationships with others. S Rupsha Mitra’s poems have a loose, meandering feel to them, as if the speaker is exploring and reluctant to rule out any potential thread that might lead to further discovery. It would have been good to introduce occasional poems with tighter rhythm and felt less uncertain. The positive note underlying the poems is a strength and they lack sentimentality or nostalgia.

Emma Lee, “Smoked Frames” S Rupsha Mitra (JLRB Press) – book review

The poems are 4-lines each, not much room to play in, you would think—though every line bears Spiers’ signature sound-play, “Electronic hearts skitter. / Data, like confused fighter jets, scramble” (“Wind Out of the North”); “Snake skins, shunting in the wind like riffs / from a broken guitar” (“Thunder Heard”).

The prose introducing and following the poems also drew me in. I love Spier’s biographical note, a Vashon Island, Washington, poet I have reviewed before, but should know better. And we get this from the bio note on artist and calligrapher Bolinas Frank, suggesting the depth and range of the symbols, not to mention the themes packed into this slim book:

Bolinas sees the painting surface as a skin, and his creation emerges on the intelligent edge where art and life interface. Through his painting’s stacked messages, he asks what is underneath things, what is on the hidden side, what secrets lie underneath, and what information asserts itself….His work speaks about migration, domesticity, atrophy, exposing underlying flaws and defects that are carried, delivered, and exposed. (p. 77)

Rain Violent is a fast read, only 244 lines of poetry, after all. But the format and the content work together to slow you down. I found myself pondering each page. Despite the one-poem per page, and the artful titles and international weather symbols as rendered (beautifully, starkly) by Frank, there’s also a sense of the book as one long poem. When I finished I went back and read it again.

Bethany Reid, Ann Spiers, RAIN VIOLENT

So overall I was quite underwhelmed with the collection, which I found interesting in itself, since it’s just won a huge prize, and not for the first time: it was already the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and is in the running for the 2024 Writers’ Prize as well. (Plainly, no-one is going to ask me to judge anything any time soon.) So why did it win? What were the judges won over by that either I didn’t see, or didn’t value in the same way? I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days. Here are some aspects of the book which put me off, but might be seen, conversely, as points in its favour:

— as poetry collections go, the book is highly unified — the aesthetic is more, perhaps, like a themed pamphlet than many full collections. It’s got a clear subject — broadly, the author’s experience as a black Jamaican man in Europe — pursued from various angles. The ‘sameiness’ of it — which bothered me — is another side of this coherence. Is there a move towards wanting poetry collections to be clearly “about” something?

— As well as a clear theme, there’s quite a bit of explicit or implied narrative. By the end of the book, a careful reader has garnered an outline of certain events and stages in Allen-Paisant’s life, and the collection offers some of the satisfactions of a novel, memoir or (perhaps especially) that distinctively French category of autofiction.

— I can see how you might experience Self-Portrait as offering a glimpse of different worlds (Jamaica, Oxford, Paris; Shakespeare, French literature, French culture) in a way that expects quite a lot from readers, but not too much. (Almost none of the French is translated, for instance, although its inclusion has also been carefully judged: you won’t miss out on anything essential if you don’t understand it; the same is true of some Jamaican terms and references.) So elements that seemed a bit superficial to me — because as it happens I speak French, and live in Paris, and know Shakespeare well — might from another perspective seem perfectly judged.

— evidently the judges of the competition don’t have the same qualms that I do about literary work which is so relentlessly self-centred. And I think it’s fair to say, too, that Allen-Paisant’s book is part of a more general trend towards the ‘poetry collection as memoir’. This is not what I look for in a book of poetry: for me, a really good poem — whatever its original occasion, whatever its emotional or literary ‘source’, and whether or not it is explicit about what that might be — is one readers can take away with them: almost, as it were, for their own purposes. For me, none of those poems were in that category: but perhaps that just isn’t a category that either the author or the judges had in mind.

Victoria Moul, On being underwhelmed

All this led me to wonder: How do lit mags check for plagiarism? And when/under what conditions should they?

Should editors really google a few lines of every work they wish to accept before publication, just in case?

Or should they generally trust contributors, leaving it up to readers to spot stolen work?

Also:

Do editors have clear parameters in place regarding what constitutes plagiarism versus what is fair use? Have they had these conversations internally? Should they?

And going back to M.’s questions, what sort of penalty is sufficient for someone who has plagiarized work?

If a writer has been caught plagiarizing, should they be banned from ever publishing anything again?

What if the writer makes a public statement, apologizes to the writers whose work was stolen, apologizes to the journals the writer deceived, and then commits to writing original work going forward? Can they continue publishing new work?

Becky Tuch, How do we handle plagiarism in the lit mag community?

None of us died from any of this, though we were far enough from adults that if any of us had, say, fallen from the second floor of the abandoned slaughterhouse out past Perch Pond on a road we almost never saw cars on, then yeah, someone might have. We were lucky in a lot of ways.

In “The Gift Outright,” Frost is trying to describe the way that the people he saw as Americans transformed from belonging to England to belonging to this new land, and he’s saying at the start that these colonists saw the land as belonging to them as opposed to them being a part of it. He ignores, of course, all the people who were here already, and the other groups who came here either to take it for themselves or who were brought here against their will. It’s very convenient for him to do so.

In this section of my poem, I’m trying to get at the way a place can lay a claim on a person, especially when you’re a kid getting to know the world around you, its beauties and dangers, but also how very often you don’t recognize those things while you’re in them.

Brian Spears, Reclamation Part 3

During our talks, she told me that she always wanted to write a book. This was among the many things I did not know and would not have guessed about my mother prior to these Zoom sessions together. From the draft essay,

“A book about your life?” I ask.

“Yes, but I could never figure out how to do that. I’m not a writer like you are.”

“Did you have a title for this book?”

“Yes,” she tells me, without hesitation. “It would be called Is it Real or Is it Imagined?”

“That’s a great title!” I tell her, and I mean it. I don’t say, “You can still write it!” because both of us know she doesn’t have that kind of time left.

She’s not going to write a book, but I am. She wanted me to. 

I expect it will be memoir, though I bet poems will emerge, too. Whatever form it takes, it will surely be difficult, unwieldy, and, I hope, beautiful and true.

This space will document the process as I re-play the interviews for the first time, then read through the transcripts to sort through what I find and begin to make shape and sense of them.

Sheila Squillante, The Dog Looks Like Three Boxes

i am scrolling in the internet’s guts
& i start watching videos of tin fish dinners.
a husband & a wife who pry open
these little gasps of flesh. capers & vinegar.
sun dried tomato. the smallest forks
i’ve ever seen. we are living in a time of canoes.
in the kitchen i taste a spoonful of the cabbage
in gochujang sauce you’ve made. there are so many kinds
of tin fish dinners. what i loved most about the video
& why i kept returning to it was that
each bite was celebration. i do not want to ever
mistake smallness for emptiness. i don’t believe
in good or evil but i do believe in sardines
& anchovies. i believe in the crooked smile
of a tin can. i can measure how far
the ocean is from us in teeth.

Robin Gow, tin fish dinner

Writers on film are always laughably unrealistic and sometimes at the same time, sobbingly familiar. A couple months back, we watched Adaptation, and though the genres are different, both of these felt similar in their critique of the publishing world (especially where it links up with the film world and its own ridiculousness.) Poets rarely make the screen, and when they do, it’s morose biopics of the most tragic and/or glaringly idealistic (ie, the husband in Mother!)

At the same time, after I watch these sorts of movies–the discussions centered around audience desires and trends and how to conduct yourself as an author in the world, my occasional feelings of invisibility actually feel like a relief. Yes, no one is paying any attention at all to the poets in the grand scheme of things, and yet, *gleefully whispers* nobody is paying attention. It’s the ultimate place of freedom when the steaks are so alarmingly low. If my next book is drastically different from the last “successful” one, it’s probably the difference of maybe a few hundred bucks in direct book sales, not a steep advance that will never pay out and critical annihilation that can taint you going forward. For every reader you may lose, you may gain more. I remember when the fever almanac, my first book came out, a couple reviews mentioned that they did not like in the bird museum as much. But other people ignored the first book and loved that one. Or loved the next.  (though the joke is on book #1 because guess which one is still actually in print?)  What is probably my bestselling book (and by that I mean maybe 300 plus copies) was girl show, which more closely resembled my first book, but which recently fell out of print with the publisher after a strong decade. The rest trail behind, though it was shared properties of water and stars, published in 2013, that perhaps got the most critical attention, but not the most sales. At some point, I stopped looking for logic and took whatever came as it may. 

With self-published titles, I can see a little the dynamics of driving book sales. The more work I put in, the more it usually yields in terms of copies sold (I haven’t yet took any of these books on the road to readings since the pandemic hit and everything has been zoom since.) The results and failure are a little bit more immediately visible rather than waiting for publisher statements and royalty checks (tiny ones at that.) Becuase no one is hoping to make money on poetry in general, least of all me, it’s almost a relief. There will be more books. They will sell or they won’t sell. I will keep on writing. 

Kristy Bowen, movies about writers writing movies

Her script now resembles nothing so much as asemic “cursive”:

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”, or “without the smallest unit of meaning”. With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. Wikipedia

Her words likewise sound as though they possess no semantic content, but her body language, facial expression, and intonation when she speaks make it clear that there is a unit of meaning in whatever she tries to convey verbally. It amazes me that she doesn’t seem particularly frustrated by her aphasia. Although I can’t know what my response to aphasia would be, I doubt I would be as accepting and unflustered as my mother is.

I think of how Eloise Klein Healey wrote her book of poems Another Phase while experiencing Wernicke’s aphasia after a bout of meningitis. I gave my mom this collection a few years back; she marveled at these short poems, when she was still able to read, deeply impressed that Klein Healey persisted in using words–creating poetry, no less–despite aphasia. Eloise has regained some of her fluency, while my mother can only get worse (her aphasia is due to vascular dementia, from which there is no possible return).

Yet my mother continues to write–to take notes? jot down ideas?–it’s not possible to know, but I find her cribbed, indecipherable cursive here and there on pieces of paper on her desk, and in a notebook in her dresser drawer. It resembles asemic writing now. That habit of recording some aspect of one’s life, or of making lists…it appears that muscle memory can include the small-motor habit of handwriting. I wonder if she is making meaning in some way that I cannot possibly discern, something interior but necessary to her. As a writer, the idea appeals to me. But I also wonder what the point of writing is when there is no audience, so that the act is no longer an act of communication. Does it then become a “vacuum of meaning”?

Ann E. Michael, Vacuum of meaning

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Is a bridge that is never crossed, still a bridge?

Oddly enough, children sometimes approach the essence of things better than adults. They have so much less of a filter; they haven’t been told what matters by other people or society, and they haven’t learned to care what others think of their efforts — that judging voice we become accustomed to as adults is not in their heads yet, but –sadly — it will be soon. As adults, we have to un-learn a great deal in order to open up again.

The result of this process is a picture, yes, but it can also be a period of time that is enormously refreshing. We center ourselves, we concentrate, we forget our ego as we work, absorbed in color and form and the wordless communication between eye, hand, and spirit. It’s a journey, and a space in time. There is no way to describe this in detail; as with many things, it’s easier to say what it’s not. […]

I wish everyone some moments of rest and renewal in the coming days. You don’t have to be an artist to experience the kind of time-out-of-time that I’m talking about here. Look around you – something is calling for your attention. You don’t need to paint it or write about it, just look… and then look deeper for ten or fifteen minutes, being conscious of your breathing, and see if you don’t feel that something has shifted for the better.

Beth Adams, Centering and Simplifying

squeaky snow-
so much to tell
without saying anything

Tom Clausen, squeaky snow

My sister and I are reading the same book right now, Wintering, by Katherine May. Chris got it from a friend, who found it good for grieving and healing, for hunkering down when needed, and I found it on the library shelf while collecting adjacent books for a display. The subtitle is The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and we are both resting and retreating since the death of our mother. Bitterly cold, it’s an excellent time to hunker down and read; “wintering,” as much a state of mind as a season or kind of weather, is all about taking time and care to adapt to any bitter reality.

Kathleen Kirk, Wintering

From the video

doorbell, we have a recording of a swift
flash of wing, an iridescence. A humming-

bird, darting across the porch. It is almost
a mirage, a rumor, a dream, if not for this

evidence. What more the small bodies
glimpsed through rubble, under skies

brutal with death and darkness at noon.
Even the smallest breaths leave a trace.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence

How are you? Here’s my face. Long darkness, wintry silence, cold night skies. I’m clocking into the 4am Writing Club. I’ve been in here every morning for quite a few weeks now. Winter. Writing. Watching for first light. I’m like a surfer waiting to catch a wave on night oceans. I don’t know why I take these lonely pictures, maybe to document the isolation. The feeling of now. Maybe so when it is another era and another time and things are different and changed, I’ll see it and know how this time is gone. How nothing changes. How everything changes. One day these pictures will be in the past and long ago, and we will be in other worlds, I don’t know what that will look like yet, but I have faith in it, and I hold onto it, and want to meet you there.

Salena Godden, January and poetry…

Choose wilderness.
Forget cucumbers and melons:

the Voice
is always calling.

The name of the game
is becoming.

Nowhere better
than ownerless here

to tend the fire
burning on the altar

of your heart,
never to go out.

Rachel Barenblat, Choose

The first digest of 2024 is a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short. (And yes, I know that expression dates me. I am an old.) Ten inches of snow fell and then were partly washed away again as I compiled this post today, which is quite Janus-faced: half looking back and half looking forward, half summarizing and half summoning. Let’s begin.

Whether we feel like we’re gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It’s hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation – not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I’m hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it’s more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I’m trying to do is think about what’s real, and that’s probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here — a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year’s Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year – we’ve had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself — its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance — remains very real and very much itself.

I’m still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I’m comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don’t have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say “look at me!,” with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

Beth Adams, What is Real?

All we need is a list, a
table: who will do what, when — names,
places, actions, dates — all adding up to
less than 1.5^oC. And maybe one more
grid: who will pay how much, when —
names, places, actions, dates — all adding
up to the billions required for loss and
damage, for mitigation, for adaptation,
sorted by historical burden. Now, that
would become a poem. But what do we
do with pages of unmetered language? With
unwieldly metaphors and no rhyme? Without
totals? Without a safety net?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Phase-out/Phase-down

The sunflower
tore off its petals,
the rainbow
slumped,
the pink and purple
cut to white,
the morning sun
melted
and when night came
the stars
had lost their reflections.

Sue Ibrahim, Sea star mass mortality event

To answer my question about how poets write about literal and existential risks to life on Earth, I started collecting “apocalypse poems,” a term I used broadly. My list is below. Many of its poems address end times head on. Others are less explicit but have (in my assessment) apocalypse vibes. They are “end-of-the-world adjacent,” using apocalyptic or dystopian settings as a backdrop or simply gesturing at demise and so I’ve allowed their metaphors to work within this list of apocalypse poems.

In these poems, poets speak to what may be coming and flirt with a kind of inevitability fueled by our complicity and impotence. They issue warnings that beg questions: Can we be saved? Do we want to be saved? Who’s driving the bus? What’s worth saving? Are we willing? What does it mean to survive?

Carolee Bennett, The One With 50+ Poems for the End of the World

The too-short truce was all the time
they had to bury the dead boy lying

in their rubbled apartment. Already
they’d waited four days, the body

of their 10-year-old wrapped in
a blanket providing no warmth,

his last rites un-mouthed, never
to be heard amid the later bombings.

Maureen E. Doallas, Gaza Funeral (Poem)

I haven’t been writing much—not enough mental energy—but I do think about the idea of “wintering,” or that we need to sort of make our way through winter gingerly, at least making some awareness of the need for warmth and hibernation. I’ve been sleeping at off hours—awake at 3 in the morning, asleep at 5 pm—which means I’m only watching weird stuff on television and reading in stray catches of awake time. “Winter just wasn’t my season,” as the song “Breathe (2 AM)” says. […]

I was thinking of two great writers we recently lost, Louise Gluck and Colleen McElroy, how both had disabilities they rarely talked about (Gluck had epilepsy, Colleen had RA), both were fiercely devoted to their work. Gluck was born into a lot of privilege; Colleen had to struggle more against a world less friendly to women, especially women of color, as a young person. I feel Colleen didn’t get enough recognition for her gifts as a teacher and writer and was the kind of person you instantly trusted—she radiated energy and warmth. Gluck wasn’t warm—even her obituaries seem prickly. I wonder about the value of our writing and our personhood after we pass away—how will we be remembered? Will time be kinder to one than the other? I wonder about the value of work versus the value of relationships, how often women are forced to choose in a way men are not. I am lucky I had a husband who was just as supportive when I was working ninety-hour weeks at Microsoft as when I now spend hours submitting poems to journals that don’t pay enough to cover the cost of submission. I never had to choose between a marriage and work, or a child and work (since I couldn’t have kids in the first place). As I get older, in the cold January months, I think harder about the choices I’ve made in my life. It will be later in life that I’ll be able to see if I made the right ones.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Wintering: The New Year So Far, Honoring the Season, and the Choices We Make

We’re browsing because I want a new jumper, distracted by Shetland, cable knits, elaborate nordic and traditional patterns which women once knew as a matter of course. And then distracted by Stitchcraft and taking phone pics, until I go off on one about the New Look and Jane disagrees with me saying some women found it offensive in its excess. No, Jackie, she says, it was celebrating a way out of poverty, wartime. And yes, of course that’s right. I’m a little on my high horse with the champagne and tired, and maybe too attached to the old dichotomy, the masses v the rich. 

So we carry on reading the box that is reminding us of a fraction of what women did, the stitch counting, fair isle, arran, bonnets, shawls, evening dresses and skirts, kids’ coats, darts, gathers, ruches, smocking, pleats…

I began my blue coat on Boxing Day and will finish it a few days into 2024. It’s been a good use of the limbo time at the turn of the year when my notebook remains untouched. That and the odd walk with Bambi, reminding me of what matters – those waves battering the sea wall at Saltdean, and this, Noah’s Ark, beached there, police tape fluttering in another gale, a warning of sorts. 

Jackie Wills, The Poetry of Domestic Arts and Sciences

I don’t mean isolation is necessary in a physical sense, although pottering about doing jobs on our smallholding, looking after hens, pigs, woodland and a four-acre field can mean spending hours alone in whatever the weather might throw at us.

I don’t mean isolation from the news either. I want to know about Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, what’s happening with the state of the planet. I want to know what the ‘leaders’ of the world are saying, even though I understand they’re just performers on a stage, mostly anxious to protect their own power. The reality of the misery of the victims of their actions or in-action is of little consequence to them, unless it causes their wealth to be de-stabilised. The world is as mad as it always was.

Politically, the older I get, the more radical I get, the more intolerant I get of the lies or half-truths (the half that suits them) politicians tell as a daily routine.

No, the isolation I’m interested in is the healthy isolation of being a writer. With a very few exceptions, I have no friends who write – anything, let alone poetry, or something close to it – and seek out none. It’s not a case of banishing people to the fringes of life as it rolls along, just an increased need to write free from the influence and society of others.

Yes, there are occasional, welcome email conversations that are a result of what is published here, or what others publish on their blogs, but these days that’s about the limit of it.

Bob Mee, THE OLDER I GET, THE MORE I PREFER ISOLATION

2024 has entered with wet, wild winds. Ice everywhere underfoot. The world is slippery and precarious. This kind of weather isn’t unheard of on Kachemak Bay at this time of year, but it is unwanted. It tarnishes all the brightness of snowy landscapes and makes getting around outside difficult.

And so I turn inward. Spend evenings in a pool of lamp light near the woodstove. Consumed already this year: two books of poetry, Some of the Things I’ve Seen by Sara Berkeley and Earth House by Matthew Hollis, as well as Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and Stag Cult by Martin Shaw. Last year, I read fewer books that I usually do, and I am wondering at the reason.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Welcome 2024 – Whatcha reading?

In my annual tradition since 2012, I share my self-audit of what I read and favourite reads. Throughout the year at instagram I have posted all the reads and some of the quotes from books I liked.

I aimed to read more fiction proportionally this year, setting aside some obsession with poetry. Intention didn’t translate. 57% of titles were poetry, so all systems stable, with 1% more poetry than last year. A fifth of reads were chapbooks (56 of them). I read 20 fewer titles than 2022. This year I reread 15 instead of 24 titles. […]

The source hierarchy for 2023 was Amazon, small press fair, free online, used book store, review copy, then library at 8%, with direct from author 6%, and direct from publisher another 6%.

I persisted through diminishing returns more often, valuing 4% at one star out of 5, instead of 1% the year before,  but for that I blame the cat sitting on me more, with nothing else in reach.

Pearl Pirie, 2023 Reading

I was delighted that the Englewood Review of Books invited me to contribute to their year-end Favorite Books of 2023 podcast! A link to listen and a complete list of recommended books is available at this link.

I gave a shoutout to These Walls are Starting to Glow by Karen Bjork Kubin and Box Office Gospel: Poems by Marissa Glover.

Katie Manning, ERB Year-End Episode

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. […]

I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar ‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction, or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I remember that this list takes a full day to compile and post, so there you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that, I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting work being produced right now?

rob mclennan, A ‘best of’ list of 2023 Canadian poetry books

In 2023, I read 100 books. That’s according to Beanstack, where I track my reading now. I read all kinds of things, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, murder mystery, young adult, and even a children’s book, the marvelous Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, which I had heard about for many years. And I gave some books as Christmas presents, favorites from the year or from the recent months spent escaping, slothlike, on the couch, covered in fleece blankets. Speaking of sloths, I have already earned a sloth as a “completion prize” in the library’s winter reading challenge, set up as a bingo card, where I have scored a Bingo from slothliness. […]

All my poems these days are about my mother, even if they are ekphrastic or written on poscards. “Grief deranges,” says Gish Jen in The Resisters, a book I read in January, actually. “Healing is slow.” It sure is. I am participating in a solstice-to-solstice poetry postcard project and have sent 8 postcards and received 3. (Maybe that will pick up after the holiday mail…) Some have gone to Santa Cruz, CA and Portland, OR, where I have family, and one went to Japan! I love the random coincidii…

Kathleen Kirk, 100 Books

Lushly, thickly
a polar bear hibernates
under our infinite skies, 

in our midst:
bristling white 
visiting behemoth.

From my tiny pane,
I see its heavy
lugubrious

breathing 
see its lungs, and fir
rise and fall

in branch 
and mind
and rise again.

Jill Pearlman, Winter’s Other

I’ve been trying to make a summary of last year without slipping into the negative, so I’d like to single out a wonderful thing that happened in 2023: my second book of visual poetry was accepted by Sarabande. Boy, I started that sentence on a down note but typing to the end made me happy.

For the past three years or so I’ve been working with “Classic Crimes” by William Roughead, considered one of the first books of the true crime genre. This is a hefty NYRB book of around 600 pages about murders in Scotland more than 100 years ago. They are base and grisly murders, though the writing can be staid and sticks with the facts. I hope my erasures and collages give the pages a good airing.

Sarah J. Sloat, Crime of Passion

On a personal level, 2024 was a very busy year, which largely explains the sparse posting! In addition to writing and teaching, I served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Fraser Valley in the winter, and then returned to campus to coordinate the Fraser Valley Writers Festival in the Fall. I also wrapped up edits on my next book, Weather, a companion piece to my 2016 collection The News, which will be published this Spring from Gaspereau Press.

Rob Taylor, the 2023 roll of nickels year in review

Whatever You Do, Just Don’t has been chosen by The Yorkshire Times as one of their Books of the Year 2023. Thanks to Steve Whitaker, the literary editor, for his selection. Here’s a quick quote from the article… “…Whatever You Do, Just Don’t is as warming and as compelling as the fine Spanish wine that Stewart blends…” And you can read the feature in full via this link.

Matthew Stewart, The Yorkshire Times’ Books of the Year

As I usually do at the start of the year, I look back on the data of a calendar year of writing. 16 poems in 12 paper copy journals or anthologies. Humbled that one of my poems landed in an anthology not too many pages away from poems by the writer Sheila Bender and Joseph Powell, one of my creative writing professors at Central Washington University. In 1993, he published his collection of poems, Winter Insomnia. I attended that launch and in the copy of the book I purchased after, his inscription encouraged me to “keep up the fine writing and send me a copy of your first book.” I made true on that in 2017 when I mailed him a copy of Something Yet to Be Named. I still have the letter he wrote in return.

Additionally, I published 18 poems in online journals. I am so very grateful for all editors who take a chance on writing and move it from a page in a writer’s hand to a greater reading world. 

And because I’m an absolute believer in seeing the whole picture, 2023 landed me 23 rejections and 15 still-waiting-for-confirmations, or in the words of Submittable, “Received” or “In Progress.” And that’s all bundled up in the beauty of writing as well. 

Kersten Christianson, Rolling in 2024

In reference to a recent post, I’m coming to my poetry in 2024 with a great deal of curiosity and openness. I’ve been rather myopic in the past–out of necessity, as we’ve gone through some difficult times–but now I’m wondering these things:
1. Who is my ideal reader?
2. Where does this ideal reader, read? What literary magazines, which presses?
3. Who is my ideal reader already reading? Which writers and poets?
4. These writers and poets–what contests are they winning? What conferences are they attending?
5. Which poets can I look to as career role models–both those who are far ahead (60+ years of writing), those who are a little ahead, those who are my peers?

I think this could give me some direction as to where to focus my efforts this year. What questions are you pondering in 2024?

Renee Emerson, 5 Questions I’m Asking

In December, I participated in an annual poem-a-day challenge. This is my happy place. It is also my anxiety. What if I can’t think of anything to write about? How, or with what, do I start? That concern begins on the first day–even when I come equipped with prompts and a project, an idea for a series. It’s the fear of facing the blank page.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Paul McCartney. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the documentary The Beatles: Get Back, Part 1. The footage includes a lot of bickering, but one moment stands out in my memory. While other musicians are arguing about, probably, everything, Paul is working on a little riff, maybe eight or ten notes. He plays it, then he plays a slightly different version, and again, and again, and again. He keeps playing with it, refining it. He didn’t come up with a genius phrase; he came up with a starting point and kept experimenting with it.

The word that comes to mind is noodle, to noodle around with something. The idea that you don’t have to come up with the right image or line or phrase on your first try. Get something, anything, down on the page or the screen, and then keep playing with it, keep noodling. See? Much less pressure.

If we’re going to revise through multiple drafts anyway, why should the starting point contain so much importance? Instead of the starting point, it’s just a starting point.

Joannie Stangeland, Not just the fresh start

It’s Monday, the first day of the new semester and I am on sabbatical: sitting in a sweet café down the hill from my house–a place I have intended and failed to visit for the last year– having a slow, intentional, delicious coffee, listening to jazz music from the speakers and car music from Second Avenue, and staring into the wide open space that has opened up in front of my exhausted body, brain and spirit.

This is precious.

What will I do with my one wild and precious sabbatical? Well, Mary Oliver, let me tell you: I am going to savor it like I’m savoring this cup of coffee. I don’t precisely know what that savoring will look like, though. I am not traveling much outside of some events to promote my new book in March, and while I did propose a specific project in my sabbatical application, it’s been three years since that application and the project I proposed has morphed into something very different.

Sheila Squillante, A Wide Open Space

There’s a physiotherapist on Instagram who specializes in breast cancer “survivors”. She says that technically, in Australia at any rate, a person is a cancer survivor from the moment they are diagnosed until they die. She points out that a lot of “cancer survivors” don’t like that designation. It sounds like some kind of loud rally slogan. I feel that way, too. I would really like these 8 months to fade into the wallpaper. It’s there, but I don’t want cancer to be a part of my identity, as much as it has been conspicuous in every aspect of my life for a while.

I know there are many women who have managed this.

I have changed. But not as significantly as being a mother changed me. Probably not as much as any of or all the mistakes I’ve made in my life have changed me. As travel has changed me. As having lost a friend has. As love – so many loves. As so many things I don’t want to write about here.

If I let myself carry these new changes forward as I return to my “real life”, I believe I can find a different kind of peace than I had before. My ambitions are softer. While I used to believe that my writing was about the doing, about the in-the-moment flow, I don’t think I was honest with myself. I was still whipping myself more than I was allowing myself to just enjoy what comes or doesn’t come. I was still looking for approval as much as I was wanting communication. this applies to me teaching, too. Even some of my relationships.

It’s not that I’ve lowered the bar of “good enough”, really. I’m doing away with the bar.

Ren Powell, The End of Active Treatment

I am a tumble down mess red in tooth and claw like the tumbling tumbleweed of yore my body a ghost town with dust and saloon doors flapping open and closed and my neck feels funny and I need to drink more water don’t we all just need to drink more and more and more water until they have to cut a hole in our guts to let it stream out at our end. But I am PRESENT I am inside my body. I am notating Jerusalem it is lovely inside my face a red sky sloop down weepweepweepweep stained beyond anything that might occur in the bathtub.

Jupiter sits on my chest and begs me to stay I will stay because she is the Magiker sleek black we are dizzy with mustard pricks. When my phone rings I fling it out of my hand. My throat is a yellow eyeglass. My lungs are wasps but in spite of all this I baked a goddamn gorgeous cake feral in its chocolately gnashy truffle goodness.

Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report king tides & A High Wind In Jamaica edition

When I first re-visited the video so that I could write this blog, I have to admit I cringed a little. It’s tempting to apologise for my double-chin & jowls, thick torso, my awkwardness and kind of arty-posiness. But I won’t apologise, because making these things visible is the point. By showing the cracks, the fat, the visceral textures & racing sky I believe Patrick has captured something far greater than me in this video poem, so much so that I recede as protagonist and become just one of the textures woven into time and space. I really think he’s made a video poem that could read as a meditation (in the same way that Pamela Boutros did in the video poem LOST)

FUN FACT:

We filmed in Patrick’s bedroom in an old house in Melbourne, Australia. But first we had to prop his bed up against one of the walls so we had enough room to film.

Caroline Reid, VIDEO POEM: To Touch & Taste a Comet, featuring Caroline Reid in a bedroom in Melbourne

This little beauty is a sneak peek at the GRANATA project now in the final stages of proofing that will be topside near the end of February. The series of text pieces were written (the bulk of them) in the summer of 2022, so there is definitely a lot of summer about them, as is fitting for a book about everyone’s favorite goddess. But it’s also a book about the Furies, which many believe were the punished friends of Persephone who failed to save her from abduction (or conversely, were gifted with wings and a craving for vengeance to help find her.) It’s a book about lost innocence on all fronts, about sensuality and sexuality, about the girl world and all its monsters and ghosts. 

The art pieces that appeared were actually created a year later and mostly over the course of a single week, sometimes several a day. While I initially had planned the book to be a text-only cover, this summer’s spurt of visual work prolificness had other things in mind. Once I started I could not stop, until there were around 20 collages that accompanied the text pieces perfectly. 

Kristy Bowen, cover reveal

This January’s first round up of PoetryRx is for treating the winter blues.

Now, as you know, I don’t believe in plastering joy over sorrow or spring poems over winter ones. To paraphrase what I said about poetry in a previous post, poems offer solace by inviting us to feel our humanity activated and witnessed. They share truths that resonate with our experiences and make us feel less alone. They articulate a present reality that, through the luminous clarity of its wording, provides relief.

I hope these poems will deepen your curiosity in the season and in your own feelings about it. My own relationship to winter is a work in progress, but it’s a relationship I’m infinitely grateful to have the chance to cultivate and nurture each year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The poems in Maya C Popa’s book, Wound is the Origin of Wonder, ask big questions: what can we learn about ourselves from the religious systems  and mythologies we created in the past? (Whether they’re believable or not isn’t the point here – Popa is looking for patterns and archetypes). What’s the world like when we’re not looking at it? What would it be like to be inside someone elses head? It’s risky territory. Poets must ‘go in fear of abstractions’, as Ezra Pound put it. But then all artists who create successful art take risks. Does Maya C Popa pull it off and, if so, how? Yes, she does – but it’s just that here and there, I found myself wondering. Then again, one thing I learned from reading the book was that the joy is in the wondering. You can read my review of it here at Stride Magazine.

Dominic Rivron, Wound is the Origin of Wonder

“Indeterminate Inflorescence” is a series of aphorisms from Lee Seong-bok’s creative writing lectures and collected by his students. Lee Seong-bok has published eight collections of poetry, academic and mainstream literary criticism, books on creative writing drawn from his career at Keimyung University, interrupted by a period of living in Paris studying the post-structuralists and tenets of Seon Buddhism.

Books on creative writing seem to largely fall in two camps, they’re either laden with academic and theoretical jargon so as to be borderline unreadable or engaging, questioning pieces that illuminate and make writers (whether professional or hobbyists) think about their practice. George Sander’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is an example of the latter. This is is also the camp Lee’s work falls in. […]

From “Writing”,

“A poet’s notebook is often better than their poems. Some do say to write poetry as if writing in one’s notes. Once there’s an awareness that ‘writing’ is being done, a kind of stiffness goes to the shoulders and the language becomes unnatural. The back of a pianist often reveals what they playing will sound like. Just like in golf or tennis, it’s only through relaxing the shoulders the ball can really be hit hard.”

Emma Lee, “Indeterminate Inflorescence” Lee Seong-Bok translated by Anton Hur (Sublunary Editions) – book review

I take comfort from this poem, which may seem strange. I love the time sweep of it, and yet its timelessness, how it wings out dizzyingly and then settles beside us in life’s tedious waiting room. How it gathers dust and whatnots — shells, poems, quotes, bits of intellectual and scientific history, an ever hopeful dog (itself having a strained [straining at the leash?] and estranged relationship with “time”). I love how the poem takes its time meandering through thought, picking things up, putting them down, souls and corpses.

Marilyn McCabe, That’s My Bag

‘Happiness writes white,’ said Larkin, abbreviating Henry de Montherlant’s maxim, ‘Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches’ [‘Happiness writes in white ink on white pages’], but there are exceptions to all generalisations. The end of 2023 saw the publication, by Vole Books, of My Family and Other Birds, Rod Whitworth’s long-overdue first collection, full of poems which largely, though not exclusively, celebrate life and its myriad joys. Hats off to Janice and Dónall Dempsey at Vole for recognising that it needed to be out in the world. It’s available from them, here, or from Rod, here.

Rod asked me to write one of the two endorsements for the collection, which I very gladly did, but here’s a sentence from the other one, by Peter Sansom, which truly nails the book’s qualities: ‘The work of a skilful but unshowy writer, it is imaginative, open, honest and shrewd, and many other things besides, like funny and angry and loving – a chronicle in fully realised individual poems of lives and times.’

Matthew Paul, On Rod Whitworth’s ‘Mr Knowles’

I know, I know – not that Julian of Norwich quote again, I hear you say. But it’s the start of the year, I’m looking out at blue sky, and this is the first day since November 8th that I’ve felt properly well, and that the three colds I’ve had back-to-back since then are finally wearing off. Life is good and all shall be well.

Julian of Norwich was really just a name to me until poet friend Antony lent me his copy of I, Julian by Clare Gilbert, (Hachette) which is a fictionalised autobiography of the medieval anchoress who wrote ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. I was interested in finding out more about Julian’s life, and actually I found it un-put-downable.

At the other end of the spectrum I’ve been converted to the Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths which I’ve been hoovering up on my kindle. They’re great fun, perfect for long waiting times in airports and hospitals, and a good example of (ahem) how to write not a single novel but a series.

On the poetry front, Janet Sutherland’s The Messenger House (Shearsman) has risen to the top of the TBR pile and I’ve made tentative progress through it. The book is a hybrid of prose, poetry, memoir, travelogue. So far I’ve found it intriguing and exciting. Janet likes to push the boundaries and her work is never predictable.

Robin Houghton, All shall be well

I was up early this morning, listening to the precipitation, trying to determine if it was rain or ice or sleet.  I thought of Epiphany, read T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” remembered a poem I had written in response (go here to read it), did some internet wandering, came across an idea in a blog post of mine, and wrote a few lines in response.

Two years ago, I wrote, “I am thinking of the angel warning Joseph in a dream to flee to Egypt, and he does. Did other parents in Bethlehem that night dream of angels with strange messages about their infant boys? Did they remember their dreams? Were they haunted by the memory?”

This morning I wrote about being frozen in place, unable to escape what’s coming.  Part of me wants to turn it into a poem that references Gaza; part of me thinks it will be stronger if it’s more universal. 

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Epiphany Ponderings

Last year, my January challenge was to do a post a day on the blog. It was hard, but it went reasonably well and I did manage to complete it. I thought I might try to do the same this year, although I wondered if this might be setting myself up to fail. So, I’ll just aim to post more frequently! In the meantime, I’ll leave you with those ghostly mute swans, those ethereal snow clouds, the movement of feathers and snow flakes, and all the entrancing sounds Polona Oblak’s haiku contains.

Julie Mellor, The Haiku Calendar

My current slow-read is K. Setiya’s book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. While there are many aspects of this philosophical book that interest me and pertain to current or recent experiences in my life, something that gained my attention regarding writing is the author’s suggestion that the concept of failure as a loss is bound up with cultural narratives. If we imagine our lives as arcs with the aim of goals, journeys’ ends, attainment of heart’s desires, finding true love, and the like, Setiya argues, it is too easy to feel that we are failures, and to despair or grieve. Maybe we should not be so caught up in narratives, he suggests.

Hmm. As a poet who writes a good deal of what may be termed “lyrical narrative” work and as a human who loves a good story, I’m more drawn to theories of story-as-essential-to-humans; I’m thinking here of Daniel Dennett and Brian Boyd, about whom I’ve blogged in the past (I will place those links at the end of this post). Nonetheless, poetry is often writing about what is NOT a story; some of my favorite poems have no story per se to tell, yet they move me to reflection and/or to emotional resonance. Hence they feel deeply significant.

And if you have happened to click on the links to the right of this page that lead to my poetry online, or purchased and read my books (thank you, dear readers!), you are sure to find several pieces that are not even remotely narrative. As someone who has struggled with self esteem and ambition, and often felt myself a failure, Setiya’s philosophical undoing of the concept that a well-lived or meaningful life entails having “successes” comes as a relief. Whether one decides to accept his idea–I guess that’s up to you. It’s a book worth reading given how anxious contemporary American citizens seem to be and how powerless and despairing we often feel.

Ann E. Michael, Life story

making a living takes so much time
three acres of colour
galloping after us

the Coventry Carol
packed away
and left in the dark

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2024

I started this last year with the intention of posting once a week. That didn’t last long, as evidenced by the fact that I don’t think I’ve posted anything since September. I could feel badly about this, but honestly I don’t. No one is paying to read this, and there’s no law that says I have to be consistent. But it’s good for me to take the time to write something that doesn’t hold the tension or pressure of writing a poem. So here I am, starting up again with the same intention as last year – one post a week – and I will do my best to follow through.

When I was a teen playing on the high school basketball team (until the rest of the team grew and I stayed five foot three and mostly useful as someone who would go in and foul people), my coach always encouraged us to “follow through” on our jump shots, to maintain the arc and momentum, to give ourselves a better chance at scoring. My father and mother were always insistent about following through on commitments as well, which is probably why I still find it so difficult to cancel plans, even if I’m ill.

So what does follow-through look like in a creative life? For my writing, I am still working at not self-rejecting, not holding back on submissions or opportunities. Once I write the work and feel it is ready to be public, I need to follow through by putting it out into the world if I want others to read it. (I have started the year well in that regard – five days into the new year, I have submitted to four journals, one book prize, and one residency. Gulp.) As a newbie visual artist, I have even more impostor syndrome, but 14 pieces of my work are currently adorning the walls of my beloved local library for the month of January, a step that I wouldn’t have taken a year ago.

Donna Vorreyer, In Which I Humbly Resolve…

It is a week today since we lost him. Last night I dreamt that he is on the bed and I was telling him how beautiful he is. I keep catching him out of the corner of my eye, entering the living room, or in his bed in the kitchen. I have yet to venture down the lanes that we walked for fifteen years, it doesn’t feel right. I hadn’t realised how much I constantly chatted to him – about our day, about our plans, about him – and I miss his attentive face, always ready to engage. I miss loving him, and I miss being loved by him because he had huge capacity to love, his whole being was about love, and joy and innocence. He was the most loving dog I have ever know. You all think you have the best dog, but you’re wrong, I had him. He was mine. I was his.

I would have him back. But I can’t, he was on loan to us, and has now gone back to wherever it is he came from. I hope it is this: a field with filthy ditches, and dead pheasants to roll in and rabbits to chase and an endless blue sky to run under. Or a wide, flat beach of yellow sand, rock pools to dip in and out of, some cliffs to run up and down, other dogs to roll and run with. This is how I will imagine him.

Wendy Pratt, For Toby – the best worst dog that ever lived

Last night we ate a dish of green.
Basil and spinach, a pesto. Citrus
zest binding the grains of orzo.
The kitchen window overlooks
the yard, where the persimmon
and fig are still wintering. Sometimes
we crave a cleansing. But keep the fire
alive in the grate, the quiet smolder
inside, honey softening in the comb.

Luisa A. Igloria, Correspondence

What do you want your future to taste like?

I rather like the idea of my future tasting of jam doughnuts and candy floss. Mixing in a tinged of chip shop chips, hot chocolate and garlic butter would be good too. And then my future would taste of satisfaction with the welcome twang and tang of vivacity.

I definitely don’t want it to taste like elastic bands, but I do have an interesting passion for them which will continue into my future!

Here is one of my favourite #ElasticBandPhotos. It has now become the cover art for a ‘coffee table’ book I have worked on which puts together a year’s worth of full moon poems alongside a selection of my elastic band photographs. I loved being able to work with Jason Conway to bring this book, Vortex Over Wave, into the world.

Meet The Poet: Sue Finch (Annick Yerem)

When MoonPath’s Lana Hechtman Ayres told me Patricia Fargnoli had been her teacher and mentor, I went looking for her. Winter, the sixth volume in the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, was the first to arrive, and is now on sale for $9 at Hobblebush Books (use this link: https://www.hobblebush.com/product-page/winter).

I have fallen hard for this book, and this poet. In “The Horse,” she begins:

I let the horse into my apartment,
pushed back chairs,
shoved the rattan chest
up against the tall bookcases…

Horses abound in this book. What’s not to love?

In addition to any other praise I might dish out, it’s a perfect book to read on a cold and rainy January day. Yes, New Hampshire, snow, but it works its spell here in the Pacific Northwest, too: “[I] found a sad music in the fork of an ash tree, / a music made of wind and the tuning forks of stars” (“Glosa”). As Meg Kearney tells us on the back cover, Fargnoli has “listened deeply to the silence of winter.”

Many of the poems in Winter are about dreams.

Bethany Reid, Patricia Fargnoli (1937-2021)

i am so hungry for goodness
that sometimes i read the “good news” website.
a little girl becomes a pilot. a man
eats his weight in teeth. there is a scientist
who turns tears into fossil fuels.
hope is a thing with no feathers
but tells you “i will be a swan.” i do not
want hope. i want a jar of nutella.
i want a burning police car.

Robin Gow, 1/8

Joni Mitchell sang into
an open piano

when she recorded
her first album

because David Crosby
thought it would

enhance her voice —
and it did,

but it also magnified
the other sounds in the room

so they were forced to
strip away the high frequencies,

leaving a flatter beauty,
and this is why

I am careful when I
look at you

because the universe
has limits.

Jason Crane, POEM: The Many Worlds Hypothesis & Song To A Seagull

When I’m asleep, my books venture out into the world.

They sneak into other people’s homes, trade amongst one another—a Jim Carroll for an Anne Waldman, a Joy Harjo for a Juan Felipe Herrera.

Some books run off on their own: Bob Kaufman stays out all night, composes love poetry to the cosmos. Bukowski visits his old Hollywood place on DeLongpre, cracks open a beer, sits by the window, watches all the women walk by.

Patti Smith and Rimbaud wander downtown streets, creating the dreamiest of mandalas from memories, while Claudia Rankine and Wanda Coleman don’t take any crap from the cops.

Come morning, most of my books are back on their shelves, along with a few new ones.

Rich Ferguson, Independent Books

open up
peel back your ribs
expose what’s inside
see the child
crying

feel
start with pity
or compassion, then
become responsible
if you can bear it

if he is like you
if (you think)
he is not like you
this is how
the journey begins

Rachel Barenblat, Open