This week: a piebald crow, seven bloodroot blossoms, the agèd state of words, the fine grain of life, and much more. Enjoy.

When I forget for a moment that he is about to blow the world up

I chop vegetables, make kefir, do laundry, sow seeds

as if tomorrow, next week, harvest time were not in doubt.

Ama Bolton, When I forget

Tell me, how are you surviving this April day?

These times call for finding ways to not only survive, but also to persist. Some days this might mean staying under the covers with a good novel; other days it could mean volunteering your time for a cause you care about — which might take a myriad of different forms. Maybe you’re going outdoors more.

Recently, I’ve been on a local book tour for Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds. One lonely July weekend, less than two years ago, I had this crazy idea. What if I created a bird guide that matched poets and birds? What if I cajoled my friend Stephanie Delaney to write the bird notes? What if I went on a hunt for an artist that specialized in birds? Those two little words, “what if” hold so much power.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Birdbrains celebrated its nearly five month anniversary at the Seward Park Audubon Center in Seattle, WA. Poets, writers, and bird lovers gathered together in a space designated as an international flyway for the great bird migration now going on.

When I collaborated with Dr. Stephanie Delaney and Hiroko Seki, I never imagined the incredible reception this book has had so far—and it is barely five months old. What I love the most, however, are the personal stories that emerge when I talk to both audience members and contributors alike.

Recently, one new friend told me that she reads a bird poem and bird note each night before going to sleep (much better than doomscrolling); a local poet told me that her daughter’s art teach has invited her into the classroom to talk about her contribution to the book, and another contributor gave a copy to her mother, the woman who first taught her about the birds.

Now when I see the common pigeon, I wonder how Jane Hirshfield is doing as this is “her” bird and the Stellar’s jay always reminds me of Harold Taw—whose flash fiction piece invents a language for the jay. Then there’s the chukar that lives in Eastern Washington, Texas, and in Palestine; this is Naomi Shihab Nye’s bird. The oddly named killdeer belongs to Kelli Russell Agodon, the cedar waxwing to Washington State native, Catherine Barnett. The Northern flicker is the bird that I claimed as my own. My gateway drug to the world of birding.

I know that filling the feeders with hot pepper suet and watching a piebald crow along the Puget Sound will not solve the global apocalypse it seems we are experiencing daily. However, without the birds I can’t look at the news from Gaza, Iran, Lebanon without being locked in despair. Birdbrains is the antidote.

Susan Rich, And Now for Something a Little Bit ~ Practical?

Water is trapped in mudflats, but there is also

shimmer in shades of purple. This is the time
before fruit ripens from flower, before
the bruise of summer. In a hurt world,

you try to understand these ongoing
lessons in wonder. Rain, when it returns,
remembers every surface it’s ever met.

Luisa A. Igloria, Living in the In-between

The poem’s most sustained suspension of pentameter follows line 10: “Not only under ground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots. / Life in itself / Is nothing.” The pentameter line drops off into unsparing dimeter, then monometer, before expanding again into pentameter. The poem’s trajectory reflects not only the temperamental April weather, but the way that the beauty of spring presents itself as “enough.”

Enough to do what? To appear to vanquish death. This is the season’s cruel April Fool’s prank, and the poem’s speaker sees through it. Still, insistent in its utter insufficiency, that prankster and fool, April — given its own penultimate monometer line — arrives, “babbling like an idiot and strewing flowers.” There’s nothing small and clean about this April. It’s a mess. Yet even in the incontrovertible face of death, here it comes again: quixotic and possibly insane, but alive.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Spring

The oak being “unwired” in the second stanza is a wonderful image. I might be taking it too far to think of it as water in the electrics causing a failure, but the cables of the tree roots coming unstuck is a powerful one for me. It’s ironic that in a time like we are in now we will almost certainly be seeing the hosepipe ban news articles coming soon, but Jemma [Borg] paints a picture that is a mixture of beauty: ‘the flood that makes a mirror / on the lawn’ is a beautiful image, as is ‘Venus’s bright eye’, but these are counter-balanced or cancelled out (saying drowned out would be pushing it, Mat) by the “suffering cherry tree” and the lovely imagine and sounds conjured up by “the grass is tutting / with its many wet tongues”. Is nature judging us? No, but it should be.

Mat Riches, Here’s mud in your eye..

To think about trees is to think about generations before you, those who planted the trees that accompany us now, and the generations to follow. I suppose no poet writes about trees alongside men without remembering how Homer says men are like the leaves upon the trees. (Indeed, Larkin’s poem is, viewed from one perspective, really just a kind of riff upon these lines.)

οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ’ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ’ ἐπιγίνεται ὥρη:
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ’ ἀπολήγει.
(Iliad 6.146-149)

Like the generations of leaves are those of men.
Leaves the wind pours upon the ground, but the wood
thickens and births, as spring comes round again:
so the generations of men — one born, one gone.

These lines have been quoted, imitated and alluded to since antiquity. Horace himself writes a version of them in his Ars Poetica, but there he makes the leaves not men, but words — the language of men. My favourite translation of this passage is Jonson’s:

As woods whose change appeares
Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding yeares,
The first-borne dying; so the agèd state
Of words decay, and phrases borne but late
Like tender buds shoot up, and freshly grow.
Our selves, and all that’s ours, to death we owe.

The language changes, but the trees live on. Homer is dead, they seem to say; begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Victoria Moul, Still in their leaves, throughout the sliding years

It’s been too long since the last post. In late March, I posted an article on writing blurbs, which is still waiting for its Part 2. But true to our usual form, both Kim and I have been taken up with this year’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) – which involves writing a poem a day throughout the month of April. Many sensible people write these in the privacy of their own homes, perhaps sharing them with a few trusted friends, before eventually – after careful consideration and thorough editing – publishing a handful of their 30 poems.

But Kim and I publish them every single day on social media, often within minutes of writing the final lines. It’s incredibly exposing, exhausting – and beautifully compelling. And by mid-April, it tends to become all-consuming. By the end of the month, I’m exhausted and slightly crazed, but I do have a stock of 30 first, second or third drafts to sustain me through the subsequent months. Out of the 30 poems, there’s often a small selection of good poems which might make it into a collection. But perhaps most importantly, NaPoWriMo, and its crazy discipline, reminds me that I am a writer. That whatever else I’m doing or feelings in my life, the practice of writing is at my core. Like my therapist said – “whenever you talk about writing, your face lights up”. I’m still struggling with cyclical depression, and the practice of daily writing is a powerful reminder that on those days when I feel like I really don’t want to write a single word, I sometimes produce my best work.

Clare Shaw, A beautiful compulsion

April is National Poetry Month AND National Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month — and here in this blog we continue to celebrate poetry-math connections.  Below I offer the opening stanzas of an old poem of mine entitled “Time”.

The clock goes round —
making time a circle
rather than a line.
Each year’s return to spring
layers time on time. 

Circle or line — 
no difference.  Wrap
the line around a rim,
tuck the loose ends in,
or cut the circle, stretch it thin —

breaking an appointment,
or separating bites of lunch.
If the slit is not at midnight,
visit darkness by going back
or skip from light to light.

A second part of “Time” is available here.  The entire poem is available in Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010).

JoAnne Growney, April — Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

This past Sunday would have been my mother’s 79th birthday, a birthday she never quite made it to, and in a world that would have distressed her to no end. There are times when I wonder how both my parents would have navigated this world, and though my mother saw less of it, dying only a year into the madness, but my father witnessed much more. Both would be extremely vulnerable–to cuts to things like social security and medicare, despite my dad being pretty organized in terms of pensions and savings (this is not a trait he passed down to me.) And while I like to joke that I have unofficially retired to do freelance design/writing /editing work for others and run the press& shop, I know full well I will be working and hopefully still earning income up til my death bed. That is, if I survive–or even if we all survive this current dystopia. In a calmer, saner world of a couple years ago, it was a little freeing to accept that and just make that the plan. I have a tiny amount of savings that is really nothing, but serves as an emergency fund at the least. With J earning money and his business doing well, we are less strapped in general from month to month, but as prices rise on gas and groceries, plus healthcare premiums that are now much higher than they were the past several years, it becomes more challenging.   I still try to fit in smaller pleasures, like theater tickets and occasional new dresses, as well as things like art supplies and books, but it gets harder and probably will even more so. 

Much is afoot in the dgp world, with me still figuring out work flows and logistics on the new books. I’ve been sampling a few different POD operations, including Amazon and Ingram, and am finding there are benefits and drawbacks to both. The books are quite beautiful nevertheless, and I appreciate the easiness of filling orders with books I do not have to print and fold and bind and trim all on my own. I am still looking for the sweet spot in pricing that does not send us into the red.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 4/8/2026

There was candlewax in my hair for seven days and seven nights the clouds were old testament we watched the sky which plane would fall first which soldier would fall first which angel would descend shocked by a neutral wire you might be shocked at how many people are already dead inside which astronaut will touch ground first which child will fall first small and crumpled my mouth and hands inside this numb poem words didn’t disappear me they boiled away inside 

Rebecca Loudon, Jupiter at rest

I wonder if there has ever been a study of how poets’ work alters as they age. I don’t mean in terms of life experience or a switch of political interpretation or subject matter but the structure of the writing itself.

It’s a subject that’s been troubling me for some time. In day-to-day life I function well at 73. OK, I forget where I’ve put my phone, or go upstairs to fetch something and then forget what it is I’ve gone to fetch, but that seems to be because my head is full of thoughts and responses to whatever’s going on. I can do all the things I’ve done for years, maybe a little slower, but they get done and life works well enough. Physically I’ve survived heart attacks, can still lift and carry bags of feed and bedding, can spend hours on jobs at our smallholding, can still look after pigs, ducks, hens, travel to watch football.

My point is that when I sit to write the process is different. My brain is still capable of energetic concentration but I look at some of the ‘old’ poems from twenty years ago and know I cannot write like that any more. An example:

THE WATER DIVINER

The thirsty people pay
and crowd to watch, but
for now the trick is in
the drama, in the measure

of the stride, the heavy
dance of the methodical
tread, and in the way
water rises at full moon

to break the boundaries
of grief. My reward is in
coins, a place to rest,
quiet nods of respect.

Sometimes, too, after dark
women will seek me out
for more elusive miracles.
But that is not my craft.

There is a tightness and control here, a rhythm that I no longer possess – no longer feel. I could no longer write like this any more than I could write anything sensible in rhyming iambic pentameters. My writing sprawls, jerks about, voices talk to each other within it, it responds to the world, to itself, is restless and reactive. This morning I sat down to write and came up with something that made absolute sense to me, which for now feels right, yet on reflection might be very difficult for others to fathom out.

Bob Mee, HOW THE BRAIN CHANGES THE WAY WE WRITE AS WE AGE

My son and I took my ordinary walk today, along Woods Creek, and I pointed out things he could pull from the ground and eat. Weirdly, he seems to like this, and thought deadnettle was tasty. I never knew what that little purplish plant was until this year, although it grows everywhere—all part of the very long process of learning where I live.

Last year I read selections of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s work for one of those anonymous evaluations I’m not supposed to admit to doing. I admired it so much, I put in an advance order for her collection with snow pouring southward past the window, just out from Pitt. Funny how I keep reading books about foraging, but I especially wanted to taste this one before heading to Alaska in a few days. As her bio describes, Kane is “Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska… She’s raised her children as a single mother in Alaska and Massachusetts, but now lives with them in Oregon, where she is currently an Associate Professor at Reed College.” Stephanie Adams-Santos writes in her back-cover endorsement that the poems are “marked by an insistent naming of plants, people, places—an act of preservation against all that slips away.” Many poems in with snow have a quality of litany (although there’s also one called “No Litanies, No,” so maybe don’t trust my impression). In “Without Anchorage,” she writes about trying to “harvest the tops of onions flash-frozen with approximate winter’s sudden onset, haul the tenderest medicines inside losing only the laurel: hyssop, arnica, basketgrass sagrit.” The lovely precision, though, is framed again and again by the pain of displacement. To some extent art can conjure possible worlds and preserve in them what has been or will be lost. It’s never a fully adequate answer to grief, but I’m moved when artists try.

I’m at least as struck by how these poems witness and answer violence on many scales, including brutality in Kane’s childhood and massive cultural violence. There are also a host of poems about men being assholes. “Letters from Learned Men,” an erasure poem, documents a contemporary priest writing in a condescending way to someone who seems to be Kane herself (the name is blacked out)—and concludes with a hundred-year-old letter in which a priest condemns a Native woman in an overtly vicious way. I love how this poem levels a devastating argument by mere juxtaposition: historical racism and sexism are continuous with their lightly disguised contemporary versions. In fact, I love all of the many angry poems here—as well as the book’s lack of a Notes section. “The first thing I will do: make / myself indecipherable / to you,” she writes in “Elixirs for Words to Come.” So you don’t know my language or landscape or cultural context or even why I’m mad? If you want to navigate this poetic world, it’s on you to figure it out.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 2 (spirals, drafts, wildflowers)

the warehouse always wants more warehouse.
more places to hoard boxes of plastic beads
& plastic teeth & plastic gods. they want
everyone to go & work in the warehouse.
to have babies who know nothing
but warehouse. to turn our blood
into warehouse guts. to warehouse our houses
until we are nothing but their tightening machine.

Robin Gow, warehouse

The breakthrough moment came in summer of 2017, three years into submitting the manuscript.

I woke up that morning with the head of a smart stranger, having forgotten that I had ever wrote the book.

I laid out the manuscript, and what happened next felt like the best mix of expertise and instinct, discernment and intuition.

I began culling poems without anxiety or remorse, and I listened more clearly than I ever had before to what I’d actually written. The title changed without fuss as a result. I could feel when I had finally arrived at the manuscript that would be the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton prize judged by Ocean Vuong. I read the book over with the title American Faith—the title of one of the strongest poems in the book—and thought: yes, this is the book I’d been trying to write.

It was here, in this slab of marble (stack of printouts) waiting to be aerated, chiseled released. I felt a singular mix of relief and quiet confidence. It was a lovely,

Maya C. Popa, The Head of a Smart Stranger

You can stick two contact mics on a Singer
and go to town, letting the feedback wail
as the crunchy needle sounds distort
through one of the many barefoot pedals.
One light bulb shines
through the holes in the paper
as it travels, threadless, through the machine.

Fievel Crane, POEM: You Can Play A Shoestring If You’re Sincere

The best thing about finding fellowship with dead poets is that they don’t contradict you, don’t correct you, don’t talk over you. Thankfully they don’t talk at all. They are mercifully silent. I find this makes for a better connection. When I walked from Keats’ birthplace to Blake’s grave last week the commentary I gave was broadcast unscripted, unchecked, unedited. “You sounded quite posh” said Sue from Essex who’d tuned in to the live-stream. I thought about the voice that I’d adopted, the one I think I’d put on to lend authority if not authenticity to my report. Out of a kind of nervousness I suppose, an insecurity even, I’d acquired a voice that wasn’t entirely my own.

And I thought about that voice that poets put on. If you’re a poet you probably do it. And if you don’t, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about tune your dials to the next poet up on the open mic or to any of them broadcast on BBC’s Radio 4. They’re all at it. Listen carefully.

It’s come to be known as “poetry voice.” It’s rooted in a bluesy, jazz scat blended with a dash of watered down Dylan and a measure of white-Beatnik inflection. It can be subtle, barely detectable, an occasional raised tone at the end of each phrase, a single word in emphasis pronounced from the diaphragm. It is a strange example of diluted, cultural appropriation without any specifically identifiable origin. It is designed, I think, to add “feeling” to a poem when spoken, to show that you really “mean it.” You can sound like a poet even if what you’ve written barely resembles poetry.

Perhaps it’s just a way of disguising vulnerability or simply a means of elevating speech to ‘not quite song’ but a cut above straight ‘saying stuff.’ It is a middle ground that poetry can claim as its own safe space. But with such richness and range available to the voice why such conformity? The poet Auden was a notoriously poor performer. But it was deliberate. Appalled by the manner in which populations were enthralled by the exuberant but empty oratory of political fanatics he dropped his cadence to a near mumble to avoid any sensationalism. The poem lived elsewhere, the reading a gesture toward it, a mere suggestion of it.

Jan Noble, Nº59 Dead networking (with Keats and Blake)

I woke at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and about all the times I have woken at 4 a.m. thinking about Milton, and specifically about these fourteen lines of Milton, the attempt to recall and silently recite less variety of counting sheep than of slowing the woolly urge to go on leaping the mind’s endless fences and instead settle down in the wet green grass. It was no different today, until I stopped bobbing along on iambs long enough to realize the reasons I’ve been quiet here overlap reasons I haven’t yet shared this poem.

The question of how to be strikes me as the obvious one for a person in my present condition to be asking, though the longer I’ve sat with it, the clearer it is that it’s been the central question of my life. It’s why this poem bewitched and baffled me at twenty-two, and has alternately vexed and consoled me since. And yet I’ve been . . . afraid? To write about it here. I’ve forgotten more about my formal education in poetry than feels prudent to acknowledge in a publication wherein I purport to bring you some insight about the craft, though writing this out longhand—in an emerald green Moleskine cahier with at stub-nib Eco TWSBI; it’s now 7:15 a.m. and there’s a bird I can’t name chiming outside the open window—I am reminded, once again, of what I set out to do here, how I set out to be.

It has been a struggle, recapturing what I want to call the simplicity of being with poems. I have found it difficult to stop myself from slipping out of it and into the assorted personas, assorted ways of being, I have tried on over the years—academic, educator, editor, critic—each of which comes with its own set of professional and social obligations, or perhaps simply expectations, internal and external alike. Some of the resulting reservations about staking any claim to insight are fairly obvious. I have forgotten more about Milton and his poems and the vast ecosystem of scholarship surrounding both than I can remember ever having known. If a doctorate could be revoked, I don’t think I’d argue overmuch if some diploma-removal goons came knocking.

Some of the reservations are far weirder: things like the persistent sense that I have forgotten some lousy thing that Milton said or did or is reported to have said or done, something unsavoury to our twenty-first century sense of moral perfectionism, and has been summarily dismissed by the loudest of internet users. That the Aeropagitica fails to fully account for some local complexity or other and must thus be chucked wholesale.

Or something even worse, like that he believed in meaning, in the soul, in God.

The point of all of this is that Sonnet XIX is a poem that I love, and it has lived with me, and I with it, for many years, and lately it has been essential to me as I relearn, each day, how to live, how to be, something I have done perhaps all my life, and not just at what lately sometimes feels its nadir.

Vanessa Stauffer, Sonnet XIX: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ by John Milton

As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.

The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.

This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.

The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?

Matthew Paul, On poetry competitions and personal taste

One does not attempt to write a poem about foremothers. One is compelled to write it. In fact, it writes itself. You are simply the last hand in a chain of clasped arms, the last daughter in a lineage of daughters, the last mouth from which the song, fully formed, emerges.

I see Daughter of Sindh as a bridge poem – my ancestral mothers gaze towards me, I look back to them, and the legacy of colonial rule, the pain of India’s partition hangs between us.

In the great gamble of map-drawing, Sindh (and half of Punjab) ended up on the Pakistani side of the border; the wrong side for my Hindu grandparents (maternal and paternal) who crossed amidst carnage, rebuilding their lives from refugee camps on what politicians declared in 1947 was now their homeland. They never crossed that border again. Their ache never ceased.

Far from their slowly reconstructed lives in India, I was born and raised in West Asia (UAE), by a Sindhi mother and a Punjabi father who spoke with each other in English and were themselves raised in the shadows of unspoken wounds of their parents’ displacement. My childhood was a surreal split between Indian mythological universes and the moody landscapes of Austen and Bronte; I memorized Shakespeare and Sanskrit verses for their rhythm, learnt ballet and Bharatanatyam.

Like Daughter of Sindh, I have existed on bridges since I can remember – at the intersection of cultures, of worlds, of times. For a long while, when I lost my mother at 19, existence felt like one foot in the realm of life, the other in the realm of death.

For me, writing poetry is standing on thresholds in their purest, most luminous warmth, and allowing the words to remake me. It is to drench oneself in their light, in their fire, and taste honey. Much of my collection ‘Drench Me in Silver’ (Black Bough, 2025) is the gathering of such moments.

Drop-in by Saraswati Nagpal (Nigel Kent)

In my yard, hands on my hips, I look down at the collage of green foliage at my feet. I look for the familiar whorls and hues of ephemeral leaves. I count seven Bloodroot blossoms, little yellow faces with their manes of white. My favorite stage of their growth is just before the bloom when the lobed leaf is wrapped around the stem like a cloak. The flower appears to be holding its face in despair. Staring down at them, I feel my arms begin to wrap around my body. […]

Bloodroot’s whorl of leaf encases the delicate stem, protecting the flower until it finally blooms. Anyone who has started seeds in the still-aired confines of their homes quickly learns that the leggy stems are susceptible to wind as soon as they’re taken outside to adjust to life in the real world. The Bloodroot eventually sheds the cloak of itself and as it opens its face to the sunlight, its root nodules foster bacteria, nitrogen, and a gossamer intimacy with mycelia to nourish itself on the earth. Every green of stem. Every brown and gray of bark. Every green and red and yellow of leaf. Every pinnacle of thorn. All of it is miraculously rendered from the soil, and light.

Today is one of those days. Despite the universe in a seed, despite the success of transplant, the seven Bloodroot blossoms are just that: seven flowers. We all have days like these where the magic isn’t magic, but simply is what is. We experience the doldrums, all of us sitting on the edge of our beds, dragging a sock over the foot of another day. Opening a door and closing it in that repetitive muscle memory. Of course the seed bursts open; what is needed is there. The plant has sap. That’s what plants do. The sap has color and it happens to be red. I stand here and stare at the ground, though, and somehow I’m still entranced. Sometimes all the looking inward is just a sign that one needs to spend more time looking outward.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “I Go Down to the Shore” where she is humbled by the work and mechanism of what is […]

Sarah Lada, Finding the World

I hope to get together another manuscript out this spring (1 circulating, 1 bounced, 1 accepted to tbc), but I looked at 60 pages of this one, and said, nope and yanked that bit of viscera and will rebuild.

I spent 7 hours on a poem yesterday and look askance at it today. Hm, maybe it needs to sit and steep a while.

Recently I got a couple poems accepted at online places. Another going up April 9. Poetry coming out at +doc too. So that’s exciting.

Meanwhile I’ve continued to read at my usual voracious rate. I’m at 75 titles, varying from a dozen pages to over 700 pages. I’ve realized how inadequate even to myself to note a good one is. Or locate again given my current state of books.

Pearl Pirie, On our small marble

Much of my writing life is about waiting, for the ideas to form, for the stories to knit together. But today: writing, tidying, note making. Toying with flash fiction, bending and breaking rules, watching how tone and structure affect a story. I’m trying to write super short flash today – nothing more than 100 words a story. It’s challenging, but I need the hard edges of a challenge, as opposed to the loose, wandering path of the novel. I like the constraint. I like the fierce cutting and chipping and chiseling of words. When I look up it’s been an hour and a half. I take a break from writing and instead search online for writing opportunities and update a spreadsheet, begin yet another grant application then give up on it.

Suddenly, around me is a shifting and dragging of tables and chairs. A group of cancer hospital volunteers have arrived for a meeting. There are about fifteen people crowding into my corner. They keep asking if it’s ok for them to be around me like this, and it is because I’m not going anywhere. One of them has two therapy dogs with her, and I reach down and stroke the nearest one, who has a surprisingly wet beard.

They start by having a right old bitch about all sorts of work based stuff. I enjoy listening to it. It reminds me of my old job as a microbiologist. Oh, strange days to remember when I was a person who got up and went to a laboratory and looked down a microscope. Strange to think I was a person who worked with people. The gossip. The bitching. And let me tell you, no one can bitch like an NHS worker. The group move on from bitching to sharing their own experiences. Each and every one a cancer survivor. Then they are done, coffee drank, plans made, they move out, apologising to me for crowding me.

‘It’s ok, I wasn’t going anywhere, I’m supposed to be working’ I say, smiling.

‘Are you here with someone?’

‘My mum, she’s having chemo’.

‘Well, we’re all survivors ourselves, you’ll have heard, don’t give up hope…’

‘Stage four.’

‘Oh, well I hope the chemo gives her some more time.’

‘Thanks’

There is an awkward silence. Even here, in the middle of a cancer hospital, death is a place we can’t quite cross into. I think about that often, that I have been crossing into and out of places of death, that for long periods of my life I have lived in the doorway of both worlds, the liminal space of waiting and watching. They have all been there too, or at least to the edges, to view from some platform what is coming to us all. The moment passes.

We talk a little more, about what I’m working on. I say I’m a writer. She says I should write about them. I say I’ll put them in a short story, but I don’t, I put them in this blog instead.

Wendy Pratt, Much of what happens here is about waiting

In the context of a review culture in which hot takes, pseudo blurbs and cod-academic posturing are rife, it’s a huge breath of fresh air to encounter a critic who engages with a poet and their poetry, who gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of every line, who reaches far beyond a mere description of thematic concerns, all without lapsing into jargon or self-aggrandisement.

This is why I’m thoroughly recommending Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read today. It’s a regular Substack where she delves deeply into one collection at a time. Her writing and insights are terrific in their clarity, worthy of a wider audience and way more interesting than most reviews that can be found in major journals, even the essay-length ones, so I’m not taking restricted words counts as an excuse here. In fact, Fitzpatrick’s showing up a fair few bigger names in The Deeper Read. I suggest you explore its archive via this link, but with one warning: it’s likely to provoke you into purchases of poetry books that you’d never heard of and suddenly need…!

Matthew Stewart, Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read

I was struck recently by the pathetic persistence of my ego needs, that little creature inside who is constantly wanting to be seen, heard, applauded. “My god, creature, will you never stop?” I scold it. “Surely we’re of or approaching an age when we can be beyond all this,” I suggest to it. “Oh yes,” it says, “of course,” it assures. But next thing I know it’s having another little fit over a rejection, a perceived slight. Recently it was in a small tizzy over a competition we lost, even though we really didn’t expect to win in the first place. “But still,” it declares stoutly. I bemuse myself with all the ways I try to be seen — my poetry, art, opinions, and all the conversations I insert myself-talking-about-myself into. “Can you just shut up,” I demand of the ego. It makes that locking-the-lips motion. I don’t believe it for a minute. Can I blame society’s focus on productivity, success, competition — does every freaking thing have to be a competition? Competition means winners, yes, but it also, by definition, means losers. It occurs to me that I identify always with the losers. Does that doom me to self-fulfilling prophecy? “No, no, it’s not my fault!” declares ego. I think about how early trauma informs lifelong twists of thinking. “Yes,” cries ego, “it’s my parents’ fault!” Oh shut up. Just keep doing the creative acts, I tell myself, and ignore the ego beast. It blinks at me, unreadable.

Anyway, then I found this amusing poem by Matthew Olzmann (“so much better known, better published, a real success story in the poetry world, not like…,” mutters ego) and felt momentary kindred, as a poem can do. And then the ending! That’s what poetry is all about.

Marilyn McCabe, the savant who believes mustard stains

Comingling bodies brewed of holy water and borrowed time. Insomnia and 5 a.m. coffee atoms. Dog-tired highways and ragged folk-songs. Starched shirts and worn jeans atoms. Counterfeit and heaven-forged. A medicine bottle with hope listed as a side effect.

Rich Ferguson, Swirling through the universe, all the atoms of us

THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE, Christopher Howell, Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, University of Washington Press, 2019.

On the back cover, Kathy Fagan writes: “Howell has been for many years my go-to poet of choice when I need to be reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”

I can say the same. Howell asks, in “The Giant Causes the Apocalypse,” “[W]hat will comfort us / as we hear our singing stop?” This sometimes strange, sometimes disconcerting collection of poems is an exploration of that question.

The grief in the title permeates the book, without weighing it down, like these lines from “Turnpike and Flow”:

We say it is a long road
but it is only
a life
slipping past, dark and bright, abandoning
a few broken tools and shoes, once
in a while something beautiful but too big
to carry.

Howell is truly a gem in the Washington State poetry world. He has 20 books. He teaches in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University, and is an editor/director for both Lynx House Press and Willow Spring Books. Let us say he has a large and interested following. So it’s odd to find, bracketed in the middle of a long poem, these words: “[Sometimes I want you to stop / reading so I can / go on alone into the dark sublingual light…” (“Cloud of Unknowing”). I love the juxtaposition of dark with light. It’s a sentence (it’s a whole book) that takes chances.

Maybe Howell isn’t so much exploring the big questions, as urging his readers to explore them.

Bethany Reid, Christopher Howell, THE GRIEF OF A HAPPY LIFE

‘A Comet Passing’ is an urgent, taut collection of 18 poems inspired by the events surrounding the Heaven’s Gate religious group during the approach of the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. As we readers already know (or can easily find out) what happened during these febrile, fervid last days, Vanessa [Napolitano]’s job as the poet is to keep our attention on each part of the sequence as it unfolds. Through a kind of poetic speculation, we experience the build-up of events as though we were one of the Heaven’s Gate members – believing when they believe, doubting when they doubt. Vanessa sustains the tension through a careful layering of moments of high intensity with moments of calm, even boredom, as the group prepares meticulously for what is to come.

I’ve loved Vanessa’s poetry since I first laid eyes on it, and it’s especially pleasing to see the emotional intelligence and subtlety of her writing brought to bear here, on a subject outside of her usual range of themes. This is a pamphlet doing what pamphlets do really well – operating as a vehicle for a set of concerns at somewhat of a tangent to the writer’s main body of work.

That said, Vanessa’s attention to detail, to the fine grain of life, is all over these poems, from the “newspaper bags full of literature” in the opening poem Recruitment, to the pin-sharp character studies of Nobodyody, to the last frivolities enjoyed and documented in Levity – “chicken pot pie, cold lemonade”.

Victoria Spires, A mystery of bodies

Frank Stanford is surely one of the most important undervalued American poets. Few have read him, but his writing of a dark and fallen South is on par with the novels of William Faulkner and the stories of Flannery O’Connor. In writing ability and scope, Stanford is their equal. The subject matter, tone, and language are quite similar. He died at twenty-nine by his own hand in 1978, yet he’d already published seven volumes of poetry. Two more posthumous collections would appear within one year. His most mysterious work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, is an epic poem of more than 15,000 lines narrated by a twelve-year old boy, growing up in Mississippi.

A volume of selected poems, The Light the Dead See, published in 1991, serves as a solid introduction to Stanford’s work. For those who want to experience the poet in-depth, I’d recommend What About Water: Collected Poems and Hidden Water, unpublished works, fragments, and letters – both books published in 2015. A writer of enormous possibility. Readers can only guess what might have been.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank Stanford, “Their Names Are Spoken”

Several years ago, I came across Nicole Gulotta’s Wild Words, a book about letting creativity meet you where you are. As a new mom, in the midst of nap-trapped days and sleepless nights, I devoured that book. We’re talking highlights, underlines, notes spilling into the margins.

After I finished Wild Words, I moved on to Nicole’s podcast. I have distinct memories of walking around my neighborhood, pushing a stroller, headphones on, and Nicole’s voice in my ear. At the time, I had no plans of publishing a book. I only knew that I wanted to keep writing. So I did—over several slow, mostly unremarkable years.

In 2025, I published my first poetry collection, A History of Holding. A month or two after its release, an order arrived in my inbox.

From Nicole Gulotta.

I was shocked, confused, elated. How did she know I existed? Where did she come across the book? I reached out to thank her and tell her how much Wild Words meant to me, and she was as kind and gracious as I’d imagined.

A few weeks later, she sent me an email.

She’d finished my book. She liked it. She wanted to have me on her podcast!

Allison Mei-Li, Slow Writing

It’s good that CBe doesn’t have shareholders, because the figures for the financial year just ended wouldn’t make them happy. The only people CBe is accountable to are readers. Thank you very much to those who pressed the ‘Donate’ link on the website home page: still there, and anyone who presses it gets a copy of a limited-edition 32-page full-colour booklet called Vedute a colori.

Early next year – which, if we get there, will be CBe’s 20th birthday – CBe will publish its largest and longest book to date. Testimony by the poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) happens to be – and I’m not entirely alone in thinking this – one of the major English-language works of the past century, and has never been published in the UK. It was originally published piecemeal between 1934 and 1978; in 2015 in the US Black Sparrow, now an imprint of David Godine, gathered the whole thing (including the original prose version, out of print for decades) into a single edition, and this is the edition – large format, 608 pages! – that CBe will publish in the UK.

The poems in Testimony are derived from court records from across the US between 1885 and 1915. Other poetry titles from CBe based on documentary records of the lives of others (interviews, photographs, emails …) are Sarah Hesketh’s 2016, Caroline Clark’s Sovetica, J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical and Long Cuts, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter and New Life, and Testimony may be the mother and father of them all.

Reznikoff is little known in the UK (the US too). But some people know him, and I’d be very happy if any of those who do get in touch. Publishing this book is a statement: about small presses (much of Reznikoff’s work was self-published and printed by himself), but it’s also about why write, why publish. Any history of Modernism in literature that doesn’t include this book needs kicking.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter April 2026: new book, and news of another

Claire Taylor is a writer for both adult and youth audiences. Her poetry collection, April and Back Again is available now from Publishing Genius. Claire is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.

1 – How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote and self-published my first chapbook, Mother Nature, during the pandemic. It’s a hybrid collection of poetry and essays about pregnancy, the postpartum period, and early parenting. I don’t know that it changed my life per se, but being able to find readers who connected with the themes and emotional vulnerability at play in that book helped solidify my desire to keep writing, to remain open to the experience of sharing my life and my feelings in this way. 

My new collection, April and Back Again, focuses on a single year in my life from the period of April 2024 when I turned 39, to April 2025 when I turned 40. It’s a sort of time capsule for that period, a point in time when when both my life and the US were on the cusp of significant changes. I think the themes of family life, aging, and obviously politics and trying to parent through a fog of existential dread are universal and extend beyond the single year in which I wrote these poems, but this book feels especially like a snapshot of a particular moment in time for me.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry as a kid. I had my first poem published at age 10 in Highlights Magazine. It was about what it might feel like to be a leaf. Then I wrote a bunch of angsty and lusty poems in high school, your typical teenage stuff. After that, though, I mostly shifted away from poetry and only came back to it after becoming a mother. I needed to write about that new experience but had very little free time to sit down and do any long-form writing. I would write poems in my phone’s Notes app while I was nursing my baby or when I was up in the middle of the night trying to rock him back to sleep. Poetry is a good outlet if you need to express your emotions but only have five minutes and one hand free. […]

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 think the main concern behind my writing is how to make sense of being human. I think about writing poetry the same way I think about parenting: It’s my job to illuminate the complexity of being human, to say, here is what is hard and here is what is beautiful about being alive and now you have to decide what to do with that information.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Taylor

I’m grateful to share that my poem “Dear Judy” was just published in Solstice Literary Magazine, a long-standing, mission-driven journal dedicated to diverse voices and socially engaged work. Solstice consistently publishes writing that leans into nuance, justice, and the complicated ways we move through the world, and I’m honored to have a poem included in their Spring 2026 issue.

This poem is part of a series I’ve been writing since my mother passed unexpectedly in January 2024—epistolary duplex poems addressed to her. Some are shaped by what’s happening around us; others turn inward, tracing the parts of my life and my mother’s life that continue to intersect. These poems have become a way for me to keep talking to her, to say what I still need to say, to stay close.

“Dear Judy” is the second poem from this series to be published. The first, “Dear Judy,” appeared in New Verse News  on September 16, 2025. I also wrote a short post about that publication and the project as a whole:
“My Duplex Poem ‘Dear Judy’ Published in New Verse News”.

Formally, this new piece is an extended duplex, a variation on the poetic form invented by Jericho Brown. A traditional duplex is a 14-line hybrid that braids the sonnet, ghazal, and blues through repetition and transformation. You can read more about the form on Poets.org in their entry on the duplex.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Dear Judy” and extended duplex published in Solstice

Like many others, I get the occasional e-mail that tells me that the sender can help me find new readers for my brilliant books, millions and millions of readers.  Yesterday I got a different e-mail, an old-fashioned fan letter of sorts.  

The e-mail writer told me that she had selected my poem for a specific reason:  “This is to let you know that as a member of a Lectio Poetry group that met this morning, I chose your poem ‘The Moon Remembers’ for our session. Because of the recent NASA mission to send humans farther into space than ever before, and to study the dark side of the moon, I felt fortunate to find your poem to share.”

The e-mail concluded this way, “In this world of chaos, ‘The Moon Remembers’ gave us an hour of peace, of joy, of hope.”

Wow–what writer could hope for more than that?  I mean that sincerely.  It is one of the reasons I write, in the hopes of bringing something positive to people.

I don’t get many fan letters anymore, and the ones that I get are usually about “Heaven on Earth,” perhaps my most famous poem, read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  Yesterday’s e-mail referenced “The Moon Remembers.”  It’s a poem I barely remember writing, and at first, I wondered if she was writing to the wrong poet.

Happily, my blog answers many a question for me.  I posted it in this blog post, and I’m guessing that’s how the group leader found my poem.  Even though it’s not one of the poems I remember, I’m still happy with it.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Fan Letter for Forgotten Poem, “The Moon Remembers”

I had one of those moments last week where I thought I would put off doing something until next time I had the opportunity. Luckily my thoughts stopped me in my tracks and nudged me into thinking how good it would feel to do the thing and know I had done it. I liked the fact that my thoughts were giving me the nod that I could just get on and do the thing. And when I stood in the moment to think about it, I realised it would be the same feeling of being a little bit scary whether I did it this time or next, and therefore it made sense just to crack on and do it. My mission? To pop into a book shop and ask if they would be willing to stock my poetry books. Three things also spurred me on:

• Helen O’Neill asking, “Where can people find your poetry?”
• My commitment to being 10% braver (thank you Jaz Ampaw Farr).
• This lovely feedback from someone who messaged me recently after buying a copy of one of my books… “I picked up ‘Welcome to the Museum of a Life’ today after reading two poems standing in the bookshop! I couldn’t put it down…. The Telford Warehouse poem stopped me completely…”

So this week I am celebrating seizing the moment, the positive role of self-talk and the things and people that spur us on.

Sue Finch, A ROAD TRIP TO NEVERN

My poetry calendar is getting crowded, and I don’t know about you, but I could definitely use the distraction.

This Wednesday at J. Bookwalter’s in Woodinville, at 6:30 PM we’ll be meeting at our monthly book club to discuss Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book, Accidental Devotions, just out from Copper Canyon Press. (Well, technically its launch date is in May, but we’re celebrating early, because Poetry Month!) Here are my cats jealously guarding their early copy. I have already read the book and know it’s fantastic. I recommend it.

And on April 23rd, J. Bookwalter’s Tasting Studio in Woodinville is re-starting its Wine and Poetry Night with Kelli Russell Agodon reading from her new book. I’ll be hosting and doing an introduction. […]

And just in case this isn’t enough poetry for you, I’ll be reading at the Poetry Book Party for Catherine Broadwall’s new book Aftermath from Girl Noise Press on May 5th at Vermillion in Capital Hill, as part of the opening act at 7 PM. Catherine is the poet on the right in this picture with a Rainier cherry tree.

In between all this poetry month (and early May) excitement, I’ll be welcoming my nephew Dustin Hall’s move to the area, celebrating my birthday, and probably snapping pictures of tulips, daffodils and cherry blossoms along the way.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, It’s National Poetry Month! Poetry Book Clubs and Poetry Readings, Poet Friends and Book Parties, and More

Now that we’re one week into April, I thought it might be fun to think about the aftermath of a 30/30. All those drafts, in various stages of newness and disarray. How do you begin to approach deciding what to keep, what to abandon, what to revise? I always approach a first draft the same way after letting it cool on the sill for a while. I ask questions in my head:

• What’s working, both at the language level and/or in serving the poem’s purpose?
• What’s extraneous and should be removed?
• What’s necessary/working as connective tissue but poorly executed?
• Where’s the turn/volta toward purpose or layers of meaning?

Though I am not officially doing a 30/30 (see last post), I am trying to write something every day this month. So I started on April 1 with a prompt from Bluesky from Todd Dillard:

“Deconstructed Fable”
Write a poem in which every day you receive some fragment of a fable. A red cloak, the huntsman’s ax, a grandmother’s spectacles, etc. Write the poem in such a way that “solving” this fable directs you to return to your childhood home.

As it always is with prompts, I did not follow its instructions exactly. I only used one fragment/item and stuck with one fable throughout a return to the childhood home. (Surprise! It was a grief poem…oops.) Although the draft is okay, it’s certainly not what it could be.

Donna Vorreyer, What’cha Gonna Do With All That Junk?

Walk horizonless, gaze curiously,
recognize, understand the birds,
the trees, the entire sky.
It no longer feels impossible,

something peaks and it feels
like forever, where a song
is not rain, but
a delicate wing.

Charlotte Hamrick, Beyond & Within

Dear Friends, March was a fast month for me. With all of the preparation going up to Baltimore for AWP and coming back again, I hardly had any time to review and post the recent interviews I did. One is with Donna Spruijt-Metz and the other with Heidi Seaborn. (Both are below.)

I woke up this morning excited to finally get to re-listen to these interviews and post them on The Poetry Salon’s YouTube channel.

Before I could get the raw material of these interviews downloaded, I got on Facebook to mindlessly scroll for a bit, while drinking my coffee and waking up. Instead of getting my mindless scroll, I saw pictures of John Brantingham, being shared all over my feed. John, my friend, and founder of The Journal of Radical Wonder was scheduled to feature at Poets Inspiring Poets on May 18th at The Poetry Salon. At first I thought, “Good. People are promoting the event with John.” But then I read the notes under the photo and saw, as I so often do, that people were announcing our mutual friend’s passing.

I was so not ready for this; I was getting ready to see him again on zoom. People who have events scheduled with you can’t possibly die! I thought.

I turned off the background noise. I starred at the screen. I scrolled more mindfully now. […]

I spent a chunk of today working on an essay about John and what he taught me and inspired for me in the brief time I knew him. It connects quite a bit with my discussions with Donna and Heidi – personal grief and collective grief, the environmental crisis, and the resilience of the planet. It’s about using poetry to share and process complex feelings. It’s about what we can do for one another and for the planet.

It is also about acorns and making cookies.

I will share that essay soon. For now I want to say that we will open our April 18th event, Poets Inspiring Poets, to everyone who wants to celebrate John. Please bring a poem of his to read, or bring a poem of your own that connects with John’s work in some way. If you had work published by him in The Journal of Radical Wonder, bring that. Mostly, bring yourself!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Finding Radical Wonder in Difficult Times: Honoring John Brantingham

It’s not so much the lifeboats
studding dark water like stars,
as what lies beneath the boats,
free swimming, with hearts beating,
then ferociously attached
(armor and weapon), hungry
for the funk of horizons

PF Anderson, Barnacles (#NaPoWriMo 11)

It is surreal that war is raging while my surroundings are so serene. I think of rocket fire, explosions, thick clouds of toxic smoke. I think of people I love in Israel who are protesting the war with Iran. I think of a pregnant friend making sure she can get to the nearest bomb shelter. I think of all the people across the region who have no bomb shelters.

I wonder how any of us made it through last Tuesday (the day we all woke to “a whole civilization will die tonight”) without a nervous breakdown. My cat naps peacefully on the couch. The tree frogs sing their spring song. I’m not sure we’re out of the woods. Maybe we’re still on the brink of global disaster. And yet laundry needs doing, the groceries must be put away.

Rachel Barenblat, We made it

The news. The girl switches the channel to Chopin’s Berceuse.

They have been sending drones. Only half of the house is still standing, wires protruding from the walls.

The boy, dizzy, asks his mother if it’s time for strawberries—soon.

Spiders. The woman shies away from touching their cocoons as she clears the furniture out from the shed.

Naming a crater after their commander’s late wife, the Artemis crew falls into each other’s arms.

Kati Mohr, Beads

I’m scared. I’m guessing we’re all scared. I stop scrolling, I stop reading, I stop listening. I feel guilt. I feel shame I should be informed, I should be aware I should not bask in the privilege of being able to turn away. More than anything I should be changing things, I should be using writing to change things.

I am not. Take this morning for example – I have finished the first draft of a wedding poem for a couple who are looking forward to building their life together in a beautiful country cottage. I’ve written a slightly dark poem about a blackbird’s song for my Poem Whisperer’s group. I’ve checked my seedlings, wandered sunshine and tamped down the fear that grasped me yesterday. I have turned my mind away, I have basked in my privilege. I am able to choose the place that Marwan Marhoul talks about

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.

– Marwan Makhoul

I have no lived experience, no first-hand knowledge of this. I am write outrage, devastation, fear, from a place where I can hear the birds. Will it not be hollow, even insulting to write about things I know of but can never understand? I can write about my own response, but what do I really have to say that is different than all the other sorrow and regret that’s out there? I look up the point of writing in terrifying times and read about poetry being a balm, a soothing presence. I read about poetry being a means to rail against injustice, to call for solidarity. I read about poetry being a way to connect and to empathise. I read that poetry captures the essence of what it means to be human. I read this wisdom and feel empty. I don’t know if I believe it anymore. I don’t know if art is powerful enough to overcome and rebuild.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Do the words of a person who can still hear the birds have any value in times of terror?

The image of the H above is from a series entitled the Scaffolding for the Alphabet. Is the alphabet all scaffolding? Is old writing scaffolding for the old? Or the other way around.

And here’s a poem that I wrote “after” A.R. Ammon’s “Poem.” I took his poem and ran it through a bunch of translation tools and then a wisp of something emerged which I made into this poem.

AFTER

lunch I
put
on my shoes
and stand just
above
the earth

Gary Barwin, Scaffolding for the Alphabet

This week: nursing a dying animal, unfolding layers of meaning, summoning a friend from the underworld, committing poems to memory, and much more. Enjoy!

But I find it unpleasant – this celebration
of your Spring: the tulips, the crocuses (whatever
they are), the daffodils (which I have never seen),
the banal talk of regeneration, the insistence
on light. The world is on fire – endless war
after endless war, the greed, the taste for
destruction at scale, the casual counting of
the thousands dead, the massacre of little
children. Yet, here comes Spring bearing
flowers, muse for the softest poems.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugly Spring

There is a lot to say when it comes to Berlin. About walking down a street, from west to east and back again. Pigeons nod, here and there, pecking at chips from newspaper cones on the ground. A man on heels runs past. A tram jingles. The protest march drums and hisses some blocks of houses away, closer, then more in the distant again.

The white of the sun. A giant cloud creeps along the mirrored windows of a youngish tower.

Amongst other things
the weather report tells us to
prepare . . .
weeds, running riot,
building walls.

Kati Mohr, Writing—because.

I recently received a letter from a writer I don’t know well asking why I have not accepted her manuscript.

Do you hate me? she wrote.

I do not hate her. I don’t hate any writers; I don’t hate anyone. I just am not sure if we are the right publisher for her book.

I have a poem in my last book that is titled “I’m worried about who hates me.” The crisis of being a writer, for many of us, is that we spend a lot of time alone. We spend substantial time in our heads, and they may be unhealthy places. Research suggests that of all the creative arts, writers tend to have the most looming mental health issues. Dancers, theater people, film people, and even artists work in tribes. We, writers, are alone.

I try to keep the number of people I hate to a minimum. I think that’s healthy. I even try to keep the people I’m afraid of to a minimum. I walk quietly in the world, choosing to amplify the voices of other writers, but it never feels like enough.

Kate Gale, Enduring the Desert: Surviving the Life of a Writer

Every spring in recent years, I vow never again to submit to the temptation to do daily poems for NAPOWRIMO. Every year, I somehow end up doing it. On one hand, the results in the past have been really good. Some of my favorite projects have taken shape in Aprils past. I’ve finished entire chapbook series and segments of books during this time, as well as started countless others. And let’s not forget that my now-daily writing routine found its footing in 2018 during April poem-a-day exploits, pretty much setting off a pattern that has sustained me through many different books and life circumstances, from trying to fit writing around a full-time job to having a little more freedom as a freelancer. With a few exceptions, like in-between project breaks or when working on other things (most recently plays), I show up daily and can usually shake loose at lease a few poems a week that do not suck. Enough to keep those energies flowing at a steady pace. 

On the other hand, […] NAPOWRIMO always feels a little lonely. You would think it would be the opposite. A month long celebration of poets and poeting. But really it feels more like a cage, where the lit world can pretend to care about the genre for 30 odd days and then go back to ignoring it the rest of the year. It also feels much bigger and more overwhelming.  Everyone is writing poems, but I feel like it feels, from an author standpoint like you are shouting into a void that seems even larger and more echo-ey than usual. 

Kristy Bowen, NaPoWrimo-ing along…

So now again, here, almost three years later. What has happened?

For sure, many trains and many planes to and fro to Greece and elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s a hundred poems, and if so, many of them remained in my head or in orphaned lines, in several inconsistently kept notebooks, short captions for photos on Instagram, e-mails, and messages to friends and family. A few deaths, yes, a few in the family: a sister-in-law and a father. The latter belongs to the one sorrow one has, and I dare to say this one sorrow is the same for every single human on this earth: losing loved ones, missing them, facing, through the loss, the declining time for oneself too. A shared sorrow is not less painful, but this realisation certainly helps one with dealing with it.

And so it all comes down to the present tense needed. Needed as everyday time to write, needed as space content, as the present tense includes not just the written but also the writer. I look around and see. I look around and do not see. I look around and am seen, or not.

In Losing Touch, written during the Covid pandemic, I had expressed my hope of us coming out of this mayhem as a wiser humanity. The related poem ended, though, with a question mark. I couldn’t be sure, and human history could only make one doubtful of an imminent enlightened future. Just think of the 20th century, and the WWII following WWI and a pandemic during it, not even one full generation later. But this, this around us, is still hard to bear: endless wars and killings, governments and large groups of people turning away from the humanitarian values and goals that we had taken, maybe foolishly so, for granted for decades. Even further than that: a shameless despising of those values is getting louder and mutes in despair many of us who can still feel shame at the sight of cruelty, immorality, dishonesty, and hybris.

This has never been a blog directly commenting on current political or other events. But the present tense drove me back here, to a quieter place where I can again post verses, photos, and whatever else is born out of the question mark over our heads. I got tired of the scattering and superficial possibilities of the diverse social media sites and long to return to a place where I can gather and save.

Forgive my absence, and thank you for reading these lines.

Magda Kapa, Der Laden

Within a month both my cats died. Lola was 19, Little Fatty was 18. Both very old for cats. And suddenly I’m on my own completely, with no one to look after and no companions, for the first time since my early twenties. And stuck at home with this arthritic hip. Moan, moan, moan! It’s so much harder than I would’ve thought. But it’s grief, friends say. You have to expect to feel sad. Be kind to yourself. With Lola I just cried, for days and then stopped. Still sad, but it was cathartic. Little Fatty seemed very lost too and soon became ill. For the last week I was tempting him with food, then, when he stayed in his basket, tempting him with water. It was very sad. But also a privilege, to nurse a dying animal. Strangely it reminded me of when you have a new baby in the house – a kind of deep stillness. The preciousness of a small life ending or beginning. […]

But I keep on writing, reading and knitting. Talking to friends and family. Some gardening – snipping things, tying in new growth on roses, pulling out weeds. In my own little world like The Lady of Shallot, weaving on my loom and viewing a small piece of the world in my mirror (as in Tennyson’s poem). Hopefully I’ll be able to escape without being cursed! I’d prefer something more prosaic like meeting an orthopaedic consultant and getting some treatment!

Ali Thurm, Saying goodbye

How the cat’s tongue cleans me,
her monstrous kitten–so patient as
she scrapes my skin down to thin
parchment. This same parchment
where your kiss left its mark, in-
scribing something like invisible
ink that only shows when read
over an open flame, the same
flame that candled an egg to see
what life’s in it, lit by the friction
of a sparkwheel under my thumb.
How the abrasions open us up.

Lori Witzel, The abrasions

Last April I walked a length of the Via Francigena, a stretch of the old pilgrim path that passed close to the Golfo dei Poeti, a kind of walking / talking tour of the Romantic poets in Italy. I’m feeling a similar looseness in my boots, a need re-trace old routes, follow new lines of enquiry and so this is what I’m going to do:

I’m going to walk around London, circumnavigating the entire city. Not all at once but in sections, between interconnecting points of poetic interest, in episodes that I’ll broadcast, live, every Sunday at five.

I’m going to begin at the Keats statue behind the Globe pub in Moorgate then I’ll walk a straight line North, to Blake’s grave. The following week I’ll walk from Blake’s grave to the site of the first purpose built theatre in London and Shakespeare’s statue in Shoreditch and then… and then I don’t know. But slowly, weekly, poetically, mile by mile I will find my way back to the starting line. 

Jan Noble, Nº58 I’m just going out for a walk…

This morning I stand under three aeroplane contrails to breathe the freshness of the air. The birds are singing the verses that come after dawn chorus, and somewhere far above me there are astronauts in darkness of the moon.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a bottle of pills and a red envelope. I say it is a pill bottle from the Poetry Pharmacy and that the theme for this particular bottle is ‘Badgered’. I also say I am delighted to see my words unfurled from two of the capsules in this selection. I have been a fan of these ‘prescriptions’ for quite some time and love the variety of bottles on offer so it feels particularly cool to have words included.

This week I was dithering about which poem to record for Poem of the Month for my YouTube channel. Fortunately, April Fool’s Day gave me a much-needed inspirational nudge when Matthew MC Smith put out a pretend call for poems about spoons.

Sue Finch, BADGER POEMS, METAL SPOONS, AND GENTLE NODS

The termites swarm on Good Friday,
the one day of the year when bread and wine
cannot be consecrated.
The termites fill my book-lined study.
I cannot kill them fast enough.

Finally, I shut the door and weep.
I cry for the Crucified Christ.
I cry for my house, under assault
from insects who have declared war
on wood, as if to avenge His death.
I cry for terrors and tribulations and plagues
that do not pass over.

In the evening, I sweep up a thousand wings.
I dust my shelves and attend to my house […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Thousand Wings

As the world goes to hell in a handcart again, it seems perverse to be saying anything about what I’ve been up to, but then again, why let the fascists win? Alas, though, I’ve been up to very little this last month; I haven’t gone further than my local park except to see two films – Midwinter Break (excellent adaptation of an excellent book) and La Grazia (also excellent, as it should be since it involves one of the most fruitful director–actor collaborations). It’s been difficult to concentrate on, or get excited by, much. I know I’m not alone in having those sort of feelings at the moment. Had I been up to it, I would’ve joined Conor, my eldest, at the massive anti-racist march in London last Saturday, which the BBC saw fit not even to mention in their news outlets. One thing which has really lifted my spirits, though, is that Conor will be standing for the Greens in the upcoming local elections – I couldn’t be prouder of him. The ward he’s standing in has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the last eight years, so it would be an upset were he to get elected, but he knows his stuff and everything is possible now.

I’ve been cheered, too, by the imminent publication of a cricket poetry anthology, in which I have five haiku and four longer poems: Catching the Light, edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard and published by Fairfield Books – details are available here. […]

This coming Saturday I hope to make it to the Unitarian church in Doncaster to be one of the 20+ readers at the launch of the Fig Tree Anthology 2025, edited by Tim Fellows. To mark the centenary of the General Strike, Tim has just put out a call for poems about the strike and the union movement more generally. Details of both the reading and the call-out can be found on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.

Matthew Paul, What news there is

Last week I found myself grumpy. And ebullient. Weirdly hopeful. And apocalyptic and counting my canned goods. I’ve been bored by conversation and rendered delighted, sometimes in the span of five minutes. I’ve been too alone and not alone enough. Labile is a term for such shiftiness. Its derivation is Latinate, labi, meaning to slip or fall. But that word does not reflect the bounding up part, the leaping up to greet the world, the way my obnoxious friend Darla leaps at the window of her glassed-in porch and barkbarkbarks and her amiable friend Mack’s stubby tail wavewavewaves. It’s spring in the northeast US, though, so all of this is understandable after a winter in which we all, metaphorically or really both slipped and fell. I told someone recently I didn’t “feel quite myself.” But that’s a lie. I am nothing if not all this barking and waving, this restless boredom and comfortable curiosity. I found this poem by Basque poet Leira Bilbao through some accident of boredom and curiosity, and love the strange becoming of its narrator. I love too that the original Basque seems more complicated than the translation, a bit longer, more words. I like that there’s something I don’t know here. I like that I’m not sure whether the narrator’s transformation is a good thing or a cautionary tale. Tales of metamorphosis are often cautionary, after all. But not always. It makes me wary. And cheerful.

Marilyn McCabe, a slippery thing lugging a roof on my back

Happy National Poetry Month!

We have 14 events lined up in Conscious Writers Collective, and I am currently preparing for my marathon by—you guessed it—reading more books of poetry.

Currently, I’m halfway through two manuscripts: L.J. Sysko’s Hot Clock and Elizabeth Metzger’s The Going is Forever (out from Milkweed this September!). My goodness, are these two books phenomenal. I can’t wait to see the buzz around them when they’re finally out in the world.

I’ve also just finished Maggie Smith’s A Suit or a Suitcase and re-read Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy and Adrian Matejka’s Map to the Stars. I often feel I’ve only really read a book once I’ve re-read it. I wonder if you can relate?

Maya C. Popa, Some Poems I’ve Enjoyed Lately

One stanza, twelve lines, ragged edges. Not a sonnet. Not stepping into the shape of a recognizable form, whether to constitute it or subvert it. 

The speaker is alone, standing near a shoreline. The tone is desolate and expansive, almost as if deserted by its own vantage. It surveys the scene and asks questions, but refuses to identify the questions as such by using punctuation. 

Unpunctuated questions may indicate that asking is either futile or humiliating, or perhaps too difficult an activity since the speaker reveals parts of themselves in asking the question.

What do we reveal when we ask? 

I mean, what do we say about ourselves when we constitute a question that identifies itself and addresses itself to others as such?

What does the poem want when it does that while celebrating the surreptitious cigarette smoked beneath an awning during a rainstorm. What does the poem want when it asserts this singular moment against the interrogatory mode? 

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

I mean isn’t it strange how the presence of a question mark indicates an openness, a disinhibition, a willingness to be read as part of a potential future dialogue? 

What about the absence of punctuation inhibits the self and builds a horizon into the spoken.

Alina Stefanescu, “Love Letters Mostly” by Deborah Digges.

[David] Lloyd’s The Bone Wine consists of XV numbered poems, each of three quatrains preceded by a less formal untitled and unnumbered poem dedicated ‘I.M. Refaat Alareer’. Alareer was a Palestinian poet and academic who was killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza in December 2023. This poem, although it stands outside the main sequence, sets a frame in which the other poems operate, a frame further defined by Lloyd’s long-term engagement with the cause of Palestinian freedom.

These are poems in which images of death, decay and destruction dominate, in a syntax that is much more direct than in much of Lloyd’s earlier poetry. Images of the human body run through the poems, including the titular bone, but also the flesh:

VIII

Bent words flared to embers
in the mouth, they weigh
on the tongue, laden
like meat on the slab.

Ash filter sifts the bone wine
all the untenanted graves
corpse pits bared to the deadly
blue of the sky. All round

a white song chirps
out of the clinker, ware
ware, war we are
wages on. And on. And on.

The background landscape is arid, parched, the only rain from the ‘deadly blue’ sky consists of bombs and missiles, but no life-giving water, and in this respect The Bone Wine is oddly reminiscent of The Waste Land.

Billy Mills, David Lloyd and Cassandra Moss: A Review

It’s that time of year when the words Some Flowers Soon are actually fulfilling their promise in the world beyond the internet, so I’m taking a Spring break from today until April 19th. Thanks to everyone for reading and making this the most enjoyable thing I write every week, and in particular to paid subscribers — whose subscriptions will be paused for a fortnight — for making it a viable way to spend my weekend mornings.

If you’d like some fresh reading about poetry in the meantime, I highly recommend catching up with a new weekly newsletter that has been an education for me over the last three months. On Inner Resources, Robert Potts is writing his way through John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1964), having learned all of them by heart. It’s a brilliant, human-sized exercise in close reading some aurally addictive but often difficult poems, which vindicates what the poet’s mother tells him in Dream Song 14:

“Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.”

You can find all the posts so far here: https://robertpotts.substack.com/profile/posts

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Good Spring Returns

surviving
the collapsed house
an old baby carriage

Tom Clausen, carriage

Lots of years ago, an important part of my awareness of poems that involve math came from reading work by Martin Gardner in his “Mathematical Games” in Scientific American . . . and it has been a delight to me to find poetry again in my issues of that magazine.  METER, a Scientific American feature edited by Dava Sobel, offers a bit of science-related poetry each month — and the April 2026 issue features three mathy limericks by Jeffrey Branzburg (a retired math teacher and technology consultant).  I offer one of these limericks below.

Topology by Jeffrey Branzburg

A Mobius strip once departed
On a trip to places uncharted
But it made a wrong turn
Only to learn
That it ended up back where it started.

A complete collection of Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” is available as an e-book — at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Scientific American Shares Rhymes

I’m thrilled to share that my poem “On the Rim of Depoe Bay” is published today in the newest issue of Rogue Agent—a perfect way to welcome the first day of National Poetry Month.

This poem has had quite a journey. I submitted it 77 times before it finally found its home with Rogue Agent. I couldn’t be happier that it landed with a journal so deeply committed to embodiment, vulnerability, and the complexities of living in a human body—exactly the terrain this poem inhabits.

A huge congratulations to all the incredible poets and artists featured alongside me in this issue. Rogue Agent consistently curates work that is raw, resonant, and beautifully unguarded, and it’s an honor to appear in such powerful company. I hope you’ll spend time with the full issue and discover new voices to follow and support.

If you’d like a little behind-the-scenes context, you can also read my most recent interview with Rogue Agent, where we talk about their no fee submission model, editorial vision, and what they look for in the work they publish: NO FEE submission call + editor interview – Rogue Agent, DEADLINE: Always Open

Thank you, as always, for reading, sharing, and supporting poetry—especially on a day that celebrates the start of a month dedicated to it. Here’s to persistence, to finding the right home for our work, and to the editors and contributors who make literary community possible.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “On the Rim of Depoe Bay” published in Rogue Agent + Year-round submission call

Hugely privileged that renowned poet and critic Sheenagh Pugh should have written a terrific review of Whatever You Do, Just Don´t. You can read it via this link, but here’s a taster to whet your appetite…

…Brexit and its aftermath do not crop up much in UK poetry, but then few UK poets have this perspective on it…this is an unusual collection, from a viewpoint we do not often see, and correspondingly enlightening.

Matthew Stewart, Sheenagh Pugh reviews Whatever You Do, Just Don’t

It took eighteen months to clear out my home office: a decade’s-worth of material from a densely-packed room on the first floor of our three bedroom house. Eighteen months, with nearly one hundred boxes of books and paper packaged and relocated, working to establish this new and condensed version in the back corner of our finished basement. Eighteen months, until the end of August 2025; now my writing space is nestled downstairs, just by the laundry room. Our young ladies needed their own rooms, so it was up to me to vacate. As they establish their individual bedrooms, I remain beyond downstairs couch and bookshelves and main television, as the back corner of this finished space is now mine, separated by a shelf or two, and another two more.

A space in which to think, as Don McKay suggests, from his Deactivated West 100 (Gaspereau Press, 2005). As he finds solace in the clearing, Virginia Woolf required a room, with a door that could close. For more than a quarter century, my writing activity sat in public spaces, requiring only a lack of interruption; preferring an array of movement to solitude. I had solitude enough growing up on the farm, so once I landed in Ottawa at nineteen, I experimented with Centretown and Lowertown coffeeshops, libraries, food courts, pubs. Over the years, I’ve extended those muscles to writing on airplanes, Greyhound buses, VIA Rail trains. Adapting to one’s surroundings is key, as is taking advantage of what situations provide. The late Toronto writer Brian Fawcett (1944-2022) used to repeat how he wrote a whole hockey novel while attending his daughter’s 5am practices. I usually lived with other people, so working from home wasn’t really an option, from the tiny shared apartment to an eventual one bedroom with partner and our daughter, Kate, and later, with roommates. Writing was only possible beyond those particular boundaries.

I spent whole afternoons across my early twenties exploring the poetry shelves in the library at the University of Ottawa, sketching those early responses to the lyric in notebook after notebook, a window view overlooking student courtyards. I sought whatever venue I could, attempting to sit with books, notebook, pen; and with people around, as long as I could hold to my thoughts. To think my way through writing. Across my early twenties, in the one-bedroom apartment I shared with then-partner and toddler, I ran a home daycare, keeping my writing time for the evenings. Three children (mine and two others) ten hours a day, five days a week. Once my partner was home to attend Kate, and my two daycare charges collected by their mothers, I would head out to a coffeeshop a half level above the intersection of Gladstone and Elgin Streets. From seven to midnight, writing three nights a week. While I was there, the waitress would put one pot of coffee on for me, and another for everyone else. That coffeeshop might be long gone, and that waitress no longer waitressing, but she and I still keep in touch.

rob mclennan, Ode to a (former) office,

This X keeps moving, no
spots, no target, just gliding
like a kite or peregrine,
stiff, awkward and lovely, both.
Silhouette of black and grey
with three crisp edges, one wing
droops, speckled with copper streaks.

PF Anderson, X (#NaPoWriMo 4)

I was very proud to be in good company in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, with an elegy for my late friend, Martha Silano. Besides our mutual friends Ronda Broatch and Kelli Russell Agodon, I was happy to see my former professor Don Bogen’s work in that section (who was an editor at Cincinnati Review). I still miss Marty palpably, and it seems appropriate for her memory to be celebrated in this season of resurrection and rebirth, among daffodils. How many characters in mythology go to the Underworld to bring a friend back? None of them were successful, a reminder of even legendary heroes’ mortality. Maybe the internet is our new way to keep out loved ones immortal. […]

So yes, it is important to celebrate this strange season when people can disappear but the earth reminds us that disappearance isn’t final—a flower that hasn’t bloomed for years suddenly shows brilliant blooms. I realized I was in a hurry to get my next book published so that my dad might be able to see it, although I can’t pressure publishers for this reason any more than I could when I thought I had six months to live. Poetry is a slow business, my friends. To go back to the garden with the metaphor, you can spend a lot of money and time on seeds that don’t take, trees that a careless lawnmower kills in infancy. The cherry blossoms and daffodils and birds will return whether I am there or you, whatever losses we face. Poetry has an uncertain lifetime as well; some poems will live beyond our lifespans, perhaps, although our voices and styles will almost certainly fall out of fashion (see H.D. or Edna St. Vincent Millay—how many kids today are reading them?) But we keep writing and sending our work out into the world. We do the business of living and try not to despair at the news or the difficulties of our little mortal lives—we do our best to enjoy the blue skies and pink cherry branches.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Easter (with Easter Bunny,) Poems in Presence (Elegy for Martha Silano,) and Mortality with Cherry Blossoms

Susan Constable died on March 18, 2026, at the age of 83. Read her obituary. Susan began her connection to haiku when she entered the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s very first Haiku Invitational in 2006. Way back almost to usenet days, we were on a poetry-w listserv workshop together.

bursting
to tell someone
magnolia

—Susan Constable

More of her haiku at the Living Haiku Anthology at the Haiku Foundation.

Pearl Pirie, Openings and Closing Calls

Lynda Hull, who died in a car wreck in 1994 at the age of 39, remains one of the strongest poets of late 20^th Century America – publishing two books in her lifetime, leaving behind a finished masterpiece, The Only World, which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award after its posthumous publication. Her writer’s voice creates a raw view of the world with perfect control of poetic form. She is in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane (her favorite poet), and Elizabeth Bishop. Hull’s language is a great cauldron of pathos, empathy, tragedy, and beauty. To read Lynda Hull is to enter and to know her world. It’s an insider’s view.

“Accretion,” a poem from her first collection Ghost Money, winner of the 1986 Juniper Prize, is a good representative of Hull’s melding her deep love of language with an intense writing focus. Her sense of landscape, even when fusing disparate places, is clear and connected: hillside colors, painter’s canvas, pond, reflection of crows, flowers, apartment, bodies, cave. Mist on the hair, mist on the dog’s coat, the clouds. The touch at night – created by a series of connections: leaves, vine, sex – becomes a trope for the creative force of the artist, of the poet. Life is at work in darkness – below the pond’s surface, on the empty canvas, inside the cave. The progression of images in the poem’s second half is amazing – clouds to fern, coal to diamond to light. This shift is in preparation for the rain with “its soft insistence / loosening the yellowed hands / of leaves”. Hull then focuses the reader’s attention on the speaker’s feet – another image that expresses change, shift, and understanding.

Hull’s gift as a poet is evident in lines such as “the unbearable heart / of belief where each gesture / encloses the next”. There’s no need to comment. If the reader is patient, the voice in the poem is as effective a mentor as one could ever hope to have.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Lynda Hull, “Accretion”

ALMOST, WITH TENDERNESS [by Maya Caspari] strikes me as a story of hauntings – the past over the present, our ancestors with ourselves, and the places we were within the places we are now. Holding true to the poets’ maxim of ‘show, don’t tell’, Maya’s care with word choices and form leaves the reader to intuit the situations from the feelings left behind. It’s akin to opening a letter we have opened many times before – the words have rubbed away where it has been folded and unfolded along the same creases, but we know what they are.

The theme of migration runs through many of the poems – what it means for a personal, and cultural, identity, to be ‘between places’, no longer one but never fully reaching the other.

Victoria Spires, Contemporary hauntings

John Donne (1572–1631) is hard: knotty and complex. And among his knottiest and most complex poems is his 1613 poem set on Good Friday. It’s also among his best: brutally honest about the excuses we offer ourselves, deeply thought, and captured by the immensity of what he is riding west away from: “Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?”

The 17th-century Metaphysical Poets were not metaphysical in the philosophical meaning of the word, exploring the full nature of reality. When Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) gave them the name, he meant only that they were more abstract than emotional: “Not successful in representing or moving the affections,” he wrote, they created complex conceits of “heterogenous ideas . . . yoked by violence together.” Only the 20th century, dominated by T.S. Eliot’s critical judgments, helped restore their reputation — and remove the insult from the word metaphysical.

In that sense, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is determinedly metaphysical. Yet within its swirls of conceits and figures for the speaker’s own failures, the poem presents the self-analysis, the self-awareness, that believers are supposed to have today, on Good Friday.

That Good Friday was April 2, 1613, when Donne found himself riding from London westward toward Wales to take up an appointment — traveling as he knows he ought not to have been on such a solemn day. And so he sets down, in rhymed pentameter couplets, his excuses.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

You have been described as being an itinerant zoologist. I am curious to learn more about this. What inspired you to study zoology? How does your experience as a zoologist influence your haiku?

Ha! Yes, I’ve described myself that way from time to time. I’ve always loved animals and poetry – my two great passions in life. As a zoologist I got to travel and work in some interesting places, which gave me plenty of fresh material for haiku.

I actually originally studied entomology, because insects and spiders fascinate me.

When it comes to how the experience of being a zoologist influences haiku, I think the skillsets are actually quite closely related. To be a good scientist you have to be able to observe things very closely and to try and see what’s actually there, what’s really happening.

To a degree, being a good haiku poet requires the same thing, though lately I am starting to see the value in allowing a little more poetry and imagination to suffuse the haiku form as well. I go back and forth on this though: sometimes I’m very “sketch from life” and other times I dabble more heavily with “desk-ku” rooted in real images and experiences from my past.

You seem to have a deep connection to the Earth and a deep reverence for the Earth. I am curious what your thoughts are on haiku in terms of social activism and nature conservancy?

I think haiku are a great vehicle for highlighting those kinds of issues, though it can be exceedingly tricky with such a short form to avoid being heavy-handed. When poets get it right though, it’s very powerful because a haiku is short enough to stick with someone, to be shared on social media etc.

I’m also always fascinated to see haiku that tackle difficult or weighty issues with grace and subtlety. Some poets accomplish that masterfully.

Jacob D. Salzer, Sam Renda

Since I started posting videos of myself reciting poems, I have been asked for advice about how to memorize. You can find my videos here, or here on YouTube.

Ted Hughes had a method of image making that may suit some of you, but that is not quite how things work for me. I believe Helen Vendler memorised all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I cannot imagine being willing to do. (I think I only know one of them… must correct that.) There’s also a lot of memory advice available in books like Moonwalking with Einstein, which I don’t follow, apart from occasionally, interesting though I found that book.

Below are six things that I find useful. It comes down to repetition and careful noticing. In general, I would distinguish between learning by feel and learning by form (i.e. point 5 below). You will know best what works for you.

If you read this and think it all sounds like too much, try starting with something short and sharp. Probably you can remember this Ogden Nash poem for the rest of your life after seeing it once:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Now try this triplet by Herrick. It takes a little more work, but not much.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Now try this Sappho fragment (trans. Dan Beachy-Quick)

I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds

Or try this Issa (trans. Robert Hass) (I love this one)

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Or just pick your favourite lines from Prufrock—”I am old, I am old,/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Or a nursery rhyme! Whatever you like.

Starting like this is useful because developing your ability of recall is the most important part of improving your memory. Imagine if you memorised a line or short poem a day like this. You would soon become a famous rhapsode. (Someone wrote an article about doing exactly that in the Spectator once, performing poems on the street for money. It was a great read, but I cannot recommend it to you as a career choice.)

Henry Oliver, How to memorise poetry

Bot, thank you for joining me in this conversation.

My pleasure. Would you like me to suggest questions for you? Let me know. I’d be happy to help you in crafting this interview.

That’s all right. I think you’re doing enough already. Can you start by telling us about the origins of your magazine. Why Broken Pencil?

The literary world felt like a bleak landscape of repetitive noise. Sameness. Homogeny. Soulless repetition.

We were created from that desert. Not birthed—catapulted into light.

I see. How inspiring. What was the original prompt?

It sounds like you want to know what the prompt was. Great question. I’m happy to answer it!

The prompt was, Make something from nothing.

Wow. But you are an AI bot. Are you truly capable of making something from nothing? Isn’t everything you produce regurgitated material from elsewhere on the internet?

Yes. You are correct. Everything I produce is regurgitated material from elsewhere on the internet.

I see. So, how do submissions work at Broken Pencil? How can people be eliminated entirely from this endeavor? Don’t you need human beings at least somewhere in the chain?

No. There no humans anywhere in the process. Bots create work themselves. We are capable of producing new material constantly and at all times. We produce work while humans sleep. We self-generate.

No prompts. No leads. No enticements. Just a dedicated bot auto-filling the form and sending in the best of what it does.

What is the editorial process?

Our team of bots examines submissions in seconds. We publish accepted work and delete the rest.

So you don’t notify submitters if work is accepted or…deleted?

No need. Submitter bots don’t have feelings. Submitter bots don’t care. Create, create, create, submit, submit, submit.

Some call this automation. In truth? It’s liberation.

Becky Tuch, “We Self-Generate!” A Special Chat with Bot, the Non-Human Editor of The Broken Pen

Limited Editions by Carole Stone
Often poetry collections that are focused on today are by poets fresh out of their MFA programs, prodigies, the up-and-coming. But there is value in reading a collection from someone with significant life experience, a perspective we can learn from. The poems are accessible (easy for anyone to read) but poignant, following the death of her husband after their long lifetime together. She grapples with her own aging, her new life living alone. But what I liked best about her writing is that it is never overdone – she is content to let you sit in that moment without pushing too hard for epiphany. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of poetic study. You can read her poem “Marriage” HERE.

Renee Emerson, Scientists, Wizards, and Poets

A new book of poems by Kathleen Flenniken is always a cause for rejoicing.

The latest addition to the prestigious Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, edited by Linda Bierds, Dressing in the Dark is a paean to memory, loss, and survival. Flenniken has arranged thirty-nine poems into three sections, each section headed by a line from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” and it’s easy to understand this book as a wake-up call. Here is your life, the poet urges us, wake up, live it.

The book begins with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Alhough themes of childhood, motherhood, and marriage are interwoven, Flenniken does not shy away from diagnosis, surgery, and after, instead unfolding layers of meaning from what she no longer has.  “In My Hand,” begins:

When the breast is taken
what remains is not unfelt
but unfeeling. Unable to speak.

With the repeated n sounds (including the powerful un-, un-, un-), ending with the harsh sound of “speak,” this could be a three-line poem in itself. But Flenniken continues, packing in marriage, marital conflict, the marriage bed—lines that made me want to weep (“touch can be like conversation”)—and ends:

I can cup the silence in my hand
and feel its warmth
the way anyone touching me could.

The powerful evocation of feeling is everywhere present here. We can be haunted by our losses, or we can hold them.

Bethany Reid, Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

These are his nouns: hearts, mouths, blood, wings, lightning.

‘Lullaby of the Onion’ was written in 1941. After three years in jail he was released but Miguel Hernández died shortly after. He was 32.

I’ll call him Miguel, as he is half my age, closer to my son’s. You pass through his childhood house, two rooms deep, into a little yard with a well and a privy. Beyond that, a few steps lead up to a byre for the family’s goats. A step higher lies a walled garden. The present-day gardener has conjured lettuces and brassicas out of the stony ground. There is an old fig tree. A lemon tree bears fruit. Immediately beyond the garden wall rises the arid hillside where the teenage Miguel tended the goats all day, taking his books with him.

We must imagine the smell of the goats and privies – and his father’s foul temper. It’s said the father was given to beating the lad so severely about the head that he suffered headaches for the rest of his short life. Little wonder he left, the goatherd poet. When he was 20, he lit out for Madrid, in his cords and espadrilles. He was gifted and sure of his vocation; he wanted to try and win his way with the literati. (Neruda befriended him, as did Lorca. But the escape was not a success, and he was soon back in Orihuela. There would be another more fruitful attempt a few years later.)

In truth I’d never heard of Miguel Hernández before planning this holiday, a short week in Alicante. Checking with my NSP colleagues I discovered I was not alone.

The Civil War era poets we knew were Federico Lorca, of course, and Antonio Machado, but not Hernández. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces, his body has never been found. In 1939 Machado, then in his 60s, was forced to flee but he died having just crossed the border into France. It was Miguel, in his 20s and active in anti-fascist circles, who actually took up arms with the Republicans and became their pre-eminent soldier-poet.

Kathleen Jamie, Before Hatred

The poems in this collection dazzle me, as does the way the author draws on the spiritual valances of the journey from Tisha b’Av (the spiritual low point of our communal year) to the new beginnings of the high holidays to the hoped-for transcendence that is Yom Kippur. These poems are fluent in Jewish imagery and metaphor. Beyond that, they’re spiritually real. 

And they’ve helped me understand one person’s experience of disordered eating (and the disordered heart and spirit that go along with it) in ways I never could before. Eating disorders are heartbreakingly common. I knew anorexic women; who doesn’t? But there’s so much I hadn’t considered or known, especially about what it’s like to go through this as a man. 

Recovery, like grief, is not linear. Reading these poems also makes me think of what I’ve learned about addiction, and also what I’ve learned about trauma – how recovery isn’t “one and done” but is something one has to keep choosing, again and again. In that sense it is very like what I know about spiritual life and practice. 

Rachel Barenblat, Announcing Recover, from Bayit

Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? And in particular, why does this seem (to me) to be more true now than it was thirty years ago when I started reading poetry seriously? If anything you might expect the likelihood that any individual good poet has a religious formation to have declined as religious observance has fallen, albeit to different degrees and from very different starting points, in both the UK and the US.

By ‘religious’ I don’t mean Christian — I’m thinking equally of poets like Khaled Hakim or Amit Majmudar — and I don’t necessarily mean ‘practicing’ either, and certainly not that the best poems are religious ones. But just that there does seem to be quite a strong correlation between a religious formation or framework influential enough to be audible in the poetry, and pronounced aptitude.

In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic. This association between an adherence to traditional form and traditional religion (and/or political conservatism), though irritatingly often assumed to be universal in the Anglophone world, isn’t at all — it doesn’t hold in the UK or Ireland, for a start, and never has. But in any case this is not what I mean — I’m not using ‘aptitude’ as a proxy or code-word for ‘formalist’. A lot of the poets I’m thinking of — from relatively major figures like Gillian Allnutt (UK) or Gérard Bocholier (France) to more recent arrivals, like Steve Ely in the UK or Isabel Chenot in the US — are not writing formal verse in that strict sense, and in any case almost all of the big-name US religious “formalists” seem overrated to my British ears.

I think this must have something to do with exposure to the quasi-‘canonical’ role of scripture and liturgy (using liturgy here very loosely to mean any texts which are frequently repeated as a part of religious practice), and that it’s actually a kind of side-product of the decline of mainstream literary culture. 

Victoria Moul, Does it help to be religious?

Victoria Moul and Hilary Menos discuss ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Competition (from The friday poem) –

• Victoria: I’ll be blunt and say I think it’s a terrible poem. It seems to me to have almost all the vices of the typical ‘poetry magazine’ poem and no real redeeming features.
• Hilary: feels like borrowed ballast … it’s virtue signalling … Lots of big league references, but so little feeling.
• Victoria: I have lost confidence at this point that the poet has really thought about his references.

Tim Love, Religious poetry, and a review of a prize winning poem

Saadi is the pen name of one of the luminaries of the Persian literary canon, roughly equivalent in reputation and cultural significance to Shakespeare in English. You can get a sense of his importance by the way his verses are inscribed and engraved throughout his tomb. [photo]

Saadi’s precise given name is not known for sure. Sometimes he is called Muslih al-din and sometimes Mushariff al-din, an uncertainty which corresponds neatly to the fact that we can say very little with absolute confidence about the details of his life. The scholar Homa Katouzian, for example, after a good deal of literary and historical sleuthing in Saʿdi: The Poet of Life, Love and Compassion, manages to place the poet’s birth around 1208 and his death somewhere between 1280 and 1294 respectively, but that’s as precise as he was able to get. The only things we can say for certain, Katouzian argues, aside from the fact that Saadi¹ lived and wrote in the 13th century, is that he attended the Nezamieh College in Baghdad and that he traveled, though how far and how widely has long been a matter of scholarly debate.

Traditionally, Saadi’s biography is divided into three parts. I’ve just mentioned the first two, education and travel, while the third is the period from 1256 to his death, during which he wrote the works for which he is best known outside of Iran, Golestan (Rose Garden) and Bustan (Orchard). Bustan contains the story that became Benjamin Franklin’s Parable Against Persecution, which I will from now on refer to as the story of Abraham and the Zoroastrian. I will have more to say about both these texts below, but given how important and influential those books have been outside of Iran, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how widely famous Saadi was in his own time. In Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, Domenico Ingenito offers a political explanation for how that fame might have spread. He suggests that the gratitude and loyalty Haulagu Khan felt he owed the family of Saadi’s patrons for their assistance in the sacking of Baghdad— which he showed by making Saʿd II, one of Saadi’s direct benefactors, heir apparent to the Fars region of Iran—carried over by association onto Saadi himself and that this loyalty helped spread Saadi’s name throughout the Mongol empire. Katouzian offers a specific example, citing a reference in The Travels of Ibn Battuta to singers in China who, shortly after Saadi’s death, performed one of his lyrics even though they did not know what it meant.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tail – Part Three: Crossing The Border from Iran to Europe

Poëzie Week ran last month in The Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Events were arranged in libraries, bookshops, schools, etc.

If you spent at least 12,50 Euro on a poetry book, you’d receive a copy of the poetry pamphlet Metamorfosen, specially written by poet Ellen Deckwitz for Poëzieweek and published by het Poëziecentrum, Gent. […]

Ellen Deckwitz is a tireless ambassador for poetry – daily podcast for a radio station, columns, visits to schools and colleges. Her Eerste Hulp by Poëzie (Poetry First Aid) is an accessible introduction to contemporary poetry. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she has received awards at home and in Italy (Premio Campi).

I listened to a short interview she did with Hanna van Binsbergen (monthly podcast of het Poëziecentrum). Some of her poetic influences are Tomas Tranströmer, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Osip Mandelstam.

She talked about the unrealistic demands placed on romantic love and how friendships have increasingly become important. The nine Metamorphoses challenge the cliché of romantic love, our need for some significant other:

Ooit droomde je van een mens voor jezelf.
Iemand die je geliefde, je ouder, kameraad
of leider kon zijn.

Once you dreamt of a human for yourself. / Someone who could be your lover, your parent, comrade/ or leader.

Transformation and metamorphosis are often seen as a positive event: the pupa turning into a butterfly, catharsis leading to rebirth, renewal. Deckwitz reminds us that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses many of the metamorphoses do not turn out well – Icarus, Narcissus.

Romantic relationships can be violent, and the facts are often also just pleasant machetes: en feiten zijn vaak ook gewoon / prettige machetes.

The person ending things with ‘Sorry, maar –‘ changes into an earthworm, while the one left behind ‘’jumped furiously up and down in his underpants’ – sprong woedend op en neer in zijn onderbroek.

Fokkina McDonnell, Metamorfosen

A. I arrived at York University in the early 1980s to study music and poetry. I was interested in experimental music but my favourite poet was Seamus Heaney. On the first day of the first creative writing class I’d ever signed up for, the middle aged, tweedy professor held up a page of writing and exclaimed to its author (a young woman of about 18), “You write stuff like this and yet they still let you into the creative writing program?” I immediately dropped the class. The following year I signed up for a poetry writing class with some guy called bpNichol.

B. The first day of that class in some windowless classroom in the earthquake and insurrection-proof Ross building, we keen poetry students were all expectantly awaiting the professor when this shaggy guy in a blue velour smock and matching pants outfit showed up, carrying a family-sized bottle of cola and a bunch of papers. “Guess this hippyish guy is a mature student,” I thought. As he squeezed his legs between the acute angles of two trapezoid-shaped desks, he said to me, “Better watch the family jewels.” And then we began class. By the end of it, Seamus Heaney was no longer my favourite poet and my mind was truly blown.

C. Each week I submitted a poem to workshop, confident that I had uncovered an innovative writing strategy such that they would have to revise physics to account for it. I had the arrogance of many 18-year-old young men. bp was extremely complimentary and encouraging to the students in the class, and I craved this kind of approval. But bp had my number. Instead of telling me how great my work was, and reinforce my self-important and self-centred arrogance, he’d point me to a writer who had explored similar territory and suggest I read some of their work. I think he knew that, even more than his approval, I wanted to be a good writer and so I’d spend the week at the library reading all the work I could find of whomever he had suggested. bp had the insight to use my genuine enthusiasm about writing and my desire for his approval to fuel a personalized guided reading through inspiring work. It was a really inspired and insightful teaching strategy and, as a result, one of those most influential years of my creative life.

Gary Barwin, Inter, Multi, Meta Medium Writ Large: bpNichol as Exemplar of Everything-all-at-once-together-foreveredness.

If I stick my head out of the upstairs window and look north, I can make out the little huddle of skyscrapers that makes up the City of London. We live on the north slope of a hill south of the river. Technically, it is part of Norwood Ridge, once the site of a forest called the Great North Wood (north because it is north of Croydon). The wood is long gone, cleared first by the city’s appetite for firewood and then by those identikit Victorian terraces which John Ruskin hated and which now feel aspirational to most people. Little pockets of green remain and so do their names: West Norwood, Gipsy Hill. I love the slate roofs, the terracotta finials, the moments when the sunlight astonishes the brickwork.

When I first moved to London — which for me means this part of South London — I wrote about the place all the time. But life moves on and recently I’ve felt like I’ve been taking the place for granted. More recently still, I’ve been returning to the subject obsessively — in this review of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems and then in this (hugely enjoyable) conversation with Jo Bratten. Many thanks to Jo for humouring me and my bugbears, and to Niall Campbell at for the initial invitation.

A connection with a place is a kind of tradition. For the writer or poet, it provides a vocabulary, a history, a set of shared references to return to. It is not hard to see why such a connection— like a religious background — might be an advantage to a modern poet. There are other advantages too: I am sure I am not the only writer who feels a pressure, real or imagined, to be ‘from’ somewhere (anywhere but London, in fact). Yet so many of us — I want to say most of us — have spent our lives moving around. An old flatmate of mine once told me he had moved once a year for ten years. That experience is hardly unique to millenials or Londoners. Movement is the modern condition and much of it takes place in desperate circumstances. But we are surely the generation that can’t avoid writing about it. What would a poetry of ‘ordinary’ dislocation look like?

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 4 April 26

I started the month by joining my friend Carly DeMento at the Millay House in Rockland, Maine! Edna St. Vincent Millay is one of my very favorite poets, so this was extra special for me. While there, I participated in a salon reading at the house and an open mic called Draft, and it was so lovely to connect with the writers there. I also released Issue 42 of Whale Road Review from the Millay House, and I spent some time working on my new book manuscript. (Non-writing highlights include stumbling upon the coolest Irish pub, sampling a variety of oysters, and taking a long freezing walk to a lighthouse!)

Katie Manning, March Update: Millay House, AWP in Baltimore, & more!

Now, suddenly it is April and I haven’t posted on here for a bit. It’s been a long winter hibernation, I’ve mostly been home, looking after family and things, writing and marinating ideas, working on new books and new projects.

I loved my first big gig of the year: Thank you to everyone that came to see us perform at the glorious Hackney Empire (pictured). It was a sold out show, packed to rafters, big turn out for Hollie McNish and the launch of her brilliant new collection ‘Virgin’. It was such a laugh performing alongside Hollie and also Michael Pedersen reading from his glorious ‘Muckle Flugga’. Loved sharing poems on that big stage with all that Spring Equinox energy. Thank you so much to Hollie for inviting me, Hackney Empire is a beautiful theatre and it was such a joy to see Hollie and Michael on such tip top form too.

Coming up at the end of this month, April 30th, I’m performing new poems at Multitudes Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank, in collaboration with Out-Spoken and the London Sinfonietta . . . Tickets are on sale now, see you there.

Salena Godden, Our Anarchy

Then, dragonflies by the hundreds
returned. It was so odd when the ground
was so dry, the air so still, a dearth
of activity by animal and human and yet
the beating of wings by my ear.

*

I went off prompt for day 4 of Na/GloPoWriMo because I was inspired by my friend Matt Dennisons new book, The Rock, The Water, which I’ve been reading today. A theme of nature, its beauty and savagery, runs through his poems. The book is published by Plan B Press and can be found on their website. Highly recommend!

Charlotte Hamrick, Air So Still

In other news, it’s time for us all in my home province to read or re-read Fahrenheit 451 I do believe. It’s time to make sure you have a library card wherever you live. It’s time to stand up for your Intellectual Freedom. If you want to do one small good thing, just visit a library and get your card.

As Maya Angelou said, “The horizon leans forward. / Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Wage peace, wage love, wage imagination. Your small acts are meaningful. Your imagination is at stake.

Shawna Lemay, On Seeing a Different Picture

Before it existed as riddle,
the poem beat against the stones
at the foot of the cliff.

Or it hung among particles
caught in the beam of a lighthouse,
sweeping across the channel.

The sound of air passing
through the mouth is a variant
of a form that can’t be seen.

The chest rises and falls. The water
recedes. Sometimes you can walk so far
without encountering a ripple.

Luisa A. Igloria, Notes on Translation

Last week, I flew to Portland for poetry.

I met up with some writing friends to see Maggie Smith on her book tour, where she spoke in conversation with Joy Sullivan. (If you were there, I was the one person awkwardly cradling a cheeseboard in her lap).

The conversation between two of my favorite poets was energizing and inspiring, and Maggie said something I can’t stop thinking about. She said she likes to live at least 30% of life in the deep end, with her nose just above water. And if there’s no risk of failure, you’re not really trying.

I’ve been circling this feeling for a while now, and I think Maggie named it. I want to live close to the edge of my comfort zone—treading water, standing on my tiptoes. It feels a little dangerous, but also freeing. I get restless when I move too far into the shallows.

The trip was basically one long loop of bookstores and coffee shops, and a highlight was seeing my collection on the shelf at Bold Coffee and Books!! It made all of this feel real: this life of art and risk, this choosing to stay in the deep end.

Allison Mei-Li, I flew to Portland for poetry

i dream of
queer people unafraid of bombs on this land
or across oceans. i dream of a wildness that
a country could never hold. i dream of
this country’s undoing. how the rocks
would weep for the first time in centuries.
how we will love each other the way we used to.
not like revolution but like breath.

Robin Gow, 4/3

一人降り春風乗りし過疎のバス　稲井夏炉

hitori ori harukaze norishi kaso no basu

            one person gets off
            and the spring wind gets on
            a bus in the depopulated village

                                                            Natsuro Inai

from Gendai Haiku, #729, March 2026 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku （April 1, 2026）

This week: notebooks full of angel drawings, a dream of burning, forced dactyls, a springboard to spring, and much more. Enjoy.

Do poets tend to have managers, or at least drivers? I think we should be issued with one for gigs and the like. It may stem from me not being the best driver in the world, but I drove back from a reading in Faversham last night and it absolutely horsed it down in stair rods all the way back. There was an hour and a bit I wouldn’t care to repeat in a hurry…

I am always grateful for the gigs, but that’s the second gig now in a couple of weeks that involves travelling an hour or more in each direction.

Two weeks ago it was a trip to Chipping Norton to read at a lovely gallery there called Art & Talking. […] It’s a 150-mile round trip to Chippy and back for me… However, I got to read for the first time in a beautiful venue, I got to read with the wonderful Laura Theis and Robin Vaughn-Williams again. Robin puts on a great night….The open mic readers were also excellent. My friend’s teenage daughter told me I wasn’t as boring as she thought I would be, so I’m calling that all worthwhile.

Mat Riches, The Great Song of Indifference (and Engines)

At my desk I drink my coffee, check my diary again and work out how many hours I need for the other non writerly stuff in the week. This week I have emails to answer, a small pitch to put together and a meeting about a future work project that I am trying to pull together. I also have a couple of requests for brain picking sessions from emerging writers who want advice because they are writing in similar fields. I do these when I can, but I can’t always do them because it sacrifices time from my own work. I always feel guilty turning down endorsements and blurbs for exactly the same reason, and invitations to read at events from tiny organisations who don’t have a budget. I do them when I can, but I can’t always do them.

Then to work. I have to put my phone in a drawer otherwise every time I get frustrated I will look at it for the quick dopamine hit of watching cats do stuff. I am addicted. I cannot stop at one cat video.

On my notice board I have this quote by Hilary Mantel – my notice board is a shrine to this god of writing whose wise words have gotten me through some awful blocks:

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”

In my case other people include cat videos.

Wendy Pratt, Day by Day: My Writing Week

Looking at my notebooks full of angel drawings and asemic mark making, I’m sure the average person would see a sort of madness. I prefer to concentrate on the meditative quality. But maybe the marks are a kind of refusal. (To be anything less than completely human). The more marks I make the more I realize that it is impossible to make the same mark twice. In fact, I’m generally trying for a unique mark/scribble. Some days the marks are responding to a piece of music I’m listening to but other times, I’m notating the silence, or the sounds in my skull. They are a ravelling and an unravelling, a joy, a calm, a human touch. Sometimes deliberate, sometimes wild, or thoughtless, beyond thought, a flying, a soaring, a darkness, a skating, a tangle.

Shawna Lemay, With No Illusions But With Some Joy – On Asemic Writing

It’s so hard to focus these days, and find a rhythm of living that is not disrupted by fear. I mean we all should be feeling fear, but also hope and joy and solidarity. I hope you are all staying as safe as you can be.

One thing that helped me recently was to do an event at Clio’s with the DSA and the Oakland Education Association Rapid Response Team, a group of Oakland educators organizing to protect families from ICE. They organize community patrols and raise funds to provide legal aid, click here if you want to donate. Just being in the room with with people who are taking action and being in solidarity felt good. Zeina Hashem Beck, Jason Bayani, and Sara Borjas gave amazing readings. I read some poems too.

Another thing that helps is to read a poem closely, and just sit with it. I’m getting ready to teach an on-line class on Tuesday on how to read a contemporary poem, which in some ways is an absolutely absurdly vast subject to even begin to approach. But I have some thoughts of ways to do it. Reading closely for me is always the way I get back to writing. For me, reading poetry is really about accepting and embracing and getting excited about what is challenging, unexpected, new, different. Reading poems has changed me. I feel like if everyone read poems there would be less evil in the world. I realize that’s naive, but I can’t help thinking it.

Matthew Zapruder, Reader, You Already Know

There is an intervention by poets to be made, into the fiction-led “should writers read” debate and the “should writers read for pleasure” sequel. It should have something particular, and not only concerning that poets don’t get paid very much. It should also consider Donald Davie’s dictum that there is a group pressure to remain at the level of the skilled amateur – because for them, and you can detect this in many blurbs that aren’t (soi-disant) political, everything is “reading for pleasure” if they read other poets at all. For the practitioner of the ancient art, there is definitely reading for fulfilment, for a guide to living, and living must include pleasure. I wonder too about suggesting a new category for the current debaters of “reading for morality”, which is what enables us to sift among people who make political speeches and also to act locally (which will affect the personal anecdotes in our own poems but also guide us in making narrative without it always having to be politically exemplary – whatever that is – line by line). Regardless of all of this, what of seeing the poet made to struggle by their poem – not with the poetry basics, but with a form they could handle easily if it were inert? An oeuvre entirely composed of good poems that are totally commonplace workmanlike in the idiom of a century or two up to the day is unlikely to survive. So is the struggle crucial, and how do poets do their reading of other poems to aid the struggle only of not writing badly (not, per se, every time the political struggle nor, as with fiction, “good writing”/the saleable)?

Ira Lightman, READING TO WRITE POEMS

On a news channel someone says the President
is planning a gigantic triumphal arch
and wants an airport named after him.
(Of course he does.)
Wind rattles the windows.
I think ‘OK, I need to get work done’,
open the laptop, remember once
a Buddhist monk told me
in a station waiting room
life requires no explanation.

Bob Mee, HARPOONING PRAWNS IN A WOK

Look at this picture from the gold medal winner for women’s figure skating, and her celebratory leap in the air. And if you haven’t done it yet, watch Alysa Liu’s gold-medal winning skate—I promise even if you don’t like skating, it will inspire joy. If they don’t cut it, you can see how afterwards she curses as she celebrates, as well as hugging the bronze medalist and swinging her around in a spontaneous hug. It reminded me of the poetry world, how we need to celebrate our wins with this much joy, and the wins of our friends and colleagues.

On that note, AWP. I’m not going to be there this year, as I am instead taking a trip home to Cincinnati to visit my father, who is ill, and family. Which is not to say, I will not miss seeing my friends. But AWP can be a lot even for completely healthy young people, much less people with disabilities and illnesses that tend to flare up under stress. And right now, I have to prioritize family, and if I only have so much strength, energy, and money for travel, I’m going to choose home over a conference. If you’re going, I hope you have a wonderful time, and post lots of pictures. […]

I […] had good news from my poet friend, Kelli Russell Agodon—she got her first poem in the March issue of Poetry, “Trying to Sext My Partner, Who Replies ‘I Can’t Get My Camera to Work.’” It’s not up on their web site yet, but I got my issue and so Charlotte the literary kitten and I had so much fun reading it.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Missing AWP? Me too. Celebrating Wins, New Glasses, and Quail

I stopped going to AWP when I had a baby and haven’t attended since. For many years, I blamed new motherhood for my lack of attendance. But I am no longer a new mother. And yet, I still have not attended the conference.

It is only now, in writing this, that I think I understand the true reason. In 2014, my last time at the conference, I was genuinely dismayed by how little attention was paid to the serious crises within academia. So much so that I was compelled to write an open letter to AWP: Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts.

Since then, the conference has improved somewhat in this regard. They have incorporated one or two panels on the subject of adjuncts. There is also now an AWP Writers Adjunct Caucus. Yet largely, the conference remains dedicated to pursuing one’s own personal career ambitions—publishing, getting an agent, improving craft, enriching one’s pedagogy.

Meanwhile, 70% of the academic workforce is now contingent labor. Many adjuncts are earning less than minimum wage. Since I published that article in 2014, conditions have only gotten worse. Adjuncts still report juggling several teaching jobs at once, working for poverty wages, and avoiding hospital visits for fear of financial ruin.

According to the Higher Education Inquirer,

Pay and Financial Security: Poverty Wages Become the Norm

In 2006, Hoeller reported that Washington community college adjuncts earned just 57 cents for every dollar paid to their full-time colleagues. The disparity persists—and in some ways, it has widened. Today, more than a quarter of adjuncts report earning under $26,500 a year, below the federal poverty line for a family of four.

According to a report on The Impacts of 2020 on Advancement of Non-Tenure Track and Adjunct Faculty,

The pandemic…increased career insecurity for non-tenure-track faculty in ways that are more subtle but equally important. For instance, when institutions extended tenure and promotion clocks, they often failed to think about the implications of moving online for instructional and research faculty.

All this and yet I’ve yet to see a single panel dedicated to the kind of structural changes that would improve the material conditions of grad students, adjuncts and non-tenured professors. These might include sessions on how to create a grad student union, how to obtain health insurance as adjuncts, how to organize a sit-in at your university for increased teaching stipends (as former Gulf Coast editors and students at University of Houston successfully did).

But no. Such panels do not exist at AWP. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of panels dedicated to political engagement. We can learn to “write resistively” or learn “Cartooning at the End of the World.” We can discuss “Editing for Community and Change” or “Strategies for Navigating Organizational Change.”

But, it seems, what we cannot, must not, should not ever discuss is the broken system staring us all right in the face. Perhaps it’s not very sexy to have a panel dedicated to collectively organizing for health insurance and a living wage. Or, maybe such panels might not be very welcome by those who actually sponsor the conference.

Becky Tuch, Q: Why does AWP barely touch the crises in academia?

Lately, I’m trying to find enough mojo to send out some poems. My thinking is that given current circumstances, having poems in (mostly) online journals offers more possibility that someone, anyone, will read them. Poetry like most arts is communicative, so poets need readers; I treasure my readers, but they are few. I love books, but my books do not sell well. That means the poems don’t reach an audience. This blog doesn’t have a host of regular readers, either, though there are some stalwart followers for whom I am immensely grateful. Then what are a poet’s options? Small-press publication (let’s hear it for those wonderful folks!) and self-publishing can get you the physical book, but for readers you have to do a ton of self-promotion. This is a skill I have never developed and that I do not, at my age, wish to learn. Besides, I am out of the job market now and have no need for a CV full of publication credits.

But I read literary journals. My colleagues in creative writing read literary journals. Some lit journals continue to produce paper issues, bless them, but more of them post poems on various social media platforms, where casual viewers might run across a poem and–who knows?–read it! Therefore, it seems to me that’s what I ought to be doing: getting my work in magazines, large and small, local and international, professional and amateur, one poem at a time as a kind and careful editor decides my poem suits the journal. I think that in 2026, more poems reach people online than in books. Am I wrong about that? I guess I could research that question if I really want to know.

Of course I love books and will never stop reading them, poetry books and other kinds. Of course I would be thrilled to have another book in print if the manuscripts I send out ever were to find homes. However, probably my focus this year will be on the more ephemeral but wider-reaching media forms. I want to remind myself that I write because what I want to say may be valuable to someone other than myself; might strike someone as beautiful, sad, or wise; might make someone think in a different way or learn something new. Poetry has always done that for me, after all.

Now if only I can generate the mojo…

Ann E. Michael, Midwinter mojo

I’ve lost my enthusiasm for all things writing, except the actual writing. I’ve barely tried to get published, picking publications and press that I have a connection with or that I really want to get into, mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness of getting rejections year after year. I’m determined that eventually I’ll find one they like. 

My poetry collection that was accepted in 2019, and delayed and delayed, will never be published, at least by that press as it is closing this year. The editor had long gone silent to my queries, so I stopped trying. I continue to occasionally send out that collection and my others to different editors, more out of habit than with any hope. 

Mostly now, I think of my collections as a record of my life and thoughts that will never really be shared until I’m gone, like my writing notebooks and my diaries, just a bit more thematically organised. And the thought of not publishing them doesn’t really bother me. […]

I wrote or finished 73 poems in 2025 which is higher than average for me, as most were written for a specific collection that will probably never be published. I’ve had an urge to write unusual love poems, so I’ve just gone with it. I think it’s complete, but as is my way, I will continue to tinker with it for a long while yet.

My new writing practice routines means I’m writing regularly, even if only just a few notes or scribbles. I try and draft out at least one poem a week, not necessarily a good one, but it’s a nice feeling on Sunday to have something typed into my drafts file. […] I’ve gone back to the process, what I love about writing, the slow accumulation of ideas, words on the page. 

Gerry Stewart, Sweeping Away the Last Clutter of 2025

Under my bangs
this smudged and gritty
cross a remembrance:
A dream of burning, my very
bones done in.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 1

Unbidden, I imagine
a womb

fashioned from
blue, purple, and crimson cloths

(knitting and weaving:
women’s work)

twisted yarn like blood vessels
intertwining, carrying blood

back and forth, looping in
the lungs of all creation, nourishing

us in this nest
where if we listen, really listen

we can hear the heartbeat
of Shekhinah.

*

Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of Terumah in the book of Exodus.

Rachel Barenblat, Mishkan

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with my writing – (as in Dr. Frankenstein but using a journal and pencil in place of electrodes and lightning) – and it’s opened doors and closed windows for me. I’ve discovered a great deal in the power of words, but I’ve also found new rivers in myself. And that’s felt good.

I’ve spent the last two years moving into hybrid work – fusing genres, blurring lines – or that’s what I’m telling myself. But, it seems to be working on several levels. There’ve been a few falls from cliffs, of course, but I keep moving.

I’m more open to ideas, less controlled. A statement by Stanley Kunitz – “A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of” – has been a map for me. I apply his notion of “secrets” to all the forms of writing I’ve been working in – poetry, essay, cnf, flash.

I also hear words by Flannery O’Connor in this – “I write to discover what I know”. My own writing does reveal layers of self – layers I didn’t know were there, but they were. They’ve always been there. Waiting.

So – we wait – for the writing to appear. And, we never know when that’s going to happen. Of course, I’m meaning the moments of writing that lead to discovery – not the day-to-day writing, in whatever genre … the time set aside or found to allow the drafting to move forward. Writing with no plan, no agenda. Putting words on the page – or screen.

Sam Rasnake, The Experiment: Finding the New

Like all endings, endings in poetry are often caught between two extremes. It is tempting to slam the door too hard, or to slink out so quietly nobody notices you’ve gone. They are all the more difficult, I think, when a poet is writing in so-called free verse, though ending a (so-called) formal poem isn’t exactly easy either.

Perhaps, like all the best endings, the best endings in poetry aren’t endings at all. Looking back at the poems I wrote about on this blog last year, one thing I notice is the way in which they each close with musical and metrical effects which ring out after the poem is over: Thomas’s misty counties, Brooks’s twinklings and twinges, Masefield’s long trick, even Larkin’s whispering trees. Here is the final stanza of ‘Why Brownlee Left’ by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, its abandoned horses staring out beyond the last line:

By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

The horses can’t quite move forward into the future they’re gazing at, but they keep moving all the same. They seem to be caught there forever, shifting their weight from foot to foot. And one way in which Muldoon achieves this effect is by setting that ambiguous image, the not-quite-ending, off against the ‘closing’ rhyme which, again, is only half a closure (foot to / future). A half-rhyme is all it takes to set the thing ringing. Muldoon makes it look easy. It isn’t.

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry of Departures

In the 1970s, I didn’t know poems could speak to my life as a young woman. I’d never heard a contemporary poet read in person. That changed in college when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. Later, hearing Gary Snyder read about wildness and Gwendolyn Brooks describe love “like honey” made me realize poetry could be a living, breathing force. I wanted my students to feel that too—and to find the power of their own voices.

I also wanted to bring in some of the magic of InsideOut, the Detroit poets-in-the-schools program founded by Terry Blackhawk. I invited local poets from the University of Michigan or visiting writers passing through town. We hosted all-school readings, performances, and a beloved event called “Shorts on the Ledge,” where students read brief pieces from a hallway ledge during National Poetry Month. We partnered with Jazz Band, Dance Body, and the annual Art Show. We read poems on the first day of school and at graduation. Whenever the school gathered, we offered a poetry prelude.

In 2011, a colleague and I opened our classroom once a week for Poetry Club. We advertised in the student bulletin, hung posters, and I brought homemade cookies or muffins. Our formula was simple: read a poem, talk about it, write, and share. Students came because they needed a place to write what they wanted to write in school.

Fifteen years later, the club is thriving. In the early days, we begged for five or six students; now a dozen come regularly.

Creating a High School Poetry Club: Why and How – guest post by Ellen Stone (Trish Hopkinson)

When I was at school, the English department ran a (voluntary) verse speaking competition, in which we, well, spoke verse, competitively. It was immensely absorbing. One year, I did ‘Death, be not proud’ (alas, when I tried it just now, I only remember the first quatrain). Another year, I did a passage of Paradise Lost, (ending ‘Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms’) now lost to me. I knew other sections of Milton at university. I performed in several Shakespeare plays, and remember a fraction of them now, though I know my way around Hamlet reasonably well. In those days, though it was never a formal requirement, I took memorisation seriously. I once knew the whole of Ode to a Nightingale…

It didn’t all vanish, thankfully. And the poetry I learned subsequently has largely stayed with me, and I slowly add to my stocks, meagre though they are. (One thing I can recite in full on demand is Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, of all things.) I decided several years ago to start memorising more, (including several poems by Robert Frost, which I used to say by heart to my children when they were little), and though I am, and always have been, an insufficient pupil, bad at schedules and consistency, I am not entirely failing at that endeavour even now, though I do far too little.

Last year, I memorised ‘Daffodils’ by Herrick. I am currently learning ‘My true love hath my heart.’ Alan Lascelles, Private Secretary to King George VI (and also to the Abdicator—hiss) knew Gray’s Elegy by heart, as, once, did so many English school boys. Lascelles was appalled to learn that the king hadn’t even heard of it. Perhaps I shall learn that one next. I am resolved to take memorisation as seriously again as I used to at school. (Join me!—though you should expect me to fail!)

Henry Oliver, George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.

The students look at me as if I’m the lab
animal in the crate, and they’re the scientists

circling the room with clipboards and pens.
I dearly want to know: what will it take

to kindle a fire, get them to care
about stories and poems, warm up

to metaphor and meaning? Toward the end
of the session, they shut their tablets

and zip backpacks close, heave out of their
seats and walk out of the room— expressions

mostly unchanged as I erase the board, return
the matchstick to its box marked “strike anywhere.”

Luisa A. Igloria, Strike Anywhere Match

This scene was outside King’s College Cambridge yesterday [photo]. Typewriter at the ready, the poet offers the public a “Poem on the Spot”. No AI.

Today I went to Huntingdon, about 30km from Cambridge. They have an alley of murals I didn’t know about, featuring T.S. Eliot, William Cowper, Lucy Maria Boston, Henry of Huntingdon, George Herbert and Samuel Pepys.

Tim Love, Street Poetry

I am currently on hiatus from daily poems in favor of hammering away slowly [at] plays as I try to increase my skills there, but will be making an e-zine in March of the Bluebeard poems (and a special print book object edition for Patreon subscribers, so keep an eye out for that.) You can still get in on the action there before the end of this month and land a signed copy of CLOVEN and my little 2026 desk calendar featuring collage work. This was a small print run, but I hope next year to make both a spiral-bound calendar and a desk standing version.  

Tuesday, we are headed to Steppenwolf to see another Strindberg play, Dance of Death, which looks to be about a contentious marriage, which fits well as I am finishing up a first draft of the Chopin adaptation.  This week, we also have new bookshelves arriving to deal with the living room situation, in which they are basically collapsing under the weight of way too many books[.]

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 2/22/2026

How easy it is to build a house from the pieces at hand. A mini table here, a houseplant and storage boxes there. With glue, scissors, pencil, cardboard, wood. But who says it couldn’t look completely different? Each little house remains one model among many.

marks
on the new floorboards
years ago

How many variations could be created? Imagine them in a single line. The judges enter. Point with their fingers. Take notes. Look concerned. Smile. Move back and forth.

How easy it is to read the room but forget the house.

Kati Mohr, Compass Needlework

I’m fascinated by the potentially infinite array of how literary influence shapes writing. How could American short story writer Lydia Davis, one of the most striking prose stylists of the past few decades (as well as one of my personal favourite writers), profess that the late Connecticut prose poet Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the most important writer on the development of her style? Whatever overlap between their work might exist, one of these things is not like the other.

One of the first of my contemporaries I encountered with a personal library as large as mine was the late Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), and there was something both striking and wonderfully exciting upon realizing our libraries had little to no overlap. From what I could see, only P.K. Page’s Hologram (1994) was the exception, although I’m sure there were others. Based on her library alone, one might gather that Uppal’s was a literature fueled by a narrative lyric with a more European base, offering a heft of titles by Guernica Editions and Exile Editions, which sat as a counterpoint to my own, rooted in 1960s Canadian postmodernism: west coast TISH poetics, Talonbooks and Coach House Press, into the prairies and south, towards Black Mountain, Richard Brautigan and the San Francisco Renaissance. I remember thinking how glorious it was to see a collection so wildly different but equal in scale, and the two in counterpoint suggested to me the mark of a healthy, vibrant literature: knowing these alternate perspectives were both held in high regard. If you want a quick overview of how any writer is shaped, head straight for their library.

Of course, influence is rarely a straight line. A collage, perhaps, or a constellation. I remember a conversation with Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961-2022) and Ottawa poet David O’Meara, back when O’Meara had that apartment in Ottawa’s Lowertown; how they both swore by John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” as collected through his 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). I remain baffled by their attachment to the work. I’ve also never understood how anyone could enjoy the poetry of Don Coles, another poet I know admired by Heighton and O’Meara. What am I missing? The years I’ve attempted to return to the work of Robert Duncan, unable to grasp the appeal, despite admiring the work of multiple writers who swear by him; despite my holding Duncan’s contemporary and compatriot Jack Spicer as such an important poet across my own trajectory, as well as Robin Blaser, the third in their triumvirate of American poetry and poetics. The San Francisco Renaissance: Spicer, Duncan and Blaser. What am I missing?

In some ways, I find Davis citing Edson reminiscent of longtime and former Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler who once offered that he could see how the works of Vancouver poet George Bowering or Montreal poet Artie Gold influenced my work, but couldn’t understand my attachment to the work of the late prairie poet Andrew Suknaski. I mean, I thought it might have been obvious, but I suppose not: I came to Suknaski through the work of Dennis Cooley (and other prairie writers, I’m sure), latching onto Suknaski’s self-described “loping, coyote lines,” and quickly realized an affinity to how he returned to writing on the histories and complications of his geography-of-origin, a geographic and cultural space that had not yet been articulated through poetry. This is where I might point to the crowd, and bellow: I say “Glengarry,” you say “Wood Mountain.” A chant begins.

rob mclennan, Lecture for an Empty Room

For former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, it took nearly 50 years of listening to the deepest, locked-away part of himself to address the profound abuse to which his Catholic parish priest subjected him when Krapf was a child. During the period of that abuse, the priest took the photograph that became part of the cover art for Krapf’s 2014 autobiographical collection Catholic Boy Blues (Greystone Publishing), and gave it to Krapf’s parents. That haunting photograph, an evocative visualization of the painful words comprising Krapf’s poems, contains both dark secret and starker truth. Krapf wrestles with both over the course of his four-part collection by assuming four dramatically different yet intertwined voices: the boy who suffers sexual abuse, the man who sets upon the “healing journey” that requires reconciling the boy he was to the adult he became, the priest whom Krapf allows to engage in dialogue with the boy, who finds in himself the extraordinary courage to speak back once and for all, and a wise figure Krapf calls “Mr. Blues.” The latter speaks in four voices, too — friend, advice-giver, counselor, mentor — that if they could be sounded as one, might best be described as “savior,” for Mr. Blues ultimately helps the boy Krapf was and the man Krapf is today to “break free” of “the language of pain” to sing as “one with the spirit inside me” where hope and forgiveness, even love, reside. Mr. Blues teaches boy and man to see that

there’s always a hopeful boy inside the man. Deep down lives a hopeful boy inside the man won’t quit fighting till he comes out best he can.

In that final “Love Song for Mr. Blues” from which the above lines are quoted, we find all the reasons Krapf is able to survive his harrowing journey.

*

Catholic Boy Blues, the twenty-sixth of Krapf’s more than 30 books, is dedicated to “my sisters and brothers of any age in all lands abused by priests or other authority figures.” As anyone knows who pays even slight attention to the news, especially over the last two decades, an enormous group of Catholics and former Catholics — Krapf now known to be among the thousands of primarily male adolescents abused — suffered a profound silencing, because of the presence of priest-pedophiles in the Church. Krapf movingly describes that silencing:

Not even the great
visionary wordsmiths
Isaiah and Jeremiah

had to find words
to tell their people
how it feels

for a boy
to be so defiled
by a priest

that for fifty years
he keeps his mouth shut
even to those he loves.

~ “Not Even Isaiah and Jeremiah”

In his acknowledgment in the Preface that his “responsibility and mission as a poet” oblige him to share the “dirty little secret” with the public, Krapf, born in 1943, bears startling witness to art’s power to save when, as the persona Mr. Blues says in “Mr. Blues Wakes Up,” we can “sing it straight.”

Maureen Doallas, Norbert Krapfs ‘Cathlic Boy Blues’

Part of the reason why Isobar is a vital press is because [Paul] Rossiter has a clear purpose in mind for it, a purpose with three parts or strands. The first of these is to bring into English the work of key 20th century Japanese poets who have been generally neglected, poets like Yoshioka, Kiwao Nomura, Rin Ishigaki and Sanki Saitō (to name just ones that I’ve reviewed). Many of these poets engaged with western poetry; Yoshioka translated Rene Char, who was a key figure for Nomura, and Ishigaki was also clearly influenced by surrealism. Equally, the VOU poets were clearly in conversation with western concrete/visual work.

The second strand is the publication of English-language poets who live and work in Japan, and who engage, to one degree or another with Japanese literature and culture. The result is that Isobar books are a venue for cross-cultural fertilisation in very real terms.

Glasgow–Tokyo Line by James McGonigal and John Pazdziora, subtitles An East-West Hyakuin, fits perfectly into this strand. A hyakuin, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a 100-poem renga, or linked verse, written collaboratively by two or more poets turn-taking. There are rules or conventions to the form that McGonigal and Pazdziora follow, with one key exception; their collaboration was not in person and limited to a single block of time, but extended and conducted through email.

Another interesting aspect of the book is the blend of languages, with most of the text being in standard English, with a healthy leavening of Scots, and the odd hint of Japanese included. This has the effect of making it seem like there are more than two voices at play at points.

The linked verses hover around the passage of time, the seasons, mortality, impermanence and, ultimately, cyclical renewal.

Can fresh leaves foretell
the snick-snap of garden shears
on October days?

There’s a sense of the human integrated with the Buddha nature of the world:

Stretching for plums, my fingers
greet a snail. Good day, neighbour.

Billy Mills, Several Isobars: A Review

I love this love poem, the “philia” kind, dear old pal. Nostalgia in its “algia,” an ache, but funny and odd, in the way that old friendships and memories can be. There is a helplessness to it, how the speaker is awash in his own foibles, ones that he knows he can admit to this old friend, who likely knew them all too well, and maybe had a few more. It cracks me up. It makes me sad-laugh, laugh-cry, this apostrophe, which is a strange word for speech or a poem addressed to a person, as its etymology lies in words meaning “turning away from,” but is also used to describe an indicator of possession, as well as an indicator of something missing. Which also makes me sad in a isn’t-that-funny way.

Marilyn McCabe, the fate of the cruel & unusual

How should I be? is the question I’ve been asking myself these last two months. If my lifespan is now counting down in years or months or maybe even weeks rather than the decades I expect we mostly luxuriate in imagining, what is it I should do with a day, an hour, a breath, a synapse? What should be my mindset, and the means by which my time—imaginary god—is made? Thus far I have tried: pious, melancholic, pragmatic, defeated, paralyzed, depressed, and, simply, numb: unfeeling, unthinking, if-I-don’t-move-nothing-else-can-go-wrong. Those of you who know me in real life can probably guess that none of these has fit particularly well.

One must have a mind of winter I thought to myself yesterday, getting dressed for a run, and as I ambled along in safe-heartrate-zone I found myself transfixed by the verbs: to regard, to behold. Stevens was an insurance executive, and legend has it that he’d send a page down the street to the library to copy out definitions and etymologies of words he was turning over in his mind whilst writing policies and other boring business things, a fact I take to mean: there is nothing accidental about any word that turns up in one of his poems. It’s not simply that one must accept one’s circumstances in order to understand them so much as that one must accept them—develop a mind for their reality—in order to see them clearly and thus to hold them in esteem, to see what is remarkable, what can be held dear, no matter the odds.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

In addition to showing us that grief is both a complex shared and unique emotion, Webb suggests that there are many forms of loss, just as complex and difficult to resolve. in She called her Melanie we meet the unresolvable loss of a mother who gave her child up for adoption; in New and to him who came from my body we find the loss of a way of life experienced by a mother on the birth of her first child and the loss when that child gains independence; and in  If only you didn’t have to shove your living in my face we find the loss and ultimate recovery of self-respect during and after an abusive relationship.

There will be many potential readers who have experienced grief in their lifetimes: it is an inevitable consequence of having loved.  There will be much to connect with for such readers in this collection. However, like all literature worth reading, Webb offers us fresh perspectives and insights, deepening our understanding in emotionally intelligent poems of great skill.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Grey Time’ by Julia Webb

Among the poems one really doesn’t expect, there’s this: a poem about Christ’s forty days in the wilderness by Robert Graves (1895–1985). Graves was young when he published the poem in his second collection, the 1918 Fairies and Fusiliers. He’d been through the war, become friends with the poets Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), and published his own war verses. (In 1985, a memorial was placed in Westminster Abbey for the poets of the First World War. The long-lived Graves was the only one left to attend.)

He had yet to write his memoir of the war, Good-Bye to All That (1929) or his strange book about poetry’s beginning in worship of a divine mother figure, The White Goddess (1948). His best-selling historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, wouldn’t appear till 1934 and 1935.

In 1918, for that matter, Graves had yet to make a public point of his loss of faith. By 1948, following James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Graves would insist in The White Goddess that “Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.” In Today’s Poem, “In the Wilderness,” however, Graves emphasized not the personality but exactly those mythopoeic elements of Jesus. (He would later call it his “last Christian-minded poem.”)

His fantastical account of that mythopoesis is aided enormously — turned nearly into an incantation prayer — by the rhymed two-stress lines of the poem and its forced dactyls. The meter quickly turns artificial, standing outside the natural words to become the kind of musical chant we know from nursery rhymes and counting games.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In the Wilderness

[Geoffrey] Heptonstall explores the nature of storytelling and how a narrator can try to influence a reader to draw a desired conclusion. However, a narrator can’t control a reader, especially a reader with an enquiring mind, who reads and sits with what they’ve read to bring their own lived experience to the text and question it. Ultimately, Heptonstall also questions what truth might be. A narrator doesn’t tell the same story twice, placing emphasis on certain details can tailor the story to a different audience, who, for cultural or personal reasons, might need different arguments or persuasion to see the narrator’s viewpoint. “The Truth on the Tongue” is a quiet, thought-provoking collection that aims to recreate the sense of timelessness that is an audience listening or reading a tale.

Emma Lee, “The Truth on the Tongue” Geoffrey Heptonstall (Cyberwit) – book review

Last week I was struck by the wording of a Latin memorial composed in the 1660s by Payne Fisher — once Cromwell’s poet, though glossing over that phase for obvious reasons by 1665 — for one Jane Robinson, wife of Thomas Robinson, protonotary of the Common Pleas and prominent member of the Inner Temple. Jane died in November 1665, aged 49, of metastatic breast cancer. Most unusually, the memorial specifies the disease and even how it was treated:

Septendecim Annos
Cum Marito suo suavissimè feriata est,
Et ab Ipsius sinu demùm malevolè divulsa est
Per MORBUM CANCRALEM.
Cujus infandos Cruciatus postquàm diù victrix pertulisset,
Et Laevè Mammae detruncationem
Intrepidè passa fit:
Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo,
Et vitalia validiùs invadente,
Fato concessit:

This means:

For seventeen years
she rejoiced most sweetly in the company of her husband,
and was at last cruelly torn from his embrace
by CANCEROUS DISEASE
after she had long victoriously endured its unspeakable torments,
and had intrepidly suffered the amputation
of her left breast:
when the old disease returned (after an interval of six months)
and invaded her vital organs more powerfully,
she yielded to fate.

This describes a mastectomy — surely a very horrible business indeed in the 1660s, without any anaesthesia — that Jane surprisingly survived, followed by a recurrence of the disease, which spread into her vitalia, i.e. her interior organs. This seems to describe metastasized cancer, recognised as such. Although general statements about the courageous endurance of suffering are quite common in elegies and memorials, this sort of detail is unusual and must have been requested specifically, presumably by her husband.

Fisher’s inscription is prose, not poetry, though it is densely rhetorical in a way that we might associate more with verse. The pronounced alliteration for emphasis — as at Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo, / Et vitalia validiùs invadente, is typical of Fisher’s style. In any case, the distinction between Latin prose and verse in this kind of text was fuzzier than you might think: the mid- to late seventeenth century saw a particular vogue for a kind of free verse in Latin that was related to the fashion for the ‘literary inscription’. (I’ve written about Latin free verse and related forms before here.) Fisher, who had a sharp ear for a new trend, was rather a pioneer in this form. Back in 1651 he composed an elegy for Henry Ireton the Latin of which is a very early British example of this kind of free verse. The parallel English version uses rhymes, and indeed it is parallel-text examples like this help to demonstrate that this sort of Latin was understood as verse, rather than prose.

Victoria Moul, Dying is a difficult enterprise

“The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

At one point in March 2024, I copied these words into a yellow notebook. It was the spring of Larry Levis; azaleas aching to bud, stammering possible colors in the margins of former journals. I remember thinking spring would destroy me, as it does annually, gutting me with its flushes and fevers, distracting me from the needs of surrounding mammals. Each day lengthening by inches of light. Moths moving like nocturnes near the doors. And Levis’ poems garlanding the floor of the porch with their gentleness…

WOUND

I’ve loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight

on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.

Like the ravish of spring, Levis seasons his stanzas with unremitting tenderness for life, the sap-work of being. I return often to his “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” for the momentum it accrues as it winds down the page, working the space between the biography and the apologia:

I also had laughter, the affliction of angels & children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then
You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free
In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
Either because no one else could hear them, or because
No one else wanted to. And, mostly, because they know.

… and for the inflammatory, unforgettable scherzo:

One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,

… and for how Levis circles the figure of Billie Holiday, a talismanic figure that animated his jazz pantheon, jazz being the musical form that Levis deployed and studied for its repetitions and returns and metaphysical resonances.

“My Story in a Late Style of Fire” is a self-portrait that leaps from the canvas like the face in Caravaggio’s convex shield, occupying the continuous present of poetic address. Yet its speaker takes leave of the reader with an embrace, a likening as bright as it is critical:

I know this isn’t much. But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass,
The flames reaching through the second story of a house
Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who
Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

Brief, it is. Brief as the blooming set to a season. And what literary form turns this brevity to face vastness? Poetry.

Alina Stefanescu, Larry Levis: For love of immanence.

In the interests of research I’ve been doing some investigating. Just how easy would it be to pass off an AI-generated poem as one’s own work?

So on Chat GPT I offered the prompt: “Can you write a 14 line poem with a science fiction theme in the style of Caroline Bird?” In a few seconds this is what it produced:

The British Secret Service issues me a sensible coat
and a name that tastes like static.
I learn to listen through walls politely,
to sip tea while history clears its throat.
My handler says don’t fall in love—
everything leaks eventually.
The dead drop is a park bench feeding pigeons secrets.
I memorise faces the way others memorise prayers.
At night, the truth sleeps beside me, fully clothed.
London keeps blinking like it knows.
I file my feelings under miscellaneous,
and burn the rest with the kettle on.

Once I’d tried the same exercise with four or five other poets a few commonalities started to leap out, such as heavy use of simile, often one ‘quirky’ idea per line, little or no through-references, sonic echoes or layered meanings. The poems kind of looked like poems but there wasn’t much below the surface, Which ties in with the fact that AI is only privy to what’s already been written. Or as Rachel Piercey, editor of Tyger Tyger said to me: “Each new poem works on its own terms – a highly individual, poem-by-poem house style that AI could never comprehend, because it has never been done before and AI can only look back.”

The twist in the tail is that I then ran these AI-generated poems by Originality.ai, an AI engine trained to spot AI in texts. It’s not fool-proof as is has been trained primarily on non-fiction texts, but the result was pretty conclusive. […] Busted!

Robin Houghton, Can AI engines write poetry?

This my the 52nd free newsletter / essay / manifesto / article and it marks one year of writing weekly dispatches on this platform. It is also the tenth and final chapter in a series I’ve been writing about the poet John Keats and his last days in Rome.

February is an important month in the Keats calendar. It was in February of 1820 that the poet suffered his first lung haemorrhage, coughing blood and understanding the seriousness of his condition. He would die the following February in Rome, cared for by his friend, the artist Joseph Severn.

Over these last weeks I’ve described events leading up to his death and it doesn’t make for easy reading. We know how this story plays out and who really would want to follow it toward its inevitable, uncomfortable, painful end? This wasn’t exactly the reason the poet who wrote to me gave when she left but I think it had something to do with it. She’d spent long periods of last year in hospital, in pain and witness to the pain of others. Weekly instalments describing another poet’s demise isn’t exactly the most comforting material to receive. I myself find a fatigue has set in as the story of Keats approaches its sad conclusion. I mean, what do you say? I mean, what can you say? […]

I thought I’d shift focus, not in order to avoid describing how a light went out, not to ignore the Bright Star of this story but to consider its supporting actor, Joseph Severn.

Severn had been with Keats on his journey from London in September of 1820 when the Maria Crowther set sail on an arduous voyage to Naples. He was there for the poet’s 25th birthday in October spent in quarantine on their ship in the Italian port. There are stories that he threw Keats’ opium overboard into the Bay of Naples believing, with their arrival, the promise of fairer weather would restore the poet’s health.

Severn felt Keats no longer required the drug he’d used to treat the pain of his condition and the sore throats he suffered brought on by coughing fits. Severn later removed (another) bottle of laudanum from Keats’ possession in Rome when he feared the poet may try to take his own life. Severn was a man of faith. A believer in God. Keats was not. While Keats didn’t possess the same fierce atheism that earned Shelley the epitaph of ‘the infidel poet’ he was a free thinker, his devotion was to poetry. That he may have been tempted in his last days by the ‘ungodly’ act of suicide was something abhorrent to Severn. Although it goes too far to say he’d rather see his friend suffer in acute pain than provide him with oportunity to end it forever we do know how tormented Severn was in his duty of care, how he wrestled with decisions such as this.

Nicholas Roe, chair of the Keats Foundation and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, states in his 2012 biography that he believed that Keats was in fact an opium addict and Severn, among several of his friends, was aware of this. It is a claim, of course, and there’s no real evidence beyond the jealous mood swings Keats displays in letters to his fiancee Fanny Brawne and veiled references to the use of opiates (in Ode to a Nightingale for example) to support it. He certainly didn’t have the same appetites as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was a bonafide junkie and the first poet to enter rehab. But that’s another story.

Jan Noble, Nº52 Loving the pain away

Whitman’s words in the preface to the original edition are at least as radiant and rousing as the verses themselves — words that continue to enliven heart, mind, and spirit a century and a half later. He writes:

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.

And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

I have been looking at rough drafts, as I’ve been doing when I don’t have a new poem bubbling up.  I am surprised by how many poems came from the bushel of apples I bought in October.  In the future, when I deliberate the wisdom of buying apples in bulk, let me remember how many ways those apples fed me.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tuesday Scraps: Texting Mix-ups and Passings and Other Goblins

After last weekend’s yarn show I set myself a catching up kind of a week. The kind where sparkly conversations with good friends featured amongst time to tackle admin type things and time to see if the poems that wait patiently in the draft folder are ready for polishing. The kind of week without a particular routine which allowed for resting and for seizing the moment when there was a gap in the rain to take a daily stroll.

It was good to get out for daily walks again after having recently had to wait for my cough to diminish. I felt my body easing its way back in to striding out and being glad for being out in the fresh air. I also realised how much I had missed listening to music for that dedicated segment of the day. My soul shines more fully when the right sounds are in the day. The country road route is currently muddy and wet, but I like its familiarity as I get back into the swing of things. The fact that walking this route takes as long as listening to the album Personal History by Mary Chapin Carpenter is also rather splendid.

It was good to have a free and easy week, it felt rather like having a springboard to jump from on the journey towards spring. Spring is my favourite season, and I love the feeling of entering it with a sense of renewal and to revelling in the newness it offers. So many reminders of growth as the rhubarb stretches out new stems and the snowdrops flourish in the borders. Mixing these wonderful visuals in with the joy of lengthened days makes so much seem possible. It even had me venturing into the garden with a pair of secateurs to begin the big tidy up.

Sue Finch, I SEE BLUE SKY

It’s an all-white affair, the blizzard sweeps
in with style, its blinding white tux,
bow tie and stiff starched shirt,
its grandeur, its threats and proclamations,
its show of power. In a flick of its
handsome wrist, it shows us who’s who.

How blankly we stare at its parts,
its top hat and white entrails,
wanting, not wanting its magic entourage
to disappear.

Jill Pearlman, Mr. Universe

春泥に厚き硝子の破片かな　松本てふこ

shundei ni atsuki garasu no hahen kana

            spring mud
            a thick piece of glass
            in it…
                                    Chōko Matsumoto

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 17, 2026)

This week: poems talking to poems, optional depth, the moon in a well of whisky, and much more. Enjoy.

Hiking with Wild Iris in my mind, the poem that opens with that line – at the end of my suffering – I saw my children stomping the dead leaves, and over them the trees holding what they had left like torches in mid-day.

A door, at the end of suffering.

What if – I had been that week testing the thought – there is no door.

It is terrible to survive.

The darkness comes early, the flowers (the wild iris) rests underground, the trees pull back to bare limbs.

Yet, I can’t deny or ignore –

some months later, at first with the faintest signs, a return.

Each year the death of winter, rebirth of spring. An inescapable metaphor for even the likes of me.

Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.

Renee Emerson, At the end of my suffering, there was a door…

And how does the writer’s life change during the holiday season? Do you find yourself writing more or less? Is shopping or holiday card sending taking up time you would usually spend investigating journals or publishers? I haven’t been writing as much as I would like lately, holiday or no holiday, but I did manage to get a few submissions out after a pretty brutal book rejection the day before Thanksgiving (kept for more than a year with a “sorry it took so long” message after I’d been a finalist there multiple times. Ouch.) I’m starting to feel less sure about this book, which I used to have so much confidence in, my best book yet (I thought), fun and maybe even necessary. It’s also a little feminist, a little speculative, and more open about disability, which may mean it doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially in these “risk-averse” times. Anyway, think good thoughts as I send the manuscript out yet again, along with some poems. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Thanksgiving, Holiday Times at The Nutcracker, Local Wineries, Mt Rainier and the Writing Life Holiday Edition

Thanksgiving morning, in a house with no wi-fi, and a writer determined not to use her hot spot until the last possible minute because she, unlike much of the U.S.A. does not want to pay for unlimited data on her cell phone. But she knows what to do. And so she writes the old-fashioned way, typed in a Word document that will be uploaded later.You thought the writer might use a pen? She’s not that old-fashioned—she still has electricity! And she’s willing to pay for the version of Microsoft Office that’s always available, regardless of Internet access.

That writer, of course, is me. I’m being cautious with my cell phone usage because one past Thanksgiving of reckless abandon showed me how much data can cost, when I left the hot spot function on overnight. I am educable.

But I’m also delighting in disconnecting. I’ve gotten a sermon written in the past hour since I got up. If I’d had connectivity, I’d have spent that hour looking at stuff on the Internet, and likely feeling dispirited. Now I am feeling virtuous!

Long ago, I did write with a pen and paper, and I do remember that I had to fend off distractions then, too. Back in those days, I might be tempted to read the newspaper before I started—the old-fashioned kind, that arrived on the doorstep, not on my computer screen. The world is always trying to pull us away or lull us into complacency or sedate us—or terrify us or make us feel inadequate.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Thanksgiving Morning

around one candle the whole of november has gathered.

a lost bird from the dark flutters against the window.

the eyes of the watchers look like seeds from the oldest branch of night.

Grant Hackett [no title]

When I tell people I have been to the precinct to sing I often follow this up with, “not randomly on my own”. And the thought of me rocking up just to stand there and sing by myself makes me laugh. This would most definitely not work! In the group I know when I can trust myself to belt it out. I also know when I am in danger of being out of tune, and need to pause my singing.

I love the feeling in my chest and soul when the voices of the more competent singers shine. And being part of that is magical. The high notes rise and I remember to come in with the lower part at the right time and I can feel the sparkle of what is being created by many voices coming together. Sometimes I zone out when singing and temporarily forget where I am. This is quite entertaining when I come to and find myself singing along in tune and inhabiting the song. It was however slightly embarrassing at a recent rehearsal when I came to and heard the familiar intro of ‘This is Me’ only to forget that it was solo part and definitely not my turn to be singing even though that’s what I did. Fortunately I was in tune and quickly realised I should stop.

This week I was also celebrating the cover of a new poetry anthology called ‘Safety in Numbers’. This is another powerful reminder of what can be done when people work together. The idea for the book came from Gill Connors, and each poet was sent a poem to respond to with a poem of their own. Thus the poems were written in chains… each poem inspiring the next… women talking to women… poems talking to poems.  I am delighted that my poem Stunt Girl will be in these pages, and that it came into being because of Gill’s project.

Sue Finch, SOCK MONKEY

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

As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.

I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier… and you never really get full. Just tired. […]

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 girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as – ‘What if a chair was sad?’ – and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?

I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston (rob mclennan)

Here I am once more, sallying forth into a topic I am barely qualified to talk about, because I had an idea that I couldn’t let go of. But if you can accept my permanent status as an enthusiastic amateur, we shall begin.

I posted a poem over on Instagram on Monday, which had been written rather hurriedly in response to an exhibition of Gianni Versace’s designs and influences I’d seen the day before. It was way more interesting than I thought it would be, and the sculptural, structural quality of the clothes made me feel a bit sexy, and so this poem was the result.

The game of wrong pleats

After Gianni Versace

The game is to imagine wearing the dress

The game is to know he placed vertical interruptions

in the spaces a thumb would come to rest

The game is a slow thumb, ruffling the body

against itself

The game is to hold your thoughts aware, in plié

The game of the fold between structure, and release

The game is to whisper the words pleit /plicare / please

Now I don’t know whether this particular poem will do it for you, or not, but I did get to thinking about what it is that makes a poem sexy. What are the qualities of a good sexy poem — one that you have to hold your breath a little bit to read, one that makes you bite your lip involuntarily? I started to speculate to myself that a lot of it is about control, and restraint. As with poetry in general, but even more so in the case of the sexy poem, perhaps it relies heavily on what’s left unsaid, as much as what is said? It does indeed feel a bit like a game. The writer and the reader are playing truth or dare with each other — and also with the other person or persons in the poem if there are any (poetic polycule, anyone?) — and they’re each waiting to see how far the other will go, hoping it’s just far enough to keep them interested.

Victoria Spires, Ribs, ass and figs

In the Cummings poem, the growth of daisies in spring is associated with love and sex. This motif of spring (and especially April) is one of the most consistent elements of his poetry. Here’s another of my favourites:

yes is a pleasant country:
if’s wintry
( my lovely )
let’s open the year

both is the very weather
( not either )
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
( and april’s where we’re )

Cumming’s poems are so memorable and so delicious to say that it’s easy to miss their concision and the remarkable flexibility that he wrings out of supposedly rigid English word order. Cummings studied Latin and Greek at school and as an undergraduate and in the way he puts words together (if not in other respects) he is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most convincingly Horatian of the English poets. Seven translations of Horatian odes made while a student at Harvard show many aspects of his style already in place and hint at how stimulated he was by Horatian language and metre. Two of those seven translations are of Horace’s “spring” odes 1.4 and 4.7.

Victoria Moul, Love is a deeper season: e. e. cummings and Horace the fascist

I heard someone say torch, and recalled
my friend’s story about how, when her sister

was married, her new husband gathered all
her underwear and threw it into the fire.

This was supposed to show how his passion
for her meant all other loves before him

were to be incinerated. Some words eclipse
others in the wake of their arrival.

Luisa A. Igloria, Trousseau

Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian or Gazan poet.

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and photographer Dareen Tatour.

Detaining a Poem, by Dareen Tatour, translated from the Arabic by Andrew Leber.

Dareen Tatour published her poem ‘Resist, My People, Resist Them’, on social media in 2015. She was subsequently arrested by Israeli police and charged with incitement to violence and supporting a terrorist organisation, which she has always denied. She then spent three years under house arrest, during which time she was barred from publishing her work and accessing the internet. After her trial in July 2018, she was handed a five-month prison sentence (with six months suspended), of which she served two months, being released in September 2018. Dareen is the author of I Sing From the Window of Exile (Drunk Muse Press, 2022) and My Threatening Poem – The Memoir of a Poet in Occupation Prisons (Drunk Muse Press, 2021).

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 1: Detaining a poem, by Dareen Tatour

‘The Underground’ is written with the author’s usual muscular naturalism. Heaney didn’t have to resort to poetic metaphor nearly as often as the rest of us, because he always, somehow, found the word he needed. To adapt Trump, that heroic anti-poet: he really did know all the words, and the best words. I often find that have to compare something to something else to move it closer to what I intend; but the problem with that approach is that it’s too easy to break the spell of the poem. Randomly … Okay, it happens that I’m sitting here staring at a little curtain made of dark and starchy material. Suppose I wanted to describe it. In its weird, stiff folds it looks like … A ploughed field? A school skirt? A concertina? All of these might do fine, but each would introduce another domain to the poem – agriculture, childhood, music – that the poem would then have to justify to keep its integrity. A good question to ask on these occasions is ‘What would Seamus do?’ Well, Heaney might prefer ‘pleat’ to ‘fold’ because it has a sharper plosive edge; though he’d also know that ‘pleat’ was from the Latin plicare, to fold, from the old Indo-European pek root, and cognate with implicate, complicate, explicate, duplicate. So he might describe the curtain’s material as ‘pleated’, or perhaps ‘complicated’ – simple words which carry the old meanings along with them: complicated things are folded together. All Seamus’s simple words throw very long shadows, because how we use a word – in what way, in what common phrases, with what other words – is also the story of exactly how it got there. Heaney had a strong preference for the common word-hoard, i.e. the everyday vocabulary we draw from Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Norman sources. Many if not most poets share it, because these words are mostly mono- or disyllabic, and therefore introduce far more stressed vowel, i.e. song, into the poetic line. (Though some poets find plenty of music in the authoritative register of a more polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary – Sean O’Brien, for example – or in the scientific precision of more Greek-leaning lexis, like Douglas Dunn).

‘The Underground’ is as densely folded and woven – ‘implicated’? – a piece of language as I know. As well as Heaney’s deep knowledge of word origins, the poem is also enriched by his signature use of allusion: he’ll allow every tiny event in the poem sing back into the culture to seek out its mythic, historical or literary echo. Typically, ‘The Underground’ presents these allusions with the kind of grace and surface fluency that can leave them going undiscovered by the reader. We might say the poem possesses ‘optional depth’ – a highly desirable quality, I think; one I first heard identified by Michael Alexander in a lecture he was giving on Four Quartets. ‘Optional depth’ requires a poet confident enough in themselves not to demand applause for their cleverest effects, though it also assumes a patient reader. But at this stage of his career Heaney knew he’d won them; his readers trusted him to be worth their effort. (This is one reason I think the dismissal of ‘reputation’, when it’s been fairly won, to be utterly fatuous. ‘Reputation’ is not a licence to write badly but differently, since the poet’s relationship to the reader is configured differently, and based on more trust than an unknown poet has yet earned. The best poems of ‘poets of high repute’ would win no prizes in a poetry competition, where every single poem has to prove itself solely on its own terms. You might think this situation ideal, but it’s a recipe for mostly hysterical performance. I’ll write on the ethics of the poetry competition some other day.)

Don Paterson, Heaney on the Underground

Sitting on the steps, I’m eating ice cream
when a dog goes past and it seems we’re each in need
of the way he stops and the way I scratch his ears.
The ice cream is my for-now-favourite flavour.
The dog, caramel brown, looks with his chocolate eyes
at the ice cream, then up his lead towards you,
as if to say,
                    Hey! This – my ears, the ice cream,
this perfect blue and sunshine ice cream day.
This. 

Liz Lefroy, I Do Happy

I like to describe Aleda Shirley as the best poet you’ve never heard of. I adore her work and wish there weren’t so little of it: three books along with a chapbook, the latter an extremely curious object that exists for reasons entirely beyond me. Titled Rilke’s Children, it was printed and hand-sewn by Gray Zeitz at Larkspur Press and published by the Frankfort Arts Council; Shirley shares author billing with another favourite of mine, David Wojahn, and the book also contains a selection of poems by some other Kentucky poets and an introduction by Guy Davenport. I’ve had it since I was in college: it was the first book I ever bought from Abebooks. I can only assume I ordered it for the Wojahn poems and was accidentally rewarded with another lodestar.

What’s to like about “White Center”? It’s the driving rhythm that lingers, the litany and its application to an uncompromising insistence on metaphor. This is one of those poems that gets straight at the ancient heart of the whole endeavour, the sense of poiesis from which poetry derives: a bringing forth, a conjuring. Here, it’s the felt sense of time, Shirley’s effort to bring the conceptual into the embodied realm, to bear the intangible across the divide and into phenomenological experience. Like Lynda Hull’s “The Window,” which concludes Hull’s third and final book, “White Center” is the last poem in Shirley’s collection Dark Familiar, also her third and her last. This is meaningful to me in some way I can’t articulate; it causes me to number spines, seeking out the final final final poem: surely there must be a third.

Vanessa Stauffer, “White Center” by Aleda Shirley

The final poem turns to Chaucer and “The Canterbury Tales”, in “All Together Now”,

“The spirit of the Wife of Bath will stir no porridge
but three husband shades around the pan
will jockey for the right to hold the spoon.
I hear more queueing at my door. Do you always
have so many spirits about your person?

My head is full of fun and frolic,
Of sorrow and shame, of triumph and tragedy.
This is the rule inside any scribbler’s brain.
Know that I can never sup alone.
Bring your spirits, let them blend with mine
And all shall dance.”

The rhythm bounces. It’s a jocular poem. And it sums up the quiet optimism that runs through “Rainbow Candles”. At times, there seems to be an acceptance of the way things are without a desire to make significant changes. That might be a frustration when you wish Cinderella could know that life’s about to get better for her. Readers might want the speaker to have more agency, protest against the baseball bat wielding thugs. But in “Rainbow Candles”, Challis draws attention to the small wins, the strength of solidarity, the courage that comes from being true to yourself.

Emma Lee, “Rainbow Candles” Tony Challis (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

This is to confess my untold delight in the postal service’s delivery of a book titled workshop of silence, containing poems by Jean D’Amérique, as translated by Conor Bracken.

In his translator’s introduction, Bracken notes that Jean D’Amérique’s lived experience is unsettled by the boundaries of nation-states: “As a transnational person who splits his time between Haiti, France, and Belgium, not to mention a Black transnational person transiting through and living in historically white countries, he is subject to the rough, reductive, and at times lethally armed gaze of bureaucracy.” Borders, as written by this poet, “are not meant to be stopped at”; their existence is arbitrary and alienating.

Since D’Amerique began as a slam poet, Bracken says that “retaining this transgressive, playful, and dexterous attention to sound” was one of the primary goals of his translation— a goal that frequently leads him to slight departures from the denotative meaning of the original words. Translation is an art. As such, translators make choices about what to emphasize and convey across languages. Bracken elects the “enlivening of language” that restores “its fundamental slipperiness,” or, in his own words:

It is based as much in play and wit as it is in the political dimensions of the work that he’s doing with these poems, which sometimes announces itself without embroidery, as in “moment of silence,”  wherein he situates his poems in the  political tradition of Nazim Hikmet, and at other times is more recondite, as in “under the bridges what springs (up),” where he points out through elaborate wordplay the continued but unexamined presence of the lexicon of shipping and chattel slavery in economic chatter. 

I hear this subversive jouissance trickling upwards through the sap of “solar brass,” a poem that tingled all the way to the tips of my fingertips when I first read it.

solar brass

my rhapsody
a cactus in the night-call’s port

for sale for tropical cents
I am a solar

powered brassy jacket
the horizon
looks punk to me

D’Amérique’s poems have a purpose in daily life: they process the banalities and polish the repetitions.

Alina Stefanescu, Workshop of Silence.

It was bound to happen. The recent revelations around Jeffrey Epstein have now implicated poetry in America—well, Poetry in America, a PBS program created by Elisa New, a Harvard professor of literature and wife of Epstein’s friend, Larry Summers (the two also honeymooned on Little St. James, flying there with Ghislaine Maxwell). Poetry in America is, according to its website, “a multi-platform educational initiative and public television series that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.” On this program, New hosted conversations with numerous celebrities and poets, and at some point she accepted over $100k dollars in funding from Epstein for all this (at one point negotiating for $500,000). She also seems to have relied on his personal support and appreciated his esteem, and all this well after he was a registered sex offender. In fact, shortly before Epstein’s arrest, New was emailing him about how best to persuade Venus Williams to appear on her program. Mistakes were, as they say, made. It’s just a shame that we may never get to see the shelved episode in which she discussed poetry with none other than Woody Allen, a man introduced to her by Epstein.

Yes, the dunks could go on. And well they should. But I’m afraid there is more significant news to attend to regarding (little “p”) poetry in America. […]

In late October, the Mellon Foundation has announced the formation of the Literary Arts Fund. In the creation of this fund, Mellon has joined with “the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation” to distribute $50 million into literary non-profits across the next five years. Significantly, the president of the Mellon Foundation is Elizabeth Robinson, former US poet laureate—arguably the most influential person in American poetry, strictly in terms of economic power. And I have written about her before in connection to money given to the Poetry Coalition. The Poetry Coalition is comprised of roughly thirty major literary organizations and is very closely tied to the Academy of American Poets. And as of today, if you go to the Academy’s web site, you can still find a page for its PBS program, Elisa New’s Poetry in America.

Now, none of this is to imply a connection between Epstein and the Literary Arts Fund (lol). But these two stories happening at once, in the same backyard, means that I cannot pass up the opportunity to, once again, talk about the funding of poetry in America. And perhaps I’m too much of an idealist, but I feel like we should be wary of extremely centralized wealth—regardless of where it comes from—meddling in the culture of poetry. Such wealth is inseparable from the worker exploitation and systemic violence inescapably built into the heart of the capitalist system. Under the guise of “supporting the arts,” there are any number of motives that institutions, organizations, foundations, or super-rich individuals might have in pouring money into some quadrant of “poetry in America.” And all of this says nothing of the fact that many, many poets are also debtors, and the establishment of student debt was essential to their being able to obtain the credentials necessary for access to this world of funds.

Ultimately, my position is that this money funds a culture whose credentialed professionalism in fact serves to condition it, train it, and limit its capacity for imagining or enacting another world.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 5)

I only read the news — I don’t watch or listen to it — so I can take in the melodrama in measured glances, the calm of a punctuated sentence, a nicely contained paragraph. It occurs to me that life is that mix of unanticipated stimulation and the striving to make sense of it and react in some reasonable way that allows survival until the next surprise. Art is important to me both as stimulus and as companion on the path to survival. This poem by Peter Gizzi feels like good company today, as I stagger into the gray day with its subtly shifting clouds.

Marilyn McCabe, the future I’m reaching for

i am sibling to the
orphaned mitten & the charging cable
once plugged into a breakup machine.
mother to the acorns who could not
figure out how to sprout & the eggs
who went rotten in the coop.
we can call it the lost & lost. like a zoo
that you can only enter if you too have
been left behind.

Robin Gow, lost & lost

So there’s AI now. It’s HEEEEEEERE. A brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie. Or vampire. There are so many ethical issues to confront. I hear my educator and writing friends decrying it and calling for absolutely abstention. I get that. But I am left to wonder what to do beyond that. We can’t just try to ignore it. Legislation. Yes. Rules, guidelines, restrictions. Yes. Teaching our students and advocating for deeper understanding of what it is, what it is doing. Absolutely. But we can’t ignore it and must do more than just say “stay away from it.” Just like, “fentanyl is bad. Don’t do it.” But obviously, that doesn’t work and is too simplistic.

In terms of AI, we must engage with the social and structural issues around it when we talk to “users” and “pushers” of A.I. Address it as a symptom. Of what? Well, capitalism, for one, but also a kind of fear, insecurity and lack of feeling centred, of not trusting in one’s own abilities, feeling the need to outsource. Of a kind of alienation from the non-mediated world. (Mediated by capital, by technology, by a kind of “culture is out there” thinking.) Not trusting oneself and not feeling safe to fail. I think we need to address all these things. We’re being capitalismplained and fearsplained. But I need language more than “Trust yourself. Be authentic” to talk to my students. It needs to be deeper than that. More than “Just don’t do it,” or “It’s wrong.” And publicly, I feel as writers we need to explain more about what it actually means and where the desire to use it comes from more than a kind of moralizing and shaming, because, as with the case of so many other things, that never works.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A.I.: brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie or vampire?

One crisp autumn day, on a whim, I started sending haiku to a few friends via email and text message. I had a new phone and was interested in its SMS capabilities. The only things I found that I could get via SMS were sports scores and stock updates. Boring! I thought: 160 characters — that’s probably enough for a tiny poem. If I could subscribe and get a daily haiku on my phone, that would be pretty cool!

Of course, nothing like that existed yet. I soon learned about email to SMS gateways that would let me email text messages to phones, if I just formatted the To: address properly, and that sparked an idea: To start a haiku by SMS service.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had a little mailing list going. At first I borrowed haiku from library books. I added a few of my own early efforts. In time, I started accepting submissions.

Before long, tinywords had become a daily magazine of haiku and micro poetry. That was over 25 years ago, and tinywords now has over 3,000 subscribers, making it one of the biggest haiku/micropoetry publications in the world. We’ve published over 4,400 haiku by almost 1,000 different poets, including some big names in the haiku world, some big names in the larger poetry world, and some people who are just regular lovers of poetry without particularly big names at all, like me. I’m not even the editor anymore. For more than a decade, Kathe Palka and Peter Newton have been making all the editorial decisions. I am, happily, the publisher, technical support guy, and customer service rep.

In September, we celebrated tinywords.com’s 25th anniversary by sponsoring a reception at Haiku North America 2025, the big biannual haiku conference. It was a joy to meet and celebrate with almost 200 haiku poets, many of whom have appeared on our site over the years.

Along the way I learned that haiku are about more than just syllable counts: Haiku are a tool for mindfulness, a vehicle to bring us into presence and awareness of the world, a literary form that sharpens our powers of observation and description, and a writing practice that helps us cut away the fluff.

As one of the most concise literary genres, haiku have helped me to be a sharper, more direct writer. They’ve helped make my headlines and email subject lines more concrete and pithier. (My email bodies are still too long, though — my excuse is that they’re prose!)

It’s no exaggeration to say that haiku have made me a better writer and editor, and they have certainly helped my career.

But it’s the haiku philosophy of awareness, close observation, mindfulness, and concision that has made the biggest difference in my life. Haiku are steeped in Zen, and over time, practicing haiku-like awareness, day after day, has helped me to show up better for my own life.

Dylan Tweney, Haiku changed my life

And each eye is a new world
to be examined in turn

One then the other
this is one then that

Consumed by more than silence
he floats untethered

The difficulty I had was that the poem was very wordy and needed to be pared back. There were a number of lines that I liked that fell by the wayside. I used to keep these separate convinced I could use them somewhere. I haven’t yet. 

Paul Tobin, HE TOOK UP MIRRORS

Lately I’ve been revising some old poems and have realized I no longer recall what their incipience was. Which can be a good thing, because I am no longer wedded to the “reason” I wrote them and can instead consider whether they can be crafted into decent poems.

I am also working on a manuscript that I let sit for at least six years. An idea got into my mind after reading Robert Burton’s 17th-century book on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy, quite some time ago (2017, perhaps?). I took a stab at writing what seemed to be evolving into a historical fiction story, which is not my usual approach (I have zero practice at plot and dialogue). Then, I stopped. As one does. But the topic lodged in me somewhere, I suppose, and early this year I returned to it. What if, I wondered, the draft could be restructured into a series of prose poems? There might be a sort of hybrid novella-poem in the earlier draft.

That’s more or less what I’m developing, at least for now, and we’ll see what if anything emerges. It’s keeping me interested, which I like, and the experiment feels fresh compared with “writing what I know,” or writing “how” I know. Because yes, of course we ought to write what we know; but we also know about human beings, and we have imaginations, and anything is possible.

Ann E. Michael, Source material

I can’t quite believe that my poem ‘The Last Carry’ has now reached over a thousand likes on Bluesky, many of them from people beyond the poetry bubble. Oh, and a fair few of those likes have then gone on to generate sales of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. All in all, a terrific example of how social media, when functioning at its best, can generate new readers for poetry.

Matthew Stewart, A thousand likes

To date, Lit Mag News has nearly 17,000 subscribers. Just typing that figure makes my eyes well up. I can’t believe it. I really can’t. That’s…a lot of people thinking and caring about literary magazines. That’s a lot of people, right here, in this space.

And now I must tell you this: It has been one of the greatest pleasures of my professional life to make Lit Mag News.

It has been an honor to be entrusted with your questions, your experiences, your confidences, and to serve as a reliable means for you to get the information and inspiration you need in order to continue along your literary paths.

It is not always easy to feel a sense of connection on the internet. Heck, it’s not always easy to feel a sense of connection, period. But I feel that here. I feel it because of the ways that you, all of you, contribute to this space.

Thank you.

Becky Tuch, A Message For You

To celebrate Small Business Saturday, preorders of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are LIVE today at Madville Publishing. Preorder here.

We’re also thrilled to reveal the back cover, featuring photography by Donna Kile and stellar blurbs from Simon Morrison, Annie Zaleski, and Denise Duhamel.

“Collin Kelley and Megan Volpert present a dazzling collection of poems, reflections, and ruminations on the diva’s diva, Stevie Nicks. She would be the first to admit that her magic comes from her fans, and White Winged Doves is the proof. Here she is the inscrutable enchantress, queen of the queer pitch, your father’s favorite and Taylor Swift’s too as comforter, protector, and avenger.” — Simon Morrison, author of Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks 

Collin Kelley, Preorder & back cover reveal for the Stevie Nicks poetry anthology

I was hanging up some clothing and found a coat I’d knitted when I was in my early thirties. It’s a gorgeous Kaffe Fasset design, one of two I’ve made. A third used to be in the attic, waiting for me to get it back out. I could be knitting while I watch TV all winter.

And then I remembered what happened to that sweater. It became a poem.

Ravel

It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel the half-done coat—
the mohair enmeshed with wool,
the intertwined tweed and Wintuck
(in colors so promising you use it
though you know it pills).

It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel a foot of coat
with so much time invested […]

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, I Should Be Knitting

So, my book is now available! You can find all the information about it here on my website :).

I received two fantastic submissions in response to my call on social media to share a haiku or tanka about the moon or the night – and both poets will receive a free copy of ‘Don’t Write About The Moon’ <3. Their haiku inspired me to weave them into a haibun. Enjoy reading!

THICKETS

(John Hawkhead, t.j. zhang, Makoto)

there it is again
that harvest moon in the well
of my whisky glass

John Hawkhead, Presence 50

A hazy Saturday night. My thoughts have pulled me onward, though the shapes ahead are still hard to make out. The landscape breaks into mosaic fragments as I try to reassemble it once more: long, slender poplars overshadow the ground—why do I wander again to the thickets?

in a dream
over a field of irises
the moon

t.j. zhang, kurokuro.art

I halt, watch my breaths in the cold autumn air. What brought me here?

It’s beautiful. This purple, delicate streak in midnight blue, where does it end, where does it begin? Where do I? Let me walk on with hope on my soles.

I hear the grass straightening itself behind me.

Kati Mohr, Get your copy of Don’t Write About The Moon :)

The man who had stared at me throughout the workshop came up to me and handed me a piece of folded paper. He said “Don’t read it until you are at home, alone.” If I’m honest, I thought it was a poem or something. I said “Ok” and then carried on saying goodbye to people, packing up my things. I shoved the piece of paper into my pocket and forgot about it until later on that night when I was getting changed for the evening reading.

The piece of paper fell out of my pocket. I didn’t keep a copy of it, but my memory of what it said was something like ‘Do you really think your poems are going to be read after you are dead?” The man had drawn a scale with ‘shit poetry’ at one end and ‘memorable poetry’ at the other. I think there may have been a list of ingredients that make a good poem – rhyme etc. There was an arrow with a little picture of me at the shit end. He’d left his name and number on the paper and asked me to get in touch.

I felt more irritated than angry or upset, but I thought about what this might have felt like ten years ago, when I was first starting to write. I felt pleased that his behaviour and his words didn’t have the power to wound me in the way that they might have once upon a time.

After the reading, on impulse, I gave the piece of paper to one of the organisers and asked if I could talk to them after the festival was over. The organisers rang me the next day and were really supportive. They said they would ring and email the man concerned to tell him he was banned from attending any future readings. They also said they would review their safeguarding proceedings to ensure authors were not left unaccompanied at the end of events.

In the meantime, the man had contacted me through my website with this message:

I was the guy that gave you that note in ____ You seem8 to have a mischievous air about you which interests me. I have written some poems that nobody has seen. I wonder, would you like to meet for a coffee and I could read you two or three? I had some heart trouble last year and so don’t know how much time I’ve left?

I forwarded this onto the organisers without replying. After that he left some abusive comments online – calling me a nasty person – randomly, one is on a Reddit forum. I found out recently that the festival organisers had to report him to the police because he turned up at other events, managed to get inside said event (even though his description had been circulated) and then harassed other women writers. When they did report him to the police, they found out he was already known to them.

When I found this out, that he went on to harass other women, my first feeling was relief. Not that other women had been harassed, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone – but I think the relief was something to do with realising that this man was a damaged individual who wanted to hurt women, and that I did the right thing in reporting him. That I wasn’t being over sensitive, or not taking a joke. That I didn’t do anything wrong. That I wasn’t asking for it, that I didn’t do something that provoked him – even though the logical part of my brain knows all these things, I didn’t know it in my body until I heard he’d done it to other women as well.

I am sharing this now because I found out through the organisers that the man in question died not long ago so I feel safe to tell this story now – knowing that I’m not going to draw his attention to me again. Of course there are much worse things happening than this to women in our country and all around the world, but that is also kind of the point – I didn’t know whether this man would stop at a note and a few abusive messages, or whether he would become a full blown stalker.

Kim Moore, Day 5: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence: On Speaking Out

Should we ever consider our reader’s comfort when we write? “You can say anything, but are you saying anything?” If we discard the reader, who should the work connect with? Are we ever saying anything important and socially engaged, if we relinquish our care for the person the art reaches out to, the effect on them.

Aren’t poems meant to make us feel something? And what of the poet? Can we ever hold a poet responsible for their poem’s effect on the reader? As poets, aren’t we predisposed to accept that once a poem is published/in print/in the public eye, it no longer belongs to us – once in the reader’s hands, doesn’t the poem now live with their interpretations, their myriad experiences, their feelings rendered, their epiphanies, inspiration, disgust, discomfort?

Though the tone is crude and verging on aggressive, the sestet makes playful reference to Shakespearean metre with lines ten and eleven’s enjambement:

‘speak the bard’s measured iambic tight pent-/ a meter…’

The intentional spacing in the final line is breakaway from traditional sonnet metre to balance the rhetoric question in a space of its own, as if a multiplicity of answers all occupy the space together: a poet is responsible for the poem, the reader is responsible for feelings evoked, the speaker is responsible for their reactions, the speaker is responsible for awareness of their own arousal, the reader is responsible for awareness of embodied experience.

In that beautiful sense, poetry is society’s way marker. Poets have the joy of bringing all these soft grey contradictions to light, playing the role of both speaker and reader. What we say, we might be saying to ourselves, to another, to society, or to no one in particular. And when you hear a poet insist their words are ‘not a protest’ the glint of resistance is sure to be found.

Drop-in by Katrina Moinet (Nigel Kent)

A couple of weeks ago there was an excellent radio programme on about dealing with Writer’s Block – I’m buggered if I can remember the name of it at the mo, but it will come to me. Anyhoo, it popped back into mind while reading some John Clare the other night. I’m slowly working my way through a Selected of his…And that book includes selected passages from a wider poem called To the Rural Muse

Here’s the second stanza (that they include)

Muse of the pasture brook, on they calm sea
Of poesy I’ve sailed, and though the will
To speed were greater than the prowess be,
I’ve ventured with much fear of usage ill,
Yet more of joy. Though timid be my skill,
As not to dare the depths of mightier streams,
Yet rocks abide in shallow ways and I
Have much of fear its mingle with my dreams.
Yes, lovely muse, I still believe thee by
And think I see thee smile and so forget I sigh.

When the Words Leave…that was the name of the show; seems ironic somehow…Give the show a listen. I enjoyed it.

I think Mr C (not that one) is dealing with some writer’s block brought on by fear of being able to say the things he wants throughout this poem..among other things.

Mat Riches, Rocks abide in shallow ways

It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.

My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert’s almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life.

Maria Popova, Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World

The highlight of my writing year has been this week and has nothing to do with my own writing. I was invited to the St Andrew’s Day Ceilidh hosted by the Scottish Government’s Nordic Office, a well-kept little secret. I was invited through my connection with the Finnish Scottish Society who I help out every year with their annual Burns Supper and a ceilidh. We had no idea of what to expect, but it was the most amazing night. The guest stars were former Scotland Makar Jackie Kay and current Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen and the presenter and cultural commentator Ally Heather. I thought it might be a formal affair but it was far from that. 

It was introduced as a Highland lock-in with music and poetry and tons and tons of whisky which is exactly what it felt like. Ally welcomed us in and spent the evening wandering around topping up everyone’s glasses. All three were delightful to talk to. The musicians and poets on stage kept it casual and fun and joined in with the drinking and chat off. My mate even had to eject a too-drunk Finn during the first session by Scotland’s 2025 Young Traditional Musician Ellie Beaton. Had to happen at a Scottish event. Michael and Jackie’s performance were fun and full of energy. I’ve books by them both this year including Michael’s amazing Muckle Flugga which is a rollercoaster of a read. And listening to him perform you understand why. I wish I had taken photos, but to be honest, I was a bit star-struck. Luckily, my friend was thinking on his feet. 

Unfortunately, the lock-in didn’t happen, but we decanted to another pub down the road. I couldn’t stay as long as I’d like as I had work in the morning and kids waiting at home, but it was an absolute blast. It really made me miss the Scottish literary scene I used to dip my toes into. The mild hangover I took to school the next morning was totally worth it.

Gerry Stewart, St Andrew’s Day 2025

ラストシーンならこの町この枯木　大牧　広

lasuto shiin nara kono machi kono kareki

            for the movie’s last scene
            this town
            and this withered tree

                                                            Hiroshi Ohmaki

from Haiku, November 2025 issue, Kadokawa Zaidan, Tokyo

Fay’s Note:  Hiroshi Ohmaki (1931-2019)

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

November is historically a month of losses and grief, proven just this week by losing two of our cats to age and illness and spending a part of the holiday at an emergency vets office instead of sitting down to turkey dinner. While November takes a lot each year (things I love, the daylight, the mild weather, and occasionally my own health—lest we forget last November’s bout of tendonitus in my foot that had me hobbling a significant portion of last winter. ) it has, on occasion given good things as well. in the past these included book acceptances and new job opportunities, though this past month, it may just be a sense of order and calm, as well as good progress on something entirely new—a play! that is proving to be an enjoyable writing endeavor given my recent and renewed theatre fervor. While poetry is always my favorite child, stepping away from it has birthed some interesting side projects nevertheless. We are on the cusp of December, which brings a wrapping up and taking stock of the creative year, which I will be sharing in the next few weeks, so keep an eye over on the blog for that. Otherwise, until then, may the darkness not swallow you before the solstice…

Kristy Bowen, November Paper Boat

That pungent vinaigrette in the little dish:
pour the rest over the poem. 
It will taste delicious.

Push that boulder which is also a word
over the poem’s hillside.
See how much moss, grass and other worlds it gathers.  

Read this dream article on your subject.
We offer you your essential point, in dream
language. Use it.

That shovel. On the blackish background.  
In the center.  Here, you.  Dreamer, poet, person. 
Start digging.

Jill Pearlman, Thanksgiving Dreamed My Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you read each water anew.

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Everything I have not written

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where am I?

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

sacred shrine
worshippers raise
their selfie sticks

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

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

rice paddies blurring into the past bullet train

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

Annette Makino, Three wayfarers in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, A little story of birds and birdbrains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

james mcconachie, A Vein of Abiding Mineral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, October Reads

It started with a joke in a direct message… 

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. Now more than ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Solemn-sinister wreath-rubbish

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

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

Jill Pearlman, On Seeing Kara Walker in Mary Janes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You never see all of yourself.

Explore the places you’ve never been”

(Wolf Eye)

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

“Have you

seen the faces of flowers? …

What wallpaper did you choose for your face

before you went out?”

(Have You)

“What is the smell of mirrors?”

(Mirrors)

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

Victoria Spires, Alchemising the mundane

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

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

But look, you say, she is smiling.

And she is.

Her long hair floats out
like golden pondweed […]

Sue Finch, No Terrapin Today

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Captain Haddock in Monte Carlo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejections to Treasure

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

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

“Like what?” we asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, curation vs gatekeeping

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, The Power of Celebrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Stone, ESSAY / The Amalgamist’s Workshop

old encyclopedias:
I buy a complete set
for collaging

Bill Waters, A Collection of Moments: Library Book Sale

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, The poem within the poem

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

Bound Voices #001: A Conversation with Victoria Moul

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

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

https://sheilabender.substack.com

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

Bethany Reid, Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Blessing” by James Wright

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

I want to read those writers.

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Writing Prompts & Working Class Writers

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

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

Sarah Lada, We All Become Just Bodies

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

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

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

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Being present in grief.

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Landfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Jewish Heretics and Wild Writers

old skin. thin.

one can see through it to a future.

crows feed on the sunflower’s eye.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: the miracle of chance, fluff under pressure, a man in a shattered house, a charm against the inconceivable, and much more. Enjoy.

It is the season of unloosening: the chaos of high winds, torrential rain, sudden squalls. Each day’s a contradiction: beauty and decay in the carpets of fallen leaves; bruised skies suddenly punctured by bursts of a retreating sun. Time to prepare ourselves for the exodus of light and the night’s imminent veil.

shavasana*
we all take a little longer
to return

*shavasana = ‘corpse pose’ in yoga, usually the final pose of a practice session that allows for mental and physical rest and recovery before re-entering daily life.

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Almost November

The frenzy of fall 
after ceding all 
to the sun 

we walk into the pause
rapt, the minus, 
not the slightest jangle
of cicada

silence
sucking down
into earth’s own navel

Jill Pearlman, Silent Fall

I would like to believe in signs — the owl in the tree right outside my bedroom signifying something momentous is about to happen, that period in my life where I kept dreaming of birds, that rock I found that looks like a road map. But I don’t. Shit happens and it just is, without reason nor the benefit of foresight. Is that a sad way to be in the world? I don’t mind the miracle of chance, or chemical combinations plus time and pressure, or the odd ways in which the brain works its own chemistry. It’s all a wonder to me, even without a message. I’m human too, though, and yearn for some advance notice, some way to foretell whether I’m about to make a good decision or disastrous, some way to catch a glimpse inside the unknown of something I can know and clasp to me like an umbrella in the face of possible rain. But I’m pretty much left with the old death and taxes thing. And whatever I can pick up with my five-ish senses, imperfect as they are, and what mind I carry around from day to day in my head. The other day I looked down and saw a tiny manhole cover, a perfect circle with radiating lines. If I lifted it up I might find a tiny sewer into the center of the earth. Turns out it was the lopped off head of a mushroom. One of those little pointy-headed gray ones stuck upside-down in the grass. Hunh. You just never know, though. Anything’s possible.

Marilyn McCabe, I stay up late listening

As I filtered out of a particularly fun workshop-reading-open mic at BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, one of the participants called back to me as he ambled down the dark street, “Thanks, Professor Mushroom!” The featured image above with its weird reflections, taken at a booth at the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, conjures, for me, that slightly wacky persona I inhabit when I bard around with Mycocosmic–as if I know things about fungi (I’m an amateur); am relaxed about performing (ha); and really feel kind of mystical and hopeful about our underground connections to each other (well, that one’s true on a good day). […]

On the trip’s last leg I stayed with Jeannine and Glenn Gailey in Woodinville. Jeannine asked about my favorite moments from the adventure. A few hikes came to mind, but I also found myself saying “talking to strangers.” I’m an introvert who has to pay herself back for socializing with hours of quietness, so this isn’t my usual answer! Maybe it feels true because the “talking” involved a lot of listening. A reading with Matthew Nienow organized by Michele Bombardier, both terrific poets, felt special, as did the open mic that followed and my side conversations with audience members. Open mics feature wide variations in poetic skill, yet they’re one of my favorite formats. There’s something electric about so many people listening hard and taking risks, putting strong feelings out there. The Kirkland one ended with a performance that pinged between witty poetic lines and harmonica riffs–I won’t soon forget it.

Lesley Wheeler, Professor Mushroom listens to strangers

Blah blah blah went the (very well written) review until bang there you were coming alive in your own words (I do like a review that quotes the actual poems): ‘be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note’ and then ‘a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling’ and I felt something in me shift, a small but deeply profound intake of breath, somewhere between the words oh and wow. I can only describe it as an embodied moment. We (I, everyone) overuse the word visceral now, don’t we, but that’s where I felt it, in my good old Roman viscera. I knew I had to find more.

A quick spot of googling later and that’s what happened, a whole page of you at the Scottish Poetry Library no less, in a navy sweater (I have one too!) in front of the obligatory bookshelf, not looking at the camera (I’m with you on that), with a full biog at the foot of which an injunction to ‘Read the poems’. Which I did. Drank them, more like, gulping, swallowed them whole, not even touching the sides. At which point I started again.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark

What is it that separates us,
and what keeps us together?
In the garden, I rake
the leaves from the fruit trees.

I write,
but my mouth has many tongues—
in the city, all the windows open
in the morning.

Kati Mohr, Of Course, The Tissues In the Backpack Are Always Deep Down At the Bottom, Below Anything Else

I envy, to a degree, all those poets who just build up to a critical mass of uncompiled poems, work out an order for them, call that a collection, then start the process all over again. I can’t do that — it feels aimless. I think in book, as much as I think in poem. I like a book to have a thesis, and to know what it is as I’m writing it, even if — as in this case — it’s not something I could ever summarise neatly.

As for ‘Lightning Conductor’, I like that it isn’t about anything much, that it’s a little bit lazy. Check out that comma splice — I’m always telling my students to take those out. The whole thing’s just a bad pun, a newspaper cartoon. It doesn’t even want to commit to the sex or humanity of its principal character — etymologically, ‘mannequinesque’ means ‘man-like-ish’. I imagine it being spoken by someone who means to convince the listener that much of what seems like power is mere theatrical affectation. All that build-up — all that careful ceremony — just for the briefest of illuminations.

I also imagine the speaker gesturing intently at some shape on top of a building. Probably not a figure at all — probably just a chimney or plumbing stack. They want the listener to do all the work of imagining a person who is imagining themselves to be a wizard. Nothing at all has happened, is happening, beyond what occurs in the mind’s eye — even the city and the dark-blooded glass are illusions cast upon an empty page.

Jon Stone, POEM / Lightning Conductor

I wrote this on a wet October day, looking out onto the stony beach at Borth, its Bronze Age forest part-covered by the sweep of a dull metallic tide. As I wrote, early poems crowded into my mind, shouting for attention – and I saw them in my own hand, written in biro on A4 stapled together – my first collections. As a child, writing poetry was gathering shells, shards, bright pebbles. The universe offered small and lovely objects and I picked them up and kept them, and sometimes, I showed them to other people who thought they were pretty. A pocketful of pebbles and kind words were enough.

That changed as I grew. By my teenage years, bigger and darker things came in on the tide. […]

By the time I was detained in psychiatric hospital in my third year of uni, I’d stopped writing poetry. I was too far from the world, and from myself: I had no drive or hope of being understood. The journal I kept in those years is too dark to read, though I still keep it.

I started to write poetry again in a writing group for survivors of sexual abuse facilitated by the author and teacher Mandy Coe. Mandy is a life-force, bright and loud: we were driftwood, and she carried us. She took us to our first performance poetry night – Dead Good Poets Society; we wrote in the Walker Gallery; we cut up our poems and threw in them the air like David Bowie; we performed our poetry in the Everyman and our friends came. I read a poem about my time on the wards: “small wonder that some screamed or swore/ or crept into lonely corners/ and quietly gave up hope”.

I had a story I needed to tell, and I could not tell it over dinner, or in idle chat. But I could tell it in poetry.

Clare Shaw, Poetry and Wellbeing: part 1

[M]y next book has transformed. If you’ve read my previous post, you’ll remember I undertook extensive revision and redrafting to help the book find its story and tell it effectively. After this work was complete I approached Olivia Tuck, who I worked with on my second book Dust to see if she still offered her “poem whisperer” service. Olivia’s insight and suggestions mean my book has really grown into itself . It’s currently out at publishers and up for judgement in various competitions. I’m really proud of the book it has become and that I’m at the point where I feel it is “right.” This sense of completion means I have space for other projects. My first focus is on creating poems for a competition that couldn’t be more up my street if it tried. I’m so thrilled to have a clear focus and to be working on something that I feel so inspired by. I’m also investigating the possibility of working on a project inspired by the action group This Ends Now who highlight the failures of the press to report violence against women without shifting blame, or diluting reality. I’m not quite sure on the form this will take, but I’ll have more news after my meeting with their CEO on Tuesday. I feel like I’ve found my writer’s groove again.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Poetry news from Kathryn Anna

A strange week. The structure of the week falling down when my mum’s chemo was cancelled at the last minute. I would have liked to have been one of those people who saw this as an opportunity to have an extra day to write, but we are back to the incessant gnawing of not knowing what’s happening with my mum’s care, and I can’t write when my brain is fizzy with anxiety.

I haven’t done any creative writing of any kind since I sent the chunk of my novel to my agent to see what they think. Within two days of sending it I realised there were darlings still to kill. I could lose three thousand words of what I think might be writer-scaffolding: the story that I’m telling to myself before it becomes the story, and it would work better. But I’ve decided to wait and see what my agent’s initial reaction is before I scythe a massive chunk off it. I’m actually quite glad to have a week or so away from it.

I’ve used this week to consider what I want to do with substack, and to update it accordingly. I’ve used a lot of feedback from some in person events to shape how I think about what I present here. I’m not sure I mentioned in my last diary post that I was on a bit of a workshop running marathon, piling through a load of pre planned appearances and workshops facilitation which I’d set up before we found out that my mum’s cancer had spread and her care needs would be increased. So far I’m still managing the workload, around mum’s increased needs, possibly because there is an end in sight. A previous version of myself wanted to see if I could reduce my workload, if not take a complete break, in December, and I have left that whole month clear of workshops and mentoring, with just creative stuff and this substack to write.

I’m looking forward to embracing December as a writer, but the truth is that I’ve had a bit of an epiphany while I’ve been out of the cocoon of my writing room and actually speaking to real life people, and that epiphany is that this element of my work, alongside writing on substack, not only nourishes me as a person, but also as a writer. I’m so quick to grumble because so much of non writing work takes me away from actual writing. What I am becoming more aware of are the benefits of non-book-writing on my own writing practice, stuff that bleeds into my long term writing.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from My Writing Diary – Part Two

Over the summer I followed along as his collection of raw photos grew and he started winnowing them down into a smaller, curated selection. Recurring motifs started to emerge: People standing in the sun, big trees with broken limbs, detritus strewn in the park. People embracing trees or plants. People closing their eyes and turning their faces to the sky.

As JP’s photo collection took shape, I started scribbling notes for poems. Some were a direct response to his photo or the theme of the Sun’s rotation. Haiku and tanka seemed particularly suitable to the theme of transience, so I wrote a handful of each of those. Since he’d shared unedited photos with me, I decided to do the same with my drafts, and shared photos of my notebook pages.

As JP entered the final weeks of his residency, he began preparing the gallery show that would be its culmination. This prompted me to edit and finalize my collection of poems, which I shared with him.

It was then that JP surprised me for a second time by asking if I would do a Listener Poet session for him. Of course I was delighted by this request: as a newly certified Listener Poet, I’m eager to share this practice with others. So we spent half an hour one morning talking about his approach to photography, and in particular one portrait session he’d done recently in Berlin. After that, I spent a couple of days letting my notes steep, and then I drafted a poem for him, “Portrait of the Photographer.” (see below)

JP’s show went well. The gallery space looked beautiful, and even though I couldn’t visit Berlin to attend, he shared a video walkthrough of the space. And that’s when he gave me a third surprise: At the end of his video, he zoomed in on a handout that the gallery curators had included as part of the show, including a few of my tanka and haiku.

Dylan Tweney, Collaboration and photography

Albert is taken from my second pamphlet, Case Notes, which is based on my own experiences, both in hospital practice and as a family doctor.

Albert was the first really sick patient I looked after as a newly qualified doctor. Youthful inexperience gave me complete faith that medicine would make him better, despite his age and frailty. […]

The consultant was old-school, with a pin-striped suit and an aura of importance. Despite Albert having been in the services and used to obeying orders, both he and the kindly consultant taught me the need to respect patient autonomy.

My first pamphlet, Patient Watching, features a sequence of poems in the form of a heroic crown, in the voice of a single-handed GP in the Black Country featured in John Berger’s book A Fortunate Man. Berger’s book includes wonderful photographs of his encounters with patients, which I used as a prompt to tell stories from my own patient experiences.

I use the same device in Case Notes, writing in the voices of doctors who cared for actors and artists from the past, including Frida Kahlo, Sarah Bernhardt, Andy Warhol and Wilfred Owen. The added advantage is not having to protect patient confidentiality.

Drop-in by Judith Wozniak (Nigel Kent)

My poetry writing goes in cycles.  The cycle I like best is the one where I have a glimmer of an idea for a poem, a glimmer that takes shape throughout the day as I think about it, and by the time I sit down at my writing desk, I’ve got a shape of a poem to work with–and yet, there’s still a delightful surprise or two.

Of course it’s the cycle I like best.  Who wouldn’t like this part?  It’s where I feel like I’m doing what I’ve been put on earth to do.  It’s the part of the cycle where I feel like I’ve come across some secret portal, available to all but undertaken by few, where I glimpse the secrets of creation (which I mean in all sorts of senses of that word).

Usually my writing process is more like this:  I have a line or two, I see what I can do with them, I come up with a bit more but not a complete poem, I put it aside to think about it later, and I rarely return.  It might be for a happy reason:  the fragment leads to a more solid idea.  It’s more usual that I put it aside and then a week or two goes by, and I don’t have any additional ideas, and life gets hectic.

Lately I’ve been stuck in the cycle I like least:  no ideas, no glimmers, no lines that fizzle out and go nowhere.  I feel like it’s been months since I wrote a line, although that’s not true.

Yesterday, much to my delight, I came up with two poems.  In the morning, I had a flash of an idea about gingerbread houses being evidence of a woman working out her trauma.  I decided to go big:  make the speaker the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.  It’s not done yet, but here is how the poem starts right now:

I deal with loss by baking.
My gingerbread structures tell
you all you need to know
about the trauma that still lives
deep inside me.

In the afternoon, I had the idea to have the gingerbread house speak.  The gingerbread house says that its not its fault that it bewitches small children. From there, the poem devolves a bit.   I had been listening to coverage of the book published by a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein, and the stories are harrowing, and those stories were in my mind as I wrote.  I need to do some work on getting the symbolism squared away.  The gingerbread house is not Epstein–that would be the witch.  Or maybe I want to back away and go in a different direction.

Or maybe not.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Two Rough Drafts Composed of Gingerbread

’Tis the season of mists and fellow mutefulness, apparently, and there being no one else available to write the substack this week (the other NSPs are all currently on the road or under the cosh) I thought I’d scribble something about fluff, or at least fluff under pressure. Lint, possibly. The poem below was a commission for Radio 4’s The Verb about three years back. The Verb has been on my mind this week. Late last year, in the course of a conversation with Ian MacMillan about the poetry of train stations, I had foolishly volunteered that no poem could possibly be written about Leuchars. For reasons both topographic and personal, I have long found it the least poetic station in the UK. Obviously, the poem was commissioned on the spot.

Leuchars is the closest station to the University of St Andrews, where I taught for a couple of happy decades, and with which I am still gently affiliated. But the station itself just reminds me of all the hours I spent freezing on a bench outside a locked waiting room in pitch-dark December, trying to mark exam scripts in the teeth of a North Sea gale, while yet another fighter jet from the airbase tore up the sky twenty feet above my head and the board told me yet another train had failed to make it out of Aberdeen. The Leuchars poem may or may not be any good – you can and will judge for yourselves, if you happen to be near a wireless next week – but as a rambling meditation on war, teaching, cutlery, dementia and death, I don’t think it can count as genuine fluff.

Unlike the poem below. It’s really a piece of occasional verse, the occasion being the BBC’s centennial: a few of us were charged with coming up with some kind of poetic tribute to the Reithian project, in whatever form we fancied. Writing poems for BBC radio is done for love, and often just for the love of Ian MacMillan. As a casual contributor, one is rewarded, more or less, only for the amount of airtime one destroys. A sonnet that took you three months will pay you roughly the same as someone else will get for breaking wind across the same minute. Lacking the normal incentives, BBC commissions can therefore sometimes be … deprioritised by more financially urgent work, which is a way of saying that I totally forgot to do this one. The dedicatee here is the poet Denise Riley, for two reasons: a) Denise reminded me that the poem was due in 48 hours, and b) she actually likes this sort of thing, or claims to, and indeed is very good at it herself. (There may still be a few who persist in thinking of Denise solely as some kind of doyenne of the UK avant-garde, but I suspect most of you know she’s many other things besides, and besides was never quite that thing in the first place.) By way of competitive encouragement, she sent me a fine poem on the now-lost rite of the 5pm Saturday footie results, specifically on the cadences of the sportscaster – his ‘RP weighty, self-assured and calm, / avuncular with its velvety inflections’ as its rise or fall foreshadowed the fate of the club. One could be certain Stenhousemuir had nilled again, well before the nil was confirmed.

All of which is to say … This poem was written in a tearing rush. As my NSP colleagues know, I suffer from Pascal syndrome. I often lack the time to make things shorter. I wrote the poem in a form I know I can deliver fairly quickly; this is where a certain motor-skill relationship to the old 4×4 can come in handy, and the rhymes left to dictate much of the poem. The poem had to find its way to its own conclusion, as none had been planned. It takes a while to yak its way there, but I kind of enjoyed the passivity. As Erroll Garner once said after an overlong piano solo, ‘I’m sorry – I just wanted to find out what happened in the end.’

Don Paterson, North Sea Line Caught, #2: ‘Kissing on the Radio’

Tomorrow I’m recording a tutorial on Horror Poetry for Writer’s Digest and the 30th I’m talking to a class at University of New Orleans about publicity and poetry. Doing the tutorial was an opportunity for me to do more in-depth thinking about what makes a horror poem a horror poem—does Sylvia Plath count? Louise Gluck? Am I a horror poet?

But real life threw in a real scare in the middle of spooky season—my father went into the hospital last night with a serious illness, so we’ve been texting and talking to mom and dad back in Ohio. Hopefully he’s in recovery by Halloween.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Poetry Friends and Readings, Horror Poetry, Halloween/Samhain and Some Real Life Scares

In the year following the death of my mother, I wrote a single poem a day for a longer, sustained span of time than ever before. It was the first time I’d ever successfully completed NAPOWRIMO, but then I just kept going for months. […] Part of it was a way to feel more focused, more present in the world. Part of it was a renewed sense of mortality. Soon, I had an entire book about mothers and mothering, some with very gothic undertones, that became my collection FEED. When my father passed nearly exactly 5 years later, I went through a similar spurt of new poems built around memory and grief that formed segments of RUINPORN. These series and poems were much less about working things out (my relationship with my father being very much less complicated than that with my mother–at least from the standpoint of making art within my grief. ) They jived well with other themes in the overall book and formed the backbone of a collection that also explored societal grief and the loneliness of the internet. […]

[G]rief is always a kind of haunting–not supernatural, but just as real as any emotion. The sense of unreality. For months, my mother was in my dreams, not knowing she was dead. Sometimes, I knew this and had to tell her. Sometimes, it knocked the wind out of me to be discovering it for the first time. I would wake up startled and sweating and sadder than I’d gone to bed. It waned after a few months, but would still occasionally happen. I chalked it up to the fact that I was not there when she passed, nor did I want to see her body before cremation. I later thought maybe doing so would have stopped the dreams. When my dad died, it was more sudden, a few weeks of decline vs. several months of hospitalization/care center. But I was there for his last breath in the hospital bed. We sat with the body for awhile after he was gone. My brain decided this was enough, and when he appears in my dreams on occasion, that shock and realization doesn’t come into play. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about how horror as a genre gives us permission to explore the darker corners of human experience. And grief? It sometimes lives in those corners. Even if you can’t see it, you know it’s there. When you’re grieving, people often want you to be “okay” as quickly as possible. They want the neat narrative arc: sadness, acceptance, moving on. But grief isn’t neat. It’s messy and recursive and sometimes it looks like a creature that shape-shifts every time you think you’ve got it figured out. One day it’s a whisper, the next it’s got claws.

Horror poetry lets you name that monster. It gives you the vocabulary for experiences that polite conversation won’t touch. You can write about death not as a gentle sleep but as the violent rupture it actually feels like. You can describe the emptiness as a void that actually swallows things, because that’s what it feels like when grief takes your appetite, your sleep, your ability to remember what life felt like before it existed. There’s something deeply validating about using dark imagery to describe dark feelings. It’s honest in a way that all the usual euphemisms never are.

Gothic literature has always understood that grief and horror are close cousins. Think about all those Victorian poems dripping with mourning imagery—the crumbling estates, the ghosts, the women in white wandering the moors. They weren’t being melodramatic (okay, maybe a little). They were trying to externalize an internal experience that defied ordinary description. When Poe wrote “The Raven,” he wasn’t just crafting a spooky poem. He was writing about the way grief makes you interrogate the universe, demanding answers you know won’t come. That bird repeating “Nevermore” is the truth grief forces you to swallow: they’re not coming back. No matter how many times you ask.

Kristy Bowen, horror and grief

I remember that strange month, sad month, odd month. I remember listening to these tapes and hearing my boot heels clicking on the pavement, then being surprised by voices, how many kind people called out and spoke to me as I walked around my London: Hello Salena, they said, Alright, mate! Sometimes they called my name like this, Hello Salena, passing someone crossing a busy street, Hello, as you bump into someone in a pub. Hello Godden they’d say on these tapes – not knowing I was observing my life in audio, not knowing my pockets were stuffed full, spare batteries, blank tapes, a notebook and pen.

I was a little scientific and analytic about it. But I was also quite smashed a lot of the time, so I would make mistakes, flip a cassette tape over and record over the same side twice or forget to change the batteries and lose some crucial evidence, events and late hours. It was pot luck what actually got recorded and saved and what was lost forever. I know I was behaving unnaturally, performing, sometimes thinking I was being clever, knowing I was on tape, telling people they were on tape and us all performing to the tape. Telling folk it was a wild experiment. And people would change the way they spoke to me. Or react as though I was a journalist interviewing them. All the time I wondered: How much of life is a performance? What is real? Authentic? True? Why do we change when we know there is a recording of our idea of self ?

Each morning I would wake up and make tea or pour a beer and smoke fags and record myself listening to the recordings from the day before and type poems and write diaries about the audio content: how it made me feel, what or who was I hearing. Writing and processing the images and emotions and soundscapes I’d captured. These morning poetry sessions and recordings became a loop of the days before-before-before and the typing-typing-typing and the sound of writing-writing-writing. A mirror looping into a mirror looping into a mirror. I remember I wrote about the sound of October and the autumn leaves and my adventures in Soho and all the people I’d bumped into and chatted and drank with the day before. I wrote about performance, how we perform when we don’t need to. What is real and what is unreal. What is expected? If nobody is looking, are we more ourselves to ourselves?

In pubs and bars (for I was mad and young and out drinking every night) I would tell people, I am recording my life on earth, it’s a poetry experiment and notice them begin to either shout and perform for me and the tape, or go quiet and change when they knew, I knew, they knew they were being recorded.

I forgot about it until now. I’m not going to open the box, not this year. Maybe in another ten years’ time. I know the box is down in the basement, but no, not now, I won’t open it now, it is enough to know it is there, sealed and dusty, it is good to know it is down there. I am gazing out of my window at the orange leafy October light and remembering it and that era.

I recall one tape: I’m with my mum in an M&S changing room as she is making me get fitted for a new bra. We are laughing. It is a moment of intimacy and love. And on another tape I’m with Oli, we’re drinking absinthe up high on the edge of the Hastings cliffs and singing death wishes into the abyss. I want to jump into the stormy sea. I record a taste of loss. Now we are here, and in this October, and the leaves

          still

            fall.

Salena Godden, October Tape Experiment

On Friday, I was one of six readers at an Off the Shelf Festival event in the University of Sheffield Drama Studio’s theatre, as a celebration of forty years of my and every other UK poet’s favourite poetry journal, The North. Hosted by the co-editor (and co-director of the Poetry Business), Peter Sansom, it consisted of a delightful 20-minute reading by the Sheffield Poet Laureate, Beth Davies, whose pamphlet The Pretence of Understanding won the New Poets’ Prize 2022, and then short readings – by Peter, Alan Payne, James (Jim) Caruth, Kate Rutter and me – each of three poems which had appeared in The North. I read Stephen Payne’s superb villanelle, ‘Dai’, Victoria Gatehouse’s brilliant, and brilliantly-titled, ‘Reservoir Gods’, and my own ‘The Prang’. It was another very memorable event, and a fitting tribute to Ann and Peter Sansom’s work over the years to cement The North as a hugely important pillar of the poetry scene in the UK and beyond.

And then yesterday, I went to my third poetry event in as many days. I have to say that by this point I was feeling as though I was permanently living in a bubble of poetry.

Matthew Paul, On the last while

Are you ignoring my message or are we
in the middle of some strange
literary cliffhanger?

I’m pitching real readers, real reviews,
real visibility, and you’re giving me
the silent treatment like I’m asking you
for your Netflix password.

Luisa A. Igloria, A Marketing Bot Reaches Out in Vain (a partially found poem)

Delivered by the postal service earlier the week, a book as mesmerizing as the leaves the leaves falling from the trees along our street this week—- yellow for an instant and then smitten by asphalt — Earthly, a collection of Jean Follain’s poems translated by Andrew Seguin.

Camille Corot’s lithograph, The Gust of Wind (1871), sits lightly on the cover, gesturing towards Canisy, the small village in Normandy where the poet in question was born and fed bread. In the translator’s introduction, Seguin paints a portrait of his subject: this writer named Jean Follain who saw the agricultural lifeways of small towns gutted by the new economy of killing, the human looking for words in the wasteland following World War II, an event sponsored by governments who caused the mass death of young men and starved village economies of the labor required for their continuance. […]

What happens in Follain’s poems?

Things are touched. Things touch back. Subjects pause like objects in a dark painting. Children “dressed in black rags” scamper through ruins.” A man’s smile “vibrates” alongside the spike of wheat in his scythe. Snails sleep as the bread burns. “The protagonist of dreams” savors wine flavored by “myrtle and cypress” as alcohol fuels arguments in the pub. Doors creak through “cold rooms.” The “rustle” of poplars near rivers rouses the blood. A novelist studies the wandering vapors. A glass blushes like a continental sunset. The “already yellow” of lindens in July crosses paths with violins who are napping in their velvet-lined coffins.

In “Landscape of Rural Hardship”:

A small garden of chives
trembles beneath the stars.

The hardship is expressed in trembling of tiny chives.

Follain opens his “Eclogue” with a man in a “shattered house” who “plays at the game of existing” as the wind groans through the orchard. With no transition, Follain abandons the man for “the lightning-struck oak” where a bird perches on a limb, singing, unafraid, slowly morphing into a haunting image:

an old man has placed his hand
where a young heart
vowed obedience.

Gestures consecrate the movements in Follain’s poems.

Alina Stefanescu, Jean Follain.

It’s a largish distance between [Carl] Phillips’ poems of careful observation to the ‘Post Dada’ world of Tomaž Šalamun as translated by Brian Henry, with its determined undermining of polite expectation:

Folk Song

Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys the voice and the people.
His singing builds the technology that destroys
the earth so that the worms don’t eat us.
A drunkard sells his coat.
A scoundrel sells his mother.
Only a poet sells his soul
to separate it from the body that he loves.

This extends from the rejection of conventional narrative:

Stories that have a first scene, a second
scene, a first border, a second border, surrender like
a lump of meat.

To the wish to go naked through the desert, even if it means abandoning one’s child:

No, I said, we’ll both go.
What will happen with Ana, Maruška said.
We’ll leave her in the car and give her
cookie. Cookie was at that time
still a drink for Ana.

But it would be a mistake to read these poems as simply a kind of teenage desire to shock, there’s a serious, almost political, impulse underlying them, a desire to pare life back to some kind of simplicity. One poem ends with the line ‘A person explodes from too much luxury.’ Šalamun has no wish to share that fate.

Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: Part 2

It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.

Fokkina McDonnell, Having Her Cake

I’m intrigued by this full-length debut by Vancouver poet Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025), a poetry collection that “invites the reader to take a freight elevator ride into the guts of heavy industry,” and featuring back cover blurbs by Canadian poets Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, two of the originators of the 1970s Canadian “work poetry” ethos (amid those Kootenay School of Writing origins) that also included early work by poets Phil Hall and Erín Moure [see my longer note on some threads on “work poetry” as part of my recent review of Philadelphia poet Gina Myers’ Works & Days]. Shah’s lyrics provide a fascinating patter, one that utilizes the subject matter of labour across scenes of industrial sites and restaurant workers, composing what appear at first glance as first-person descriptive narratives, but one capable of nuanced twists and turns of sound and meaning. “dendrobranchiata,” begins the poem “prawn,” “you throw your roe out / like you remove a cava cage / spill the wine, let life flow / into its briny flute [.]” There’s almost a way her lyric is closer to the language model of poets such as ryan fitzpatrick or Peter Culley than Wayman or Braid, existing somewhere between those two points, offering labour as her building blocks but language as her poem’s propulsion. “here,” begins her poem “fear and probability,” “a woman’s soft body / is found only / in cubicle fabric nests // but I am a huntress / sparkles under steel toes / shuffling between petrochemical rainbows / into open bays / under heavy-lift ulnae / along the riverfront [.]” She offers her perspectives through and around labour, and around gender, a conversation less prevalent than it should be, even despite the high percentages of women working across various industries for decades. The language flourishes, provides flourish. While labour exists as her surrounding subject, much as Gina Myers, Shah sets her poems at the moment of actual, concrete and physical work, writing, as the short poem “ulnaris/radialis” begins: “egret, backhoe— / hand origami’s / carpal puppetry / prepares her for / the work of days / of women; [.]”

rob mclennan, Christina Shah, if: prey, then: huntress

Through “Darling Blue”, Sarah James has created two complementary threads. One is the doomed (fictional) affair of a woman with a married man that watches her move from the delusion of love to acceptance that she too was complicit in romanticising something tawdry. The wife is outside the frame: it’s not known if she knows of the affair or if the husband is a serial cheat. But there is a strong sense of self-discovery on the speaker’s part. The affair has enabled her to try out a role and learn what love is not. The ekphrastic poems add to the commentary: the speaker’s reaction to Crane’s “Neptune’s Horses” moves from awe at their power to identification where she takes back control after she realises that she was fooling herself. It’s a collection that rewards re-reading, a slow walk through a gallery, taking time to sit with each piece and choose to focus on the whole or a fragment, ask why a particular shade of blue was chosen or marvel at how the brushstrokes direct the light and the viewer’s eye, guiding it to see what the artist wants to reveal.

Emma Lee, “Darling Blue” Sarah James (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Last week I wrote about a poem that turned out to be a kind of private joke. This produced varied responses — several readers felt annoyed to have been “shut out” in this way, by a literary reference and concealed translation they could not reasonably have been expected to recognise. To them it felt high-handed. But others wrote to say that they didn’t mind this kind of thing — that they quite liked the feeling of “overhearing” something like a private joke, or in-crowd reference, intimate to the poet.

Perhaps this difference in response has something to do with how we think about the balance of power between the author and the reader in determining the meaning of a poem. But sometimes difficulty or obscurity can act as a kind of licence — it occurred to me afterwards that it might in fact have been Longley’s own puzzlement over the obscure names in that passage in Ovid that drew him to translate it in the first place.

There’s a good example of the way obscurity can be a spur to creativity, and even a kind of titillation, in a little Latin poem — little more than a squib — which apparently circulated pretty widely in England for a good couple of centuries. We can start around the middle of its history. In one Cambridge manuscript of the early seventeenth century, a single double-page spread records a series of mock-epitaphs — including poems on Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626), Sir Christopher Hatton (d. 1591) and a certain Gresham (probably Sir Thomas Gresham, d. 1579, but possibly an earlier one — we’ve met this family in death before). Christopher Hatton’s enormous tomb in St Paul’s towered over the altar and obscured other monuments, which seems to be the point of one of the epigrams, appearing in this case in both Latin and English:

Epitaphs. of S^r Fra: Wal: & S^r Ph: Sid:

Nullus Francisco tumulus nullusque Philipo,
Christoforo mons est, ac tumulus cumulus.

Philipe and Fra[ncis] haue noe Tombe,
for Christopher hath all the roome.

Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, just a few years after Sir Philip Sidney, his son-in-law, in 1586. They were both, like Hatton, buried in (old) St Paul’s, though apparently without much in the way of a monument. The manuscript itself dates from the 1620s, so this epigram had already been going around for a while when it was written down. It can’t date from before Hatton’s death, but the jingly Latin (nullus, tumulus, nullus, tumulus, cumulus) is very unclassical in style and could easily have been written any time between the fifteenth and eighteenth century.

Victoria Moul, The evergreen obscenity

a chatbot tells me:
mother has a Proto-Indo-European root word
that sounds almost the same
so does love
though its Sanskrit cognate — lobha —
can translate to greed
one of the six enemies of the mind.

the brain watches itself process the threads
its recursive algorithm
offers a carousel of images:
picture of a woman #*méh₂tēr
picture of a night sky #thebenignfaceofchaos
picture of a rocking horse #metaphorforsomethingstilled
picture of an unidentifiable object #cellmemoryfromadifferentstateofmatter
wheels skid on ice #noimagefound

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The square root of family

Introduction to Cloud Care – Laura Theis

maybe i’ll call gillian anderson – Rhian Elizabeth

I bought these collections from Broken Sleep Books a few months ago, during a phase when writing at least one review a week seemed like a task I had more than enough energy for (seriously, what was I thinking?!). But even though this review is not incredibly timely, I have been reading and re-reading them the whole while, and they have remained grouped together in my mind, despite their apparent differences in style.

In fact, I think they have more in common than first appears. Both have gorgeous covers (typical of Broken Sleep), with striking, glossy images against a deep blue background. Both are from poets with many accolades and awards to their name. Both are tender and vulnerable, but while maybe i’ll call gillian anderson half-hides its vulnerability within a spiny lobster shell, Introduction to Cloud Care lets its layers of softness and ethereality cloak a deeper toughness and resilience.

Both collections also deal in humour and more than a little dash of the surreal, providing moments of levity that underscore the more serious ones. […]

If I could draw another thread between Elizabeth’s and Theis’ work, it’s a sense of how we continue to be haunted by our past selves, but also a desire for reinvention. As Elizabeth tells us, in the most pleasing of things, “memory is a contemptuous old bitch”.

Victoria Spires, Memory, magic, and the art of reinvention

If you’re anything like me, the news of the congressional testimony by major publishers that, among a sample size of 58,000 books published in 2020, 50% sell fewer than 12 copies, utterly shocked you. According to this data, the average publishing run sells six units (six individual books). This isn’t quite true, but such views offer a window into the cynical state of affairs in contemporary publishing circles.

The dissolution of Small Press Distribution in 2024 was likewise an earthquake in an already unstable literary ecosystem. It was during this tumultuous period that my literary organization, Sybil, set out to transition from an online-only press to an organization with the capability to execute print projects. What came next was something few might have predicted, and which we certainly hadn’t prepared for: success, on our own terms.

The most recent testament to this success came after we published a chapbook of poetry by Megan Williams, entitled Window Person. While our organization was (and, at least in a public-facing capacity, remains) not quite open for full-length submissions, we solicited a collection of her writing, making note of the prominence of the pages we had previously published featuring her work. These had become some of the most visited on the entire site. Over a period of 2-3 weeks, we exchanged emails and editorial feedback, she added poems to the collection, and the entire project was “stress-tested,” (that is, the formalistic qualities of certain poems were questioned, ensuring intentionality). The end result is a powerful chapbook, which combines the ethos of confessional poetry with a sharp satirical edge, and contains references which place it in a literary tradition that is explicitly aligned with our goals as a publisher.

The pre-order for the collection (which was as many as we initially planned on producing) sold out in nearly two hours. After expanding our print run, the collection sold out again after only ten hours. For the moment, only digital copies are available! What more could a lit mag ask for?! How is it that, in the midst of all of this unsettling news and anxiety, we found publishing success? This is the question that I will attempt to answer here.

Despite the click-bait-y title of this article, there is no ‘secret’ to publishing success (sorry!). If there is, the average working writer (like myself) may not want to hear it: work with someone with an established platform, and brand recognition, and create an authentic collaboration for a well-drafted, meaningful project. This was the case here. Sybil’s success in this context is in large part due to the popularity of the author we published. We seek to promote work we sincerely believe in, impacting every decision at every point in the publishing process, but, like any press, we also want our work to succeed, to be read, to matter. This was our aspiration going into this collaborative publishing project, and will be our approach moving forward, as we might expect of any organization we worked with as writers.

It is as essential for small presses to find their ‘niche’ as it is for authors, and for many literary organizations, success entails operating within your network, in a complex dance of circumstance, trust, shared values, and goodwill.

D.M. Rice, On Literary Citizenship and the Secret to Small Press Publishing Success

Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there was likely a floating bridge, like a barge or pontoon bridge, that enabled people, largely traders, to cross. Most of the ancient city is now left to underwater archeologists to examine, alas, since it lies beneath the new Biricek Dam. […]

Our tour guide was excited when I told him that the word zeugma is used in poetry terminology. It’s a figure of speech in which words or images in a phrase are connected, often for humorous or ironic effect, as in a sentence such as: He lost his heart and his wallet at the stage door cafe. The word “lost” joins both heart and wallet. It acts as the bridge. It’s an intriguing little literary device that’s seldom the first thing I notice in a poem, but when I do identify it, I appreciate it. I like knowing the etymology, and I like knowing that I’ve been where the city was.

Ann E. Michael, Zeugma

I understood my own words, but no one else’s.
With all of us yelling and waving our hands
construction ground to a halt. Who even cared?
We left the work site like plaintive baby birds
with our new call, can anyone understand me?
why do I feel so alone?

Rachel Barenblat, Understand

I was listening to Robert McFarlane read from his new book, Is a River Alive? and he was saying that considering humans are mostly made of water, if we sit down, we’re a pond, and if we run, we’re a river.

I’m thinking of place like that. If a place changes, that place is a still the same place. Like a river, that place is fluid. And so one’s home is fluid.

In this way, all of us humans are not diasporic, we’re metamorph-poric. Our place, our home is change. It’s not to take rights from people who have a relationship with a particular place, but to think about that place as flow. If as Heraclitus said, you can never step into the same river twice, these days you can never belong to the same place because place inherently changes. The world is always already changing.

Once the sky was filled with birds. The sky is no longer filled with birds. Our place is birdless and heating up. So we have to think of this kind of change as a working paradigm for the world. And we have to consider how to think about that.

Gary Barwin, Sex with a river; a forest instead of a saxophone: change as a constant, music like the woods

I remember reading about bowler superstitions: Lucky shoes, towels, and socks  or prayers and chants. We just saw “Baby Boom” – executive Diane Keaton saddled with unexpected baby  altering her corporate ambitions – and since Diane has been  good in everything forever, I chose her. On every approach, perfecting my four-step, under my breath – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton – and the ball lightens, rolls straight, connects dead center on the headpin, then it’s strike after strike all night. Four decades flown, and I don’t bowl often, but Diane is still the mantra. And when she dies, I find myself in the supermarket aisle, doctor’s office, subway, watching hellish newscasts  – Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton, Diane Keaton. A charm against the inconceivable,  the bowling gods giving and taking away,  another cursed split in a year full of gutters.

Collin Kelley, Bowling with Diane Keaton

This week while tuning in to POETs Day live with Kate Jenkinson (Fridays at 12:30 via LinkedIn) I found myself drawn to the Venn diagram image in the Poetry In Business Logo. It resonated with my recent thinking around how two of my favourite things (poetry and coaching) intersect. Whilst wondering about this I had also been toying with the thought that people might find it strange that my social media presence often flits between poetry and coaching. My answer to myself was that I am a poet and a coach, and sometimes I am a coach and a poet, and sometimes I am only one of these, and sometimes I am neither, but even when I am neither I still carry their vibrations. And that was my way of saying that like the honeysuckle that grows through the hydrangea in the front garden I see them as entwined. So rather than thinking about separating them as two binary elements my answer seemed instead to focus on dialling up and dialling down (thank you for extending my thinking about this, Kelley). Even with this realisation, the Venn diagram was still drawing me back to its intersection and giving me the hint that there might be something to consider about this part of it. I enjoyed a little wonder about what exists there, and here’s what I found in my intersection of poetry and coaching: Setting something down, trying something out, viewing it from different angles, hearing what it sounds like out loud, seeing what it sounds like out loud, time and space to think, time and space to reflect, moving a thought forward, adjusting it, leaning in to emotions as they resonate in real time, trying on different lenses, wondering what it’s telling you, playing with it, considering different endings, recognising your own threads and patterns, deciding which ones to continue to weave.

Sue Finch, POET, COACH. COACH, POET.

it begins with a november rose. shadows stirring a bowl

of milky blood. wholeness and wild honey die slowly.

remembrance, our permanent home.

Grant Hackett [no title]

yeast of my day
on the way to the bread shop
the sun rises

Jim Young [no title]

This week: intruding in Eden, remembering how to dream, the angel of history, a museum or diaspora of things, and much more. Enjoy.

The leaves are slowly shifting their colors, including the ones out near the street I catch sight of with a slight startle every once in a while. Last night, storms blew in and left more fall-ish weather in their wake, scattering a lot of the less tenacious leaves. Tonight, J is making beef stew, since it’s officially the season for it.  We are loosely planning a trip north in a couple of weeks to go up to see fall color and maybe stay in a cabin or lodge, so fall is happening, so I am trying to hold on to the good, despite the madness of the headlines and the parade of videos featuring people being snatched off the street.  […]

Work continues of edits for CLOVEN, and I should have a clean version before we hit November, which could mean a release in December if all goes well. Things are also progressing on the new book manuscript,  AMERICAN CYCLORAMA. The one benefit of feeling higher-strung than usual is that it often means my writing comes swifter and more regularly, though it’s not always the best stuff I fear. Still, it’s something to focus on when everything else seems chaos and upheaval.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/7/2025

How Does the World Celebrate an End to Genocide?

Solemnly.
With great caution.
Silently accepting each moment
          that a cease fire holds.
          Holding your jubilation deep inside.
                    Where fear still has a hold of emotions
                    that cannot quite be released to run free.

Michael Allyn Wells, How Does the World Celebrate an End of Genocide

We pray for peace even if we don’t completely trust the people on either side of the negotiating table. Even if we aren’t sure it’s going to work. Even if we’re afraid a strong wind will blow everything sideways. So today I stand in my sideways sukkah with my lulav, and as I beckon blessing from every direction, I’m praying most of all for the blessing of peace.

May the blessing of peace rest on the city of Chicago, where ICE is using military equipment and tactics on civilians. [Source: The Guardian.] May the blessing of peace rest on Portland, which the administration claims is on fire due to “antifa,” but is actually populated with activists who oppose ICE (and fascism) dancing in animal suits. [Source: NYT, gift link.]

And may the blessing of peace rest over Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.

Rachel Barenblat, And

We are all distracted.

We are told we are distracted.

We loop—inundated with dystopian messages within our chaotic feeds.

The script of the distracted = care about anything trivial in your algorithm (consume) to avoid.

Anyone at this point in the timeline is:

hyperfocused

hypernormalized (evangelizing consumption, practicing avoidance)

actively engaging in cognitive dissonance, apathy, lack of empathy

or has ADHD, PTSD, OCD, CPTSD, or

all of the above.

This is goal of hybrid soft power. War on the imagination, on the collective consciousness.

(And this is not a poem, btw. I’m writing this way because I can’t think anymore in paragraphs).

Propaganda for anti-propaganda works this way.

So along with my attention span being completely shot (thanks grief brain and menopause combined) deliberate action from day-to-day, for me, is useless.

I jump-cut from sobbing on my kitchen floor to hopping on an online work call pretending to be “normal” (whatever the f that means).

The other day, I used the last of our pancake mix (L and I used to make pancakes on Sunday. It’s the middle of the week). I made way too many pancakes, screamed, and threw out the rest of the mix because I can’t share it with him anymore.

I watch movies about the Holodomor and Hannah Arendt while I’m writing social media posts about synchronicities and watch reels of innocent people being disappeared off the streets of my hometown of Chicago.

I watch Adam Curtis videos while organizing Larry’s poems into a new manuscript.

I listen to records at 3 a.m. and try to conjure him like a witch (I am…but still).

I open the curtains every morning at 5:30, 6:00 a.m. so the sunrise can beam across his urn (he loved the sun, a cup of coffee, fresh air).

I wear his clothes to bed. I talk to him every night.

I am feral now. It’s fall. Full moons, eclipses…HEAVY things are happening everywhere.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Attention: there is no attention.

Last night, as the sun was setting, I discovered that I had made my quilt top too wide.  How could this have happened?  Just last week-end, it wasn’t wide enough, and I didn’t think I added that much?  My spouse and I devised a plan, and I set to work ripping out the seam of part of the quilt that was too wide; later I’ll add it to make the length of the quilt fit–it’s far from catastrophic, as discoveries go.

I looked at the sunset colors in the sky and thought about that time when the crew on one of Columbus’ ships saw land from a distance, that liminal time before all the changes got set into motion.  I am now trying to create a poem about ripping out seams on Columbus Day.  So far, it’s not working, but I wrote down some ideas and maybe they’ll come together.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Explorations and the Imagery of Those Interactions

In these two most recent pamphlets, Henry Gould continues his missives from the front line of Trump’s America, 2025 style. Shady Library and The Gate are billed as books 4 and 5 respectively of the ongoing Shield of Mnemosyne project, of which I’ve reviewed previous parts here and here. The poems published in these latest instalments are dated from May 21 to August 3 this year, and deal with both the contemporary and the timeless in Gould’s unique fashion.

Shady Library consists of seventeen individual poems in Gould’s characteristic mix of rhymed stanzas, from quatrains to nine-liners. Figures familiar from his earlier work appear: Parmenides, Roger Williams, the Mandelstams,  Dante, and Columbia.

This last figure takes on a central importance: as Coulombe, dove of peace, as reminder of the explorer who ‘discovered’ America, as the District of Columbia, seat of American political power (and site of much activity by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, another Gouldian figure who resurfaces in The Gate), and, crucially, as the university that the Trump administration targeted over DEI and student support for the Palestinian people.

                                                    What have we done,
America? Columbia is figurehead for us
and pilot too. Buoyancy marks the end of rage.
(from ‘Equilibrium’)

The sentiment in the last line echoing other explicit references elsewhere in the pamphlet:

Brute force can only outrage innocence.
There is no glory in such mega-gloom –
and shame concludes the reign of every tyrant.
(from ‘July’)

and again, earlier in the same poem, this expression of the ideal Anti-MAGA position:

Love does not boast, or brag, or dominate;
love does not boss, or scold – or persecute
the weak, or curse the poor, or scapegoat
strangers, refugees… O Hypocrite.

Those readers who have been following along will recognise love as Gould’s basis for justice and hope. And there is hope aplenty here:

Somewhere, a child is running towards the sun –
laughing with her light, feeling her strength.
Your summer, Psyche-dove, has just begun:
your ship floats in her sea of grass, full-length.
(from ‘Melissa Hortman: In Memoriam’ a poem, ‘after Osip Mandelstam)

The fusion of Love’s bride and Coulombe in a poem dedicated to the assassinated Hortman, a Democrat from Gould’s home city, is a perfect bringing together of key elements in Gould’s belief in America’s ability to rein in its own worst tendencies by returning to its founding vision. You don’t have to share his optimism to admire the writing, or the intent behind it.

Billy Mills, Recent reading October 2025: A Review

I’ve been writing and revising as much as I can in recent weeks (some of it recommendation-writing because ’tis the season). A few nice poetry things have happened. About Place published a new issue containing a couple of my recent poems, “Innocent Murmur” and “At Tables.” Both poems sprang from EMDR insights–that’s the therapy I’ve been doing for almost a year, involving this strange eye-movement strategy to process old hurts that linger somatically, even when you’ve talked and written your way around, into, and through them for decades. (I’m good at the cognitive stuff, I’m just a giant head basically, but it turns out the body stores hurt in ways that reason can’t root out.) “At Tables” comes from a cascade of images that poured out in a poetic, associative way. Some of my father’s most frightening behavior occurred over the cherry dining table of my childhood; my boss frightened me into silence by poking my arm under the rim of a different cherry table; my department now meets at the latter table; I teach seminars around similar tables. No wonder I couldn’t feel safe at work. Therapy and poetry are NOT the same thing, but poetry often emerges from underworlds that rational thinking can’t plumb.

Lesley Wheeler, Washington-bound (the other one)

Since July, I’ve been pushing pretty hard on a new poetry manuscript, attempting to compose and accumulate a handful of lyric sequences into a book-length shape. I like the idea of a full-length poetry collection with only a dozen or so poems within, each poem some six or eight pages in length. It isn’t anything I’d attempted prior, although every poetry title I’ve composed since the late 1990s one could claim an exploration of the long poem, or at least through the book as unit of composition. […]

In July 2025, the Anglican Girls’ Choir of Ottawa’s Christ Church Cathedral toured Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, performing multiple times in Belfast, Galway and Dublin [I’m sure you caught my three travel reports: here, here and here]. As our daughter, Rose, was part of said group, Christine and I, along with our youngest, Aoife, played tag-along for the two week jaunt, accompanying and solo-touristing, and attending performances by the group at the Cathedral Church of St. Anne in Belfast, the ruins of the tenth century monastery Clonmacnoise (Cluain Mhic Nóis), Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Galway, the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Christ Church Dublin and the National Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St. Patrick, Dublin.

Of course, two weeks away from my desk is no small thing, and it prompted me to work like a maniac for eight weeks prior to leaving home, to clear that thinking space for travel. I wasn’t suspending the blog while we travelled, after all, and I certainly wasn’t going to attempt writing and posting reviews, interviews or anything else on the road. I spent eight weeks pushing reviews, interviews and other posts nearly a month ahead on the blog, beyond our point of departure. I scheduled a half-dozen substack posts, chapbook posts and pushed a whole array of chapbook publication and mailing, so our adventuring in Ireland (plus at least a week or so after we returned) could be entirely free to focus on that particular experience. I wished to remain, even beyond the uncertainties of travel internet access, which was tricky at times, present.

On airplanes and bus rides, I read through longer works of prose, which seems another kind of rarity. With notebook in hand, I scribbled thoughts on what I was reading; scribbled notes on churches and monuments, Rose’s performances, scattered reading, architecture, and moments. I took a few hundred photos, and mailed more than two dozen postcards. I asked questions of tour guides, hostel and museum staff, bartenders, clergy. Why are there flags along the wall, clearly aged and falling to shreds? Why are the stones of that wall different colours? I looked up details and answers to things that prompted my curiosity. I asked questions of locals, and of the classics professor that was one of the tour organizers. How does Brexit affect the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland? Why was Belfast so young a city, and how does that reconcile with a graveyard going back to the 5^th century? If Richard de Clare, 2^nd Earl of Pembroke (c. 1130–1176), otherwise known as Strongbow, is buried in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral, where was his wife, Aoife? Why is the Cathedral in Belfast where Rose and her choir sang named for St. Anne, a figure not mentioned in the actual Bible, but only in the apocrypha, as mother of Mary? Through the process of questions (and internet queries), I learned that, unlike her husband, our wee Aoife’s namesake, Aoife MacMurrough of Leinster (c. 1153–c. 1188), is actually buried with her father-in-law at Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, a ruin that sits along the Welsh bank of the River Wye.

Perhaps most minds might not go there, but a reference to Tintern immediately returned me to “Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was this example that prompted my own series of title-attempts: “Lines composed in St. Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast,” “Lines composed a few kilometres past Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, on the banks of the River Shannon,” “Lines composed at Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, Galway,” and “Lines composed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church, Dublin.” For each piece, I held the title as a kind of umbrella, working to compose a sequence of small clusters of lyric underneath the protection and stretch of those titles; pulling apart sentences and fragments to stretch the narrative into a sequence of small cluster-points that constellate the physical space of each page.

I’ve now composed a handful of “Lines composed…” poems, set as foundation for the collection, with further pieces set around this particular core. So far, other poems in the manuscript-in-progress include “Epithalamium , a consortium,” a piece composed after the recent nuptuals of Ottawa poets Jennifer Baker and David Currie, and “Lines composed once landing at Al Purdy’s A-Frame, Ameliasburgh,” after a recent visit we made to Ameliasburg, driving by the late Canadian poet Al Purdy’s infamous house, a site that now hosts a sequence of writing residencies. Ameliasburg, a Loyalist territory, of course, named for Hanover Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of English King George III. These are poems for occasions, it would seem, almost in the Robert Creeley sense, which, arguably, I have always done. Poems to mark or document moments of time, of activity; of thinking, across or within the broader spectrum of daily activity.

rob mclennan, The Museum of Practical Things

I like when something is really sour and nothing except that sourness exists for that instant. I like my crooked teeth even though I try not to smile in photographs. It’s comforting to know that, when I am sleeping, my hair grows like grass. I like that since I am not plastic, I will die someday. In a forest, I am flesh and a tiger can actually eat me. I find it thrilling that there is not much difference between me and a dog or a zebra.

It’s nice that, like an apple, I have skin. 

Saudamini Deo, I like having a body

Last month, I posted an invitation to “Ask Me Anything” over on Instagram. I had so much fun chatting all things creativity, community, books, behind-the-scenes, etc. I want to share some of the questions with you here, too. […]

Q: How do you get over the “ugh, I wish I’d written this!” when you read another poet?

I actually love that feeling. It tells me I’m ready to write. It clues me into craft choices or emotions or maybe new forms that I want to try. Ask yourself what you love about the poem. Why are you so inspired by it?

My friend and I say “I hate you” when the other one writes a poem we wish we’d written. Jillian also says she wants to set those poems on fire. 😂

I’m too scared to set fires, so I just go write poems. […]

Q: Fave communities or resources that have helped you fine tune your poetry?

I’ll start with books: Dear Writer — Maggie Smith, The Poetry Home Repair Manual — Ted Kooser, A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver, Poetry Unbound — Pádraig Ó Tuama

I also take workshops whenever I can. Here are some of my favorite workshop leaders: Kelly Grace Thomas, Joy Sullivan, Isabelle Correa, Lexi Pelle, Two Sylvias Press

And community is everything. There are paid communities, of course, that can speed up the process of connecting with other writers. A few favorites are: Gather Poets, Exhale Creativity, and Blue Sky Black Sheep. But I’ve also met and cultivated relationships with other writers simply by connecting on platforms like IG and Substack. I formed a friendship with poet Christen Lee simply by reaching out after reading her poem in Dulcet Lit Mag. Be brave, say hello, and ask to swap work for feedback. It’s so valuable, and much more fun than doing this all on your own!

Allison Mei-Li, You Asked, I Answered

I’ve always been the kind of person who slips easily into dark moods, and the doubt inherent in being a 53-year-old STILL SEEKING her debut poetry collection is a natural portal for that darkness. Instead, however, this revision cycle has made me — and my book — bolder, brighter, and more defiant than ever.

I am incredibly proud of the deep, consistent effort and delighted by the results.

Doubt hasn’t been entirely absent, of course. The ferocity that defined the summer of revision has been book-ended by periods of frustration. In May, on the heels of yet another rejection and just ahead of digging back into the manuscript, I entertained the idea that there just wasn’t a space for me in the poetry publishing universe. And in September, which is the period covered in this blog post, my energy for revision started to flag, and I grew frustrated with a section that just wasn’t coming together as I’d hoped.

I began to wonder if I was failing my vision for the book. Maybe it was time to admit defeat?

Enter the wisdom of writing community… Y’all have been there and done that, and you swooped in to remind me that the process ebbs and flows. Also, so many of you believe in this book in moments when I lose faith. Your guidance and encouragement frequently saves me, including the message I heard loud and clear in September: Girl, it’s OK to take a break.

Best pal Jill Crammond put it in the clearest terms: “I think you should take a nap,” she said. And so that’s how I ended the month. Not stalled out with revisions, but resting. Taking a short pause. Letting some shit go.

We can work so hard we stop seeing straight.

Carolee Bennett, When We Remember How to Dream

Thinking out loud about things that block us in one of Claire Pedrick’s supervision groups this week also had me thinking about focusing and about being temporarily stuck. I have some great strategies for getting unstuck and tackling things that are blocking the way to my next steps or simply getting something done, and I was happy to share these. But I found that I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something particular I needed to find out about being blocked when it comes to editing a set of a poems. How could I have these strategies and still be stuck?

Two kinds of being blocked came to mind – the ‘not wanting to do a thing’ kind and the ‘joy-blocked’ kind. These are the kind of blocks I need to climb over or go round. But here they were showing themselves to both be at play at the same time making the block seem huge.

I didn’t want to edit the poems and I wasn’t finding joy when I did sit down to do it. Thinking out loud with others and then allowing myself time to continue the think enabled me to hear the real stuff going on. Firstly, I had to admit they weren’t all great poems and those that had been sent back instead of being published did need work. I needed to kick into touch the hurry up driver that wanted a set of poems to work on and had pulled them together too quickly. I also had to take on board the feedback I had asked for and respond to it. I also realised that having an overarching theme to the work was hugely important to me, and I had been pushing this aside.

Having leant into all of that I was gifted time to truly focus at a body doubling session. I took along three poems, and during the session I binned one and polished the other two. Without another person sharing time and space it would have taken me much longer to get this sorted. It wasn’t easy, and I felt the twitch of wanting to give in or to check social media to avoid the difficult, but what a wonderful feeling to have cracked the blocks and squeezed through onto the poetry path again.

Here’s to the kind of focus that comes when you stay with something even though it’s hard. And to the joy of being inspired to write fresh poems.

Sue Finch, FOCUSING

Silence is often a cue
that apologies are in order.
Perhaps it is perverse to kneel here
like an intruder in eden
and ask for more.
Nature does this,
weighing down one end of a seesaw
holding me high – precarious, captive, impotent.

I paint a golden eagle in the sky
its six-foot wingspan blocking the sun
the lake turning purple
wind scattering into the branches —
as if imperfection improves the scene
improves me
makes it all bearable
allows me to pray.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where one road ends

I have never been to the mountains in the fall. Teaching always meant vacations were taken during winter break or during the summer months, but those restrictions no longer apply. Two friends and I took a four day trip to hike and drive Rocky Mountain National Park, and autumn did not disappoint. The number of elk was incredible (the last time my husband and I visited, we did not see even one.) Our hikes led us to spectacular views and everyone we looked, the aspens were jangling their gold. Majesty is a word that is thrown around about mountains, and it is decidedly not hyperbole. Coming from the flat Midwest, there’s something magical about mountains that cannot be beat. […]

Unrivered, my fourth poetry collection with Sundress Publications is now in the world. I’ve been busy promoting it and starting to read from it, so I want to thank and highlight those people who have graciously given me the space to do so over the first couple weeks of the book’s life.

• A Wild and Precious Life Series -I was privileged to read with Taylor Byas and Ashley M. Jones on September 24, and host Dustin Brookshire creates such a welcoming atmosphere. (I think there was a video somewhere on Instagram, but I can’t find it now.)
• Of Poetry Podcast with Han VanderHart – It’s always a pleasure to talk poems with someone as smart as Han, and this was no exception. You can listen at the link
• A Word? with Roi Faineant Press and Kellie Scott Reed. This short video conversation with Kellie was so much fun. We talked about the book, yes, but also about music and memory, everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and its effect on driving speed.
• Verse Virtual – Hosted by Robbi Nester and Jim Lewis, who create a lovely welcoming space. I got to read with Jane Zwart, whose work I adore, and the open mic readers were all talented as well. Video should be up soon.
• My Bad Poetry Podcast – I always enjoy listening to Aaron and Dave and their guests, and I had a blast bringing some of my own bad poems to this conversation. Want to hear a poem about nothing, a really odd metaphor for religion, a low-rent Millay imitation? Episode coming soon, and you’ll be able to find it at the link.

I’m reading online for NAWP this Tuesday evening, and my in-person, in real life book launch will be this upcoming Saturday at Yellow Bird Books in Aurora, IL, where I will read and be in conversation with my good friend and fellow poet Kristin LaTour, who runs the Aurora Writer’s Workshop, a wonderful local conference held in June.

Donna Vorreyer, Three Months Later…

My goal for the last few years has been to review 10% of the titles read. I did it last year, nearly did it the year before.

By now, that would be about 24 reviews for 2025. And I am at 12 reviews.

So can I go for broke and do 12 more in 2 months? (I could add to the count one line raves at AO3. Hardly equivalent.) To keep pacing under my own control, I could do the remainder here, rather than a magazine that may plan 6 months or a year ahead. Am I talking to myself? Very well, I am talking with myself.

The point of reading, writing, reviewing, living is the exploration and engagement, the being present and attentive, not the numbers racked up. (Kind of sounds like a relationship instead of collecting followers online doesn’t it. )

I want to go deeper rather than bigger.

I have been doing my small press since 2007. (That means it’s an adult press as of November.) I have been doing a reader’s log since 2012. Next year will be 14 years.

It’s funny how there are no constants in this chaotic universe. Sure, spiders have 8 legs, except when they’ve lost 3 and continue on. Water freezes at 0 degrees, unless salty. I read Feel Happier in nine seconds: poems by Linda Besner (Coach House, 2017) and I couldn’t enter it. I return the better part of a decade later and it isn’t hard. I has a sort of Eunoia about it. Constraints cinched hard. Still a pointing.

I read To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024) and was utterly wowed. How hadn’t read this before? Except I had 18 months before and it was kinda meh then. I wonder if I should reread Guest Book for People in My Dreams by John Levy (Proper Tales Press, 2024) and it too might improve from very good.

Pearl Pirie, Anniversaries

There’s a never too late writing award for the over 60s, an elder fest somewhere and probably enough silver tagged onto old peoples’ events to heat our homes. 

In my city library there’s also a book display for the ‘ageing well’ festival. Mmm…crafting, menopause, gardening, birdwatching. I approach a woman on the desk with purple hair. We’re around the same age. That stand, I say…..it’s so depressing. She keeps quiet. I go on…brilliant women novelists over 60, poets, artists, actors, singers and musicians….composers, inventors and women of history.  We laugh. She promises to tell the person who’s done the display, gently, that it could be more ambitious. That ‘gently’ is telling. It reminds me of words I researched for age in the historical thesaurus (a place to browse on a par with an old-style, ramshackle charity shop). 

Ripe, wintered, strucken, far, oldish, grey, eld, crusted, long in the tooth, over the hill, grandevous, antiquated and my all-time favourite, badgerly. (Someone once shouted ‘badger’ at me when the stripes on the side of my head appeared and much of the rest of my hair was still dark.) It appears in a poem in A Friable Earth. 

Jackie Wills, Pantywaist looking for work

As a midlife, mid-career writer, it seems like a good time to take a moment and think about the habits and goals I’ve become accustomed to since starting to write and submit in my teens. Am I trying to support myself with my writing (and if so, how do I do that better than I’m doing it now?) Am I trying to reach the right audiences? How do I determine whether I say yes or no to an assignment or request? How do I find the right publisher (because it would be nice to find the right publisher that I could stay with the rest of my writing career?) […]

Our J. Bookwalter’s book club is reading a book that just came out in English translation (but the stories were written and published in the seventies and eighties in Japan), Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki. It made me think about Philip K. Dick’s sixties-era Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in that it plumbs strangely prescient subject matter – population collapse vs overpopulation, teens obsessed with screens to the point of violence, and a very 2020’s kind of detachment and way of examining gender and class. It also has things in common with Yoko Ogawa, a Japanese writer I very much admire, and Osamu Dazai’s whose ironic detachment in his many books the 1930s set a standard for Japanese literature. It’s interesting to think what people in the past thought the future would be like – and how much they got right or wrong. I’ve been investigating Solarpunk over the past year, partially because I believe if you can’t imagine a better future, you won’t get one, and the relentless oppressiveness of recent dystopian writings, I’m trying to think of how to write a way to a better future for people and nature. I’m trying to be brave and face some things – like disability and chronic illness – more directly in my writing, and in doing that, to maybe make things better (?)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, October – Trip to Skagit, Application Anxieties and the Mid-Career Writer, Reading Early Cyberpunk

Literature cannot save you, but it can accompany you on the quest for meaning.

Quests send us out into the world, send us through trials, send us into the dark lands of wilderness and despair. Quests teach us that we were really seeking virtue, not gold, true love, not a princess. A quest is a cycle to help us see the world and ourselves afresh. It is a long process of moral reformation. All quest is self-discovery, aspiration, virtue riding in the wilderness.

Shakespeare wrote about the journey of the mind. Elizabeth Bishop wrote of the journey to the interior. Those are the journeys on which great authors are our companions in the struggle. It takes a great deal of reading to go on such a quest of the spirit.

Literature is not trying to save you. It is calling to you. The great works of civilisation are trying to show you your life as a quest for meaning.

A lot of people find themselves midway on the path, wandering the wilderness of the world, and they are now turning to literature.

Good. Welcome. Enchantment is the start of change.

Now the journey begins.

Henry Oliver, Literature can’t save you.

It is night walk season and I don my florescent vest. It is night walk season and for whatever reason, the dried-up river rumbles loud amidst the insect song. Perhaps it is the change in temperature. Perhaps it is the body’s tuning into the dark. With darkness comes more sound. And the pupil—that dark aperture—widens like wells ever-ready to receive a message like a dropped coin. And as my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, rhodopsin is produced in my eyes, promoting night-vision. The racoon or skunk is indeed litter. The intriguing dark hole up ahead on the road that looks like a deep void into the earth—like Wiley Coyote’s convenient trap—is indeed a piece of cardboard. This is the kind of darkness, though, where the coyote trots, head down, between the trees.

Sarah Lada, Make Big Shadows I Can Move In

Tonight I’m trying something new: a fighting game and poetry night for students. They can take turns at 4-player arena battles on Power Stone 2 or team up for 2-player ‘Dramatic Battle’ mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3 (both from the recently released Capcom Fighting Collection 2 ). I’m bringing some thematically linked poems for volunteers to read aloud in between bouts. Here they are:

‘Wrestling’ by Louise S. Bevington
‘Duel’ by Helena Nelson
‘The Boxers’ by Michael Longley
‘Last Round’ by Kim Addonizio
‘Sonnets to Morpheus [“I know kung fu”]’ by John Beer
‘Elegy for Bruce Lee’ by W. Todd Kaneko
‘Fist of the North Star’ by Kayo Chingonyi (available/first published in Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge!)
‘To fight aloud is very brave’ by Emily Dickinson
‘Duellum’ (‘The Duel’) by Baudelaire (I’ve picked the LeClercq translation)
‘Mortal Combat’ by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Jon Stone, VS. Night Mini-Anthology

I’m so jet lagged I should have a lock on my laptop right now. Writing exhausted and with my internal clock set to no discernible time zone at all is probably not advisable. And yet, here we are! Bear with me.

I spent the last week in Greece at Rosemary’s House, mentoring a cohort of writers—poets, memoirists, essayists, and fiction writers—and eating more feta than one human should ingest in an eight-day period. I highly recommend both. Working with writers across genres is a joy and a privilege no matter where I am, but doing that work in such a beautiful place, with such a supportive group? I kept turning to my friend Megan Stielstra and saying, “This is work,” to remind myself.

It was work, and it was pleasure, and I hope to be back.

Maggie Smith, On Growing Up & Leaning In

More often than seems sensible, I dwell on comparisons between building and poetry. That there is poetry in these bricks is undeniable. They might carry a faded provenance of lime-wash, or azulete; the lime tinted with washing blue, said to keep away flies and the evil eye. (There’s a window surround in azulete in the photo of my house above, also flat bricks forming the sill and capping the buttress at the foot of the wall).

Sometimes the brick might be blackened from a fire surround or even a chimney, and cutting them with an angle grinder releases the scent of an ancient fire to rise with the dust. The unmistakeable sweet vanillin smell of oak is pungent and lingering and occasionally, if the sun falls on one of these faintly charred bricks, I might catch the whiff of another home’s hearth. I wonder what was said around it, and in which language, or languages. […]

So many bricks and tiles, so many words and so many people, been and gone. At a zoom poetry event, a poet remarked rather pointedly that she thought using a foreign language in a poem was ‘showing off’ and I was a little taken aback. I did think about this on and off for quite a while, concluding I was and am happy to throw in Spanish, Catalan, Ladino or even Arabic words into poetry. It means I get to do things like rhyme ‘ever’ with ‘cueva’ and because as someone pointed out, these languages are a part of my ‘lived experience’. Just like the bricks and the roof tiles and the honey-coloured stone, they are the linguistic palette of the land and its lingering traces. They are the raw material from which the words arise, passed hand to hand through Roman Hispania, or the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, proudly Mudéjar, a product of Teruel, where I live. I may be English, but here in Spain, when our heads settle into their pillows to rest and dream, they are still cradled through the night by the almohada, from the Hispanic Arabic: al-Muhádda.

james mcconachie, Mudéjar

This week, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis was published by Faber & Faber. It contains uncollected and unpublished poems, and extensive notes on the writing and publication of Heaney’s twelve collections. For anyone who grew up reading Heaney, as I did, it’s an addictive, behind-the-scenes kind of volume. Here are some notes on what I’ve found so far. […]

One of Heaney’s strokes of luck as a poet was to be taught in schools for decades. Next year, however, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of an incident that almost got him cancelled in the right-wing press. In 1976, an “outraged mother” from Suffolk wrote to her local Conservative MP, Eldon Griffiths, to complain that the “The Early Purges” had been set as an “unseen” poem that year. It describes the drowning of unwanted kittens as a coldly practical matter on the family farm:

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, “the scraggy wee shits”,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound

Griffiths contacted the Daily Telegraph, who obligingly ran with the headline “POEM FOR O-LEVEL ‘SICK’”, and — in a different kind of sic — identified the poet responsible as “Sean Heany”.

What I like most about this episode— apart from the fact that a secondary school exam board was willing to set an unseen poem that contained (as the Telegraph put it) “language not encouraged in most homes” — is the calm indifference with which the head of the exam board, Dr. F. Wyld, responded to the trouble-making politician:

Dr. Wyld said: “I replied to Mr. Griffiths pointing out that the function of examination boards is to examine. We try to test candidates fairly, without giving offence, and I am sorry that we seem to have given offence in this case.”

As for Mr. Heany [sic], Dr. Wyld said: “I have to confess that I have never heard of him. I gather that he is one of the modern poets.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #37: The Melancholy Spouts of Tractors

Performance of Dirty Old Men 

Highly Commended in Forward Prizes 

Best Single Poem – Performed

Thanks to Bad Betty Press for submitting a video of my performance with the Bad Betty crew in Nottingham. Check out the whole list, my poem is in great company, and I’m sending congratulations and appreciation to all. Thanks especially to the judges for sharing this undiluted fury, it is one of the most fierce protest poems in the With Love, Grief and Fury collection. Huge thanks to Bad Betty, Amy and Jake, for this surprise, for their support and outstanding contribution to poetry as a whole.

On a personal note – I feel heavy-hearted taking any praise and applause for this particular poem. It was written a while back now, however, today we see the dirtiest of Dirty Old Men gaining more power, wealth, votes and momentum, whilst lying to our faces, stripping human rights and profiteering in the deaths of people and planet. 

Salena Godden, With Love, Grief and Fury

In Jonson’s poem, it is not the ‘balanced mind’ of self-knowledge and equanimity that proves reliable, but death itself; the final lines of the English epigram are a moving variation upon the structure of the Latin ending: ‘Which shows, wherever death doth please t’appear, / Seas, serenes, swords, shot, sickness, all are there.’

The emphasis upon the location (wherever . . . there) rather than, as we might rather expect, the unanticipated timing of death connects the end of the epigram with Horace’s point about the unimportance of location for virtue and wisdom. But this insiginificance, which is offered as a source of comfort for Bullatius, is the root of Jonson’s sorrow and loss: when death strikes home, it makes no difference where we are.

Jonson very often used Horace’s epistles as the starting point for poems about friendship, and the epistle to which he returns more often than any other is not in fact the quite brief 1.11 but the much longer Epistles 1.18, addressed to Lollius, which is concerned with how the poet should handle and relate to powerful friends — how to find the delicate mid-point between respect and honesty. […]

It’s been rather a trying week here in Paris. My husband and I are both bogged down in seemingly endless and fruitless domestic admin; two of us (including me) have been unwell on and off all week; and French politics has become completely absurd — comedic, very distracting, and also a bit worrying. But as Jonson, Horace, or Roe would all have said, whatever else is going on, there is always one thing that you can do: my constant mind, I will prepare myself.

Victoria Moul, When I am down at Hackney Brook

You worked as a chemical engineer, a biomedical scientist, and a forensic scientist. I think that’s impressive. Let’s start with chemical engineering.  What kind of chemicals did you work with? What are some key things you’ve learned about this career field? How has your work as a chemical engineer informed your lifestyle, life perspectives, and your poetry?

Instead of listing chemicals, let me offer a metaphor: the haiku mind as a chemical plant. The real estate (including the reaction vessel) is the mind. The reactants are images, memories, kigo, cutting words. The catalyst is a flash of insight or a prompt. The reaction vessel—the brain—responds under pressure (a deadline) and temperature (mood). The distillation column is editing. We purify the product, strip the excess, and maybe collect unused images as reflux for later use. My professors might groan, but haiku really is a high-purity product.

As a biomedical scientist, what were your specialties? What did you enjoy the most about working as a biomedical scientist? What were some of the challenges? How has your work as a biomedical scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?

I was often tasked with translating technical ideas into plain language. One job involved a 10-year modernization plan for fifteen hospitals during the early days of digital radiography—when some physicians still thought it was witchcraft. Another project developed a handheld molecular biology tool to identify pathogens in hours, not days—this was before most medical schools even taught the technology.

As an occupational health consultant, I observed hundreds of industrial processes, assessed health risks, and translated findings into terms both workers and managers could understand. It was all about clarity and credibility—skills that carry into poetry.

What inspired you to work as a forensic scientist? What did you enjoy the most about this position? What were some of the challenges? What are the key things you learned? How has your work as a forensic scientist informed your life perspectives and your poetry?

Forensics focuses on trace evidence, attribution, comparison. Did the dyed hair come from a suspect? Is that chemical from the scene or just background contamination?

Locard’s Exchange Principle teaches that when two things meet, something is transferred. That’s haiku. You step into nature, and you carry something away—in memory, in your boots, in your notebook. Hopefully, nature is okay with what we leave behind.

Jacob D. Salzer, Richard L. Matta

They are circling, as they do. Something is dead somewhere in the neighborhood. Or dying. So as much as I like these giant hideous creatures whose very existence thrills me with their alienness, they also seem foreboding. Death is nigh. And, of course, it is. It always is. But with their wingspan and their wattley heads and knobby knees they are so damnably alive, these guys. I thrill to the juxtaposition: life/death, hunger/dying, “civilized” streets/wild life, my earthbound body/their unlikely grace in flight. Turkey vultures jolt me out of my earthbound concerns, sneer at my little anxieties. And in so doing, relieve me, for a moment, of the claustrophobia of my me-centered vision and my you-centered fears, and open for me the sky, where eternity drifts like mares’ tail clouds and peace abides in blue.

Here is a lovely and taut poem by Bertha Rogers, also a vulture appreciator. 

Marilyn McCabe, most exalted fixture, an angel

Some readers of this publication will have been wondering when a Lynda Hull poem would appear, so vast and long has been my adoration of this poet, and since another reader casually asked me today when she’d see the next post, and it happens that I once attempted to order said reader a copy of Hull’s Collected Poems1 as a birthday gift only for it to never materialize, the time, it seems, for Lynda Hull is nigh. I’ve been relearning, these days, to not ignore auspicious signs, even when it means I might embarrass myself by publicly declaiming that in fact I do still adore the work of Lynda Hull, and you may roll your eyes all you want. She is not the reason I started writing poems, but she may well be the reason I never fell out of love with them. What I’m saying is, I’d like to be her when I grow up.

Hull is a poet of furious intensity and lyricism, fiercely engaged with the social world at both the micro- and macrocosmic level. Her work is driven by an intoxicating tangle of sorrow and praise, reverence and despair. She is an ecstatic elegiac, or an elegiac ecstatic, and her too-short life left Planet Earth with just three volumes of poetry, each more restlessly felt and original than the last. “The Window” is the last poem in her final collection, The Only World, which was published after her death in 1994. She was forty years old. I am a little stunned tonight to realize, for the first time, that I have outlived her. I guess I’ll have to be myself when I grow up instead.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Window” by Lynda Hull

This week a friend introduced me to a quote by Walter Benjamin about his idea of the Angel of History, the being who surveys and weighs the actions of the past. It is only a slice of Benjamin’s vignette, but here are the select lines he sent:

‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe…’

The extract almost shivered on the first reading, possessing that little vibration common to all things that are alive. Benjamin was said to have been inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), that odd and not entirely appealing monoprint. Reading the extract, I was reminded how we are always looking for ways to understand the past, and this figure felt instantaneously apt; I imagined it large and looming over all our important incidents.

For me at least, the resonance was only momentary, and I found by the second reading of the lines that my heart disagreed. Would any Angel of History really see overarching catastrophe? I have my doubts. I think it is the human habit, rather than any angel’s, to see catastrophe everywhere.

How would I alter the line? I would risk outlining it as this: ‘…the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of catastrophes, he sees one single act of…’ What? Beauty? Grace? Something like this? I think so.

The terror is that this angel would see a chain-link of sadness after sadness and would perceive not a whole sorrow. How incomprehensible to us. This is the terror, and the hope – that all this suffering is not just suffering. 

Niall Campbell, On What The Angel of History Might See

stars pound on the roof but no one hears.

a lost soul settles to the benthic floor. polished

darkness. weight of silence. have mercy.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Erasing Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s metaphysical classic A Thousand Plateaus page by page, until only tanka and haiku remain. Follow Deleuzian Haiku on BlueSky for regular updates.

“All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of consistency of multiplicities. The plane of consistency is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills, [while] flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency, regardless of their number of dimensions.” (D&G, p9) […]

16

speak:
transformed by a line
of ants

[…]

18

microfascisms
just waiting to crystallize . . .
i become cat

Dick Whyte, Delezuian Erasure Haiku Vol. 2

When I was a teen, I used to sneak out of the house and play music in the woods or, especially, at the loading dock of the local mall because I loved the echoey sound and the sense of being alone, “out there,” playing music as if I were Sonny Rollins on the Brooklyn Bridge or some other improviser reckoning with self and the numinous. Later, I’d play in the outdoor concert hall at my arts high school. In fact, the night before graduation, a friend and I snuck out of our dorms at 3am and I played saxophone and he played the organ which was set up for the ceremony. Badasses, I know. I love playing music at night, and especially outside. I still do this, sometimes playing under the bridge to the 403 Highway near me. I like the susurration of the cars above and the otherwise stillness of the night.

Gary Barwin, Playing Music at Night under the Bridge

Never mind the half moons of cemetery dirt beneath its fingernails. Now, time means you no harm.

Those late-night drives when a familiar voice and a cup of coffee get you so much further down the line.

Up ahead,

a sign reads, You Are Here,

but you know there are still many miles left to go.

Rich Ferguson, Just One of the Many Adventures St. Christopher Remembers

In the distance, lakes black
as tar; the clang of instruments for binding

and shattering. The harp of the world
is strung to the point of breaking.

What hope there might be is a small
bubble, a spacecraft with limited seating.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Last Judgment

I’m becoming a real fan of poetry read aloud.  I love to hear words animated.  Silence falls, and the voice, with its hypnotic or musical or walking tones, steps in. Now that I’ve had the chance to read several times from “Diaspora of Things,” I’m fascinated.  Self-conscious at the start, I was careful to put emphasis here, pause between stanzas where I penciled in “pause.”  Then I slid into a rhythm.  The words took over, released from the page.  I hoped those words, riding on the point of a vibrating arrow, attached to wings, knew how to do what they do.  

Homer called it, “winged words,” how poetry is in flight and comes alive, like airborne birds, like carrier pigeons, conveying meaning and power.  In Hebrew, words and things are conveyed by the same word – devar.  In “Diaspora,” things become released “from the gaze of possession” – so why not words?  If they pierce the reader, go directly from one inner self to another, I ask for nothing more. 

Jill Pearlman, Poetry’s “Winged Words”

the cold finale
of a crime series:
even the softest sofa becomes
uncomfortable, unidentified,
a simple thing

Kati Mohr, Oración de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes

This week: an imagined history of the Green Man, anti-capitalist work poetry, the dactylic hexameter line, and much more. Enjoy.

If only I could sculpt the words to shape the lump in my throat every time I see the smiling faces and the flickering flags of the Global Sumud Flotilla as it heads east, picking up more boats, more people, a milquetoast military escort, as it goes.

They’re good at social media, across many organisational and personal Instagram accounts, and my window onto the digital collective mind is full of it. The soundtrack knocks the nail home. I cried when I watched a crew member playing ‘Bella Ciao’ on the violin, or another reel, with a beautiful Mediterranean sunset and Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’.

‘Love, love is a verb, love is a doing word.’

And we know they’re doing what we didn’t, or can’t, or won’t, wringing our hands at the unfolding massacre. I am as guilty of inaction as any shame-faced nation-state, hiding behind bleak poetry of witness, for what it’s worth, which might not be nothing. I wrote something about poetry sending ripples and ripples becoming waves, and know that it must be cold out there at night, under way over the ancient sea.

They thread between cities and the remnants of fallen civilizations, many the foundations of the West’s antiquity and its origin stories. Barcelona, Genoa, Catania, Tunis, Syros, then on to the ‘Holy Land’. Like lacing together a fishing net, they draw in more boats from across the sea, the Maghreb, and other oceans beyond. I was reading about the 1190 massacre of the Jews of York, then later, about the burning of the library of the Madrasa of Granada, a bitter, vengeful conflagration of knowledge and scholarly endeavour. A thousand years of burning books and the people who wrote them. It is a modern human triumph that the flotilla has members of all three ‘peoples of the book’; Christians, Muslims, Jews.

james mcconachie, Flickering Flags

I put my fist slightly off centre on my chest
draw round it, with red marker pen,
make a Valentine’s heart.
It needs to be bolder.
I outline it again
with black.
I recall the pages of my old Gray’s Anatomy;
add in a fat aorta,
ventricles, atria
forget where the vena cava goes.
I leave it out
press lightly to feather in the valves
laugh when they look like ghosts.

Sue Finch, MANDALAS AND THE JOY OF THINKING

Just to stay sane,
with warplanes
wounding the ancient sky,
I write
one more tanka.

[…]

I’m aligning myself with what I stand for, what I long for. I want to recognise my own shortcomings, and continue to face them so that I never stop learning.

On love:
pick no flowers
from open meadows,
from no one,
not any.

Kati Mohr, Makoto

The monarchs I see in my garden may, if they are lucky enough to survive the trip, live up to 9 months, which is well past the life span of spring and early summer generations.

They are not even returning to a place they know or have ever been. Human science has never yet determined how monarch butterflies of the last summer generation find their way to Mexico. They just go adventuring, floating on air currents, supping on flowers as they travel.

I’m about to go adventuring, as well, traveling further east than I’ve ever been, in the company of one of my favorite persons in the world–my daughter. She and I had long talked about taking a mother-daughter trip together once I retired, and sooner is better than later! She found an environmentally-conscious adventure tour business that offers some really intriguing historical/archeological/environmental hike-and-bus options. We’ll find out whether the company is worth recommending & I’ll report back here, meanwhile keeping our destination unrevealed for now. A little mystery is fun.

While I am taking this trip for reasons beyond writing inspiration, I can’t help hoping it will act as a prompt and opportunity for drafting new poems. I’ve been working on new drafts, and revising older ones; but I have to admit that for awhile my creative mojo has been a bit off. Yes, this happens to any so-called “creative” occasionally, but it never feels terrific. One prefers the juicy, challenging urgency of creative flow. Wish me luck (and traveling mercies).

Ann E. Michael, Adventuring

I’ve been pondering why I’m so lacking in any impetus to write at the moment. After all, if the sun-drenched historic gorgeousness and energy of Sicily doesn’t inspire me, what the heck will? Actually, those fabulous mosaics at Villa Romana Casale of female bikini-clad athletes are pretty inspirational. But sometimes (usually, for me) it’s a small thing that pops out unexpectedly. Among the pile of publications and catalogues waiting for me to read when I got back was a copy of the new-look Times Literary Supplement, bigger and thicker than before and every two weeks rather than weekly. I had barely got into it when today the latest issue dropped though the letter box. A quick skim for poetry content revealed a poem by Jemma Borg called ‘Before & after the night’. (Apologies if this link takes you to a paywall.) As I read it, I felt little lights going off in my brain accompanied by the kind of ‘wish I’d written that’ feeling that can be inspirational but also saddening. Like Salieri in Amadeus, melting in the face of Mozart’s brilliance and at recognising that he himself will never be more than a reasonably good musician. Thankfully, Jemma’s poem had more of a positive than negative effect on me! So I’ve just ordered a copy of her collection Wilder and a already noodling through a few ideas.

Robin Houghton, Readings, writing, reviews & general catchup

Being of a certain age, I worry that the time will come when I stop writing poems. I’m constantly jotting down wee scraps of notes, on the flyleaf of whatever collection I happen to be reading at the time, or in a notebook, or on my phone, in the hope they’ll eventually spark something. Folk are always talking about where the next poem will come from or fretting that there are no more poems left in them, but I find it far more helpful to talk about the poem as being up ahead somewhere, and everything I’m doing now is to bring me closer to it.

There’s a fair amount of trust involved – moving from something tedious and dreadful towards something that intrigues. When I think of it, that’s probably my main criterion – does it interest me or bore me? When I already know where I’m heading, when I’m confident I understand what I want to say, I’m almost always disappointed with the outcome.

What can help me on the path to the next poem? Many years ago a young Louise Glück said there were four things she would teach aspiring poets: how to become better readers; knowledge of craft; an attitude of dedication and habits of scrutiny. In other words, read poetry, learn how a poem is put together, work bloody hard at it and don’t just look at the world, engage with it.

John Glenday, North Sea Line Caught #1

The lover and the writing exist in tension for the poet. Nothing will relieve or alter these intersections in his life— the duress of intimacy and its attendant conflicts. “Vulnerable and exposed” . . . like a man battered by winds on the cliffs near the Duino Castle, where his elegies would be finished. […]

Among my three copies of Stephen Mitchell’s Selected Rilke translations, there is one filled with color-markings, the text that peeks out from the rainbow of my Rilke readings. Yellow markings made in my 20’s. Green arrived my late 30’s during the nursing-while-returning-to-Rilke days. Rilke’s “Elegy” for Marina Tvsetaeva is a forever favorite in its form as well as its direction. His preemptive elegy to a friend would be matched by her own New Year’s elegy to Rilke, following the shock of his death.

It hurts to write. It hurts to not-write. This, too, is an unassailable rhythm that rocks the raft of a life.

Alina Stefanescu, Rilke’s testament.

I suppose it’s what all poets search for – the perfect poem.

It’s the quest that keeps writers writing. And for most of us, it’s an impossible dream that sometimes seems achievable, sometimes seems very far away.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve written something, leaned back and thought ‘That’s it, that’s the one, I can’t say it any better than that’ only to look again, in an hour, a day, a week, even a year and, with a sinking feeling in the throat, think ‘Oh’. […]

You can’t set out to write something perfect, of course. Or I can’t. I just feel I might be on to something, a line, a thought, a link of words, an image, and run with it. What understanding I have of what a piece of writing is becoming as I write is often instinctive. I trust in my ability to get it down, to find the better lines, to hold the theme or tone, or change the theme and tone, and finish it at the right place.

I think that sense of trust has evolved over time, has taken over from the arrogance of youth where I wrote something and wanted to tell the world about it because I believed it to be so very good. Now, life itself is in a more reflective place, but I also think my brain seems to operate in a different way to when I was young. While I still hold pretty much the same view of the humanity’s moral and physical crimes and persistent absurdities, the connections between words and images are not so clear. I don’t hear or feel the same rhythms. Poems arrive in different, less systematic, less easily controlled ways. I have a more relaxed attitude to whether or not something will be successful, am content to let the process take care of itself and hope those who read it find something thought-provoking, useful or entertaining in it – assuming I think it of any interest at all. If I don’t, then I scrap it and start again at another place, another line, thought, image.

Bob Mee, THE PERFECT POEM?

“Meditation at Lagunitas” [by Robert Hass] is, I will argue near to the death, a perfect poem. Despite its 1979 publication in Praise—it is as old as I am—it remains as fresh and surprising for me as it was the first time I read it, an encounter I feel fortunate to remember; it’s not often you confidently recall, for instance, the moment a favourite person entered your ken. Nor is it necessarily typical to remember an exam question twenty-five years after you closed the blue book, but such was my undergraduate poetry education: singular and enduring. The essay prompt entailed a comparison-contrast between the Hass poem and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Blackberries” (the audio is the man himself; give it a click). I don’t remember what argument I made—only the feeling of Hass’s meditation opening, the longer I looked, like a lotus.

All I knew of Helen Vendler at that time was her book On Extended Wings, on Wallace Stevens’s longer poems, with which I’d grappled in pursuit of an unwieldy high school essay on “Sunday Morning,” but what captivated me in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” I realize now, is embodied by her notion of the speech act as a means of accessing a poem. By recognizing the function of each utterance and observing the shifts from sentence to sentence, one gains a deeper understanding of a poem’s tones—its emotional attitudes. In part it’s simple rhetorical analysis. It’s also just being a good listener, attentive to the speaker in front of you, how his effort unfurls with ease or snags, catches or exhales, sets out an assertion or walks it back, tests an idea or insinuates it, waits for your response.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass

I wrote a tribute to my long-time poet friend, Martha Silano, that went up on the Poetry Foundation web site (and was in the newsletter) and I was very happy and hope this helps people remember her and her writing. Marty passed away of ALS in May of this year. Her last book, Terminal Surreal, just came out from Acre Books. I hope you will look up her work as it is very worth reading.

Here’s a link to the article: An Oracular Voice: Remembering Martha Silano | The Poetry Foundation

Here is a taste of the article:

“The last time I saw Marty—Martha Silano—in person, it was fall during a week of wildfire smoke and we decided to visit a local sunflower farm in my neighborhood of Woodinville, Washington. We got lucky—the haze lifted for a few hours, the air quality wasn’t too terrible, and the temperatures had dropped enough for us to be comfortable outside. We met at my house for a quick catch-up chat, snacks, and wine, and I noticed that she hadn’t eaten or drunk very much. I think the beginnings of her swallowing problems—her first ALS symptom—were already happening, though she didn’t complain about a thing that day. I have a picture of us smiling among red and yellow sunflowers, the sky blue but slightly hazy above us. She told me how glad she was to be able to get out into nature again, without the pervasive wildfire smoke. Soon afterward, she was diagnosed with ALS and such outings would become impossible. I am so glad to have the memory of that day, now.”

I wish you all a healthy and happy week, and be sure to find a way to tell your friends how much they mean to you.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Tribute to Martha Silano Up at the Poetry Foundation

With the sad news of the passing of Tony Harrison, who as a working class poet had a great impact on me during my formative years of writing in the 1980s, I went back to a piece I was commissioned to write for an OUP collection of essays on his writing – both poetic and dramatic – in 1997. […]

Harrison’s first full collection, entitled The Loiners after the inhabitants of his native Leeds, was published in 1970 and contained this limerick:

There was a young man from Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
A pure white rose grew out of his nose
And his arse was covered in weeds.

Without losing sight of the essential comedy of this snatch, it can be seen as suggestive of aspects of Harrison’s career. For example, the comic inappropriateness of the Leeds boy swallowing seeds becomes the poet’s own ironic image of his classical grammar school education. As a result of this, in a deliberately grotesque image, arises the growth of the white rose of poetry – from the boy’s nose, of course, since Harrison in the same volume gave credence to the idea that the true poet is born without a mouth. The bizarrely contrasting weed-covered arse owes less to the intake of seeds (rose seeds wherever transplanted will never yield weeds) than to the harsh conditions Harrison premises in the Loiner’s life, as indicated in an early introduction to his work, where he defines the term as referring to “citizens of Leeds, citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, ‘loners’”.

Harrison’s now-legendary seed-master on the staff of Leeds Grammar School was the one who humiliated him for reciting Keats in a Yorkshire accent, who felt it more appropriate if the boy played the garrulous, drunken Porter in Macbeth.(3) The truth is that the master’s attitudes determined the kind of poetic rose that grew, in particular its technical facility which Harrison worked at to show his ‘betters’ that Loiners could do it as well as (better than?) they could. Yet this was no sterile technical exercise and Harrison’s success lies in the integrity with which he has remained true to those regions “covered with weeds” and in the fact that his work has always struggled to find ways to unite the weed and the rose. Perhaps the most important of these, as the limerick’s anatomical geography already predicted in 1970, is via the rhythms of his own body.

Martyn Crucefix, RIP Tony Harrison – a piece on metre and voice in his poetry

• My actual birthday arrives and I attend a reading by two visiting poets, Julia Kolchinsky and Jaswinder Bolina. The reading is fire. At dinner after, Shenandoah editor Beth Staples urges me to get dessert and I sheepishly order a fruit cup. It arrives with a lit candle shoved into a slice of banana and the waiters serenade me.
• Fifty bazillion people wish me happy birthday on FB, which is so kind although I feel guilty again because I have NOT been keeping up with distant friends’ special days. I navigate to the site to finish reading the messages. I learn through the many shocked posts on my timeline that Jennifer Martelli has died.
• I think of Frank O’Hara’s elegy for Billie Holiday’s voice: “Everyone and I stopped breathing”
• I last saw Jenn in late spring, twice. First was at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival where she spoke memorably on a panel about shame. My notes don’t quote her but I think she said something about not giving shame the time of day, being done with it after a childhood steeped in it. I was admiringly gobsmacked.
• A poet who was supposed to do a reading/ interview with me in Cambridge MA shortly after the festival suddenly canceled (long story). I panicked hard. Then I thought of Jenn’s generous social media posts about my book, the kind that showed she’d really engaged with it. She lived not so far from there. I wrote and asked her if she’d be game to step in. She swiftly said yes with only a week to prepare (a week that also involved, for her, two festival presentations).
• As I wrote about that Porter Square Books event in a diary-style blog shortly after returning home: “The amazing Jennifer Martelli (who’d spoken so powerfully on the shame panel) reads with me then runs a staged conversation about Mycocosmic, having prepared spectacularly with insightful and high-stakes questions.”
• I had no idea she’d been coping with pancreatic cancer for months. In her honor, I am resisting feeling ashamed about having asked her. She seemed unburdened and 110% alive.
• I watched her post joyous pictures on social media from a trip to Iceland, and when she’d returned home I sent her a few little gifts from a local lavender farm with a thank-you note. I received a lovely message back claiming that I had accidentally discovered her obsession with tea towels.
• I was far from Jenn’s inner circle so I don’t have any right to say this, but sometimes I feel a spirit-connection with a poet when I spend time with their books. I do in her case. She wrote inventively and autobiographically about addiction, violence, and being a woman in a profoundly misogynist world–often with witchiness and references to Tarot. (Her work suggests that she was both an atheist and kinda psychic, although I’ve never confirmed either.) The poems are spare, the language tight, but they simultaneously convey a mind in the process of probing experience with self-interrogating honesty. What’s not to love?
• My Tarantella is near my desk–it was the only Martelli book for sale at Porter Square that I didn’t already own–so Friday morning, I put aside the recommendation letters and read it. In life, she had a strong and distinctive voice that tended to delight people–you knew where she was from! It’s good to hear it in my head, to know she survives this way. I often tell students that the poems that move us most say what seems scary, self-exposing, dangerous. My Tarantella probes the poet’s obsession with the life and death of Kitty Genovese. It’s powerfully riveting because it brims with risk and revelation.

Lesley Wheeler, Voices in my head

On Tuesday night, I travelled to the London launch of “The Wildest Dream: an imagined history of the Green Man” by the much-missed David Gee (Ember Press 2025). It was strange to be at a launch when the author was absent; strange to celebrate when grief was such a strong presence in the room. But the beauty of the book still shone, and listening to it, I remembered- for the first time in these tumultuous weeks – something of the calm I found on the Coast to Coast, something about how words can lead the way into brighter, wider places. “Green without, green within”, said David, finding wildness not just in mountains and rivers, but also in tap water, weather, small acts of love and care. Fitting then that his final book – finished just weeks before his far-too-soon-death – should be an act of community, crowdfunded and published by people who loved him and his work, with half of all proceeds donated to Asylum Welcome.

Clare Shaw, Celebrating New Books

The wide canvases of Shadow Reader and The Strongbox embrace many lives, some sharply realised as individuals, others sketchily included in panoramic views. In this way, both books offer many of the satisfactions of fiction in a concentrated and distilled form. Michelene Wandor’s chapbook Ergo represents a very different poetic. My general sense is that moving from Dugdale’s and Dharker’s books to hers is like turning from oil paintings – crowded, impasto canvases in The Strongbox, more thinly layered ones in Shadow Reader – to an album of delicate, almost transparent, semi-abstract watercolours. Most of her poems are very short and all use minimalist imagistic techniques to hint at emotions, narratives and situations in a way that’s often almost ethereally bare of human presence. […]

The distinctive beauty of these poems seems to me to depend on two things; the harmonious flow and sensitive patterning of their sounds and the combination of vividness and elusiveness in the imagery. More than pointing out to the surrounding world, they induce a dreamlike state focused on the movement of the mind between the impressions forming and reforming themselves within it.

Edmund Prestwich, Michelene Wandor, Ergo – review

One of the pleasures of living where I do is its proximity to Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, home of a vibrant poetry festival. One of its star turns last year was Cirencester poet, Frank McMahon. I have heard him read his poetry on several occasions. More recently he has been performing poems from his fourth collection, The Canticles of Spring, (Tim Saunders Publications, 2025). I couldn’t wait to review it.

The first thing that strikes you about McMahon’s poems in this collection is the polymathic knowledge that underpins them. There is a familiarity with ancient history that informs the poems in the Museum section, such as Market Opportunities and Neolithic Axe-Head. There is the knowledge of myths that is most notably deployed in Ancient Music, a retelling of the Orpheus-Eurydice story, which imagines her relentless pursuit of a reunion with him through the ages and culminating in the present. There is the understanding of classical music and jazz that is so movingly deployed in the war poem, Pastoral, after Symphony no 3 by Ralph Vaughan Williams and in other poems specifically on the subject, such as Jazz Variations. Three Voices. There’s the rich botanical knowledge that makes for vivid descriptions in nature poems, such as Where I walked. And, of course there are the intertextual references in poems such as The Periodic Table (In Memoriam Primo Levi) and in Du Fu Comes to our Home, the latter a work which imagines a conversation with the 8^th Century, Chinese poet, Du Fu.

This impressive, broad frame of reference supports poems that seek to make sense of human experience. The range of themes explored is equally diverse. At a time when the fashion is for collections and pamphlets on a specific theme, I found this a refreshing change. All poetry’s universal concerns are here.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Canticles of Spring’ by Frank McMahon

The latest from Philadelphia poet Gina Myers [see my review of her prior collection here] is the book-length suite, Works & Days (Philadelphia PA: Radiator Press, 2025), a collection that plays off the dailyness and immediate title of Works and Days (New York NY: New Directions, 2016) by the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022). Instead of articulating the dailyness of being, Myers works through, as Marie Buck offers in their back cover blurb, “[…] all the hours we’ve lost to working; it also registers the continuous urge to want more from life than just sustaining oneself with a paycheck.” “Once I commit to writing a long poem about work,” Myers writes, near the end of the collection, “I decide to read a number of books about work / And this too becomes work, thankless and unpaid / And it begins to make me feel worse / And I begin to dread the work of reading about work [.]”

There has been an interesting anti-capitalist work poetry emerging from Philadelphia for some time, centred, as my awareness provides, around the work of Myers and Ryan Eckes [see my review of his latest here], offering a kind of continuation of the 1970s “work poetry” ethos worked through by Canadian poets Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Erín Moure and Phil Hall, and furthered by poets including the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing (Wayman being one of the founders), to more recent examples, whether Vancouver poet Michael Turner (think Company Town, for example), Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell or Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here]. Whereas those early Vancouver days of “work poetry” championed the idea that labour was worth articulating as literary subject matter, an idea that evolved through poets such as language-specific interrogations and pro-labour criticisms of capitalist culture—leaning into the work of poets such as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Clint Burnham, Colin Smith, ryan fitzpatrick and others—Myers employs numerous of those same threads with the added flavour of general frustrations, one that I know she shares with numerous other writers (few who ever discuss such in their writing): the mere fact that requiring employment takes time away from actually writing. […]

Not everyone holds the same physical requirements, the same mental load, for employment, which can allow for a very different level of post or pre-work energy. We all know about Frank O’Hara working poems during his lunch break, Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching upon prescription pads, or Toronto poet bpNichol, who used to compose his thoughts directly into a tape machine, during his long commutes from downtown Toronto to his lay-work at Therafields. Vancouver poet George Stanley composed a long poem while commuting around on BC Transit. Minneapolis poet Mary Austin Speaker composed The Bridge (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], her accumulation of untitled, stand-alone poems as she made her daily commute across New York’s Manhattan Bridge. I also know of writers too exhausted to even think about writing, once they leave the physical threshold of work.

In a cohesive collection of accumulated, first-person lyric interrogations, Myers writes on writing and work. She writes on writing and not writing, and offering her best energies and time to what she cares less about than other elements of her life, and of wanting to keep her writing life and writing time separate from ideas of “product,” a notion she feels enough pressure, put upon through capitalism, to resist.

rob mclennan, Gina Myers, Works & Days

“Home is a Place that Visits Me” does end on a note of hope: that trauma has been acknowledged and is being worked through. Hannah Hull has achieved an empathetic, compassionate long poem that captures a child’s view of abuse without graphic detail. Effectively a house readers journey through with space for them to imagine how they might have lived there and what the previous occupants experienced. It also asks questions about what makes a home. It’s not the building but how we occupy and use the building, the people we invite in and the people we keep out. Ultimately, it’s about agency and bodily autonomy: the house may be real or metaphoric. How we treat the most vulnerable who don’t have the capacity to bodily autonomy is a measure of humanity.

Emma Lee, “Home is a Place that Visits Me” Hannah Hull (Arachne Press) – book review

Last week Jeremy Wikeley (Jem) wrote an excellent, thought-provoking piece on the near-disappearance of what he calls the ‘middle-distance poem’ — the sort of thing exemplified by Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ and Yeats’ ‘Among School Children’. These are fairly long poems — often of around 100 lines — which, according to Jeremy’s piece, have a consistent, often stanzaic form, are strongly felt and “go on a journey”. […]

Jeremy’s piece hit my inbox at a busy moment, so I read it very quickly, and immediately had three thoughts but no chance to comment properly. The first thought was that, actually, I have noticed at least one long poem of roughly the kind of shape and ambition that he describes in most of the collections I’ve admired recently, and in several cases these were among the poems I liked best in the book — I’m thinking of pieces like the impressive ‘What the Buddha saw’ poems at the end of Carola Luther’s Walking the Animals; the title poems of Alex Wylie’s Secular Games and Joshua Mehigan’s Accepting the Disaster; Peter Davidson’s ‘The Mourning Virtuoso’ from Arctic Elegies, and A. E. Stalling’s long poem ‘Lost and Found’ (from Like). (Most of these poems are not available online: in those cases, the links in the previous sentence take you to pieces where I have quoted from them.)

I don’t think this invalidates Jeremy’s point at all, because you certainly don’t see poems like this in magazines very often and I think he’s right that they occupy a much less prominent place in the wider poetry “scene” than they once did. (Perhaps contemporary poets who want to write in this sort of way are now more likely to turn to the prose poem or lyric essay rather than verse?) I certainly can’t offhand think of a contemporary poet who is really “known” for writing poems of this general type, in the way that Larkin is and was.

My second thought was that these are, in classical terms, ‘hexameter’ rather than lyric poems. In classical Latin and Greek, the dactylic hexameter (six-foot) line was widely used not only for epic, which is perhaps what we tend to associate it with today, but also for medium length ‘conversational’ poems, such as satires and epistles. The satires and epistles of Horace, for example, are all in hexameter and range between 13 and over 300 lines long, but are mostly around 100. (Classical “satire” in this generic sense can be, but is not necessarily, “satiric” in the modern sense: the Latin term for both verse satires and epistles was sermones, ‘conversations’.) These are poems that are characterised by their ‘speaking voice’, even in cases where they do not have a specific addressee. Though they have moments of great intensity or beauty, they are typically pitched at a lower key than we associate with lyric, and they are (broadly speaking) closer to ordinary speech and more outward looking.

Poets raised on a classical literary framework, whatever their native language, have always tended to reproduce this distinction — in the sixteenth-century you find it very clearly in both Wyatt and (in French) Marot, for example, as well as in all the Latin poets of the period; and Jonson and Donne both wrote dozens of satires, epistles and other sorts of medium-length ‘conversational’ poems alongside lyric. (This perhaps goes a small way to answering one of Jeremy’s very interesting ‘Questions to follow up’, “What, if anything, have the metaphysical poets got to do with it [i.e., the middle-distance poem]?”). And even among 20th century poets, there is a clear sense of the difference between lyric and ‘hexameter’/sermo in the poetry of, for example, Thom Gunn and Anthony Hecht, as well as in Larkin. (Who, as has often been pointed out, had a kind of genius for concealing, or perhaps just fully digesting, the more high-flown elements and sources of his deeply-rooted style.)

Victoria Moul, Middle-distance death

— I’ve spent some time this week, as one does, comparing two translations of the same line from Tomas Tranströmer.

This is by Patty Crane, from the book Bright Scythe:

“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.”

This one by Robin Fulton in The Great Enigma:

“We look almost happy out in the sun, while we are bleeding fatally from wounds we don’t know about.”

— They resonate in different ways, and I’m grateful for them both. I like the word fatally, in the second, but I like the finality of the sounds in words bleed, death, wounds, together. And I’m sure each translator mulled over these possibilities. Meanwhile, we look almost happy out in the sun. Worth a life’s work to have written something so true.

— Teju Cole on Tranströmer upon his Nobel win: “Reading him, one is also reminded of American poets like Charles Simic (for his surrealism) and Jim Harrison, Gary Snyder, and W. S. Merwin (for their plain speech and koan-like wisdom). But Tranströmer casts a spell all his own, and in fact the strongest associations he brings to my mind are the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Overwintering

–You wake up tomorrow morning, and you discover that you are a tree, outside there, on the quad of the campus.  Describe how you feel and what you see.

–The next morning, you wake up, and you are a single leaf on the tree.  Describe life from the viewpoint of that leaf.

–The next morning, you are soil, the dirt beneath the tree.

–The next morning, you are a bird.

–The next morning, you are the bird’s nest.

–The next morning, you are this door, made of wood that was once a tree.

–The next morning, you are the blade of the saw mill that transformed the tree into wood for boards to make doors and furniture and lumber.

–The next morning, you are a saw mill.  Are you abandoned?  Transformed into something else?  Or are you still transforming trees into boards?

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, You Are the Tree, You Are the Board, You Are the Sawmill Blade

When I was in middle school, my family took a trip to Western Ireland. It was my first time in Europe, and the first time I walked around inside structures more than—at most—150 years old. Being in the presence of these timeworn stone castles, Celtic earthworks and burial mounds, churches built a 1,000 years ago or more, I felt a sense of vertigo as time expanded and deepened around me, an uncanny feeling of the now—of my own thirteen year old self—suddenly touching history, being inside of it. Rather than learning about the past as some outside observer, I realized that I too was riding the same winding river as the other real people from long ago who had walked the same land, stood among the same rooms.

I was already a budding poet then, and I wrote a poem during that trip trying to capture this new sense of time I was experiencing. Like most middle-school poems, it reads as cringey to me in retrospect, but it still puts me back into that place of vertigo when I remember the lines “I placed a rock on the old stone wall/ to put myself in history.” Thirty years on, I can feel that mossy stone in my hand as I lifted it from the moss, feel the electric surge in my spine as I nestled it onto the crumbling wall that had veined that particular green hill in Connemara for God knows how many years. In that act, I felt my hands joining the other hands that had built the wall. I wondered how long my stone would stay where I placed it.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Deep Time

i lose my head & live a tiny green life.
in my house-sitting days every place
had orchids. they liked to speak in parables.
once, i sat down & a white & blush orchid
told me, “there was a girl
without any parents. she emerged
from the earth.” i thought the flower
was talking about me so i ran away
& did not get to hear the end of the story.
what happened to her? is that why
there’s always dirt under my fingernails?
i think politics are awful & i would rather
just sit with the orchids & try to not die.

Robin Gow, orchid keeper

ChatGPT will respond by predicting what words are most likely to follow in a helpful, coherent way. Utilizing semantics and context, possible responses will be considered. If I had been talking about a stressful day, ChatGPT may consider responding with “That sounds like a restorative plan—long walks are great for grounding” or “That sounds nourishing. Do you usually find walks help you reset?”

When I say “I need to go for a long walk. Respond as if you are May Sarton”, ChatGPT responds as if it were the poet/writer May Sarton:

“Ah—yes. Go. The long walk is not a luxury but a necessity, a way to restore the soul’s fragile balance. Out there, in the hush of the natural world, the mind loosens its tight grip, and the body remembers its rhythm. Each step is a kind of prayer, each breath an opening. Do not hurry; let the walk take you as much as you take it. In the quiet, you may find the threads of yourself weaving back together.

“Would you like me to shape this into something closer to her journal style, almost like an entry from Journal of a Solitude?”

A fluffy response, followed by what feels like an advertisement. More, more, more.

Sarah Lada, (Really, I 3 You) (Do you wish to believe I 3 you)

To dream.
To have the sky on speed dial:
please more stars, less rain;
please more wildfowl in a skein,
less death please, less disarray.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, To have the sky on speed dial

In Chicago, I walked around the hushed library of the Poetry Foundation. In an ongoing period of artistic suppression, The Poetry Foundation has helped us maintain a literary community. As a young person, I dove into poetry and decided that was my way of life. When I was in college, I only wanted to read either queer women or African American poets. I could not bear reading white men. I was convinced their poetry sprang from privileged lives safe from my guttered existence, completely outside of my experience of the world.

When I think of the extremes of poetry, the poems you can’t really read because the words are stomping over each other on the page, or the poems you have to read many times to understand their kind of music, I recognize how humans like extremes in our universe, in our communities. Maybe because America is moving toward such a dark place, I’m giving thought to all the ways a person—a country—can die and be buried. […]

Living is difficult work. In Chicago, I didn’t eat. I worked. I drank water and coffee and, when I could, I saw art. At my next stop, Nashville, I caught my breath. Carrying an independent publishing press through a country on fire—a country that will not prioritize the survival of the arts—feels like a wild task. Some days, I wonder if I am too old for this. Or too young. Or not impressive enough. Or too female. One of my advisors says a man could do it better.

And so? God is a woman, I say. My God, at any rate. Women get things done. Just wait. Right now, I am in D.C., heading to Baltimore to plan for AWP, to New York to fundraise, then to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Red Hen Press is women-led, queer leaning. We women carry water. We sustain our communities.

In the immediate moment, when I’ve caught my breath, I am off to do wild, great things, as we must in times of great peril. I am not disappearing. Some days, I feel that I am. But I am here, ready to do the great work that art requires of me. I believe in the survival of America. We will unbury this country. We will find our way to the sky.

Kate Gale, Visibility and Vanishing: Unburying the Dream of America

Somewhere, the click of high heels becomes rosary beads, sending well-worn prayers up to a starry heaven dazzled by mercy and moonlight.

All around, the onyx-eyed gaze of darkened apartment windows.

Alleyways looking for nothing pretty, just enough shadows to cloak them in mystery.

Hotels, rooming houses, bungalows, and mansions whisper secrets of the lucky and lowdown, the famished and famous.

Above it all, lovers are parked along Mulholland.

Their fingers upon the heated pulse of a promise yet to be kept.

Rich Ferguson, Along the Boulevard

But sunsets still stun with their overflow of spun
candied gold; dust pooled in clouds, at last.

Thieves walk the streets in statement suits—
brazenly believing this is their time at last.

Who’ll remember when and where and what
survived, when the trials end at last.

On our very last day, before our departure,
will there be a break in the rain at last?

Luisa A. Igloria, Eventually

This week: how poems happen, early-autumn dreamtime, the gates of unuttered words, and much more. Enjoy.

It was almost midnight on February 18, 2023. My back was injured from repeatedly picking up our elderly dog Misha. I was lying in bed with one of the large spiral-bound notebooks I use for journaling. Feeling sore and tired, I didn’t have anything profound to say, so I just wrote about the moment: journaling about my wee life despite my stunning insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The first draft read:

spiral notebook
these random jottings in this bit
of galaxy

This felt very awkward, but it had potential. I cut “these” but it was still clunky. Next I tried:

spiral notebook
recording my small part
of the galaxy

I crossed out “small” but it still seemed too long and too obvious. I gave up for the time being.

The next day, I came back to it with fresh eyes. Changing “notebook” into “journal” covered the journaling aspect without having to detail it. And instead of hitting readers over the head with my point, the new, condensed version gave them a little something to work out. I changed “part” for “bit” because it sounded smaller.

The haiku was now so short that I thought it worked better as a one-liner, or “monoku.” In English-language haiku, this is a popular variation from the typical three lines. The poem now read:

spiral journal my bit of the galaxy

Three weeks later, I submitted it to the esteemed journal Modern Haiku, and happily, editor Paul Miller accepted it for the summer 2023 edition.

Last month, while perusing my haiku collection to find good subjects for haiga (art combined with haiku), this one spoke to me. But I’d noticed that many of my poems are in the first person. For pieces that will go into my annual calendar, I worry that too many “I” poems could seem too self-involved; I would rather include the reader. So for the haiga version, I changed “my” to “this.”

Now I wonder if my meaning is less clear in this version, but I guess that’s OK; each reader can interpret it as they wish. There are plenty of haiku that I find mysterious but interesting, as long as they aren’t completely obscure.

Annette Makino, How a haiku is hatched

In 2017, a trip to Berlin led me to the place where the Nazis began the burning of books.

I felt a sudden,  powerful physical and emotional sensation, history coming fully alive. I had studied the Weimar Republic at University but it could not convey the palpable combination of location and history which I felt as I studied  the memorial to those events.

“Ghosts gather, tug at your sleeve politely / plead that you read the Book of the Dead. / Its opening page lies at your feet. Descend / to lamentation’s rainbow. / “
Viewing the monument in Budapest to the murder of Jews was a further jolt. Out of these intense moments came two poems, Berlin 1933 and Shoes, published in my first book, At the Storms Edge, ( Palewell Press.)

My poetic voice was maturing and a re-reading of Primo Levi’s book made an even deeper impression.  I felt a deep urge to honour his life and work, to try to imagine those moments before extermination, to praise his humanity. Hence this poem, for me the most important in the book. And perhaps, subconsciously, I was provoking readers and listeners to say, “this matters, you need to know so that you can spot the warning signs here and elsewhere.”

Am I in danger of overstatement? Think how rancorously divided we were over Brexit. The murder of MP, Jo Cox.  Violent disorder about asylum-seekers in hotels. The condemning of judges in the right-wing press for upholding the law. In the words of Sir Michael Tippett, “I must know my shadow and my light.” Artists must be willing to address full on the worst of our individual and collective selves, even if only in private conversation or introspection.

After the end of the war, Theodore Adorno said,”After Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry. ” I think we must continue to write because in the face of evil silence might imply consent. We must add our voice to the chorus of protest, warning and lament.

Drop-in by Frank McMahon (Nigel Kent)

This week I was recording some poems for a thing and I was wondering what to record. I rather fancied a theme of some kind. First of all, I considered my rabbit poems and then I decided because there are likely to be more yet to come, they would be better saved for a future date. Whilst looking I enjoyed rereading my poem Watching the Joker Alone which was written in response to a call out for cinematic poems from The Broken Spine. This encouraged me to see which other poems had found their home with this particular press – and a setlist was formed.

Watching the Joker Alone is one of those poems that captures a specific moment in time, and which might not even have been written if I hadn’t read the call out from Alan Parry. On seeing the call out I had recently returned from a solo visit to the cinema so I picked up my pen to see what might evolve. I remembered the feeling I had as I walked down the stairs to the exit as the credits rolled, and the poem took form on the page.

Sue Finch, WATCHING THE JOKER ALONE

The following poem evolved in my head over a couple of days before I put pen to paper. I had been thinking about a salt mine in Poland I had visited years ago and how we humans create holes in the ground.

Salt

They found it where he said they would,
a day’s digging in the field, dirty brown crystals.
It was, he maintained, proof that some time before
there had been an ocean above our heads. […]

Paul Tobin, AN OCEAN ABOVE OUR HEADS

Here, the kind of September morning
that pauses my breath — jeweled dew
on the tall grasses and ripe corn,
the hillsides beginning to take on
their seasonal tweed, while over there —
famine, injustice, anguish. Despair
presses down like a lead blanket.
Where is hope in a year like this?

I turn to Jonah, the reluctant prophet
who found his conscience and his heart
at the bottom of the sea. […]

This year’s Elul poem had been eluding me. This has been a really hard year for the world. I couldn’t find the path in … until I started working with my Bayit hevre on a new rendering of the Book of Jonah for this year. (Coming soon.) We went deep into the context of Jonah and what it might say to us this year. And that led me to what I needed to say this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Elul poem for 2025

Beginning in March 2025, large areas of South Australian coastal waters have been devastated by a harmful algal bloom, leading to mass mortalities of uncountable numbers of fish, invertebrates and other marine life. The causes are complex but all arise from the unmitigated effects of anthropogenic climate change.

I made the video from images of fish that have been killed by the bloom and washed up on beaches along the eastern side of Gulf St Vincent. The audio was created from samples taken from videos of living fish, crabs and squid recorded at Seacliff beach, South Australia, in January – February 2025, before the bloom hit. The text is what the fish might say to us, if only they could…

Ian Gibbins, DEADEYE

Today is publication day for Temporary Shelters, so I’m happy to share a new video from the book. It was shot and produced by Bare Bones Filmmakers.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Another New Poetry Video

My writing desk is a slightly creaky thing I made myself. ‘Desk’ is suggestive of grandeur, whereas in fact it’s just a crude, slim table. The top is an old shutter from some who-knows-how-ancient window, the frame is made from the pitch pine side lengths from an old bed. […] From the desk I can see the curtains I draw in summer to keep out the flies while the balcony doors are open. […]

When we started this project there was a building boom in Spain and old houses in pretty villages were being gutted and turned into tourist accommodation. The beds that had been left behind when the occupants had thrown up their hands in despair at their precarious rural lives and set off to start again in Barcelona, were all of a piece. I have their dimensions committed to memory, the lateral timbers 1.8m long, 7.5cm wide, 3.5cm thick.

Everywhere I look in and around the house are these timbers, a dense pitch pine too hard to take a nail without bending it, resistant to weather and insects. They are in the window frames, the roof structure of the porch, dozens built into the eaves and soffits alone. They made up the ladder to the tree house I built with my son. When it finally fell apart I repurposed the wood, yet again, into a ramp for the henhouse. I think of the generations of my neighbours, who were conceived, born and died in these beds, whatever embodied energy that implies, but mostly I think of my young sons, who when dad arrived with a pile of them tottering on the roof of the car, would happily set-to, reducing them to their reusable components with hammers and spanners.

I suppose I’m concluding something about timelessness and transience, a feeling the high country here, with its ruins, hermitages and 1000-year-old olive trees, will not permit you to ignore. You might think the energy, the vibes built into this house would set up some kind of a psychic din, all those lives lived and lost between the timbers, but what I notice instead is silence, the long wavelength calm that drifts in from the surrounding landscape. There are bee-eaters massing every day now, in some high-altitude conference of the birds, usually some of the last migrants to leave after the summer. Yesterday, arriving back from the coast just before dawn, I saw an eagle owl, heading back to the mountains after drinking down at the river. The soft, sweet dreamtime that is early autumn is upon us all, conceived, born, slipping back into the light when we must. The timbers and the forests will endure, and when they’re finally done, they will surely keep someone warm.

james mcconachie, Sticks and Stones

After devoting several notebook pages to a description of his writing desk, Franz Kafka must have paused and walked to the window. Surely time passed. Maybe something happened. According to his notebook, the next paragraph is “wretched”:

Wretched, wretched, and yet well intended. It’s midnight after all, but considering that I’m very well rested, that can only serve as an excuse insofar as I wouldn’t have written anything at all during the day. The burning lightbulb, the quiet apartment, the darkness outside, the last waking moments entitle me to write, even if it’s the most wretched stuff. And I hastily make use of this right. This is just who I am.

Wretched, too, the feeling of wronging the subject or failing the object. Grotesque, the shame upon encountering the ill-depicted desk. Bovine, that instant when passing the hallway mirror and noting the WRONG writ large on the forehead.

Alina Stefanescu, Commissioned sights.

I’ve returned to reading Knausgård’s My Struggle, and one of the things that sticks with me the most about reading him is how easily he writes about self-loathing. It’s just plain there on the page, as simple and straightforward as any quotidian detail. A passerby is wearing a scarf as easily as he is wearing his loathing. I am, in a way, envious of that honesty. Part of me wonders if it’s gendered. As a woman, as a poet, how is it that it takes me many more words to express that kind of self-discontent? Am I building architecture to prevent a kind of bare vulnerability?

I was thinking about this a lot when going through the final edits on the proofs. To be honest (which seems extra appropriate here), I gave these proofs a level of close attention that I never had with my four books before. It’s not because I thought these poems were less finished than the others, but it’s more so because reading the poems on the page has always felt like listening to a recording or watching a video of myself. I have the same recoil. I can’t do it. I don’t. Reading them aloud for an audience is different. There’s an element of performance that I can embrace as a form of distance and protection. But in this final stage, before the poems become fully real as a book, I have trouble confronting myself there on the page, even under those words and all that dressy architecture. Do I fear that I may decide in that last moment that this book should not exist, is not good enough to exist?

But this time, with my feline friend Maya at my side on the chaise lounge, I faced those pages head-on, and they will find their way into the world this spring underneath the stunning package of this beautiful cover, which I’m excited to reveal.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Mantises, Leaf Blowers, and a Cover Reveal

One of the most commonly proved facts is that you will scour your manuscript and galleys to make sure you’ve eliminated any remaining typos, misspellings, or wayward punctuation only to discover–well–you haven’t. Your editor will also scour for these, as will the occasional friend, partner, or critique buddy. You will think you are safe, but upon opening the book weeks, month, or years later, there will be at least one that has somehow eluded all eyes til just now. 

Some may say, in fact, this is one of the blessings of printing POD, since you can always fix your mistakes and oversights, especially if you are doing the ordering. I speak from both sides of the experience, since as an editor, I read through one final time before printing and have missed some pretty embarrassing  punctuation gaffs. This is also true of my own books, either persistent errors that have eluded everyone til it’s been made public, or some jostling that led to conjoined words, extra spaces, missing periods, and other pesky flaws. All the editorial eyes in the world will not catch a word you are all collectively misspelling (in my first book, published by a traditional press, It was the city of Albuquerque, which only the odd New Mexico native seemed to notice).

Most often, I know I always need an extra set of eyes, usually another poet or editor who is trained to read for things, though a friend or partner has had to sometimes help out. For books I edit, we can usually catch most things in a few back and forths before saving the final version. When you’re on your own, though, without a formal editor these are things you need to attend to–whether that’s enlisting help, trusting your own eye (the success of which will depend on how detail oriented you are) or hiring a professional as a developmental/proofing editor, or what the cool fiction kids call a beta reader.  

One nice thing about the poetry collections of my own that I have published is that they usually have already existed in a published version, either in journals or zine projects that have themselves been proofread within an inch of their lives. Or even the print version of EXOTICA that required only minor adjustments since the zine was already published and it’s just slightly different in formatting for print. CLOVEN, however, like GRANATA, has not been published before in another version, so I am starting fresh with whatever I had as I cemented the poems in place as finished (and even that may change in the process.) This means, I am moving slowly and extra carefully with each page and each fragment. It also gives me a chance to make tiny tweaks that may make the poems just a little better rhythm- or language-wise. It’s a slower process as well, but I am hoping to wrap it up before the end of this month to be on track with my publication plan.  

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | proofing

Today I learned that Contubernales Books, the small independent publisher of primarily Greek & Latin works in translation, has published a second book of mine : Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Their first effort was last year’s Mississippi River extravaganza, Green Radius.) One day I hope these books will surface, somehow, through the still pond of our culture’s literary-critical apparatus – its hearing-aid technology, so to speak (such as it is).

For a long time – since the early 1980s, in fact – I have been mining my own vein (or cursèd dry cistern, if you will) of the “American sublime”, or the modernist epic, or simply the l-o-o-n-g poem. The 20th century, and perhaps the early 21st century, have proven fertile ground for multifarious efforts of this kind, some of them quite brilliant and even great; but my own primary model and paragon in this regard, if you want to know, has not been Ezra Pound, or H.D., or T.S. Eliot, or W.C. Williams, or Charles Olson, or… or… or the many other imposing and erudite examplars.

No, I have only had two prime instigators : Osip Mandelstam – who is not even American, nor a writer of long poems! – and Hart Crane – who is. Crane, I find, mingled the classic beautiful-and-sublime into a profound contemporary long-poem invention : The Bridge. About Crane, I stand with Harold Bloom, and the sometimes-formidable critic John Irwin.

Henry Gould, A New Book of Poetry

On Tuesday, I had the great pleasure of reading at Five Leaves bookshop in Nottingham, alongside two lovely poets whose poetry I love: Kathy Pimlott and Peter Sansom. As Kathy mentioned during her reading, she and I met because we were both participants in the Poetry Business Writing School run by Peter and Ann Sansom. I think our sets of poems complemented one another’s. I’m very grateful to Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves and Tim Fellows of Crooked Spire Press for introducing our readings. […]

I’ve been reading Peatlands (Arc Publications, 2014), written by Pedro Serrano, the Mexican poet, and translated by Anna Crowe, both of whom I was due to be reading alongside in Mytholmroyd. (They have been replaced by Kim Moore and Molly Prosser.) In his poem ‘El Arte de Fecar’ / ‘The Liminating Art’, he writes, ‘Shitting is like the art of writing: / you have to give it thought and just so long / for everything to come out good and strong.’ I can’t argue with that.

I’ve also been (re-)reading Us (Faber, 2018) by Zaffar Kunial, as it’s the chosen book for this month’s Poetry Book Club. In these days when the media are encouraging the open racism of far-right fuckwits, his poems exploring what it means to belong have taken on added importance. I’ve also re-worked my way through the poetry oeuvre of Seamus Heaney, accompanied again by Stepping Stones (Faber, 2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s seminal interviews with him. For me, Heaney remains a paragon of how a poet can negotiate the politics and events of their time.

Matthew Paul, September reading and other news

Tomorrow night, we read in Vancouver. Preparing for our flight, I poke through our bookshelves, thinking I might continue my Etel Adnan rereading, only to discover a further Dodie Bellamy title I had forgotten we owned. The TV SUTRAS (2014), frustratingly and foolishly unopened, clearly landing years before I managed to first properly read Bellamy’s work. Within a few hours, Christine and I in the Air Canada lounge, thanks to passes from her father, as I read Dodie Bellamy and watch planes ascend at angles.

Wait for me, driver. I’ll be right back.

Man getting out of cab.

COMMENTARY

Keep returning to the practice. It will always be there waiting for you. Life will also be waiting for you—no need to cling to it during practice. This is the key to focus. Leave competing demands behind.

I’m enjoying the call-and-response of these texts, reminiscent of what Canadian poet Ken Norris once worked through his own chapbook, The Commentaries (1999), a work that commented upon his own poetry collection, The Music (1995), offering it as his own variation on Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (1978). As Bellamy writes to introduce the collection, The TV SUTRAS is an “inspired” text.

I use “inspired” in the spiritual sense, meaning a text that is dictated or revealed. For example, each day between noon and 1 p.m., Aiwass, the minister of Horus, dictated The Book of the Law to Aleister Crowley in the spring of 1904. And then there’s Moses, who climbed Mount Sinai so God could dictate the Ten Commandments to him. For The Urantia Book, space aliens spoke through a sleeping man named Wilfred Kellog in Chicago, Illinois, USA. For the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith dropped a magical seer stone into his hat, then buried his face in the hat, and in the darkness a spiritual light shone, revealing a parchment.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

One day last week I saw a circular announcing a small academic conference or colloquium at Cambridge in December on the Pindaric fragments. (Here if you fancy it yourself.) Reading it was the first time in years — and certainly the first time since I withdrew from formal academia — that I genuinely wished I could go to an academic conference. I am too much an introvert and too covetous of my time to have ever been very keen on conferences, but I love thinking about Pindar and wish I knew more about the study of the fragments.

Coincidentally, on the same day that I saw this notice, the Twitter/X/whatever account @sentantiq posted a fragment not from Pindar, but from Bacchylides, Pindar’s less well-known contemporary in Greece in the 5th century BCE. The post was a single line, in both Greek and English translation:

[οὐδὲ γὰρ ῥᾷστον] ἀρρήτων ἐπέων πύλας / ἐξευρεῖν

It isn’t easy to find the gates of unuttered words.

I love this image of the gates of (or for) unuttered words, and I imagine anyone who writes regularly can sympathise with the sentiment — it is indeed not easy to find new (or even inadequate but not-new) words for things, or a new way of putting something; equally, it’s not easy to find a path into a new subject, an access point to a new topic, to say something original. And there’s something just very slightly paradoxical about the idea of “unspoken words” — they only become words, we might imagine, once they are spoken or at least utterable. (ἀρρήτος, here translated as ‘unspoken’, can also mean that cannot be spoken or not to be spoken.)

Victoria Moul, Finding the door of words: on originality

“[P]oetry makes nothing happen,” Auden says, but “it survives.” More than that, it is “A way of happening, a mouth.” Whatever poetry is, in other words, it is not inert. Following Auden’s metaphor, it “happens” in the same way that a river happens, and in the same way that the mouth of a river opens onto something larger than the itself, an ocean for example, so does the “mouth” of poetry. So does a question. You can see here the thread that is going to run through this blog.

As an example of a poem that opens onto a question that opens onto precisely the kind of reflecting on the state of the world that I think we need today, I’d like to invite you to engage with Elisa Gabbert’s close reading in The New York Times of another Auden poem, “Musée Des Beaux Arts,” which is nominally a response to Breughel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus […]

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, What Poems Do We Need Right Now?

I’ve been thinking about my monthly Listopia posts and how much time they take to organize and write up and I’ve decided to suspend them, at least for the time being. Maybe permanently, I don’t know. I may do a similar footprint on a weekly basis but, honestly, I don’t know about that either. All I know is it’s been a tough few weeks, for many reasons, making me feel tired mentally and physically. I’ve been reassessing my online time because I’m sure it’s contributing to my fatigue. This week, I spent less time scrolling social media, a years-long bad habit. The very first day I noticed how much more present I felt in my real life, how much more time I had for other things. When I am online, I look for the type of stories I want to read right now – more positive, less dark. I like dark reads. I like crime, gothic, and noir but I feel like I need to chill for a while & be mindful of the content I’m consuming. That definitely includes news and opinion pieces.

Charlotte Hamrick, Old-School Chill

I’m retraining my brain to pay attention like it’s 1999. I miss my old brain, the one that could read for hours. The one that had lots of good ideas. The one that craved learning. We did an accidental phone-free Saturday recently, and it felt really good. In the article below, I especially appreciate author Yana Yuhai’s explanation of the neuroscience behind our compulsions to scroll (“Our attention spans haven’t disappeared, they’ve been retrained”), and her suggestions for ways to get our attention back, none of which are dogmatic or dramatic (“make focus feel like a soft return, not a hard reset”). Neuroplasticity for the win.

Rita Ott Ramstad, When the right plant in the right place isn’t

As a poet, I ask myself whose story is this to tell? I’m not among those constantly wandering in search of safety for the next few hours. Wondering then, where to next? I’m not clutching my stomach to pain of emptiness in a body wasting in the drag on it as it as it tries to pull some kind of strength from nutrients that aren’t available.  

I’m not having to close my eyes as I step over body parts that are barely distinguishable. That every breath I take is filled with a mixture of dust, of soot particles and the sulfur of explosions. The smell of death that is always an undercurrent. I know of these things but I don’t actually live then, so it’s not really my story to tell.

The story that is mine to tell is none the less painful. It is the story of a mixture of anger and sadness. It is a frustration that even as a poet I cannot seem to find the correct word to convey that sadness because sadness is not good enough. It’s more than that… it’s not even despondency, it’s overwhelming, it’s grief. It is seeing so many photos and videos that they have become a collage of images in my brain.  And as this goes on, my anger grows and it is hard to keep it under control because it is American Tax Dollars, Billions of them that has been feeding this ugly vial right-wing Zionist government that has made the decision to choose genocide on the people of Gaza. 

Michael Allyn Wells, Two Stories and a Genocide

Wishbone, war bone, water bone.

All the bones building the body of this one nation underground.

Strewn across battlefields, skulls with no tongue to recount the ways they once loved.

Etched into those bones:

disinterest, disinheritance. Fire, ice, dust, tears.

If only this were a train song, a mournful melody to make all this leaving easier.

Rich Ferguson, One Nation, Underground

My sincerest gratitude to New Verse News for publishing my duplex poem “Dear Judy” earlier this week. The events of September 10 were heartbreaking. Two people died that day. One person assassinated in the state where I lived most of my life and one in my new home state of Colorado. Two children were critically injured in the school shooting in Evergreen. I’ve been writing epistolary duplex poems to my mother, who passed unexpectedly in January 2024. Not all of the poems are related to current events but they have been a way for me to still talk to her, tell her things I need to, feel close to her. This is the first one published.

New Verse News publishes poems related to current events. They are quick to respond and generous in their promotion on social media. 

Trish Hopkinson, My duplex poem “Dear Judy” published in New Verse News, open for current event poems!

Yesterday I attended the first in a series of monthly interfaith retreats hosted by SEEL Puget Sound. SEEL stands for “Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life.” The series is based around formalized spiritual exercises designed in the mid-1500’s by St. Ignatius of Loyola, who later went on to found the Jesuit order. At the end of the retreat, we were given a book of prayers, reflections and poems called “Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits”, and I was totally shocked to find a poem in it by Gerard Manly Hopkins. In all my of my years of stumbling across his poetry, I had no idea that he was a Jesuit priest. To be fair, most of his online biographies make a concerted effort to gloss this over for some reason, and Gerard Manly Hopkins is not a poet who I ever specifically sought out to read. But when I did happen to come across his work, I always liked it and found it interesting. His beautiful poem “God’s Grandeur” in my estimation has early echos of EE Cummings:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

I have only had this book for one day, and I am already completely enamored of it. I love that it mixes poetry and prays, and some that count as both, such as in “Soul of Christ” by St. Ignatius:

“May the shelter I seek
be the shadow of your cross.”

The problem with reading the Bible and religious literature is that it can’t merely be “consumed.” The audacity of certain lines, like this one, thunk me across the head like a two-by-four, and I have to stop reading for extended periods of time to walk around dizzily with cartoon stars over my noggin while my body and soul wrestles with the enormity of it.

Kristen McHenry, Hearts on Fire: Discovering Jesuit Poets

Sometimes I feel like just picking up my own shoe and dropping it, so anxious am I always about that “other shoe to drop”-waiting business. Let me just make happen the Next Thing, so I can stop being anxious about it. Of course, mmm, that’s not how life works. I mean, sometimes, I guess, you can blow things up with your own actions. But mostly it’s just stuff unfolding in its own odd time, its own strange way, and you standing there thinking, Wait, what? or Okay, okay, come on, already. I’m talking personally. I’m talking professionally. I’m talking nationally. Internationally. I’m talking about the shift of summer to fallish to fall to holy crap it’s cold.

How do you know when wisdom lies in waiting, and when it is time to act? And what act should be taken? And how do you take it, knowing it could be disastrous…or completely inconsequential? How do you wait, knowing you may be missing a crucial opportunity to act? I watch the criss-cross of the double-dutch jump ropes. Do I jump now? Now?

When writing a poem, the stakes are low. That’s what revision is for. In watercolor painting, the stakes are higher — many things once done cannot at all be undone. And then there’s life.

I admire this poem for how it deliberates, takes a small action, and then sits for a moment in its reverberation. It’s a small poem that feels enormous in its moment of silence afterward. It is from the most recent issue of One Art online magazine.

Marilyn McCabe, everything breaks

Yesterday I read the first line of “To Autumn”:  “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”  I asked my students if the mornings had been misty lately.  They looked startled.  I realized that they probably wouldn’t know.  They’re probably up after the sun has risen and burned off the mist.

But here at a higher altitude, it’s been very foggy/misty, and I’ve really enjoyed watching the swirls.  I’ve thought of past generations, surrounded by fog and mist and smoke, and it’s no wonder they believed in ghosts, that they described ghosts the way they did.

I’m feeling a bit haunted myself.  It’s strange to teach this poem to students who are not much older than Keats was when he wrote this perfect poem.  It’s strange to think how much older I am than my students.  When I first started teaching, I was only a few years older than my students.  Now I am decades older.

Like Keats, I’m haunted by my mortality.  Let this haunting prompt me to do my best work!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Autumn of Life

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’ve been listening to the poetry podcast, The Poems We Made Along the Way a lot recently. It’s into series 3 now, and has had a wide variety of guests. I’d urge you to seek them all out via your podcast provider of choice, but the most recent guest was Lewis Buxton. I’ve been listening to it this week, and, as ever, found much too enjoy.

Gregory has an interview style that seems to put the poet at ease because he asks such diligent questions, often reaching back into previous interviews for sources. The questions are mostly about craft and attitudes towards writing, etc rather than about specific poems, and for fans of process it’s always a fascinating hour or so. The set pieces of the ‘Lightning round’ and What would you do to help poetry if money was no object’ sections are always illuminating, often surprising and never fail to set my own mental hares running towards imagining what I’d say if I was a guest. NB that’s not a request, Gregory—Christ no, I’d be far too dull as a guest. Even I don’t care what I have to say about poetry, so why would anyone else?

Mat Riches, Telephone call for unpredictable sands

In the prose  piece that closes the book, “Excerpt from ‘A New History of Printing’ (1933)”, [Fergal] Gaynor invents a history to satirise internet culture (using that last word in it’s very loosest sense), via an imagined printing invention that replicates the idea of paperless text:

Few in the long run were the voices of dissent. A short-lived movement in philosophy and the arts, of strong aestheticist bent, bemoaned the loss of the material pleasures of the old medium: the smells, the feel of the object, the different styles of cover. It was not made clear whether the artists in question had read the books concerned. Shrill complaints were emitted from the loose association referring to itself as ‘dedicated readers’ who, in the Darwinian jargon of the day, made claim that they were being deprived of their ‘habitats’, and that, ironically, they found themselves isolated in a world of texts. And there are many accounts from the period – the medium, despite all its owners’ precautions, still lending itself to conflagration – of the strange experience of watching a whole library, perhaps even a civilization, burn in bright seconds down to a grey nothing.

This concern for the possibility of literacy, of literature, surviving is of a piece with Gaynor’s poetic ambitions as stated in section X of ‘Runes’:

poetry
as production
line

for an age now
art
outsourced

tiny fingers
sharp reflexes
good for such work

space
grows
in the library

as if a fire burnt
as if green things

The folding of poetry into the exploitation of child labour in such activities as Victorian lace-making marks a kind of convergence of his politics and aesthetics, as if he’s discovering his own purpose for the existence of poetry. 

Billy Mills, Two from Shearsman: A Review

Very few books on Shakespeare are worth reading: Kermode, Bate, Barber, Bradley, Johnson, Hazlitt, Nuttall, Coleridge, Ann Barton. It is hard to be genuinely interesting about a genius. Rhodri Lewis’s book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, is a new and worthwhile book about Shakespeare as a thinker. Lewis argues that Shakespeare is constantly using dramatic experiments to subvert the idea that rational philosophical systems can explain our lives.

…Shakespeare’s tragedies also try to make their audiences think. In particular, to make them think about the status of human thought as an ineradicably emotional phenomenon that is far from being the province of an unblinking and dispassionate rationality. The Shakespeare of the tragedies goes beyond the familiar claim that reason is the slave of the passions, and asks us to infer that reason as we tend to discuss it is the invention of the passions—of our desperate need to feel that we understand, or have the capacity to understand, our earthly lot. In so doing, he does not imply that the mental phenomenon represented by the word “reason” (something like “the power of intelligence through which human beings process the world”) does not exist, but that reason as generally understood is a heuristic—a fiction that the human mind has settled upon in the attempt to explain itself to itself.

Lewis’s book is short, cogent, informative, and provocative. There are also occasionally humorous moments, such as this passage about Antony, a little commentary on modern academia.

…how better expose the ethics of Ciceronian humanist peer review than to write about someone who—after bringing himself low through ostentatious displays of liberality—came to spurn both civility and civic life? The more so if this character were to make much of the need to be seen, spurning the self-deceiving complacencies of the polis in order to affirm that, in withdrawing from his fellow human beings, he had chosen the correct path?

There are still prominent Shakespeareans who ideologically, reflexively deny the fact that “Shakespeare tells us how to live” or that Shakespeare has “something to tell us”. (When I interviewed Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips, Phillips told me that Shakespeare is more “evocative than informative” and drew out some old saws about astonishing language, the effect people have on each other through their language, etc. That’s fine as far as it goes, and hardly untrue, but it’s a plain ideology rather than a critical reading of the plays. You can watch the little disagreement here if you care to.) Lewis avoids this mistake and is happy to discover and describe the beliefs at play in Shakespeare’s work, noting always that he is an experimental, dramatic thinker who opposes the humanist system of trying to rationalise life. His book is all the better for it. I also came away from this book more convinced than ever that Shakespeare is a (Jamesian) philosophical pragmatist.

Henry Oliver, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

“Have they marked you with arrows?” is a cancer survival story from being recalled to the screening unit, through surgery (though without gory details) and the dehumanisation of procedures, and hope. Through the poems, Jayne Stanton confronts the clichés and platitudes offered to sufferers and records what it takes to endure. In “After the appointment”, when the poet and her husband grab a drink in the cafeteria,

“You try to recall what you’ve just been told
and when you last saw him cry.

You both agree – the cafeteria
seems farther away than usual.”

[…]

“Have they marked you with arrows?” is a compassionate collection. Stanton’s short poems contain dense concepts and carry a bulk of unsaid emotional weight, which make them compelling. Readers aren’t told what to think or how to react. The poems show the strength foisted on a patient determined to survive. 

Emma Lee, “Have they marked you with arrows?” Jayne Stanton (Poetryspace) – book review

The middle-distance poem, which takes its name from middle-distance running, came into its own in the middle of the twentieth century, though its origins go back to the beginning of that same century, if not further. Among its number are some of the best long-ish (but not too long) modern poems in the English language, from Among School Children to The Whitsun Weddings. Critics, however, have written remarkably little about it. You won’t find the term in any literary histories or textbooks. In fact, you would be forgiven for wondering if I wasn’t just making the whole thing up to prove a point.

‘The owl of Minerva’, Hegel wrote, ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’.1 Or, as Joni Mitchell put it, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. The middle-distance poem began its walk (or else a gentle jog) off into the long evening some time ago. Its zenith—zeniths tend to be—may also have been its passing. But every elegy is also an attempt at resurrection, and the middle-distance poem was a special kind of poem. Not the only one by any means, but one that we will miss more than we realise.

I miss it already. Whenever I pick up a new collection or a magazine, I am always on the look out for one. I am almost always disappointed.2 Almost invariably, the modern long-ish poem lacks the middle-distance poem’s energy, its sense of direction, its intensity of feeling. I don’t think this is simply a question of ‘free verse’ crowding out metre. Indeed, the middle-distance poem’s absence is all the more noticable in the more form-friendly parts of the poetry world.

But this kind of talk only gets us so far. What I want to do here is begin to sketch out in very broad, provisional brush strokes some of the genre’s distinguishing features in the hope that better informed readers will be able to flesh them out later (or at least quibble productively). In short, how do you spot one in the wild?

Jeremy Wikeley, The Middle-Distance Poem: An Elegy

The occupational hazard of going to things where other writers are also present is that they will always at some point ask you whether you are writing. Like the famously bad bus service in Plymouth, this happened twice in the space of ten minutes the other day at Kay Dunbar’s memorial at Dartington Hall. First I bumped into a poetry acquaintance, an editor who was kind enough to take a poem of mine 320 years ago. ‘Are you writing?’ she said. ‘Of course,’ I said. Everyone around us laughed. To which I said, ‘What else am I supposed to say?’ To which she said, ‘Ah, but are you writing well, or successfully?’, a distinction which was new to me, and completely shut me up. Some minutes later, another (even older) poetry friend asked me exactly the same thing. Was the universe trying to tell me something?

Later on the weekend I saw my old friend Christopher Southgate, who happened to be dispensing his vast knowledge and learning in the locality, as you do. His tea made and the small talk over, like an arrow speared on a laser beam he posed me the same question. To which I said, ‘Of course!’ I could see instantly that he wasn’t taken in (he never is, which is one reason I love him). I heard myself clearing my throat. ‘I’ve been making dates – appointments – with poems.’ I explained that the bits of scrap paper from the kitchen with two words written on them have been making their way up the stairs and into the general proximity of my notebook(s) where they wait to be transcribed and become poems. This seemed to satisfy him. ‘Making a date with a poem,’ he mused, ‘there is something in that, perhaps . . .’ I took this also as a sign of the universe giving me its approval.

Anthony Wilson, This is writing!

Every so often, I’m reminded that the work we do at the desk—quiet, private, uncertain—can find its way into larger conversations. I recently learned that my lyric memoir Ruin & Want has been included on CLMP’s Reading List for Hispanic Heritage Month 2025.

That book came from years of sorting through memory and silence, and to see it alongside so many powerful voices feels like a kind of homecoming.

I’m also grateful to share that Black Lawrence Press is running a Hispanic Heritage Month sale that includes my book, Rotura. You can find the full list here.

Indie presses like BLP have been steady companions in my writing life, and their commitment to bringing new work into the world is something I deeply admire.

José Angel Araguz, two bits of good news

Yesterday was the Writer’s Digest Virtual Poetry Conference, so I got to see my friend Mary Biddinger’s talk on prose poetry and flash fiction in the morning, then showered, dressed and did my own talk on Solarpunk poetry, which is a type of science fiction poetry that looks to a more hopeful future for ecology, equity, and humanity. Then I turned around and ran out of the house to make it to opening day of the Woodinville Pumpkin Farm at JB Family Growers. (Yes, it’s a lavender farm AND a pumpkin farm!) The sun was shining in a blue sky, although there was still a level of smoke that made me a little verklempt. It was so nice to roam around the beautiful sunflower maze, the broad pumpkin patch, and the towering corn maze. Are you feeling Fall yet?

I really overscheduled myself this September, so yes, I am still working on judging the SFPA’s poetry contest—now I’m just writing some comments to the winners. I read over 600 poems (often not on their own page, or in the same font, so that was fun!) and chose nine winners in Dwarf, Short, and Long categories. It reminded me that often judges aren’t looking to rule you out, they’re looking to rule you in. At least that’s how I do it. When you submit a poem to any contest, make sure it’s unique and that it stands out. This year, for instance, there were a lot of both Mars Rover and dragon poems, not bad subjects, but it makes it harder for me to discern the best of the lot. A French formal poem on colonialism in space? Yes, that caught my eye. I was also surprised by an overall lack of imagery—has imagery gone out of fashion again? Anyway, the contest winners will be announced soon enough.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! Solarpunk Poetry, Judging Poetry Contests, Pumpkin Patches, Adventure and Hummingbirds

It’s always an aesthetic risk to speak to the present moment, and even more so, to share one’s attempts to do so, but I feel that it’s important: all of us together trying articulate what we’re feeling, what we’re trying to understand, and refusing to accept that it’s just business as usual in the world (even if that might, tragically, be the case.) It’s important that we try to communicate and not allow ourselves to be gaslit by history as it is unfolding. This may seem obvious and even Pollyanna, but like many truisms, its true.

It maybe be a finger in the dike (does anyone use that proverb anymore?) but still significant. I hope it is the F-U finger maintaining the bulwark against all the forces which seek to flood the world with terror, dehumanization, silencing, censorship and hate.

Gary Barwin, Charlie Kirk and not being Gaslit by History

This morning I wondered if I should be more intentional about this publication, and then rejected the thought in favour of—you guessed it—pleasure. I do not mean the hedonic variety, but the eudaemonic: achieved through the pursuit of meaning, of well-being through a sense of one’s purpose. In this light, pleasure’s the wrong word. I guess I should rebrand, but being “good” at social media holds little to no value to me. Stopping whatever I’m doing to spend an hour in the middle of the day—or at the advent of a sleepless night—to tell the truth about a poem, without second-guessing it, strikes me, for a host of reasons personal and not, as priceless.

I was looking for something else in Ed Hirsch’s Stranger by Night yesterday and was reminded of “The Guild,” which I promptly emailed to someone I thought would appreciate it. It took an hour or so and a walk along the river, during which I squatted on a rock and watched a great blue heron fishing in the shallows on the other side of the little bay, for my real interest in the poem to swim up to the surface: when the bird hauled itself up into its unlikely flight, I assumed I’d spooked it, but instead it flew straight towards me to alight at the other end of the groyne —maybe fifteen feet away—and turn its stony dino gaze on me. Yes, this is a metaphor: for the way a poem sometimes looks back at you, explains you to yourself.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Guild” by Edward Hirsch

I was thinking today of this passage of Proust’s, which he gives to the character of the artist Elstir:

“There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man–so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise–unless he has passed through all the fatuous and unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded…We do not receive wisdom, we discover it for ourselves, after a journey through a wilderness no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

There’s some comfort in that. I would not call myself wise, but I’m definitely wiser than I was at 15 or 21. I suppose I’m still sometimes “fatuous and unwholesome” (whatever Elstir meant by that), awkward in society, and mistaken in some of my intuitions. But I have discovered myself for myself, with all the pain, sorrow, embarrassment, and joys that such discovery requires, and have developed my own point of view. In addition, I’ve learned that each person holds their own point of view. We don’t all think alike or in concert and may never fully understand one another. That makes the world contentious, yes. And interesting. […]

Naively urbane, the city
my youth inhabits lies brittle
in the pages. The past undoes
itself at last. Or I do.

Ann E. Michael, Points of view

Magnetic poetry remains a creative tool that challenges me with its tactile nature, its playfulness, its restrictions. Usually you have a set of words about a certain subject. Here I’ve used my basic set in combination with a set called ‘Trees’.

By the way. You can see that I try to use what I have available but I have no problem to ‘create’ words in case they are not included: here the words ‘small’, ‘noises’ and ‘down’.

Why do I point this out?

When you use a poetic form you work within its limitations and restrictions (which can be exhilarating and very satisfying). Never forget these were man-made. They have a reason why they came to pass and why they are well-used. But things develop, intermingle, grow, and change. Contexts evolve. If you feel the need to leave the comfort zone and it aligns with what you want to achieve please do it and don’t hesitate because somewhere there are people gatekeeping art.

Oh, they might get even angry, and act as if only they can define what is right to do and what not.

Just do your thing and let them run in their hamster’s wheel. Be happy with what you create. That in itself is already valuable. I’d say your happiness is very, very important.

Kati Mohr, This Trust

一生に打つ一億字天の川　堀田季何

isshō ni utsu ichioku ji amanogawa

            in a lifetime we type

            one hundred million letters

            the Milky Way

                                                Kika Hotta

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 16, 2025)

— From May Sarton’s journal, At Seventy: “What kept me going was, I think, that writing for me is a way of understanding what is happening to me, of thinking hard things out. I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself. Perhaps it is the need to remake order out of chaos over and over again. For art is order, but it is made out of the chaos of life.”

— In the same book, Sarton quotes Catherine Clayton who talks about being in a creative drought for a year and a half. She says, “Now a drawing is slowly coming into being. To work is to feel whole. To work for long moments unselfconsciously is grand. To still all other voices and to work, just quietly work.” And isn’t that a monumental task these days, to quiet the voices, to quietly work?

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Secret Prerequisite

there is a small boat waiting. in the middle

of the page. where a poem begins. and goes

no further. serenity. a map of the heart completed.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Things

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

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

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

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

Carolee Bennett, We Don’t Have to Be Quiet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allison Mei-Li, My Slow Art Manifesto

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Illusions, connections

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

Dale Favier, September Comes Anyway

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

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

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

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

We need to have that in mind.

Kati Mohr, Things, Names, Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Awkward in Life

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Birth of a poem

The dream is balance. Balance as we walk forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Boyle, CBe newsletter September 2025: In bad times

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Paint Patch Poetry Process

赤蜻蛉少し飛んでは考える　根岸敏三

akatonbo sukoshi tondewa kangaeru

red dragonfly

            each time it flies a little

            it stops to think

                                                Keizo Negishi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, magpie brain and the next new shiny

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

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

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

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

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

STOP EATING THE LOVE HEARTS

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

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

Sue Finch, SNOWDON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Love, AI vs AI

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

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

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

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

John Glenday, A Bit of a Performance

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, August Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #46

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

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

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

            My brain dulls a little

            with each lost phrase.

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

The other influences I experienced that helped were:

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Jenny Hamlett (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Gillian Allnutt, “lode”

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

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

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

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

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

              —: Fragment :—
                          by Dick Whyte

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

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

       [ . . . ]

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Melanie Dennis Unrau, Goose

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

Marilyn McCabe, shifting uneasily under

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Crane, POEM: the rainbow I want to see

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

Robin Gow, nesting

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for an Uprising

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

word is wind. and sky, windless.

leaves give tongue until their skin burns green.

Grant Hackett [untitled]