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

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

Wendy Pratt, I want to show my workings out

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

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

Kristen McHenry, Fall Metaphors

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

Robin Gow, sunlight diary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharon Brogan, snapshot poem 02 september 02026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, Three Images and Prompts Before Summer Ends

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

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

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

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

To Know the Dark

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

–Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems

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

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

Bethany Reid, Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Farewell, Wendell Berry

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

Sarah Lada, The Art of Harvesting Brussels Sprouts

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

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

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

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

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

Ira Lightman, Rachel Blau Duplessis RIP

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

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

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

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

From across a wide ocean I look in astonishment and horror at what is happening in the United States.

Here is a poet in the midst of it and still writing about it every day. I can barely imagine how he keeps on keeping on, but the sequence of poems entitled Writing My Country continues to hold power up to the light and to find it wanting.

“Beau Beausoleil is the most important voice of witness in our country right now …” – Naomi Shihab Nye

These poems of compassion and loss and obstinate resistance use everyday events, conversations and observations on the street to illustrate ‘this ruinous work’ that is taking place in a country that no longer feels like home.

“Our lives are filled
with the debris
of destroyed dreams” (p 13)

The altered flag on the cover seems to speak of imprisonment and disempowerment, but the poem superimposed on it asks stubborn questions that will not be silenced.

Ama Bolton, Writing My Country

their viscous prick-song spit into
the wind. an old, infectious fable. says
that it will fill them up. it cannot fill
them up, so makes instead a virtue
of their emptiness, a weapon of their
emptiness. they are not men, not now –
the hot and crackling aggregate
of rage. now they are joy, torn along
its leanest length; the gutless conjuring
of power, each hood without a head.

Fran Lock, NOLI TIMERE

I have, out of an abundance of caution, not named the Iranian poet whose interview with me I’ve been posting here one question at a time. Perhaps I am being too careful, but given the fact that we are at war with Iran, even if the federal government is going out of its way not to call what’s going on a war; given the corresponding fact that Iran very clearly understands itself to be at war with us; and, finally, given how literature—writing it, reading it, discussing it—is an inherently subversive pursuit, an abundance of caution seems just the right amount. I’ve tried several times to get in touch with this poet since the war began but have had no success. If I do hear back from them and it turns out I can safely identify them, I will do so. In the meantime, I am going to continue posting my answers to their questions.

I was not expecting the poet’s fourth question: “There is a theory that says that all writers even the male, write with a feminine soul. After all, the Muses were goddesses and not gods. What do you think about this theory?” This was my answer:

While I think I understand what you want your question to mean, it has never been useful to me to think about where my work comes from in such explicitly gendered terms. I have never experienced myself as having a muse or my poems as being somehow “gifts” from the Muses. Indeed, the one and only time anyone ever talked to me about my having a muse was my graduate advisor, a critical theorist, who dismissed my desire to take a year off from the MA in Creative Writing that I was pursuing so I could work on my writing by saying, “If you want to go commune with your muse [the sarcasm literally dripped off his words], that’s your business. I thought you came to graduate school to learn something.”

His words had the precise opposite of their intended effect. I dropped out of the program that semester and never set foot in either a graduate English or Creative Writing program ever again. (I’ve written the longer version of this story here.) In thinking about your question, though—and I have to say that this is something I’ve never explicitly articulated before—I realize that I do agree with one aspect of the critique underwriting my advisor’s attempt to use the notion of the muse to shame me. The concept of the muse mystifies the creative process, turning it into something that is ostensibly separate and apart from the socioeconomic, political, and cultural circumstances in which creativity takes place.

I don’t mean to say, of course, that there is no such thing as inspiration; and I certainly would never tell a poet who experiences inspiration as somehow coming from outside themselves, who experiences poems as “gifts” from their muse, that this experience is somehow “wrong.” However, defining that experience in a way that elides the role played by society and culture in shaping both our conception of what inspiration is and how we give meaning to a poet’s response to inspiration ultimately weakens the role that the poet and poetry can play in society.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Do All Writers Write with a Feminine Soul?

“What the Mirror Tells” explores the origins of the word ‘mirror’ – from Middle English meaning “object with a reflective surface, reflection, model of conduct” and Anglo-French “to look at”, derived from the Latin “to be surprised, look with wonder at”. It also asks if events and people linger long after their passing, does an aurora of those still hang around? […]

In each poem, [Denise] O’Hagan has created a small theatre where readers see the show and get [a] chance to reflect and probe its meaning. She also picks up those hesitations, where speaking out may not be received in the way the speaker wants to achieve, where it might shatter an illusion. Many of the poems sit in that liminal space between an event and [its] consequences, allowing the reader to fill in the detail and decide what might have next, what the effect might be. These are thought-provoking and humane poems.

Emma Lee, “What the Mirror Tells” Denise O’Hagan (5 Islands Press) – book review

One thing I’m realising more and more as I write these pieces is that I acquired much of my poetry in a decidedly circuitous and fumbling manner. Philip Larkin came to me third-hand: at sixteen I hadn’t read a word of his poetry, and I hadn’t read Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him, but I had read Alan Bennett’s honest and affectionate review of Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him. The things we did before the internet. So Larkin arrived kind of distorted, a figure peered at through the wrong end of a telescope and through the lenses of two other men, this grumpy man in glasses who shagged his way round the library personnel of the North of England and had a soft spot for both Thatcher and Hitler, the kind of guy who’d take a girl on a date and later write to his friend

Don’t you think it’s ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE?

Based on this picture, I assumed that his poetry probably wouldn’t be for me, and I moved on. I was about to be swept off my feet by Dylan Thomas, who I hadn’t read a review of a biography of, so that was fine.

But over the years Larkin poems dropped quietly one by one into my life: This Be The Verse, of course, and then The Trees, An Arundel Tomb, The Mower. I found it hard to compute, having read the biographical stuff first, that the man who wrote such tenderness as

begin afresh, afresh, afresh

and

what will survive of us is love

and

we should be kind while there is still time

was in fact the same bloke who Motion refers to as ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’. Well, this is why you’re supposed to meet the poems before the poet, and sometimes not the poet at all. Poets are real people, and flawed. It’s the poems that keep us fond of Larkin.

Nia Broomhall, Week 25: High Windows

In Boswell’s Life, Samuel Johnson says of poor Christopher Smart (1722–1771), locked in a madhouse: “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”

That line, “I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else,” has stuck with me since I first encountered it. Christopher Smart was a madman, a genius, and a Christian poet. What is most powerful in him, or, at least has most influenced me, is his mysticism, for it is not a grand thing — not the loss of the self in the absorption into the numinous, not the flight of the alone to the Alone, not the ecstatic transport to the oneness of reality. Smart is instead the model — even in his madness, or maybe especially in his madness — of what I have elsewhere called the mysticism of small things.

This is not pantheism, each object in the world a little God-bit. It cannot be for Smart, because pantheism is irreconcilable with his orthodox Christianity — but even more because pantheism is ultimately a denial of the sharp and vital particularity of things. Christopher Smart sees every living being as entirely itself: distinctive, singular, quirky, special. And in that particularity he sees not God, but God’s grace, God’s plan, and, most of all, God’s creation — a creative power so vast that it can populate the world with real existences that are not God Himself. Smart sees the world as infused with grace, hungry for redemption, and alive with the interaction of creatures and Creator.

This picture of reality appears most clearly in Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), the incomplete poetry manuscript he wrote between 1759 and 1763, during his confinement by his in-laws in insane asylums. Not brought to light till the 20th century, the poem was finally published in 1939 and reordered in 1954 and 1980 editions.

Jubilate Agno consists of four fragments, totaling well over a thousand lines, nearly all of them beginning with the words Let or For. The generally accepted scholarly reading is that Smart intended the poem as antiphonal, the Let verses and For verses meant to be read responsively, Let X / For Y, the way a psalm alternates two voices in worship. The Jeoffry passage is all For lines, because it’s from the side of response (although we lack certainty about the corresponding Let lines). In other words, Smart isn’t just writing free-associative madness. He’s also doing liturgy — the cat’s every motion set into a structure of praise and response, a “duly and daily serving him” devotional order. Jeoffry’s catness is his worship.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Cat Jeoffry

Today I thought I’d look at a rather charming and apparently one-off verse diary entry for June 21st 1628. It’s by Thomas Crossfield (or Crosfield, 1602-1663), who was a fellow at the time at Queen’s College Oxford, and it appears in his otherwise prose diary which is still in the Queen’s College archive. Crosfield was only in his mid-20s when he wrote this entry and the lifestyle he describes, though strongly structured by religious practice, is not that far removed from the life of an advanced graduate student or postdoctoral fellow today, if they happen to be doing quite a lot of teaching. His day is taken up mainly with teaching and his own reading […]

All this performed as before I said:
There other bookes by chance before me laid
And two of them I tooke into my hand
The first was Withers poëme, which our land
doth wondrous well describe in Cantoes eight
with many passages of iniury & right.

This is George Wither’s Britains’s Remembrancer, published only in 1628 — so hot off the press. The poem is a long and in part heavily allegorized account of Wither’s experience during the plague in 1625, its spiritual significance, and a prophecy of the judgement to fall upon the nation. It is also written in rhyming couplets and though to modern taste it seems rather wordy and extravagant, in the second canto Wither makes a point of stressing and defending the straightforwardness of his style in defiance of literary fashion:

Let no fantastique Reader now condemne
Our homely Muse, for stooping unto them,
In plaine expressions, and in words, that show
We love not, in affected paths to goe.

[. . .]

It is the usefull matter of my Rimes
Shall make them live. Words alter as the Times:
And soonest their fantastique Rhetoriques,
Who trim their Poesies with schooleboy-tricks.
That, which this age affects, as grave, and wise,
The following generation may despise.

[. . .]

Let no man therefore dreame, I will bestow
My precious Time in what will vary so;
Since that, which, with most ease I shall produce,
May have (for aught I know) the longest use.

Wither’s points here is that trendy words and styles make you sound up-to-the-minute in literary circles, but quickly go out of fashion, leaving the purchase of your message blunted. If the point of your poem is to convey a message, it is better to be unfashionably plain. His ‘fantastique Reader’ is perhaps intended to recall Donne’s ‘Giddy fantastic poets of each land’ (from Donne’s first satire).

Crosfield’s summary of Wither’s (very long) poem — he surely didn’t read it all that afternoon — focuses upon its political and religious aspects, but it’s hard not to suspect that the urgency and immediacy of its style has something to do with Crosfield’s apparently unprecedented attempt to describe his own ordinary day in straightforward English verse.

Victoria Moul, My whole Ephemeris: a diary entry in verse from 1628

“The floor-to-ceiling bookcase hoarding one wall / Filled with forty-year-old literary journals / Holds its breath.” The subject of the sentence, the bookcase, shows up in line 8 and the corresponding action, “holds its breath” finally appears in line 10, right before that hard break I mentioned earlier. This poem is working hard to be Poetic.

The second half of the poem is two sentences and the I of the poem appears early. They’re standing in front of this wall-length bookcase, and it must be a hell of a wall to hold all these journals.

If I move, if the air stirs, The dust spouts again the words of poets Listed in ten thousand Tables of Contents.

That’s a lot of contributor’s copies and a lot of poems published and a lot of dust. I’ll only speak for myself here but I suspect most of them don’t get read much after they get put on the shelf. I’ve had the experience of pulling one down to check something and then realize, when looking at the table of contents, that I’d been published alongside someone I met later in life.

But here’s where the poem turns, and in a way, I think it hits at the darker side of how some poets look at ourselves and others.

Even the journal in which this poem appears
Will be wedged in a wall among its brethren
Until someone down the decades draws it down
To drag one finger down the list of contributors:
Nobody, nobody, nobody, name, nobody, nobody
All the way down to the cold damp ground.

I take it back; it’s not about how poets look at ourselves and others. It’s about how we fear we’ll be viewed once we’re gone. It reminds me in a way of a poem by Miller Williams from The Ways We Touch titled “A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeeth Century” which talks to critics and scholars who decide who gets to be anthologized and by extension, remembered by future readers, and acknowledges in the end that it’s really himself he’s talking about.

What I find most interesting about the way Waters hits this note is the coldness of both nobody and name, the complete erasure of any humanity there. The person down the decades isn’t opening the book to discover something new or beautiful or challenging. They’re reducing the work to whether the name of the contributor is one that lasted for whatever reason. There’s no indication that the person is excited about the name they recognize. That they recognize the name seems to be the point, even while their finger drags down the page toward the grave.

Brian Spears, “Nobody’s Poem” by Michael Waters

Jeremy Springsteed is a barista and occasional activist living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and a member of the ReDrum poetry collective. His work has been published in many places online and in print such as SPREAD, Pidgeonholes, Underwood, Pageboy, Internet Void, Another New Calligraphy, and Limanal Spaces. He is the author of four collections of poetry: A Guide To Getting Lost. (Cyberwit 2022) Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other. (Cyberwit 2023) Beneath The Ashes of My Grandfather and My Youth. (Cyberwit 2025) By Wing and Foot. (Carbonation Press 2025)

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

My first book felt like a validation of all the years I had spent working on my craft. All the readings I had organized or taken part in. All the rejections. It alleviated the imposter syndrome.

The first collection was more like a greatest hits than a thematic grouping of poems. As I produced new work I thought of it in a more contingent light. When writing work for this latest collection I would look at those oddball one off poems and find the correct home in the larger body.

While I have always had my themes and return points, my process recently has been looking towards enriching connections in tone and subject. 

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

I had always wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a poet though. I have a very vivid memory from when I was 13, my depression had really set in the year before and I was doing pretty poorly in school. I was talking with my mom in her bedroom and she was trying to figure out what was going on with me. I was crying, “I just want to write and I don’t even know what that means.”

We were a paycheck to paycheck working class family. I had, as far as I knew, never met any kind of an artist and I had no idea how one became such a thing.

I would work on my silly little stories instead of paying attention to my classes. Stories like– Hitler secretly surviving and taking over a small US midwest town or stories of me being a secret agent with a large base under my parents’ rented house.

I would keep falling deeper into depression. I started playing sports to try to fit in with the other boys. Eventually I destroyed my knees and my mental health.

I was having mild auditory hallucinations. I began writing them down, then I began altering them. Eventually I didn’t hear them but they were still in my head.

I took creative writing and was lucky to have a fantastic teacher named Joel Long who introduced me to a larger world of poetry. Joel brought big name poets into the classroom, (the poet laureate at the time Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, etc.)  which was no small feat for our suburban Utah high school. I was introduced to many local poets. He gave me a structure to use. I have never looked back. […]

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

Readings have been an important part of my formation as a poet. Hearing when a line cuts through people, or when it just lies face down on the floor. Receiving immediate feedback and interpretations of a new poem is powerful and valuable.

I have been the open mic MC for a few reading series. I would always start the open mic with a new poem which kept me writing. It also put me in close contact with all manner of writers from a diverse skill set. Writing is solitary work so any opportunity to be in community with other writers is to be relished.

I am also a founding member of the ReDrum poetry collective with my dear friend Alex Bleecker. Our troop has been involved in both publishing work and performative work. The performances are always occasional and based on a singular theme (whales, Carlo Zinelli, time travel, etc.)  that the 2-4 poets work towards separately and as a group. Those performances have allowed new ways of looking at what a poem might be.

My first book wouldn’t have been possible without public readings. It helped me to group poems so the flow of the work was more natural. They let me know what was working and what I should focus my energy on.

Then there is the theft. There is no better teacher than hearing someone read a poem that you wish you had written and trying to figure out how you might be able to still write that poem but make it yours.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeremy Springsteed

I read haphazardly, dipping in and out of poets and collections. Some of these I’ve recently picked up while looking out new reads for the dissertation, some I read for The Poetry Book Club, and some I am coming back to again and again.

I haven’t read them all cover to cover. Mostly, I’ve dipped in and out, read sections or several at a time. But in all of them I’ve found things that astounded me and that I love, whether that’s attention to detail, careful wording, unexpected use of images, interesting line breaks, masterful use of form, lyrical style, or wonderful inventiveness.

Read cover to cover more than once are: Hannah Copley’s ‘Lapwing’, Victoria Chang’s ‘With my back to the world’, and Yanita Georgieva’s ‘Small Undetectable Thefts’.

The collection that most recently absolutely blew me away: Tishani Doshi’s ‘A God At The Door’.

Do with those pieces of information what you will.

Rachael Hill, Some poets I’ve been loving

My first encounter with Paula Rego was accidental. On a trip to Lisbon almost thirty years ago I visited the Gulbenkian Museum and happened upon a major exhibition. It was the first time I’d seen her work, and it changed me. I last saw her paintings at a retrospective at the Tate Britain just before she died. I left the exhibition refreshed and optimistic – I’d hazard to say even inspired – about the trajectory of women’s rights. Perhaps we might yet pull out of our current nosedive into the most misogynistic cultural period I’ve witnessed in my lifetime?

Whenever I look at a Rego, I see an artist whose project was to put women’s subjectivity at the centre of an exploration of power, status, history and the family. Plath, Szymborska and Akhmatova are perhaps her poet-analogues. I agree with Germaine Greer’s take on Rego: “It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting. Still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly.” […]

In The Artist in Her Studio (1993), a woman sits centre stage surrounded by a cornucopia of props and symbols: mythological creatures, statues, animals, art, models, sinister looking vegetables with their connotations of fruition, harvest, impending decomposition. Her inner world is complex, fantastical and populated by women and girls. At the centre, the artist, who is simultaneously being painted by a child-version of herself, squarely faces us, legs apart in the pose of a middle-aged male farmer at rest, elbow on the table. She is smoking a pipe and gazing heavenward, lost in thought. My heart leapt when I first found myself in front of this piece. I’m a fortunate middle-aged woman who has viewed thousands of paintings, but it‘s still rare I find myself standing before a vision of female subjectivity as complex and contradictory as that so long available to men.

Lisa Brockwell, The Private Worlds of Women

I am zooming out
and out.

Life is pixelating,
nothing but tiny squares.

Here, suspended in air,
a bridge I must
have built myself.

I have been here before.

These are things
I have done before.

I am learning
to trace my hand
to grip
the fat purple crayon.

Rebecca Cook, The Orange Ribbons of Autumn

When I step outside the synagogue now, or onto my own deck, I hear the chirring of crickets and other late summer singers. I can’t help anthropomorphizing them: our days are short, let us sing while we can!

Of course, that’s the subtext of every Yom Kippur, too. Our days are short: let us sing while we can, and make teshuvah while we can, and change our lives while we can, because we never know how much time we’ll get.

Tonight we’ll make the last havdalah of the old year, and then we’ll sing several of the piyyutim (prayer-songs) of the high holidays for the first time since last Yom Kippur. A spiritual stitch in time between then and now.

Where did the year go? There was some illness. There was winter. Didn’t I just thrill to the spring song of the tree frogs in the wetland? And now suddenly I hear the song that means summer is slipping away.

No matter how many times I walk the labyrinth of the seasons I’m surprised when I reach the point where we turn. “So this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray.”

Rachel Barenblat, So this is how.

The Lesser Palaces
After Abdullah Hany Daher

a house burns in the flames
and again in the eyes
of those who loved it
and again when we
enter and go out
the front door
of the world

Very excited that my new novel is launching out in the world. I’m doing quite a few events but the launches are in Hamilton and Toronto. Also (below) my daughter and I made a trailer in the local cemetery. […]

Also, I’m doing a series of what I’m thinking of as mystic comics using various impossible shapes and clouds.

Gary Barwin, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead + poetry motivational poster

In 2019 I took ‘My Name Is Swan’ to New York. The only way to arrive in New York is by stream ship, preferably in the 19th century with a single suitcase containing an unfinished manuscript, a bottle of potato brandy and second-hand suit gifted by a consumptive relative.

I paid my passage on the QM2 from Southampton, Swan stowed away and sailed for free. My agent at the time instructed me that I had a week at sea to find myself a rich patron. I saw it as a week looking out at the unabridged nothingness, at the intact emptiness, at the whole unbroken poem of the Atlantic Ocean.

I did take the opportunity to introduce my stowaway to those who’d not give up his secrets and this included the ship’s entertainment officer. The QM2 boasts one of the largest floating libraries in the world containing around 10,000 titles. They also host literary festivals and employ the Royal Court to put on Shakespeare plays. I thought passengers and crew should be treated to a reading of ‘My Name Is Swan’.

After a few days gently badgering the entertainment officer, name dropping and persuading him of my poetic pedigree, he eventually gave me a teatime slot in the Queen’s Ballroom. A storm blew up the afternoon I was due to read and we’d not long passed the chart position where the Titanic had struck an iceberg. The conditions were perfect. The ship pitched and listed as I stood in the middle of the dance floor and gave my reading. The tea-cup classes tried to maintain their dignity while navigating finger sandwiches and miniature scones in a force eight gale as both ship and poetry rolled around the ocean.

Jan Noble, Nº80 All at sea with Swan…

We find ourselves in September and the light is already dwindling earlier each night. This weekend brough the final writing mini-retreat of the summer, this time up in Wisconsin along the lake. I was able to get polished drafts on both the Indiana hotel play and the train station / time travel project I’ve been working on, as well as two more scenes in the play about emails from the dead. […]

Since I cheated on poetry all spring and summer with writing all these plays, there is still the next Greek project to dig in on, as well as some other play ideas that feel really sparkly right now, including one set the night Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. I also need to eventually turn an eye to the next full-length book project, which is more than 3/4 of the way finished. I do already have a working title I will share closer to the end of the year as it takes shape over the next few months. 

Otherwise, it’s a lot of galleys and edits on the first few chaps of the dgp season, and reading more submissions as I go.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/7/2026

Three years ago I decided to get up and sniff the air each Monday morning. I also decided to write a blog. The reason? A pivot. A very large one where I decided to step out of my thirty-year career and see what came next for me.

And the first blogs were rather short, but I was starting, and it was getting me up early for myself instead of early for travelling to work. I love watching the day unfold. I love sunrise and the peacefulness of a day when things are just beginning. When the kettle’s on for the first cup of tea and the air is relatively free of fumes there’s a freshness and a sense of another new beginning to be grateful for. I wanted to make the most of these moments, and I also wanted to set something down in a similar way to my three years of early morning driving to work tweets that had kept me sane and noticing after covid. I needed one stable thing to mark each new week, and that was standing outside each Monday morning and breathing deeply.

Doing something regularly has a beautiful familiarity to it which marks time rather than letting it slip by. And because I am someone who, as my sister puts it, is either climbing a mountain or not sure I want to go for a walk, I like the fact that this habit has stuck. The writer in me likes writing and it feels good to me to mark a new week.

One of my poems has been published in Molecules Unlimited Poetry Journal: Issue 1, and I am glad that Stephen Paul Wren chose to include it in this anthology. Poems submitted for consideration were on the theme of the heart and this theme reminded me of a maths activity I used to enjoy working on with the children where we compared the heart rate per minute of different mammals. This poem was written in response to the call out for submissions and started with me remembering this lesson and seeing where I could find a poem within that thought. It felt cathartic to set down the words. It also seems apt because this time three years ago when I was starting this blog, I was also starting to focus on reading my poetry out loud to more people and that came with a whole range of thoughts and feelings that the newly training coach in me wanted to explore.

Sue Finch, JUST START AND KEEP GOING

Moths keep interrogating the porch light—
so many small insistences, against the stance
of something that won’t budge. The trash
bins wait to be returned to the corner
of the yard beside the browning hydrangeas,
their mouths agape. I shut them close, then go
inside and wash my hands. But dark does not yet fall
like an anvil or a heavy curtain. Sometimes, just as it’s
about to flood the threshold, a small rift opens.
And then a chorus of frogs, a choir of crickets.

Luisa A. Igloria, Darkness

This summer brought me some good writing time. In May, I went on my university’s faculty writing retreat and spent several days at Mission San Luis Rey. I finalized a new full-length manuscript, drafted some new poems, read a book, and enjoyed meals and giggling over evening games of Ransom Notes with colleague friends.

I continued hosting Writers Gonna Write, a monthly 3-hour co-writing session on Zoom for PLNU alumni, current students, and faculty. It’s amazing how much we all get done in those 3 hours! I’m so thankful for the folks who show up and do this with me, including the regulars who have shown up since this began 6 years ago!

In July, I got to be on faculty again for the Glen Workshop as the writing retreat guide. The Glen was held in San Diego for the first time, and USD was a great venue for it. We’ll be there again next year. I wasn’t sure how it would go for me to do this in my city, but it was wonderful to get to share The Glen with local friends and to share San Diego with my Glen friends. I got a lot of good writing time alongside my retreat crew too.

In August, I got to read on the main stage at the KPBS Book Festival alongside Blas Falconer, Ana Carrete, and Michael Klam, who are all fantastic. I read a few poems from Tasty Other in honor of its upcoming 10-year anniversary (what?!), and I especially loved getting to share the day with my 11-year-old.

And this week, my new semester began! I have a lighter teaching load because I received a fellowship to work on a writing project, and I’ve already been making some good use of that time this week. Happy fall writing to us all!

Katie Manning, Summer Writing, Had Me a Blast

“Ebb tide; I smoke in the darkness and inhale rank seaweed.”

— Joseph Brodsky, “Brise Marine”

*

Odd how a single word invokes an image, dragging memories into footprints over a beach behind it.

The verb form of “invoke” comes from the late 14th-century Latin invocare, meaning “to call upon, appeal to.” It slithered into English through the Old French verb envoquer, meaning “to summon, implore, or appeal to a higher authority, law, or deity.”

Ebb tide aside, I woke from a dream with Hannah Höch’s seaweed laying across my eyes. […]

*

As for the seaweed, some say you can read the stories your mother never told you in the shapes and figures that eveningtide brings to a beach. This is why people are drawn to the shoreline at sunset, their electrified bodies moving across the sand like the hands of a god who has forgotten how to read his own letters.

Alina Stefanescu, What seaweed brings up.

I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, within easy busing distance of the State Fairgrounds, and within earshot of the nightly fireworks. Whether or not I attend, the fair is a dependable marker of the end of summer, for me and thousands of others.

I’m fairly confident that my poem “State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day” is reproduced online in more places than any other poem of mine. And by the grace of the late lamented series American Life in Poetry, it’s been seen widely offline, too, since it ran some years ago in the many newspapers that carried that feature. Though many Substack readers will already know the poem, I hope there are some of you for whom it’s new.

I’m conscious that it’s an enormous privilege to be able to enjoy such a normal, seasonal ritual: to take an untroubled day of entertainment and to ride buses and to walk home in lighted streets in a calm city, contemplating the changing season.

May the world soon be restored to that sort of calm.

State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day

Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose
shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls,
hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls.
They scream revolt at what the body knows:
all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no—
another rose! another peony! break,
flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make
the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though
we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow
back through the crush of bodies, the lank air,
to buses that inch us, sweating, across town.
As though we were not dropped in silence there
to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low,
the crickets counting summer’s seconds down.

Maryann Corbett, A Ritual

This week: 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: falling snow, a broken country, walking on an icy sidewalk, the space in which to take a small breath, and much more. Enjoy.

free fall and crystalline

intricate machines of vanished moments

the outside of silence

Grant Hackett, snow

Something is scratching in the walls and I imagine it’s the stucco itself, chilly and damp out there in the dark morning, seeking to ease inside for a bit of warmth. “Is a River Alive?” asks Robert Macfarlane in his recent book, and I have long wondered the same of rocks. I have a nodding acquaintance with many. Well, I’m doing the nodding, anyway. At least in the quick time frame of human life.

An animate world is the kind I want to live in, so I make assumptions that anima is everywhere. “Sorry,” I say to the throw rug whose corner I flipped up with careless footing. I feel a little bad it has to stare up at that water stain in the ceiling I can’t get around to painting over. But the stain looks like a feather. So that’s nice.

It is an old tradition, to see the world this way. I am reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Simpson is a member of Alderville First Nation in Ontario, Canada, and is a scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, the indigenous people of southern Ontario. This book is an imaginative and strange telling of tales in which characters are at once human and other-animate — a tree, for example, that pushes its shopping cart around Toronto; a caribou spirit who wears a backpack it found on the street. One section is voiced by the geese preparing for departure, trying not to feel judgey about the ones choosing to stay behind (in the changing climate that allows such choice now). Two sections are the voice of a frozen body of water, Mashkawaji, which in Ojibwe means “is frozen.”

Marilyn McCabe, the methodology of giving up

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie.

The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry.

An inquiry, an invocation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter into the unknowns of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, into the desolate haunts of our own interior that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a kind of prayer: for presence, for understanding, for seeing the world more closely in order to cherish it more deeply. To name, to understand, to dignify and hold — these are the gifts of poetry, and these too are the antidotes to just about every form of fear.

In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is essentially a field guide to loving life more, anchored in the recognition that “the opposite of love is not hatred or rancor but fear” and in a passionate insistence on “how important is it — how critical — to understand there is and has always been, for each of us, a wilderness within.”

Maria Popova, A Spell Against Fear: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry and The Art of Productive Impatience

I keep thinking about this phrase for a poem, the next worse thing, because that’s what it can feel like living in America today: waiting for the next worse thing to come, bracing before it even arrives. I don’t think this is good for us.

Which is why I deleted all my social apps from my phone last night. I never know what video will pop up, what headline will slap me in the face, what will send my brain into high-alert. The strange part is that I’m supposed to be promoting my upcoming book right now, and social media is “where you do that,” but for a bit—I’m choosing something else. I’m choosing to protect my mind. I’m choosing the forest, the page. I’m choosing this little corner of the internet and decaf coffee. […]

It’s unfortunately funny that my first Copper Canyon book came out during a global pandemic and now my second is coming out during the fall of democracy, so clearly I have a gift for impeccable timing. If Copper Canyon publishes a third book of mine, please check on your neighbors and stock up on beans.

Kelli Russell Agodon, How To Live in a Broken Country

It feels like a strange time to be talking about a new book of poems. I’m heartsick. I’m angry. But in harrowing times, I also think we could use more poetry and more time in community. I’m craving both right now, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to visit a handful of cities this spring with A Suit or a Suitcase.

It’s always surprising and moving when we can get into a room together, isn’t it? We leave those rooms a little different than when we entered them.

My last collection, Goldenrod, came out in 2021 (how was that five years ago?!), and the tour was virtual because of the pandemic. So this will be extra special, because it’s my first in-person poetry book tour. I’m sharing my schedule with For Dear Life subscribers before I share it on social media or my website, so you’re seeing this first. Thank you so much for your continued support of me and my work. It means more than I can say.

Maggie Smith, Book Tour Announcement

“People escape into other things; you don’t escape into poetry. You confront yourself when you are reading poems…” ~Mark Strand

I’m overwhelmed. Everyone I talk to is overwhelmed. There are so many crises happening simultaneously that it’s hard to keep paddling the little rowboats of our own lives through the ongoing cataclysms.

Anyone who has studied history surely wondered what it would be like to be alive during the fall of the Roman Empire or what they’d have done during the Nazi reign of terror. We may be finding out.

We live in a society that upholds profit as a de facto god. Bombs are dropped to enrich military contractors, schools are twisted to serve corporate test-makers, and the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to secret political spending–offering them vast influence over elections, laws, and federal policy. The average person is squeezed on all sides as billionaires grow every more wealthy while our (billionaire-owned) media fosters divisions between us.

Infuriating is not a strong enough word. I don’t think there is a term yet coined that sufficiently expresses how we feel let alone helps make sense of our anger. That’s where poetry comes in in all its beautiful, inspiring rage. Here are a few examples, with gratitude to the poets.

Laura Grace Weldon, Furious Poems For Infuriating Times

The sky above:

a park filled with cloud benches, breeze swing sets, songbirds echoing playground’s blue dazzle.

The world below:

ash and collapse, shootings and protests, the autopsy of so many regrets.

When violence comes to a neighborhood near you, it helps to recognize the world beyond its horrors and sorrows—

dogs walking their owners; neighbors saying hello; children biking by, untouched by bullets’ bloodied fists.

Once the smoke has cleared and all the mourners have left the church,

let’s meet in the sky park’s most dazzling blue.

Somewhere there’s a cloud bench with your name on it.

Rich Ferguson, The Sky Park

In the golden space between house and tree —now magenta, now indigo— in that space of fiery fervent sky, I swim, lost in the bleeding striations of sunset.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Once More to the Attic (reprise)

I’m rarely in a food court because I’m rarely in a mall, however, when somehow I find myself there, I find it strangely comforting and a productive place to write. I feel enveloped by a coherent context but also feel like a still point, a hole in the context, surrounded.

Mark Strand writes:

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

I don’t feel that “I am what I missing,” but I instead like I’m wearing the context like a blanket around me. And amidst all this quotidian businessing, writing seems unbounded. It’s not that I feel better than or more serious or thoughtful than the denizens of the foodcourt or the “filthy lucre” of the mall and its capitalism—after all, whatever issues I have with the system, the people are just people having lives. We’re almost always inside of this larger system, despite what we might think about it. That is, in many, ways how such all-encompassing economic, epistemic systems work.

But I like the feeling of kindling a small flame in its middle. Writing what is only marginally saleable, what exists outside of the system. And I feel fellow-feeling with the people in the food court, eating, chatting, being humans.

Gary Barwin, Utopia or neartopia or bettertopia: a then-and-there literature

I hear God in the breath
sounding a 3D-printed whistle
alerting neighbors to stay home.

I see God in all who comfort
every frantic family,
every grieving widow.

But “Come to Pharaoh” tells me
there is no place
where God is not –

even where corruption festers.
I’m not generous enough
to see God there.

Rachel Barenblat, Come

Yesterday, January 19, was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Dr. King, whose was born on January 15, 1929, would have been 97 years old.

Twelve years ago, in 2014, celebration of the holiday and Dr. King’s real birth date fell on the same day, and in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, Greenwell Springs Road Regional Library invited teenagers to use found poetry as a way to “engage with” Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which he had delivered at the “March on Washington” in 1963. The idea, as explained to the youths, was to try composing a poem using words from a transcript of the speech.

I took up the challenge myself and wrote the poem that appears below.
[…]

for one hundred years
hope was tranquilizing

despair a mountain
of solid stone in hands
crippled by manacles

but we emerge now
not drinking from a cup
of hatred, of violence,

of bitterness, not jangling
chains of distrust
but able to sing here, today

our protests in community
battered, suffering, we will
not turn back, cannot walk

alone but demand to work
together, pray together
struggle together as one

Maureen Doallas, one nation

Focusing on my own work hasn’t been so easy lately, as I’m sure is the case for many of you. At such times I turn to certain things that help me: meditation, exercise, repetitive and absorbing activities like knitting, drawing, playing the piano, and reading — especially poetry. I want to try to share some peacefulness here in the days and weeks ahead, but not peacefulness devoid of meaning or significance for the moment in which we find ourselves.

Today I took down from my shelves a volume titled Postwar Polish Poetry, selected and edited by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1982. The work of 20th century Russian and, especially, Polish poets has always spoken to me. These are poets who have seen the worst; they write with irony and sometimes black humor, but they have not lost faith in humanity or its basic values, or in what is noble or beautiful in the world and in each life. 

Beth Adams, Two Polish poems, and a sunflower

I planned to get my third novel started this January, and I have. I wasn’t far in, though, before my brain started playing hooky. Psst, Lesley, I have a poem idea for you. Poetry always seems to prefer a sidewise approach, when I’m looking the other way. There’s nothing to do but obey.

Arthur Sze’s 2025 collection Into the Hush, however, is also to blame for any bloom of inspiration. These days I often feel struck silent by horror. What can I possibly say about ICE abductions and cities under assault by their own government that others aren’t saying more powerfully? Hey, um, most of us are glad for Greenlanders’ sake that they’re NOT part of the US? So I found myself all the more impressed by how Sze, in the face of so much nightmare, bears poetic witness. These meditative poems brim with wondrous gestures and small creatures closely observed, including spiders crawling across laptops and sipping from taps. In the opening poem “Anvil,” though, butterflies and apple trees share space with the names of vanishing languages, reports of human violence, and how “a matsutake emerges from out of the rubble of Hiroshima.” Somehow these juxtapositions carry argument without becoming argument. Understanding the technique inspires me to try the same.

Lesley Wheeler, Arthur Sze’s mushrooms

Full disclosure: I am typing this under a blanket next to a box of tissues and a very hot cup of tea, fighting the urge to take a nap. A nasty cold/cough (thankfully not COVID) has me down for the count the past couple of days, and I woke up this morning thinking about how, when I was teaching, I would push through this type of illness to avoid the hassle of wondering if I’d get a decent sub or the worry of not having left lesson plans ahead of time. (This is common for LOTS of jobs, but particulary for teachers.) Being retired now, the only battle I fight when I don’t feel well is the urge to berate myself if I don’t workout or do anything productive. (Like this morning, when I actually got on the stationary bike for thirty minutes until my body said “bad idea” and pushed back by making me woozy. I decided to listen. Thus the blanket and tea.)

I guess you could say I’m still trying to be productive by writing this post. You wouldn’t be wrong. However, I am getting better at passive productivity. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but hear me out.

With regards to reading…During lockdown, I struggled to focus on reading, and I started listening to audiobooks on my walks or while cleaning the house or gardening. A passive and yet enjoyable way to complete books while doing something else, an efficient way to consume the latest suspense thriller or bestseller. I save my physical reading for poetry and for books I imagine I’ll want to savor, study the language, stretch out the story, hear the characters the way I want to hear them instead of interpreted by an actor. Of course, I don’t always know this ahead of time, so if I really love the language of an audiobook, I’ll often stop listening and check the book out of the library to finish it.

It’s the same with writing lately. Instead of pushing myself to draft new work daily (as with the Stafford Challenge) or on any kind of schedule, I’ve adopted more passive strategies for approaching the page. One way is by reading through older, unpublished poems and looking for salvageable or interesting pieces that slipped through the cracks. This way, I’m not starting from scratch, and the productivity comes in small, manageable pieces of revision time. Another way is to use my reading time to generate writing exercises, like the grammar imitation I wrote about in the last post. These usually leave me with strange and interesting blocks of language that might become fodder for a successful poem later. Another way is to actually submit work that is lounging around in my computer looking for a home. This makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something writing-related without any writing actually being done.

Donna Vorreyer, Slowing My Roll

This week, a poem I wrote for a dear friend was published by a new journal that I admire! I’m so glad to have “Love Poem with Tumor: A Translabyrinthine Approach to a Large Cystic Vestibular Schwannoma” in Issue 5 of Asterales.

Katie Manning, “Love Poem with Tumor” in Asterales

James Reeves published A Short History of English Poetry in 1961, and boy is it fun to read, if you like nastiness, especially that unique nastiness about poetry that only a practicing poet can muster. In today’s academic literary criticism, filling the pristine pages of selective journals, interpretation is the aim, and that aim takes lexical priority over evaluation—if, indeed, any evaluation is offered at all. For Reeves, it’s the delicious opposite. He tells us what’s bad and he tells us what’s good, and rarely bothers with what the poems mean.

Fast forward to chapter 10. The discussion of Romanticism starts off with a bang, a rare moment of adulation: William Blake

was a poet of the purest inspiration, at once a man and a visionary. There is about his best lyrics a rightness of tone and feeling, an inevitability of rhythm and language which give them a kind of authenticity, even authority, that we accept without question.

This judgment itself, we are to accept without question. Indeed the whole book is a display of what you can get away with, if you are free to assert and not defend.

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

There are times in the history of society when accepted ideas and forms have become rigid and stale, and when the only possibility of new growth lies in the capacity of gifted individuals to renew the contact between the human mind and the primary sources of experience.

Rigid and stale, that’s surely right, but come on, does the human mind ever lose contact with the primary sources of experience? Aren’t those sources impinging on all of us at every moment, yea even on me right now, as I type away?

Wordsworth and Coleridge also come in for praise, but fainter praise—Reeves admits that they “transformed English poetry”; and Coleridge, we are told, “was at no time a great technical innovator, but he had a superb ear.” Nothing like the praise reserved for Blake. It’s much the same with Shelley and Keats.

And it’s at this point that the awesome negativity comes full to the fore. Regarding Byron,

It is doubtful if even his most fervent admirer today would accord him a fraction of the praise lavished on him during the last ten years of his short life.

His poetry is

the sort of intoxicating stuff which easily persuades immature or undiscriminating minds that they are enjoying fine poetry.

O ye undiscriminating minds!

Brad Skow, Tell Me What You Really Think

Berryman has been ‘in the air’ on substack recently. A week or so ago I was in the middle of composing a note asking whether anyone still read him when I saw one from Paul Franz saying that the summer issue of Literary Imagination will carry a review of the new edition of Berryman’s unpublished Dream Songs. And now Robert Potts, who has learnt all of the original 77 Dream Songs by heart, is kicking off a series of readings of them which looks like it will be fantastic — definitely worth a follow: https://robertpotts.substack.com/p/dream-awhile […]

There was a period of a few months at the beginning of 2007, a rather miserable time for me personally, when I was clearly reading Berryman and Robert Duncan quite intensively. I know for sure that I encountered Duncan for the first time around this time in Michael Schmidt’s superlative Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English — still for my money the best such anthology there is, in which neither “side” is an afterthought. In the autumn of 2006 I had moved from Cambridge to Oxford to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College and I bought it in the long-lamented Oxford branch of Borders. This was the first time, I think, that I read systematically in modern American poetry and I learnt a great deal from this anthology about how American poets and poetic trends fitted in with, or differed from, what was happening in Britain.

Enthused by the brief section on Duncan, I remember looking for more and being delighted to find that Borders also had a copy of the Selected Poems, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and published by New Directions, which remains an excellent introduction to his work. Borders used to be surprisingly good for poetry and one of the few places in the UK where you could reliably find US poetry collections. (As Jem’s recent piece on Matthew Buckley Smith points out, this is still quite difficult — perhaps in fact more so than it was twenty years ago.) Indeed, it took me years and a lot of trans-Atlantic shipping fees to complete my collection of Duncan’s poetry, because all the other books were only available in America. Or as Berryman in England put it:

These men don’t know our poets.
I’m asked to read; I read Wallace Stevens & Hart Crane
in Sidney Sussex & Cat’s.
The worthy young gentlemen are baffled. I explain,

but the idiom is too much for them.

This fragment comes from a poem called ‘Friendless’, part of a pretty straightforwardly autobiographical sequence — almost a memoir in verse — which was published in his 1971 collection Love & Fame. Berryman was in Cambridge in the late 30s, just before the start of the Second World War, so these poems are recalling events from more than 30 years before, with such local detail and precision that I suspect that he, too, was relying on diary entries.

Victoria Moul, Gift us with long cloaks & adrenaline: on reading and its consolations

Sunday was Burns Day — January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns (1759–1796) — and we shouldn’t let it slip away without a gesture toward the Scottish poet. As we noted when we looked at “To a Mouse,” Burns’s rise to fame came in part from the advantage of coming early: a proto-Romantic to whom the Romantics would turn, a genial promoter of Scotland whose work would seem nation-defining to later Scottish nationalists, a poet who could write in English with a light Scots dialect that would endear him to the English-monoglot descendants of Scots scattered around the world.

What’s more, his poetry showed a genius, unmatched till Kipling’s prose, for using unfamiliar words (Scots, in Burns’s case; typically Hindi, in Kipling’s) and not defining them — but giving just enough surrounding information that the reader can more or less triangulate the meaning.

In his explicitly Scottish verse, Burns would take an existing anonymous song and work his magic on it to smooth it out and make it sparkle — and with the added benefit of his fame, his printed works distributed across the Anglosphere, the result would become what later generations took as the standard version. “Auld Lang Syne,” for example. “John Barleycorn.” And Today’s Poem, “Comin thro’ the Rye.”

There’s some suggestion that early versions were bawdier, and there are later versions in which the sex between Jenny and her swain — or multiple swains, one each time she passes through the rye — is spelled out. Burns’s own version is milder, but even that is often Bowdlerized: erasing the draggled petticoats, for example, dropping the suggestive “wet” and reference to Jenny’s “thing,” and implying that all they did was kiss. Knowing the bawdiness of the song makes even more ironic Holden Caulfield’s mistaken use of the song as an image of protecting innocence in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Comin thro’ the Rye

Burns was born in 1759 in Alloway in Ayrshire and died, neither very much later nor very much further away, in 1796 in Dumfries. He wrote his best poems in Scots, and his best poems were so good they did a great deal to guarantee the Scots language some kind of literary future. He suffered for his art, and lord knows others suffered for it too, particularly the women who loved him; but his art was also fuelled by his experience of suffering, especially that of watching his father beaten down by authority and exhausted by farm labour. While he became many other poets besides, this helped form Burns into a satirist of the kinds of religious and political thought that perpetuated or condoned inhumanity. And just as inhumanity has never gone out of fashion, neither has Robert Burns. What he made of us remains as true now as then.

Though one comedic aspect of Burns – maybe I mean tragicomic – is what we’ve made of him. Since his character was so complicated as to effectively not exist – there’s barely a single human trait that Burns did not exhibit at some point as if it defined him – everyone’s free to make their own reading of Burns according to their own personal, critical or neurotic agenda. And heaven knows they have. Burns is a everything from a noble savage to a brilliantly read autodidact; he’s a male-chauvinist pig, and he’s a champion of the rights of women; he’s a rather dodgy English late Augustan poet and a brilliant Scots proto-Romantic. Most bewilderingly from our contemporary perspective, the author of ‘A Slave’s Lament’ almost took a job at a Jamaican plantation as a ‘bookkeeper’ (which was ‘junior overseer’ in all but name). In view of all this, you should be aware that any single assessment of the Burns and his work will be one that many will disagree with. Folk tend to see themselves in Burns, even if it’s the self they most dread, and must condemn the most harshly.

Don Paterson, The Burns Identity

Fifteen years ago, on 25th January 2011, the poet R.F. Langley died. His death, at the age of 72, has been one of the ongoing sadnesses of my life. I last saw him for a cup of tea to celebrate the end of a course of treatment for cancer, and to look forward to spring that year. But a week later, recovering at home, he died, suddenly, in the middle of the night. We had known each other for ten years, and there was no other contemporary poet I admired more. Living in neighbouring East Anglian counties (Norfolk and Suffolk), I had also become very fond of him as a person: dry, modest, knowledgeable, and then intense and twinkling when something interested or delighted him. I was in my twenties when we met, in my thirties when he died—by which time his words had become a permanent part of the way I see the world. To give just one example: I think of him every time I see the constellation of Orion in the southern winter sky, which hung high there as I left his wake in the unlit Suffolk countryside, as if it had stepped out of a poem just published, “At South Elmham Minster”, with its “twelve stars / in the winter night, under the feet of / Orion”. […]

In the last poem that he published, “To a Nightingale” (18 November 2010), R.F. Langley […] “stopped at nothing”—as he often did—and started to look. “Nothing along the road”, runs the opening sentence. Then the mind’s eye begins to unclose what is there: “But petals, maybe. Pink behind / and white inside.” Word by word, the empty road is framed and sketched: “Nothing but / the coping of a bridge”.

More details meet on this concrete surface: “mutes” (bird droppings), moss, insects. By a play on words, which ties up disparate etymologies, “the coping of the bridge” is also the poet’s mind finding an image for its own patience, bearing with this emptiness just as the bridge bears the road, carrying its “nothing” to an unknown destination, “coping” with it by being something in between.

Speaking of the “Man of Achievement especially in Literature”, this is the quality that Keats called “Negative Capability”: the state of being “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. The poem searches for precisions around the edges, lighting on “lemon, I’ll say / primrose-coloured, moths”, which “flinch / along the hedge”, and “are Yellow Shells, not / Shaded Broad-bars”. But it aims further along the road, beyond “the nick-nack of names”, at Keats’ condition for poetry, in which “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration”. Finally, it is the sound of a nightingale that brings release from wondering about “caterpillars which / curl up as question marks”:

… I am
empty, stopped at nothing, as
I wait for this song to shoot.

To know Roger Langley was to learn the virtue of both knowing and not knowing about beautiful things. In 2001, I reviewed his Collected Poems in the London Review of Books. The volume gathered 17 pieces from three decades of small press publication. Here, suddenly, was contemporary poetry like nothing else I had read, with—as I wrote then—“rich, tightly-orchestrated diction and rhythms” which followed the “close mapping of subjectivity […] relieved by moments of lovely objective clarity”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, We Speak From Out There

As I write this first review of 2026, it would be easy to despair at the current national and international news.  Well, Chris Campbell’s new collection, Why I Wear My Past to Work, is just the antidote for any despondency that we might be experiencing. It turns our attention away from such concerns and focusses on the domestic, for it is here that he suggests true fulfilment and happiness can be found.

Of course, he acknowledges that our lives are demanding and not without threats. In Today I met an Armed Robber he amusingly reflects upon our vulnerability, as we never truly know the nature of the people we interact with in our communities. There may well be ‘a torturer’ and an ‘armed robber’ in our supermarket queues too, but we can only ‘guess’ if that’s the case: we can’t be sure. What we do know is that there are people like that in our society and that recognition may make us feel vulnerable. This notion of vulnerability is reinforced in Section 2 of the collection, It Rains Tulips, in poems that  vividly portray the effects of serious illness on the speaker. In Today I Can’t Speak, the title alone suggests the suddenness with which the speaker’s life has been transformed for the worse. The life-changing symptoms are powerfully captured through spacing, repetition, and questions as the speaker struggles to find words to make sense of what is happening to him: ‘Can’t    speak    speak/    speak today, or/    did      did    I repeat it?’ As a consequence of this experience, the speaker becomes acutely aware of his own mortality. In a later poem in the same section Campbell writes:’ There is a mortuary on the horizon, where the traffic ends.’ Death is a certainty and we can’t afford to ignore it.

Now all that might sound quite dark. However, in Section 2 the patient recovers, and he is wiser for it. 

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Why I Wear My Past to Work’ by Chris Campbell

The father tries to comfort his small daughter by telling her not to worry. But behind his words, the father knows, “the monster, unmasked, has come to life,// as real as the splattered flesh/ and candle crushed beneath our feet.” What goes unsaid is that the daughter will have to learn to navigate this world of unmasked monsters in time. The couplets suggest though that the daughter will have her father’s support in a way the father didn’t have the support of his own. […]

[Bruce Parkinson] Spang’s poems are rooted in the ordinary, looking back through a forgiving lens. They explore how an individual is shaped by parental and societal expectations and how wearing a mask to fit in distorts an individual’s shape. It’s only when an individual is able to twist from expectations into their true selves that love, including self-love, can be found.

Emma Lee, “Twist” Bruce Parkinson Spang (Warren Publishing) – book review

Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, by Roger Sedarat:

As important as source language remains in any discussion of literary translation, Emerson further follows the Sufi mystics in his conception of an ideal poet who can “speak through the symbolic language of nature” (Loili 112). Important to an application of Emerson’s approach to translation and its early effect on his own verse, such a seemingly translingual symbolic connection helps to build a strong case for his having anticipated Ezra Pound’s appropriation of the East in his influence of the American poetic tradition.

This is a book for scholars of American literature, in particular those who are deeply familiar with Emersonian scholarship, which I will admit up front that I am not. Nonetheless, despite the fact that my ignorance made it difficult to follow a good deal of what Sedarat had to say, as someone who, like Emerson and Pound, produced what some call “bridge translations” of classical Persian literature I resonated with what I was able to understand. (“Bridge translation” is a label signifying that I used an informant because I am not literate in Persian.) I wrote a little bit in Four By Four #41 about the translation work I’ve done and the ethical dilemma(s) attached to it. What I appreciated most about what I could follow of Sedarat’s argument is that he allowed me to place that work and my thinking about it in an American literary tradition I’d never really thought all that much about. In particular, I appreciated the way Sedarat set up a kind of continuum, with Emerson, who respected the integrity of the Persian poets he translated on one end—which is where I have tried to place myself—and, on the other, people like Coleman Barks and Daniel Ladinksy, who so deracinate the poets they “translate” (Rumi and Hafez respectively) that they are almost unrecognizable as the deeply religious, Muslim poets they were. (If you want to read a critique of Barks that is completely in line with but far more accessible than Sedarat’s, check out The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, by Rozina Ali.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #51

I have been missing my dad, so today I put on his old cotton knit sweater, the one that’s developing holes in the weave, the one I kept because his scent lingered in its fibers. It’s been over five years since his death and, alas, that familiar scent has finally vanished from the sweater. Though I like to think that it has been absorbed into the other items in my closet, maybe the hoodie my daughter knitted, maybe the flannel pjs, maybe the four old pairs of jeans I wear continually or the one full-length gown I’ve seldom donned but have kept for reasons not entirely rational. I’m hoping my dad has somehow permeated my closet, the things I wear next to my skin, my life.

And I came across this poem recently in Gary Whited’s Having Listened. Indeed, it resonates in the way a poem can, a sort of slanted parallel of feeling, affinity, relationship. I love the idea of “shirt knowledge,” the thought that inanimate objects might “know” in ways humans cannot perceive. Those last lines: “how to be private and patient,/how to be unbuttoned,/how to carry the scent of what has worn me,/and to know myself by the wrinkles” seem accurate to my current state. Comfortable, comforting.

Like an old shirt. Like a good poem. Like a memory of my dad.

Ann E. Michael, Shirt knowledge

I first read this beguiling lyric as a sophomore in college. Like so many poems from that formative year, it’s been with me ever since. I have only half an idea what it means, the result of a lifelong effort towards comprehension begun that term with an essay I hazily remember as a comparison-contrast with, of all pairings, Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.”

I don’t think any great poem necessarily exists in order to be comprehended, but “The Waking” tips further east on the comprehension–apprehension spectrum than most of the poems that inhabit me. Etymology teases out the distinction between the two poles. They share prehendere: to catch hold of or to seize. Comprehend derives from comprehendere: com, meaning “with, together,” with a sense of “completely.” Apprehend, meanwhile, is from apprehenden, to grasp with the senses or mind, to grasp, or take hold of, physically. It’s the same action, a catching hold, with a difference of what I first want to describe as degree, though I think that impulse is merely the result of our old Cartesian wheelrut, the one that privileges the thinking mind over the sensing body, that doesn’t allow that the mind might feel, the body think, despite the plain fact that there is no mind without flesh, that the inarticulate gut is packed with neurons.

When “the mind” catches hold we say we understand, we comprehend; when “the body” does the catching, we have apprehended. And yet don’t we experience a third kind of grasping? Apprehension allows a mixed state, one in between: a knowing that precedes thought, a physical sensation of insight, a clicking-into-place as we proceed through a well-cast metaphor:

Life
Candle flame
Wind coming on

(from Asian Figures, trans. W.S. Merwin)

We comprehend the meaning before we can say it, and the sensation it engenders—the quiver in the chest, a chill on the nape of the neck—similarly precedes our own words. Think of walking on an icy sidewalk and seeing someone, even a stranger, slip: your own stomach lurches, and you reach for them before you can think I will help. There is something inside of us that calls to connect, that can’t help itself connecting. There is something that knows what to do. I want to call it presence, a moment of perfect awareness in the instant of apprehension. Not the awareness of having awakened, but an ongoingness, an eternity of the present: a waking.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

Martin Kennedy Yates is a poet and mixed-media artist (as well as many other things) based in the Black Country. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University and began to seek publication for his poetry around this time. Since then, he’s been published widely, including in The Rialto, Stand, Magma, Poetry Wales, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Broken Spine.

He’s led and collaborated in workshops and multimedia projects with other artists and featured on Brum Radio Poets with Rick Sanders. This Wilderness & Other Concerns is his debut collection and it won The Broken Spine Chapbook Competition in 2024.

I’ve known Martin for a little while now and consider him to be an excellent poetry friend and all-round human being. I was delighted for him when he won the Broken Spine competition and was lucky enough to see an early draft of the book. Then, as with reading again more recently, I was struck by the inventiveness and ambition, as well as the humour and pathos. Martin is very sensitive to real human quirks and foibles, and his characterisation is spot on. As a reader, you really feel for this cast of characters the poems summon.

And what a cast. The book is divided into three parts: This Wilderness, Other Concerns, and a sequence of so-called Scousenlish poems. This Wilderness is a kind of modern day Brummie reckoning with TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. As such, it’s presented as a collage of different voices, places and identities that weave in and out of each other and the spaces they inhabit. The middle section, Other Concerns, is a collection of shape poems ranging through personal, spiritual and political concerns. And Scousenlish … Well, we’ll come back to Scousenlish.

Victoria Spires, This Wilderness & Other Concerns

Geoffrey Squires in conversation with Fergal Gaynor, LegalHighsPress, 2025, £4.00

This fascinating little book is a record of a conversation carried out by email over a number of years, with half a dozen Squires poems dotted through it, in order of original publication. The conversation ranges across the body of Squires’ work, both original and translation, starting from 1978’s Drowned Stones through to the 2024 volume Triptych, reviewed here. And it is a conversation; though the focus is on Squire’s work Gaynor is not just asking questions. For example, he offers a detailed and compelling case for reading the book-length sequence that is Drowned Stones as a verse bildungsroman, a reading that Squires agrees with.

It’s a tricky book to review, so I’ve decided to focus on what is the main thread that runs through the conversation, Squires’ evolving view of the nature and role of language. Here’s one of the things he says:

Insofar as language poetry is founded on the belief that language constitutes the world, á la Wittgenstein, I think mine embodies the exact opposite. Ever since I was a boy, wandering the hills above our house in Raphoe, I have been struck by the limitations of language, the difficulty and often impossibility of describing or expressing what we perceive, visually, aurally or physically, the fact that language only partly covers the world. So, paradoxically, while my work is often and obviously preoccupied with language, and thus may have a superficial resemblance to LP, in fact it stems from the diametrically opposite position. In it, the verbal is often under threat from the non-verbal, and has only a tenuous or precarious hold on things.

Much as I admire a great deal of language poetry, I think Squires is making a significant point here, and one that reflects his move away, rejection of, the ‘short personal lyric’ poem as discussed earlier in the conversation. In a sense, his discrimination can be read as a more nuanced replacement of the distinction between, for want of better terms, ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental’ poetries; poets either believe in the efficacy of language in charting or constituting the world or they accept and embrace its imperfections as a medium. On this spectrum, it could be argued that Robert Grenier has more, philosophically speaking, in common with Seamus Heaney than might meet the eye.

Billy Mills, Geoffrey Squires in conversation with Fergal Gaynor: A Review

Something about “the drying soul / of the world” made me think of an oil painting by Donald Roller Wilson that pulls us into the room ghosted by its inhabitants. There is always a tinge of ghostliness in representational art that seeks to depict an interior.

Wilson wrote a poem to accompany (or enhance) (or revision) (or animate) his painting. Reading it adds [to] the scene a bit: many of the actions — peeked inside, seen the light, we fooled, it seemed, she was inside — play [with] the idea of seeing against the materiality of the sight. I treasure the way Wilson keeps the whole lettering of “all” in the closing portmanteau word. Moving back and forth between the image and text, one has the sense of being populated by the voices in Mrs. Jenkins’ “interior,” looking for verbs inside the shadows and left- open drawers.

Alina Stefanescu, A few by William Heyen.

When I come across a title that connects math and poetry, I become interested — and want to read more. Google helped me discover here, in China Daily, an article featuring German professor Andrea Breard entitled “Reading numbers like poetry: A journey into ancient Chinese math.”  She goes on to tell about some algebraic methods that were written as poems — the rhythm allowing easier and better memorization.  

Andrea Breard is a German historian of mathematics, specializing in Chinese mathematics.  Her remarks took me back to my childhood when we frequently repeated “counting rhymes” as we dressed or played or whatever.  “One, Two, Buckle my shoe …” and “Hickory, Dickory, Dock . . . the mouse ran up the clock …” were frequent  parts of my childhood chatter.

JoAnne Growney, Reading Numbers Like Poetry

I am behind on more things than can be dreamt of, in your philosophy. The days of the past few weeks have been breathless, moving task to task, keeping my head above water. Our spring poetry festival organization moves ahead, I work a stack of reviews, I am putting together a mound of spring chapbooks. Every evening: Fold, staple, repeat. Fold, staple, repeat. I address and fill envelopes. Everything moves as it should, working up to a particular deadline of our Vancouver trip, attempting the space in which to take a small breath. So that I might breathe.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

It’s at least a year since I’ve written anything that’s been accepted. What am I doing wrong?

• Maybe I’ve been writing too much, and the quality’s gone down – well I’ve certainly written more this year. My output in 2025 was 5 poems, 36 Flashes and 7 stories – about 22k words. I’ve hardly ever written more in a year.
• Many of the magazines I used to be in frequently have gone – I’ve found nothing to replace Poetry Nottingham (20 poems) or Weyfarers (24 poems).
• I’m reluctant to pay submission fees, but the magazines most suited to my work now ask for them – I’m generally in favour of fees. $3 for 3 poems or a story is fair enough. However, I struggle with paying $3 to submit a single 100 word piece of Flash.

This year I shall pay to submit stories that I think merit publication – a couple of my favourite stories remain unpublished – and cannibalize the rest.

Tim Love, Rejections 2025

I amused myself this week when I found myself emerging from the rabbit hole that was me reviewing my hair in my poetry videos. It had started as a dedicated period of time to tackle some admin jobs and before I knew it I was giving my hair ratings out of 10 in the videos. I am not sure how productive this was, but it definitely entertained me. Along the way I loved rediscovering the poem about the time I felt a sudden urge to get a haircut on holiday, and the way everything the following day suddenly became linked by things that cost seventy pence. It has not been published anywhere, but I do like the fact that it is a poem that sets down a moment in time.

Sue Finch, HYDRATION, CONVERSATION, AND GOOD COMPANY

My task this week is a return to the play script I began in November, whose subject matter and more is drawn from a chapbook series I wrote two decades ago.  Revisiting archer avenue has been wild, even thought I love these poems and feel like they came at a time when my work was evolving quite quickly. Initially, I managed to draft what felt like a decent few acts, but on rereading, much like the fiction I occasionally try to write, it felt rather boring and ho hum compared to the poems I was working on in the interstices. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading and researching poetic drama (not necessarily verse drama) but feel I may be getting close to integrating the poetic and the dramatic with an eye toward performance. The result is a mix of portions of the original chap blended with dialogue and action sequences that I think may work well (or it may be a starling disaster, we shall see.)

The ordinary language feels flat sometimes when you are trained, as a poet, to be highly specific and imagistic. To create something out of nothing on the page. With drama, the dialogue becomes speech yielded amidst a barrage of other elements that make up the stage. The movement and performance of the actors who are the mouthpieces. The sets, the lights, the logistics of mounting any production (moving props and sets and setting a mood.) Luckily, my previous theater experience makes it easy to juggle these things, but then again, its the language I am struggling with most. The ordinariness of it. 

Kristy Bowen, on poetic drama

On July 12, 1873, in Brussels, Verlaine shot at Rimbaud with a pistol injuring his left wrist after a long and stormy affair. Rimbaud decided to leave Brussels without immediately pressing charges. On the evening of the incident, Verlaine and his mother accompanied him to the Gare du Midi where Verlaine behaved even more erratically. Fearing that Verlaine might shoot him again, Rimbaud sought police intervention, leading to Verlaine’s arrest. Verlaine was charged with attempted murder, underwent a medico-legal examination, and was interrogated about his relationship with Rimbaud. One of the police examination reports read, “In morality and talent, this Raimbaud (sic), aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster. He can construct poems like nobody else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and repulsive.”

After the bullet was removed on 17 July, Rimbaud withdrew his complaint and the charge was reduced to wounding with a firearm, and on 8 August 1873 Verlaine was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Mons city jail. In jail, where Verlaine spent 555 nights, he composed his finest poetry. […]

If one looks at his black and white photographs, the one in which he is young, it’s quite arresting: a young man with a sort of troubled regard, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit like a true Parisian, and bearing the weight of a heavy moustache, he is the portrait of a poète maudit, accursed poet, a term used for poets at odds with society with a life marked with crime, insanity, and addiction. Verlaine himself composed a work titled Les Poètes maudits, as an homage to three other accursed poets (apart from himself): Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. 

I think I could never be a respectable person and I don’t think I would ever refuse to be photographed alongside thieves and pimps. I would like to walk in the rain, slightly drunk with absinthe, grateful for my accursed life. I would like to hold a rose in my hand that I know will wilt. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Paul Verlaine

I came upon the work of Clarice Lispector because I read about her in the work of Kristjana Gunnars and after reading this passage I thought to read again one of Lispector’s Chronicas. It’s titled “Yes.”

“I said to a friend:
— Life has always asked too much of me.
She replied:
— But don’t forget that you also ask too much of life.
That is true.”

There are books that are gifts and there are some that surpass, so generous are they, and The Silence of Falling Snow is that. I’m grateful for the thinking through of living, of being there for someone at their ending, of all the details, observations, dailiness, intermingled with the thoughts of others, the Buddhist philosophy and its application to the conditions at hand.

She reminds us that if the wood is wet there will be no sparks to light a fire. “Conditions for clarity of thought have to be created; they do not happen on their own.” Which is something to think about in a number of contexts.

Shawna Lemay, Bibliotherapy: Loss and The Silence of Falling Snow

the snow falling. a buried house. one day
my brother & i went too far. his boots filled
with snow. he does not remember this now
so i often wonder if i made it up but
i took his feet in my hands
to warm them. breathing on my own fingers
& flexing. the blood, a water cycle.
corn husks all sleeping gilless under our feet.
i think i saw my reflection too in the snow.
it was that bright.

Robin Gow, two feet

独り言落として枯野から帰る　山路　花

hitorigoto otoshite kareno kara kaeru

            dropping a monologue
            I return
            from the withered field

                                                            Hana Yamaji

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (January 20, 2026)

Stand here so that your view is between those two trees. Do you see the telephone pole at the bottom of the hill? Now look directly above that to the top of the hill and then to the right. There is a tall tree. You will see the pair of them on different branches in that tree.

Locating birds is an intimate act. Numerous times, I have smelled the detergent or musk of a fellow birder as they approached me to guide my view to a kinglet or warbler. I am always reminded of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Lying While Birding”:

Yes Yes

I see it

so they won’t keep telling you

where it is

But I saw them, the pair of Bald Eagles, as my husband guided my view. While living within such an undesirable and regressing timeline, our attention has gone more to the birds, books, and each other’s interests. He has taken to building things. I dive into making and learning about art. He wants to work out more with me. I want to raise mealworms. We spend time on our own branches within the same tree. […]

If one were to have used their binoculars, they would see two people on the path in the distance. Both of them hold binoculars. The male holds a camera and wears a bright orange hat. He smiles at the female. Between them their voices materialize into a cloud and dissipate in the air around them. In cold air, sound carries. If one were to listen closely, they would hear a conversation about serendipity and the romance of two animals following one another. Eventually, the two people would walk off together into the distance, a snow squall enveloping them.

Sarah Lada, And the Rest Is Rust and Stardust

Have you told your daughters
your most important stories, what they
should do with all these books and all
the trinkets you saved from your other
lives? You’ve never had a financial
adviser but now you’re standing in
the lobby of his building, about to take
the elevator up to your appointment. Perhaps
this means something in you still believes
in the future, something now willing
to join the game of risk and gain.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returns

This week: polar bears in the pews, the pace of chance, bioluminescent joy, the secretary spider, and much more. Enjoy!

Today I am in church again. I have come for silent reflection in one of my favourite seats, but it feels a little closer to the edge than usual. Shuffling footsteps in the aisle have me predicting who might be about to go past. Slowly and steadily polar bears are settling into the pews around me. Their black claws lightly clasp copies of The Book of Common Prayer. One across the aisle is flicking the pages randomly as if speed reading, another puffs out fishy breath in celebration of finding the right page.

Sue Finch, CLAPPING WITH MY HEART

the blue hills open a window.
i greet the poem with calloused hands.
silence ticking in the walls.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I think a lot about how the words author and authority are related. What does it do to the authority of the poet—and the speaker—when errors are allowed to remain and play an important role in a poem? I’d argue that it’s worth the risk, and that there is value in that transparency. I’d argue that it doesn’t undermine the authority of the poet or speaker as much as it prioritizes authenticity.

By allowing imperfection into our poems—by letting some of the breaks and repairs show—we’re allowing for a different kind of intimacy between the reader and writer. I read poems to witness someone else’s mind at work, and these moments of error or brokenness, those switchbacks and wait-on-second-thoughts, help me see that work.

I don’t go to poetry for comfort, as a writer or as a reader. I go to poetry to be changed, to revise my own thinking. I’m much more likely to be changed by the original thinking of another human being, a voice I trust because it’s honest with me, and because I can see myself mirrored in the utterance: the occasional faltering, or disorientation, or struggle to find a new foothold.

We’re imperfect. We slip up. We change our minds. We lose our train of thought. We misspeak or mishear or misunderstand. We do this, all of us, in our lives, but can we also sometimes do that in our work? I want to leave you with a prompt: Let some of the seams show in your next poem or essay. Accept the gifts that arrive packaged as missteps. Try not to buff out every scratch, or sand down every splinter. Give yourself permission to be more human.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

I recorded some el cheapo broken student violin. I played a wonky zither (both plucking and bowing it.) Then I slowed down some of the violin sounds. And finally added alto recorder. Of course, I added some digital processing — some reverb and echo effects to make the audio sound good.

And then I found a text file on my computer which had a bunch of poetry material collaged together. I then further randomized the lines and edited them, moving some around, changing some, removing some others. And so I arrived at the poetic text.

I tried videoing me drawing with a thick pencil around some stones but it didn’t look very interesting, so instead I filmed the rocks in close-up, slowly. I slowed the video down even more and then combined the three elements: the music, the text and the video.

I found it the mix of sound, scrolling text (using a fake old typewriter font) and the visuals to be satisfying. Usually inscrutable and ambiguous.

I did think about what the experience of someone watching the text might be. The slow visuals and the non-developmental music, the ambiguous text. And I thought about what the experience might be if encountered online, which I know is different than say, experiencing the work in a gallery or cinema aka biosphere, as my South African granny would say.)

I think in this work, I’m interested in a slow yet rich experience for the viewer, one that asks questions while keeping the viewer engaged in its play of signs. What is happening? What is being said? How does it feel? What does this say about making art and art itself? How is this like or not like the world or my experience of the world? What do I notice? What thought, feelings, experience, tactility, does this work bring up for me?

Gary Barwin, When I invent rain: how much do you want to know about an artwork?

How might we fashion
the pace of chance?

– Sam Kerbel, “Broken Record”

“Broken Record” is from Sam Kerbel’s chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price, a series of poems that riddle, poems that inhabit the riddling, poems engrossed in the unconscious communication between instances and objects. Words are played into their sonic shadows, or their near-homophones, as with “Romance,” which finishes:

Yes royalty is our golden ample
But we’re never quite finished with things
Are we?

The plural pronoun of the last line asks both if “we” are and what “we” is under conditions too thin and skimpy to imagine the events of tomorrow. The conditions, as they stand, are not enough. And yet there is a confirmation  — “Yes” –  followed by that play on sound and idiom which gives us the “golden ample” rather than the golden apple. The ample is not an apple. 

Alina Stefanescu, “Lyric research and adamant digression.”

Another coolish, sunny afternoon in Northern California. Yesterday biking, today gym, everyday, in the morning, writing, translating. I’ve been slogging away at some prose texts (poems) by a contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli. I discovered Magrelli by reading a selection of his poems by a British poet Jamie McKendrick (Faber), really fine translations that made me want to read more of Magrelli (and McKendrick). I began with a recent collection of poems called Exfanzia, then switched to the prose called In the Flesh Condominium, as backup. I’m gradually getting it, but it’s not easy. I’ve fallen back on Baudelaire as relief, a poem called ‘The Giantess’ (La Géante’) ‘recited’ by Matisse in a book I was reading, a favourite of Matisse, apparently. It’s lovely, I hope I can get it word and tone-perfect.

I’m also trying to do that with a couple of my own poem drafts, over and over, in each case a stanza that won’t come right (of course I come back to them after not having worked on them for a while, and nothing will seem right).

So I’m going to the gym and maybe a yoga class to think of something else.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Palo Alto, Tuesday 12 August 2025

Discouragement, a regular visitor to this writer (and many other writers), has settled into the house with me. Summer is often, for me, a time of writing less and doing outdoor and social things more; this year, though spring was lovely despite torrents of rain, summer commenced with the deaths of two long-time friends, and I haven’t been able to shake my low mood. Now the rejection slips are arriving thick and fast, and I’m questioning the value of my work in particular and of creative writing in general. Like, why bother? What am I doing this for? For whom? What’s my purpose? And under what circumstances? Why? […]

Somewhere on a social media platform, I encountered these words by Virginia Woolf (from “A Room of One’s Own”): “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Good perspective, that, to stop being concerned for how long your writing matters, or to whom, as long as what you write is what you wish to write. And then if you don’t submit your work for publication? Maybe that is something you can live with. Rather, something I can live with; at this point in my life, I have had hundreds of poems and essays published, six chapbooks, and three poetry collections…maybe from now on, I should write (as I always have) for myself. Even if my work is not in fashion, or considered irrelevant, or judged as potentially lasting, it is still what I wish to write, what I find necessary to express.

Ann E. Michael, As you wish

O, gentle reader. We’ve all been there. And what other medium is open to bottom-feeding poets like myself, but the open mic. And the whole thing is satirised in outstanding fashion here. The persona of the book, Zuleika, wants to be a poet. So she organises an event (hang on… I see where this is going…). The chapter/poem is called ‘Verbosa Orgia’. The first poet to read I has the adopted name of ‘Hrrathaghervood’ and comes on to shout at everyone and receive a ‘standing ovation’ for his ‘Pictish patois’. I won’t spoil all the lines, but everyone in the audience feels as Zuleika does that ‘Mesmerised… by his stage presence, I had hardly/ listened to his utterances’. You’ve met this guy. I have. In the fiction, his name is actually ‘Robbie’ not ‘Hrrathaghervood’. Like I say, you’ll find him familiar. Familiar, too, is the next poet to read at the reading who is called ‘Pomponius Tarquin who has won the “Governor’s Award for poetry”. He says to the audience “This first poem/ is called ‘Matter. Moment.’ This first poem/ is called ‘The Day My Cat Died’./ There are one hundred poems in the collection,/ but I’ll only read seventy-five of them now.” You’ll finish the chapter thinking you were at this reading (but for the ending…). Next up is ‘Calpurnicus Trio who is ‘popular with sheep’. It’s good poetry satire.

Andy Hopkins, ‘The Emperor’s Babe’, by Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin, 2002): Five Reasons to Read.

Last night, I looked at the Saturn through a low-resolution telescope. It took me some time to understand: the large planet of Saturn appeared like a tiny orange dot with rings around it. At first, I felt a bit disappointed but just a few moments later I couldn’t believe that it happened, that I saw the planet of Saturn with my own eyes through an eyepiece lens. After some time, I went to see it the second time. All day today, the orange dot keeps returning to me in flashes and I keep thinking: I saw the planet of Saturn. 

I would not want to live 2000 years later where it might be commonplace to travel to distant planets. I would like to die in a forest somewhere looking through a telescope. And someone, thousands of years later, will find bones of an ancient woman not knowing that she died looking at rings of Saturn. 

Saudamini Deo, The Rings of Saturn

I feel like I’m crawling out of the primordial swamp, I said to my friend Jody yesterday as I crawled out of cave water to where I was eventually able to stand on my feet. At that point, I was the farthest I had ever gone in that cave. My bare knees stung from crawling on my hands and knees over rocks. We started off as a group of six that dwindled down to four due to personal comfort preferences. The four of us, bipedal again, stared up at the cave ceiling as if we were standing inside an expanded, textured lung. What looked like draperies of flesh was limestone and calcification. Some parts of the ceiling had organic debris lodged in the crevices, an indicator of having been flooded to the ceiling. I then had a flashback to the briefest paralysis of panic I felt when army crawling through the earth just minutes ago. I had imagined the small space I occupied filling with an unexpected torrent of water. Being a pro at panic attacks, the paralysis had subsided with my well-practiced mind tricks.

All of us adorning head lamps, we illuminated the limestone cathedral and marveled at its decadence. The ceiling, lung-like and gill-like, had me mindful of my own breathing apparatuses. The expanding and retracting sacks adjacent to my heart. The swell of my diaphragm. The way air catches in the throat. The way I hold balls of air in my mouth and move them around my gums and lips. How those balls of air chortle as they break down into smaller balls of air. And there I was, a little human inside a ball of air within the cave’s body.

Sarah Lada, What in Earth?

In the just-about dark twilight of late summer, the stars coming out after their long Scandinavian rest, we stripped off – no costume or shyness required. L&P insisted I go in first promising me a surprise, and not the jellyfish which L scanned for using a torch. 

I took my silhouette down the ladder into the sea. I swam, and as I stroked the water saw sparks fly from my fingertips. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed. “Oh, oh … wow!” I could think of nothing more poetic. As I moved in the water, it seemed stars were born. 

I looked up at the sky – stars. I looked into the water – stars. Starlight everywhere. Starlight within reach and starlight beyond imagination. 

L&P came in to join the celebration, the firework party, the bioluminescent joy of seawater – plankton when ruffled – in dark-skied warmer waters of this late season.

The current drifted us away from the jetty – we took the light show with us, between our fingers and toes. We laughed, sang, played with the magic of the night – British, Australian, and Belgian, in Swedish waters, nothing between our skins and the heavens’ gift of freedom, of joy. 

Liz Lefroy, I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars

When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, he joined a tiny but existent coterie of Nobel laureates who were poets: Walcott, Miłosz. Brodsky. Wisława Szymborska joined a year later, the same year both Odysseas Elytis and Joseph Brodsky died. Tomas Tranströmer joined in 2013. You could have intelligent discussion about who else should or could join that list. Les Murray? Adam Zagajewski? Adrienne Rich? Hughes? Darwish? Voznesenski?

Then they were gone. The poets, I mean. I am deliberately excluding Bob Dylan. Louise Glück spent a lonely couple of years as the only Nobel Prize-winning poet on the planet. She died in 2023, leaving none.

To my mind, this feels like an extinction. The removal of a charismatic megafauna. And yes we all know that megafauna need a busy ecology of small and lesser creatures, and unlike extinction, the situation might be temporary; but I feel the lack. Where now that rumpled clique, however few, however male-dominated, of older poets of global stature? You didn’t necessarily have to like them or their work, it was enough that they existed: far from slick, far from performance-y, invested with authority, with shambling gravitas and various accents, persons of conscience whose presence at a festival or a lecture-hall induced a frisson and attracted a crowd.

Why are there none? Why does the very idea of a Great Poet seem almost old-fashioned? Surely it’s not the lack of talent or availability of poets; there have never been so many published poets. It must be to do with the times and our current sense of what poets are for, or can be, in public life.

Kathleen Jamie, Where Have All the Great Poets Gone?

Here’s the first paragraph of a message sent to the Associated Press’s book reviewers a few days ago:

“Dear AP book reviewers,

I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.”

No one reads book reviews?? Or, to quote the above paragraph, “the audience for book reviews is relatively low”—in comparison with which audience? Or audiences?

This message does not include any substantial data to back it up. A “thorough review” should show statistics like website visitor engagement, how many views a piece of content receives, and how long users stay on a piece of content. The people who’ve been writing book reviews for the AP deserve at least that.

And what about the idea of supporting a literary form that might have a small, but passionate audience (such as poetry)? An organization like the AP helps drive culture forward, but without book reviews, it’s a poorer offering. I was saddened when American Poets, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, ended the “Books Noted” section, which contained micro-reviews of recently published poetry books, in 2021. I did not renew my subscription in 2022.

The letter goes on to thank someone named Mark, no last name, “who has edited the reviews and incorporated best practices for trying to get reviews to appear in search results and get as many readers as possible.” So I guess we can blame this poor guy for not getting more readers for those reviews you worked so hard on.

Erica Goss, Associated Press Ends Weekly Book Reviews

While a couple of weeks too late to celebrate Bloom’s Day (June 16) properly, I made my pilgrimages to the Martello tower and Eccles Street. I bought a bar of lemon soap at Sweny’s pharmacy, and I ate the traditional gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Brynes. I’d been living out these moments in my imagination for more than 25 years, and I savored every minute of making it real—to take something as miraculous as a novel and to let that magic spill over into the lived world.

But what surprised me most, and what I cannot stop considering, is how much of Dublin—and Ireland, more generally—is dedicated to a celebration of its literary tradition. It reminded me of being in Slovenia in the early 2000s, when even the pre-Euro currency had poets on the bills. It’s not Joyce, of course, who gets the attention. In Dublin, there’s even a Samuel Beckett bridge. Living in Clout City, I cannot imagine something like a bridge or a tunnel not being named for a politician. But in Ireland, two of the most challenging and experimental modernist writers and their works are honored—perhaps, even more so, because of their difficulty.

This is the land of Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, Iris Murdoch, and Elizabeth Bowen, among so many more. And, it feels like that literary culture is still an incredible point of pride, something you see called out in big or small part wherever you are. And yet, I came back from Ireland to the news that even my home institution—the University of Chicago—was cutting its commitment to the humanities, due to funding pressures caused in great part by our own country’s retreat from supporting higher education and the arts.

I am worried less these days about what my own artistic legacy might be—I know I won’t fill auditoriums like Maya [Angelou] did—and more about what legacy there will be of the literature of today. What happens to a society that gives up on the things that exist outside market value? Who will we be and what will be remembered?

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Country That Celebrates Its Writers?

I became interested in thinking about the poetry of interiors thanks to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. (Originally published in the late 50s, my edition came out in English translation in 1994). All the writers at a certain point had read it. How can any of us think of space the same way after reading it? Mark Z. Danielewski says, “it has everything to do with how our comprehension of space, however confined or expansive, still affords an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just as they are about to give way.”

And John Stilgoe says of the book: “it demonstrates to its readers that space can be poetry” and he notes that the book “opens it readers to the titanic importance of setting.” I can only be jealous of anyone encountering this book for the first time. […]

If you’ve read this far, thanks for coming along with me into this little rabbit hole, thinking about our happiness in spaces. Thinking about how spaces can hold poetry. Thinking about how sight-lines, smells, colours, doors, windows, light, sounds, all operate together on our nervous systems to make us feel certain ways below the surface of our awareness. But how when we become aware of those spatial comprehension we might be able to manipulate where we are to accommodate a poetics.

My morning writing space is a bit of a sacred thing: quiet to begin, then some wordless music. A candle burning, perhaps. Good paper and a fountain pen to think things through. Books and more books. Paintings to look at. (Yes, I’m spoiled in that category). Plants are also nice. Interesting lights when there is darkness, and natural light when possible.

Our spaces don’t have to be perfect, just offer us a place to breathe. Because we can’t be creative when we’re not breathing well. We can’t work well. And who want to squander their gifts?

Shawna Lemay, Neuroaesthetics and Interiors

In the early 2000s, I worked at a tech job on Bainbridge Island, Washington—our office was on the third floor surrounded by trees. One day, I overheard two coworkers having a discussion—one said, “I think a pet store burned down. Or maybe someone’s canaries escaped?” Wait, whaaaat?!

I looked out the window and saw what they were seeing—dozens of yellow birds flickering through the evergreens. I turned back to them and said, “Gentlemen, those are goldfinches.”

Sometimes when beauty shows up, and we panic and think the worst—or we mislabel it. But it’s still there. Beauty just being beauty.

Since the start of 2025, I’ve been trying to write a poem each day (another kind of beauty). There’s something funny that happens when you try this practice—you write a lot of bad poems (okay, that’s not really funny, but it is.) This daily writing practice is kind of like batting practice, except instead of baseballs, you’re swinging at metaphors and images, and occasionally, one cracks the sky open—in a good way.

Daily poems remind me that beauty can still be created, even when it feels absent everywhere else—wordbeauty—when you pair two words together and they surprise you. […]

I turned in the FINAL version of my manuscript, Accidental Devotions, which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026! I have worked so hard on this collection! And one thing I’ve learned through it all is how revision is its own kind of devotion. My advice when revising a manuscript: 1) Let go of what isn’t strong enough. 2) Bring in a few newer poems to create energy. 3) Continue to allow the manuscript to evolve—even when you’re certain it’s finished.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Beauty Just Being Beauty ~`♡´~

I volunteer at a county food bank, staffed by a handful of paid workers and a stalwart volunteer phalanx of middle-aged (and I use the term loosely) women, and some men. They show up early, stay late, do what needs to be done. They are funny, quirky, busy, kind, crabby, generous. This may be the future, this aged rabble. They may make the way. I don’t know.

I think often of this poem [by] Antonio Machado, perhaps so common as to be a chestnut now, but I find power in it. That first word has been variously translated: traveler, walker, pilgrim, wayfarer; and the second noun as path, road, way. Each has its pleasures and power. I favor “wayfarer” and “way” as a satisfying echo to the original: caminante, camino. I like “pilgrim” too, with its sense of someone going with a purpose and humility, a sense of something larger than themselves at work.

“Proverbios y cantares XXIX” in Campos de Castilla.

Antonio Machado

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

[…]

my translation:

Wayfarer, your steps
are the way and nothing more;
wayfarer, there is no way,
the way is made by walking,
by walking you make the way
and when you look back
you see the way that will never
be walked again.
Wayfarer, there is no way,
only the wakes on the sea.

Marilyn McCabe, and when you look back

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure my first book did change my life, though it perhaps coincided with a volatile period in which I did go through some very big changes. I can’t say for sure from this distance, but I likely held some hope that my first book was going to somehow open doors (to where, I don’t really know). All in all, the response was quiet, and this was one of several elements of my life that contributed to a deepening depression and addiction. My drinking, which was already problematic, got worse and worse, and I dove straight to the bottom and stayed there for some time.

When I finally began to get sober eight years ago, it took a great deal of time to get healthy enough to begin writing. Making If Nothing changed me. By going back to the source of pain and betrayal again and again with a hunger for honesty, I had to grow my capacity to be with the parts of myself I couldn’t bear. By doing this, I became more coherent, more resilient, and much more available to my family and friends. Until writing the poems that make up this new collection, there had always been a faint veil between my daily life and my poems. This book erased that separation for me and I haven’t fully metabolized what this means in the larger scope of my life.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matthew Nienow

On Aug. 1, Megan and I submitted the completed draft of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology to Madville Publishing. We also got some lovely photos of Stevie via photographer Donna Kile, so the cover is in the works, too. Contributors should see a proof this autumn and the book is still on track for a May 2026 release. 

Last month, I received a surprise acceptance letter for the Visiting Joni: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Joni Mitchell, a forthcoming anthology edited by Debra Marquart, Alan Davis, and Thom Tammaro. I submitted my poem “Night Ride Home” to this anthology back in 2022 and, frankly, had forgotten all about it. Glad the anthology is finally seeing the light of day in the near future. 

Collin Kelley, The Sealey Challenge and a Stevie update

My first full collection, Daughter of Fire, reimagines the life and legacy of Queen Margaret of Anjou, the late medieval Queen of England and fierce protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. Margaret is best known today as Shakespeare’s villainous “she-wolf of France” or perhaps as the alleged model for Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.

Like many women of history who dared to tread their own path, the living, breathing woman behind the reputation has been lost to time. Margaret has not been treated kindly by chroniclers and historians, playwrights and novelists. She’s even been a Manga villainess, which I explore in another poem in the collection.

Daughter of Fire reconsiders this much-maligned warrior queen, seeking out connections with women’s experiences through six centuries, right up to today. My aim was to call out the maligning of women, the gendered insults, name-calling and inuendo that are so often used to control women’s behaviour. That said, this is not a history book or hagiography – this Margaret of Anjou is not a saint or a “girl boss” but a woman with many faces: daughter, wife, consort, mother, political schemer, leader of armies, survivor.

Drop-in by Lucy Heuschen (Nigel Kent)

It’s been a long time — seven years — since I published a poetry collection. I was interrupted by the pandemic, a busy work schedule, and other projects. Receiving a poem is a delicate thing. It requires an intense, Zen-like freedom from thought and for me, quiet mornings. A space opens, a mood descends, and then a thought or image. As it touches the soil, words arrive like wings folding to yield to gravity. A poem is much like a hawk landing, wondering what to devour.

This summer opened a gate to the creative fields, and I found myself circling around a concept that feels like home. It became clear, and I worked myself up to naming a theme: The Artist’s House. I drew into the document poems from my vault and new imaginings. I indulged in paying homage to inspirations and my early immersion in the arts. My parents were dedicated to music and visual art. They enriched my childhood by encouraging me to read and taking me to see painting and sculpture in museums and galleries, as well as to experience live music and dance. They gave me all the lessons I wanted, for which I chose a focus on ballet.

This collection forms a sustained contemplation of what art means in my life, and of the creative process. I tip my hat to favorite artists—Monet, Caravaggio, Andy Goldsworthy, and Oz book illustrator John R. Neill. Favorite poets Emily Dickinson and Rilke get whole sections. Walt Whitman makes an appearance, as does another favorite, Alice Oswald.

Rachel Dacus, New Poetry Book in October

As someone who designs books for other people (or at least designs chapbooks, with occasional commissioned covers for other publishers) and an avid zinester, I have to admit I may approach the task of putting together a book a little differently than a writer who doesn’t have their hands as much in the design. Typically by the time I finish a manuscript, there has already been some thought about potential cover designs, interior layout, materials like video poems and reels, graphics for the book promo stuff. For other writers, the manuscript alone may be the focus, the words on the page, but this will be the second longer project I’ve done with artwork included, so there are already a lot of visuals and design elements at play by default.

Kristy Bowen, self publishing diaries | finishing the book

So far, I can’t recommend Bluesky enough for poetry. Over the past few months, it’s enabled me to connect with a lot of poetry people who were new to me, while also finding a whole host of additional readers from beyond the poetry bubble. One excellent example has been the reception for my poem ‘The Last Carry’, first published in The Spectator and then included in my second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023). As of today, it’s garnered well over 600 likes and more than 100 shares, all along with numerous generous comments from readers. This is the nearest I’ve ever come to going viral! In fact, not a week goes by without a trip or two to the post office for me with books that I’ve sold via Bluesky. From my experience, it’s really worthwhile in terms of finding a new audience for my poems, though perhaps the most significant bit has been the lovely people I’ve encountered on there…!

Matthew Stewart, Poetry on Bluesky

I’ve attended the Glen Workshop many times, so it was a special honor to return as faculty this summer. I was the writing retreat guide, and I spent a few hours each morning working on writing projects in the company of wonderful creative people.

There were too many highlights in the week to name them all, but one that stands out to me is the LOGOS poetry reading on Sunday night. It was co-sponsored by EcoTheo and hosted by Shann Ray, who created such a welcoming space. I loved reading alongside Phil Metres and Gabby Bates, and the audience conversation and Q&A times were more lovely than I can describe; the whole event had a beautiful earnestness about it.

Katie Manning, Glen Workshop Reflection

But of course, what really made me feel better was getting the writing tasks done.  I now have a sermon I like, and I made significant progress on my CPE paper.  Now let me think about the upcoming semester.  I want to establish some habits that can get me back to writing more of what I want to write:

–I want to write my sermon by Thursday, which means that I start thinking and planning by Tuesday.  I had this goal in the spring, but the seminary course work I needed to do often took priority.

–I want to return to my goal that I formulated in the first days of this year, writing one finished draft of a poem a week.

–Actually, that’s not really my goal.  Here is that goal, as I wrote it in my January 1 blog post:  “I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

–Right now, I have 14 finished poems in the file.  So I am seriously behind.  But I still have 19.5 weeks in the year.  I could get to 52 poems in the file if I focus.

–I have a lot of rough drafts.  Many of them won’t require much revision. So, I’ll take a look through those drafts, as I am also writing new work.  I also want to get back to writing new poems.

–Let me finish with the words of Octavia Butler, from one of her early journals, before she won the MacArthur, which changed her writing life trajectory:  “So be it, See to it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Goals for the Last Third of the Year

It works I think, a simple straight-forward narrative, something I could have remembered. I don’t, though, think it is true. It is a very vague memory. But then again, things don’t have to be real to be true, or so it seems with all the made up nonsense circulating about the internet.

Paul Tobin, BOUNCING LIGHT

I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge – one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people’s stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person – and a mercifully short one at that – turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title Cargo of Limbs. Originating in events almost 10 years ago now, it is utterly depressing that the longish poem that constitutes most of the book remains relevant. Now – as then – the news is full of people in small boats. Then, refugees and migrants were embarking in the Mediterranean. Now, most of the talk here is of people embarking from the coast of France to risk the real dangers of the English Channel. The book remains in print and can be bought from Hercules here or by contacting me directly. […]

It’s early in 2016 and I am on a train crossing southern England. On my headphones, Ian McKellen is reading Seamus Heaney’s just-published translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is the book in which Aeneas journeys into the Underworld. As he descends, he encounters terror, war and violence before the house of the dead. He finds a tree filled with “[f]alse dreams”, then grotesque beasts, centaurs, gorgons, harpies. At the river Acheron, he sees crowds of people thronging towards a boat. These people are desperate to cross, yet the ferryman, Charon, only allows some to embark, rejecting others. At this point, in Heaney’s translation, Aeneas cries out to his Sibyl guide: “What does it mean [. . . ] / This push to the riverbank? What do these souls desire? / What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy waters?”

The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries. The timing is crucial. It’s just six months since the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body – drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey – had filled the media. In the summer of 2015, this three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes of their planned flight across the Aegean, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.

Beyond my train window, the fields of England swept past; Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family. It struck me that some form of versioning of these ancient lines might be a way of addressing – as a poet – such difficult, contemporary events. I hoped they might offer a means of support as Tony Harrison has spoken of using rhyme and metre to negotiate, to pass through the “fire” of painful material. I also saw a further aspect to these dove-tailing elements that interested me: the power of the image. The death of Alan Kurdi made the headlines because photographs of his drowned body, washed up on the beach, had been taken. When Nilüfer Demir, a Turkish photographer for the Dogan News Agency, arrived on the beach that day, she said it was like a “children’s graveyard”. She took pictures of Alan’s lifeless body; a child’s body washed up along the shore, half in the sand and half in the water, his trainers still on his feet. Demir’s photographs, shared by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch on social media, became world news.

Demir’s images were indeed shocking, breaking established, unspoken conventions about showing the bodies of dead children. I remember passionate online debates about the rights and wrongs of disseminating such images. Yet the power of the images, without doubt, contributed to a shift in opinion, marked to some degree by a shift in language as those people moving towards Europe came to be termed “refugees” more often than the othering word, “migrants”.

Martyn Crucefix, Continuing Relevance of ‘Cargo of Limbs’

I suppose we can blame Trump for the mini-shake-up in the literature world. His selective reduction of NEA grants has helped provoke an anti-woke reaction.

There’s nothing very pure about the Arts. They’re used as a vehicle by dictators and revolutionaries. They’re used as therapy, as vanity showcases. When public funds are used for the Arts, closer scrutiny is attracted. The NEA’s home page currently says that “Approximately 34 Percent … of Arts Endowment-funded activities [are] in high-poverty communities”, which may make US tax payers think that the NEA is left-wing. But stats can be misleading.

Sometimes when I read a magazine I do some stats based on the bios. Some info is easier to collect than others. I like seeing how many of the contributors are Creative Writing lecturers, or have Creative Writing degrees. The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories. Age and race details are harder to determine. Even if stats can be determined, interpreting them is difficult. Why should the demographics of authors correspond to that of the general UK (or world) population? Isn’t it reasonable to believe that a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people than the general population will turn to writing?

Tim Love, Reactionary writing?

But the poet can dream. The poet
has the freedom to wish this much
at least will happen: That her
plan works. That the poem can
manifest wings. That the reader
can open a cage. That the thought
can escape, become airborne. 

Rajani Radhakrishnan, It won’t bite

Perhaps we are born with a tendency towards certain landscapes, but I think we learn what to love. As the youngest of six in a single parent family, I had little supervision, and sometimes this came at a price. But in South Cumbria, it felt entirely safe, and I learned to love the tall hedges, the small walled fields and their gates, the copses and crags. I am so grateful to her for this.

I think we were at our closest in nature. As we walk in the heather, I tell Niamh how, long ago, I dreamt Mum told me she wanted to me to be there when she died, and how, against all the odds, it came to pass. I told Niamh how being present when someone enters the world, and when someone leaves it, is the most privileged and holy space, how all ordinary things fall away, how all that it left is the unspeakable magic of it. As Niamh pointed to the peat, I felt something of my mother on the moors.

Peat is unrotted vegetation; that’s why it holds so much carbon, why it’s such a vital defence against climate change. It’s largely formed from sphagnum, which grows from its tips, leaving its death behind it in its roots, which can be millennia deep. Peat, moss, bogs, are death and life all at the same time, deep and dark and soft. My mother is gone, and my mother is in my humour, and love of nature, and I talk about her every day.

When the walk ends, my holiday with Niamh is over, and they will head off with their other mum. The prospect is painful. Remembering what we’ve done these last fourteen days is painful. Even as we live them, every moment is sliding away into memory; there is no way to stop it from moving and leaving. How brave it is to love something, anyone, anything, knowing that it will pass.

Clare Shaw, Coast to Coast: Day 14

At all these fields of flowers, the finches have been twittering around us in the air. The hummingbirds are dwindling in number but still busy at the flowers as well. I’ll miss their bright colors and songs when the winter comes back. Some small parts of late summer are my favorite parts. (Wasps, not so much, but the birds, absolutely, and the blueberries in my garden this year – especially sweet.)

This is a busy month – my older brother is coming out to visit the week after my folks leave – I am trying to look at my schedule for the fall, with readings and classes. After the health and dental dramas of the past weeks, I am ready to relax a bit, hopefully. I’m also hoping my next book gets picked up soon so I can start focusing on my next writing project, which might be quite a different creature than my previous works.

In the meantime, my friends, this seems like a rough and tumble world, but there are tiny moments of joy, beauty, kindness to be found. Sending you all hopes for tiny good August joys.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parental Visits, End of Summer Flower Farm Visits, August Birds

On the bottom step of the patio,
unmoving: the perfect wire
symmetry of a dragonfly.

In a clump of grass a few
meters away, the armor
shed by a lone cicada.

When the stars emerge
tonight, will they let down
a ladder for them to ascend?

In the shadow of the fig
tree, the secretary spider
keeps writing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Chronicle of Small Moments in Time

This week: detonation points, Coleridge and nukes, speechlessness, poetry from the edgelands, and much more. Enjoy.

Under this administration, every day, I struggle to stay focused. I have a job. I write. I work in publishing, and publishing is under siege, too, especially diverse publishers. I need to raise funds for Red Hen. I need to edit, to work, to find ways to continue to live and breathe.

In Hungary, in Cuba, in China, in Vietnam, in Russia, in North Korea, there are people taking care of their families, asking the universe for change, living with joy. Our state of mind is our own. I resist. I work for change. I try for joy.

But ICE is in my city, ice melting beneath us. The unsteadiness of the world makes me feel every day like I am on the deck of the Titanic. I try to finish one thing, but mistakes are abundant. When did everything become so dire, so wildly unsteady?

Warm salt water rushes under the Thwaites Ice Shelf. It is becoming unmoored. The current president will be gone when Thwaites finally loosens from the Antarctic shelf for good, but the impacts of his policies will resonate for decades to come.

We live in a country that ignores reality, and will until it’s too late. From the start, we’ve disappeared people, species, histories.

Now, they come for us.

The climate collapses. People go missing, slip under the ice.

As the Titanic sank, the band played “Nearer my God to Thee.”

What will be the sound as our ship goes down?

Kate Gale, What Will Play As Our Ship Goes Down?

Walking on a road called Pas de l’Assassin,
I might think the sea is the victim.

In the brutal emptiness, 
the stubbled fields could be rolled up
and sold to market –
I might be richer, but the land poorer.

The strange crucified lord
of the corn fields might answer someone’s 
need, but not mine.

I settled down by a tank of green waters,
drowned my sorrows by downing
a dozen oysters. 

Jill Pearlman, How to See the Sea

I can see sky through the whale.
Its to-scale belly propped two storeys high,
ideas layered like oil on water,
steel bent into a dream of the thing
in its city sea. […]

Dr Jen Dunn writes about medicine, the inner world, mental health, her Christian faith and psychoanalysis. She has been published in a wide range of Scottish and UK publications, from Poetry Scotland to Surgeon’s News. Jen has won the Perthshire Writers poetry prize and the Society of Medical Writers’ poetry prize, and has been short-listed for the James Muir poetry prize. Jen’s first poetry collection, Tell Me About The Broken Bones, was published in 2025. You can find a copy here at Seahorse Publications.

Karen Macfarlane, Tay Whale

When I was in high school, I wrote nearly two dozen editorials and articles on the ocean and its perilous state (which was, of course, not as perilous as it is today.) At the time, there was a sense of hope that science and environmental activists would turn around the terrible ticking clock. When I am feeling especially helpless given recent (and even not so recent news) I think of those other lives I may have lived. […]

Perhaps that scientist still lives inside me a little, even though her math is bad and she probably has forgotten more than half of what she’s learned in the 30 odd years since high school. She loves research and learning new things about the natural world. The names of birds and plants, varieties or trees and flowers. She doesn’t write about dolphins or whales (not usually) but does write about mermaids more than she should. But perhaps its less like science and more a tiny religion of sorts. That’s what drives the poems sometimes, especially the ones that inhabit the natural world more fully.

Kristy Bowen, the poet and the scientist

Poet and science-writer Sam Illingworth has been noted in earlier posts in this blog — here’s a link — and I enjoy online-searching for his work again and again to find still more.   Illingworth’s blog, The Poetry of Science, is a wonderful site to visit and revisit, to read and explore.  

Recently I discovered the following Illingworth poem  (posted at The Poetry of Science on June 19, 2025) — a poem with a bit of math AND inspired by recent research findings that living near a golf course increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease (possibly due to exposure to pesticides used on the course).

Overspill by Sam Illingworth

They do not play,
but live beside
the tailored grass.

Fairways curve
where warnings should.

The air carries
what water cannot hold.

A hand begins to shake.
A name
slips from the scorecard.

No fence keeps out
what was never invited.

Previous postings in this blog including Illingworth may be found here.

JoAnne Growney, Mathematics and Golf

On this day [16 June] in 1945, the United States exploded the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

Robert Oppenheimer named the site, and when asked if he had named it as a name common to rivers and mountains in the west, he replied, “I did suggest it, but not on that ground… Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: ‘As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God;—.'”

I love a scientist who loves John Donne. Metaphysical poetry and atomic weapons: they do seem to go together in intriguing ways.I think of Oppenheimer watching that explosion. In one book I read, the author states that these scientists were fairly sure what would happen, but not certain. There was some fear that they might somehow ignite the earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet. But they proceeded anyway.

Oppenheimer says that he watched the explosion and thought about The Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” Once we had a crew of guys come to cut down a tree. The leader with the shaved head took off his shirt and tattooed across his back was the same line; it was a big tattoo–I could read it from inside the house. On that same day, from the gay guys’ apartment complex on the next street, I could hear disco music, The Village People and Donna Summer, in an endless loop, interrupted by the buzzing chain saws from the tree crew. Some day I’ll use these details in a poem or a short story. Or maybe having recorded them in my blog, I won’t feel the need to use the details elsewhere.

I thought with the film Oppenheimer, more people might know the history, but the significance of this day can get a bit lost.  I hadn’t remembered until doing some digging this morning that the explosion was scheduled for this date because Truman had an important meeting with Allied leaders in Potsdam on July 17. Bomb as savior? Oh, so many poetry possibilities! There’s the desert aspect, the prophets that so often emerge from wilderness areas. There’s the fact that this part of the country has become a detonation point for various immigration fights through the last four (or more) decades.

Those of you who have been reading this blog and/or my poems for awhile now will be saying, “Haven’t you already explored this poetic terrain?”

Indeed, I have. Yet I think there may be more to do.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Trinity Test Site, in History, Film, and Poetry

I live about 20 miles downwind of our local nuclear power station at Hinkley Point on Bridgwater Bay. Hinkley A and Hinkley B have ceased production. In the 1980s I was one of many local people active in opposing a third reactor, Hinkley C. A poster in my front window showed a Roman soldier and the words If the Romans had had nuclear power, we would still be guarding their radioactive waste. Planning consent for Hinkley C was given in 2013 after many years of legal and financial wrangling. Construction began in 2017. It is the biggest construction site in Europe.

My friend and fellow-poet Graeme Ryan has been working on a long poem inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his keen interest in (among many other subjects) electricity. What would Sam have made of Hinkley C, just a few miles from Nether Stowey? Parts of this great work have been discussed in zoom workshops that have helped to keep a group of seven writers connected since 2020. The published work as a whole makes a huge impact; it is far more than the sum of its parts.

Last month a group of us from Wells Fountain Poets went to the delightful Brendon Books in Taunton for the launch of The Dreaming of Hinkley Point. This book, beautifully designed by Terence Sackett, combines Graeme’s poetry with mixed-media images by artist Georgina King. In addition, the artist created a film based on her images, a marvellous backdrop entirely in harmony with Graeme’s reading.

The scope of this sequence is vast, with leaps of creative imagination from Nineveh to Bridgwater Bay via New Mexico, Chernobyl, Fukushima and Zaporizhzhia, and from 1797 to the present day and beyond. Both here and in his previous collection, The Valley of the Kings, the poet shows great skill in overlaying time-frames and identities layer upon layer. There’s nothing sweet and simple about this work. It is as deep and complex as The Waste Land in its network of references, with new revelations on every re-reading. There is the power of rage, but also a strong underlying sense of the holy, the holy-ness of the earth.

Ama Bolton, The time-travelling adventures of Sam Coleridge

After the snake has swallowed its own tail—
what then? Does it tuck itself into a scaly
ball, stitch itself into a leathered sphere
to be kicked around on a green playing field
or struck with a bat as people cheer
in unison from the stands? After the river
has gorged itself on houses and tractors,
gas stations and trucks that slid as if without
protest into its onrushing mouth, did it lie
back down in its bed, its terrible hunger
quiet until the next time?

Luisa A. Igloria, After

A very quick post to draw your attention to the wonderful news that Abeer Ameer, a guest reader for Trowbridge Stanza last year, is shortlisted in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry in the Best Single Written Poem category for her poem ‘At Least’ published online at Modron Magazine.

Abeer gave a terrific reading in Trowbridge last year. I know that some of you who read this blog will remember her wonderful poems and the time she spent meeting the group, talking about her writing journey and answering questions. It was a really interesting and entertaining afternoon. Abeer has been writing consistently during the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine – you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook where she has been publishing poems responding to the devastating news from Gaza.

Congratulations to Abeer and to all at Modron for championing her work. Good call, Forward Judges!

All the lists for this year’s Forward Prizes are published here.

Josephine Corcoran, Congrats to Abeer Ameer and Modron Magazine!

The Canongate Wall is a feature of the Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood, Edinburgh. Designed by Soraya Smithson and opened with the Parliament in 1999, the wall is in pre-cast concrete; its monumentality and sense of flowing movement has something of the glacier, or a new-built ship easing down the slipway. Set into it are bullish samples of natural rock from across Scotland. Behind the parliament rises the dolorite rampart of Salisbury crags. Stone meets stone.

At the foot of the wall are the grey slabs of the pavement, and then the security bollards that surround the Parliament and keep passers-by safe from the constant traffic.

There are niches in the wall: rhomboids, like skew-whiff windows; they speak to the building as originally designed by Enric Miralles, who died before the project was complete. And maybe also to tenement windows, or eccentric pages of a book. In turn, set in these niches are stone slabs carved with lines from the Psalms, and the occasional proverb, but mostly poetry.

Until a fortnight ago, there were 26 carved stones. On 11 June, however, there was a small unveiling ceremony for three new ones, inserted into vacant niches. The quotations they bore were by the three living former Scottish makars: Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay and me. We three were in attendance, as were Smithson, the stone carver Gillian Forbes and her apprentice Cameron Wallace. Although it was a strongly female team (the Parliament’s presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, did the honours), our three quotations brought the number of women’s quotes from one to four (out of 29). The only woman previously represented was the socialist and mill-worker Mary Brooksbank, with a verse from her ‘Jute Mill Song’:

Oh, dear me, the warld’s ill-divided,
Them that work the hardest are aye wi’ least provided,
But I maun bide contented, dark days or fine,
But there’s no much pleasure livin’ affen ten and nine.

After coffee and shortbread in Queensberry House, in a room often used to entertain international delegations, we filed out through the security gates onto the pavement, where one by one we unveiled our stones. (The quotations had been chosen by the public, in a vote organised by the Scottish Parliament. Three options each, approved by us, were suggested and the public were invited to choose between them. Five thousand people voted.)

First Liz Lochhead. She and the presiding officer peeled away a bit of sticky ribbon and a board to reveal a small slab of Ailsa Craig Marble:

this
our one small country …
our one, wondrous, spinning, dear green place.
What shall we build of it, together
in this our one small time and space?

A few words into a microphone, some photos and Jackie Kay was next, a few metres down the street:

Where do you come from?
‘Here,’ I said, ‘Here. These parts.’

Then it was my turn. I sent photos to my children – both abroad – and thought about joking that I wouldn’t need a tombstone now, but I didn’t. It made me think of time passing. I wished my mother could have been there. I felt a rush of affection for those who were there, especially the poets, now we are in our third age. We have been in each other’s orbit for decades. When I began publishing, Liz Lochhead, now 77, was the only properly visible woman poet in Scotland, with her Glasgow glamour. (Very different from me. I took to writing partly because I didn’t have to be visible; the present ‘performance’ culture would have shrivelled me.) As for Jackie Kay, when she read out the lines now carved on the wall, I realised I had known them for ever, and could recite them along with her. The plain assertion of belonging, as a black person in Scotland, is now writ in stone on its parliament building.

Kathleen Jamie, At the Canongate Wall

Last Monday, I was the featured poet at A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends. This weekly Zoom reading and conversation hosted by Jimmy Pappas is so fun! I loved presenting game poems and having the attendees ask questions and make observations back to me. In addition to sharing some poems from my How to Play chapbook, I also shared two game poems I love that were written by other poets: “Do Not Pass Go” by Jennifer H. Dracos-Tice (first published in Whale Road Review!) and “Queen Me” by Kelli Russell Agodon.

Katie Manning, A Conversation with Jimmy and Friends

On Wednesday evening I walked up some very steep hills from Sheffield city centre to Novel bookshop – whose website is here – in Crookes for an evening of readings by seven poets published by Brian Lewis’s Longbarrow Press. The ethos of Longbarrow – whose tagline, ‘poetry from the edgelands’, very much resonates with me and whose website is here – is concerned with making beautiful, mostly hardback books of beautiful poetry.

The readings took the form of half the audience sitting downstairs in the shop’s back room and the other half upstairs, with, in the first half of the evening, three poets reading downstairs and four upstairs; then, after a break, the poets changing over and the audiences staying where they were. The cosiness of the rooms and the excellence of the poetry made for a much more intimate yet paradoxically relaxing set of readings.

Matthew Paul, On Longbarrow Press and James Caruth

I have a new essay out today in the This Be the Place series at Poetry Foundation, edited by Jeremy Lybarger. I wrote about the solace (and abandonment) of the pond I grew up beside on my family’s ten acres in Virginia—along with C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, a little Agnes Varda, et al—and you can read it here: “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness.”

The end of the essay references Larks, so for readers of Larks, I hope it deepens the landscape of the poems, and for those who haven’t read Larks, maybe this will encourage you to pick up a copy at your library or bookstore.

Hope you are resting and caring for yourselves and each other as best you can during this long summer,

Han

Han VanderHart, “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness”–new essay today at Poetry Foundation’s This Be the Place Series

On recent Artist Dates, Jill Crammond and I have been talking about wanting to live creative lives, to buckle down and put in work, to feel like poets, to be part of and contribute to vibrant creative communities.

There’s one problem with the wish: I think we’re already doing it LOL (I took my poetry manuscript into the Adirondacks, for crying out loud!)

As I was putting together my last recap of creative activities, it hit me: I’m doing more than I think I’m doing. So why does it feel like I’m not living a creative life? Is there a disconnect between how I’ve romanticized creative life vs. what creative life actually looks like? What does it really mean to live a creative life? Maybe the only thing I’m missing is the belief — the confidence — that I’m doing the damn thing.

Maybe I need to reconnect with the thrill of it.

Maybe I need to drop all resistance to it.

*

And maybe I’ve been so focused on the single mantra “Don’t Quit!” that I haven’t caught up with the fact that I’m no longer white knuckling the creative life .

There are different varieties of “Don’t Quit.” One is in reaction to rejection. And wow — I’ve had a couple solid years of NO’s. It would only make sense that I’ve been hanging onto “Don’t Quit” as a stubborn response to so many doors closing.

But there is another kind of “Don’t Quit,” and it’s driven not by fear but by love and passion. Maybe that’s the magic of living a creative life.

A recent installment of Erinn Batykefer’s Substack “The Long Pause” has something to contribute here. In Erinn’s interview with Kelley Beeson, author of Undress, a chapbook from Lefty Blondie Press, Kelley recalls a question from Big Magic: “What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?” Reflecting on her prior focus on publishing alone, Kelley reflects, “[Publication] became my main engine in writing. Yuck. There are other, more interesting reasons to write.”

More interesting reasons to write. Yes!

Carolee Bennett, “We’re Traveling Through Space” and Other Reminders of a Creative Life

To think I once was once juggling a dozen blogs. And now? A post every quarter at one or two places… For the curious, or compulsive readers who must finish a paragraph, I once had this poetry blog, a cat-narrated blog, one for flash fiction, a vegan recipe blog, a daily life, and a poem-a-day, a daily selfie blog, a weekly portrait of B blog, one written by a sock monkey, a weekly in Spanish/French, a dream journal, a haiku one, all unhooked from each other because that much hyperglossia would look crazy, no? And I would often binge-write and then let it autopost in an orderly fashion to give the semblance of steadiness while I, behind the screen, crashed.

A difference is keeping things for myself these days. And rather than throw things indiscriminately, I share cautiously with those who have earned trust. Who actually are invested in me. Terribly at odds with being a poet, I know. […]

I previously used all my energy as an introvert on extraversion. People said I had so much energy but I had a boom-crash cycle where after an event I didn’t function or ran the red line of panic attacks and living inside headache constantly. I mean daily headaches from early 80s to 2015 or so.

I laughed more then but chuckled not at all. I was wrapped way tight, keeping myself hopped on excitement, hafta, hafta, gotta, and sugar to extend my comfort zone, keep the walls from crushing me, learning to talk. I was aways stacking triggers to prove myself I could do anything, then wondering why everything was hard.

It’s an interesting fast headspace and I could parse at speed but there’s the sensation of inspiration without..something. The sensation of being productive is not the same thing as useful. Or as being present.

Only by hyperfocus through text I could pull out one thread of purpose from the many tangled threads and find a piece of what felt like order.

Now order is slow and quiet. Of course there are structural changes to make that happen. Ghosting bad dynamics and being less passive, more intentionally choosing instead of drifting. Balking, refusing to play, giving up FOMO, letting go of more, givng myself space to see patterns, to act not only react.

Instead of having my hand in many pies, on committees and publishing, going to many events, trying to keep contact with many people, living in thin-walled places where neighbours scream at each other and traffic noise never stops, I read instead. Probably 3x as much as when I was peak “busy”.

Pearl Pirie, Been a minute

My new mushroom-patterned dress and I will appear at Kramer’s in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday 7/22, where I’m reading at 7 pm with Steven Leyva and Tonee Mae Moll. (The dress is kind of retro and I think I look like a sci-fi 50s nurse in it, or maybe a waitress at a fungus-themed diner.) If you can’t make it but would enjoy a short recorded reading from Mycocosmic in ms form–made in January!–please check out Tina Cane’s Poetry Is Bread series.

In the meantime, a little more on Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”: I’m now firmly convinced that “Truffled Hut” should read “Truffled Hat.” As Dickinson’s fans know, she hardly ever saw her poems into print and early editors tended to bowdlerize them; in the1950s, editors started revisiting her manuscripts, some of them sewn into little booklets or “fascicles,” to translate them to print more accurately, although her ambiguous handwriting and inclusion of possible alternate wording makes that tricky. A ms version of “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” DOES survive, contrary to what the internet had me believe (shocking, I know, that a web search led me astray). Reproduced in Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, it reveals how closely her longhand lowercase a’s resemble her u’s: it’s not a matter of whether the top curve touches the upright, as you’d think, but of how close the two strokes come. All respect and gratitude to her valiant editors, who in this case interpret the millimeter’s difference perfectly plausibly. I just think “hat,” with its allusion to a mushroom’s cap, makes more sense. I floated my apostate interpretation at my Phosphorescence reading last week, a totally lovely event that was superbly run, and earned a nod from the moderator plus a comment in the chat: “Team Hat!” I felt quite pleased with myself.

Other than events like these, occasionally typing up a poem draft from a notebook, planning some fall stuff, and dealing with postponed medical appointments, I’m not getting much done in these dog days. Okay, I look at that last sentence and acknowledge I’m ridiculous, but I feel guilty when I’m not teaching yet not writing anything new. Like a mushroom, my confidence tends to evanesce fast. My rational self says, “hey, give yourself a break, your sabbatical is just starting, Mercury’s in retrograde, the world is screwed up, and you’re tired.” Another voice says, “you’ll never write a good book again and nobody sees you fruiting on the forest floor.” I see the same doubts manifesting on a few poet-friends’ social media–and even within some of the recent poetry collections I’ve been reading. Same old poetry life. My friend Emily Dickinson would tease me for getting my feathers truffled about it.

Lesley Wheeler, A D.C. reading, ghost pipes, & more Dickinson

Dear ones, I am so, so thrilled to share that my debut full-length poetry collection Once Is Not Enough is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in Fall 2027!!! When I received the offer to publish from managing editor Gabriel Cleveland, I wept listening to him share notes from three rounds of readers that really understood what I was trying to accomplish in the manuscript, no, the book! It’s going to be a book!

Once Is Not Enough is a collection that is haunted by loss—death, miscarriage, and language most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, the emergence of peonies in the spring, the taste of salt licked from your own palm. Formally diverse, the work includes brief lyrics and longer sequences, poems in two voices, and poems written in Korean and translated into English. There is a preoccupation with the multiplicity of meaning and voices inherent in language as well as the cyclical nature of grief and life. Music and sound are essential to the shaping of individual poems and the overall structure of the manuscript, which is divided into four numbered sections which I think of as movements.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

I’m very happy to share this new video from my upcoming book, Temporary Shelters. It was produced by Barebones Filmmakers (who happen to be my daughter and her boyfriend–both extremely talented). We did the filming earlier this year in various locations in Pennsylvania’s Poconos.

We’ll have two more videos to release probably in September when the book is officially available.

On that note, I’m also happy to share that Temporary Shelters can now be pre-ordered from Cornerstone Press (at a 20% discount).

Grant Clauser, New Poetry Video and Book Update

horses lie down beside me, one nuzzles my back.

dream life. july.

strawberries feed from my hands.

Grant Hackett [no title]

Life doesn’t have to be a series of grand gestures or great works because most living happens in the quieter moments. The accumulation of those average moments can build to greater achievements but sparks of creativity need introspection and focus. The noise of markets or a gloss of festive lights can be shallow distractions and move people away from themselves. […]

Through “Continuous Present”, D A Prince effectively presses pause, giving readers space to dwell in the moment. To create a period of time to focus on word choice or study the paint strokes, to see how small details accumulate and cohere into a complementary whole.

Emma Lee, “Continuous Present” D A Prince (New Walk Editions) – book review

So, the collection traces – in old-fashioned chronological order – the start, middle, end, and aftermath of a decades old love relationship. It’s a little bit Shirley Valentine, a little bit The End of the Affair, though the role model Farish herself suggests is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Despite the long distance recall, there is a vivid, sensuous immediacy to the writing. In lesser hands, a likely recourse would be to old photograph albums, but Farish is as liable to start a poem from an old map, still in her possession, on which the young lovers scribbled notes for their anticipated, future return (which never happened). And there must have been a lot of maps, as the book unfolds in an almost picaresque fashion with the lovers meeting in Morocco, travelling to Italy, and Sicily, onto Greece, and Crete, before a return to the UK in Oxford. One of the key methods Farish uses to convey the thrill, freedom and passion of early love is through these exotic locations, the colours and customs, the names, the booze, the food. ‘Things We Loved’ – the book’s first poem – does this via Morocco’s markets, rose sellers, taxis, tagines, its acrobats and a dilapidated cinema. In Palermo, we’re along the Via Maqueda, sampling gelato, or polishing off a bottle of Donnafugata in bed (‘Mozart’s 233^rd Birthday’). Later in the book, the woman – now looking back over the decades – finds it’s still a bold Italian red, penne, gorgonzola, and oranges that conjure those long-lost days in true Proustian fashion (‘Pasta alla Gorgonzola’).

Martyn Crucefix, Helen Farish’s new collection, ‘The Penny Dropping’, reviewed

Matthew Paul’s second collection, The Last Corinthians, Crooked Spire Press, 2025 follows on from his first, The Evening Entertainment, Eyewear, 2017.

I enjoyed Matthew’s first collection and it’s clear he’s been honing his craft over the last 8 years. In this time he’s moved from London to a more rural life in south Yorkshire and (as the dedication makes clear) lost both parents. So, a different stage of life. There are still quirky, playful poems, as in the previous collection, but a sense of melancholy is more prevalent. The title poem, The Last Corinthians, is a concept I was unaware of (sport not being high on my agenda!). It refers, to a time before sport became a profession and there were players equally skilled in say football and cricket, as well as having a day job. […]

When I read through the poem titles (eg: The Ballad of Mike Yarwood, Double Chemistry, A Short History of Greenhouses, I was concerned that nostalgia was going to be overwhelming and the poems would be too similar to be interesting. Like those school reunions where you get stuck with that guy who recounts funny incidents from school at great length and with little humour, because for him they were the best days of his life. I can safely say Matthew’s poems are far cleverer, much more entertaining and emotionally sophisticated. At first, I found myself focussing on the pinpoint-accurate historical details and colloquial word choices, but on a second reading, I could appreciate Matthew’s obvious love of language, his skill with rhyme and half rhyme, and his subtle use of form.

Ali Thurm, What I’ve been reading

I will always be in awe of Paul Batchelor’s ability to use speech and voice in his poem ‘A Brace of Snipe’. (click to read)

I can’t express it any better than Andy Hopkins. who writes in his blog piece
‘ The Acts of Oblivion by Paul Batchelor – Five Reasons to Read’ how ‘ the voices of the ‘characters’ are distinct, and are distinct from the persona’s voice.’

Like Andy, I also love the digressions in this poem- the skilful control that enables Batchelor to capture the sense of someone interrupting themselves as they insert detail adjacent to the narrative before returning to ‘the point’ or message of the story, which is, when it finally arrives, in no way obvious or glib. And there is a sense of ‘real people’ in their environs in this poem, affectionately and unsentimentally portrayed, in contrast to the arrogant, cartoonish, rather grotesque and undignified ‘her Ladyship’.

The second poem in the link is the deeply moving Powder Blue. Also concerned with class, and this time about the experience of being ‘Unable to escape’ where you come from and don’t fully belong, while also being unable to escape judgement for being from where you are from- ‘Listen to your accent!’

PaulBatchelor’s latest collection, The Acts of Oblivion, was published by Carcanet in 2021.

Roy Marshall, Two poems by Paul Batchelor

On his website, Hosho McCreesh describes Psalms from the Badlands as “An expansive collection of 150 “psalms” or haiku-like, Japanese-style breath poems about the brutal and beautiful American southwest, with nature as the catalyst for deeper meditations on life, love, grief, loss, and, of course, death.” From poem 1 to 150, you can clearly see his awe of the Southwest, as well as his deep appreciation for haiku and related forms. For example, Poem 21 reads:

The woman’s hands,
watching them peel chile,
the way it still burned days later
in the sunlight—

still burns
years later
in your mind

In my notes, I indicated how close this poem came to a haibun (a prose poem that ends in a haiku). Other poems invoke the long linked form of renku, even in their brevity, such as Poem 80:

Fingers of late spring fog,,
burnt off by morning.

Early July monsoons,
the sunflowers drink deep.

Brittle October stalks,
every drop baked out.

And still it returns
as January snow.

Beyond their connection to the haiku world, this collection does an exceptional job of capturing the landscape and atmosphere of the Southwest in a visceral way. I particularly appreciate that the human element is not removed from these poems, as we are as much a part of the environment as the animals, plants, and weather. Poem 25 is one of my particular favorites in this regard:

Red chile ristra
cleaned of harvestmen
& their cobwebs.

Water boils
red as a
Jemez flood —

Hungry, we wait for
carne adovada.

Ultimately, when reviewing my notes, I don’t find a single disliked poem, or piece that seemed out of step with the broader collection. Psalms from the Badlands is not just an example of exceptional writing, but also a masterful demonstration of how to organize a poetry collection.

Allyson Whipple, Review: Psalms from the Badlands by Honsho McCreesh

At several points throughout the collection, ‘but’ acts as a hinge, starting a last line or a final stanza, just like in the above example, indicating a change in tone as McCaffery homes in on the core of his inspiration. And then in the poem’s concluding clause, ‘as if’, another of McCaffery’s favoured turns of phrase, also kicks in with a leap that lends the poem an extra layer.

When looking at this quatrain in depth, it becomes clear to the reader that those three devices (‘but’, ‘though’ and ‘as if’) all undercut each other in turn. Absolutes no longer exist in vital and linguistic terms. Supposedly modest and clear-cut words suddenly take on unexpected new ramifications.

This additional depth of nuance is to be savoured by any reader, but especially by McCaffery aficionados. Skail evokes the undercutting of everything that came before it, hinting at riches to come in his future writing, a significant landmark on his continuing poetic journey.

Matthew Stewart, The undercutting of everything that came before, Richie McCaffery’s Skail

The full-length debut by Philadelphia poet Mia Kang, following her pamphlet debut, City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020), is the impressive All Empires Must (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2025), a title I found unexpectedly second-hand at Books Upstairs in Dublin, of all places. “I summon my cruelty / but cannot / name him.” she writes, to open the poem “The Author Calls Him X,” “I am // failed / by my rage, / love // embodied in / an ardent relation / with limits, voice // made by not / doing, not saying.”

All roads lead to, and away from, Rome in these poems, as Kang writes around and through an empire and a series of moments across the stories of ancient history, specifically the founding of Rome. There’s a coyness to her directness and vice versa, writing specific and slant through figures and stories known and less-known, getting to the heart of each character and encounter across a wonderfully delicate lyric. As the poem “In a Roman Story” offers, writing Rhea Silvia: “That wasn’t / what she wanted: she asked // to face the wall / to more fully be // -come the gate he sought. / Oh Mars, you mistook me // for someone / I briefly was.” There is such thoughtful and incredible pacing across these poems, one reminiscent, slightly, of Canadian poets George Bowering or D.G. Jones, the slow hush and halt and play and propulsion of Canadian postmodernism an accidental (I can only presume) patter across her lines. “I have to tell you: I made two. / Didn’t know how else // to make it.” begins the poem “Roman Couplets,” “I put them / a double return a // -part on the page, let them / fall through sky // side by side. I oppose / these maneuvers, but the truth // is there were two— / one left me, one loved me, // they were the same.”

There’s something magnificent in the way Kang articulates elements of Roman history, offering elements on how to hold to a single thought, or reach across decades, attempting to articulate the ways in which one might live, might be; each poem a small moment, each of which together collect and pool into accumulations of large movements. Through Kang, poems and books are composed out of moments, providing a powerful precision of thought, story and word. She writes a book-length narrative, one that provides both an expansiveness and a pointed specificness, held in space, in amber.

rob mclennan, Mia Kang, All Empires Must

One of the things I enjoy about writing these reviews is opening a collection or pamphlet of a poet whose work I don’t know and finding that I’m immediately drawn to it. That was my experience with Pete Strong’s Greenfinch (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2024). Even more enjoyable is returning to those poems and each time finding more in them. I have read Strong’s pamphlet several times and that is still my experience, such is the strength of the work.

The poems are concerned with discovery, of achieving a deeper understanding of the self and of the poet’s place in the world which he inhabits. Significantly, the title poem, Greenfinch, is a highly charged expression of discontent with the speaker’s life. He expresses a desire for something entirely different, the life of a greenfinch, which symbolises the happiness, fulfilment and love which has eluded him. He sums up his aspirations in the final line: ‘In my next life I want to be flying.’ He wants to be able to put his current concerns behind him, rise above them, find new perspectives upon life, but perhaps there is also a sense of wanting to escape, to ‘flee’. At the end of the collection, however, we meet an entirely different speaker in the poem, Maps.  He tells us that he carries a map, ‘not to find my way/ nor in case I get lost.’ No, he carries it, because the map ‘reminds me of who I am.’ This is a man who has found himself at last, one who has achieved a new perspective on life, so urgently desired in the former poem. Like the greenfinch in flight, he is able to look down upon the landscape, that is ‘a record of my soul’s use,’ which ‘has soothed like a lullaby/ these last few years. It is/ the portrait I have been painting each day.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Greenfinch’ by Pete Strong

A long time ago, when I first came across Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sestina,” I didn’t realize that the title referred to the poem’s form. I thought that “Sestina” was, perhaps, the grandmother’s first name—a different form, if you will, of the name “Tina” – “In the failing light, the old grandmother / sits in the kitchen with the child.” 

Once I understood that a sestina is a specific poetic form, however, I decided I would write one. How hard could it be? Well, yeah. I’ve yet to write a sestina I was happy with. It’s a form that’s gotten the best of me every time.

The Handbook of Poetic Forms defines a sestina as having “six unrhymed stanzas of six lines each in which the words at the ends of the first stanza’s lines recur in a rolling pattern at the ends of all the other lines. The sestina then concludes with a tercet (three-line stanza) that also uses all six end-words, two to a line.” Although technically accurate, I think you will agree that this description leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of actually understanding how to write a sestina.

I was intrigued, therefore, by Terrance Hayes’s article, “Your Do-It-Yourself Sestina,” at the Poetry Foundation’s website. The subtitle perfectly reflected my feelings about the sestina: “I almost always anticipate failure or boredom when I attempt the sestina. It’s among my favorite forms.” It’s true, the sestina is one of my favorite forms, but as an admirer of other people’s work, not my own.

I enjoy writing in forms because, as Hayes puts it, “As in almost every excursion into form, I hope simply to be surprised and challenged.” Forms do surprise, and they certainly challenge. I love how the repeating lines of pantoums and villanelles create their own weird logic, and how a formal poem often delivers more poetic satisfaction than free verse. As Hayes writes, “The sestina’s numerological architecture and lexical repetition create a lyrical, potentially alchemical energy.” 

Erica Goss, Sea and Stars: Writing the Sestina

Well, we drove through multiple mountain ranges and wildfire smoke both ways in the five-hour drive to and from La Grande, Oregon. Average temperature? 92°F—with red flag-level winds. I’d never seen how empty most of the states of Oregon and Washington are east of the Cascade mountains. Lots of twisty mountain passes, then miles of semiarid scrub, barely a McDonalds or Starbucks to be found. La Grande, almost at the very Eastern end of Oregon, is a little mountainside oasis—a drive-thru Starbucks, little Eastern Oregon University, where the low-res MFA program held its New Nature Writing Conference. We made it there the first day and we were pretty exhausted, the heat and smoke were hard on my MS symptoms, so I barely had any sleep before I had to get up, dress, teach a class on Solarpunk poetry, and then get ready for a reading and Q&A. Immediately after, we turned around and made the five-hour drive home, barely getting through the mountains before the dark settled in, and once again chased by wildfire smoke. The faculty, staff, and students at EOU were warm and friendly, and I felt very welcomed and thankful to be invited to speak—especially on nature and ecology, which are definitely subjects I’m very interested in, but man, physically this trip was hard. […]

One question I was asked during my class was “how do you keep your optimism with things like these wildfire evacuations?” (One of my friends texted me during the class she was evacuating her nearby small town.) How do I keep optimism? I wish I could remember how exactly I answered. There are always reasons to hope, however slight, and though I consider myself a realistic optimist—or an optimistic pessimist—it is hard, though imperative, to keep a view of the light, however dim. Hayao Miyazaki—along with Octavia Butler—sort of the godfather and godmother of Solarpunk—have visions of the future that, although dark, contain seeds (Parable of the Sower puns here) of how it is possible to have a more equitable, balanced world where technology, humanity, plants and animals co-exist in peace—usually after an apocalypse. So, maybe it’s around the corner any day now?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Nature Writing Conference in La Grande, Oregon, Ecology and Hope, and Grateful for Home

When she ceased whispering, skin thin,
skin frail and still tough, skin holding
almost everything that matters …
when she ceased whispering, I was

wracked with coughs, choking on wildfire
smoke, invisible smoke crossing
invisible boundaries, smoke
I couldn’t smell. The forecast is

for more smoke, and more. The forecast
is for whispers leaving our lips
to take their own sweet time shifting
between states of matter, moving

from gas to water, rock to star.

PF Anderson, Saying Goodbye, Again

We are moving yet again — I can’t believe this is the second move just since I started this substack. (Ah, no, the years, O!) After three moves in the last four years, I sincerely hope this is it for a while. I’m aiming to get a longer post out as usual later this week, but here’s a topical poem as a placeholder just in case.

As is now traditional — very loyal and longstanding readers will remember the first iteration of this post back in September 2023 — this is my favourite “moving house” poem, Hardy’s ‘During Wind and Rain’. As an extra treat, I’ve given you the whole thing this time, even though it’s only really the last stanza that’s relevant today. […]

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Here in Paris of course it’s not so much furniture on the lawn, as furniture teetering terrifyingly on the monte-charge as they haul it all up. I had to hide in a café for a few minutes while they did the piano, I couldn’t bear to watch.

Victoria Moul, No sudden moves (2)

It’s been raining daily for weeks now. Afternoon and evening thunderstorms crash and bellow and sometimes make me jump like a scalded dog. (Do you know in Britain they say “like a scalded cat.”) Afternoon thunderstorms in summer are common in New Orleans and actually welcomed as they cool things off a bit. But when days and days of rain pass it can get tiresome. I find myself yearning for the sun and, when it peeks out, I feel my mood lift. My tropical plants love all the rain and humidity and are growing like gangbusters but my poor tomatoes look droopy and weary. Too much rain. I’m giving up on tomatoes in the future. The last four summers have been a bust and I know it’s time to accept that I don’t have the tomato touch.

*

I wrote this bit of fluff one day in 2013 when it had been raining for days and the water was over the sidewalk, creeping into the yard, and someone’s dog was barking and barking.

On 13 Days of Rain

Hush now, dog! There’s nuthin’ on the front porch but an empty chair rockin’ in the rain spatter drippin’ off the roof. This ole house is creakin’ and growlin’ but it’s holdin’ tight as a tick. Swoll up clouds are kickin’ great balls of fire and the wind’s battin’ ‘em ‘round our heads. Thunder’s rappin’ an a-rollin’ a stanky leg ‘cross the sky. Yeah, it’s loud enough to wake the dead but they best stay sleepin’ lest they float away too.

Charlotte Hamrick, Women and Nature

I think of thunderstorms on days so hot we could just run around outside in sundresses or bathing suits, getting doused, or sit on a porch and read while the lightning flashed and the rain came down in torrents. And then have garden tomatoes and corn on the cob for dinner, and go outside after dusk arrived and chase fireflies in the wet grass. These are the kinds of things that I feel nostalgic about, though I am not generally a person who gives much energy to nostalgia. It has been awhile since I had enough unoccupied time on my hands that an hour on the back porch observing the rain seemed like a valuable thing to do.

But it is.

Anyway, here’s a prose poem from my book Abundance/Diminishment that I recalled to myself while I was watching the storm.

~~

Competition, Wet Summers

…so here’s this young woman practically in tears—it’s almost one o’clock
and raining harder than ever, thunder so close it’s practically grabbing us by the
shoulders and the lights dim inside each time the sky goes millisecond-bright.
It doesn’t feel like midday. Every stall is full and the horses aren’t happy.
We can hear the skittish ones hollering, pawing, kicking at the doors. It’s a squall,
I tell Sara; but she’s frustrated, fuming, has her tack cleaned and her dress breeches
on for a three o’clock show she’s convinced won’t happen now that all hell’s let
loose in the form of torrents and flash floods, and there’s a stream coursing from
the south door into the first bay of the stable—it looks like the River Jordan.

The roof leaks at a spot directly above her shampooed and just-groomed mare
and I’ve run out of cheery platitudes and patience; I just walk myself to the barn’s
far end, feel the rain splash up my legs from the puddle at the threshold, dripping
on my neck and face through rotten shingles. The wind stops. It’s a straight-
falling deluge and hot, a no-relief rain with big drops that bubble in temporary
pools of runoff by the wash stalls. The afternoon is green and grey, the puddles
a stirred-up brown, and I remember my former boss—thirty years ago—standing
in the type shop doorway on a day like this one. The look on his face was worse
than Sara’s, not frustration or mutiny but numb desolate recall, slack and empty.

“Man,” he said, “It used to rain like this in ’Nam.”

Ann E. Michael, Wet summers

It seems my sister and I have invented another tradition to go alongside our ‘sisters at the snooker’. Our new one is a July concert at Dreamland Margate. Last year we saw Suede and Manic Street Preachers and this year KT Tunstall and Texas. We are already wondering who we will see next year.

And breaking news… I can clap in time in certain circumstances! I have discovered that I can find that rhythm… when I am at an outdoor concert, when I really like the song, and when it’s been in my heart for a long time. Having not really ever been a clapper-alonger before this is worthy of a little celebration. My dancing is still a little on the wrong side of rhythmic, but I can clap along and jump up and down in a relatively beat driven way. There was plenty for me to get my hands in the air for at the concert, and lots of singing along too. […]

It feels apt to share a poem about clapping, but please note it is the kind of clapping at the opposite end of the continuum to the ones described above!

CLAPPING

You can hear your own clapping
louder than anyone else’s.
You are not matching the rhythm
of anyone in this room.
Soon they will be looking at you
willing you to stop.
You try to change the way
your hands hit one another
but you cannot unhollow the sound.

Sue Finch, ENTHUSIASTIC APPLAUSE

Maybe it’s because I’ve finished Novel No.5 and am letting it stew, because I’ve finished compiling the poetry collection and am thinking how best to take the next step to publication, there has been a pause in writing. No poems, no short stories, no stop-gap stream-writing.

We’re working on the smallholding, strimming areas where the flowers have died off, bringing in new hens, testing an old incubator, building a pig ark (arch), planning basic repairs and improvements. And, of course, watching Test cricket on TV and keeping an eye out for what comings-and-goings summer brings at West Bromwich Albion.

The previous life of a sports writer, latterly boxing, but before that cricket, football, swimming too, has long been consigned to history. For years I’ve been selling off, giving away, all the bits and pieces I hoarded over my career. It’s been nine years now and there are still books everywhere that I’ll never need to read or dip into again, reminders of a life that to some extent I don’t want to be reminded of.

I was ok as a writer. I got by. Earned a living. Travelled. Worked at the biggest world championship fights of my generation, worked alongside some fine writers, and felt the privilege of the lifestyle before, eventually, it nearly killed me.

Journalism has changed as technology has changed but I feel fortunate to have worked when I did, among people who wrote sport better than I did, from whom I learned, whose company I (mostly) enjoyed. I suspect press rooms, or media centres as they’re called now, are more anodyne places than they were, full of devices of one kind or another, not so full of raucous laughter and energetic arguments. The insults we traded in fun on a daily basis would give today’s HR people nightmares. Success is measured by the number of hits a story achieves. It’s the way it is. The meaning of expertise has been transformed. […]

Journalism is a different art to poetry, obviously. A proper journalist writes about other people, a subject outside of him or herself. A journalist, as have I told those who have asked to interview me on blogs and podcasts as I’ve become older, is not the story.

I’m fortunate that I have written all my life, have learned a craft, and adapted it as and when needs arose or the inclination took hold.

Now to sorting out the piles of old sports books that can go. A man is coming later this week because he believes some are worth sending to auction. I don’t know what he will choose, if any, but one thing is certain – he won’t be looking at the poetry section.

Bob Mee, AN UNEXPECTED TIME FOR REFLECTION

hair grows on the tops
of my feet. call me whatever comes to you.
i want to be a purple thing. a crepuscular self.
it is summer & i am not barefoot enough.
i use “he” pronouns like the tight shoes.
a gym class kind of word. i imagine
the “h” like a house with a chimney.
a place to go & take everything off.

Robin Gow, he/him

I have been unwell, and craving silence, surrounded by workmen and hubbub, and heat that leans on me like a nightclub beat. I cannot bear talk of politics, can no longer tolerate expressions of righteous indignation. I can’t listen to music I don’t make myself. Am mute in the face of idle chitchat. I am thinking about the impossibilities of communication, of directives, of explanation, excuses, of justifications, logic, of misplaced humor, thought-less jabber. Only this morning, wind on the water, wind among the many leaves, that susurration. The sound of clouds moving across a broad sky. That is all the sound I can stand right now. But maybe the whisper of fabric against fabric as you sit next to me here under this sky.

Marilyn McCabe, in a sudden strangeness

Non-head-injury-related aphasia is new to me. It’s been a strange month. Some parts of speechlessness are familiar, or bound to the age of 15, and some are new. Too new. Wandering through Ingeborg Bachmann’s lectures and nonfiction essays has been a solace, even though reading is strange: I begin a sentence and then lose my grip on it. Not even the most voluptuous syntax holds my attention. It’s as if words have lost their teeth. […]

I’m not sure why this is comforting to me. Perhaps summer, itself, has whisked this gluttony for comfort and silence into my head. But speechlessness gives me time to type old notebooks, which is how I discovered an essay draft from early last year titled “A Eurydice Who Limps: Analogy and Your Orpheus,” a glance at various textual and artistic treatments of the Orphic myth.

After typing up a bit of it today (while groaning over my terribly tiny handwriting), I dug up my copy of Maurice Blanchot’s essay, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” which turns Eurydice into an absence of light waves, rendering her the “profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night seem to lead,” dragging her silence into what Christian theologians would mark as “the fortunate loss,” a peculiar sort of metaphysical baggage that continues to haunt various religions as well as theory […]

Alina Stefanescu, “Language is punishment.”

Pull another chair. Let grief sit with
us like a friend. Let us tell it our
saddest dreams. Let us hold hands,
let us feel fire burn through us not
like flames but like a fever, feel cold
that chills, not like ice but like a tomb.

Just for a moment, destroy euphemisms,
masks, prettiness. Just for a moment, let
it be the beginning. Let it be raw. Let
it hurt. Let despair seep into ears and
eyes and skin. Allow the world its
ugliness. Allow the abyss its hungry
depth. Allow sorrow to hold us close.
Allow it to tell its side of the story.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, In which the terms are non-negotiable

This week: clay-pits, a beautiful dumpster, the Hole of Sorrows, a tablespoon of cream, and much more. Enjoy.

I don’t know how any of us go on with our ordinary lives lately. I am among those privileged enough to have my days largely unchanged, so far, despite—among other tragedies—a climate pushed past the tipping point, despite the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, despite all three branches of government stomping directly into authoritarianism. I’m aware my puny efforts to protest, write letters, support good causes, even drive around with a handmade protest sign on my car aren’t enough. I simply hope it’s a teensy contribution toward the transformative 3.5 percent rule invoked by Erica Chenoweth, author of Why Civil Resistance Works. After researching hundreds of social/political change movements over the last century, Dr. Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics depend on many factors, her data shows it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. But what are the chances it can happen here, I grumbled to myself.

And then I drove past a dumpster. A beautiful dumpster.

It was a deep purple, a purple most often seen in delphiniums, pansies, hydrangeas, and irises. The sort of purple that would look good as a velvet dress or painted across a domed ceiling scattered with gleaming constellations. My mind gladly rested on that color purple for the rest of the drive.

Laura Grace Weldon, A Glorious Shade of Purple

These 6 poetry chapbooks were written over a span of exactly one year : May 11, 2024 to May 10, 2025. They represent some kind of quasi-pre-Socratic sagacity-foolishness of mine, on behalf of a civil society. I am perhaps now JUST BEGINNING (hopefully) to write about our actual or ideal “polis”.

Henry Gould, One Year in Poetry

Ventriloquism
a boxing match
of beings and voices 

sharpened by a whiff of the abyss

The self.  
How very small.  
The poem, how other. 

Jill Pearlman, MEMO TO SELF

The editors observe that many poems in this issue are ‘in conversation’ with other works of art, film and literature. Mine is a response to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and the 1971 film of the same title directed by Luchino Visconti. It draws on Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and was also inspired by the documentary on the life of Björn Andrésen, “the most beautiful boy in the world”, who played the part of Tadzio in Visconti’s film.

In their notes, the London Grip editors comment that they have deliberately ordered the poems in the issue so that “each poem is related to its neighbours by theme or narrative thread or at least some keyword.” I love the connections that emerge — the poem before mine is “Thomas Mann” by Norton Hodges and the one after links thematically. You can find the full issue here.

Ruth Lexton, He’s Looking At You, Kid

This post is coming to you at the tail end of a month of in person events where I have been promoting the paperback version of my nature-landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake, and my latest poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk. In between the in person events I’ve been mentoring poets and non fiction writers, running write-alongs (the next one is today!) and trying, and failing, to cram in work on the new writing project.

It’s been a very #authorlife month. Next week I can turn my face back to working on the funding bid for Spelt Magazine‘s digital platform and working on a new structure for Notes from the Margin, which I’ll tell you about in another post. I may even (shocked gasp) get time to WRITE.

Wendy Pratt, How to Get Published

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed through an entire interview before, but the My Bad Poetry podcast made it happen. Thanks to Aaron and Dave for the hilarious conversation about my old poems!

Katie Manning, My Bad Poetry Podcast

It’s my pleasure to introduce our May guest poet Jane McKie. We met many years ago on a writing workshop and are still part of an email group. You can find her biography at the end of this post. Cinnamon Press recently published her new poems and I’ve chosen some poems from Mine: vivid, clear embodied images with marvellous economy.

Mine

On nights when the wind drops, I hear it crooning softly,
not like a real bomb. A toothless, barnacled silhouette, wittering
to itself when the tide is low. My friends and I sometimes get close,
daring each other to nudge its rust. But what happens when
the music cuts out? Tonight, the mine’s a mute companion:
whiff of brine, cryptic fist. As my eyelids close, that’s when it—

Fokkina McDonnell, Mine

i dream of hundreds of broken windows
and of she who believes
there is no stone in my heart

Grant Hackett [no title]

[A] deluge of rain—I mean, it rained all day long, steadily, wonderfully, wow, it didn’t stop at all, all day long! Which means virga, because the next day it looked like it was raining everywhere in the distance but not right where I was, yet somehow, I felt like I was walking through mist but the mist didn’t register on the windshield so was I actually feeling mist? Which means that virga might have been happening—when rain falls but evaporates before it hits the ground. Which means that virga is a form of gaslighting. Which means that virga is here but not here. Which means that virga is so relatable, here but not here. Mysterious but explainable. Which means that I am constantly learning new things, making new connections. Which means that when I do write, I write piss-poor poetry. And that means that I have not much else to share with anyone but this piss-poor poetry and a handful of weeds.

Sarah Lada, Virga

This morning I wondered how grad studies might have changed.  Would we still spend the same amount of time on Wordsworth and Coleridge?  Is Frankenstein seen as more important, the gateway to much that is modern?  And more sobering, to think about how removed I am from literary scholarship, that I’m probably asking the wrong questions.

I am looking forward to teaching these works again. I will probably not spend much time on the last 40 years, particularly as Norton enlarged the scope to include all sorts of countries that used to be colonies, which makes the topic unmanageable.  We will do a deep dive into post World War II lit and end by thinking about whether or not these topics (fear of nuclear annihilation, seeing an increasing concentration on human rights for more groups, who will rule the world now) are still relevant.  

For decades now, when I got to make my own textbook choices, I’ve gone with no book.  This year, as I’ve been reading Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer:  Pep Talks and Practical Advice for the Creative Life, I decided to use it in my English 100 and 101 classes.  I’m not sure exactly how yet.  For those first year writing classes, I still plan to do a lot with trees and observing nature.  But some of the chapters in the book will make a great contribution to the class and to their experiences as first year college students–at least, that’s my hope.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Placing Book Orders for College Classes in an Age of AI

“You know,” she said, “I’m finally in a place where every shooting doesn’t hit me the way they used to.” We talked about how different schools had been when we started teaching, before locked perimeters, security badges, security officers, hallway cameras, shooter drills, and “run, hide, fight.” We talked about what it did to us to be constantly on lookout for danger. We didn’t consciously feel it all the time; our conscious minds had so many other things to attend to. But we knew it was always there, just under the surface, in the way we came to respond immediately to anything out of the ordinary: a lone adult we didn’t recognize in the hall, a loud and unusual noise, unplanned fire alarms, a certain kind of agitated student. We’d suddenly be scanning, on high alert, running through possibilities in our heads, locating exits. We’d each had close enough encounters with physical danger at work that threats were never hypothetical or abstract for us. Our work environment had become dystopian long before the pandemic, and Uvalde helped me see that.

There’s more I might say. I have so many thoughts about what it’s doing to all of us (of course, some of us more than others) to live in a heightened state of threat and fear now, in so many different settings, from so many different sources. But that would take me down a deep and dark rabbit hole, and all I really want to do in today’s post is share a link to that essay and provide some context for it.

Here it is: “On the Morning of a Massacre of American Schoolchildren,” which is in the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

I hope the words there say all the things I might say here, but in a better way. It is about a lesson in a high school English class, and about a school shooting, but it is really about more than either of those things. At least, I hope it is. Maybe read it as if it were a poem, if you click through. (Also, there’s an audio recording of it, if you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like.) And maybe read the poem that the essay hinges on, Jim Daniels’s “American Cheese.” It’s a good one. That we happened to be reading that poem on that day will always make me feel that there are forces at work in the universe beyond my ken.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Maybe read it as if it were a poem

i want to become a piece of the sky.
if i gave a cloud all my water, would
i still be able to think? to write poems?
i have learned to shrink my list of necessities.
i used to need lungs. i used to need
a tablespoon of cream.

Robin Gow, plane full of geese

My upcoming collection, The Artist’s House, is a series of poems engaging with art and artists in other forms. Ekphrastic poetry, it’s called. Each poem gives a nod to another poet, painter, musician, composer, or writer. The manuscript is leaning on me to include images. That will turn it into a more expensive book, but will increase the visual aspect in an appropriate way. I find that the most appealing ekphrastic poems are publishing online, where the image to which the poem speaks can be shared in full color at no cost.

At first I was thinking of this as a traditional print book, easy enough to publish those on Amazon, but then I remembered how many of my poet friends don’t buy poetry books. Sad, but true. And I discovered that my program that creates interior formatting for fiction doesn’t work well for a poetry collection. But thanks, Google, I found downloadable poetry book templates, some inexpensive ones on Etsy, some free from poets online.

But an illustrated poetry book? I only have one in my collection. Snow Effects by Lynne Kight, was published by Small Poetry Press in 2000. It’s this wonderful poet’s response to a traveling art exhibit called Impressionists in Winter. I saw it at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and so did Lynne. Her ekphrastic collection responds to many specific paintings, and poet David Alpaugh’s Small Poetry Press performed a miracle in putting a reproduction (with permissions) facing each poem.

Could I find a publisher to bring out such a full-color illustrated book of poems? Not a chance!

The solution: I’ll have to self-publish this kind of poetry book. That means I have to promote it. But what poet isn’t faced with that responsibility?

Other options come to mind: to publish online with full-color images, and even to make short videos of the kind that are popular on Instagram and TikTok. A poem I’d read aloud over moving visuals. Or maybe I can do all three forms of self-publishing! I do like challenges, especially the slightly impossible ones.

Rachel Dacus, Self-Publishing a Poetry Book

Self-publishing has freed the market to allow pretty much any of us to put our work out for public consumption. Some of the old guard don’t like it, of course, believing it leads to a lowering of standards. A pompous, self-satisfied view, obviously, but one that has had a disproportionate influence for too long.

They would argue that being accepted by a ‘traditional’ publisher is both an accomplishment and a sign that a piece of writing is of a high enough quality to be admired by someone qualified to judge.

If only this were true… unfortunately for that argument, most traditional publishers are in it for the money. They have to be. They have wages to pay, a business that needs to turn a profit. Therefore, they look for what is marketable, which does not always reflect the quality of the product. If you’re on TV, if you’ve got a ‘name’ of some kind or other, then you’ll get your novel or children’s story published, however flimsy a piece of writing it might be. If you’re a duchess or a duke, that helps too.

In my view it’s this eagerness to publish pretty much anything by famous people, just as much as the availability of self-publishing, that constitutes a danger to ‘literary standards’.

And on the positive side, I can’t see what’s wrong with having choice. In the past, self-publishing was hampered by bookshops, who concentrated almost entirely on what was offered by distribution companies linked to publishers. A few would have a ‘local author’ section – sometimes jumbled up in a box by the door – and most would charge percentages of the sale price that left the self-published or those published by small presses, who were inevitably dealing in short print runs, facing a deficit on every sale. And most would apply a ‘sale or return’ policy which meant the small or self publisher would have to live near enough to fetch back what didn’t sell, often within a very short timespan, or pay the postage.

Now bookshops face competition from online companies – obviously Amazon springs to mind – who will produce a book for you as well as market it. Sure, the costs will be advantageous to them, but they will get your book out there.

Bob Mee, TWO BOOKS BY AN OLD FRIEND: A CHARMED LIFE AND HELL IN PARADISE

When people first hear that I work in book publishing, the assumption is always that I’m an editor, as though that’s the only job that exists in the book world: the one that decides what is and isn’t published. And well, yes, in part of my life, I am that gatekeeper for Black Ocean, but in the part of my life that pays the bills, I am someone other—the one whose job it is to talk about books: the publicist. And, talk about books, I do. A LOT. […]

We talk a lot about the atomization of the media when it comes to politics these days, but the same is true of book media and culture media as well. There are significantly more books being published each year than ever before (the number only increasing year to year), and the outlets and space for reviews have not remotely grown to match. At the same time, with the dispersion of media and our attention into more specialized and niche outlets, we’ve lost the power of a common or shared curator of taste. We all have different go-tos for recommendations and criticism, and that diversity is as helpful as it is harmful sometimes. I’ve watched a lot of good books not get the reviews they deserved. And, whether it’s books or music or movies, I know there is good stuff out there I am missing because I don’t have the time to cull through all of the voices in their many formats and platforms offering opinions. The reality is that book reviews are harder and harder to come by, and it takes more of them to have an impact on moving books. It is undoubtedly harder to be a publicist today than it was more than two decades ago when I started working in book marketing.

This makes me even more grateful for the publications and book review editors that have remained committed to covering and engaging with serious literature and nonfiction. And, I want to extend a big thank you to all of you who have taken on the often thankless (and not well compensated) task of reviewer and critic. We need you! And, I need to talk about books with you!

Carrie Olivia Adams, Let’s Talk About Books

Twenty numbered parts. Twenty first lines: She taught me how to sleep –

A Dickinsonian cascade of variations on a theme.

Instructions for falling asleep: “string  / the stars hung overhead,” “listen for the sea,” “name the gemstones  / in the sky behind my lids,”  “memorize a poem of breath / each molecule of air a wing / upon my tongue.”

Descriptions of a “she” who is part mother; part ghost; part earth, our home hung spinning in space: “her sweater pressed against / my cheek, the blanket satin / frayed by dreams.”

Kleinberg is also an artist (see her blog featuring her word art, chocolate is a verb). Each line is compressed, every word weighed and weighted, and the effect overall – hypnotic.

Bethany Reid, Sleeping Lessons, a chapbook by J. I. Kleinberg

I was told to read Vanessa [Lampert]’s work by Christopher Horton a while back..Maybe 18 months ago. I obliged and bought the collection mentioned above [Say It With Me, Seren, 2023] about a year ago, and it’s languished on my TBR pile until a couple of weeks ago. I figured that as we are reading together soon (17th June, The Devereux, London. Supporting Matthew Paul, also featuring Ian Parks) I should get myself up to speed. I was instantly grabbed from page one…ok, page seven because that’s when the poems start, although I did subsequently go back and get grabbed by the quotation from Richard Thompson at the start.

I raced through reading the collection relatively quickly..Turning the corners over as per usual to mark up poems to come back to, and the book is now mostly turned over.

Mat Riches, Stuck on a call

Penguin Modern Poets isn’t a new idea. There was a series in the 1990s (I have a few of these), but the original series ran between 1962 and 1979, publishing 27 slim volumes in all. Recently I’ve been rereading the sixth of this original series, published in 1964, reprinted several times up until 1970, which I bought second hand at some point for a princely £2. A lot of the names in the original series are now obscure or forgotten, and this volume contains poems by Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith and George MacBeth. I’d guess that if readers have any knowledge of any of these, it’s most likely to be George MacBeth. Edward Lucie-Smith, rather sportingly, is apparently still alive at 92, though he is known rather as an art critic than a poet, and has no page on the Poetry Foundation website. (This reminded me of a piece I wrote last year, in which quite a number of the poets picked out in The Forward Book of Poetry 2000 had gone on to focus on different kinds of writing.)

But it was Jack Clemo that prompted me to buy the volume. I came across his work via C. H. Sisson and Donald Davie, who both wrote about his poetry back in the 70s and 80s. Shamefully, Clemo has no page on the Poetry Foundation […] though there has been a small revival of interest in his work recently — Enitharmon published a new Selected Poems, edited by Luke Thompson,in 2015. Unfortunately I don’t own that, so can’t comment on the selection.

Clemo — born in 1916 — was significantly older than the other two, though like them he was still quite early in his poetic career in the 1960s. The son of a clay pit worker in Cornwall, he became deaf as a very young man and blind while still in early adulthood. His poetry is full of the landscape of the clay pits, which he combines with a devout Calvinist faith to very memorable effect. Here’s the beginning of ‘Christ in the Clay-Pit’:

Why should I find Him here
And not in a church, nor yet
Where Nature heaves a breast like Olivet
Against the stars? I peer
Upon His footsteps in this quarried mud;
I see His blood
In rusty stains on pit-props, waggon-frames
Bristling with nails, not leaves. There were no leaves
Upon His chosen Tree,
No parasitic flowering over shames
Of Eden’s primal infidelity.

(‘Olivet’ is an alternative name for the Mount of Olives.) The poem ‘Sufficiency’ pursues a similar theme. It begins like this:

Yes, I might well grow tired
Of slighting flowers all day long.
Of making my song
Of the mud in the kiln, of the wired
Poles on the clay-dump; but where
Should I find my personal pulse of prayer
If I turned from the broken, scarred
And unkept land, the hard
Contours of dogma, colourless hills?
Is there a flower that thrills
Like frayed rope? Is there grass
That cools like gravel, and are there streams
Which murmur as clay-silt does that Christ redeems?

Clemo returns again and again to an association between the bleak and broken industrial landscape of the clay-pits and the humiliation and suffering of the incarnation and crucifixion. I find this guiding metaphor very powerful and also quite unusual; I would be interested to know if any readers can think of other poets making any similar link to the industrial or post-industrial landscape? Blake, with his juxtaposition of the ‘dark, Satanic mills’ and the new Jerusalem is the obvious example, but his point is quite different — for Blake, mass industry is Satanic, a force working against the salvation of the people. Whereas Clemo sees in the realities of labour and its effect on the land an image of the incarnation.

Victoria Moul, Calvin in Cornwall: revisiting Jack Clemo’s early poetry

When I think about myth, I occasionally flash back to those first poems I wrote over two decades ago in my grad school apartment, many with similar origins in myth and literature. At the time and maybe even a little in hindsight, it seemed like good subject matter. They always say write what you know, but in your mid-20s, especially when you’ve spent the past two decades in the classroom, the stories are where you find your inspo good or bad. The first two poems I ever had accepted and published in a non-school journal?  One about Paradise Lost and the other about Salem witches. The first chapbook I put together? Rooted in personal details but imagined though things like myth, fairytales, history and lit. It’s surfaced in other projects beyond the Persephone one. In books about other things than myth–like “no girls were harmed in the making of this poem” in MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS and “beneath” in THE FEVER ALMANAC. TAURUS is basically a modern re-imagining of the minotaur myth, but set in the midwest.  (The only thing I may get more mileage from is fairytales, urban folklore, and horror films…lol…) I felt the pull of it especially enticing when I was writing a lot of lessons on Greek art, myth, and literature the first year I was freelance writing for the online lessons, since that was how I spent my days amid research and refreshers on things I’d only studies in lit or theater history classes prior.

I think, or at least I hope, I can use myths more adeptly than those clumsy early poems. Maybe it’s a question of lived experience making them more grounded, however fantastical they are.

Kristy Bowen, cloven, or revisiting the Greeks

Nin, Colette, Casanova, captured something. Reveal what you wish. It’s your story. Tell the story they want to hear. Story of desire. Story of passion.

I am starting my diary. I am the greatest lover of the twenty-first century.

Men who sleep with me never recover. Nor do women. They are all of them mad.

I am Aphrodite of the modern world. Music precedes me. Stories follow me. Give me fourteen years at the Chateau Dux. My name will be synonymous with pleasure.

Kate Gale, Venice, Who Will Tell Your Story?

The Plan B default for me usually entails spending “down time” reading, writing, or housekeeping, though visiting the library and meeting friends for coffee fall under Plan B, too. Today, since I feel lousy and have a spate of brain fog, reading has been the choice. I still have a few books on the bedside pile that I haven’t gotten to–mostly poetry collections I bought at AWP at the end of March. But also there is Ocean Vuong‘s heartbreaking and beautiful novel-that-reads-like-memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that I finally got around to reading, and a back issue of Rattle Poetry a friend gave me–one that was largely devoted to haiku and related forms–that featured a fascinating interview with Richard Gilbert (thank you, Lesley S!). On the poetry-only book list, I read January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road, Julie Kane’s Naked Ladies, and Ross Gay’s first collection, Against Which. All quite useful to me in times when I feel bleak and physically frail–there’s humor, sorrow, and bravery in all of these writers’ poems. Though I’m too foggy-headed to write mini-reviews at the moment, I encourage my readers to check these poets out.

Perhaps my next post will be about the lovely time my friend and I had in northern New Mexico, visiting my daughter and Santa Fe, including my opportunity to see Bandelier National Monument again and ponder its environments and history. A trip like that takes some time for me to “digest.” But it was wondrous. And so is a day at home to recuperate in my favorite way: reading.

Ann E. Michael, Plan B (reading)

Composed during the Covid-19 pandemic, Which Walks presents itself as a book on walking and being, and being present within an unprecedented global event. “reaching back / to owned devices,” the opening walk offers, “feel free, imaginary, / and tactile as the shudder // of daily acquisition, / domestic, time-bound, // vexed by practitioners, / whose practice // like ours, / a consummation, // is thrown up and out / as the poison // presence of each entrance / of nonlife into life [.]”

It has been interesting across the past few years to see the variety, volume and intimacy of literary responses to the Covid-era, a flood of eventual titles we all knew was coming, including British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020), Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield’s a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here] and American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) [see my review of such here], not to mention my own pandemic-suite of essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022). Each title, in their own individual ways, working amid and between the two poles of anxiety and calm, navigating the treacherous and uncertain waters of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

rob mclennan, Laura Moriarty, Which Walks

It would be difficult not to like Pam Thompson’s poetry, because it has immediacy, depth and variety. Her Sub/urban Legends won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet prize in 2023 and has recently been (rather belatedly) published. At only £5 (plus p&p) it’s a genuine bargain and is available to buy here. It’s Pam’s first publication since her excellent second collection, Strange Fashion, published by Pindrop Press in 2017. […]

Pam is influenced, inter alia, by the New York school of poetry, a loose amalgam of poets associated in the 1950s and ’60s, chief among them Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Pam has discussed her particular liking for, and the influence of, Schuyler in an intriguing 2023 podcast with Chris Jones, here. The deceptively offhand diction of the New York poets, their acute but apparently nonchalant awareness of what’s going on around them, their precision, urban sensibility and painterliness can all, I think, be discerned in Pam’s poems. And as she says in the podcast about the New York poets’ poems, hers are almost always ‘peopled’.

Sub/urban Legends doesn’t feel like a themed pamphlet, because it isn’t one. Its 24 poems are varied in tone, subject-matter and form, and each of them is worth spending time with.

Matthew Paul, On Pam Thompson’s ‘Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest’

“Bloom and Grow” feels like tending a plant in the plant owner’s absence. The poems are tended and cared for, but the writer is happy to let readers watch, figure out if that curved bud is a leaf or flower, if the stem is getting longer or thicker and to know when to deadhead the flowers. Donnelly writes from personal experience and concerns of family connections in a subtle, familiar language, showing that the lives of ordinary people are worth documenting and remembering.

Emma Lee, “Bloom and Grow” Peter J Donnelly (Alien Buddha Press) – book review

One of the strong and consistent promoters of connections between mathematics and the arts is Sarah Hart and she recently gave the 2025 Einstein Public Lecture at Clemson University (sponsored by AMS, the American Mathematical Society) entitled “A Mathematical Journey Through Literature.”  

Hart is the author of Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books, 2023) — NYTimes review here;  purchase info here.  Her presentation, summarized here in an AMS article entitled “The Axiom of a Sonnet,” explored ways that the guidelines for a sonnet — or other poetic structure — are similar to the guidelines for a mathematical structure such as a group or a ring.  A thought-provoking quote from her presentation:

“We talk about mathematics as being the language of the universe, a vital tool for science . . .”  She also noted that mathematics also provides the rhythm of music, symmetries in art, poetry rhyme schemes, and symbolism in literature.  She further noted, “Literature itself has an inherent structure much like geometry.”    (Read more here .)

A variety of poetic stanzas are scattered throughout Hart’s wide-ranging exploration of math-poetry connections — including attention to Martin Gardner and the Oulipo.

JoAnne Growney, An AMS Presentation by Sarah Hart

Now that I had my ‘captive’ poets, I wanted to seize the opportunity to go beyond the poems themselves. My poets all had additional skills and knowledge as, for example, editors, translators, competition judges, lecturers and slambassadors. Therefore, at the end of each chapter, having first discussed the development of their poem, I asked each poet for their advice on aspects such as putting together a collection, applying to competitions and examining the difference between writing for the page and for performance.

The Process of Poetry seemed to be quite well received, including being put onto a number of universities reading lists and that of The Poetry School. I therefore thought that it might be good to write a sequel. Having dual nationality, I turned towards Australia. John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge were joined by Mark Tredinnick, Sara Salah, Gavin Yuan Gao, Sarah Holland Batt, Judith Nanagala Crispin, Anthony Lawrence, Bella Li, Audrey Molloy and Jaya Savige.

In doing so, I discovered two fascinating differences. Firstly, in content, secondly, in form. Whereas in the UK version the poetry was often quite personal in nature, in the Australian sequel, The Making of a Poem, major preoccupations were clearly environmental concerns, the protection of native flora and fauna, for example, as impacted by bushfires and smugglers, and the amazing search for aboriginal ancestors.

In the UK, I was inundated with sonnets, in Australia free verse and experimental verse prevailed. Words such as anti-establishment and ‘a resistance to formal poetry’ appeared in our conversations. Having said this, ultimately the sequel contains forms such as an Abecedarian and an ideogram.

For me, the most fascinating aspect was that poets had distinct outlooks and creative processes. The fact that these were sometimes conflicting, in my opinion, only adds to the book. I hope that, if you read it, you too will celebrate the differences.

Drop-in by Rosanna McGlone (Nigel Kent)

I have a buzz after the last Haiku Canada Conference with no energy crash. That’s odd. Grocery shopping can give me an energy crash and days of trough. I did things differently, blew off talks, the day starting and ending for me when I got there or left. Not a strain to absorb everything. Chatting with folks or not. Where is this lack of pressure coming from? Who knows. 

The core of life, of writing, of events, is about people, affections, connections, curiosity about people not “Networking” and “Learning”. Reflecting on the weekend there are all kinds of salient patterns, inner and outer. […]

It doesn’t matter what I am not. What I am not is also infinite. I love the idea of being a generalist, a know it all, a curious renaissance man or polymath, drilling down immersively also appeals.  

I’ve kept one foot in familiar, compensated. I was the peacemaker, negotiator, translator, who was bridging worlds. I don’t need to be a runner, messenger on the bridge. I don’t need to shield people, make myself available as a piggy bank for other people’s secrets. I don’t need to use up my slack for people who are thrashing. I don’t need to affirm everyone and sooth and mute myself to not make waves. That may seem radical and selfish. That may seem to bear no relation to how I seem. I have spent a lot of time trying to justify my existence by helping and pleasing others, trying to be found acceptable by people who would use anyone convenient. 

I don’t have a lot of life left even in best case scenario. Maybe a third if I’m lucky. 

Being drawn by glimmers, by quiet yesses instead of being hampered and hammered by crowd of hectoring internalized voices condemning is a new idea. What if I could say, shush you, and be led by what lights me up. 

Pearl Pirie, Events: It all works

What do you want that is beyond a word?
Beyond any word? Beyond want?

Take a plant primed to flower.
Not wanting rain.
Just holding the possibility of the flower.
Not waiting. Just being under the sky.
The sky knows this. And the plant.
And the water that isn’t rain yet.
And time that isn’t the time to flower yet.
And the flower that isn’t a flower, yet.

The sum of all that potential is not want.
Is not a word. It existed before words.
Words constrain it.
Language craves it so it can survive.
Silence tries to spell it without alphabets.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Wanting

Daily one sits at one’s desk; or doesn’t. One wakes and scans the retreating subconscious, rich with dreams, for the glimpse of an idea. One tastes words, mines memory, goes about earnestly noticing things: but it all turns to ash. A line, a half poem, an idea – all flounder. This goes on for months. You try too hard, fail. The months become a year, and all the while we have Capitalist expectation of production, Calvinist horror of idle hands. You feel anxious and guilty. If you’re not working you must perforce be on holiday. But then there’s the suspicion that, for writers, even when we are ‘working’ we are actually on holiday anyway. ‘You’re hale life’s a holiday!’ said my mother, once, bitterly.

I don’t believe in so-called writer’s block with all its suggestions of drains and fatbergs. Whatever is going on, Dyno-Rod will not help. I do believe that if you’re beating your head off a wall to no avail, chances are it’s the wrong wall. As someone said, and I wish I could recall who, it was a woman and a poet – she said something like ‘if you’re suffering writer’s block it’s because you’re lying to yourself.’ Lying is a strong word, but yes, could be you’re trying to write the wrong thing. And why would one do that? Often because we try to mine an already exhausted seam. We return ever hopeful to a cupboard which now lies bare.

Not ‘block’, then, but fallow. All these metaphors. There are good ones: the bare cupboard, the fallow field, the well which must replenish drop by drop, the battery which must recharge. All understandable. But living through it feels like a waste of life.

Kathleen Jamie, On Not Writing

Marty [Silano] was a dear friend of mine. I met her in 2001 at Seattle’s Poets for Peace reading. Since her death, I’ve found myself unable to write poems—even though I can hear her in my mind telling me, You need to write that poem! It was a phrase we often said to each other, whenever one of us shared something like, “The castle on the top of the cliffs looked like a discarded chess piece,” “Our neighbors want to trim our hedge during nesting season!” or “I’m at the airport and O’Hare autocorrected to o hate!”

The first day at this retreat, poet Grace Wells brought us to a sacred Irish land to write—Poulnabrone Dolmen, sometimes translated as the “Hole of Sorrows” (Poll na mBrón). I sat on limestone, listening to a cuckoo calling from the distance (yes, they have cuckoos here), in an ancient landscape full of stories and birdsong. I thought of Marty—of how brief our lives are, the temporariness of this all, how much she loved the natural world. For the first time since her death, I began to write. The draft was rough, clumsy, I would even say—not good—but it was a draft and I had words on the page. I ended the poem with: The cuckoo continues / counting moments. I am empty / of everything I once held.

That night, Marty came to me in a dream. She was laughing and dancing and said, “I only need a thimble of wine now.” She added, “Write me into your poems.” It felt as if the place had opened me, the dream too. I woke up and wrote a draft of a poem that I continue to work on. Since then, I’ve been writing again. . .

So that’s where I am—writing, thinking of home and Marty and the beauty around me. Marty’s absence from this world has been so deeply felt by many. It’s hard to make sense of a world that so often takes the best souls too soon—but here we are. She was endlessly generous—with her love, her praise, her joy, her fierce care for the environment, and the way she continually lifted other poets, myself included. She will be missed.

Also, if you don’t know Marty or if you do and want to hear her voice again, you can listen to this wonderful interview by where they talk about meditation, Marty’s creative process, her teachers, as well as her thoughts on poetry, ALS, napping and more, for Jess’s podcast.

Kelli Russell Agodon, With Love from Ireland 🇮🇪 & Remembering Marty

Grief has been the perished rubber of a flat tyre, the wrinkled end of a deflating balloon, a dull heaviness to the body, a horizontal. Songs on my playlists have been welcoming me back when I have pulled myself out of my need for silence. Finding colour and light mixing in has given me things to lean in to, something to prop myself up against, a gentle re-plumping.

Reading ‘Hopscotch’ at The Gloucester Poetry Society’s Crafty Crows open mic felt good because I was taking part in things again. And although I shared it on my YouTube channel back in 2022 I had never read it to a live audience so I wanted to give it an airing of its own. Afterwards I discovered that the theme for National Poetry Day this coming October will be ‘Play’. That gives me a prime opportunity to read it again which is good because I like reading it out loud. This news also sent me to my poetry folder to see what other poems I have that will fit this theme and which drafts I can polish in readiness. I look forward to exploring the theme in detail and predict that poets will be sharing some cracking poems on that day.

Sue Finch, RAINBOWS AND CHICKPEAS

About 7 years ago I was working on my first full manuscript. I think the title at the time was “Cartography Lesson.” It was the collection of all of the best poems I had written at the time. And I’m an eclectic writer with eclectic interest so the poems had wide ranges of styles and subject matter. There were poems about my parents next to poems about swans, and poems about swans next to poems about sex. What held the collection together was basically that all the poems were the best pieces I had at the time. That’s all.

At one point I got word that the book was a finalist for a prize from Moon City Press. You’d think I would be excited about that, but as soon as I saw it listed, I actually had a very surprising reaction. My stomach clenched and I heard a voice say, “Oh my god, I hope I don’t win!” […]

Fortunately, I didn’t win. The poet Jeannine Hall Gailey won for her book Field Guide to the End of the World. And I was relieved.

I’m serious here. I’m not just having sour grapes about the fact that I didn’t win. I really, sincerely hoped that I wouldn’t. Because, even though I believed in the individual poems in the book, I did not believe in the book as a whole. What was I thinking, having those sex poems in the same book as the poems about my parents???

Ew.

I had put that book together not because it was ready, but because I was impatient and wanted a book out. Over the next few years I took the book apart. I divided the poems into different categories, poems about my family, poems about nature, poems about being young in the city, poems about romance and sex.

Turns out I didn’t have one book. I had the start of 3 different books.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Why I’m So Glad My Manuscript Didn’t Win This Poetry Prize

The book is well and truly launched. A month or so ago at Free Verse, the poetry book fair in London, I was helping out Jeremy Page on the Frogmore Press table while at the same time handing out promotional postcards – a bit cheeky, but Jeremy was OK with it. It was a shame not to have the actual book to sell but hey ho.

Free Verse was fun. The publisher tables were so closely packed we were virtually on each other’s laps. We were sandwiched between Caroline Davies of  Green Bottle Press and Liz Kendall of The Edge of the Woods. The nature of the event means you do a lot of waving and not-quite-conversations with people, nevertheless it’s very nice to see old acquaintances and meet new ones. I crossed paths briefly with Claire Booker, Paul Stephenson, Julia Bird, Caroline Clark, Tammy Yoseloff, Isabelle Baafi (after interviewing her recently for the podcast) and Kate Noakes…and met for the first time a number of small publishers including Kym Deyn of The Braag and Carmen et Error and Julie Hogg of Blueprint Press. I liked the fact that magazines were represented alongside book publishers.

A few people came up to me and said how much they enjoyed Planet Poetry, including one of our regular supporters Richard Chadburn, who promptly got his local bookshop to order my book! It’s always gratifying to know we have listeners, and fans even – tee hee.

So The Mayday Diaries – yep, we had a lovely launch event in Lewes with both poet and non-poet friends and family. I say ‘we’, because I had alongside me my ol’ poet pal Peter Kenny and also my mentor and Telltale Press Associate Editor Catherine Smith, who emceed. Peter read some poems, including those in his recent pamphlet Snow (Hedgehog Press). Snow is a collaboration with artist Palo Almond, who came to the launch with two of her paintings and spoke about how the pamphlet illustrations came about, which really added something special to the evening.

Robin Houghton, Free Verse, book launch & readings

It’s hard to put your finger on what makes a good workshop. Of course, it’s something to do with structure and pacing, something to do with writing exercises which include you, and excite you, and challenge you…. I’m thinking of Carola Luther’s skilful crafting, how much planning and intelligence in her teaching – how she holds her workshops gently, perceptively, so that they engage everybody. I’m thinking of humour, and charisma, and Jackie Kay, and the workshop I attended in Lancaster where I wrote the title poem of my first collection, and it came out almost finished. It can be something to do with presence, and fame: I’m thinking of Carol Ann Duffy at Moniack Mhor, her hand on my shoulder, how I hung off every word, how she read “Stafford Afternoons” to us and the whole week, the expense, the trials of sharing a room with a stranger, the 8 hour drive in a leaking car that wouldn’t get me home, was worth it. […]

In tonight’s workshop, we read Rachel Mann’s “Eleanor as Julian as Margery”, and we considered the ways in which pressure can make us beautiful. The pressure in a writing workshop – the task, the limited time, the need for concentration, the weight of expectation, the silence – is a beautiful thing as well. It can act like poetic form, providing the boundaries which hold and enable our creativity. It’s a place of contradiction: as a participant, you are both supported and challenged, liberated and contained, pushed further and further into your own interior as a result of being amongst others. Beyond the murderous levels of irritation I feel at someone repeatedly clicking their pen, there’s also a level of acceptance and unity which is astonishing in its taken-for-grantedness. Strangers from disparate backgrounds sit alongside each other as they consider and explore deeply personal aspects of themselves and their worlds; they may share stories they have never shared before, in ways they have never considered. Incredible.

Clare Shaw, Making Our Own Light

I am surrounded by objects who wait for me to move them. Sometimes, these objects must be tidied. Sometimes, washed. I pick them up with my hands and place them elsewhere. Put certain ones in the sink, others in the recycling bin, another on a shelf. Often, I gather up several that belong in the same location and make a small pile on the couch or the hearth where they wait again, coalescing, temporarily, into a new collective shape.

If I ever begin to feel depressed by my constant maintenance of objects around me, I remind myself that when one cares for something—even middling care suffices so long as one can sustain it—that thing becomes a sort of pet, and then it is able to give as well as to receive love. […]

Surrounded by objects as so many of us are, should we not have more nuanced language to describe the universe of things, as the Inuit are said to have their many words for snow? I ask the internet about this cliché and find that it is at least partially true, depending on how different linguists count words in agglutinative languages, wherein affixes (such as prefixes and suffixes) are added to a root word to form a wide variety of nuanced vocabulary. Examples of the Inuits’ basic words for snow and ice include:

qanik: snow falling
aputi: snow on the ground
pukak: crystalline snow on the ground
aniu: snow used to make water
siku: ice in general
nilak: freshwater ice, for drinking
qinu: slushy ice by the sea

And so, clumsily, I venture the start of an object lexicon:

earthing: object formed naturally on Earth (such as a mineral or fallen leaf)
starthing: object in space
handthing: object made with care
machinething: mass-produced object
screenthing: object one looks through to elsewhere
fragmenthing: an object more beautiful now that it is broken
meaningthing: object bestowed with significance through care or memory
plaything: object temporarily electrified by a child’s ardor

These words are inadequate, and immediately I want to replace them with other words, other categories. They have an earthy, AngloSaxon ring to them that I like, however. Noun upon noun, like two feet stomping a circle around a fire.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Everlasting Universe of Things

I am still feeling a bit at odds and ends—am I doing the right things? Am I doing too much—or too little? What should my priorities be right now (health vs. fun vs. work, etc.) Is this normal at my age? I’ve signed up for way too many things next month (judging a poetry contest, taking a class, doing a tutorial, plus an essay or two will be due, plus all normal things including another dental crown.) Needless to say, I have anxiety about all of this. I have been trying to reconnect with some old friends—the loss of one friend makes you realize how important that is. Here’s another kind of frightening thought—do I even want to do poetry anymore, or should I be trying something else? I have a lot of friends (poets) who’ve moved into essays, memoirs, even standup comedy. It certainly would be nice to be paid one in a while and have people actually read what you write. I don’t know what’s next. I’m open and hoping for guidance.

While the world is burning, the poet acts a little lost. She goes to the forest, where several giant trees have toppled—the forest seems more bare, though the river runs even louder than ever. The gardens have fewer plants and fewer birds. Maybe she doesn’t recognize the places she thought she knew. She worries about losing people, not just places. She doesn’t see a clear path ahead the way she used to. That can be unsettling. She worries that she used to be the hero of the story, and now she’s just the one taking notes.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry Readings in Woodinville, Suddenly Summer Weather, Goslings and Goldfinch, Searching

The wind was a ghost
I learned also went to bed, waking

early just as fruit bats returned
to their roosts on the cliffs.

Held in this interval, I felt almost
endless and untranslatable; but also,

small as a pebble in the throat
of a universe threaded with seams.

Luisa A. Igloria, Perigee, Apogee

This week: the idea of blackbirds, the bones of a feeling, an assembly of hares, and more. Enjoy.

So hard
when I hear nothing
not to be nothing
falling on the concrete floor.

I’ve noticed that there are no more blackbirds in our neighbourhood. I wonder if they are dying out everywhere now and what will happen to all the poems and songs in their honour? I love the Beatles song. In a few years’ time, perhaps no one will understand that the morning has become emptier and that an idea of blackbirds was important in our lives. Funny. How people cling to themselves and what has been. It’s somehow charming and nonsensical at the same time.

Kati Mohr, Curtains Are Not Necessarily More See-through In Broad Daylight

“Everything is covered in blood related to sound” (Pascal Quignard)

Pascal Quignard organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s. However, in 1994, Quignard suddenly renounced all his musical activities. No more music, he declared. He was finished. What followed was the publication of a book, The Hatred of Music, on the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. These ten treatises about the danger in listening aim “to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”

Quignard’s beef is actually with the omnipresence of sound, a sonic super-profusion that has metastasized into a force of death more than of life. “Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum,” he wrote. Q mines a pet peeve of Glenn Gould’s when he concludes that “concert halls are inveterate caves whose god is time.” Ultimately, it is an irresistible book about how we hear, and how what we hear can destroy it.

Alina Stefanescu, “The disordered and passionate application” of the non sequitur image.

There is not enough love to smother
every wound. A single day demands
five stages of grief and four stages of
anger. Or all nine parts of disbelief.
The summer sky explodes with
lightning in the late afternoon
as if it too can only take so much.

There is a strangeness in normalcy
like it shouldn’t be and yet it
should. How else will the days
pass if we cannot play hopscotch
when we pass a chalk grid on a
side street, if we do not sing
along with the radio, even if we have
forgotten the lyrics, if we will not slow
down the last forty pages, because
a book must end, but not just yet.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, How much do we need to know?

I don’t want to say a whole lot about the poems, as I often say more than needed. But the description is “studies in an undead mood.” And that’s how I feel about it: the book is guided by mood, ambience and impression, and it wrestles with pervasive dread. Also, uniquely among things I’ve put out, this one has pictures (nothing fancy, mostly internet detritus from my camera roll). See a couple samples below.

Lastly, the print is limited to 35 numbered copies. Don’t sleep! They’ll disappear.

RM Haines, NEW BOOK IS HERE

“Life is long,” a poet friend said to me recently as I was reckoning with a similar rupture. But life was not long for Emily Dickinson, who died suddenly in her fifties, not a single grey on her auburn hair in the small white casket cradling her body and a posy of violets. Life is a feather borrowed from the swift wing of time. If she had lived longer, perhaps Kate would have returned to spend her remaining days with Emily and not with her English lover, or perhaps they would have met again in perfect disenchantment, in perfect friendship. “If” is the widest word of all, the immense alternate universe in which all of our possible lives live. Hope is what we call the bridge between this universe and that one.

Maria Popova, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

Dizzying, the tumult of waking. It seems as I watched, the early rhodie opened a bit more a bit more. Daily I stood under the crab apple to breathe in the rising perfume, a bit more a bit more, not wanting to exhale in the still cool morning, the usual human din briefly lulled to the dull roar of a distant dirt mover and plank-on-plank rattle from a neighbor’s construction crew. Buzz of bee moving through the whiteness above me. It was an intimate moment: me, the blossoms, the busy bee. The world was there but not.

Marilyn McCabe, windows. The windows turned to night and night turned into a heavy rain. Then the rain

In our hands we hold the lost,
but our bright eyes stare fiercely
into the heat, harm, hardship
that destroyed them, and thus us
as well, in some other way.
I don’t know if the crowds roar
or blood pounds red in my ears.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 121: Blow the Trumpets Before God In Times of Catastrophe #NaPoWriMo

This is the first new month that has started without my dad being here. I’ve learnt that I want to tell everyone what I learned from him. I’ve learned that one of the best things I can think of to do right now is carry forward the very special parts of him to the best of my ability. I’ve also learned that writing some of this down in a poem felt right, but that reading said poem when we gathered together to say goodbye to him required a large hanky and plenty of time for deep breaths. […]

The way he turned his head to look and smile
never minding being interrupted.
That quiet, gentle, I’m alright, thanks my love.
The time I called him

from somewhere between Crawley and Croydon.
Parked up. Feeling lost.
To hear him tell me exactly where I was
based on the wrong turns I had taken.

Sue Finch, SOMEBODY’S MISSING

My dad passed away this week. I feel shocked by this every time I say it. This post is not about my dad, but it felt wrong not to acknowledge that after the last few hard months, things here continue to be hard and sad.

Somehow, there’s still been joy and fun in the last couple of months too. This extrovert writer is especially happy when I get to throw myself into a sea of writers and spend days totally immersed in the writing world […]

Katie Manning, AWP, PCA, & the San Diego Writers Festival

I never want to forget that we live in a world like this, among creatures that know nothing of our human preoccupations. The paths were muddy and mucky, the sun warm on my face, the smell of wet earth and waking plants strong; nesting blackbirds scolded me from swaying reeds, and song sparrows and white-throated sparrows made music as beautiful as any I can imagine. I will miss going to the lake this year, so it’s important to me to find places and time closer to home where I can leave urban life behind for a while, rest, and recharge my senses and spirit. Meeting that turtle’s beady eye renewed my faith in nature, if not humanity, and that was enough for today!

Beth Adams, A Walk in the Woods on Election Day

I want to thrive. Today. Full stop. In spite of (waves arms wildly) everything. I want to thrive not as an act of resistance, but simply because I am 60 years old, and I don’t want to give away what’s left of my life waiting for some better time that might not come before I go. Since none of us ever know how many years we have left, this stance, I think, is valid for anyone at any age.

Rita Ott Ramstad, No such thing as bad weather?

On April 30 […] I felt like I walked into the light again, as the sciatica calmed and the cold faded out. It reminded me of emerging from serious depression, an experience I’ve had the bad and good fortune to undergo several times. Suddenly you look around and think, oh, I’m better, and only then realize how not-there you were for weeks. […]

It wasn’t the easiest trip, given the sciatica, but in other ways the timing was lucky, as in escaping Spain right before the big blackout. And while I could have used more energy during this first week of spring classes, my verve is perking back up as I need it for more barding around with this new book that is so much about my mother’s death as well as mycelium and other occult life. I just recorded a podcast with The Mushroom Hour; I will read at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville on Sunday 5/4 (live and hybrid, sign up here); I’m joining the always virtual Wild and Precious Life series this Wednesday 5/7; and I’ll be in Baltimore for the Hot L series at Ivy Bookstore on 5/11. That last is Mother’s Day. I wonder if I’ve just delayed the seasonal sadness, or whether I’m genuinely healing from mother-loss, too?

Lesley Wheeler, Dark corridors

What is it knocking on the walls of this little house in the forest? Are we mostly scared of imaginary and unseen and unknown things? Are we afraid of monsters? Wild animals? Maybe zombies, werewolves, devils and demons? Or are we scared of actual threats like axe murderers and serial killers? Or let’s be honest here, are we scared of this alone time with our manuscript and the fact we have no excuses right now but to finish the work and write, write, write and push ourselves from night, towards day, towards the light and the last pages.

It is of course, mostly, the latter, and so instead of working on the book … I think I see a flicker in the night. Then I tell myself a wild horror story and scare myself rigid. I write this Substack post, it is all about fear and how I wish to boil the bones of this feeling down to get to the sticky glue.

Salena Godden, Fear Of The Last Pages

I’m working on an ekphrastic poetry collection titled The Artist’s House, inspired by my llongtime association with visual artists, musicians, dancers, and writers. My poetry and my novels often feature artists or a response to their work. It’s because I grew up with an artist father who painted constantly and invited many artists to our home and shared studios with them. He took us to working studios, local art exhibitions, and art museums in the Los Angeles area. More about my childhood with art and artists here.

The smell of oil paint and turpentine evokes these childhood memories and the wonder of a Saturday morning, watching my father mix oil paints and dash colors and shapes onto a white, gessoed canvas. In the mid-50s he painted these fishing boats at the dock in San Pedro, where we lived. It represented his passion for sport fishing. I loved the flaring spotlights, the night blues, and the way light and midnight blue meet and interpenetrate. My father’s time and focus on his art showed a lifelong devotion. Even as he eased into dementia, a brush was still in his hand. Once, in his basement studio, he confessed, “I don’t know how to mix paints anymore.” But he kept trying.

Rachel Dacus, Art & artists are a theme in my fiction and poetry

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. It comforts me somehow, even when the poems are sad or angry poems (that seems to reflect the times, which poetry can do). Your own writing, who has it? Does it exist on some hard drive somewhere? You always were excellent at organizing things. A talent I envy and do not possess. […]

When a person we love dies, I guess there’s an impulse–almost an instinct–to memorialize them, at least among those of us in “Western societies.” Or maybe it is a human impulse, I can’t say. I have written too many poems of elegy, and there will be more; but sometimes, it takes awhile before I feel I have the right perspective or frame of mind to write about them, or about my feelings of loss. Today, so much reminded me of you, Beejay, that I had to write something. If not a poem, then an epistle–the way I used to write to you, of ordinary things, the garden, cats, seasons, poetry.

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Ann E. Michael, Correspondences

It did make me feel somewhat philosophical, turning 52. I’m still around, even after multiple doctors said I wouldn’t be. I’ve lost friends in the last few years, friends who seemed much healthier than I am. So much seems random, out of our control. This leads me to think that maybe we should let go of some of the things that keep us from living a full, joyful life, right now. Don’t put off fun, or things you love. […]

Imagine my surprise when I discovered my poem, “Lessons You Learn from Final Girls,” from Field Guide to the End of the World, was up on the Daily Kos this week (right after Yusef Komunyakaa, whose birthday is apparently a day before mine) as birthday poets. See the link here.  

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Dinosaurs, Birthday Poems on Daily Kos, Hummingbirds, and More

I woke up thinking about Frankenstein, about ways I might teach my British Lit class even if I’m off campus for some of the teaching days.  I woke up thinking about online discussion posts, but now I’m thinking about a collage/erasure poem.  Now I’m thinking about a wide range of projects that could use erasure and collage.  It’s an interesting way of thinking about assessment:  choose a page, make an erasure poem, add collage elements, and write analysis showing how your creation shows understanding of the work.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

It was the dead time between Christmas and New Year and I couldn’t breathe, so I went outside for some air. My eldest joined me and we traipsed the pavements of our town as dusk fell, before turning onto a footpath to cross a playing field. Here, in the unlikeliest of settings, we encountered the mysterious circular assembly of hares, better known as a ‘parliament’ or ‘council’.

This remarkable sighting in the edgelands of north Bristol became a totem for me through the traumatic years during and after my divorce. A marvel few people have the privilege of witnessing had been revealed to me and one of my children: how, then, could we not get through this ordeal together?

Sadly, despite my magical thinking, our depleted family was further fractured by the inevitable fall-out of that rupture, with my eldest ultimately choosing to go no-contact with their three siblings and me. In an effort to make some sense of the situation, I began to explore this estrangement – carefully – through poetry, turning again to the hares in the hope I’d find some redemption through them.

At first, I expected this poem to be just one of forty or so that might comprise a collection, but during its writing it became more important than I’d anticipated, positioning itself as a potential envoi. At the same time, it increased in complexity, particularly with regard to time. As well as inhabiting what the critic, Jonathan Culler, calls ‘the lyric “now” or moment of utterance’, it looks back to when my eldest and I were apparently in step with each other, and forward to when I’ll be dead and the only reconciliation possible would be for my child to make alone. In this respect, it seems to be in the spirit of poems Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes wrote for their dead wives, only with the status of narrator and addressee reversed.

Drop-in by Deborah Harvey (Nigel Kent)

I have an odd superstition about getting published.

I believe that the real goal of writing and sharing our work is not just to get fame and fortune, but rather to help us get connected to our authentic “tribe.” I have a belief that whoever gets published alongside me in a journal or anthology is someone I’m supposed to know – or their poem is one I’m supposed to read. […]

I therefore believe that every time I get a piece published, I need to read the full journal I’m published in, and if I don’t I believe the poetry gods punish me by refusing to give me any more acceptances until I do! Therefore, when I get a piece published, I make time to do this specific ritual that helps me not only make new poetry friends, but also find my next submission target.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Strange Ritual That Helps Me Decide Where to Submit My Work

In preparation for my Creative Retirement Institute course on May Swenson, beginning next Tuesday afternoon, I’ve been reading Swenson’s poetry and a collection of essays, Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Gantt (Utah State Univ. Press, 2006). I also searched for my photographs from my visit to her archives at Washington University, St. Louis, and I found my 2022 blog post about it.

Believe me, I have come very close to contacting CRI and screaming, “I can’t do it!” But, in calmer moments, I think it will be a good distraction from all else that’s going on in my life. Show up, Bethany, it’s only 4 weeks, 8 hours total. Read some poems together, talk about the poems. Talk about Swenson’s creative life and ideas and how far the tendrils of her influence have reached. Easy-peasy.

Of course we will read “Question” and “Centaur,” also “Bleeding” and more of Swenson’s iconographs.

Bethany Reid, Nature: Poems Old and New

[Karen] Solie’s poems offer both deep wisdom and a lightness across the line; a sparkle, if you will, of truth, if that idea might still be one that holds any resonance: the heart of one true thing articulated across an otherwise landscape of dark. Her poems craft deep wells of meditative thinking, lines that turn a leaf over in one’s hand, to study every side.

The landscapes of her poem-scenes are solid, foundational; shifting from poem to poem but always returning, book after book, to the foundation of the people, physical detail, climate and intimacy of rural Saskatchewan, a sense of home and prairie Solie has in common with Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers [see my review of her latest collection here]: the further out either of them might move through the world, the stronger the pull to return back to the landscapes that shaped them. As Solie writes, as part of the extended and descriptive “THE GRASSLANDS”: “And when you do venture in / with your tire tracks and snake gaiters //  the hospitality of grass / is a dry loaf, cracked cup, mattress of prairie wool, / northern bedstraw and great blanket flower, / wild licorice, clover, corn mint, bergamot, // and heat, rippling like curtains / as the grasshoppers saw away – / leave your packed lunch out they will eat it in an hour – [.]”

There is almost a kind of restlessness articulated through these poems, with an inability to remain still even across multiple poems on and around stillness, but rarely in the same geography, the same moment, beyond that aforementioned Saskatchewan (and Toronto, I’ve noticed). The poems, together, cite a restlessness, or perhaps a curiosity, perpetually seeking to reach across another horizon to seek a better understanding of what might be out there, whether through moments across geography, or even across the narrator’s own past. It it the clarity, one suspects, she seeks.

rob mclennan, Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

Andrew Taylor, who was credited as editor of the vast two volume Collected Poems of Peter Finch in 2022, has now written a companion volume that is part-biography, part-critical analysis.

As I like much of Finch’s work, it was perhaps inevitable that I would appreciate Taylor’s efforts to give it perspective. […]

I’m not so sure about Taylor’s claim that Finch has been overlooked and underrated. You could say that most poets, short of poets laureate of one kind or another, always are. I think Finch has fought for his own space and recognition, partly through performance as well as through his willingness to engage socially or professionally with those who hold literary influence, and, perhaps because he has been so persistent, has become known and respected, I was going to say, within the poetry community, except there is no such thing. It’s just a place where some poets can be bothered to fight for validation and others can’t, so some are visible and others not so, or not at all. Finch has fought, and has done it, it seems to me, ferociously. Unlike those with less stamina, his reputation has increased and established itself over the decades. I admire him for that.

Bob Mee, THERE’S EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR, THE POETRY OF PETER FINCH by ANDREW TAYLOR

In the British Library there’s a manuscript collection containing many of George Herbert’s Latin poems, including a little occasional epigram which is very probably also by Herbert, but for no obvious reason has been left out of previous editions of his work. The poem is about a gift of gloves.

Here is a transcription of the poem and my own translation:

Wren cum Chirothecis

Candida amicitiæ nascentis pignora, sed quæ
Nescio quo dicam nomine dono tibi
Græca mihi supplet, supplet vernacula nomen
Deficit ad numeros sola latina meos
Et iuste male nempe voco, quod debeo donum
Pollicitum satis est reddere; dono nihil.

Pure tokens of a friendship that’s begun — but which
I cannot name — I give to you.
Both Greek and English offer me a name
It’s only Latin verse cannot contain
My gift. Fair’s fair; it would be wrong to call
What’s owed a gift; if I fulfill
A promise, then that’s not a gift at all.

Occasional verse of this kind — I mean poems written to and for a specific person, to mark a specific event — are often the most difficult to interpret. Frequently we just don’t know enough about the context — their attitudes, relevant recent events, what they agree or disagree on, which of them is the senior or more powerful, what their shared intimacies or injokes might be — to be sure of interpretation, especially when it comes to tone. Imagine for a minute that you dash off a teasing letter to an old friend, or an awkward email to a good friend of your boss, and how hard it would be to reconstruct the tone and context of such exchanges if a historian encountered them without any other information.

These are historian’s problems, of course, but they overlap with questions of literary judgement and interpretation especially because of the particular difficulty of assessing the tone of poems like this. ‘Wren cum chirothecis’ has recently been edited by Robert Whalen and Luke Roman, and I believe they plan to include it in the forthcoming complete edition of Herbert’s work for Oxford University Press. But Whalen and Roman, I think, slightly over-interpret the epigram to Wren. They take the final phrase, dono nihil (literally, ‘I give nothing’) to mean that the poem was not in fact accompanied by a gift after all — that the prospect of a gift (of gloves) is proposed and then withdrawn, making it a kind of mock- or even meta-occasional poem. I think this is almost certainly wrong: there are quite a lot of examples of Latin poems saying, roughly, “thanks for nothing — this gift is so pathetic you might as well not have bothered”, but they are always satiric at best, if not outright invective. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here at all.

Victoria Moul, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?

You became a doctor and wrote a book titled Bedside Manners. As a medical doctor, what is your specialty? How has your career in medicine informed your poetry in general and your haiku?

Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology are my specialties. My writing and my work inform each other. No doubt, I am a better doctor because of it. The writing, if we do it well—by that I mean, with courage and setting aside the usual protections that keep us from the truth—is a pathway to enlightenment. That kind of understanding brings us to fundamental truths about how the body and the mind work, an area of interest to the healing professions, though we leave much unexplored in our educational processes. It’s all about compassion, empathy, kindness, and making a connection that emboldens trust. How else can we change our lives to accept the often invasive notion of getting better?

You also collected an anthology titled, Poems for the Time Capsule. What was the inspiration behind publishing this book?

I have taught poetry for thirty-five years at a wonderful place called the Fromm Institute. The professors there are allowed to choose their topic. There is no homework, no tests, just explorations of knowledge. The students are all educated and arrive there not to advance their careers but to gain knowledge and understanding. In order to have a text to demonstrate my opinion about the best poems of all time, I created this offering, Poems for the Time Capsule and a second version to use in the classroom. I also have placed it in doctor’s waiting rooms. Reading great poetry builds trust, which is so valuable in the healing professions.

Jacob D. Salzer, David Watts

At this point, a therapist would have me list all my successes: I raised a good-hearted child who’s a hell of a writer and musician; I had a book published by Simon & Schuster; I have two Master’s degrees; I’ve been in a stable and loving relationship for more than 40 years; I make good art.

But for each of those things, I can add the failures: my child is sad, my book was panned, etc.

Sometimes people tell me I’m a badass: tough, confident, impressive. But badasses don’t spend their days inert, playing games on their phones and crying while the TV murmurs in the background. Badasses know their worth and don’t settle for less. Badasses brush themselves off after a swing and a miss and swing again, and they don’t stop swinging. I’m more of a broke-ass bitch.

I don’t say these things because I want sympathy or reminders of my value. And this didn’t come from the suck voice or imposter syndrome. I’m not an imposter. I have a strong mind and I make some good stuff and I still like to squeeze all the juice I can from this life. I’m just being honest about the demoralization of a job search—at any age. And I’m showing you the ways I cope—or don’t—with my failures.

A lot of us feel this way at times, and it can impede action. However, even as I stew over my lack of worth to the business community and my brokeassery, I do what I can. I went to three May Day marches, in DC and Maryland, on Thursday. I went to the Flower Mart (first time ever for this forever city resident) yesterday. I’m heading to an in-person Indivisible meeting today. I’m planning a doll-head and thrifted ceramics indoor/outdoor fountain. And I’m trying to figure out how to turn myself into Blossom, one of the PowerPuff girls, even though I’m more of a Buttercup. (Buttercup won’t go over well on LinkedIn.)

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, No Crying in Baseball

sometimes i wish i would
have left that interview halfway through.
i would have said, “there is a hole
in the sky that is calling me more than this.”
i wish we could get real with each other.
i want people to tell me i didn’t get the job
to my face. i want them to say,
“you looked too crazy for our
pretty white building.” then i can laugh.
i’m convinced i can hear it between
the form rejection’s lines. i don’t apply
to jobs anymore. i plant garlic. i leave offerings
for fairies on the windowsill. i check my bank account
like a morning mass. no eucharist
just the stingy taste of spruce tips
from the cutting board. sometimes feed my fingers
into parking meters to buy myself
just a little more time.

Robin Gow, form rejection

a softening of the heart
a lowering of walls
advice over the phone:
avoid the area

later we learn
someone shot himself
in the dark on the campus lawn
avoid the area

sell yourself short
sell yourself cheap
just sell yourself
avoid the area

Jason Crane, POEM: Avoid The Area

In “The Rabbi,” Marc Chagall placed a sassy rabbi in a vivid yellow and green space as he takes a pinch of snuff. His dark gaze challenges, engaged in a metaphoric parable. It is self-critique, myth, provoking. “Degenerate Art,” an exhibition at the Musée Picasso in Paris, tells how the Nazis dragged this luminously yellow canvas through the streets of Mannheim, with the tag, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” It is chilling, the philistine, ideological and disgust all wrapped up in a familiar package.

Jill Pearlman, The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

We witness the world coming at us—

profits and poverty, despots and detainees.

Galaxies of goodwill and a moon refusing to turn maniac.

Wars coming at us. The bullet that killed Lorca coming at us. 

Fury, forgiveness, and imprisoned humanity.

Our weary world is spinning faster. Behind us is history, and even that is changing.

Suddenly, we’re different but still living in our skin.

Rust, reprisal, and death-pallor promises coming at us. Ma Rainey blues and the incendiary jazz of revolution.

We move through smoke and dust, search for stable stars in the night sky.

Across our knuckles, a tattooed map to find our way home.

We allow no one to alter the image to lead us astray. 

Rich Ferguson, We of the World

The trees are leafing out again at last.
Flying little chartreuse flags, crumpled
like wet laundry before they spread
and take up space.

If this were a love poem
I would say, I want you to take up space
and stretch toward the sun, exuberant
as the birds who can’t stop singing.

If this were a love poem
I could say anything at all
and you would know I really mean
all I want is for you to bloom.

Rachel Barenblat, Spring

Play heart-rendingly 
                     on your instrument so as to move
the coldest juror and melt the prison bars—  Blindness
         and the long road back—   A shorn head, loosened
                     cuffs; chains snapped for a body restored—

Luisa A. Igloria, The Underworld

And here’s a bonus poem, not really written “after” [Gale] Wilhelm, but still somewhat inspired by her work […]

spit on the spirit
till it’s holy
& filled with holes

like rain articulating
the surface of a lake

we kiss

Dick Whyte, Gale Wilhelm – 4 Short Poems (1929-1930)

This week, a somewhat shorter edition than usual (perhaps the weather was too nice to blog?) with corpses and coffins, stillness and transformation, conglomerates and cigarettes, and a famous poet snacking on small purple carrots. Enjoy.

The chief mourner so small,
shrunk under his flat cap.
His overcoat,
heavy as a king’s mantle,
pinning him to the earth […]

Karen Macfarlane, The Costume of the Chief Mourner

Several years ago (how long can some poems take to arrive in their proper form?) I was staring from a window (in a classroom – perhaps I was invigilating a test) and down in the car park below I saw a car valet parking up his van next to a much fancier car. I seem to have watched him pretty carefully if the poem is to be believed (which I’d usually say not to). Gradually, the poem acquired its erotic undertones (the lovers back to back in bed, the intimacy of the hand-washing, the moisture, the smells, the final turning away) which surprised me as I thought the poem was mostly a comment on work, labour (I love poems about processes) and ultimately about class differences (for money, one man cleans another man’s car).

Martyn Crucefix, Two New Poems – at ‘The High Window’

I’m honored to bits that two of my poems were published in Villain Era this past Friday!

There’s something so special about being included in a brand new publication, and I could not be more delighted about this revenge-themed magazine edited by Charlie Jensen. The concept and the editor are brilliant!

Katie Manning, Villain Era

Over the past month of mourning, I’ve found comfort in knowing that my mother led a long and full life, getting to do most everything she wanted even into her 90s. And she had the kind of death we all wish for: at home in bed, with loved ones near, in no pain, at peace. I’m also grateful for the ability to grieve, laugh and reminisce with my sisters.

Since then my mother has visited me several times in my sleep, a loving and comforting presence. Even in scenarios that involved corpses and coffins, the dream character of my mom conveyed that these were merely the outward trappings of death, while her spirit lives beyond. Other dreams have echoed our close bond: in one I asked her if she needed anything, and she replied simply, “hug.” In another I was washing her dear face with a washcloth, very tenderly, just as I did while caregiving for her in recent years.

My mother not only gave me unconditional love, she modeled how to live an authentic life. As one of my sympathy cards reads, “those we have loved are always with us.” I am truly blessed to be my mother’s daughter and to carry her in my heart.

the shape of a life
one sparkling wave
returns to the sea

Annette Makino, In memory of my mother

When I was at my mom and dad’s, my mom showed me various books that she had used as devotional texts for Lent.  One book, Forty Days with Madeleine L’Engle, had all sorts of scraps of paper in it, including some of my poems.

We couldn’t remember whether or not we were using the book together, but across a distance, or whether she was using it to lead a local church group.  I was happy to see that I still liked the poem.  It was first published in Chiron Review, back in 2009.  I’m almost certain that I wrote it earlier.

I’ve now written a variety of these kinds of poems, the ones I think of as Jesus in the modern world poems.  They are an attempt to answer that old Sunday School question of how the world would react if Jesus returned again and what would Jesus do and how would we recognize him?

I think of my Sunday School teachers of long ago, asking those questions, and I imagine that they would be scandalized by my poetic answers.  Of course, they may have been secretly radical themselves, as they taught us about the Jesus that the Church wanted us to know.  They may have planted these seeds that have bloomed into poems, decades later. 

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, That Year When Jesus Came to Your High School

Well, I was expecting a book about motherhood, from the title and the cover. The first poem is called “Lambing Season” so I was expecting – well, kind of cute and fluffy lambs. Maybe cute and fluffy poems? I, and any reader is quickly disabused of this notion with this opening poem. This is lambing season, but the lambs we are talking about are no longer living. Their hearts are being fed to the dogs. Cuts of meat are hanging in the window. Somehow this ordinary image of a butcher’s window is made extraordinary – visceral and full of death, as opposed to the usual feelings we might have about new life starting in lambing season.

Kim Moore, Putting Together a Collection – Looking at Swell by Maria Ferguson

In February, I took another stack of material to the Georgia State University Archive. It was amazing to see the care with which they’ve cataloged and stored my papers and ephemera from my career as a poet and writer. This stack included the working manuscript and proof of Wonder & Wreckage, my first attempt at a chapbook from 1995, and a school assignment from 1987 that has some of my first poems. In the middle of that stack (pictured above) are five notebooks from 1990 to 1999 that contain the handwritten early drafts of poems that would later make it into my collections and a lot of cringe-worthy heartbreak and experiments that were all part of the process. Thank you again to Morna Gerrard for being a world-class curator.

I’m now three issues into my editorship of Georgia Voice – the LGBTQ+ newspaper of record for the southeast. The news for the community continues to be dire as the current administration works to try and erase us, especially trans folks. The anti-trans legislation at the state and local level is absurd and cruel and mainly a distraction from all the other ways lawmakers are trying to strip people of their civil and human rights. You can read the March issue of Georgia Voice here.

Collin Kelley, Anthology update and other news

Jimin Seo is a trained pianist, and the musical term ossia is an alternative phrase or piece played instead of the original. Within the collection, poems alternate (generally, not every time) between English and Korean. It is not necessary to understand the Korean as a recurring theme is how to express how one feels and the limits/barriers of language. It follows the Objectivist school, “Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” (Louis Zukofsky). The poems are not expressions of a truth, but a search towards a truth. Using two languages underlines this isn’t about understanding, but the difficulty of communication, how to find the right language, the right words, to express an idea or emotion. How, in a conversation, most communication is not the words, but the tone, the rhythm, the non-verbal signals towards connection and sharing.

Emma Lee, “Ossia 오시아” Seo Jimin (The 87 Press) – book review

A poem about love and loneliness and the crippling anticipation of loss. First published in BOAAT, which sadly ceased to exist, as if to reenforce the anguish of the poem. Good thing there’s memory to keep us warm and fuzzy. Or cold and hungry, depending on our vantage point. I imagine that from the beyond, looking back, we’ll be as needy of human connection as we had always been. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we’ll be stoic and unmoved by the fading of everything we have ever loved. I prefer the former scenario, albeit it’s the infinitely painful one. I worry (very much) that we’re condemned to the second. 

Romana Iorga, Pied Piper, the Wind

“For a whole year I lived with Dante, with him alone, drawing the eight circles of his inferno,” Rodin told Le Matin. “At the end of this year, I realized that while my drawing rendered my vision of Dante, they had become too remote from reality. So I started all over again, working from nature, with my models.”

The artist’s dream is officially realized with the stamp of a State commission in 1879, when the Under-Secretary for Fine Arts offered Auguste Rodin the opportunity to create a work for the public. Obsessed with his readings of Dante, Rodin asked for permission to create a doorway for the planned Museum of Decorative Arts, a threshold between interior and exterior based on the first section of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, from the Inferno.

For the next two decades, The Gate of Hell would consume Rodin’s thoughts and work. He missed the 1885 deadline for the commission. Even at his death, Rodin’s gate remained unfinished, its fragments scattered, quoted, reshaped into various sculptures and pieces that rest across the museums of the world. […]

Rodin’s famous statue, The Thinker, was sourced from The Gate of Hell, where Rodin located him above the door panels, calling him “The Poet”, a god-like figure stationed at a central point, perched atop a rock looking down on the endless anguish of creation.

Alina Stefanescu, Rodin’s Dante.

Writing a poem is straightforward. Most of the time. Explaining the poem is hard. Embarrassing, even.

But what is almost impossible is describing what being a poet means: how the frame shrinks or expands suddenly, how objects and colours are interchangeable, how things connect to other things like strangers on a train, how every word, every sky, every shadow, every explanation, even this one, creeps into a poem, creeps into the poet, the process of stillness and transformation simultaneous, incessant and inevitable.

How long before eyes glaze over? How long before the conversation slides into a shallow awkwardness? How long before that pause segues into inanity? How long before dusk descends upon yet another impotent day?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Deliberation

One of [the] trails I frequent in the winter holds its history, it seems: the ravages of old big water coursing, of the sharp edges of glaciers arriving, receding, of rock heaved up, stones hurled down, transformed now into a narrow valley and a lively stream opening out into punctuations of marshes ringed by hills. Rocks tell complicated stories of the comings and goings. I like moving through this long story with my brief one. I have a few old scars that tell stories, falling off a bike here, a bit of surgery there. It pleases me that history writes itself this way on the material world, my skin included. I wonder sometimes about memory and whether it’s something only biological entities experience, or whether a stone recalls its rolling, a tree what caused its slash. Does a feather recall flying? And if it does, is it with nostalgia, that ache for what can no longer be? Is every step we take in the world awash in time past and recollected not just by me but everything around me? It makes my fears of the future seem silly, somehow, with so much of the past still held and writ large and small. The future just more writing to add to the dripping rockwall. Victoria Chang’s intriguing book The Trees Witness Everything felt in keeping with some of my own thoughts these past weeks.

Marilyn McCabe, The field remembers

Over the years, I’ve been told many times that we should move Red Hen to a city that loves and supports the arts: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Boston. My husband would prefer to live in any of these cities to living in Los Angeles.

Minneapolis has three presses. San Francisco has Heyday and McSweeney. Portland has Tin House. Seattle is near Copper Canyon. New York is the mothership of literary culture and media.

At nineteen, I watched a woman shake out her curls and approach her boyfriend at a truck stop. He was missing teeth. He had wicked tattoos. He was bald. He put his arms out to her, and he howled. She dove into him, her home in the world.

We uplift stories that will help readers find their own home in the world, to see themselves and know who they are. The stories of the West need to be published in the West. In my wild, thrumming life, I’m ready to find the next story. Life is big and messy and complicated, but we get to make art, to work with writers.

Kate Gale, Our Home in the World

I know there have been many eager to see what Toronto writer and editor Terese Mason Pierre could do through a collection beyond a chapbook, so it is good to see the release of her full-length debut, Myth (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2025), a collection of physical and precise poems on and around stories, storytelling and how stories take hold. These are poems as foundational as the earth or the ocean, offering sharp and astute first-person observational, declarative and descriptive lyrics. “My grandfather says we can eat what we kill.” she begins, immediately setting the tone with the opening line of the opening poem, “Fishing,” “We wade into the water and find a shark.” Terese Mason Pierre’s poems tells stories, including those that hint of their implications, meanings and true purposes. She wants you to listen to what these stories are saying. As this particular piece continues: “In the bleeding night, we carry it home, across / the mountain. The way your feet land before // mine, I memorize. I copy your plan for leading / me out of this spectacular cycle—fold it in and over // ourselves until our parents finally call for / the doctor. Our love has never allowed // itself to be gutted.”

Set in five section-clusters of shorter lyrics—“Expanse (the sea),” “Interlude (the deep),” “Brink (the earth),” “Interlude (the cosmos)” and “Swell (the stars)”—she interplays the elements with the cosmos with a call-and-response, the “interlude” of the Greek chorus, providing asides to the main narrative as part of this main narrative. “I’ve done it because it was what I wanted. / My neighbour’s garden grows mangoes beyond / a rotted fence,” she writes, to open the poem “Rich,” “and I stole one as it they’d require / a descendant if caught. But this trope is old. / This means nothing.”

In the end, myths are the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the stories that warn, catch and inform, stories that can propel us forward, hold us back, distract our attention or inform our world-view, including times when all of the above occur simultaneously. “My mother tried to tell me I was broken,” begins “Dead Living Things,” “and I shut her away. Who died and made her oracle? / Where my mouth falters, my skin reserves.” Oh my, this is good. Myth is a striking and deeply complex debut.

rob mclennan, Terese Mason Pierre, Myth

butterfly bush
high on the prison wall
thoughts take flight 

Jim Young [no title]

The poem with which the collection begins, Views Along the English Coast, is typical of Lund’s complex, challenging verse that draws on an impressive range of intertextual and cultural references to make its point. It begins with the matter-of-fact statement that ‘The chalk cliffs are falling again’. The simplicity of the description is deceptive: as the rest of the poem reveals this is more than a simple depiction of coastal erosion. Lund is summoning the iconic resonances of the white cliffs on the South Coast: he is calling upon their significance in music, art and literature as symbols of the national character, of the bulldog spirit, and of England as homeland. The fact that these cliffs are ‘falling’ suggests that notions of England and Englishness are unstable, liable to change. One factor precipitating that change is migration: when homes are lost new homes must be found. Lund draws a parallel between the English family rendered homeless, and needing to be taken in, with ‘the people, who, of course, got out of somewhere else’, in other words those migrants and refugees risking their lives in small craft crossing the Channel to seek refuge in England. Offering them a new home will have inevitable consequences for the nature of the culture of their adopted country. […]

[A]s nationalism is making itself felt in countries across the world, Jacob Lund’s Acoustic Mirrors could not be timelier. This is not an easy read; the themes are discomforting, and the pamphlet features layered, complex poems, rich in imagery and symbolism, drawing on a wide range of references. Behind them is a powerful intellect with something of real importance to say and the poetic skills to be able to do so.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Acoustic Mirrors’ by Jacob Lund

I’m delighted to be able to showcase today a poem from Martin Ferguson’s latest pamphlet, Stone Age Howl (Dreich Press, 2024).

The poem I’ve chosen is titled ‘Fugitives’. It’s especially interesting because of its delicate layers, starting with the title, which seems to refer to the protagonists but also hints at the passing of time itself, a theme’s that’s pivotal to the poem as a whole. A mention of grandparents nods at the passing of a generational baton, as encapsulated by the children’s use of rusted, ageing skates. And then there’s the filter of memory: this poem takes place in the past and the narrator’s perspective is of an adult who’s no longer a child. It’s an implicit invitation for us to reflect on our own lives, the specific rendered universal. I hope you enjoy it…

Fugitives

Small window in the winter
of English winters, when we knew
that conditions chance aligned,
to hold the weight of our escapes. […]

Matthew Stewart, A poem from Martin Ferguson’s Stone Age Howl

Recently on the weekly program Poetry Moment on WPSU — a radio station in Central Pennsylvania — poet Marjorie Maddox featured work by another Pennsylvania poet and Emeritus Professor at Penn State University, Emily Grosholz.

Grosholz’ featured poem, “Holding Patterns,” is a villanelle:  Here are its opening lines:

We can’t remember half of what we know.
They hug each other and then turn away.
One thinks in silence, never let me go.

The sky above the airport glints with snow
That melts beneath the laws it must obey.
We can’t remember half of what we know.

His arms are strong and warm, his breath is slow;
She holds him close, not knowing what to say.
One thinks in silence, never let me go.

Time silts the rivers, ravaging the flow
Of wave on wavelet, and suspends the day.
We can’t remember half of what we know.

 Grosholz’ complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Poetry Moment with a Bit of Math

What is worth noting, on the assumption you hadn’t yet, is the sound of the poem. There’s a masterclass to be had in the way the poem sounds within itself. I’m sure I’ve missed some, but the sounds of

Shale + fragrant
Conglomerates + cigarettes (the worst Oasis demo, etc)
Sex, Breakfast + eggs
Smoke + two stroke
Jolt + faulty
Gear + Golden
Feet + beach
Strata + marbles
Kissed + exquisite + this

And, “golden sand // sugaring your feet” is an excellent image that more than repays the entrance fee on its own…

Mat Riches, Chalk Lines

There’s something especially fascinating about outdated anthologies. This particular one is an unpretentious but carefully curated collection, aimed at school use — there’s no preface or introduction, but there are brief biographical notes on the poets at the back and suggested questions for each of them. The twelve poets are Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Louis Macneice, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas, Laurie Lee, Charles Causley and Ted Hughes. They are pretty equally represented, all with between nine and 16 poems: enough to get a real feel for what they are doing and how they are doing it, and the suggested questions repeatedly invite you to compare one poet to another.

This selection is in some ways quite conventional — any survey of British poetry in the 20th century ending-in-the-70s should surely have Auden, Macneice and Larkin, and it is a bit of a commonplace of university courses and introductory books to begin such surveys with Hardy. I think it’s an excellent anthology in lots of ways, and I very much enjoyed reading it, though it prompted several thoughts about how our sense of what “English poetry” is has changed over the last fifty years.

For a start, you wouldn’t even consider publishing such a collection now without including at least one woman. But which woman poet from England (or Wales) who was publishing between 1900 and 1970 would you actually include in your top 10 or 12? I don’t think it’s obvious. Edna St Vincent Millay (b. 1892), Stevie Smith (b. 1902), E. J. Scovell (b. 1907), Elizabeth Jennings (b. 1926) and Anne Stevenson (b. 1933) would all qualify chronologically, and if I were editing such a collection, I would include at least one of them, but in terms of influence — and, if I’m honest, also in terms of achievement — I wouldn’t rank any of them on the level of Hardy, Lawrence, Larkin or Thomas, and probably not with Owen or Macneice either. This is not, I think, some kind of internalised misogyny — it’s perfectly obvious why women were until very recently much less likely to have the opportunity to become, or to be recognised as, a major poet. But I think it’s hard to argue honestly that there was any English woman poet of this era who had anything like the status of the best known men. If there was a Rossetti or Dickinson of this period it was surely Plath (a much better poet than Hughes, but unambiguously an American). Do comment, though, with any suggestions.

On the other hand, it’s pretty striking that there’s also no Eliot at all. In fact, there’s something rather refreshing about reading a survey of English poetry ‘from Hardy to Hughes’ without him in it. This isn’t, as I first thought it might be, a tacit rejection of modernism tout court, or of free verse in general — much of Lawrence is much freer verse than most of Eliot, and plenty of Hughes is in free verse as well, so there’s plenty of it in the book. We might not feel comfortable calling Hughes a modernist poet as such, but Lawrence certainly is, and insofar as Hughes is a modernist he is for sure a Lawrentian modernist, not an Eliotic one. I think there are two possible reasons for omitting Eliot: one is that he was American, not English (very reasonable, in my view; he seems to me thoroughly American). The other, more prosaic, possibility is that at the time he was simply considered to be an ‘A level’ (rather than ‘O level’) poet.

The book contains no explanation of its selection, so I can’t confirm why Eliot’s out. I was interested, though, not to miss him. 

Victoria Moul, Hardy to Hughes: English poetry 1900-1970 without T. S. Eliot (or any women)

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ conference this year will take place over the last weekend of March, 2025. The conference is held in a different city each year. This year it will be in Los Angeles.

There was some deliberation over whether it was a good time to have the conference in L.A., given the recent fires. In the end the organizers decided to continue as planned.

Listening to the LA community, we believe that AWP’s presence in LA and your attendance in March will help sustain and support the local community during this critical time of recovery. Discover Los Angeles confirms that our conference in LA will boost the local economy; keep affected hospitality, tourism, and transportation workers in their jobs; and hopefully aid the city in its recovery.

I think this is the right thing to do. […]

My advice insofar as book fair conversations go (and really all conversations), is just try to be present. Talk to the person you’re talking to. Everyone has something interesting to offer. Don’t panic and feel like you should be talking to so-and-so (unless you’re actually late to meet so-and-so.) Don’t obsess over status. Listen to people, the way you want others to listen to you. […]

I’ve always enjoyed my time at the conference. In the years that I attended I got to speak to people I’d only ever known online. I got to have long conversations with editors I admired, about subjects beyond writing and editing. There were endless wisecracks. An editor nursed her baby. A famous poet sat behind me, snacking on small purple carrots. I met the OG founders of Submittable. I met the founders of NewPages. I caught up with writer-friends who lived far away.

I learned about small presses producing astonishingly beautiful books. I discovered new literary magazines I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of. Like just about everyone else, I left the conference with several pounds of gorgeous books from tiny independent presses and stacks of literary journals.

Becky Tuch, Q: Are you going to AWP in L.A.? What’s AWP all about?

Being in Mexico City was both wonderful and clarifying. In that vast metropolis of 22 million people, a small percentage are wealthy but the majority are definitely not. In the streets and subways you are confronted with human suffering and afflictions one would rarely encounter on the streets of an American or Canadian city. Water flowed freely in our hotel and rented apartments, but up on the sides of the volcanic mountains ringing the city, many Mexicans have none, and are forced to walk long distances to carry water back to their homes, or rely on spotty water deliveries by truck. The level of security on homes in more affluent neighborhoods — heavy locked gates, wrought iron pickets, mortared broken glass on tops of walls, and even coils of razor wire — as well as guards armed with shotguns or even machine guns outside some businesses, showed that theft and violence are feared and even expected.

Yet, it was clear that no matter what, daily life goes on. In that society, where the family is strong and central, people take care of each other; give pesos to beggars; support their local economies by buying from street vendors, many of whom are indigenous; participate in churches and other organizations that help those in need. Are they happy or unhappy? Some are definitely suffering. But I saw much more joy, laughter, awareness of others, kindness and genuine helpfulness than I usually do in public places at home. I observed this in simple interactions over food or travel; I felt it particularly when I talked to people in more detail or found myself in groups where we were all sharing or enjoying something together — music, dance, gardens, walking in a park, buying juice from a street vender. People are simply more human with each other. When someone gets up to give you their seat on the subway, they smile at you and speak, and make sure to make eye contact again when one of you leaves the car. Standing around a group of musicians playing on the street, the crowd interacts, dancing and catching each other’s eyes to share in the pleasure — and these are mixed groups of strangers, from the well-dressed to the tattered, all bonded by this moment of discovery and sharing of something joyful that is being given for free.

It made me think a lot about the time I spend sitting at my computer, versus the time I am with others. The time I spend in my head thinking, anticipating, and worrying — as opposed to really being in the present moment, doing things with my hands, actually learning something, having conversations, playing my instruments, observing the real world. The time I spend agonizing about politics and governmental failures, when so much of the power to make others feel better, and to make life happier, lies with each of us — and will continue to do so, no matter what happens in the larger world.

Beth Adams, A Letter from the Neighbors

Oats rise and belch as they cook,
and the whole world goes soft,
obligating you to stand here, waiting
in your wool socks,
your flannel robe.

Ren Powell, Early Spring

Stephanie and I have been engaged in trying to reclaim some of our lives from the major corporate oligarchs of our age. It hasn’t been easy but it has been rewarding. I’ve made a number of changes, including: […]

I have a Kindle. Last week I canceled my Amazon account. My Kindle still works, largely because for years I’ve been getting my ebooks from other sources and putting them on my Kindle using a piece of software called Calibre. It’s also possible to transfer them directly without any software because your computer will see your Kindle as a hard drive. There are many places to get books online, both for money and for free. In this day and age, all we’re ever paying for is a license for ebooks anyway, not actual ownership. Those books (and that music) can be edited, or removed from your devices entirely, at any time without your consent or even knowledge. The other day I came across the line: “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.” Do with that what you will.

Jason Crane, Taking back control

The politics of the country do not seem to have improved in the last week, but the shift to Daylight Savings Time better matches my sleep patterns, and longer days seem to help my mood. I am trying to find the joy in small things that I can. I visited a cat cafe in Kirkland, walked along the water (despite cold wind,) visited the dermatologist (no skin cancer, yay, but the doctor was puzzled by apparent allergic reactions to almost nothings that were pretty severe) after my father had melanoma surgery this week (he is recovering just fine.) Self-care during this time feels off. I keep dreaming about packing and repacking suitcases – on the titanic, on a doomed flight, before earthquakes – signaling my body is feeling the stress. So, this week I have some major dental work I’m nervous about – two front crowns, no novocaine, as usual. I hope my body can handle it without major MS flareups. In the meantime, I am waiting for flowers. I hope AWP will be good, despite my usual trepidation about flying (made worse by recent airplane mishaps) and finding a way to navigate LA as a disabled person. […]

I’ve been hacking around at my latest book manuscript to get it ready to send out to publishers. I’m trying to integrate the frustrations with politics and disability and being a woman in a non-woman-friendly universe into it without making it unfun to read. I’m trying to come up with working metaphors for the barriers in my life that could be universal, if that makes sense. I’m trying to re-think the way I write a poem, what a poem might look or sound like, for me. Something beyond growing into your own voice, but creating your own vehicles, vessels, forms. I haven’t had much mental space for this, but I feel it is important even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty to continue trying to create. The process of trying to explain my disability over the last few weeks to people over and over triggered a poem about monsterism and disability, the way that the world will make you feel monstrous for not fitting into norms.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Signs of Spring, Accessibility and Travel, and Reimagining Your Creative Process

stone saint
            an engine
     idles
            the sky
        longs to be known

Grant Hackett [no title]

I say in my Substack tagline that I am “Writer, reader, observer, New Orleanian.” I think observer is the most important of all. When you closely observe people, cultures, situations outside yourself, it makes you a better, more skilled, more empathetic writer and human.

I trust myself. I trust what I see with my own eyes, hear with my own ears, believe with my whole heart. There were times in my life I was told I was dumb, I was lazy, I was bad. But I didn’t believe it because I knew myself and my heart. I don’t say this to imply I’m better or smarter than others, only to encourage others to believe and trust in themselves, too. You must believe in yourself without reservation. That’s my advice as a writer and a human being in a tough world. No one else can give you that, you have to give it to yourself.

Charlotte Hamrick, Tell me what you see

The famous poet who used to be
a banker wrote, Teach us to care

and not to care Teach us to sit
still. Here too, an old man
drivels beyond repair.

Lies and spite among
the roses. Cruelties
in the very sand.

How many times did we hear
the words gold and golden
on the radio?

So we spread the butter
on the pancakes, spear
the little fingers

of meat. The dust is upon us,
but we will lick the sweetness
until our tongues grow numb.

Luisa A. Igloria, Ash Wednesday

I had a much more serious post planned for this week, about how wrong it feels to be writing when there is so much that is terrible in the world. Honestly I can’t add any more to the excellent articles that are out there, so I thought I’d take the rare step of writing something cheerful.

I’ll begin by saying my writer’s weeks may look very different to many other writer’s weeks. I live with chronic illness, which means my useful hours are pretty low – writing demands a lot of brain and body power and my brain and body can be somewhat capricious.

In my last post I said how full of joy I am that my days are made of writing. I can pretty much write about anything and feel happy (although I did once have a job writing for a sugar daddy dating website; that did not make me happy at all). I love the craft, love the tap of my fingers on the keyboard, the swirl of ink or pencil on the page. Writing is the core of who I am and the thing that I try hardest at, fail hardest at and, crucially, keep working to improve.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, My writing week has been so good I want to tell you about it

This morning the cat from across the road sings me three hellos while the air brings us gentle elements of spring.

Alt Text says this week’s photo is a shadow of a person on a road. I say this is me out on the country lane walking with my shadow. I liked the length of my shadow on this particular day and wanted to capture the spring sunshine. Whilst walking I had been pondering the way people sometimes look as though they are taking their shadow for a walk and sometimes look as though they are walking with their shadow. I was also thinking how I picture the metaphorical road I walk differently on different days. Can you begin to imagine the number of tangents this took my thoughts off into! […]

It was an absolute delight to find out that two of my poems had been shared at a World Book Day event. I felt a wonderful glow of pride when I was told. I always wondered whether something like this would happen and now I know it actually has. I tip my metaphorical hat to the sharers of words and to the fact that His Gun was performed from memory. I don’t have the skill to do that with my work, and can only recite very, very short poems that rhyme!

Sue Finch, WALKING WITH MY SHADOW

in some early legends of the moon
people believed it grew like a fruit,
ripening just to be eaten over & over
bite by bite. i have a nail gun. i have a mirror.
i know i can get the moon to stay full
of salmon & wings. a rainstorm is rolling in.
there are not enough hours to sleep.

Robin Gow, loose moon

This week: milk-blue light, a bag of grief, demonic possession, the promise of spring, and more. Enjoy.

Morning twilight brings me a sense of peace like nothing else. There is a quiet hope, a sense that the world is surviving, despite everything we place in its way. Birdsong builds, milk blue light rises above the trees and, just for a moment, nothing is spoiled.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Embroidering Hypnagogia

I try not to hate on February. The days do get longer; there’s often some early blooming or greening, a little more birdsong in the mornings, days that aren’t too miserable for walking. But. A lingering malaise of the spirit often natters about in the background of my days. This year, I am trying an infusion of art.

I’ve enrolled in an art class–visual art–drawing, sketching, experimenting with different media such as gouache, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils. I just want something to do with my eyes and hands that isn’t reading, writing, photography, social media/texting. I think of it as an exploration. The workshop I took with Anita Skeen and Cindy Morgan Hunter in October made me realize that using other forms of art might feel good to me, body and soul. This year, starting now (February), I’m taking an 8-week art class with Helene Parnell of Blue Church Art. We shall see how that goes. I am not doing this to create a good “product” but to enjoy the less-intellectual, more freeing aspects of the art as process…the way I did with the collages and book-making in the New Mexico workshop.

Ann E. Michael, Febru-dreary

The writing door in my brain has been closed lately. Slammed tight. Swollen shut. Locked and barred. I have only written two poems since January 1, and one of them is so awful that I shudder to even call it a poem. I have been trying to revise and submit, what I usually do when I hit a rough spot with my writing, but that hasn’t changed anything nor has it fulfilled the urge to make. So, with my writing door closed, I don’t look for a window. I look for another door.

Another door implies that I’m choosing to cross the threshold into a different space. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the computer, reading and responding to subs for Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters, so finding something offscreen with which to engage was appealing. That hallway has led to working on the Februllage collage challenge. From their Instagram page: “Februllage is a collaboration between Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandinavian Collage Museum. This initiative invites collage artists to make a ‘collage a day’ throughout February using our OFFICAL WORD PROMPT CALENDAR – 2025.” They provide a prompt word each day in February, and artists from all over the world, both beginning and experienced, post their results.

Donna Vorreyer, When One Door Closes, Look for Another Door

I don’t have a strong idea of who I am and I change my mind a lot. To have a strong identity of self is to have a steady thought process, a set of similar thoughts about one thing at once. You know who you are because you always think this way or that way. I’m making assumptions here, about people with a strong sense of identity, please do comment with your experiences. The flip-flop nature of my identity is, I believe, in part because I have lots of thoughts and images in my head at once: my brain is like a switchboard on which all the lights are lit up at the same time, each one containing a separate idea. These ideas are usually connected in some way, but that connection might be sensory or imagery based rather than concrete. […]

There are a handful of what I would call ‘self portrait’ poems in the collection. Some of them obviously self portrait poems, unashamedly using this very well used poetic device to explore identity. Some less obvious. Boulder Returning in Echoes of Self is a self portrait poem, Sometimes I pretend I am a Dog is a kind of self portrait poem, Drone is a kind of self portrait poem. There are a lot of poems in which my body is reimagined as nature; as an interface for nature, and my brain as the receptor, the translation place for nature. I like that idea. That is my identity in this moment. Perhaps my identity is not meant to be anything solid, perhaps my identity is meant to be fluid. There are a lot of poems in which identity, female experience and the rural identity are merged and explored, and these are often self portrait type poems. […]

The hearth is my heart. I am
rooms of darkness and forgotten light.
My language is the mid-winter sun.

Whale-backed. Face-down.
Burrowed into by rabbits.
Burrowed into by rats.
Ashes and teeth are my language.

Wendy Pratt, Writing the Poem: Self-Portrait as Bronze Age Burial Mound

The human is a bag of grief; a bag pierced with holes, 
a multi-headed bag, split and split
again.  It still asks questions: Who put the country
in the blender and pressed whirr; who remembers 
when “decent” was what we called citizens?
Who let homo sapiens out of the bag 
to torture their own? 

Jill Pearlman, Bag of Grief

This week has been given to procrastinating, the biting of teeth in pain, two trips to the emergency room to check on an a post-surgical infection, sleepless nights, and cabin fever. The rain has been coming down relentlessly since Wednesday, and I’m struggling to get a full breath. Something is bothering me. And, ironically, if I could just bring myself to write, I might be able to calm myself and breathe.

This is not the first time I’ve had this breathing issue. I first saw a doctor about it when I was in my 40s. It didn’t stop until I quit my job. Then it started again during cancer treatment. It has something to do with losing the hope that I will ever feel moored. Instead I feel that my life is flowing backwards into chaos instead of following a story arc from rags to riches—metaphorical riches—like all those stories I read as a child. The heroine of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess had a martyr-like disposition, had a neighbor with a monkey—though I would absolutely settle for a neighbor with a donkey or some fainting goats.

Can I at least expect a deus ex machina to swing in sometime in the next decade and make me feel like I have “done something with my life” before it’s over?

Memoirs have story arcs about transformations. And while I’ve been trying to shape this memoir, I’ve been writing these poems about wasps, who transform from eggs, to larvae, to wasps; from carnivores to vegetarians. But I’m not sure that I’ve undergone a transformation. Or maybe I’ve undergone several, only to morph back again to my basic insecurities and my dysfunctional methods for compensating.

Ren Powell, Arriving at the Banality of Evil

There’s a moment about 40 pages into Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want that, in retrospect, comes to read like his own description of the book at work, its operating principle, so to speak:

I only know what I think when I’m in conversation. Conversation’s an art: my thinking comes alive in dialog. I don’t have doctrines or positions, I have modes of engagement, situational rejoinders, reaction deformations. It takes two to tangle, three to rumble, four to do the Brooklyn trot.

It’s more than apt that this is the opening to the first response in the first of a number of interviews collected here, conversational interviews where the questions are sometimes longer than the answers. However, the conversational tone spreads far beyond these formal conversations; the whole book is a conversation involving Bernstein, the kinds of poetry (and poets) he wants, the reader and the kinds of poetry he doesn’t want, ‘the button-down decorum that masquerades as serious poetry’.

Billy Mills, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies by Charles Bernstein: A Review

— To whom is the poem faithful?

— To itself.

— Who does it serve?

— That flush of emotion that birthed it.

— Who does it betray?

— The world.

Alina Stefanescu, Sul ponticello.

I mentioned in my last post that January had been intensely difficult, but the weeks since then became even more harrowing. My dad had a heart attack and has been sedated in the ICU with all sorts of tubes keeping him alive. This week, I had the scariest asthma attack of my life and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Yesterday, my son injured his foot in PE and is now on crutches. And, of course, the entire political situation in the US gets more absurd and awful each day.

But just yesterday, my dad was finally able to wake up enough to nod in response to questions and squeeze hands when asked. That feels like a miracle.

I’ve had to miss or cancel many poetry-related things so far this year, but I’ve also had several lovely poetry-related things happen: I had two poems each accepted in the new journals Villain Era and Jackdaw Review, and I was invited to contribute to a really cool project called The Creative Process. Today, I get to read at the first event for the MAW Reading Series, which is run by students in our new M.A. in Writing program. I’ve been writing new things alongside my students during exercises in my writing classes.

Somehow, in the midst of so much bad, there is still creativity, newness, and good.

Katie Manning, Bad News, Good News

i don’t want to buy a mask anymore.
where would i go with it anyway? i am not that man.
i have seen the fires already & they have seen me.
we do not all want the same midnight. oh if only we did.
mine has sugar & a heavy moon. theirs
has a pane of glass from which they dream
of watching us burn.

Robin Gow, guy fawkes mask

Silicon wafers endure a strenuous process of weathering and production in order to become the little aerial landscapes we call microchips. Silicone dioxide is grown or deposited upon it. Lithography occurs, preparing it for light resistance. Parts exposed to UV light are hardened, the other parts to toxic gases. Some parts are doped with chemicals. Aluminum paths are interwoven into the landscape of the microchip. Computational power is pumped into the tiny square. Time and the manipulation of its materials has led to a single microchip possessing up to 50 billion transistors. To hold a microchip on one’s finger is to hold time and its materials.

*

I roll onto my side and focus on Nineveh. Thousands of years before Christ turned water into wine, men turned sand into a metropolis. It is argued that the meaning of Nineveh is “place of fish” or “house of the goddess”. The city, located on the east bank of the Tigris River, most certainly became a place of fish when flooded. Located next to the modern city of Iraq’s Mosul, the metropolis of the city is a backdrop to the diligent uncovering of an ancient civilization.

*

From quartzy river-worn sand comes the microchip. From above, any given microchip resembles an aerial view of a civilized metropolis. The central square, a headquarters or palace. The aluminum rivulets, a meandering river. The interface here, a suburban town. The interface there, a parking lot to the module grocery store. The USB Host is City Hall. The JTAG Interface, a skate park. The WKUP Button, a rotunda or aviary. The LCD Interface, a dairy farm full of cattle. The UART Debug Interface, a playground. And so much green space!

Sarah Lada, Time and Its Materials

Tanka are a vessel for holding tough things. I don’t want to add “in a beautiful way”. I would rather prefer to say “in a way that is necessary”. Sometimes a poem stabs you, shooting out of the dark alley of your being.

bloody uterus,
when will you
finally stop
hurling at me
probabilities—

[…]

the truth is we lost
as we began to look
the other way
augmented
reality

Kati Mohr, … an ode to tanka

I have listened to “Not Like Us” over and over since it came out. I feel this song beating inside me.

There is a reason this song won so many awards. Kendrick Lamar is a talented musician. This song catches the national heartbeat. I am the least qualified person to write about rap/hip-hop, so I won’t try to speak over the voices of lived experience. I know about Drake. I know about the diss war. But if you didn’t know any of that, you would know this song. It is America singing to you. […]

I’m not giving up.

It’s painful now, but the best of us are interested in all the ways that we are magical, unique, and share humanity. That’s why I believe that travel is so great. You meet people who are different than you, who think differently.

The first time you realize there are people in the world that eat with sticks, you think, “Wow, all this time, I’ve been stuck with these metal implements? I could have been eating with those cool sticks!”

The first time you go to a fancy person’s house, you think, “You have got to be kidding! How much silverware are you putting on the table?”

I have to say, that’s what I love about Red Hen’s current board. A group of people curious about books, stories, how the world works, and how to make it better.

That’s what makes life so amazing. Learning about the forks and sticks and the napkins folded like flowers, and the platypus, and the mangrove swamps, white dolphins, and the rings around Saturn, and all those wild stories waiting to be written down and read.

Yes, they are not like us. We could learn from them. They could learn from us. We could all sit around the campfire and share food and listen to music and tell stories like we did at the beginning of the world. 

Kate Gale, “Not Like Us” and the national heartbeat

— Let something call to you — a beautiful or frivolous object, a word, a picture, and then follow it, learn about it, ask questions about it. Maybe it’s a glitter ball, maybe it’s a typewriter.

— Disco balls or Glitter balls were patented in 1917, used in nightclubs in 1920. We know them from the movie Casablanca, and we remember Madonna’s disco ball entrance.

— Kingsley Amis called the typewriter an “alphabet piano.”

— In her book The Art of Resonance, Anne Bogart reminds that “the typewriter is a transformation modelled upon a piano.”

— The Gen AI gang like to quote (or paraphrase, let’s be real) T.S. Eliot (have they ever read Eliot? they might enjoy The Wasteland lol) who said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better or at least something different.” We hear the phrase, “steal like an artist,” often enough. Artists are allusive, though. Artists pay homage.

— Maybe we should all start imagining the phrase, “steal like a librarian.” You know, add the footnotes, the citations, the bibliography, the endnotes, the indexes. Still, that’s not really the writer’s or artist’s job. The work of art should make you want to delve, dig deeper into meanings, allusions, subtexts. Look how this worked after Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime gig.

Shawna Lemay, Beauty Notes – Typewriters and Pianos

It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all artists regularly do, to blame the block on a fickle muse and rue ourselves abandoned by the gods of inspiration. The truth is somewhere in the middle: We are a channel and it does get blocked — it is not an accident that the psychological hallmark of creativity is the “flow state” — but while it matters how wide and long the channel is, how much friction its material offers and how much corrosion it can withstand, what flows through it — its source, its strength, the rhythm of its ebb and flow — is a mystery. That is why Virginia Woolf termed creativity a “wave in the mind” — the mind matters, but the wave just comes unbidden and unbiddable. […]

as he traveled to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and spent fifteen years living in Buddhist communities, Snyder came to question many of the Western assumptions about creativity. In an interview he gave in his late forties, he admonishes against mistaking the passionate path for a path of madness, against buying into the tortured genius archetype handed down to us by the Romantics, most of whom never lived past their thirties:

The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that they and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times… I aspire to and admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging — which is to say more spiritual and more deeply physical — things.

In his sixties, with hundreds of poems written and millions lost to the mystery, he at last distilled his experience of creativity in a spare, stunning poem partway between Zen koan and prayer, found in his 1992 collection No Nature (public library):

HOW POETRY COMES TO ME

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Complement with Elena Ferrante on the myth of inspiration and Rilke on the combinatorial nature of creativity, then revisit Gary Snyder on how to unbreak the world.

Maria Popova, Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force

I was thinking about [Hilary] Mantel’s description of demonic possession this week partly because I’ve been rereading several of her books, but also because I’ve been thinking about different types of religious poetry, and especially about how women (in particular) describe encounters with the Muse, a kind of supernatural or spiritual experience which often combines a kind of possession with a story about origins — what it was that made the poet a poet. (Mantel’s story is horrible, but it, too, is a kind of explanation.) I am particularly interested in examples which (like Mantel’s descriptions of encountering the demonic) are largely unironic.

When I asked this question on social media, several people wrote mentioning Jo Shapcott’s poem, ‘Muse’, which is clever and memorable but not exactly what I mean. Her poem relies upon the modern sense of a ‘Muse’ as a (real and human) person who inspires another’s art and who is, very often though not always, also a lover or at least a person of, as it were, erotic interest. Typically, a male artist has a female muse and the wit of Shapcott’s poem lies partly in the reversal of that — though I also like the way the beloved is compared to a dreaming dog, lost (like the poet) in its own passion of pursuit.

Obviously sexual passion has overlaps with spiritual experience, and for many contemporary poets perhaps an erotic metaphor is the most accessible way to approach the mystery of inspiration. But when I asked the question I was interested in more literal — and therefore, I think, in a contemporary context, much more surprising — ways of imagining this sort of supernatural or religious experience of encountering an external power. I am particularly interested in poets who find ways to write about this sort of encounter as straightforwardly as Mantel does: the opposite of the sort of wishy-washy ‘spiritual-by-numbers’ sprinkling of vague profundity which is surely one of the most irritating features of a lot of contemporary Anglophone poetry.

Victoria Moul, Muses and demons

Surely we all have one or two Faber anthologies edited by Geoffrey Grigson on our shelves? Love Poems, Popular Verse, Reflective Verse, Nonsense Verse, Poems and Places, Epigrams and Epitaphs . . . As a critic he often wielded a savage power through his magazine New Verse. And as a big beast on the literary scene of the early 1980s, Hermione Lee interviewed him on Channel 4. But since his death in 1985, he’s better known merely as the husband of Jane Grigson, the celebrated cookery writer. His own poetry has been neglected which made John Greening’s 2017 Selected Poems from Greenwich Exchange a welcome opportunity to re-consider it. I think Grigson’s contrasting themes were established early on. The influence of two great poets (not Eliot, not Yeats) is clear from the start and it may be that the limits of Grigson’s poetic achievement and the absence of much development in his style, are because he never chose one path or fully escaped either. […]

‘To Wystan Auden’ records the moment Grigson learned of Auden’s death in the “English September” of 1973. His admiration for the younger poet is fulsome. With the appearance of his early work, Auden became “living’s healer, loving’s / Magician”. From the other end of the temporal telescope, we can now see what the young Grigson gleaned from Auden’s poetry:

You were our fixture, our rhythm,
Speaker, bestower, of love for us all
And forgiving, not condemning, extending
To all who would read or would hear
Your endowment of words.

For all Auden’s own protesting about poetry making nothing happen, for Grigson, “time, after you, by you / Is different by your defiance”. One might ungratefully gripe that these are rather vague compliments from one poet to another. But Greening quotes Grigson suggesting that Auden’s achievement was in destroying “a too familiar, too settled monotony in manner and subject”. This is undeniable and this selection shows Grigson following Auden’s lead, yet at the same time, through his life, also being drawn back to a different, more traditional poetic style in the model of Hardy.

Martyn Crucefix, Remembering Geoffrey Grigson

Poets, obviously, display varying means, foci of attention, strengths, weaknesses. Peter Gizzi’s special strength lies in his ability to transport inarticulate emotions – grief, dread, disorientation, wonder – directly into verbal music. Here I mean music in a very literal sense : ie., the words his poems, though they are words, remain inarticulate. They are sometimes quite moving, as partial songs, untranslatable melodies : yet it seems to me Gizzi attains this state of unrealized elegy – unmastered grief – with a very deliberate poetic method or constructed idiom.

The reader/listener is held fast by this suspended, unrelieved emotion, this unresolved grief – on behalf of the poem. Mute, “unexplained” emotion provides the material foundation, so to speak, for the independence, the hermetic integrity, of the poem-as-poem.

Some critics and commentators have questioned the lack of a clear elegiac “object” of emotion in Fierce Elegy. They have also noted the quick tonal shifts between slangy demotic “street-talk” and refined allusions to past poetic masters. In my view both of these effects are only incidental phenomena, representing a more pervasive stylistic idiom, which Gizzi shares with several other American poets of recent decades. I would (with fear and trembling) label this style postmodern deflection. Here, by “postmodern”, I’m suggesting that the style’s roots extend back to early modernism : the great wave, across all the arts, toward abstraction, autonomy, autotelic hermeticism, free self-realization. And by “deflection”, I suggest this style’s roots go back even further : to the symbolist revolt against “journalism”, the rhetoric of all social collectives – in favor of art-for-art’s-sake and poésie pure, the literary “absolute” of Mallarmé and (to some degree) Rimbaud.

Henry Gould, “Forget daylight, I prefer a dark tenderness”

A daughter-father relationship and threats to a way of life mingle in Fat for Our Stories by Vivan Faith Prescott, a native of Alaska.  Prescott and her father harvested salmon together; several poems describe that labor, its joys and difficulties.  Others comment more specifically on changes in the climate, leading to a sense of things out of season. The reader learns about both the life of salmon and the concerns of those who depend on them in a series of gentle poems using a variety of forms.

There are many sad notes, like “We were once good at reading weather.” in “Five Degrees Above Normal.” but also hope, as in the end of “On a Variety of Temporal and Spatial Scales”:

The scent of my natal stream
still awakens me, the sea butterfly
still stirs my morning coffee.”

This chapbook is well worth ordering from Green Linden Press, especially for those like me who have not personally experienced a life dependent on nature’s balance.

Ellen Roberts Young, A Chapbook I Recommend

Snow day has landed! Given the wealth of snow we’ve had since Wednesday (a snowfall record over a few days, going back to 2008), the arrival of my first copies of this are absolutely perfect. This is my third title with American publisher Spuyten Duyvil, following How the alphabet was made (2018) and Life sentence, (2019)! This collection is constructed as a kind of sequence of sequences, and includes the title poem, “Snow day” (produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2018), and “Somewhere in-between / cloud” (also produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2019), which was composed for and published as part of Dusie Kollektiv 9: “Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween”—A Tribute to Marthe Reed (1958-2018). 

rob mclennan, Some updates: new poetry book (Snow day) + next week in Vancouver

I have finally again (again) started a daily writing practice — just five or ten minutes in which I note what I’ve been seeing, what I’ve been thinking about. I’ve resisted it even though I know it feels good to do, to take notice of what I’m noticing, if not living an examined life, the kind worth living, according to Socrates, at least a half-awake one.

I’ve been sitting on this Tony Hoagland poem for a long time, trying to figure out exactly what I want to say about it. It’s an easy poem, maybe a little too self-conscious, a little too wink-and-nudge. But I give Tony Hoagland a lot of leeway, as his poetry tends to be open-armed and gleeful anyway. (Plus, I have soft spot for him since that day in a workshop after I read my draft, he said, “Yeah, now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.” The guy can do no wrong now. Well, I mean, he’s dead, so, yeah. Rest in peace.)

Anyway, it’s a poem of notice. A narrator noticing themself noticing, finding themself finding, and writing it all down, nosing it all down the page, but thinking, in the end, of you, reader. Finding in the end of the journey of writing that they’ve discovered a poem, and in the poem they’ve found you peeking over their shoulder. And in the poem Hoagland picks up the poem and gives it to you. Here, he says. Lookee here.

Marilyn McCabe, Once in a cool blue middle of a lake

Lots of people liked my post last month featuring a week’s worth of short poems from recent reading: [link]

So I thought I’d give it another spin. My model was the late-night radio show where the DJ has the freedom to play a mix of things without much more comment than the name of the track and the artist. This time, I’ve widened my range from recently-published books to include poems from magazines too, and sprinkled in a few links.

*

I found it hard to pick a favourite from Ian Duhig’s excellent new collection, An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador). So I decided to go with one that continues last week’s post about my discovery, as a teenager, that other poets sometimes made fun of Ted Hughes. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #28: Animal Facts

One Language (SmithǀDoorstop, 2022, available here), the debut collection by the photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, intermittently dazzles with its poems from far-flung warzones, as in ‘Welcome to Donetsk’:

You teach me this wartime trick –
to look for living pot plants
in the windows in Kievska Avenue.
Most are crisped and brown.

But one green geranium
and a succulent spider plant
offer proof of life
for the person who waters them.

It’s interesting that she writes ‘for the person’ and not ‘of’, and in so doing shifts the perspective from the external observer to the unseen person inside.

Despite their most serious subject-matter, some of the poems feel inconsequential and fragmentary, like a diary haphazardly moulded into poetry. The most affecting highlight is a 12-part sequence, ‘Stories No One Wants to Hear’, recounting, in perhaps necessarily prosaic poetry, key incidents where, for better or worse, violence played a part in her life. I was left feeling that where she does tell her important stories well, Taylor-Lind might have rendered them more successfully still as a prose memoir, in the manner of Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, because it feels like she has a lot more to say, e.g. regarding her position as one of the few females in her profession.

Matthew Paul, February reading

Long ago, in a less digital world, I wrote things and sent them through the mailbox to a few print magazines to see if they wanted to publish them. I enclosed a self-address, stamped envelope (the old SASE — anyone remember that acronym?) and waited, often for months. Most of the time, my poems came back to me like homing pigeons in the old SASE, sometimes with an editor’s letter explaining why they weren’t going to publish them. Once I had a rejection letter from the editor of The Atlantic. I considered framing it. Once I had one from the distinguished editor of Poetry Magazine. Again, frames were considered.

But in today’s digital world, everything is online and happens fast. I send out a batch of poems only to get my rejection — or acceptance — within a few days or weeks. I can post a link to the poem in the online magazine and people can actually read it at the touch of a button. No subscription required.

What I’ve learned from this is that writing — especially poetry — is for sharing. For me, it’s not about collecting distinguished credits but about being read by actual people. Many of whom don’t normally read poetry, let alone subscribe to poetry magazines.

The comments I get back teach me things. The biggest thing I’ve learned from publishing my poetry is to be generous. Writing a poem is a way of giving something to the world. It’s about the reader, not about me, though it usually starts being about me and my memories, dreams, and thoughts. The fluidity of publishing my poetry in the world is now a conversation, and as a poet, I become part of a community. I highly recommend it!

Rachel Dacus, Publishing My Poetry Online

I have a structural problem, with books. So far my digital storage isn’t jammed but there is no way in sweet purgatory that these stacks are all going into those shelves. They have overrun the box capacity and heaven help but 4 more at least are coming by mail this month. Not to mention the wish list and the inevitable caving in at least some cases.

I have to make some hard calls. No, no, not purge. Probably. Boxing up anthologies and magazines so there is room for novels, history books and single author poetry collections. Even that mitigates little. I could actually box up some to sell that I expect I won’t read again. I believe I have a box or two that I meant to drop off at a book fair but mislaid when the time came. Or I unconsciously wanted to keep them.

Two walls are covered floor to ceiling in shelves. There’s a lot of windows and few options with quilting supplies also overflowing containment. And now more canvasses, and more embroidery gear. This is getting a little out of hand. But to be surrounded by possibility and options is rather delightful.

Pearl Pirie, Conundrumming

When a dream mates with an anvil, they create the heaviest thoughts.

When conundrums shack up with condominiums, you get troubled dwellings.

What if we could take what we consider to be the worst parts of ourselves and rearrange them into a cosmos where every planet can play any musical instrument with no training?

Rich Ferguson, One of Many Litmus Tests for Longing

You erase a comma. Then put it back.

And then erase it again. You keep wondering — why did you spend this winter writing a book? Because one day we all might burn books for heat. One day we might use books to build rafts. We’ll tether books together to sail to safety.

I think maybe the world will end with dead unread books.

You snap your laptop shut. You go downstairs and switch on the TV. The news is on. There are images of empty supermarket shelves. The newsreader is talking about stockpiling food and medicine. They cut to footage of a couple stockpiling tins. The couple stands side by side and they smile into the camera by a wall of baked beans. They grin down the lens and tell us all at home that they are ready.

I’m ready. The man repeats. We want to be ready. His wife nods. We want to be ready. They say this in unison as they fill plastic storage boxes with tins of baked beans. I think the beans situation is covered now thanks to John and Elaine in Maidstone.

At the end of the world, will baked beans be like heroin? You now imagine swapping a book for a tin of baked beans and wonder, which book would you sacrifice for a tin of beans? You picture yourself scoring a cheeky hit of beans on toast by a public toilet. Hey man, got any dirty brown sauce?

You switch off the TV and go into the kitchen to make tea. You stare out of the window at the pink and the sky and the light. It is summer but it is February. But it is summer and it is February. And too bright and too warm and too weird and too sunny. It is alarming that they don’t mention this heat on the news. We need sun cream in February. Sun cream in February. And my neighbour is having a barbecue in February. And the last super tusker elephant died this February. And it is summer and it is February and it is summer and it is February.

What was the point of writing a book all winter? What is the point of us? When our time is so fractured. Divided. Distracted. Interrupted. Our attention is demanded and demanding attention. Our world is burning, flooding and changed.

But then if not for love, then why are we all here?

Salena Godden, Sun Cream In February

You know you’re only mortal and not a god
           but that doesn’t mean you know nothing 
about how language is right now being used 
           to camouflage ignorance as virtue, villainy
as self-control, avarice as acumen. Whole 
           planes collide mid-air or roll over in flames 
on the tarmac. Lawyers stutter I don’t know 
           rather than tell the truth.

Luisa A. Igloria, If You Know, You Know

The job of the politician is to try to find practical solutions for these problems. The job of the poet though is to help express how we feel, both individually and collectively. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Perhaps that’s why I felt particularly drawn to this poem by Cynthia Atkins, because she takes this difficult subject and handles it so effectively. […]

The poem comes from a book where “God” appears as multiple objects in the modern world. I interpret the title of this poem, “When God is a Bullet” to be a nod to the many powers – good and evil that fill the world but are beyond our control. In this case, the bullet is a god that takes away life and is beyond understanding.

It feels like the speaker is outside the situation looking in, trying to understand the boy who does the shooting. This is difficult which is why the speaker turns towards metaphor.

“This is the scar of the battle lost to each failed self. . . This is the blemish larger than a shrunken world. . . A jacked-up car . . . This is a storm in a damaged town.”

But this is also a real person. The speaker posits a boy who feels excluded, isn’t invited to parties. She’s trying to understand what causes him to become a shooter. But rather than trying to distance the boy and other the boy, she looks at how he is familiar, part of a family, part of a school.

Tresha Faye Haefner, When God is a Bullet

Someone wrote me a question about what her young daughter should read, if she enjoys my poetry, but couldn’t find other poetry like mine. I thought hard about the poets that had inspired and influenced me when I was a young girl, although I was certainly a somewhat unusual reader – Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, E.E. Cummings, and Louis Simpson as a ten year old. I was reading my mom’s college poetry textbooks and encountering T.S. Eliot and Yeats and Robert Frost. In college, definitely inspired by Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, Margaret Atwood, and of course, Sylvia Plath. If my own work seems somewhat unusual, it could be because it was the kind of poetry I wanted to read and couldn’t find – funny and pop culture-y and dark and not afraid. Of course, besides poetry, I was very influenced by mythology and fairy tales, prose like A.S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood and Terri Windling’s collection “The Armless Maiden” and later on, Kelly Link. I read a lot of male science fiction writers as a kid, from Isaac Asimov to Ray Bradbury, but also read female science fiction writers, like Andre Norton and Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L’Engle. What recommendations would I make to a young person today? There are so many more young women writing and getting published than when I was a kid.  Who would you recommend?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Supporting Each Other in Difficult Times, and Recommendations for Young Poetry Fans

I wrote a draft of a daft poem after hearing a discussion on The Verb between Ian and Cecilia Knapp that used the phrase heavy lifting. The draft mentions reviews. I then looked at my RSS feed after the show and saw an article by Emma Lee about reviews. All this in a week when I thought about getting back into the reviewing game again. I’m still choosing not to as I don’t care what I think at present, so why should anyone else?  

Mat Riches, (not) Under the influence (aka Two Timming)

A couple of years ago I wrote a pair of Sukkot poems, Fragile and Rejoice. In the manuscript for my next book of poetry, they’re a two-part poem titled “Shekhinah says.” You could read them as written in God’s voice to us, or as written in a human voice to a human beloved. (Or both at once.)

In recent months composer Adam Green (who is also the music director at my synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires) wrote a musical setting of those two poems. And yesterday, at our belated Tu BiShvat concert, the two-movement piece was premiered by the CBI Choir. 

It’s an incredible honor to have a composer write music to uplift my words. Melody and rhythm give them a whole new layer of meaning. I love that one piece feels wistful and soft, like watercolors or fog in the valleys — and the other, written in 5/4, feels multilayered, surprising, like it ends too soon.

Every time we sing these poems, I’m hyperlinked to what I was feeling when I wrote them. I can call the exact feelings to mind and heart. And now the poems also have another layer, because I hear them in harmony! Adam also switched the order of the two poems, which (for me) subtly changes their arc.

When I wrote the poems, I was praying for a trajectory from fragility to rejoicing. I began with what’s broken, and closed with the hope of wholeness. Adam’s choice to put them in the other order makes an existential point: even within wholeness, we are fragile. But in that fragility, we are not alone.

Rachel Barenblat, New music for Rejoice / Fragile

February always brings lovely things in this household – a birthday, a wedding anniversary and the promise of Spring in the offing. I’ve already been spring-cleaning my poetry folders, and feeling rather humbled as regards my poor submissions habit. I seem to have a reputation as a submissions queen, because of my spreadsheet. But there’s that expression ‘physician heal thyself’ (where the heck does that come from?). A number of people have accosted me recently to ask about magazine submissions, and I’ve had to admit I haven’t submitted anything much for ages. Why? I suppose it’s partly because I feel there are so many up and coming poets whose work is appearing everywhere, I’m feeling my work might be a bit ‘has been’. But I know that’s stupid really, because for all the ‘fast fashion’ that exists in the poetry world, decent writing is still appreciated. Plus, my first collection is about to launch, so this is no time to wallow in self-flagellation. I guess I’m making excuses for being a bit lazy. Having Sharon Black of  Pindrop Press critique my poems for the collection, in great detail, has given me a bit of a kick up the bum I suppose. As a result, I’ve pulled together all the poems I’ve written over the last few years that I’ve abandoned, sometimes after multiple failed submissions, others that I just lost interest in too soon, and have them now all in a  2025 folder ‘to be worked up’. There are over seventy poems or proto-poems in that folder. I picked one out randomly and (without planning to) spent a whole day playing with it. I have plenty of material to revisit!

Robin Houghton, Readings, giving myself a talking-to and some early Spring cleaning

Maybe I’m waiting for spring, as I always am, but in a new way, to uncurl and find a new appetite to turn towards. A new sun. 

I sometimes tell myself I’m a fool, an old fool, that life is slipping by. But I know I have so much going on in the reality of my life, my kids’ lives, that maybe I need this silence to conserve my energies. 

My writing has also changed. I’m writing love poems to no one, to an invisible someone. I’ve been single for about 6 years, there’s no one on my horizon and until this year my ‘love’ poems have been angry or happy to be defiantly single. 

Now, what I write is overwhelmed with a different emotion, gazing with love into that dark stillness I’ve built in my head. I don’t know what I see, but the lines that came to me today have that hope of spring in them. 

Gerry Stewart, A Change of Appetites

I’ve been in London for a few days, to see family and for a reading at the Broadway Bookshop, a lovely place on Broadway Market in Hackney. Also an appearance on Poetry Breakfast, on the erotic, for Valentine’s Day. Back the day before yesterday, now slipping back into my usual writing: mornings writing and reading, afternoons: maybe more writing, maybe biking (in the Vaucluse, or walking (Paris) plus a Tai Chi class two evenings a week. I’m reading Heaney’s translations, Will Eaves’ new collection, working on Leopardi. Also reading Eli Weisel And the latest PNReview. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. My edition, which I bought second hand, much foxed, a little brittle. It includes the shorter poems that William was working on in the period she was writing her journal.

Weather cold and sunny. There’s a church (St Sulpice) across the street, and yesterday a team of rock climbers with helmets and ropes began placing climbing ropes on the church.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Paris, Tuesday 18 February, 2025

I ask, “With what eyes should poetry look at the harshness of our world?”

I reply, “With eyes that refuse to look away.”

[…]

I ask for a poem like the skin of a
snake. The kind that will be moulted,
will be renewed, as wounds heal, as
spring comes, as a dark nimbus must
rain, as words must make way for
words, as life must make way for life,
as love must make way for love.

The sun tells me even a lament must
end in hope. Derive a possibility.
Everything is moving, I say. Snakes
and worlds and wounds and water
and words. And love. Look how hard
everything is trying to fall into place.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Not that kind of a love poem

This week: purple dreaming, invisible strings, the lives of strangers, every bloodstained stone, and more. Enjoy.

The red light seems like it will last forever. My eyes drift up to the camera mounted above the intersection. I imagine a lonely surveillant glasseyed staring at the city’s intersections on a bank of dim monitors. I perform “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth, wondering if my invisible audience is surprised by this sudden bit of theater, entranced by my flawless and impassioned performance. Is there even actually a person on the other side? I suspect I’m simply training an AI bot and hope it will learn to appreciate unexpected encounters with art and culture. I grip the wheel worrying about whether it’s even legal to jack around with the system like this. A few pigeons nod when I finish just as the light turns green. Good show, they say, clapping their grey wings. Beautiful. I drive through the city like a suspect in a slow motion car chase from the days when TV was square.

James Brush, Street Theater

I read once that one of the hallmarks of maturity is understanding that you can’t fix anything in time. Everything will change. And not according to your will. I don’t think “understanding” is an accurate verb here. Not even “accepting”, but actively incorporating that understanding into our decisions. Into our emotional responses.

I cry for the blackbirds. I cry for the hedgehog who no longer overwinters in our holly. I cry for the poisoned lake, for the corpse of a stranger, for my missing breast. For my mother, Linda, and the mother she couldn’t be. For my children, and the mother I never was. I cry for the stories that haven’t been told.

It is so damned inappropriate, and completely out of context but, as I write now, I hear Death of a Salesman’s Linda say, “Attention must be paid.” I don’t know. Orbits within orbits. Imperfections are literally the way our DNA changes, the way we evolve, and yet: we cling to our expectation that we are entitled to perfection. We are impatient that our sick lakes heal slowly. We fear that crows will—that they can—carry a grudge. Everything, like the death of a salesman, deserves attention, and we are reluctant to give it. Afraid to see ourselves?

Ren Powell, New Life within An Old Life

When I wrote the essay for my book of winter drawings, Snowy Fields, back in 2023-24, I spoke about why I sometimes work in series. It’s exploratory, I wrote, but often it’s not until later that I’m able to see deeper reasons why I was doing a particular body of work.

The initial reason I began these watercolors this week was actually quite mundane. We are going to Mexico City in a week, and I was considering taking a new watercolor sketchbook, in a more rectangular format than an older, landscape sketchbook by the same manufacturer that I used on a previous trip, more than five years ago. I wanted to test the paper remaining in the old sketchbook to see if it still suited my technique, so I started the painting at the top of this post.

That one painting showed me what I wanted to know; the paper would be OK. But a day or two later, when it snowed, I decided to make another sketch. And yesterday afternoon, I did another.

When I stepped back from the absorbing time spent painting, I realized that I’ve been thinking about how the familiar landscape of my life, of all our lives, has suddenly and radically changed. We’re facing realities and potential outcomes that shake the foundations of everything we’ve taken for granted. It’s frightening, consuming, and unpredictable. Instead of running away from that, I want to see it clearly. I want to go deeper into it and know what we’re facing — not in order to be paralyzed with dread; or to cower despairingly while praying for some savior, human or divine, to fix it; or, worst of all, capitulating in advance — but so that I can make choices and act responsibly and with integrity, whether as an individual, a friend to others, or a member of society.

Beth Adams, The Changing Landscape

I am the superior
officer who loses the paperwork
or makes up the statistics.
I am the one who ignores
your e-mails, who cannot be reached
by text or phone, the one
with a full inbox.

When the wise ones
come, as they do, full of dreams,
babbling about the stars
that lead them or messages
from gods or angels,
I open the gates. I don’t alert
the authorities up the road.
Let the kings and emperors
pay for their own intelligence.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Genocidal Despots and Poems

Money shouts and literature whispers, so the conversation is always going to be difficult, but especially so in a country that has not just a capitalist economy, society, culture, but mindset. There are Premier League footballers earning £500,000 a week; there are closures and redundancies in the Humanities departments and Creative Writing courses at universities; in the private sector, there are people paying thousands for week-long writing courses on Greek islands with good food and wine. Meanwhile, the Arts Council is scatter-gun but necessary: as well as propping up the big guns (the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, etc.), it gives cash to people without traditional privilege. It’s a Band-Aid plastered over deep political failure. The countries in Europe – two hours by Eurostar or Ryanair – that offer tax breaks to independent bookshops and restrictions on discounting by online retailers, or where the government buys copies of all new books and distributes them to libraries, seem very far away.

My tribe: writers, artists, gallerists, small-press publishers, booksellers. Not exclusively, far from it; some of the people I love have no interest in books at all. But if any of them is making more than the ALCS 2022 median income of £7,000 from their writing, painting, showing, publishing, they are rare exceptions. My point here is not to counter arguments that we are not ‘professional’ because we don’t make money (we are professional); and not to suggest that we don’t need paying because we are ‘incentivised’ by ‘love of creating’ (we also like a roof over our heads, and food); and not to claim that we are especially resilient or somehow ‘heroic’ (no). This is simply how it is, though you wouldn’t know it from how writing is reported in the news. And not from the ads for writing courses that promise to ‘take your writing to a new level’ or ‘progress your career’, with advice from ‘industry experts’.

Like most writers, like many small presses, CB editions makes a loss, every year; a sustainable loss, to date; a healthy loss, because it keeps me on my toes. CBe has never had Arts Council funding for any of its books but of course it is subsidised – by my state pension, by my bus pass, by my having picked up design and typesetting know-how in previous work so I don’t have to pay for these, by my freelance work for others, by my living in a country in which there are people who have ‘disposable income’. This isn’t news.

Charles Boyle, Writing and money (and death and sex)

In the further framing commercial scarcity model vs. abundance model, people who share haiku online, knowing it will make those poems ineligible for contests and magazines, win my admiration. Like, Charlotte. What does hoarding a poem until a reward with publication do? A publication is laminating a marginalia jotting on a newspaper clipping. Poems if shared are broadcast, exchanged, but pinning to a submission window of small paywalled patrons limits the ideas, corrals them when they could be free to bounce against other ideas. […]

Movies, shows, writing with hooks all can exacerbate the priority of crisis, the one inevitable outcome, awfulized emoting instead of creative various directions of solutions and de-escalations. Like anything so long as we remember it is silliness and play but we train the brain by every act, yes? Filtering in a reductionist way is funny unless you believe it’s getting at the underlying binary real vs. lie.

an emotion
is a thought the body has—
branch broken by wind

Pearl Pirie, Links, Thinks

I feel that learning to move around your artistic intentions, and by this I mean a wider view of what you want to do as a writer in the long term, is as important as making those publication milestones. How you move on to new projects, and the way you build the skills around finding new projects is something we don’t talk about a great deal in the creative community. There is immense pressure to ‘succeed’ in a traditional sense. Good art, good writing is success. Of course, partly what I have just said is privileged bullshit too, because art needs an audience and artists need paying for their work. But what I’m talking about here is allowing yourself space to not be entirely invested in one single project and having the courage and confidence to use that place for growth, to explore, to create, when you don’t have the much easier to acknowledge jumping off point of publication. This skill is a necessary part of developing as a writer. If you learn it early, it is easier than learning it later in your career.

There are different ways of moving forward. If you’re like me you might have a whole range of eclectic interests. You do not lose anything by playing with the ideas around them. If you’re too stuck to write what you want, just write. Bring something, anything into existence. Make notes, listen to the things that spark your interest, your joy and just write about them, describe them, journal on them. Be careful not to rush into a new idea feeling it is definitely the one, and applying for funding grants and planning out project timelines etc. I find that, after moving forward from a project there is a tendency to grasp for the high you got when you were in the flow of your original project, the sensation of really getting somewhere. In reality you will probably have to play in the fallow fields, let yourself explore, let yourself come to your work with the beginner’s mind – looking for the feelings of joy that you began your writing journey with before it begins to feel more natural to be turning your focus away from your original project.

Wendy Pratt, What if you are not the one?

i have lived my life one tablespoon at a time.
this is about how much you’re allowed
to swallow. the birds that come & make nests
in the smallest of places. voles who carve songs
through dark. i would put the sky
on my tongue just to feel a star flicker.
i buy more tablespoons.

Robin Gow, tablespoon poem

The latest from Tennessee-based poet Erin Hoover [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the full-length collection No Spare People (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Barnburner (Elixir Press, 2018). Hoover offers short, carved narratives in a sequence of compact lyric, articulating sharp images on and around domestic patters and patterns in the author’s American south, and the complexity of writing through experiences that often feel far away from the possibilities of writing. “I was trying to explain that transportation / between having thoughts and doing for others,” she writes, in the opening poem “On the metaphor, for women, of birthing to / creative activity,” “because in every household the metaphor is clear: / the caretaker is a woman, and so / when I began / writing, I listed out my mornings, the preparations / and cleaning up of spills and toys, taking down / and fetching, the driving and carrying of people / that no one wants to know about / if we believe in the reality of book contracts / and job offers.” She writes of income inequality, misogyny, motherhood and family, as the poems circle around the locus of home and family, and the conflict between a weight of domestic expectation set against the desire for something else, also, beyond (such as writing). “You’d have to understand the home / as a unified construct,” the poem “Homewrecker” begins, “as a guarded entity, / locked up like a bank vault, a virgin / or like a rarified set of collectable dolls / with no inherent value but worth agreed / upon.” The density of her lyrics are quite striking, moving through prose poems and more traditional lyric shapes, moving through frustration, love, motherhood, helplessness, politics and rage, offering cutting moments, phrases and lines I’m tempted to endlessly quote. That line from “Death parade,” for example—“It is tempting to want always to reduce the thing to its detail. To make it small.”—or further moments, thoughtfully carved. “I drove to the border // of my dry county and bought a handle of vodka,” she writes, as part of “My generation is not lost but we are losing,” “drank to blur my vision. I wanted to be as useless // as a governor.” She tells stories with lyric punches, where the mind can’t help but catch, consider.

rob mclennan, Erin Hoover, No Spare People

Current politics has made me take more notice of several politicians’ imaginary numbers — far from fact and human needs.  And, after a while — to relax — my mind moved on to the imaginary numbers of mathematics, and I found (at the PoetrySoup website) this poem which I’d like to share.

Imaginary Numbers  by Robert Pettit

Anybody can consider this statement as moot:
Negative real numbers cannot have a square root.
When working with real numbers with values less than zero,
the squared product will be positive; so where do you go?
In a parabola, all points except zero lie above the x-axis.
Many students get confused because of this.
This placed mathematicians in a bit of a quandary.
That was until numbers were invented that are imaginary.

I did not find online biographical information about poet Pettit but I did find this link to his many many poems available at PoetrySoup — a list going back all the way to 2010.  AND here is a link to his 2010 limerick, “Seventeen.”

JoAnne Growney, Imaginary Numbers

I have a confession: I can’t remember the last time I felt Joyful. Sorrow, yes, that’s easy: I felt profound sorrow after my brother died. There have been times I’ve felt so down, it seemed like up to me (to paraphrase Richard Farina). Failing to find a relevant recent experience, I felt like an imposter writing about joy. That’s why it’s been so hard to write, and to finish, this essay.

But Joy was prominent in the news the summer of 2024. I’m referring to Sunday afternoon, July 21. What’s significant about this time of joy is that you might say it happened within minutes: one minute, President Biden announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy; a few minutes later, he endorsed the candidacy of Kamala Harris, his Vice President. Immediately, donations in the millions were raised for Ms. Harris. This groundswell of support felt like a moment of wide-spread civic joy.

So, the sorrow of our limited electoral choices planted seeds, which drew forth a change. And that joy was shared and spread. “Joys impregnate,” as Blake puts it. In other words, joy is increased through sharing. A joy shared is a joy more than doubled.

As I say, financial support was a means to express joy. And a means to support joy. To prolong and preserve the joy. It’s a human symptom: we want joy to be everlasting, but joy is briefer than happiness, which is all too often contingent on outside circumstances. Fundamentally, joy is an expression of awe — which can only be expressed in finite moments. No human, it is said, can look upon the fullness of divinity (or joy) and live.

Or, as Blake put it:

He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

So, this understandable desire to cling to joy will kill it. We cannot buy joy. We cannot cause joy to be everlasting.

As Ingrid Fetell Lee has noted, psychologists describe joy as an “intense, momentary experience of positive emotion — one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.” goes further:

Joy is not happiness, even though the two are related. Joy is delight, gladness, and pleasure — a deep inner wellspring of contentment and comfort. It is a disposition, an outlook, and maybe even a purposeful practice. Happiness is what we feel in relation to external conditions; joy is experienced regardless of circumstances. A wise maxim says, ‘We pursue happiness, we choose joy.’

But that moment of elation was quickly overcome by November’s election result, which disappointed about 51% of the voting public. Again, sorrow was brought forth. Like some cyclothemic disorder, we swung from joy back to sorrow.

In fact, the emotion was more than sorrow — it was depression. If, as it is said, depression is anger directed inwards, this depression encompassed anger toward one’s fellow citizens, and mourning for the dream of America. We experienced emotional whiplash.

This real-life moment illustrates Blake’s notion that the opposites of joy and sorrow are intertwined: “Joy and Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief & pine / Runs a joy with silken twine” (Auguries of Innocence).

Joy and sorrow are extremes of human emotion: joy is something more profound than happiness; sorrow, something deeper than sadness.

James Collins, Choosing Joy

I look back to the road and notice
the sky ahead of me has broken
into a swathe of blue and I feel
that flip of joy inside me – you know the one,
as if your heart and your stomach
have performed their own little high five –
and it reaches my face in a smile.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ordinary things

How can I love a changing world when it’s this moment I love? No, wait, this one. No, this one.

Already the shadows have shifted, the bright smear of sun dwindled. That leaf blowing sideways like a flag has stilled. Has it fallen? It has not fallen. It will fall. Marcescence is the hardening of a twig against the old leaf in preparation for the new. Brash bud will push out in fresh hue in due time.

No one is due time. Nothing is owed. But this moment is for the taking and I’ll take it, ticking though it is in the palm of hand.

I found this poem by Grant Clauser in the Broadkill Review. I admire this poem for its quiet attention. I am no fisher, but I understand the kind of attentive presence required, attention that ripples out from the lay of the line to the set of the shadows to the movement of clouds, and back. The minute made long, lingering. As only a poem can do.

Marilyn McCabe, from the swift current

My husband comes birdwatching with me. He is a brilliant bird spotter. He can spot a bird well before I would. He has, however, absolutely no idea what the bird is called. Even though we’ve been birdwatching for years. He will enthusiastically whisper, ‘Over there, big white bird at the edge of the water.’ Pushed to identify it, he says ‘it’s the fish-nicker’ – which I think is a brilliant name for the Little Egret he’s seen.

Watching birds is a joy for me. I am ok with identification for the most ‘obvious’ birds. It matters to me, up to a point. If I see something I haven’t seen before, I’ll look it up, but if I haven’t taken a pic of it, my memory won’t usually be good enough. And some birds even confuse the experts. 

I write poetry about birds too – and when I write I need to use the right name. I have to accept though, that any potential reader may not know the bird I’m writing about. So, if they feel inclined, they have to look it up. And then they may think, ‘ah yes, I can see that poem captures that bird’ or ‘I can see why she used that bird for that idea’, maybe.

That’s no different from references in poems to places, people, Greek gods or whatever. The reader will either know them or not, and will either look them up or not. And then they can decide whether that reference works for them. And, as always, it may or may not work for them, and/or may not mean the same as it did to the writer.

Sue Ibrahim, Birds and poetry

I’m now allowed to announce that my poem “Sex Talk” will appear in Best American Poetry 2025, chosen by Terence Winch. I had absolutely no idea it was under consideration and have never been in one of these anthologies before–didn’t think I ever would be. The December email from Mark Bibbins was a bolt out of the blue. Thanks to both of them and to series editor David Lehman for honoring a poem by someone they’ve never met. For noticing it in the first place, amid the flood!

I know that “grabbing the brass ring” is a cliché, but I have a vivid memory of the real experience. My mother used to take my sister and me to a tiny amusement park with a carousel. I loved mounting a brightly painted outer horse, not the fixed-in-place ponies but one that rose up and down, for maximum drama. It made me feel strong to rise in the stirrups each time I passed the dispenser, lean out at fullest stretch, snag a silver ring, and collect them on one finger. Then, once in a great while, gold! The shocked joy of opening the Best American invitation felt the same, although deeper and more lasting. I knew even as I wrote it that “Sex Talk” was a poem in which I stretched out in a new way, although that didn’t mean I was confident others would see what made it a breakthrough for me. Some did, I guess! Thanks to editor Mark Drew who helped me find the ending and accepted it for the final issue of Gettysburg Review, to Poetry Daily for reprinting it, and to others who reposted or wrote me notes about the poem. It’s not only joyful but kind of sobering when something you write actually does become, as you hoped, an instrument of connection. As if poetry does have power in a nonsensical merry-go-round world.

Lesley Wheeler, Best American, lit mags, and the merry-go-round

The past month has been intensely difficult for a variety of reasons, including the sudden loss of my youngest aunt. It’s hard to feel like updating a website is important in the face of grief and political upheaval, but sometimes poets and poetry keep me going through the dark, so reminding myself of good poetry-related things isn’t a waste of time.

One of the best poetry things this winter has been the release and virtual reading events for the anthology Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift. Editor Kristie Frederick Daugherty has made the whole process a joy, and I’m so honored to have my poem “1993” included alongside some of my poetry rockstars and friends.

Katie Manning, Swift, Nothings, & Finalists : a catch-up post

Our fixations make up our meditative landscape. When we use the material of our obsessions not as obstacles to be overcome, but as artifacts of the self to be admired and pondered, that is, in my opinion, when interesting art happens.

In a Yonkers, New York basement, a news article, “Elderly Couple Found Dead Buried Under Snow,” struck me with its stark beauty and tragedy. For years, the image lingered, resurfacing with every snowfall or story of tragic love.     

As my manuscript deadline drew closer I started mining my thoughts for fixations, such as the one I had about this article. Paying close and reverent attention to my fixations has been invaluable for combating writer’s block for me. I have realized that this is the most productive and fulfilling way for me to produce work that has the potential to lead me somewhere unexpected.

Because the article I was writing about was sparse, providing very little detail about the couple I decided I wanted my poem to do the same. This decision informed both the content and the form of this poem. I used the thin lineation and couplets to metaphorically “bury” the myriad truths about this couple under this particular moment of astounding tragedy. […]

The poem ends pulled away from the scene to an imagined dialogue between the speaker and their partner. This section of the poem was the trickiest to get right. I liked the idea of adding dialogue for many reasons. Philosophically, I think one could argue the medium of poetry is silence. A poet’s job is to sculpt silence into temporary truths. Silence is the marble block with which the body of language is found. It could be argued that what the poet doesn’t say is as, if not more, important than what they are saying and that those omissions are part of a poem’s ineffable beauty. The reason I put dialogue at the end of this poem is because I felt it honored the silence of death to not to make any grand conclusions about it. Part of why I find death so haunting is the aliveness that persists despite of death. This dialogue emphasizes that.

Drop-in by Lexi Pelle (Nigel Kent)

Letter poems are in my top three favorite poem types (after list poems and sonnets), and my most recent poetry manuscript is built around them. In the past, I’ve also participated in letter poem exchanges with fellow poets, and I highly recommend it. These pen pal-esque writings benefit from vivid accounts, comfort/intimacy and the energy of deep conversation, and they’re a joy to write.

I find that even when letter poems are “made up” (i.e. not part of an official correspondence) they deliver depth and emotion that can be tricky to pull off in other forms. Perhaps it’s because we, as poets, instantly feel connected to the “recipient” of the letter, which creates a kind of comfort that puts us at ease and simplifies the task of having something to say.

Whatever the source of the magic, letter poems have something special for readers, too: They let us in on private experiences and offer us glimpses into the relationships between others. (And who doesn’t like a little peek behind the curtain?) This dynamic is so compelling it can carry entire manuscripts, as in The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello and Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann.

Carolee Bennett, 40 Letter Poem Examples for Writing Inspiration

First off, the point of departure for this post is the premise that no part of language should be off-limits or banned for poets. Writing is tough enough without forsaking a chunk of the toolbox.

However, there are a few lexical elements that seem fraught with danger. One obvious example is adverbs, which CW tutors are notoriously wary of their students employing. I actually (sic) love them!

Another is the use of abstract nouns, which feel far more troublesome to my mind. Why? Well, because they can mean so many things to so many individuals, social groups and nationalities, even within a single language. Let’s take the example of freedom. Its connotations would be hugely different for a Remainer or a Brexiteer, for instance! When a poet uses this word, they lose control over the effects that their choice of language may have on the reader.

And of course, once we get into the art of translation, this problem deepens even further. For example, la democracia in Spanish necessarily becomes democracy in English. But its baggage for a Spaniard who lived through la transición a la democracia (following Franco’s dictatorship) is very different from its multitude of meanings for certain English speakers from specific points in the political spectrum (need I say more?!). This is one key reason why translating an abstract-heavy poem is a huge ask.

Matthew Stewart, The use of abstract nouns in contemporary poetry

Ambiguity, when deployed skilfully, is not designed to frustrate understanding but to facilitate a more complex or subtle form of understanding, by positioning two or more contrasting implications against one another. In Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” for example, the line “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” simultaneously refers to the power and expanse of Ozymandias’ empire at the time of its peak, and to the near-featureless desert that remains long after its destruction. There is nothing to be gained by discarding one interpretation; the import lies in the ironic contrast between the two. Through such positioning of ambiguous elements, poetry finds ways of representing facets of lived experience and reality that cannot be achieved through logical sequencing alone.

The final question I would like to ask, for the purposes of giving an account of poetry that serves the aims of this chapter, is: what role does the reader play in the poem? From the perspective of New Criticism, they have only to recognise and identify what tensive energies and semantic equations already exist within an individual text. But for critics of the school of reception theory, ambiguity results in potentially boundless depth and restlessness, with scope for continual reinterpretation by different readerships. Umberto Eco identifies this as a defining feature of poetry in his Postscript to the Name of the Rose, where he writes that the “poetic effect” is “the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed” (2009, 545). This capacity can only be demonstrated, however, by the process of reading and re-reading. It is the reader’s engagement with the poem that fulfils its potential as a complex and compelling textual system. We might suppose, therefore, that it is the failure to take into account the role of the reader that leads [Ben] Lerner [in The Hatred of Poetry] to regard the poem as hopelessly gesturing toward a state of completion it can never attain. The reader may be cast as operator, as living component in a dynamic web, rather than the recipient who waits at the end of a single-use delivery mechanism.

Jon Stone, What is a Poem?

I was the starlight,
I was the moonlight,
I was the sunset.
Before the dawning
Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,
I was the glowing
Of youthful Springtime,
I was the singing
Of golden songbirds,—
I was love.

[…]

Fenton Johnson (1888-1958): “I came into the world in 1888. No notice was taken of the event save in immediate circles. I presume the world was too busy or preoccupied to note it. It happened in Chicago. I went to school and also college. My scholastic record never attained me any notoriety.”

“Taught school one year and repented. Having scribbled since the age of nine, had some plays produced on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre, Chicago, at the time I was nineteen. When I was twenty-four my first volume A Little Dreaming (1913) was published. Since then Visions of the Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916) represent my own collections of my work. Also published a volume of short stories Tales of Darkest America (1920) and a group of essays on American politics For the Highest Good (1920).” (Caroling Dusk, 1927)

Johnson was a forerunner to the Harlem renaissance and his poems frequented the pages of numerous ‘new verse’ magazines, including Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others. He went on to found and edit The Champion in 1916 with his cousin Henry Bing Dismond, a magazine highlighting black achievement, and The Favourite Magazine in 1918: “The first and only weekly magazine published by and for colored people.”

In the 1930s Johnson worked for the Illinois chapter of the Federal Writers’ Project, under the direction of fellow poet Arna Bontemps, which focussed on collecting writings on the black experience in Illinois and helped launch the careers of numerous writers, including the poets Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, and novelist Frank Yerby. After Johnson’s death in 1958, Bontemps would go on to be the executor of his literary estate.

Dick Whyte, Fenton Johnson – 6 Short Poems (1913-1927)

The humans and their news are making me glare and swallow hard, in between I cook and clean and build lego, the Stranger Things set. Got a basic training on autism yesterday evening. I’m making plans for this year because this is the way I deal, I live up to dates. I’m having coffee in the morning at the kitchen table and light that candle, and I want to swear, loudly, vehemently, madly.

heavy winter clouds
we’re all voyeurs
intently
scrolling through
the lives of strangers

Kati Mohr, stranger things

I have been reading about writers writing under truly terrible governments – the Nazis, terrible Roman emperors etc – and studying exactly how they tried to write about their lives and their times. Ovid, of course, and Catallus, but also existenialist poets from France. I wrote quite a bit about Ovid in my first book, Becoming the Villainess because at that time I felt the echoes of the violence and helplessness in my own life. I had no idea what was ahead for my country. I had so much optimism, then, that things would get better for women. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Like this camellia in my yard that bloomed before our week of snow, I had unreasonable optimism, it seems. […]

I think about writers who lived in far harsher environments than I do, with far less encouragement. I owe it to them to keep going. Many women writers I admire did not live to be my age, and so I shouldn’t just take it as an impediment, but perhaps an opportunity to write from the perspective of an over-fifty woman. I have survived this long for a reason, when some of my friends have not. I am still here, for now, writing on a blog I’m not sure anyone reads in a time where writing at all seems perilous, even foolish. I remember Sappho’s poetry fragments being pulled recently from a trash pile, poems that have survived across the years, against the odds.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Snow Snow Snow, and Part II of a Desert Residency in a Grim Time Plus Writing Insecurity

ground mist . . .
atop the snow
one perfect pinecone

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’25

Last Sunday was Candlemas, the commemoration of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and the official end of Christmas. In Luke 2, the old priest Simeon breaks into a canticle — a song or poem or lyric speech, in language derived strongly from the Old Testament prophets — which for many Christians around the world is one of the most familiar of all pieces of scripture, because of its traditional use in liturgy. […]

All of the Biblical canticles have very often been made into verse, in both classical and vernacular languages. That’s partly of course because they are just so well-known, and the paraphrase of a familiar bit of a scripture has been a popular devotional exercise since antiquity. But perhaps there is also something particularly facilitating or even inviting for the poet about the form of these canticles, which are recognisably in a ‘poetic’ register, distinct from the surrounding text, but not in any specific Greek verse form. That’s presumably because they are translations of poetry composed originally in Hebrew or Aramaic: the author of Luke may have made these translations himself, or perhaps incorporated or adapted existing Greek versions. Whoever made them, they haven’t attempted to make a Greek poem as such — the Greek text has instead the feel of a fairly literal translation, complete with features which are slightly alien to the language. Sometimes, perhaps, the encounter with a translation of this kind — a text audibly at one remove from its original context — can be a more fertile prompt to the imagination than the daunting perfection of an original.

Whatever the reason, there are hundreds if not thousands of verse paraphrases of the Gospel Canticles, and some of them have become established liturgical texts in their own right, most often as hymns.

Victoria Moul, Hearing the dawn-wind stir

Micropoetry is a different love language. I like the longer poems. I walk through metaphors and anaphora and line breaks the way some people experience flower meadows. I like the way verses ebb and flow till an unexpected close.

But brevity is a trap. The smaller poems still demand beauty and layers and nuance — a profoundly elegant minimalism. And while a haiku might be just an intense moment and the tanka its refined extension, forms that limit lines and words and syllables (while sometimes insisting on rhyme) can be a challenge. The shorter they are, the more difficult to get right. To me, though, the most interesting of the microforms is the Cherita. Created by Ai Li, Cherita is about story-telling but in six lines, split into three verses. There is pause, there is room for light and air and enough opportunity to create. That isn’t a bad way to write. Life, if you’re listening, that isn’t a bad way to be, either.

I wrote a few Cherita this week as the news headlines, strident and acerbic, overwhelmed me. To anyone thinking this really can’t be the world we signed up for, I feel what you feel. How to glue a broken universe together is another problem altogether, but there can be poetry on the side while we look for tools and tape and humanity. Poems to hold us together…poems to hold on to…as we find a way forward. […]

Nothing was left.

Just the scarecrow
with the broken head.

But look,
even then,
not one bird.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Just the scarecrow with the broken head

In a wonderful essay for The Paris Review titled “In This Essay I Will: On Distraction”, David Schurman Wallace evokes reaching the point in his writing when the initial spark loses its come-hither glint—the point where distraction courts the mind. Wallace’s eyes fall onto his shelves, lingering in the memory of former trysts, former relationships with texts. And there, on the shelf, is Flaubert’s final novel, the book left unfinished. There is that temptation courting the mind, looking for an excuse to wander back into it. 

Wallace gives us the paradox of writing as labor, namely, that distraction doubles as blessing and curse. Distraction releases us from desire, or from the intensity of edits and drafts and evidence; desire lets the mind literally wander over the wall, and take a side trail into an elsewhere. Desire opens an Otherwise.

Flaubert’s two clerks want to know everything, and this interest in everything keeps them from the labor of attending to something. “Their curiosity has no staying power,” as Wallace observes. Their desire lacks commitment or willingness to sweat. 

Writing is not fun in the way that this word is conventionally used. 

Writing is cannibalized by “the possibility of detours”; research leads us to the rabbit hole that seeds new ideas and flirts with different beginnings or projects.

Alina Stefanescu, Of strangeness, complexity, and ‘scandalous visibility’.

A fantasy is an open door that allows us to try on someone else’s life for a moment. With a safe word. With a way out.

In the fantasy of my life, I am ready to be anything. I am finishing my memoir, Sailing the Milky Way. My first novel, Under a Neon Sun, is still walking around the world. Red Hen Press is about to be the biggest indie publisher on the West Coast.

We are changing the world, one story at a time. And when we do, we’ll drive down Lake Avenue in my Honda (with its 200,000 miles) and celebrate. I will buy another safer vehicle.

We have a saying at Red Hen: “What matters is how we walk through fire.” We didn’t mean literal fire. After the Los Angeles fires, the staff came back into the smoky air and all got pneumonia. Soon, we are going to fix Red Hen’s roof, which blew off in the storm. (Give us a literal break.) Now, we need to come back like we’re storming the canyons.

I have told the Red Hen staff: I have skin in the game. When we sell 25,000 copies of a book, I get a tattoo. When we sell a book to a movie, I get a tattoo. When we get a million-dollar donation, I get a tattoo. By the end of 2025, I’ll be posting pictures of my first tattoos.

Kate Gale, What is your fantasy, Babygirl?

I’m a stowaway on a cold rubber boat. 

My desires and old love letters are the sails,
I paddle with spoons and old New Yorkers.  

From a surge of waves comes a sleek head,
a piercing in its nose –

A seal with a straw of plastic.

Jill Pearlman, The Executive Restores Plastic Straws

In the kind of synchronicity that usually happens only in fiction, a piece that I wrote on February 4, 2020 was published exactly five years later, on February 4, 2025. I confess that I am not sure whether to call it a poem or a piece of creative nonfiction, but it’s called “On February 4, 2020, instead of watching Donald Trump deliver his State of the Union Address…” Michael Broder, publisher of Indolent Books, accepted it for the series he is calling “Second Coming: A poem-a-day series in creative response to the threats posed to our democracy by the incoming presidential administration.” You can read the piece I am talking about here.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #36

The Ravens Perch has published four of my poems this past week.  You can find the first of them, “The Plural of Albatross” at https://theravensperch.com/the-plural-of-albatross-by-ellen-roberts-young/

Then page forward to “Night Flight” an experiment at capturing the experience of not sleeping/sleeping on an overnight flight.

Next is “Absence” which evolved from a prompt at the Napa Writers Conference in 2023: many drafts before and after comments by our workshop leader, Ilya Kaminsky and fellow students.

At the end of the set, but perhaps most meaningful to share, is “Cry for the Earth”

            Old earth,
your home, is creaking.
Can you hear how much
too fast the hidden heart is
beating?

Find the rest of this one here.

Ellen Roberts Young, My Poems on The Ravens Perch

I had a couple of ‘grey walks’ this week; grey sky, cold air, no one around to exchange pleasantries with. And then this poem popped up in my memories on my phone:

Loneliness

Loneliness is grey

It tastes like the lamb that I wish had never been killed

It sounds like crying.

It smells like chips dropped on the floor.

It looks like a storm cloud closing in.

It feels like a rat that is going to bite.

Choosing a feeling, giving it a colour and thinking about what it tastes, sounds, smells, looks and feels like was one of my favourite ‘let’s get writing’ activities when I worked with children. This group poem was written by six year olds, and I love the way their images say something extra about their experience of the feeling. I liked it too when their adults joined in and everyone shared their different emotions. It strikes me that it could also be a ‘let’s think about that feeling’ activity. I know from having written one each time I have introduced it in a writing workshop, that the same exercise results in a different end product each time. Each poem told me something about what was important to set down or celebrate in the moment.

Sue Finch, HOW DO

Wintry weeks grind along like the noisy snowplows tearing through sheets of ice this morning. At least we are having a winter, unlike some years. I may not love winter–especially the short, grey days–yet I live in a region that needs it. Indeed, it is February (alas); but in a few weeks I’m liable to notice snowdrops emerging from the dirt. Anticipation stirs my heart. It feels something like hope, although hope is something I feel less inclined to believe in every year. I guess my problem with hope is that it feels like there is human agency invested in the concept, and as I age I recognize how little effect our wishes, hopes, and prayers have upon anything.

The snowdrops emerge all the same, until such time as they can no longer withstand changes in their environment. There is some comfort in that, for me.

Ann E. Michael, Something like hope

I learned this week of the death, January 9, of my friend the literary scholar and poet Jayne Marek. My friend and my comrade poet. You can read her inspiring obituary here. My review of her new book, Dusk-Voiced (Tebot Bach, 2024), is waiting to be posted at Escape into Life (apparently there is a problem with distribution of Tebot Bach’s books). You can hear Jayne talk about and read from Dusk-Voiced at the Meter-Cute substack.

Jayne and I met at a writer’s conference. Because she lived in Port Townsend and I live in Edmonds, we did not often see each other. Neither of us were crazy about long phone calls. We did not become the sort of friends who hang out on Zooms together, or share poems vis email, though we did share publication in Triple No. 10 from Ravenna Press.

Every November, for the last 7 or so years, both Jayne and I were invited to the Glen Cove Writers’ Retreat on Hood Canal, and every year (with the exception of 2020), we went. At Glen Cove we took long walks together and bird-watched. Jayne was an avid naturalist, and she took amazing photographs of mushrooms and bugs. Evenings, we drank wine and read each other poems.

Bethany Reid, Dusk-Voiced, poems by Jayne Marek

In contemplating writing creatively about the life and death of a real person, famous or otherwise, one has (a minimum of) six key decisions to make, the last four of which are dependent on the first and second.

First and foremost is whether to write poetry or prose. With five poetry collections and four novels already published, I imagine the decision Sue Hubbard made to plump for poetry to address her subject, Gwen John (1876–1939), wasn’t an easy one to make; however, the notes at the back indicate that Hubbard had previously written (at least) one poem about a moment in John’s life so perhaps that had left an itch that needed to be scratched. I admire Hubbard for even taking on such a large and complex project.

The second decision, perhaps a subconscious one, is how much of the subject’s life needs to be recounted to do justice to their main events, relationships, successes, failures and emotions. Despite some artistic success, John, as is widely known now, had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime and lived in the shadow of both her two-years-younger brother, Augustus, who became the most celebrated British painter of their day, and Rodin, 35 years her senior, with whom John had an unequal relationship for a decade from 1904 (and whose forename was, by coincidence, the French equivalent of her brother’s). The 34 poems in this collection run chronologically from John’s childhood and adolescence in North Wales to her death in Dieppe, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. As we’ll see, they aren’t ‘Wiki poems’, i.e. they don’t clunkily include facts for the sake of it; rather, they tend more towards impressionistic sketches, pleasingly in keeping with John’s style of painting. Neither do they amount to a full-blown biography (her mother’s death when John was eight isn’t mentioned for instance, though her absence can be inferred), but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less meritorious or successful than had Hubbard written a fuller account in prose.

Matthew Paul, Review of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist

If this poem was in a family of poems, it feels as if it belongs to the family of poems that another one of my favourite poems belongs to “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm” by Wallace Stevens. There is that same strange rush of immediacy and peace to both of these poems for me, the same heady rush of restless searching and utter stillness.

I love the way into this poem as well – the ‘Here you are’. Who is the you? Is it us? Is it the poet? Is it the speaker of the poem? I know it’s not me because I’m not ‘near the edge of the world, rowing /across a vast lake’. Or am I? Perhaps this is why I feel so tired, so discombobulated, so unequal to the task of writing a Substack post, that is until I climb into the boat of this poem, and take myself back into language.

As I read this poem, I find the boundary between myself and the speaker in the poem suddenly becoming porous and I feel as if the poem is addressing me. When I read “You are tired of having / to re-invent yourself” I think of the wonderful Rilke poem and the shock of that poem in the last line, when the poem turns its face towards us and says “You must change your life”.

Kim Moore, Is February the new January?

Blossomise by Simon Armitage is a beautiful and nifty volume — poems by Armitage illustrated by Angela Harding commissioned by the National Trust to highlight and celebrate the spring blossoms in the UK which have declined in number of late. Obviously, the consequences of fewer blossoming trees has an effect on the human population and on various species. I’m not sure that I was expecting much TBH from a commissioned sequence, but I am delighted by these poems.

We have “Planet Earth in party mode, / petals fizzing and frothing / like pink champagne.” Refreshing and suprising takes, include the CV of Blossom, and also the lovely music in a poem which asks, “How many summers / up ahead? // How many autumns / in his hand?”

Somewhat reassuring is that slim and beautiful books like this go on existing.

Shawna Lemay, Poetry Club – Half an Hour

When I teach creative writing classes, one of the prompts I often give my students is to write a “persona poem,” or a poem written as someone (real or imaginary) other than themselves. This assignment is good for writers in the same way, I think, it’s good for all of us to visit unfamiliar views—it’s an exercise in empathy. The marvelous poems that many students produce are proof that deep perspective-taking can bring about surprising, as well as surprisingly deep, insights.

As a somewhat guarded and perfectionistic young poet navigating academia in my twenties, where I was compelled to share my poems with classrooms of peers and professors for regular critique, I discovered that it was often much easier for me to write in other’s voices—characters I seemed to channel from another plane—than to write openly as myself. Listening to and speaking through these other voices were like turning a palm-sized gemstone around in my hand and watching light refract off its many sides. The gemstone was me, and it was not me. The facets of the gemstone were also a web of possibilities, alternative lives and worlds. These characters acted simultaneously as shining windows into the sources of my fears, my questions, my griefs, and as a kind of shield for my personal vulnerabilities and the intimate details of my own life story that I didn’t want to expose.

As a result, my first two poetry collections—Best Bones and Darwin’s Mother—contain poems written from the perspective of a house servant, a blackfly, an 18^th century farmer, a monk, a ghost, an archeologist, a chimpanzee from Dr. Harry Harlow’s infamous primate experiments in the 1950s, of Charles Darwin as a child, a mother cicada, Achilles, the Virgin Mary, and an AI robot. As I’ve continued to evolve as a writer, I’ve become more comfortable speaking plainly as myself (hence this newsletter), but the other voices remain with me. The insects and ancestors and dinosaur bones are murmuring alongside and within my own voice. What began in part as a method of self-protection has expanded my understanding of self into something vast and fractal. […]

My fantasy, unlikely as it may be, is this: That as the negative impacts social media has on mental health and our ability to speak to one another in open-hearted ways become increasingly clear—along with the openly nefarious intentions of the tech overlords who profit from these sites—that there will be a large exodus from the rainbow river. People will put their phones in a closed drawer, then go outside and lay in the grass for a good long while, not doing anything in particular. Maybe on the third day of this new freedom, as they begin to dream up collective ways to resist the institutional crisis and ecocide-in-progress, they might see a pencil on a nearby table, pick it up, and write a poem.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Vast and Fractal

When I slap a mosquito sucking on the skin of my shoulder, I wonder
if the blood is mine or someone else’s

We’re all part of the same cellular network

It is the year of the snake and some have taken power
that isn’t theirs

Every spore, every bloodstained stone, every word we protect
and won’t give surrender

Look at the moths that arrow night after night
into basins of uncollected light

Luisa A. Igloria, Why We Should Care

if i don’t know where the poem is going
then who is writing it
how do i know when it is finished

and yet
after it is finished
i seem to know both

the breath comes from somewhere
behind the eyes

Jim Young, who poet who

to hear again one’s given voice
the great oak of infinite possibilities
breathes

Grant Hackett [no title]