This week: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.

This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.

In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.

I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:

“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?

And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]

Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up

Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.

Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]

A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.

Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings

Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.

What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.

I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.

One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.

I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but

1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.

2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.

A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.

I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).

Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

It’s beginning to flood, my foot
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me. 

Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends. 

Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes. 

We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same. 

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

the buddha in the window well
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.

These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman

As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]

As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain

If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.

Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.

Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!

The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.

But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”

Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…

Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.

Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”

I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.

Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

[…]

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review

Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.

Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

looking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:

blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wall

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

ch-                         ch-
click                     of cows                     moving
up                         chalk                         downs
and me in the dip
gathering sun

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflection

This is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:

hear      the       chalk       rabbits
beneath       the          mountain
&    thru    the mountain    &    pray
&     ray     to     the     mountain

(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.

The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:

Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.

There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

i find myself craving primordial. to chart
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.

Robin Gow, 5/31

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.

On bark cliff faces,
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem.  Here are the opening stanzas of  ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022  issue.

Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.

He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)

I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.

One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:

I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski

I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.

I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.

I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.

With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.

When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.

When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]

Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

How to explain to someone else
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.

Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.

Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.

The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.

At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.

Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.

We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.

Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community

My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?

Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.

Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: speech bubbles, egoistic namby-pambyness, the staid denizens of heaven, a rainbow in a storm, and much more. Enjoy.

/ hope’s ache, pinkly.
/ in the mind’s ill-mannered museum.
/ something is stirring.
/ claustrophobic and soft.
/ the bad idea. with its octopus of arms and gossip.

Fran Lock, OPAQUE OR “DURATIONAL #11”

Some flowers hold their petals for only a few days and in those few days they are likely witnessed time and again by what is most important, the pollinators, be it winged, footed, or the wind. The more-than-human world is always announcing itself, a lot of it silently, invisibly. The swarm of insects indicate the announcement of flowers. The perching of birds announces the quiet leafing-out of trees, the whispering growth of berries, the stock-still readiness of seeds. You smell of lilac announces the high-up cones of flowers waving at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Quiet Announcement

On the nearby peat bog and in patches on the croft, bog myrtle flowers opened. They turned from bright orange to peach and cinnamon. Each day the heavenly perfume rises and threads through everything, caught and transferred by wind. For me, the essence of spring, the herald to a year of light, colour and smell, of growth and possibilities, the fragrance of life itself, is found in this combination of myrtle-incense and peat. When cold easterlies blew, I sat in a sheltered nook near the cliff-top, facing west to the sea, and almost felt the scent of bog myrtle as a tangible thing, a stream of life, overpowering even the aroma of salt, seaweed and rock. This, this, marks the real beginning of a new year – when I am submerged in, cleansed and blessed by attar of myrtle.  

On April 22^nd I take a break from writing to catch up with the latest news. I see a picture of a small boy in a woollen jumper and long pants holding on to a chair and am completely undone. He is very young, with the stance toddlers adopt when they are first learning to walk independently – widely space legs, arms spread. His hesitant smile is that of all children at that age, wide-eyed, hopeful, ready to explore. He looks so like my youngest grandchild I need to study the image carefully to be certain it isn’t her. She is at the same stage, tottering around with her arms held out for balance, a smile of delight on her face as she investigates her world. Tears flow. I can’t stop them. Hot tears and a rage-sweat. I let it all burn out of me.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, April-May… the force be with you

This week saw my friend Catherine Broadwall launch her book Aftermath at the downtown gallery/bar Vermillion, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes, a new poem in the lit mag Assaracus, and the return of some favorite birds, like the Black-Headed Grosbeak and the Rufous Hummingbird.

Also, the Iran war continues and a hantavirus scare from a cruise ship. Plus, the Supreme Court continues to abuse the “shadow docket” in order to support an evil, racist regime. Is this all discouraging and apocalyptic? It is.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Book Launch at Vermillion, a Desert Rat Poem in Assaracus, Spring Bird Appearances, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Are you getting much sleep? Are you awake with me at 4am? Can you see this beautiful May dawn light? I’m not supposed to be here, but here I am, watching and noticing the soft peach and pinks in the May skies, listening to the dawn chorus and sipping some mint tea. Are you ok? Are you looking after your bold hearts and big dreams? Not easy is it.

What a mess.

In every direction there is chaos, calamity, catastrophe. It feels like all the sections are wrong, like the forks are muddled up in the spoons section, like all the pieces of us are scattered. It feels like the script of this episode of you and me is being writen by a maniac sniffing glue. The news keeps reminding me of boys in the playground at school kicking the bins to make wasps fly out and getting angry when they get stung. Fuck about and find out over and over again. The consequences of all of this, the divisions, the bubbling hatred, the violence, this vibration, this unease, all the energy of humanity is cornered and angry and confused and frustrated and frightened and sick and tired as this ooze of misinformation and wildly unchecked macho egomania spreads like a stinky toxic treacle sticking to every leaf and idea, every wing and cloud of thought. It feels like our world needs to be drenched with sea salt and sage and rose petals and rosemary, take a deep breath, but maybe that’s just me.

I’m going away on a Writers Retreat and just packing.

Salena Godden, Death is another country

The other day I went out for walk. I went out for a walk in the same way I would go about making a poem – and I do believe you make a poem, you do not simply write it. I went out to seek connection. I went with an idea of where I was going but, as with a poem, without knowing exactly what I might find. I went with purpose. I went, as one goes to poetry, with the cautious endeavour of bringing elements together. […]

The walk began in Moorgate, London, beside the bronze cast of a life mask of the poet John Keats. The sculpture itself marks the poet’s birthplace, a London pub now called The Globe. It was originally called The Swan and Hoop. Ten years ago I took my poem, My Name is Swan, to every pub in London that, like The Swan and Hoop, had the word Swan in its name. I read my poem in around twenty Swan pubs. The performances were documented in film. The poem is now due to appear in a book. My publisher will be making an announcement about My Name is Swan and other fine titles on their list at 4:30pm UK time. […]

The walk took me north to Bunhill fields and to the grave of William Blake. Here I began to conceive of a series of walks, with each walk connecting two points of literary or poetic history within a roughly one mile radius of each other. The walks form single scenes, short acts, that move toward a much larger play slowly unfolding across the city. The course is plotted weekly and broadcast live, here on Substack on Sundays at 5pm.

Jan Noble, Nº63 Poetry is mobility contrary to the viral thesis

So here’s something I’ve wondering—do you ever wake up and feel you should be happy, but melancholy feels like a heavy blanket someone keeps putting on your shoulders? That’s how I’ve been feeling lately, besides all the beauty around me—I’m thinking springtime birds, cherry blossoms in bloom, sunshine, so much we decided to skip going into the Two Sylvias Press office this week and instead are working from home. But to look at one’s life and feel SO grateful and thankful for all you have, but then also kind of sad.

I’ve carried this feeling a lot throughout my life (it’s come and gone and returned) and I know with the state of our country, things are feeling a bit harder everywhere. So there’s that. . .unfortunately. (Also, promoting a book at that time feels beyond ridiculous.) I’ve found planting stargazer lilies feels hopeful. I’m learning how much of my hope is tied to plants, maybe because they are a quiet insistence that something is growing despite our human world. Maybe it’s the agreement a seed makes with the future—possibility, it whispers.

Last week I met with two good friends and one said she believes things will get better, but first they have to break open before they can be repaired. And I’m like, Great, love that for us—but is there an express lane to the healing part? I’m so impatient these days and just like with movies, I want to fast forward past the bad/scary parts. But time, right? We have to day-by-day it with our fingers crossed and hope in our back pocket.

I think that’s why I’ve been writing more—writing has always helped me, even writing these little letters to you. I found myself writing a lot of prose poems too, I think because they feel as if I can get all the stuffs in there. I’ve been waking up, putting on “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp (wait, maybe this is why I’m sad, that song has lots of minor notes!). Also, please don’t think these poems are good—there are many many many really bad ones, but it feels good to be writing.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Do You Ever Wake Up and Feel You Should Be Happy?

The cartoonist’s shape of speech,
its pinch-pot gnomon pointing out
whose breath it is, and isn’t. As if
the boundary was real, as if every
exhalation wasn’t both a way to
wipe clean the mirrored self and
a fog of unknowing. Those soap
bubbles in a vanitas still life. Your
warm breath in the shell of my ear.

Lori Witzel, Bubbles

I’m writing a bit but not with vim. Whatever vim is. A wonderful word. I’m painting. I’m plunking on my piano. I love that this is my life. But I’m wasting an awful lot of time wasting time. I’ve been pretty creative in my life, but I feel the potential in me to be more so, bigger in thought, farther in reach, giddier in play, bolder, broader, braver, more wonder-full, more experimental. But I don’t seem to know how to get from this chair to whatever that is, that place where I’m being bold and giddy. What is the environment that will best draw this effort out of me? It does not seem to be this chair. It’s not the chair’s fault. (Is it?) Are there people who can help shift me to this mythical place? Is it inspiration? As I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in “muses,” alas, or I could blame THEM, their mulish absence. No, it’s the brain. My brain. That wrinkly thing that’s currently a bit soggy with allergy snot. It’s a nay-sayer often, a builder of obstacles, a doubting thomas. How do I call it to order? How do I poke it into action? I feel a little lost, in fact. Do you ever feel this way?

Marilyn McCabe, text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit

I am easing back into my Substack reading, so if you haven’t seen me around, trust me, I will return. When life is this uncertain, it’s hard to concentrate—I keep running into these walls where I just, very calmly, stop doing. I just sit down on my suitcase and refuse to move. It’s called burnout. I’m working on taking care of myself, on having fun, on doing the things I need to do. Substack is one of them.

This morning I grabbed a few moments and ended up working on this poem. It’s been a while in the making. I dug it out and started to play with it. I have three versions here. Mostly, its the pronoun usage that I’m interested in. I would love your feedback.

VERSION #1

How can we not love this world,
the elegance of it,
the way it lifts itself
up from sleeping,
the way it spreads
a blanket on the ground
and carefully sets out
the potato salad
the chicken
the cold slices of pie.

How can we not love this world,
the mothering of it,
how she catches the newborns
and lifts them to the sun,
how she lays the backs of her cool hands
across forehands to gauge fevers
how she rubs salve on the congested chests,
ladles up cool water
whispers sleep sleep
sleep. […]

Rebecca Cook, 3 Versions. Which Do You Prefer?

Wow. There’s nothing like typing a poem out to realize it really is pitch perfect. Between 15 – 21 syllables in every line. Nothing misplaced. I think again of Elizabeth Bishop’s line that what she wants most in poetry is to see the mind in action. The leaps here from Dr. Martins to wild flowers to black widows to smoking to eating shrimp and making honey—to the speaker’s need to be seen as good. It all makes sense in the context of the piece. Beautiful, stunning sense. I adore this poem. I adore Jen.

The one time I was lucky enough to read with Jen was in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It must have been shortly after COVID. Jen offered to host me at her home which meant we had a good long time together. That night 5 minutes before our reading, I asked Jen if she would be willing to try a braided reading where one poet reads two poems and then the next poet reads work that somehow echoes what’s been read before. For example if Jen read her “Dr. Martins 1460 Wild Botanica” poem, I might read my poem with the line, “The season’s don’t fuck with me boots.”

In true Jen Martelli style she said “let’s do it,” and with no time to prepare we improvised back and forth choosing poems from our own book that chimed with the other. It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing a reading.

Susan Rich, Jennifer Martelli, Way Too Early

why not?
she stands in the sunshine
blowing bubbles

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: May ’26

I don’t know who reads this. I don’t know who reads anything I write anymore, or whether that matters. I’m not sure it should… but writing, to me, has always involved this effort to transcend loneliness, however brief.

A poem and a painting then, since poems and paintings are less canny than human beings. Poems and paintings cannot — and therefore do not— condescend to you. Nor are they careerists. However much the poet or painter who created the poem or painting may be a late capitalist careerist, the poem and the painting are free to repudiate their creators. In this sense, the poem and the painting are better than us.

Alina Stefanescu, Frank Stewart’s “Marriage Among Friends”

I can only read in tiny snatches at the moment. Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets have been a great recourse in such a situation: brief, crystalline and endlessly evocative, they’re things I can dip into in spare moments, particularly the ones I know by heart and can think about as I walk to the shops or do the dishes. I have no academic grounding in them and my French is limited so my responses are personal and subjective, but I think in the case of these poems that’s as it should be. […]

Loss and recovery are fundamental, recurrent notes in the Nerval poems I’ve read. We see them here in “l’ardeur d’autrefois brilla dans ses yeux verts”, in “J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle” and in “la mer nous renvoyait son image adore” – the first two full of energy and forward-looking purpose, the third ethereally reflective. In fact the more I think about it the more the whole poem seems a magical orchestration of the tenses in three movements – a first, eight line movement revolving round the bitter stasis of a present that seems inescapable, a second, forward-looking three line movement which draws life from an eagerly anticipated future, and a third three-line movement of rapt retrospection.

Edmund Prestwich, Gerard de Nerval – Horus, a personal reading

Beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, I think, is all ye need to know. Like the key of a map, the phrase collects the poem’s principal features in one clarifying legend. Perhaps microcosm makes a better metaphor in the context of “The Dancing,” which is more interested in connectedness, in complexity and wildness, than a map’s simplified order can represent. At any rate, I think of it as a kind of signifier, distilling both the poem’s linguistic strategy and worldview.

[Gerald] Stern’s music is built of accretion, a stacking up of sounds into a sonic lushness that foregoes the simultaneously anticipatory and analeptic distance of traditional forms in favour of something I want to call more organic, arising from a corporeal present instead of a telegraphed future or reverberated past: one sound gives rise to its twin with a wild spontaneity. The assonance of “rotten shops,” the liquid consonance of “beautiful, filthy,” the pairs of present participles: there is patternless patterning here, the sense of both randomness and design.

Beyond the musical pleasure, there’s a familiar delight in the yoking of praise and denigration: how we love to hate our hometowns, or secretly cherish certain exasperating persons, the places and people who teach us the protean nature of our attachments. How quickly we shift, out of a need—real or imagined—for self-preservation, fall in and out of devotion. How tenuous the divide between what is precious and what profane. “The Dancing” holds this egoistic namby-pambyness in check, tames our proclivity for simplifying our inherent ambivalence into for or against, love or fear, praise or denigration. Pittsburgh is beautiful. It is also filthy. You can love something broken, imperfect. Even—in 1945—the world.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Dancing” by Gerald Stern

The British poet J. H. Prynne died a couple of weeks ago, prompting several touching responses from his relatively small but loyal group of readers. Coincidentally, this past week I’ve been reading some of David Melnick’s weird and extraordinary version of the Iliad, Men in Aïda. That poem is an example of an unusual (but not unique) approach to translation that prioritises the sound, the music of the original — I mean not just that the translator has attempted to use the same or a roughly equivalent metre, or even that they’ve taken the opportunity (as surely all good translators do) to echo the sound of the original where possible, but that this version of Homer chooses English words based primarily on their sonic similarity to the Greek. So ‘Men in Aïda’, the title and the first words of the poem, translates menin aeide, the first two words in Greek (‘Sing [of] the anger’).

Melnick is not the only poet to have tried something like this. Louis and Celia Zukofsky produced a similar ‘homophonic’ translation of the poems of Catullus, which is quite often quoted in passing by classicists. (And can be useful for teaching.) The reason I mention this mode of translation is because, reading Melnick, I was surprisingly often reminded of the particular pleasures (and frustrations) of reading Prynne. Quite often Prynne’s poetry sounds rather as if it might be this sort of sonic translation of something else, of a ravishing poem in a language I do not know; which is not to say that the English words he chooses have no meaning. (Melnick’s words, too, convey meaning and even a loose sort of plot, albeit more often impressionistically than by conventional syntax.) Here’s a representative sample, from Down Where Changed (1979):

The creamy recruit pines
for his stone, down under
the second-best hiding

white at the foot of green

still white, ever green, love
offers the perfect match
ignites the perfect loan.

I think this is a pretty fair example. It’s far from the best or most beautiful bit of Prynne but it’s far from the most obscure or difficult either. And it ends on loan, one of his signature words. Prynne’s poetry pushes you up hard against the sheer strangeness of language and languages. But it also delights in language in the simplest and most musical kind of way.

Rather surprisingly, Prynne has himself been translated a lot — most noticeably into French (many separate pamphlets), but also (according to Wikipedia) into Chinese and German, and he even composed some poetry in Chinese himself. This week, I was rather charmed to discover that his first published poem, as a schoolboy, was a translation of Thomas Hood into German verse. Not long after we moved here I picked up the bilingual French edition of the 1999 pamphlet Pearls That Were (Perles qui furent, French edition by Éric Pesty, 2013), with astonishing translations by Pierre Alferi. I found reading Prynne alongside a translation in this way extremely stimulating: I suppose this is partly because the translator is rarely able to reproduce identical ambiguities; he or she must, instead, adjudicate between meanings held in suspension in the original, while attempting to introduce alternative ambiguities. […]

When I asked on social media whether people thought [Geoffrey] Hill or Prynne would have the more enduring reputation, almost everyone who replied made it obvious — more or less politely — that they thought this was a no-brainer in Hill’s favour. But I find so much of Prynne’s poetry, for all its obscurity, exceptionally beautiful and unmistakably profound. The fact remains that I am more often moved to tears reading Prynne than almost any other recent poet in English. This just isn’t true in the same way of most of Hill, even though I am in variously ways unusually well equipped to enjoy him and do indeed sincerely admire and enjoy much of Hill’s later verse. How is it that two poets who have embraced difficulty and the limits of language in such apparently similar ways can produce such different results?

Victoria Moul, Bank on the grammar flowing: on Prynne’s music

Catching the Light (Fairfield Books, 2026), the anthology of cricket poetry edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard, contains, as it should, several poems by the doyen of cricket poets, Alan Ross, including ‘Watching Benaud Bowl’: ‘Leg-spinners pose problems much like love, / Requiring commitment, the taking of a chance.’ But among the great and the good (Agard, Arlott, Dabydeen, Hughes, Brian Jones, Kunial, McMillan, O’Brien, Rollinson, Selby, etc.), there are many individual poems which leap out, especially those by S.J. Litherland – one of only nine female contributors – and Matt Merritt; the latter’s poignant pair of portraits ‘Two Orthodox Left-armers’ celebrates two Yorkshire and England greats, Wilfred Rhodes (‘Every ball an interrogation, / every over a conspiracy of art and science’), and Hedley Verity, who died in an Italian hospital of wounds sustained from fighting the Germans in Sicily (‘Shell-bursts, a net of tracers closing fast, / but as upright among blazing Sicilian corn / as on any Scarborough dog day.)

Another of the fine contributors to Catching the Light, Rishi Distidar, has just had his fourth collection published: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches Press, 2026). In it, his trademark quirky wordplay and use of form gets full rein – just a scan of the titles gives you the idea. At times, his wish to entertain occasionally spills into silliness, but that’s no bad thing in my book, and there are precious few other UK poets around – Selima Hill and Mark Waldron come to mind – who seem to remember that poetry can be something to enjoy as well as be moved by. Those familiar with Rishi’s oeuvre will know that he also writes poems on the most important subjects, like ‘On board the ‘Tynesider’’, concerning Martin Luther King’s visit to Newcastle in 1967, which ends with these beautiful lines:

But actually he was at his best
when he was harried, harassed –
by time as well as the times –
at 1am on a slow train to somewhere
he would never go again, minting
coin as easily as he breathed, currency
we still spend in the realm of hope.

It feels apposite that Rishi’s books should sit on my shelves between the Dickman brothers and Michael Donaghy.

Matthew Paul, Recent and future readings and recent reading

I reread Heaney’s worst book, Electric Light, in prep for an upcoming webinar on his style – something more clearly observed when he’s in cruise control. It’s fine; it lacks only a real sense of necessity, and is mostly superfluous to his oeuvre. Disconcertingly, though, it’s still better than almost everything else. So many poems of Heaney’s seem written at the golden hour, with the shadows stretching to infinity. The sense of history carried in his language – indeed in his use of almost every single word – never fails to humble me.

Don Paterson, Our Spring Reading: Part I

“And that sweet man, John Clare.” So, famously, ends the 20th-century poet Theodore Roethke’s brief poem, “Heard in a Violent Ward,” grouping Clare (1793–1864) with two other poetic visionaries, William Blake (1757–1827) and Christopher Smart (1722–1771). Roethke’s speaker prophesies to some unknown companion in an insane asylum that “in heaven you’d be institutionalized,” classing this mentally ill person, given to violence, with the three poets, and consigning them to the same ward in the afterlife. If this classification is jarring in its equation of violent madness with mysticism, it’s also a little odd, or else a little too conventional, in its view of heaven.

This speaker suggests that aside from the whiff of actual violence, to be a mystic in the vein of these three poets would imperil the presumed tidiness of the celestial order — as though the nine choirs of angels themselves would not know what to do with such a person, except to lock him up. Possibly Roethke’s speaker underestimates the nine choirs of angels and their capacity for dealing with people who think in visions. Also possibly, Roethke’s speaker underestimates heaven itself, casting it implicitly as a place where nobody colors outside strictly drawn lines and gets away with it.

Not that Smart and Clare, at any rate, really meant to color outside the lines. Like Smart, in conscious belief and practice Clare remained, all his life, a straightforwardly devout Anglican, orthodox in all his outlooks. Unlike Blake, he was not in any deliberate way a radical. But again unlike Blake, and again like Smart, he was given to what was delicately called “infirmity” of mind, and less delicately labeled “lunacy.” Sensitive and susceptible to disturbances as natural and predictable as the change of seasons, he was given to terrors as well as glimpses of sublime things beyond the defined and rational boundaries of ordinary piety. Or perhaps, as Wordsworth before him had suggested, the terror and the sublime were all one.

In Clare’s poems we might find the reminder that while the God in whom he believed might have established and endorsed those rational boundaries of ordinary piety, this God himself, with all the reality that flows from him, is not limited by them. It’s the visionary who glimpses something of that unlimited, and therefore unsettling, reality. Sometimes this looks like madness; perhaps sometimes it is madness. Suffice it to say that often enough, Clare’s poems arise from those moments when in one way or another, his own mental clarity dissolves and re-resolves on new terms.

His “I Am,” for example, written during a stay in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, gives voice to a mind striving to assert itself in darkness, while “Autumn” renders in verse the sensory warping that turns the vividness of a hot harvest-time day apocalyptically strange and terrifying. This turn of mind, in which mere sight becomes vision, transfiguring reality into something alien, simultaneously more threatening and more glorious than it ordinarily appears, may be what prompts Roethke’s speaker to assume that for the staid denizens of heaven, a poet such as Clare would be too hot to handle without a straitjacket.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: A Look at the Heavens

Winner of the Hudson Book Prize from Black Lawrence Press, Bettina Judd’s debut collection of poetry, patient. poems, takes as its subject the history of medical experimentation on Black women. Her poems evolved, Judd explains on her website, from a series of watercolors she had been painting while healing from surgery. The paintings themselves, she says, “were influenced by the work of artists in the service of science and medicine who painted portraits of indigenous and African peoples for the purpose of study.”* For Judd, an African American, that source material raised innumerable ethical questions about the use of Black women’s bodies (e.g., as exploited medical subjects, as slaves denied their humanity). Given her academic research interests and the fact her own surgery had been performed at a teaching hospital, and thus was subject to possible study, it was perhaps inevitable that Judd would undertake a more involved project. What ultimately came into being was a multi-voiced series of poems, each able to stand on its own, that provide a narrative about some aspect of Black women’s violation and suffering at the hands of doctors and scientific researchers.

The history that Judd resurrects in her poems is, all at once, eye-opening, traumatic, disturbing. It is also sourced in facts. […]

In “Pathology.”, Judd introduces us to “the researcher”, who is both unnamed and embodied in the character of the antagonist J. Marion Sims, a 19th Century physician, called by some the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” who developed groundbreaking surgical techniques but whose medical ethics and experiments on Black female slaves were highly controversial and damnable.

How to Measure Pain I

In the woman it is a checklist:

Can you imagine anything
worse than this?

If the answer is no, ask again.

It is in this first section that we first hear from “the researcher” about the Black women Anarcha Wescott, Lucy Zimmerman, and Betsey Harris — dubbed “The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” — who “are taken into the care of a reluctant country surgeon in Montgomery, Alabama” and are experimented on: “In these three, Sims shapes his speculum, invents his silver sutures, perfects protocol for proper handling of the female pelvis” — without anesthesia or consent. (“The Researcher Discovers Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy”)

Lucy didn’t scream like most. Though sometimes she would moan—deep, long and overdue. I’d wake thinking death. It’s her, knees curled under, head face down, her body trying to move out of itself. [. . .]

~ from “The Inauguration of Experiments”

As the collection unfolds, Judd tells by turn the stories of these three “patients,” as well as those of Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, also African-Americans who suffered their own “ordeal[s] with medicine.”

Maureen Doallas, Bettina Judd’s ‘patient. poems’

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the  Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).

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

P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.

The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.

Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.

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

P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.

At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.

Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience. […]

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.

Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.

When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Sylvain

Last night (7th May) I had my Manchester book launch at Manchester Poetry Library. It was a really lovely event, hosted by my friend and colleague Malika Booker. This event was a little different to Sunday – I did a fifteen minute reading, followed by a fifteen minute Q & A with Malika and the audience, and then a poem to finish. This time Blackwells was the bookseller – they bought thirty copies and sold out!

Actually, the real story is that the bookseller bought 30 copies but only sold 29 – someone either loved my poetry so much they stole a copy, or someone absent mindedly wandered off without paying…I prefer the desperate-for-my-poetry-so-they-stole-a-copy version of the story.

This week I also ordered a box of one hundred books, ready to take round to smaller events that don’t have their own bookseller. This also means I’ve got some to sell through my own website as signed copies – another way of getting the book into the world.

When I first published my pamphlet back in 2011, I bought some postcards and some tissue paper and wrapped it up before posting it to my first buyer. I found this process both time-consuming and strangely satisfying, and have done it ever since. My friend John Foggin (sadly missed) on receiving a tissue-wrapped pamphlet said that I always do everything with my whole heart, and I think he was right – what other way is there of doing anything?

Kim Moore, Adventures of the House

Kim wasn’t exaggerating – the launch of The House of Broken Things was magic. Up at Wainsgate Chapel, off the road where the ponies gallop to the fence to see me when I walk over the moors by night, up the stoney lane which leads past the chapel to my home. […]

And in the second half, after a break filled with cake and booksales, Jodie (Kim’s identical twin sister) played her french horn with Dave Nelson’s expert piano, and the chapel filled with a perfect sound, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry before Kim took to the stage again and settled the matter.

I would love to leave it there. I’d love to say that I had a wonderful time, and that I left smiling and feeling lucky and fulfilled but – that’s not how it goes for me. Time with people is costly, and there was so much chat; there were crowds and emotions and sitting still; too much sugar. I’d forgotten to wear my “I’m faceblind: please introduce yourself” badge so there was the strain of half-known faces, unfamiliar shifting etiquette, noise. I’d a migraine by the time I left, and come evening, I walked a long time in the darkness considering the strange animal I am, how I have no name for myself, how I don’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Then out of the blue, Kim texted to tell me how’d she felt calm when I arrived at the Wainsgate, and I realised that this place here, however rocky, however changeable the weather, is where I fit. And I carried on walking into the night taking photographs of lichen and bluebells with the UV torch Amy brought to my house because she thought I might like it, because I am a strange animal, and my strange little flock is right here. Here’s to The House of Broken Things. Here’s to poetry and friendship. Here’s to finding your kin.

Clare Shaw, Different Forms of Magic

Then one of the women who organized the gathering wondered aloud how it would change things if every reading series in New York included somewhere in its web presence, or at its venue if that were possible, a written commitment to what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion, incorporating specifically a zero tolerance statement about sexual victimization of any kind. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Such a statement would allow me at the very least to establish publicly both a set of expectations and a standard of accountability for my series’ content, management, and audience. It would serve as a resource I or anyone else involved with First Tuesdays could refer people to when telling them about the series, as well as a publicly accessible code of conduct should it ever become necessary to call someone to account for their behavior, including me.

I wrote a statement, circulated it on the series mailing list to get buy-in from as many regulars as possible, and posted it to the First Tuesdays website, where it has lived now for more than ten years. I did not feel the need to incorporate it into our regular meetings, though, until we began once again to meet in person after the pandemic shutdown and I actually had to ban a fellow poet from our open mic. He’d read an egregiously sexist and implicitly racist poem for which he refused to take any responsibility despite the ample room I gave him to do so, first during the break between the open mic and our featured reader and then in an email exchange over the course of the next week or so. In that exchange, he criticized me for calling him out publicly, immediately after he read the poem. He felt blind-sided, he said, which struck me as a point worth considering, not because I thought I shouldn’t have called him out like that, but because if he’d never read what I’d begun to call the First Tuesdays vision statement, there was no reason for him not to assume our open mic was, like so many open mics are, more of a public square where anything goes than a curated literary space.

That’s when I decided to start reading the statement out loud at the beginning of every meeting:

First Tuesdays is an open mic/featured reader literary gathering where writers who wrestle with the issues of our day—from racism and sexual violence to climate change and economic inequality—can find an audience willing to embrace the risk and discomfort that come with sharing politically engaged, satirical, or otherwise edgy material; where those writers can coexist, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and camaraderie, with writers whose work is more traditional and conservative; where anyone who comes only to listen, even if they just happen to walk in off the street, can sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and feel not just welcomed, but challenged, engaged, comforted, seen, maybe even inspired.

At the heart of First Tuesdays, in other words, is an ongoing, proactive commitment to diversity and inclusivity, in both the kinds of literary work we welcome into our community and the people who come to share it. Nothing will erode that sense of community more surely, however, than the mistrust and hatred borne of sexism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or any of the other far-too-many ways that human beings have learned to target each other for who they or what they believe. So I will state this plainly. Neither work nor behavior that bespeaks any of those “isms” or “phobias” is welcome at First Tuesdays, and I will, as host, confront and hold accountable anyone who brings either into our midst.

When I first started this practice, I explained it by talking about my exchange with that banned poet. Over the last four years, though, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become something more important: an affirmation that gathering as we do every month, as we have been doing for the thirteen years that I’ve been running the series—and by “we” I mean everyone: the regulars, the newcomers, the featured readers, the people who just happen to be in the café when the reading starts—that gathering as we do to share the literature we make is in and of itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted.

When I think about the impact that reading this statement aloud has had on the First Tuesdays community, I think about the people who nod along as I read, even those who’ve heard it month after month since I started, and about the applause the statement sometimes gets, and the softly spoken—and sometimes not so softly spoken—expressions of support I hear when I’m done reading. Listening as I read the statement out loud, in other words, matters to them, just as reading it matters to me. Because even if it feels like all we’ve done on the first Tuesday of the month is walk a block or two to the café to hang out with friends and listen to and talk about literature, we should not forget that there are an awful lot of powerful people in this country who would very much like to undo not just the community that we have formed, but also the capacity inherent in literature to build that kind of community in the first place.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Sometimes Resisting Means Recommitting Yourself to What You’re Already Doing

Is it fair to say, as Micah Mattix does, that “The Nigerian poet and critic Ernest Jesuyemi was selected as a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow…until they discovered he was a Christian”?

Or is this too simplistic a description for what happened?

Was the NBCC board right to withdraw the full fellowship? Or is this religious discrimination? Does it matter that this is a fellowship, which requires working among community? Is this another artist cancellation, or is this categorically different?

Becky Tuch, I Can Buy Myself Lit Mags!

On a long oak table in a formal room
in Rare Books, on the library’s seventh floor,
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The work is verse, a church-year’s worth of sermons
probably copied by an earnest monk.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain’s chair and the task.

These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
A lot of Northern spellings. I warm to this,
matter and form, but I’m especially held
by matter, tangibles: the ink, the paper.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.

Maryann Corbett, Academic dreams . . .

I was surprised and a little unsettled by Kariega, the last poem in the book, in which the narrator and a companion paddle upstream through the game reserve of this name in the Eastern Cape. The journey is to escape the ‘concrete, tar or plastic’ of so-called civilisation, to explore the river – ‘And there’s an island far ahead where we’ll rest and eat/ with the waterbuck, the crabs and blacksmith plovers/ where the world is as it has always been, quiet and slow’. He ponders the passing of time and the inevitable end to life that I suppose most of us who have long kissed goodbye to seventy will think on here and there and considers if the end were to come it would not seem tragic if it happened in such a place. It’s a fine poem. My surprise was because, having only a very limited knowledge of South Africa, I looked up Kariega before reading the poem. It is home to a vast Volkswagen factory, supposedly the largest car factory in Africa. I expected this to come into the poem somewhere in contrast to the reserve and wonderful natural wilderness that stretches away from the town. I thought about why [Harry] Owen avoided this rather obvious contrast – and concluded that sometimes, perhaps, the power is in what is left unsaid. That view, however, relies on a knowledge of place that perhaps only a few outside South Africa would connect with.

Following on, I think when a poet is from another country – Owen was born in Liverpool but has lived in South Africa a long time now – the reader needs to attempt to understand at least the sense of the place in which a book is written. Mindforest is not exclusively bound to South Africa but it supplies much of the backdrop. My glimpses of the world in which he immerses himself, and hopefully via the poems us, were long ago. I had a couple of work trips to South Africa in 1994 and 2001 and they were confined largely to the surreal creation that is Sun City and to Johannesburg, where I found, at that time, the city centre was more dangerous, darker and considerably less welcoming than Soweto, where I needed to go to visit a boxing gym and so obviously took time to look around. Necessity and time confined me. The wider landscape of the country I experienced only in passing, in travelling through. Still, it’s something I could work with in reading the book.

I think it’s fair to say that Owen has developed as a poet later in life and perhaps this is to his advantage. Those who find a ‘voice’ or success early on sometimes burn out and the opportunity to use the supposed wisdom that comes with age is lost. Not so here, as the poet acknowledges in the poem Epiphany, which perhaps describes what it feels like for so many of us not born into financial privilege and academic expectation.

Bob Mee, REFLECTIONS ON MINDFOREST by HARRY OWEN

Back in January, I attended a conference in Cambridge on “Creative Medievalisms”. Among recurring threads of conversations throughout the event was a ripple of ideas about voice — the human voice, the creative voice, our personal voice. Margery Kempe cropped up repeatedly in these discussions, as did the ventriloquized voice of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”, Chaucer lets the garrulous, “gat-toothed”, bawdy Wife speak at length, giving her free rein in the longest prologue of any pilgrim-teller in The Canterbury Tales. Veering between learned argument in which she takes on Church teaching on marriage and virginity and earthy vignettes of her life with her five husbands (“in his owene grece I made hym frye” she says acerbically of husband number four), the Wife is a lively, funny, engaging interlocutor. As she courts controversy she is interrupted within the Prologue by (male clerical) pilgrims who don’t like what she is saying or object to her going on for so long.

In fact, the Wife is such a distinctive character that, as Marion Turner observes, she is referred to by other speakers in The Canterbury Tales and emerges after Chaucer’s lifetime as a literary figure in her own right. She is even described by Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426), a poet who knew Chaucer and promoted his reputation after his death, as a specifically female authority (auctrice) on the subject of women’s displeasure at men’s depiction of the female sex: “The wyf of Bathe, take I for auctrice” (“Dialogue”, 694). The Wife is the Chaucerian voice that escapes the bounds of the text and the control of its author to take on a life of her own.

Yet despite her unique voice, Chaucer’s Wife is also in some ways utterly unoriginal, a creation based on the anti-feminist discourse of the time, sometimes viewed as nothing more than a collection of misogynist ideas brought to life. Chaucer was entering into a contemporary debate that was crowded with authorial opinions. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) a catalogue of illustrious women is designed to respond to the anti-feminists. Although the style and form is very different, there is a common purpose with Chaucer’s Wife. Where Chaucer offers us the voice of an ordinary middle-aged woman with a wealth of experience of marriage, in The Book of the City of Ladies we encounter a dreamscape in which the Lady Reason, the Lady Rectitude and the Lady Justice explain to Christine that they will debunk all the misconceptions about women. Abounding in examples from history and myth, with a core of philosophy and a sharp critical eye for inconsistency, we can detect in Christine’s detailed rebuttal to the misogynists, something akin to the Wife’s vivacious and rather one-sided argument with the clerks. The subject matter overlaps, but the individual voices of the authors take the material in different directions.

The creative voice then is the thin thread, the wisp of experience and meaning that the individual brings to the discourse, orchestrating the interplay between the living and the dead. In the words of John Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, it is the verse that we contribute to the play. Now, whenever we talk about voice, there is the unavoidable subtext of what it means to write in the age of AI when a pattern-recognition machine can spew out sense-making words. As someone who loves the struggle of writing and wrestling with words on the page, I cannot imagine why I would want my creative hand guided by a robot and I find it difficult to care about text that is not written by a human. It’s ersatz writing to me, no more than a poor substitute for the real thing. It removes the thin thread that makes the writing worthwhile for the author and meaningful for the reader.

Ruth Lexton, The Creative Voice

The voice that is great outside us. Between us. That is all of us.

So often we’re taught to find our “voice”—both as people and as writers. But I’ve always thought that this notion of “voice” is reductive and essentialist. I’d rather imagine our “voice” to be more about the range of ways that we interact with the world and the range of relationships we have. As a writer, also. What are the ways we relate to language, culture, writing, to process. To our processing of the world and how we (and our words and our notion of words) are processed by the world.

Imagine a sculptor bringing a set of objects with which to build a sculpture. I feel that their “voice” is not so much about the objects as it is their way of considering and engaging with these objects. Perhaps the process of accumulating the objects, the way they put those objects together. The way they are open to what the object are saying.

We are always already part of the work, the world. We don’t have a singular “voice,” any more than we exist as independent organisms apart from the world. Our bodies/selves require the infrastructure of the world: air, warmth, food, bacteria, shelter, other humans. Each individual is the result of their engagement with this infrastructure. So, all writing relies on the infrastructure, the betweenness, the interrelationships, of language and humanity, readers and the society and culture that by definition surrounds the writer, their work, and the process of their work.

A writer doesn’t need to find their “voice,” but instead to develop awareness and tools for considering and realizing process, for considering their entanglement, inter- and intrarelations, their I’m-soaking-in-it-Madgedness.

Is there a self without interaction? Is there a writer?

Gary Barwin, The voice that is great outside us: writer as part of the necessary polycule

I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.

Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.

When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.

Maria Popova, Poetry: I Too, Dislike It

— I recently read the short book, brief notes on the art and manner of arranging one’s books by George Perec. I’m immersed in reading about the history of classification as it regards books right now for the novel I’m writing. Perec also says interesting things about the daily, the habitual. “The daily papers talk of everything except the daily,” he says. And, “How should we take account of, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual?” He goes on: “To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as it if weren’t the bearer of any information.” […]

— I recently picked up Imagining What We Don’t Know by Lisa Samuels, admittedly because the title refers to something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: Imagining, the imagination, our power of imagination, the importance of our imaginations.

— From the Lisa Samuels book: “Beauty is a problem for poetry because we no longer imagine beauty as a serious way of knowing. But it is. Beauty wedges into the artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not know.” She notes that taking beauty seriously and working on theories of beauty “is out of fashion.” But she says, “Forms of beauty are resistant structures, imaginative structures that present an impenetrable model of the unknown. Beauty is therefore endlessly talk-inspiring, predictive rather than descriptive, dynamic rather than settled, infinitely serious and useful.”

— To reiterate: beauty is a serious way of knowing! Yes.

Shawna Lemay, Notes on Beauty, Books, Imagining, the Soul’s Skeleton, and a Smoking Angel

Since nothing is ever complete, the poetry book I wrote about my mother, Diaspora of Things, seems like a light-sensitive print of where I was a few years ago.  The relationship keeps evolving.  The deeper I get into motherhood – all these years now! – the more I slide alongside her, intuiting her unsaid about joy, loss, “annoying aspects of inevitable change,” freedoms gained and realities of our limits.  In strange morning dreams, so kitchen-sink and unsentimental, I’m waking up to the twists that adult children exert on mothers, and how much I got away with!  Doris had a taste for the radical, and more patience than I give her credit for.  To the complexity and mystery of motherhood, and the sister-soul that walks along with us on our journey!

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Affections

It has been a time of moments recently. Stillness. Patience. A buzzard on a fence post. Applauding a flyover from a heron. A rainbow in a storm. A 5p found on the ground at a motorway service station. That tyre pressure light. Seizing the moment to drink tea on the settees of family and friends. Asking for a drink in a coffee shop by using its advertising tagline to see if the person taking the order laughs.

And a new writing desk. Sometimes I spend too long flicking through my phone, but recently it led to a serendipitous moment when I saw that a friend had a writing desk for sale. Mine was old and faithful, and it always surprised me just how much I could get done in such a small space – so many poems and videos and meetings and essays and coaching sessions. It was originally gifted to me many, many moons ago by a neighbour of my grandparents and has easily fitted into every place I have ever lived. It has been well and truly loved and as it retires I tip my hat to just how well it has served me. And now into service comes a new beauty, with space aplenty. This then reminds me of that time we were asked to bring something to show which was important to us when I first started my coaching training. Being a little nervous at starting something new I had everything ready, but felt the urge to double check before the meeting started. I felt a little bit clumsy and fumbly (and everything was crowded into a small space) and as I reached for the glass paperweight to check that it wasn’t dusty before I shared it with a group of new people, I knocked my hand on my laptop screen and promptly dropped my show and tell object into my glass of water. I do like to be ready for things before they happen, so my heart beat a little bit faster as I dipped my hand in to retrieve it and hurriedly wiped it on my jeans to dry it off. At least that solved the dust problem, I told myself as I took a deep breath and clicked to join the meeting. 

I am pretty confident that my readiness will be easier where I now sit so here’s to finding the space we need for the things that bring us joy, and for appreciating the old and the new!

This past week I was keen to find out what kind of poem would be the first to be written at my new desk (and when it would take shape). Pleasingly it was a love poem that flowed. They are quite rare for me and come with a little fanfare and sparkles when they arrive.

Sue Finch, THAT’S NOT MINE, MINE’S CRISPY…

Now is the time of spring’s coolness. The breeze and shade detain the heat. The trees look fresh and new. But the flowers are falling. The blossom is over and the rhododendrons and azaleas are nearly over. Far away in north D.C., the tulips at Hillwood House are peaking and about to wilt. Here the tiny blue flowers by the path will soon go to seed. As we walk back to the car, we hear an oven bird, whose loud clear song fills the forest from some hidden spot. So much of what we have seen are tropes from American films, and tropes of real American life. The oven bird is familiar from Robert Frost. “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.”

The sun has begun its decline. One of the fishing boats is gone now. The young man in headphones is sloping back. Bikers are strapping their bikes onto car racks. As we leave the forest, we come back to aggressive American driving, the need to get things done before bed. The late sun sinks behind the trees and lights the undersides of the high-raised roads. Dogwood flowers gleam in the evening glow. We pass the filling stations and see the price of gas is rising, rising. A fire truck goes past. The 24-hour diner sign still shines. There were two dozen cars at the shore when we left—owners and boats were still launched on the Occoquan.

In Washington, there are secrets, heard and unheard, in Congress, the White House, and the Court—at Langley, Rosslyn, the Pentagon— and in all the agencies and institutions and non-profits that fill the grid. Somewhere back in the woods, the oven bird is still singing. “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.”

Henry Oliver, He says the early petal-fall is past

I’ve read that the turn in a poem is a key to the closing, and ending lines will be stronger depending on how near they are to (or distant from, and evocative of) the turn. This seemed helpful revision advice. Yet does every poem require a turn? The idea of the volta is ancient indeed, but it need not be a prescription for all the poems in the world. Poetry from other than Western cultures often proceeds quite beautifully without a turn, and does that mean that such a poem is static? That’s often seen as a negative in art: when nothing moves, or moves the viewer. I’d like to refer my readers to L.A. Johnson on Jericho Brown’s duplex form, “Radical Stasis” in Poetry. What could be more static than repetition? And yet in Brown’s work, the lack of a turn implies circularity, not necessarily ambivalence and certainly not a lack of movement. Johnson calls it a transformation.

I want to experiment with how altering a poem’s closing might lead to changing the poem’s form or structure for a stronger impact. Another option I’ve used is moving the last lines to the start or near the start of the poem. Maybe those lines weren’t really the image or idea that particular poem was aiming for. And then there is docking the tail of a poem. It may be a cruel practice for dogs and horses, but a poem can benefit from a careful removal of the unnecessary closing line(s). Closing lines that summarize a point can wreck my delight in a poem, and alas, I tend that way sometimes…I spent my childhood Sundays in church, listening to my dad declaim from the pulpit. The oral and rhetorical structure of sermons is routed into my brain, and that can be a real problem when I draft. Poetry can be many things, but I don’t care for poetry that sermonizes.

At any rate, I have a LOT of unfinished drafts that might benefit from change-ups. Instead of writing a blog post, I ought to be working on those!

Ann E. Michael, Closure

And what about that final quote? It’s italicised and in speech marks. Did the horn blow the tune to which that ballad was originally set? Is that Childe Roland speaking about himself in third person, suddenly seeing himself from a distance (the distance of death)? Is that the storyteller Browning’s voice suddenly breaking into the dramatic monologue?

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is the title of the poem too, so to end with the same words almost suggests something circular. We have returned to the start, in a kind of Groundhog Day. Childe Roland will never get to the tower but be stuck in this perpetual circle of hell forevermore… And it’s worth mentioning that time is supposed to work differently in Elfland or Faerie Land. Perhaps it loops.

It’s a sinister, unsettling ending, deliberately ambiguous. But perhaps that is why it continues to fascinate and inspire. It creates a desire that it refuses to satisfy. Browning’s neverending story continue to haunt our literary culture.

Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning

       I could translate all this into words like hunger
or gift, witness or mercy. But I choose not to.  
   I consider the breath that unraveled so quickly, how 
       the future briefly arrived, without fanfare or song.

Luisa A. Igloria, Life Study

This week: the clay-dusted air of the workshop, the rambling treasure hunt for a poem, writing nothing but sonnets for a year, the poets on the farthest end of the table, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s a bright morning in Yorkshire. The trees are in full blossom and there’s a fierce little breeze which scatters their petals like confetti. Today is Earth Day. It’s also the twenty second day of National Poetry Writing Month; a writing phenomenon which began in the States and now extends around the globe. According to the NaPoWriMo model, a prompt is issued and poets are invited to write (and share) a poem in response .

Yes, that’s right – a poem a day, every day, for 31 days. I can’t remember when Kim and I began following this crazy instruction – seven years ago? Nine? Ten? My blurriness is partially the result of late-night-writing-sessions and sleep deprivation by the end of the month; partly the sense of almost-total immersion in the world of the poem.

For all of those years I’ve been doing NaPoWriMo, April has functioned as a sort of creative reservoir – a time when I know I will produce a stack of drafts which will go some way to sustaining me through the rest of the year. It’s not just about quantity either: the daily discipline; the heady exposure of knowing that I’ll publish my early drafts on social media no matter how imperfect or incomplete; the delicious combination of mutual support, appreciation and competition I always feel when I’m writing with Kim – there’s no doubt that I produce some of my best writing in April.

Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo

Early in my social media times I began adding a link to a piece of music to each of my poems. I’ve been doing this for maybe … eight years?? My playlist of these songs exceeds 30 hours now. Why am I doing this? The thing is …

A poem takes us into a waiting room.

We open a magazine on a random page and read. The person next to us changes their position on a plastic chair. The wall clock ticks on. The air is stale, infused with the deodorant of the man who has left before we entered. These lines. We reread them, not having quite got it. A fly that has landed on the table is shuffling its legs.

Then we look up.

Outside, mute, the branches of a tree. Traffic. A person hurries down the street and a piece of paper falls from their trouser pocket, but they walk on, not noticing.

We look back at what we’ve just read and it has changed.

Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music

Like many people, I am intrigued by bird calls. Where we live in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, just out of Adelaide, South Australia, we are graced by many types of native birds. However in the forty years we have lived here, the number of species found in the area had dropped dramatically. This decline has been well documented and is due to a combination of habitat destruction, mostly for human housing, and climate change. Nevertheless, most of the time, the air is filled with the calls of birds, some regular residents, others infrequent passers-by. But what are they saying to each other? what are they trying to tell us?

Here are a couple of videos I have made, in which I give voices to the birds in different ways. Both these videos have had many screenings in Australia and around the world.

Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…

With Birds and Duduk

In this piece, I’m playing a duduk, an Armenian double reed instrument made out of apricot wood. I’m also using live digital processing and recordings of birds.

Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds

And there is this beautiful thing Ted Berrigan said, as quoted by Ron Padgett:

The gods demand of the system that a certain number of people sing, like the birds do, and it somehow was given to me to be one of those people—and I mean I did have a choice—I could have decided not to, to be a truck driver or a filmmaker. But I like doing that, and I feel that probably the major reason I write is because the gods might destroy… the whole thing could fall apart. I lift my voice in song. I lift my voice in song.

Valium numbs every part of the song that seeks to keep things whole in me.

The administrative precision of the hospital emphasizes the humiliation of being embodied. I will always dread it. But I won’t spend this week consumed by the worry of waiting for results.

I lift my voice in song instead, to quote Ted.

Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.

I say to the tree growing inside me

It is one thing to taste your bitter
leaves but now I hear your barbets
all day, their song is crawling out
of my ear, do you know they are
planning to escape?

I think they saw a cloudless sky
dancing in my dreams.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4

During bouts of outdoor work, when I’m mindlessly weeding, pruning, or doing soil prep, I’ve been mulling over whether–and if so, how–I’ve changed as to writing poetry (see closing paragraph of last week’s post). There are vague recollections of getting really on a roll and drafting new work into late hours of the night when I was 20 or 21 years old. But how I went about it, what approach I took to writing back then? I barely recall. It’d require research into my old journals to figure that out; there, I dare not go! And what happened to all the poems I typed up on my heavy, electric typewriter (an early 1970s Adler, if I recall aright)? They’ve mostly vanished, though a few reside in my attic in several boxes of old literary magazines which chose to publish my efforts. […]

I’ve just finished reading poems by the 16th c. Korean poet Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, a brilliant person who started writing before age 8 and died at 27. A young person all her life, by our standards, and a prodigy. A frequent theme of hers is yearning for a husband or lover who is far away, a trope as common in Asian poetry as in European poetry. The lover has gone to war, or been exiled, or is in another region on work for the king/emperor/church, or is at sea. Nansŏrhŏn frequently wrote in the style of the Chinese poets who penned this sort of yearning poem; in fact, her husband was often distant, trying to work his way into a higher-status position, while she was left at his home with her in-laws. Her desire may not even have been so much sexual longing as just plain loneliness. Her work, even when it is not more romantic in subject, is suffused with an overall sorrowful yearning.

I recall having that feeling when I was in my teens and early twenties. Often, I wasn’t even sure what it was I yearned for or desired specifically. I just felt the sense that something was missing in my life, and I suspect that many of my earliest poems aimed to describe vague heartbreak about a kind of emptiness. (I assure you, my work was terrible–no comparison to Nansŏrhŏn can be made here.) However, when I read her poems, that’s what resonates with me. […]

[W]hile I recognize and appreciate the sentiment that accompanies yearning, my work has not been animated or inspired by that particular kind of longing for awhile now. It’s not that I lack desires, but the tenor of the feeling is different. Romantic love or an unrealized self? Not so much. The longing is for new places, further questions, better solutions, comfortable nearness, safe space, peace. I find much to learn every day, much to love, to admire. In spite of everything.

Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning

Kelli Russell Agodon came out to be our featured reader at the J. Bookwalter Poetry Series (just rebooted!) on Thursday night and she did a great job, as did the open mic-ers, and a wonderful audience. It’s always a pleasure to hang out with poets here in Woodinville, and the weather obliged, not being too cold or too hot, and the evening ending in golden light as the last reader read.

We also got to introduce Catherine Broadwall’s upcoming book, Afterlife, which will debut on May 5, and she’ll be our featured reader on June 18. I feel very lucky to have so many talented friends and writers around for inspiration.

Kelli read from her upcoming book with Copper Canyon, Accidental Devotions, which if you haven’t thought about preordering, think about it! It’s got Alexa solving existential crises, mermaid dreams, Emily Dickinson’s phone messages, and a whimsical take on a world in chaos. Kelli and I have been friends since before our first books were taken, so we were reminiscing a bit, how we’ve changed as people and writers, how we haven’t changed. I think both of us have become better writers, and part of that is a function of having supportive writer friends, and part of it is not giving up, and another part is becoming more comfortable with who we are as people, which somehow translates into poetry.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Kelli’s Reading in Woodinville, Goldfinches Returns with Cherry and Crabapple, Birthdays Approaching and the State of Publishing (And Fear of Failure)

“In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago” is a poem that came together over many years. In 2005 I first jotted down notes about the canyon, the view from Airport Mesa, and the Milky Way while on my honeymoon in Sedona, Arizona. Over the next twenty years or so, I returned to that material now and then, but never had the poem in my grasp, just images. After my divorce, I went back to those old, failed drafts to see what I could find. That excavation led me to a poem that is, in its own way, about excavation, and about seeing things later through a different lens.

What helped me find and shape the poem was seeing an opportunity to play with repetition and variation. Like jazz musicians, we writers can improvise and riff! I’ve noted some of that riffing in the handwritten annotation below.

As I note here, I saw the opening—“Our honeymoon was a strand of scenic overlooks”—as an opportunity to play with variations on that sentence. Mid poem it becomes “Our honeymoon was a stranded scene I overlooked,” and in the end it becomes “Our honeymoon was a strand, a strangeness, a look ahead.” Riffing on the words in those sentences inspired me to play with other words and to find possible variations. Ultimately I built the form of the poem around those variations and revisions/distortions, with the end words in lines 1-3 (stand, wrote, scenic) corresponding to the end words in lines 4-6 (strange, penned, scene), and so on.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “In Geologic Time, It Happened Just Seconds Ago”

In the summer of 2023, the poet and translator Aaron Poochigian posted on social media a link to an article about an unusual archaeological find: On a fragment of an amphora from Spain at some time in the first four centuries CE, some words were scratched into the wet clay that are quite different from the usual commercial information. The article’s authors identified the words as coming from Vergil’s Georgics. Theorizing about the sort of person who might have inscribed poetry on a pot, they note that children and youths were commonly employed in pottery manufacture of the time, and that the Georgics might well have been used in pedagogy in the agricultural area where the fragment was found. Whether or not their scenario is likely, it struck a chord with me, recalling my teenage encounters with Vergil’s hexameters, a rhythm I’ve tried to echo with the stresses of modern English, and used in several poems. The poem I based on this article has finally, finally, appeared in the little magazine Vergilius, so I can show it to you.

On some words of the Georgics,
inscribed on a fragment of Roman amphora unearthed in Spain

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

Picture him, down on one knee in the clay-dusted air of the workshop,
bent to the wet terra cotta. He’s mouthing the sounds of a poem,
working the spelling out roughly; misplacing the start of the sentence—
wrong, but we see what he’s after. Underside up, the amphora,
waiting, still soft, is a near-irresistible draw to his stylus.

Everyone writes on amphorae—the contents, the names of the sellers—
what’s to deter him? His memory’s zephyred away to the schoolroom
now, and he’s singing it—quietly, quietly—wheat fields and grapevines,
oxen and beehives; he’s singing the gyre of the year in the heavens,
Bacchus and Ceres. He’s etching his love of it into the softness […]

Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me

Much is written about how to be a good listener. Far less is written about how to be a poetic one, or rather, how to listen for the poetic.

When I write poems for strangers as I do on my podcast, There’s a Poem in That, I I don’t write affirming poems that reflect the client back to themselves, merely. Instead, I take a more assertive stance. It’s not about listening and repeating, it’s a poetic processing I’m still learning how to think about.

Nomenclature for this practice can still only be borrowed. The stranger asking me to write a poem for them—do I call them a client (medicine)? A subject (visual arts)? A querent (Tarot)? Do I talk about this work as clinical? Service-oriented? Socially engaged? A healing art? Isn’t it all those things?

Listening, too isn’t enough of a word for what constitutes the rambling treasure hunt for a poem in someone else’s story. The process is more journalistic than therapy-based, but art’s the goal. I get in there, and I tangle. It’s almost physical. I tangle with what people try to tell me.

My standard three hours of interview provide ample opportunity to learn whether, and how, to challenge my querents’ narratives, test assumptions, and clarify loose language. I begin to make demands. If someone is bold enough to require a poem from me; I’m emboldened to require they take the project seriously. I do them the favor of holding them to task.

Active listening is one thing; proactive listening is a more recently advocated set of advanced techniques in which the listener pushes back a little harder in a more deliberate effort to understand not just the words a person is saying but what, in fact, they mean by them. It’s a kind of parsing in which a subject’s words need not be taken at face value if their meaning is obscure. It’s worthwhile work for poets, who are trained to interrogate the language.

I listen for images, metaphors, motifs, patterns, and archetypal hero’s journey stuff. But I also listen for those narrative gaps in querents’ stories into which a poetic conversation can fit where nothing else seems likely to. I hasten to those clearings in a client’s imagination where only a poem might spark new fire.

Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn’t do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it’s so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn’t come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go–it’s so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that’s closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I’ve noticed that more of us are questioning the platform. Like me, these other users — most of whom, in my case, are artists or writers — don’t want to leave a place where they’ve staked out a long-time presence and do have a sense of community, but they are also putting more energy into their own websites, blogs, and other online forms that are not corporate, not part of the big system, and remain under one’s own control. They are also hungry for other forms of activity and community that require — and acknowledge — genuine connection and greater attention. I’m not going to leave the site, but I’m now much more aware of what it is, how it affects me, and how I want to use it.

None of what I’ve based my life upon is disposable. When we take the time to create a work of art, to play or listen to music, grow a garden, learn a language, write a set of poems, or build a relationship, we do so because our effort feels worthwhile and we hope the result will last. Our lives themselves are short; time is precious. I want to make intentional choices and to spend most of my time in the real world, as positively as possible. So I think the right thing for me is to limit my intake of news to what’s necessary for knowing what is going on, and not get drawn into the maelstrom of debates and opinions; to limit my time on social media; to write as thoughtfully as possible, to keep learning, to devote myself to music and art and the people I care about — many of whom are online friends, some of whom I met through Instagram itself — but in a thoughtful way that honors the best aspects of who we are and what we respect in each other.

Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited

So where are we now with the gift economy as artists/writers/creatives? I remember when I started blogging 2000 years ago and it was very much an exchange of ideas, freely given. I remember when I saw blogs like Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) monetize. It was the first blog I can remember doing that and it blew my mind. Like, jealous! A bit. But also, it seemed odd? And now I think, how my life would have been so much better if I’d figured all that out way back when. These days I still struggle with the whole Ko-fi thing :) And I’ve whined about how maybe I should move to Substack all the time and then never do.

And now the question, the problem of AI, stealing our gifts but also messing up the gift economy. And then the feeling that it’s foolish to be putting almost anything on the internet at all. I honestly don’t know what to do with all these thoughts currently. Because just the pure giving online has brought me a lot of goodness in this world. So anyway, I’m sitting with the Wittgenstein quotation, the gift as a problem to solve.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking about The Gift

This week, on a tiny writing retreat, I’ve been thinking about the idea of running without fuel in the tank. And sometimes, not just fuel: no oil, no coolant, and the car needs some work as well. I’ve been thinking about what makes it possible to move forward when your resources are depleted. To be your best self, whatever that self is.

I used to find that whenever I traveled, I ran on empty. I was eating badly, not exercising, I lost connection with my game, and when I got back, I grasped at reconnecting with my life. But I like to think that being able to be my best—my most creative self, my most wild and fun self, my most dedicated self to Red Hen self, my most focused self—all requires some care, attention.

Some people need a lot of time with other people to feel good. I need a certain amount of alone time, and I need to spend that alone time reading, writing, or exercising, not doomscrolling. The apps raise my anxiety, and they convince me that everyone else’s life is much better than my life. They give me a fidgety unhappy edgy mash of dark to mess.

Alternatively, reading centers me, exercise brings my brain into focus, and writing reminds me of who I am. During my alone time, I rein in my urge to deep-dive, and I return to my focus. […]

On this, my birthday week, I think of Molly Fisk’s poem “Cedar Waxwings.” It is a good example of finding yourself through silence. It’s a poem that makes me think about healing and finding grace and getting back to equilibrium, and all of those things that I hope are possible while I am breathing, writing, finding my pulse.

So much depends on my finding my breath again. On refilling my tank. On resisting mournful isolation and embracing good solitude. I look to Molly, now, who is such a centered, soulful person. When I talk with her, when I hear her, her voice is large and surrounds me, and I feel like she is someone who climbed a mountain and saw the surrounding fields and all the trees, who saw devastation, too, and managed to stay sane and lived to tell the tale. She’s at the center of her own stillness, writing and seeing. Let us all aspire to such grace.

Kate Gale, Solitude, Stillness & Sanity: On Remembering Yourself Through the Empty

I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I taught a surrealist poetry class with poet and librettist Melissa Studdard. We were the last class, which made me a little worried because I thought everyone might be tired and thinking about midday snacks & drinks—however, I was so wrong! What a joy to be overfilled with people—two rooms, all chairs taken, and people on the floor—all writing surreal poems. It made me realize that even with everything in the world, people still want to create something, to write poems, to be in community. I needed that reminder.

Melissa and I also did a little photoshoot for our poetry series, Poems You Need, and I, of course, wore the wrong shoes and sliced my foot (this should be no surprise to anyone who knows me—I always wear the wrong shoes).

The problem was—we had no tissues to stop the blood; it was just me, bleeding onto my discount Italian flip-flops and the sidewalk like a very low-budget horror film. Our photographer, who turned out to be a quick-thinking hero, pulled out a tiny white baby sock (clean! her son’s!) she’d been using as a lens cover and saved the day. (And yes, I was fine, no stitches, just alcohol, Neosporin, and a very tight bandaid!)

Kelli Russell Agodon, The World Is Too Much and Also Beautiful

Being at a yarn show with hundreds of people is a complete contrast to my one-to-one coaching or the times when it’s just me writing poetry, but there is also a lovely cross over with my values of being helpful, listening to people and taking time for reflection. And this week while simply being in a show ground I have felt the lovely tingle of tears of happiness in my eyes when recounting moments that have brought me pure joy in my life and listening to other people tell me theirs. I have laughed a lot and remembered to stay in the moment because after all it is the moment that counts. Oh, and I remembered to still myself and say thank you when complimented by a stranger so that I actually got to feel the complete glow of how that feels.

Here’s to finding the ways we laugh with others, supporting those we love and being ourselves in the moment.

Graphene, from my first collection Magnifying Glass, is shining in my mind as a great poem with which to end this blog…for the wonder of celebrating the shine and the marvel of being human.

Graphene

Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building

it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;

hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.

And before that, did it come from a star?

Maybe it was once inside you.
You are a study in graphene:
cleaved graphite, harder than diamond,

stronger than steel.

Exceptional.

Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW

over the last couple of years, by far my richest and most rewarding poetry experiences have been the launches of work by long-time friends. these gatherings mean an immense amount to me, and i wouldn’t trade my participation for anything in the world. but – there is always a but – the very things that make these these celebrations so joyful, so moving, and so special – their warmth and intimacy – are also the things that make them tricky. and by “tricky” i mean… what, precisely? i suppose i must mean the sensation of emptiness that assails me in the midst of the social. […]

people are very mysterious to me: how they think, feel, fit together, move through the world. i can – and do – enjoy and admire many of them – but i do not understand them even slightly. it’s like… it’s like life is a fundamentally different force for most humans than it is for me. they have all of these experiences, achievements, ideas, relationships, and these things fill them up, or they enlarge them, give them a shape and a substance, a weight in the world; they anchor them to reality and to each other. for myself, life isn’t like that, it’s momentum without mass, just restless moving energy; it forces me forward, and it thrusts itself through me, but there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to build on or around. i feel flimsy, i guess. i feel.

Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES

When I look up and away from the screen, there is a community I adore. Throughout multiple visits to a local wetland, I watched a discarded iced donut in the grass slowly get eaten away. Simply because I went for a walk to escape nonsense, I once observed ants protect aphids on a plant called Fireweed because the ants love the honeydew that the aphids produce. Community is everywhere. Symbiosis is necessary. Communication is necessary. Ten years now I have bent down to a plant or pointed to a bird and said their name to my husband. And now he says them back to me, his finger pointing up at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Rich Rich

I’ve drafted three poems now, one each morning. I’m also accumulating a windowsill full of spruce and alder cones, bits of moss and quartz, and other stray items: a rose hip, a mollusk shell, dried stalks of some kind of aster.

I hear owls at night: the deep hoots of a great horned owl, the faster, higher calls of a northern saw-whet owl. I missed some aurora activity last night, though. I gave up and went to bed at a quarter after midnight, thinking it was too cloudy, and others saw the flickering just fifteen minutes later.

Heading toward summer, Alaska, or this part of it anyway, is gaining five minutes of light a day. The sun currently sets at 9:30 but the glow lingers longer, hovering at the horizon until 10:30 or later.

Today, Saturday, is brilliantly bright, at least for now. The snow-blanketed volcanoes across Cook Inlet are perfectly clear. Directly across from my desk rises the cone of Augustine (Chu Nula, translation in progress). Visible at the edge of my view is Iliamna (Ch’nagat’in, One that stands above). I have to walk outside to see Redoubt (Bentuggezh K’enulgheli, One that has a notched forehead).

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemera pt. 3 (the wild life)

Today, my birthday started the day off with French toast made for me by J and sitting down to write some poems to catch up on NaPoWriMo hi-jinks I have fallen behind on.  We don’t really have plans for the day since J has three gigs today stretching from early afternoon til 2 or 3 am. So I am on my own, and will probably work on editing things, tidy up the bedroom, and watch something trashy later. […]

In the end 51 was a wild year. Depressing on a global scene, and dysfunctional even on a level that my previous half-century had not seen. Yet, on a personal level, things feel good, though ever precarious financially (but then again, while things are more expensive, I have never quite been flush there even when they were cheaper.)  I probably wrote over a hundred poems, edited dozens of chapbooks, made many collages and cover designs. I published three physical books (one a regular full-length collection, one a text/visual hybrid, and another special-edition hardcover w/ fauxtographs for Patreon. ) There were also a handful of e-zine editions. A smattering of video poems. Meanwhile there have been countless movies, many plays and musicals, occasional weekends away, and of course, the wedding last summer, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. 

Kristy Bowen, 52

Once upon a time, around the time I first moved to London, I wrote nothing but sonnets for a year. They weren’t strictly sonnets, because they mostly didn’t rhyme and when they did rhyme they didn’t follow the right patterns; the metre, to the extent there was one, was rough and ready even by my standards. Never mind. I’d been reading a lot of Robert Lowell (possibly too much). The not-quite-sonnet tradition goes further back still.

More interesting, looking back, was how addicted to the form I was. I couldn’t stop writing and whatever I wrote came out in fourteen lines. Here is Ken Gordon, writing about his own sonnetification in Sonnet by Other Means: “It was like a fever. I began writing sonnets continuously. Daily. Sometimes two or three (or even four) in a day. I was like a chain-smoker: One sonnet lit another.” I don’t think I ever wrote four in a day, but yes—it was like that.

Are people drawn to certain forms? It’s a good question. I am still a sonnet reader, but I haven’t started a new one in years. Maybe it is also a question of timing: to everything its season and perhaps particularly to sonnets, that form which is so contained, so combustible, and apparently inexhaustible.

You can read one of those London sonnets in the The Sonneteer. I am grateful to Ken not only for taking it, but for providing the title—the only title possible, but I didn’t know that. The poem riffs on Jackson Browne’s song of the same name (written when he was a teenager, made famous by Nico). 

Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26

Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapulting him into renown. The voting process is a black box — no one outside the Academy ever finds out who else is in the running and by how much the winner wins.

Leafing through the ballots, one other name appeared over and over, so much so that I was impelled to count.

Marianne Moore had lost by one vote, never knowing how close she had come. It would be many more years until, at 77, she was finally awarded the fellowship.

Long before that, before she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (sharing a table with Rachel Carson at the ceremony), Moore had set down her views on writing in a series of essays later collected in the out-of-print gem Predilections (public library). Pulsating through them is a reckoning with the impossible task of the writer — to weave tapestries of truth and meaning from the tenuous thread of words on the ramshackle loom of language.

In an essay titled “Feeling and Precision,” Moore writes:

Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulable. If it does manage to be articulate, it is likely to seem overcondensed, so that the author is resisted as being enigmatic or disobliging or arrogant.

How we name what we feel is not so much a matter of our writing style as of our style of being, because in order to articulate something we must first apprehend it and we apprehend every smallest thing with the whole person — with the frame of reference that is our entire life, the sum of our experience and memory. When “one of New York’s more painstaking magazines” asked Moore to distill her poetic style into a formula, she fought back the “dictatorial” reflex to quip:

You don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of the personality.

And yet a personality can write with more or less persuasion — that is, write more or less well — depending on what the person brings to the writing.

Maria Popova, Marianne Moore on the Three Elements of Persuasive Writing

This week, I attended a phenomenal reading at the Poetry Foundation featuring Ashley M. Jones, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Donika Kelly, and Patricia Smith. The poems asked a great deal of us—our attention, our emotional depth, our fullest humanity. They were not always easy—that is, they did not always say the easy or obvious thing. They did not lead with something “everyone can relate to” to win us over. They often centered on confronting and difficult subjects.

And that’s one of the things I love about poetry, the way it can immediately deliver identity and experience grounded in the complex and ongoing web of history. In other words, these poems were ambitious. They seemed to hope to outlast their moment in the grit, music, and scope of what they offered and asked of the listener. I felt challenged. I felt moved.

It made me reflect on how I’ve been teaching writing for 14 years, and my list of similes for what the process is like has grown stranger by the year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.

Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember / Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human     is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”

Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.

Bethany Reid, Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

I can’t let Poetry Month go by without sharing a few notes about books I’ve spent time with this month. So, here are a few brief recommendations:

#evolutionarypoems

by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis

When’s the last time you read an Ethiopian poet? Or poetry translated from Amharic? Well, it was a first for me, and I continue to be impressed by the incredible work that the good people at Circumference Books are doing. So many of their books are from regions and languages that are so rarely represented in English translation, and thus, feel so very new and surprising in all the right ways. And if you, like me, are looking for an activist poetics for our times, these are politically engaged poems that provide a very personal model for literary resistance.

Yes & Now

by Yvette Nepper

Yvette may be one of my earliest friends in poetry land—we met our freshman year, when we were both at Ohio University for a time. I greatly admire Yvette’s work within the poetry community in Cincinnati, and we share a Gen X love of DIY and zine culture that continues in many of Yvette’s chapbooks and projects. Yes & Now is one such limited edition chapbook (in this case produced by FTP), “printed on a mimeograph machine in Mike Cowgill’s mom’s basement.” I love Yvette’s ability to balance profound thought with humor and play that makes one feel like it’s totally okay and maybe even preferable sometimes to have a dance party within what feels like an apocalypse. Come hear Yvette read at my house this September, and while you can’t buy Yes & No online anymore, check out her other chapbooks.

Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books

This, Ian Storr’s second, beautifully-titled collection of haiku (and haibun), has been a long time coming, 16 years in fact, since Seeds from a Larch Cone. Ian is my friend, and was my long-time colleague at Presence haiku journal – he was the managing editor from 2014, following the tragic death of Martin Lucas, until last year, a stint in which he undertook much more than the lion’s share of the work involved in cementing its reputation as one of English-language haiku’s best journals, if not the best.

I know I’m biased but I have no hesitation in saying that Late Light, published by Alba Publishing and available here (scroll down) is the most important collection of haiku by a British poet since (at least) Thomas Powell’s Clay Moon (Snapshot Press, 2020) and the two collections by our late Presence colleague Stuart Quine (Alba Publishing, 2018 and 2019).

Ian hails from Sheffield and still lives there. He spent his working life as a children’s social worker, an immensely important and difficult job. The compassion, objectivity, resilience and intelligence needed for that profession shines through in Ian’s haiku.

Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light

Marriage is one of the most marked gaps in classical literature. I can’t, off-hand, think of a single good classical poem about being married, and barely any even about a wife (as opposed to a lover or would-be lover). Marriage is of course depicted quite often in Greek tragedy, though generally not very positively. But that’s not to say there’s no good Latin poetry about marriage — around 1500 the Renaissance Latin poets Pontano and Sannazaro, in particular, pioneered the Latin poetry of marriage and this sub-genre remained fashionable for a good century or so. […]

I’ve been thinking about marriage in literature, and especially in poetry, partly because I have been rereading Women in Love for the first time in decades, and partly because this week I finally received the copy of Matthew Buckley Smith’s Midlife, which I’ve been waiting for — I ordered it a while ago but it took a good few weeks to make it across the Atlantic and through French customs. Smith is the host of the popular, if oddly named, Sleerickets poetry podcast, which I’ve been on a couple of times — once a year or so ago and then just last week. I’m not a big podcast-listener myself but I enjoyed talking to Matthew, who’s a gifted interviewer, both times. Sleerickets’ trademark is plain-speaking so in that spirit I hope Matthew won’t mind that this week I’m writing about his own poetry.

Midlife, published in 2024 by Measure Press, was Smith’s second collection and the winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award in 2021. (This is an American poetry prize that recognises excellence in formal poetry, with a particular interest — in recognition of Wilbur’s legacy as a translator — in poets who also translate; previous winners have included A. M. Juster, A. E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat and Maryann Corbett.) Last year he was also one of the Rattle Chapbook Prize winners, which means that his pamphlet The Soft Black Stars was circulated to all Rattle subscribers (including me) a few weeks ago (if you’re not a Rattle subscriber, you can order it here).

The first thing to say is that Smith is a very good poet in various ways: he is technically accomplished, he has some range in both form and style, and — a feature that readers of Horace & friends will I think particularly appreciate — he conveys an enjoyable impression of literary depth. Midlife contains one excellent (and one less good) version of Horace, one fairly good version of Catullus 51/Sappho 31, one version of/response to Rilke, as well as versions, responses and allusions to Homer, Tennyson and (especially) the dramatic monologues of Browning. The Soft Black Stars, though on the whole a bit less ‘literary’, contains poems responding to the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’ and to Ezra Pound. (The title of the pamphlet is taken from a short story by the American horror writer, Thomas Ligotti, but I haven’t read these stories so won’t comment on that.) Smith is writing in that American formalist tradition that sometimes sounds to my British ear just a bit too clickety-clack, and at times I find him a little boxed-in by his forms. But this is a pretty minor niggle: if you enjoy collections written entirely in “traditional” verse, he is obviously one of the very best US poets writing in this way today.

Victoria Moul, On marriage

Rhina P. Espaillat published this sonnet, titled “Here,” after the passing of her husband, Alfred. And it is as precise a description of what remains after losing a spouse as anything English literature has to offer. It is a poem, in my own lingering grief, I can hardly bear to read and yet cannot bear to set aside.

After the death of Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas published a 1957 memoir of her time married to the poet, with the unbearable title Leftover Life to Kill. Espaillat catalogues instead the actual leftover objects.

Born on January 20, 1932, Rhina P. Espaillat had her 90th birthday in 2022 celebrated by several of the better poetry publications. Back in its heyday, Prairie Home Companion featured her work. The godmother of the New Formalism — the counter-current that emerged in the late 1980s to offer alternatives to the endless free verse of modern college writing-program poetry — she occupies a section in every contemporary anthology of rhymed and metered verse.

The authorized translator of Robert Frost into Spanish, and the translator of such works as the poetry of St. John of the Cross into English, Espaillat is a major poet working in our lifetimes. Which is why we’ve featured her work several times here in Poems Ancient and Modern: the comic “Undelivered Mail,” the dimeter of “Things That Go,” her translation of “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.”

And in “Here,” the reader will find several of the features that recur in her verse. The sonnet form she often uses. The simple rhymes, for example, that do not strain for effect. The list-making. The precise observation of “his red Swiss Army knife / hiding its tiny arsenal of blades” and the near personification of those knife blades: “like legs tucked under.” A refusal of hyperbole: “I almost hear him say . . . ” And a powerful emotion never named but completely expressed, with the unbearable ending […]

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here

The latest from Colorado poet and critic Camille T. Dungy is America, A Love Story (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a powerful collection of poems that provides a table of contents listing single poems and poem-clusters, arranged in untitled sections counterpointing with occasional stand-alone pieces. The book-length suite of America, A Love Story is exactly that: a heartfelt declaration and examination of a complicated country and culture, and a history of aggression, devastation and racism that still ripples across the landscape of generations. “America,” she writes, as part of the brilliantly-devastating opening poem, “This’ll hurt me more,” “there is not a place I can wander inside you / and not feel a little afraid.” Writing of childhood, her father and grandmother, the use of the switch and of her father being pulled over by the police, the second page of the same poem offers: “Of course my father fit the description. The imagination / can accommodate whoever might happen along. / America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire, / you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface / looking placid though you know the water deep down, / dark as my father, is pushing and pulling, still trying / to go ahead. We were driving home, my father said. / My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way / home.” This is a book of consequence and heart, and the cruel nature of love itself, articulating a detail of people and movement, history and storytelling with an attention to intimate detail. Amid the story of the neighbourhood women amid a shared stray cat in the poem “True Story,” a piece that tells far more than I’ll offer here, she writes: “One woman believed, as Issa believed, / that in all things, even the small and patient / snail, there are perceptible strings that tie / each life to all others.”

There is such a delicate way that Dungy articulates her narrative collage around the idea of love, of America, including an America that will impact her children, and all that might lie ahead; of the ties, and even the traumas, that bind people together, offering poems from a variety of sides and perspectives, coming together to form a coherent shape around how she understands and approaches her love, her America, from the best elements to the worst, and what all that requires and declares, demands and articulates. 

rob mclennnan, Camille T. Dungy, America, A Love Story

If [Liam] Guilar’s approach to translation is to reimagine, then the way Kit Fryatt and Harry Gilonis work in Book of Inversions is to take things apart and then put them back together in carefully random disorder. As the author/translators note in their introduction, it’s ‘a book of inversions, turning the world upside down’.

The introduction also mentions some antecedents to their approach, including Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Celia and Louis Zukofsky’s homophonic Catullus, Anne Carson’s versions of the same Latin poet, Richard Caddell’s transmogrification of I Gododdin in his elegiac For the Fallen, and Geoffrey Squires’s My News for You: Irish Poetry 600-1200, not so much an antecedent as it was published while Fryatt and Gilonis were hard at it, but certainly a kind of gold standard for anyone tackling the field. There are also notes that indicate textual sources, other translations (full disclosure, three of them are mine), and further interesting titbits about each poem inverted. The notes also indicate if the version is by one or other of the authors or a joint effort.

Their title plays on the Lebor Gabála Érenn, englished as The Book of the Takings of Ireland, or The Book of Invasions. As such, it is fitting that, after a couple of dedicatory snippets, they open with a version of Amergin’s Song from that text. Not the famous, or infamous, ‘I am the wind on the sea’ one, but Amergin’s third song. Amergin Glúngheal is Ireland’s mythical first poet, and the songs represent a moment of claiming Ireland, which, maybe, makes this a doubly appropriate opener. Here it is in the Irish Text Society version by Macalister, the official version, if you like:

A fishful sea!
A fruitful land!
An outburst of fish
Fish under wave,
In streams (as) of
A rough sea!
birds,
A white hail
With hundreds of salmon,
Of broad whales!
A harbour-song—
An outburst of fish,
A fishful sea!

And here’s the Gilonis take:

Fishfilled sea!
Fertile land!
Fish erupt!
Fish in waves
bird-flock-like!
Ocean’s wild!

White sea hail,
salmon hordes,
widespread wales!
Harbour song:
‘Fish erupt,
fishfilled sea!’

And the Irish text as best as I can manage to reconstruct it from what’s to hand:

iascach muir
mothach tîr
tomaidm n-eisc
iasca fothuind
rethaib ên
fairge chruaid
cassar finn
crethaib én
lethan mîl
portach lág
mniportach lugh
tomaidm n-eisc
iascach muir

What’s immediately apparent, even to readers with no Irish, is that the new version adheres much more closely to the chant-like terseness of the original, short lines and an emphatic rhythm and an echo of the Irish tendency to composite word formation. 

Billy Mills, Celtic Matters

The poet J.H. Prynne died this week, at the age of 89. I’ve been reading his work since I was a student. My first experience of it was very like the one described in this tribute by Ian Patterson for the London Review of Books blog:

[the] poems were like essays in their apparent substance, but they had a manner, a rhythm and a music, as well as a density of thought that shifted my idea of what poetry was and what it could be and do

So this week I thought I would try to give some account of that experience: the reading of words that sound explanatory but resist explanation, and which resonate with a musical air of meaning that repeats itself as a kind of thought.

[…]

wresting the screen before the eyelet lost / to speech tune you blame the victim: I’ve quoted these unpunctuated lines together because I don’t know how to split them apart. Following the clear but abstract statement of the distinction between knowing and doing, we are suddenly plunged into a confusion of violent action. To “wrest” is usually to “wrest control” of something: here, “the screen before the eyelet lost”. This is — to use a synonym for darkness — “obscure” (Latin obscurus, dark, hidden, secret). But obscurity is also what is being (obscurely) described: to put a “screen” before an “eyelet” is to block a small hole for light. So clarity of knowledge has been followed by a cover-up. “Lost”, at the line-break, is the hinge word here, the moment of maximum confusion before an immoral argument emerges which inverts the dynamics of power: “you blame the victim”. How / why do “you” do this? Because you are “lost / to speech tune”, like a good poet. But here it sounds as though your eloquence is a bad habit.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day

We’ve been thinking a lot about the poetry of Douglas Dunn recently, especially Douglas’s superb and undervalued pre-Elegies poems. This seemed a good excuse to give this little essay a second airing; it appeared in a recent-ish issue of The Dark Horse devoted to Dunn and his work. It’s about my own debt to Douglas, and to one poem of his in particular. Since that poem is unavailable online, I’ll risk reprinting it at the end of the piece until I’m told off. You can, however, still read it in Dunn’s essential New Selected Poems. […]

I remember reading ‘Remembering Lunch’ in an appropriately wine-stained paperback copy of St Kilda’s Parliament, bought in the Charing Cross Road in the late eighties. I’ll have picked it up it from one of the second-hand bookstores where, twelve or fifteen years earlier, Douglas would have flogged his review copies to pay for his long Soho lunch and its longer bar tab. I had just read and fallen in love with Elegies, as we all had; but with the young male poet’s atrocious impatience to have everyone sprawling on a pin, I decided I had Dunn’s measure. I opened at ’Remembering Lunch’. So much for that theory. For one thing, even the measure was new to me. What’s with the long line? Isn’t it prose when you keep bopping your head on the right margin? Clearly not; but are poets permitted such long sentences? At the time, one knew just enough to reach for the word ‘Jamesian’ whenever one encountered such fluent hypotaxis, but little else. I was, at least, used to poems ending with the sea. The sea is literally a great place to stop. But it was clearly going to take me years to catch up with the rest of it, and I had best make a start.

Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn

At age 76, [Robert] Cording has been writing a long time; he started before he was out of college, and he published his first book of poems in 1987, almost 40 years ago. To look back over that lengthy career is to begin to understand something about the meaning of his new book’s title: what he’s been able to achieve through decades of devotion to his craft, which produces both an accounting and an appraisal of all that he has written and published, and what is possible to ascertain from what the poems tell us about the life Cording has experienced and lived and shared, not only with those he loves but also with his readers.

About the latter, Cording’s poems make quietly clear his life’s through-lines:

[. . .] family and friends, [. . .]

our blessings—the disarming joy of being
loved, the bounty of the natural world
that still takes our sight beyond ourselves. [. . .]

~ from “Talking Through a Storm” (p. 114 )

As that excerpt implies, Cording is an observer of the interior life, one from which he draws energy and consolation, as much as he is a poet who looks out into the world of both the ordinary — “all that is / too humdrum for our notice,” the “nothing much” that characterizes daily goings-on (“Ode to Ordinariness, pp. 130-131) — and the inexplicable and divine, whether it is “the perfection of birdness” (“Lord God Bird,” pp. 132-133) or “some accidental loveliness / we put our hopes in” (“Massachusetts Audubon Chart No. 1, 1898,” p. 185).

As attentive as Cording is to these constants, as much as he can praise the recurrence of “the sun returning like a second chance / after this evening’s shower” or “the moon rising like a clockface” (“Ode to Ordinariness,” p. 131), the world, he writes, “keeps moving to its tasks, random with pain, / rich with surprise” (“All Souls’ Morning,” p. 54), landing him in an “in-between” space where grief and lament reside alongside praise and “a source of awe”: “the colors // of dawn on the earth’s other side. Everything— / the tamaracks and maples, the spruces and their / smoke- winged / sparrows, the painterly sky darkening toward infinity” (“For Rex Brasher, Painter of Birds,” pp. 75-76). The lesson to be drawn, then, is that both suffering and cause to celebrate can and do coexist, that a day can be “perfectly made for delight” while “grief is endless” (“Four Prayers,” p. 151).

Maureen Doallas, Robert Cording’s ‘What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems’

May 2026, next month, marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, The Silence of Men, which I think is worth celebrating because it is—and this is a testament to CavanKerry Press’ commitment to its authors—still in print and, somewhat remarkably (to me at least), still selling. I just received my 2025 royalty check for $4.83. It’s easy to laugh at that amount, and we’ve all heard the jokes about how poets are only in it for the money (right?), but I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world very slowly. I don’t know how many copies of the book that check represents, or how many people will ultimately read those copies, but it makes me happy and not a little bit humbled to think that poems I wrote more than two decades ago are still doing their work somewhere.

[…]

How To Write A Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times, by Adrian S. Potter:

Perhaps we sink too much energy into pretending to be unoffended when we really should feel insulted. As part of his unapologetic reign of bluster, one of our so-called leaders keeps teaching a master class on how to parlay hot takes and brash rhetoric into votes and profit. Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to write a poem that will finally put an end to bigotry, and yes, even within the false mythology of a post-racial society, bigotry still exists.

The tension in this piece is between the self-important navel-gazing that characterizes the way some writers live “the literary life” and the implicit call to action with which Potter ends the piece: “But when I try to write about [these unprecedented times]…my hand instinctively tightens into a fist hoisted high above my head.” The essay was published in 2004, and I imagine that, in light of what’s been happening in the United States and the Middle East, it lands with even more urgency than it did back then. I found myself thinking of Louise Glück’s essay “The Idea of Courage,” in which she critiqued the use of the term courage to described what it took for a poet to write poems that revealed aspects of their life they might not otherwise have revealed. Specifically, I found myself remembering Glück’s point that this usage of courage “concentrates attention on the poet’s relation to his materials and to his audience, rather than on the political result of speech.” We all know the stories of the poets in totalitarian nations throughout history who risked that political result and paid with their lives. Iran, of course, is one of them. How far are we, I asked myself when I finished reading Potter’s essay, from a time when the difference between writing a political poem and raising one’s tightened fist into the air will not be as different as he suggests.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54

in the front yard, the ferns
are unfurling their fists. i wonder what it is
that they reach for. i should probably open
my hands too. catch something. not a star,
maybe just a petal from the peach tree who might,
if the world is real enough this year, bear fruit.

Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist

The Heart of American Poetry

Based on A Poet’s Glossary, a book I always enjoyed opening, I impulse-purchased this new critical work by Edward Hirsch. But it is not a book I will finish, though I will keep dipping. The attempt to link poetry to the state of America is far too blunt, the readings are often too anecdotal, and thus the page count is far beyond the actual interest, though the book is not without interest and if some compressed version of this was available in online essays, I would read it. In general, this might be a worthwhile book for someone new to the topic, but it feels old-fashioned to me. If the topic at hand is so important (as I agree with Hirsch that it is) some other way of discussing it must be found. No easy task, and perhaps an unfair criticism, but that is where we are.

*

The Modern Element

Adam Kirsch’s 2008 book about modern poetry is much more lively, gets to the point, and has Kirsch’s own strongly-held views to sustain it. It is less about “who we are now” or whatever, but has a lot more to say about the poets and the nature of poetry. Kirsch is against “poetry’s neurotic obsession with the modern”. He thinks the “poetics of authenticity” which prevailed after the war, and which finished the job Romanticism started and led to the removal of formal qualities, “has thoroughly failed” and has prevented poets from writing major works. He wishes us to return to the pragmatic tradition of Johnson, Aristotle, Horace, and Arnold. A very worthwhile book.

Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns

It was late May, and I had a day off, or was killing time between my day and evening jobs, and I missed campus, with its grassy quad and emerald oaks and bobbing tulips, its redbuds and dogwood, magnolia and cherry, and so I went to the park in search of something like it. There was nothing there that one would call manicured, and what I missed most of all, I’m sure, was the people who’d sit in the grass and read poems with me. I remember I wrote a letter to a friend—we had email, but nobody had a computer; word processors hulked on our desks like suitcase bombs—and then I read Sweet Machine for the first time, and “Door to the River” is the poem that left me breathless in the grass.

What’s to like? I’ve been asking another version of that question a lot lately: Why do I like what I like? It’s a simple poem, so far as the literal circumstances: it begins in ekphrasis, more specifically interpretive ekphrasis—the speaker doesn’t tell us what the painting looks like, but attempts to interpret de Kooning’s intention or meaning—then progresses to narrative description, recalling yesterday’s meadow, then proceeds through a series of questions that feel by turns existential and self-directed, arriving at something like certainty, then a turn to exhortation and another narrative that leads to a moment of lyric epiphany—of transcendence. Why do I like it? Because it is transcendent, and it brings us along on its path towards insight.

Maybe simple isn’t the word.

“Door to the River” is sort of the antonym, conceptually and formally, of another field poem, Mark Strand’s compact little “Keeping Things Whole.” I’m tempted to call it an antidote as well. There’s paradox at the heart of Strand’s poem: If his speaker is what is missing, he is also the missing piece; in that sense, he belongs wherever he is—and yet the division seems to be absolute. There is “the air,” and there is “my body,” and though the two meet, they remain separate. There is such a thing as lack: the air can lack the body; the body can lack the air. Together they “keep things whole,” but this wholeness is only accomplished by continuous motion, is comprised always of its individual components.

In “Door to the River,” we have another mind contemplating another field, but the insight that arrives is entirely opposite: in this field, there is both stillness and fullness: “some / balance . . . no lack, nothing / missing from the world.” It’s an experience of completion, wholeness, abundance. And so the final revelation at the end of the breathless penultimate sentence—this is a sentence that began thirty-one lines earlier, with “It was her voice”—arrives as an utter surprise: that this experience of wholeness must be the same as the experience of death. Having tumbled through to the end of this astounding claim, we end with the simple finality of a one-word sentence: Fine.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

Spring of course is the season of possibilities. April has been a busy month but now the big weighty tasks are behind me — giving workshops, which is not a task I do with ease, memorializing a friend — and I feel lighter and the mornings have been so sweet with a perfect mix of chill and warmth from the heating sun. Trees are crazy with buds and blossoms and the azaleas across the street are laden. A squirrel ate my one lone tulip, as it does every goddamn year. And it’s been very dry and my least favorite season, summer, is on its way, and it could be a scorcher. So it goes. I try to give participants in my workshops a sense of possibilities, but memorials for friends signal an end to possibilities. One possible outcome of possibilities is nothing. I think of this often. And so. The old eat-drink-and-be-merry, the old eat-dessert first, the old be-here-now. I can only shrug or laugh or be wry. I like the word wry — it’s a tricky little devil: that sometimes-y vowel, that silent w. You can speak it without opening the jaw, the maw of possibility. I like this wry poem by Aidan Chafe for that very thing, its wry embrace of what is possible.

Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream

Listening to Kathy Acker, dead twenty-five years, read her translations of the poet Sextus Propertius from Blood and Guts in High School … let there be no double winter dead winds … I understand my missteps are all colossal flaps for the wind to carry me, whether I want to be carried or no. The landing isn’t up to me. The wind decides. All my successes or perfections don’t need the head of a pin to stand—that would be too vast—so I never keep one around. My journey needs no island. I’ve given up maps. Since having is believing, I don’t believe. Call me useless, call me criminal, call me undigested pizza with hallucinatory moments of despair—but nothing has always been greater than something.

If one assumes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is correct … Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away … then perfection is the blank page before the poem gives words to lyric, the imagined story before its told, before the idea of Venus de Milo Apollo gives shape to stone, before strokes of paint find a fence or sky or face on canvas, before the note is played. The saying, the doing can only muck the truth.

How to have one and not the other is the real task at hand, the work behind the work—the bottom of the glass reached as the meal is finished—plates carried to the kitchen—the chair returned to its place.

Sam Rasnake, Monday Works… #14: “On Perfection and Flaws”

The poets on the farthest end of the table are laughing
and the visiting scholar on the other end is trading
jokes with the futures trader, and no one quite notices
when the waiters come to fill and replenish cups of water
and tea. Your colleague is rhapsodizing over the thick
clouds of chicken and corn in the soup, and you give
your whole mind to all of this, for here as in the world
attention is a practice that asks nothing from you except
to be here. Though when all of you walk back into the night
and the air is cooler and all are hugging and waving goodbye
or someone is suggesting you find somewhere else to go and
have margaritas, you know the world is waiting to slip into
your mouth again— another kind of communion, the kind
you have every day, the kind that stains your fingers
and leaves a slight film of oil, even now in this kitchen
where, standing barefoot on cold tile, already you are
chewing on the future.

Luisa A. Igloria, Poem at 3 AM with Leftovers and Rilke

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Message in a Battle

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Bees: an Equilibrium

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

Dale Favier, Already Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Cow-Inspired Calming Practice

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

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

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

Then she smiles:

— Hurry, give him a poem!

And she leaves for her tuba lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, like silver dollars dropped in the deep end

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

R M Haines, Einstein was a Pisces

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

PF Anderson, Day of Visibility

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the bone palace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Pulling your own oars

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

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, Care

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, A Pindaric ode for Louis Bielle-Biarrey

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, New Poems Up

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Lee, Reviewers deserve better than the Gutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Meischen, “I Am More”

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

Sarah Lada, Sprout Became a Woman

My head

pushes from
the mud, the primordial

churn, seething,
thick with salty
activity.

Shit or fish sauce?

Call
it March.

Jill Pearlman, March: A Sooty Skin

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Review of MY HEART IS NOT ASLEEP

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

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

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

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

It’s the fall that ungods me. 

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Interregnum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, assembly required

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº56 The palace of misfortunes

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

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

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

Suzanna Fitzpatrick, The Deeper Read 11

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

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

Mat Riches, Pull the Uther One

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

Lori Witzel, Cultivar

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Gould, Poems Beautiful and Useful

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Like to the falling of a star

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

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

1. Find a Root System (The “Why”)

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Against Language as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

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

drivers both of change and loss.

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

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

philosophers to think; the scientists, surmise.

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

Maureen Doallas, In Greenland, Glaciers Fall

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan Tweney, Finding your flow as a writer

returning the water
from the vase
to the flower garden…

waiting in the wings by tom clausen

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

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

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

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

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

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

londubh buí
I measc na gcrann
séideann an gaoth

yellow blackbird
among the trees
the wind blows

(my translation)

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

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

one small bird
whose note’s heard
sharply pointed
yellowbill

whose notes fly
on Loch Laig
blackbird’s branch
yellowfilled

(again my version)

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

sheets of rain
a robin shelters
inside a thorny bush

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

Billy Mills, Two Irish Haikuists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

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

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

Letter to Hamrick from the Century of the Invalidated

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

Charlotte Hamrick, A poet once wrote me a poem

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

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

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

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

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

フィッシュアンドチップスに塩風光る　庄田ひろふみ

fisshu ando chippusu ni shio kaze hikaru

            salt
            on fish and chips
            the wind shines

                                                Hirofumi Shoda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, My Prima Donna Rat Hermit Era

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

Rich Ferguson, Green

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, Poems of Kindness

This week: 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: glitter on our fingers, the heaven of the moon, Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday, the buzz of numbness, and much more. Enjoy.

Chatting about beachcombing with a poet/accomplice the other week, she mentioned finding Aristotle’s lantern on an Orkney beach. I’d never heard of it – the boney, five-sided mouthpiece of a sea urchin with its fearsome, self-sharpening teeth, designed to eat through stone, which in his History of Animals Aristotle described as ‘… like a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out.’ A mouth that carries light? Light that can gnaw through stone – how would that work? […]

At age 6 our entire class had our silhouettes drawn as some sort of weird gift for our parents. It was definitely me, that black-paper other half, but a two-dimensional outline, cut from shadow and therefore expressionless and blind. This is what is left of us after consciousness has been removed, turning aside in shame. I tried to write a poem about it years later, but it had already moved beyond poetry, into significance.

John Glenday, Aristotle’s Lantern – Twenty-Four Digressions on Light

Yesterday I went to the secret woods which Nick owns/ is the custodian of, and which he shares with me and Alice Wolfe and the other people who work to protect and restore this small, injured section of land. A former tip built on ancient woodland, the site is characterised by rubble, glass, and poor, loose soils; scarred by the pits and trenches of illegal bottle diggers who show no respect to the land and have even felled its trees. We’re slowly clearing and healing it, removing rubble and glass, heavy metals and plastic, filling trenches, planting saplings. […]

And the shards. Some are so startling, or so meaningful, I bring them home. A picture of Santa! Where the pottery breaks, trees and birds, flowers, faces – even words – are taken from their usual context, liberated, perfectly framed. Most shards I place in a big bag for Alice, who transforms them into exquisite mosaics representing the wildlife who have survived, or who are now returning, to the woods. We sit together on the bench and watch the birdfeeders – crowds of coal tits feeding, a nuthatch, a tiny wren. Alice is especially pleased with the gold shards, the green, the mosaic of cracks on old white pots which she sees as the feathers of a barn owl.

But we both agree that there’s not a single shard we don’t love: how even the ubiquitous, common-as-muck Blue Willow gives itself up in infinite variations when it is broken. A manic gang of long tailed tits pay us a visit, a lone squirrel unhurriedly gathers nuts. Let that be my story for today. I am a broken thing, and I am beautiful. I am a white feather in the night, I am a leaf. I am a broken woman stroking a dog, a girl with no face, an animal, a broken King. I am a tree, a series of flowers, I’m a river.

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

Scratching her cursive
into the soil,
she scribes a language
of talon and hunger.
Upturning stanzas,
syllables of soil
fall apart and scatter.
Our yard is raw and quiet with her.

Sarah Lada, Donna

The wind of the world blows through me, and every bit of me shimmers like leaves in the sunlight. That’s not some advanced meditative state: it’s the state of my ordinary daily walk under the sky. It is often breathtakingly beautiful, it’s true, but it’s also normal, ordinary, regular. I don’t have to fetch it from far away. I just have to step out of my door, and it fetches me.

Dale Favier, Fetch

Dick Higgins calls this form ‘leonine verse’ in Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature, but I can’t find reference to it anywhere else. In fact, Wikipedia has an entry for ‘leonine verse’ that describes a totally different form. Whatever you care to call this, it looks more complicated than it is — each stanza is really a couplet, but the second and fourth (or, alternately, the first, third and fifth) metrical feet of each line in each couplet are identical, these are placed in a third line that sits between them. Effectively, the lines are woven together.

Also, if you read it across diagonally from just inside the top left corner, it goes snow, snow, snow, snow.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #6: Another Labyrinth

The third poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Batool Abu Akleen.

This is how I cook my grief, by Batool Abu Akleen, translated by Yasmin Zaher.

Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others.

She is the author of 48Kg. (Tenement Press, 2025), translated from the Arabic by the poet, with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher. 48Kg. is a Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Book of the Week’ / A Palestine Festival of Literature ‘Bookshelf’ choice; A New Statesman ‘Book of the Year’ 2025 / ℅ Jacqueline Rose; and was awarded the The Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellowship / ℅ the Akademie Schloss Solitude.

You can read an interview between Batool Abu Akleen and Claire Armistead on the Guardian website.

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 3: This is how I cook my grief by Batool Abu Akleen

When I was little I loved an annual. To me it was a book of delightful snippets collected together to be enjoyed in a period of time that involved a break from routine. I can picture myself reading in my pyjamas, the seemingly bottomless sweet tin, and the advent calendar that left its glitter on our fingers with all its doors open telling me that it was indeed Christmas Day. This week’s photo is like the cover of my 2025 annual.

This blog has been my way of building a good relationship with Mondays, and the fact there have been 114 episodes since September 2023 tells me that I have definitely adopted this as a habit. Singing as the Darkness Lifts (this blog’s title) comes from my love of three things:  the sound of birds welcoming the dawn, the feeling of darkness lifting, the moments of joy that make my heart sing. And writing each entry is a grounding in the changing of seasons when I take time to sniff the air each Monday morning and note its scent. In some ways it is also a setting down before moving on with the new week. It is a simple place to reflect, and it is a place to find joy as the darkness lifts.

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

Most of my slightly mad ideas (16 days of activism last year which included 16 poetry events, January Writing Hours) have at their heart this belief that (cheesy as it sounds) community and being together, and creating space for conversations and poetry and inspiration is important. They are my acts of self-care and self preservation.

This year we decided to make all of our written content available for free, which I hope is another act of community. We are running monthly events for our paid subscribers – another much smaller type of community. And of course there is January Writing Hours, which is approaching fast.

Kim Moore, Day 16: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

i do not want to fight myself & call it football.
put my brain in a helmet & run
at the sun. instead, i want to be
something else. it is exciting that i am not sure
what else i can be. the football tv will,
like any hole, shrink from lack of use.
maybe one day be smooth & soft.
the last little man digging at the earth
in search of himself. what if that is me?

Robin Gow, football tv

When I was seventeen, I discovered that a close friend had just broken up with another girl. Their parents had discovered they were sleeping together and, horrified, had decided to put a stop to it. My friend was devastated, and sometimes sat outside the other girl’s house in her car, crying. Amongst the many details which impressed me was that fact that they had sent each other poems. My friend told me that one of them, ‘The Good-Morrow’ by John Donne, was the most passionate love poem ever written. A while later, she gave me a copy of ‘The Good-Morrow’ along with some of Donne’s other poems. She had fallen in love with me. I was in love with a lanky indie boy pining for his previous girlfriend, and could not reciprocate. One day in the sixth-form common room I, too, passed him a copy of Donne’s poem to read.

John Donne, then, is for me intrinsically linked with all the dramas and intensities of my teenage years. As we were discovering our sexuality, my friend was pointing out the double-meaning of Donne’s ‘country pleasures’. As I gazed on my crush in tiny, grubby clubs, I was thinking: ‘For love all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room an everywhere.’

Of the seven poems published in John Donne’s lifetime, only two were authorized by him, and they were instead written to be circulated in manuscript form amongst a coterie of his admirers. It seems fit that in Turton High Sixth Form in 1996 they were also circulating in handwritten form or as dog-eared photocopies; passed from lover to love-object.

Clare Pollard, Reading John Donne’s ‘The Flea’

Bridge over the Aire is a singular achievement in the same way that Briggflatts is; a poem unlike anything that Tebb’s fellow Children of Albion have, or could have, produced. As with most long poems, there are some flat moments, but overall it is a poem of great accomplishment as well as being a remarkable document of a world that has melted away before our very eyes. There is much to admire in this Collected Poems, but this poem makes it a book to treasure, a book to return to. Tebb is, above all else, a survivor of a gone world, a world of hope based on a firm sense of community and of social democracy in all its messy glory. Read it.

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

Last week I wrote about the pioneering doctor and scientist William Harvey, and since then I’ve been reading his wonderful second work, De generatione animalium (1653). Unpicking in crisp and patient Latin the precise mechanics of reproduction — including a great deal about how human reproduction, described in comparison with that of deer — I have found it a strangely moving read. […]

Harvey was not a poet himself, but his friend and successor, Martin Lluelyn (sometimes Llewellin, 1612-1682) was. Lluelyn, who became the doctor to King Charles II after the Restoration, wrote a prefatory poem for the English edition of De generatione, and he was probably also its unacknowledged translator. Here is his description of Harvey’s achievement in matters of the heart:

There [in the dissected animals] thy Observing Eye first found the Art
Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart:
The mystick causes of its Dark Estate,
What Pullies Close its Cells, and what Dilate.
What secret Engines tune the Pulse, whose din
By Chimes without, Strike how things fare within.
There didst thou trace the Blood, and first behold
What Dreames mistaken Sages coin’d of old.
For till thy Pegasus the fountain brake,
The crimson Blood, was but a crimson Lake.
Which first from Thee did Tyde and Motion gaine,
And Veins became its Channel, not its Chaine.
With Drake and Candish hence thy Bays is curld,
Fam’d Circulator of the Lesser World.

There is a moment in the mid-late seventeenth century when the passion, complexity and rhetorical extravagance of the baroque (or ‘metaphysical’) met the precision and optimism of the new science. We see glimpses of this in late Cowley, and you could take his remarkable (and remarkably conflicted) ode to Harvey as a kind of analysis of the two elements. In Cowley, though, they never quite combine — or, perhaps rather, the combination never feels entirely natural.

Other poets, though, did see how to put it together, and Lluelyn is one of them.

Victoria Moul, The running of the deer: celebrating Christmas in 1644

The latest from Vancouver-based writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt, a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes Scholar, is the poetry collection The Idea of An Entire Life (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2025). “How we exist in the world / depends on how we describe it.” begins the opening poem in the collection, “AUTOFICTION.” The poems in this collection are quietly gestural, earth-shaking, precise and performative, offering a layering of direct statements, narrative storytelling and subtle truths. “Picture the women waiting at the forest’s centre,” Belcourt writes, as part of the poem “20TH-CENTURY CREE HISTORY,” “their hands / folded into little coffins. // Not even the snow falls with such imprecise hunger.”

I seem to be a few books behind on Belcourt, having missed A Minor Chorus: A Novel (Toronto ON: Hamish Hamilton, 2022) and Coexistence: Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 2024), the two most recent of his growing list of titles that includes the full-length poetry debut, This Wound Is a World (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2017), a book that made him the youngest winner-to-date of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here], as well as his non-fiction debut, the rich and remarkable A History of My Brief Body (Columbus OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2020) [see my review of such here]. There is a way that Belcourt has of stitching together the present moment with threads of memory and history, writing declarative details of and around Queer identity, family history and survival, utilizing factual details as building blocks into something larger, deeper. As any poem might require, in that particular moment. “I want to call attention to the dead,” he writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CRUISING UTOPIA SONNETS,” “to the barely / living. I want to remind you of the gravity and / the challenge of responding to the world, of simply / being in the world.” There is a dream-like quality to elements of these poems, blended with concrete realities, each side complementing the other in quite striking ways, hitting all the right notes of lovely, of devastating, of loss and heartbreak and wonder. These are poems of witness, of memory; of documentation; a book of the whole world, the whole body, an approach that seems to be how he approaches the books of his I’ve seen to date, including elements of his entire world in that particular moment into the work. This is, arguably, what the best work is supposed to, each poem and line offering a different facet, a different fragment, of something far larger and more expansive as a unified whole. A book of an entire life, indeed. 

rob mclennan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, The Idea of An Entire Life

I was spelunking some digital archives recently and came across Bob Hicok’s “A Primer,” which I loved to bring into classes at assorted Michigan universities. Apart from Frost, excepted for his titular role in this publication, I’ve been trying to not repeat poets, but in the days that followed my rediscovery I couldn’t stop laughing whenever I thought “I live now / in Virginia, which has no backup plan,” and so it occurred to me that perhaps my dumb little rules are less important than, well, enjoying life.

What’s to love? The ability of a poem to have an entire room of twenty-something-year-olds in stitches is a ringing endorsement in my book, though my book is titled Make Poetry for People Again and yours may well have a smarter title, like Something Nice I Saw Today. With Michigan in literal eyesight just a five-minute stroll from the desk where I am writing, I find the seasonal hyperboles are pleasingly apt. As much as I dislike small talk—try asking me some time “What’s new?” and enjoy the cold sweat it engenders—I consider weather a topic of extreme importance, an enthusiasm partially born of the perpetual endurance sports–based need to know when it might next be kind of warm outside, but mostly of the simple fact that what comes from above comes for each of us in kind. It’s always our weather.

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

In the heaven of the moon, Dante meets the humblest of the blest. When Dante asks one of them – Piccarda Donati – if souls like her desire a ‘higher place / to see more and to be yet more beloved’,

…She and the other shades first smiled a little –
and then she answered me with so much joy
she seemed ablaze with the first fire of love:

She explains that it is impossible for them or any of the saved to desire more than they have because that would be discordant with the will of God:

 ….And in his will is found our peace: it is
that sea to which all beings move that are
by it created or by nature made.

This last tercet is often quoted, whether in Dante’s Italian or in different translations. What quiet power there is in the simple phrases, both in terms of their psychological and metaphysical meanings. What I find most stunning, though, is the imaginative reach that unites these vast ideas to the delicate humanity of ‘She and the other shades first smiled a little’. Love in the most absolute sense, the creative love of God, is brought together with the simple human joys of shared knowledge, shared feeling, and the ability to communicate these things, so that we feel how such emotions in this world offer glimpses of the divine. […]

I’m no Dante scholar and can’t judge [D. M.] Black’s version on purely scholarly grounds but I have enjoyed the Paradiso in several different translations, and wrestled with it in Italian. Black’s version is the one that’s given me the most intense imaginative experience and sheer reading pleasure. This is because he writes as a poet translating a poem into poetry for a wide readership, less concerned with word for word accuracy than an academic Dantist needs to be.

Edmund Prestwich, Dante’s Paradiso, translated by D. M. Black

From the first word of the comprehensive new Poems of Seamus Heaney, Heaney writes in a familiar voice.

Hushed
And lulled
Lay the field, under a high-sky sun.

Hushed and lulled could have been the title of this volume. Heaney’s voice often is hushed and lulled, both his writing and his reading voice. There is much “hushed and lulled” imagery in Death of a Naturalist: “The squat pen rests, snug as a gun”, “Hunched over the railing”, “Snug on our bellies”, “Drifted through the dark of banks and hatches”. This hushed hunching is found in the earliest uncollected poems, but also in some of Heaney’s later work, such as Seeing Things: “Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb”, “that sniffed-at, bleated-into grassy space”, “Firelit, shuttered, slated, and stone-walled”, “claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof/Effect”, “all hutch and hatch”.

This hutch-hatch snug-nested manner is the heart of Heaney’s forms as well as his tones. Like the poet who had the greatest-but-least-acknowledged influence on his work, Robert Frost, Heaney enjoys tightness—not the neat tightness of form in which Frost specialized, but the sort of tightness we associate with being hushed, slated, lulled, or stone-walled: his poems are packed, slotted, with meanings couching, crouching, bunching.

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

The poem’s speaker moves from victim to survivor. The sequence “Surviving” uses animals as metaphor, in part iii, “Isolation: Giant squid”,

“I shared my body with the swelling sea,
flowing in freedom, salty and edgeless.
We cephalopods have been shapeshifting
in these depths for five hundred million years,
to the rhythm of our three hearts pulsing.”

Letting go of the abuse and shifting into a shape that feels like home, enabled the speaker to adapt to life free from that abuse. It’s also a place from which the speaker is able to consider the abuser, in “Faceless”, “He was a needle, not sewing to join anything together/ but because he enjoyed the holes that were left behind”. The journey continues, an abecedarian in “A-Z gratitude list”, has some seemingly random items, “G is for gusting wind”, “River’s brown windows”, “S is for shingle”, until “Zips. Keeping a child warm/ by closing metal teeth with my fumbling fingers.”

Emma Lee, “Full Body Reclaim” Caroline Stancer (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.

This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.

I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.

Matthew Paul, Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other

My pamphlet Cry (Valley Press, 2025) is all at once a delving into the ego, a rumination on the difficulties of accepting one’s suddenly-changed identity as a creative mother, and a heartfelt expression of love for one’s child. The subjective viewpoint is that of a woman who tries to carve out time to maintain her ‘writer self’ alongside the newly acquired ‘mother self’, and she wends her way between the mundanity of chores and the space needed in order to write. The poems veer from warm love for her child to frustration to exhaustion to annoyance at a husband who doesn’t consider the mundane aspects of parenting to be part of his role. Freedom and space are craved.

The poem ‘Floating’ appears almost half-way through the collection, just before the central crux, and I have chosen to offer it here for all its metaphor, psychology and symbolism. As a poet, I find it hard to escape the metaphor; indeed some things are better said through it. It lends an “otherness” which can encourage a freer voice, more immediate language, and something concrete on which to base an idea or feeling. For otherness, think of the patient’s chair facing away from the antiquated psychoanalyst to garner honesty and openness, or likening a person or feeling to a piece of fruit to detach them from yourself and describe them better: hard skin, pith, juice… One can really have fun. In ‘Floating’ I give you water.

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

Ann E. Michael, Systems

We watch other writers making best seller lists, winning awards and feel like we could have had that if only we’d set up an instagram account and promoted our books, or made lots and lots of contacts that we could pull in for favours when we needed them, if we’d set the alarm for five am and pushed out 2000 words fuelled by caffeine before shuffling the kids to school and keeping house, not forgetting making time for health and happiness, reconnecting with nature and reading fifty two books a year. We have this pushed at us from every corner of the internet. The dream writer life can be achieved if you do more than other writers. If you fight harder you will achieve more. If you push harder you will be the one that makes it. Added to this, we crave the validation of our peers, naturally, and as a species we are drawn to the idea of a hierarchy, that there must be a way to attain the top tier if not the top position. If we knew what the key to it all was, we could make it. If we took the right course, the right workshop, if we made the right friends we would, finally reach the golden summit of being successful. There are many people making money selling writers a key to success that doesn’t really exist. If you can’t physically fight, will you drown? If you can’t keep up, will you disappear? This is one of the fears that comes up the most when I am mentoring. I have that fear in me too. But our perceptions of what the writer life looks like, and about success are skewed by that fear.

Wendy Pratt, I don’t recognize the writing road anymore, or even the creative landscape my mind is waking up to.

What a lovely event it was at The Brunswick in Hove on Sunday, at the awards event for the Brighton & Hove Arts Council Poetry Competition. Jeremy Page had kindly invited me to read alongside him (he was the adjudicator) and the audience was very receptive, especially given that they were no doubt there to hear the results of the comp! One of the poems I read was ‘She offers her defence’ from The Mayday Diaries, not one I’ve ever included in a reading because it’s written in two voices and without having the poem in front of you it’s possibly a bit hard to follow. Then I had the idea of asking poet friend Jill Fricker to read it with me. I knew she would be there as she had been shortlisted for the prize. And I think our team reading went well!

Come the second half, when the results were announced we found out Jill won first prize for her poem ‘NW3’ – very exciting, and a massive co-incidence that she’d already appeared on stage in the first half. Huge congratulations to Jill. She’s actually a pretty successful poetry comper. I must ask her what the secret is.

This week I was contacted by Rebecca Leek, whose podcast The Ditty Bag is a lovely thing: she records a new episode every week, featuring five or six poems that she has chosen, sometimes on a theme. This week there’s a fair bit of water, and Rebecca included my poem ‘Before the Splicing’ which was originally published in Prole magazine. She liked the poem because of its rope-making and boat-ish references, and actually explained what ‘splicing’ is. Very helpful! The poem is a sonnet spoken by a woman having doubts (or not) ostensibly about whether the rope she’s working on will hold tight, but also whether her impending marriage will work (the sense of ‘getting spliced’). I was delighted to hear Rebecca read it.

Robin Houghton, Readings, and a poem on ‘The Ditty Bag’ podcast

I live in a world of books, in the over-passionate, underfunded world of the arts. It’s messy and uncomfortable. But art is. The billionaires are in tech in the Bay Area. While thriving financially in the artistic sphere may be near impossible, reading enriches my life in every other area: it allows me to expand my mind, travel the world, imagine myself anew, be everywhere all at once.

As a publisher, I always think about who will read the books we publish. As a reader, I read all over the place, tumbling through genres, styles, poems, stories. I like to envision that we will all keep engaging with literature, whether we read books physically, listen to audiobooks, or consume bite-sized essays and poems throughout the day.

Kate Gale, Read to Me, America: For The Love of the Arts

Many poets seem to leave their book behind as soon as it’s published, but at that point I feel I’m only just getting to know it.

First of all, the reviews it receives (if the poet’s lucky!), provide an excellent sounding board. Which poems do reviewers highlight? What elements are cast into doubt? And secondly, what about the readers who buy the collection? These days, they often select a favourite poem or two from the book and post them on social media. Which ones are chosen? And thirdly, the poems that the poet might also decide to share. Which generate most traction? Which are most popular? Which garner most sales of the book? And then there are in-person readings. As mentioned previously on here, those events enable the poet to explore their collection again, to test which poems go down best in person, and which appear to disappoint.

And finally, the poet often benefits from time to weigh up all this feedback, to gauge it, to avoid dramatic, knee-jerk reactions to it, to compare and contrast it, to consider how it might (or might not!) contribute to the writing of their next collection. Of course, none of this process is possible if they turn their back on the book and immediately embark on another creative project as soon as a copy reaches their hands. The seemingly fallow period that follows publication is, in my view, a necessary pause, a pause that may be filled by the satisfaction of engaging with readers.

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

My poetry book now lives in over 120 homes, across 28 states and 5 countries. I want to say these numbers are far beyond what I expected, but I don’t think I really let myself “expect” anything. Regardless, every time I try to picture it—these little blue books sitting on nightstands, tucked into bags, resting on coffee tables—my whole body hums. […]

I’ve learned that marketing is much less fun than writing, and I’m not really the type who can do both at once. So for now, I’m letting myself lean into sharing this book and finding my readers.

Originally, I planned to spend a few quiet months focused on online sales before moving toward in-person stores. I wanted room to breathe after the marathon of finalizing the book. But my ADHD brain saw shiny opportunities and sprinted straight to them. I ended up pitching shops almost immediately.

From everything I’d read, I expected a long string of no’s before even one yes. Instead, I got two early yes’s (woohoo!), followed by two no’s, and two that I have not heard back from yet. Of the six places I pitched, half were boutiques and half were indie bookstores. And incredibly, A History of Holding is now available at Golden Hour Goods in Ventura and The Bookworm in Camarillo.

I’ve already sold a few copies at Golden Hour Goods (in fact, the first copy sold before I’d even left the shop)! The idea that a stranger could wander in, pick up my book, and decide to bring it home? That still feels unreal. […]

Another surprise was just how time-consuming and expensive it was to sign and ship orders. Each packaged book included a custom sticker, bookmark, plastic envelope to protect the book, gold wax seal, bubble polymailer, and shipping labels. By the time all was said and done, I spent about $7 on materials and postage per book. Still totally worth it, in my opinion. There are cheaper options, of course (ahem, Amazon), but I loved sending out the highest-quality book, infused with special touches directly from me. I wanted opening my book to be the highlight of someone’s day.

Allison Mei-Li, My First Month as a Published Author

The early half of this week has been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on CLOVEN, whose release is pending just after the beginning of the year. The initial proof copy was lost in the mail or swiped from the package room (or has somehow vanished into a dimensional divide along with a bottle of nail polish and some air fresheners) so I had to order another. Given shipping times, I assumed [that] would set me back a few weeks on the release, but I there wasn’t much that needed adjusting besides some margin/gutter issues, so I was able to make those changes in the master file, get it approved by the printer, and place an order for my first stack, which given it’s the 10th, may guarantee me copies before Christmas.  It feels like a more wintry book than GRANATA, which was all spring/summer, the first book in the series, so this mid-winter debut seems perfect. […]

I was thinking the other day, when I had to order another stack of an older self-issued volume, DARK COUNTRY, how much releasing my own work has changed my view of what’s possible for so much the better. On one hand, the benefits are immediate, like control over timelines and the book’s launch into the world. It also feels good and more sure-footed to not be waiting on submissions and schedules and just feeling like there are blocks and bottlenecks that are ultimately a zero sum game, at least for me and my needs/wants. If I could go back a couple decades, as enjoyable as its been to work with other publishers, I’d switch to self-publishing much faster than I did (for zines and chaps, I’ve been doing it all along through the years, but I’ve only had the design/layout skills in the past half-decade or so. )

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

I am excited to say that I have just received advance copies of Polar Corona, my prize-winning ‘crown-of-sonnets’ poetry pamphlet, published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press.  

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

“In Polar Corona, Caroline Gill offers a vivid and precise depiction of Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife, especially the seasonal rhythms of penguins’ lives, interwoven with a poignant exploration of human fortitude in this most testing of environments. Her marvellous ear for the music of a poem is evident throughout and the intricate pattern of mostly half rhymes cleverly accentuates the pervading sense of risk and unpredictability.” 

 – Susan Richardson, Author of Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022) and Words the Turtle Taught Me (Cinnamon Press, 2018), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 

Caroline Gill, ‘Polar Corona’, my prize-winning poetry pamphlet on Antarctica

Are you surprised to see me so soon?—me too! I’m usually more of your every-so-often friend who arrives with poems and snacks, but I just got the word I could officially share this with you (and I wanted to share here FIRST before you saw it on social media, etc.—Accidental Devotions has its FINAL cover—and I’m trying (um, failing) to act casual about it.

But the day is perfect to share as today would have been Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday and Emily D. is braided all through this next book (her and Darling Sue and even pressed jasmine)! So maybe this is not just a cover reveal, but also a little birthday offering to Emily’s altar of em dashes and devotion. (Side note: I recently read that AI is using dashes now, and I wanted to shout—Grrrrl, I got here first! I know there are a lot of dash-happy poets out there—maybe we need to start an Em Dash Society or at least wear t-shirts: The Em Dash: Because Periods Are Too Final).

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

My Creative Retirement Institute class on Emily Dickinson’s fascicles wrapped up yesterday. The beauty (and the weirdness) of it was that focusing on the fascicles made it impossible for me to turn the class into “all of Bethany’s favorite E. D. poems.” In each class I asked, “What caught your eye? What do you want to bring to our attention?” As a result, we put a microscope to poems I’ve barely given a glance in the past. And everything we picked up gave us so much to talk about. It was ideal.

Today I’m having my writing group here, at my house. I’ll bake Emily’s Coconut Cake, and we’ll drink sparkling water, and read poems to one another. What could be better?

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.

It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.

I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.

Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I’m going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

Perhaps it is my southern hemisphere background, but I find it hard not to feel gloomy in the cold, dark, dreary months of northern winter.

This December has been particularly depressing. In the part of southeast England where I live, issues with mains water quality led to a disruption in supply; ironically, given the fact that it has been raining for weeks. The lines from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner acquired a new context:

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

There have also been reports of an alarming surge in flu cases, including advice to wear face masks in public settings. On a global scale, events seem to be increasingly turbulent, the background noise more dissonant, the outlook ever more chaotic and uncertain. In some ways it feels reminiscent of the pandemic: that sense, in early 2020, of flailing around, panic-stricken and directionless. Then there was the alien state of being in lockdown; schools, businesses, leisure facilities all closed, no physical contact with wider family or friends, daily announcements of grim statistics and ever more stringent protocols….

That was nearly five years ago, and it feels like another lifetime. We don’t talk much about that period of lockdown any more,  yet the repercussions continue to reverberate in deep and subtle ways. It features, directly or indirectly, in a number of my poems: ‘Post Lockdown’, for example, which was written in 2021, or, more recently, ‘Discontinuity’.

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

the world is sky, lake, three men and a killing. it is winter.

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I must admit, these short, dark days are hard to take. Being more of a night owl, I miss part of the limited daylight we get in the mornings, then feel shocked and cheated when twilight approaches before 5 p.m. So unfair! 

How to cope? I try to appreciate merino wool sweaters, flannel sheets, and our wood-burning stove. And ignore the fact that spring is still months away—in fact, it’s not even officially winter yet! Still, it’s cold, dark and damp, and I struggle.

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

But it turns out that the worst is already behind us: yesterday saw the earliest sunset of the year here, at 4:48 p.m. From today on, the days will feel longer even though the winter solstice is not until December 21. So hurray for the return of the light!

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

It’s cold in these darkest days of winter, the land having turned its face away from the sun. But you are warm here, sleeping heavily under your down quilt, your worries scattered lifelessly about the rug where your mind dropped them. In your dream, you are following a white fox who trots through the frozen forest, leading you further and further away from the safety of your cabin. Where is he taking you? The way he darts between the trees, his thick fur lit only by the moon, makes him disappear for whole minutes. Many times you think you’ve lost him and begin to panic, only to glimpse the soft plume of his tail leading always just ahead. And now, what is that singing in the distance?

A sound dissolves one dream into another as candlelight fills your bedroom. It’s the children who are singing so beautifully. Do you know them? Yes, they are the same ones who, during the day, bicker over toys and leave clumps of porridge on the table, but are now revealed as children of light. Leading them is a woman wearing a crown of fire and carrying a tray of coffee and yellow buns. The smell of saffron is the smell of the sun. She invites you to taste it.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

I am sheltered on the second floor,
the house, when lit, is a fishbowl. 
Helicopters never quit whirling over Providence.
They clip the air, giant locust wings, clip
and clip and clip, over gardens, greens, 
sewers; when they quit, the silence of grief. 

In and out of the buzz of numbness. 
We live it viscerally but our experience, 
not yet cold, is already cliché. 

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

I wrote to my community this morning about the horrific shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island yesterday, and the horrific shooting at the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney today. Over the last several years I suspect every rabbi I know has gotten better at finding words to say after unthinkable tragedy. A skill none of us wanted. […]

When life feels dark and overwhelming, Jewish tradition teaches us to come together and to let our light shine. Over the course of the coming week our literal flames will go from one tiny candle to the blazing brilliance of a chanukiyah full of light. When we come together, the lights of our souls become more than the sum of their parts. The best response I know to anti-Jewish hatred, or any hatred, is to bravely let our light shine.

That’s the best wisdom I have to share today. For those who about to be celebrating (or are already celebrating — hi antipodeans!), may this Festival of Lights be a time of joy even amidst this sorrow.

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

We have names for our dark forces.
We have names for things close to us.
Different names when they become distant.
We have names for our separations.
And names for the shadows that grow
when the moon rejects us.

I hold this evening up
against that incomprehensible design.
A cold front has crept down from the north.
Clouds obscure everything, even reason.
Even the light from Cassiopeia
that has been stubbornly travelling in my direction
for thousands of years.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

It seems like a good time of year to remember the goal of Christianity used to be “peace on earth, good will towards humanity” and “love thy neighbor” and you know, welcoming the stranger and the immigrant because after all, Jesus was born in a foreign land and no one gave his family shelter—all that stuff that seems to have fallen out of fashion among too many who call themselves Christian. Whew! All right, maybe this post got heavy. I also lost another poet friend, the great Connie Walle, who was a fixture in the Tacoma poetry scene and a great poet besides. It made me sad I had not expressed my admiration to her more while she was still here—a theme of this year for me, as I cross the names of old friends off the holiday card list because they are no longer with us. We really do a bad job of this remembering to express thanks, love, and appreciation for those friends and family, writers and artists, who have made our lives better, our memories short, our ability to remind ourselves that even our lives are not “forever,” and even small things cannot be taken for granted. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dangerous Floods All Around, Trying to Holiday Despite

Brown eyes peer through a back seat window, gazing at the sparkling white powder on the city sidewalks. A small mittened hand swipes a red runny nose then dips quickly back into the pocket of the threadbare rumpled jacket from which it emerged. Festive shoppers with bulging bags walk gaily down the street as brown eyes watch in wonder. The family in the old red Chevy sits in the background of busy streets and merry anticipation, waiting at a red light as the sputtering heater blows hot then cold and the children sniffle and cough the carol of the hungry and homeless. Down the snowy street it chugs, straining on its last fumes to reach the red door of the shelter where warmth and food and one cold night off the streets awaits if the line isn’t too long or the shelter too full. Belief is a word pregnant with hope.

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

Some leave, some arrive.
Flaggers waving lit-up wands
before the train station.

*

For a few moments,
the silhouettes of trees pressed
against the sky’s burning throat.

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

Welcome to the Some Flowers Soon Christmas Poetry Quiz! Questions this week, answers next Monday. Then I’ll be away for a fortnight and back in the New Year.

All the answers, except the last one, are the names of modern poets. The usual rules apply: strictly no Googling, but you may consult poems learned by heart. Previous editions of Some Flowers Soon may also, in some cases, be helpful. […]

Which Swiss-Bolivian poet, who died this year, wrote a poem (in English) which begins:

snow is english
snow is international
snow is secret
snow is small
snow is literary
snow is translatable

[…]

Which poet wrote a “Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan” which ends:

Christmas is the time of cold air
and loud parties and big expense,
but in our hearts flames flicker
answeringly, as on old-fashioned
trees. I would rather the house
burn down than our flames go out.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Some Flowers Soon Christmas Quiz 2025

Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation…

… for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia … and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC! 

It’s the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened my birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply to my day: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday to me in that moment. I’d planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. “But I please to know what my presents are now!” I thought, so I damn well opened my presents over breakfast, and I’m so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.

I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing.

Liz Lefroy, I “Do What [I] Damn Well Please”

All that I am
is the question of
a crow against the sky
on a cold morning
when it is too bright
to see,
too blue and white
to believe.
The tree against
the landscape. One thing
depending on the other.

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

This week: bearing witness to old rhythms, the laptop singing to life, a postcolonial flâneuse, the slow harvest of mindfulness, and much more. Enjoy.

I often cannot see the night sky, here in the mountains of North Carolina.  There’s usually too many trees that obscure the view, which seems a fair trade most nights.  But in the winter months of no leaves on the trees, I get unexpected treats as I glimpse a star here and there.

This morning there was the delight of the setting moon.  I was working on a poem that I was writing, a poem inspired by an in-class writing experiment that led to some good student writing (see this blog post for details).  I thought I might write from the point of view of the saw mill blade, but instead, I focused on the door frame, the door frame that was once a tree, that sacrificed essential parts of itself to become a door frame.  Was it worth it?  The door frame feels sorrow, much like many adults I know who feel sorrow about the sacrifices made along the way.

As I was writing it, the poem seemed tired and trite to me.  Writing about it now, I think it has potential.  I’ll put it away for a bit and see if anything new comes to me.

As I was writing, the setting moon caught my eye, and I thought, I’d probably see this beautiful moon better if I turned off the lights in this room.  And so, I did, and it was amazing, watching the moon set beyond the bare branches of the trees.  The moon was shrouded in haze, so it had more of a Halloween vibe than a December vibe.  I tried to summon a December feeling by thinking about the haunting Christmas hymn, “In the Deep Midwinter.”  I thought about Christina Rossetti, author of the words.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Moonset and Midwinters

In studying prosody, how it informs a poem’s argument or intonation, we tend to look for ruptures, dissonance, places where the music breaks down: the meter falters or the rhyme abruptly strikes a minor chord. But with Frost, as often as not, the deviation is a doubling down instead of a stepping away. “Stopping by Woods” is no exception to the exception, and while the last stanza is linked by rhyme to the penultimate, it is in fact linked more tightly, all four lines, rather than just three, rhyming with sweep:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

While the poem ends, famously, in what may be read as an avowal to continue, to push onwards, the repeated line as an assertion of determination, I hear in the music a hypnotic quality, a trailing off instead of a striking out, a settling down, as if instead of resuming his forward momentum, the speaker has decided he might linger a little while longer. The mind may know the story it’s been telling itself—things to do, places to be, don’t let anything distract you from the behest your mind is bent on—but some more ancient sense knows the thing to do when the snow begins to pile is to hunker down someplace warm and rest a while.

Solstice derives from the Latin solstitium: sol, meaning sun, plus sistere, “stand still”—the solstice is the point at which the sun stands still. In this, ahem, light, the third line of Frost’s quatrain, its wayward rhyme, is an accounting, an observing: a bearing witness to the old rhythms against which all our human machinations beat and bleat and strive. But it only takes a moment’s work to decide that you can linger there a while, and let the easy music of the wind, the sharp smell of snow, enchant you. The thing to remember about keeping promises is: they will keep.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

As you might imagine, independent bookstores really depend on holiday sales, and this is a great time of year to shop independently instead of at the enormous online retailers (who don’t need your money, frankly). You can even use that site that won’t be named to find titles and make a wish list, and then take that list of books to your local indie and buy from them instead. If you don’t have an indie or a brick-and-mortar chain bookstore near you, check out Bookshop.org, which gives a portion of its profits to independent bookstores.

To get you started, in case you’re looking for recommendations, here are some of my favorite books from 2025, plus a couple of books coming out in 2026, including a new collection of poems by yours truly, my first book of poems in five years. I love preordering books as holiday gifts, and giving a card that tells the recipient what title(s) they’ll be receiving and when. That with some dark chocolate, coffee, or tea? Instant holiday hero.

Lion by Sonya Walger
Startlement: New and Selected Poems by Ada Limón
Paper Crown: Poems by Heather Christle
Terminal Surreal: Poems by Martha Silano
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis
Scorched Earth: Poems by Tiana Clark
The New Economy: Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
A Silent Treatment: A Memoir by Jeannie Vanasco
Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, coedited by David Baker and Michael Collier
The End of Childhood: Poems by Wayne Miller
Transit: Poems by David Baker (preorder)
A Suit or a Suitcase: Poems by…me (preorder)*

*My neighborhood bookstore, Gramercy Books, allows you to order signed and personalized copies of my books, and they’ll ship to you anywhere in the continental US. I love walking down to Gramercy to sign books and make them out to the people you care about most: friends, kids and grandkids, teachers, neighbors. So please know that’s an option this holiday season! The folks at Gramercy—and I—appreciate your support.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

The second poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Sarah al Bohassi.

Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi [Instagram login required].

Sarah al Bohassi is a 13-year-old poet from Gaza. She has composed her poem in English. As Robert Macfarlane has written on Instagram: ‘Her mother has multiple sclerosis so Sarah looks after the whole household. They can’t get medication for her mother and can’t evacuate her. Sarah has not stopped writing.’

Sarah’s poem has been letterpress-printed by @theohersey. You can buy an A4 print of her poem here. Each purchase also comes with an A5 print of ‘Repeating Ourselves III’ by Alice Oswald, Zaffar Kunial, Max Porter and Robert Macfarlane. All proceeds will be shared directly with Sarah and her family, and with @doctorswithoutborders.

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 2: Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi

It’s been a good year for my memoir, and I am thrilled to have been reviewed and interviewed a few times . Today I heard I made the Lit Hub list of notable titles. The reviewer wrote: Nin Andrews’ memoir in prose poems chronicles her feral childhood among farm animals, miscellaneous siblings, and eccentric parents. As the “last daughter of a gay man and an autistic woman,” she is raised mostly by a Black nanny (the memorable Miss Mary, who nicknames her “Son of a Bird”), along with cranky farmhands and the land itself. I was swept up in the poet’s exhilaration, confusion, and awe as she digs up and lyrically configures her past. Heart-breaking, revelatory, and devastatingly funny, these are brilliant vignettes. (Charles Goodrich)

Nin Andrews, A Good Year for Son of a Bird

With no access to slots at major festivals, no wholesaler, no chance to get copies on shelves at physical bookshops, no distribution in the U.S. or Canada, no realistic retail prices on Amazon, no reviews in broadsheets or major print-based journals, Nell (at HappenStance) and I have now shifted going on for 250 copies of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. And I’m determined to ensure there will be plenty more sales of it to come over the next few years.

In this context, I’m inevitably left wondering just how many I’d have sold with any of the external commercial support network I’ve mentioned above. And, given that many significantly funded poetry publishers (who do have that sort of backing) have stated their average sales of full collections barely reach three figures, why aren’t they flogging far more copies than me instead of far fewer…?

Matthew Stewart, My personal experience of selling poetry collections in the current climate

My new poetry collection. The Artist’s House is a cultural autobiography, honoring the literature, art, and artists that have shaped my writing, with illustrations and interactive features. It will include Art Nouveau style drawings and links to music, dance, and poetry online. Listen to a song by Jacob Collier while reading a poem about Emily Dickinson’s lines dueling with Taylor Swift’s. Watch a performance of Twyla Tharp’s “In The Upper Rooms” ballet after reading the poem it inspired.

This has been a passion project, poems contemplating the world of art and the creative process. I’ve been drawn to contemplate this since childhood, as I grew up with the arts — a father who was a painter and a mother who was a musician. They enriched my childhood with reading, visual art, music, and dance—taking us to see concerts and plays, to visit museum and art exhibitions.

Rachel Dacus, Why I’m Inspired by Art and Artists

“The Instagram astrologers says big positive changes are coming for me this week!” I yelled from my reading chair to my spouse at his laptop, although the cats seemed interested, too. He said something like “that’s nice, honey,” or maybe just a neutral “mmm” because he was concentrating on the hundredth book of comics scholarship he’s found himself writing for fun, because his brain grooves on producing scholarship. I sighed, shut off the social media algorithms that were mesmerizing me into a stupor, and pulled Phillip Pullman’s massive new novel onto my lap.

Hence my delay in spotting what a few FB friends had just posted to my timeline, that Mycocosmic has been named to Literary Hub’s list of 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. (I turned off all social media notifications years ago–I’m distractible enough, thank you.) My mycelially themed poetry collection even appears in Lit Hub’s graphic, in the understory, appropriately enough. I had just woken up and searched for the local outdoors farmer’s market page on FB to make sure they’re still opening at a very chilly 8 a.m. Instead I sat on the wooden stairs in my pajamas to read and process. I’ve never had a book appear on one of these year-end lists before. It’s a multi-genre list including eight poetry collections. That’s pretty good, right?

Lest I get TOO cheerful about it: after the article throws out disheartening stats about how seldom small press books appear on “best of” lists, it states, “This is not a best of list.” Ahem. I don’t think lists intended to be “best of” actually qualify for that label, either, as it happens. It’s not like even the most diligent poetry reviewers know about every good collection published that year, much less have given each one a fair shake. The U.S. poetry scene is big, messy, and wildly various in ways the highest-profile review outlets don’t reflect. “Best” is more like “my favorites among the books that floated across my attention this year, with an emphasis on buzzy authors and prestige presses and fellow Brooklynites who already got a lot of media because c’mon, I’ve been doomscrolling more often than reading poems, just like you.” (I do get it, Imaginary Poetry Reviewer–reading everything is impossible–I’m just perpetually irked by how NYC-centric the poetry world can seem.)

Lesley Wheeler, Stars, luck, and revelations

One day during a challenging season of being, longing for something that would turn my spiraling mind outward, knowing that a daily creative practice has always been my best medicine and that constraint is the mightiest catalyst of creativity, I decided to try applying my bird divination process to the Little Free Library, trusting the lovely way our imagination has of surprising us and, in doing so, reminding us that even in the bleakest moments it is worth turning the page of experience because the imagination of life is always greater than that of the living.

Every day for thirty days, I took a random book from the Little Free Library, opened to a random page, and worked with the text on it, making no aesthetic judgments about the literary value of the books — self-help, airport romance novels, finance textbooks, breastfeeding guides, Lemony Snicket, Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and the Bible were all raw material on equal par.

As every creative person knows, and as Lewis Carroll so perfectly articulated in his advice on working through difficulty in math and in life, our most original and unexpected ideas arrive not when we strain the mind at the problem, but when we relax it and shift the beam of attention to something else entirely; it is then that the unconscious shines its sidewise gleam on an unexpected solution no deliberate effort could have produced.

After reading over the page, I would take a long walk to let the words float in my mind as I knelt to look at small things — pebbles, petals, leaves, feathers, and a whole lot of that great teacher in resilience, lichen — picking one thing up to take home. The words invariably arranged themselves unconsciously into the day’s… divination? koan? poem?… that always surprised me, always revealed what I myself needed to hear that some part of me already knew.

Upon returning home, I would place the found object under my microscope and take a photograph — cellular and planetary at the same time, itself an invitation to a shift in perspective — then begin laying out the text over the image.

Here they all are — perhaps uncommon gifts for the book-lover in your life, perhaps simply inspiration to try the practice yourself — available as translucent 4×4 blocks with proceeds supporting my endeavor to put up Little Free Libraries in book deserts throughout the five boroughs of New York City — communities more than a mile from a public library or bookstore.

Maria Popova, Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

We are in this together. The dream of the lens
has led us to an abandoned treatment plant, a cold
and vacant warehouse. Shacks, trails. Underground.
Mines and secrets whisper in the grasses, telling
of nations, angelic invasions, the terror of inhaling
eternity’s parasites. Just so, the children here
grow vast libraries of psychic error.

R.M. Haines, “The Other Century”

Whenever I feel trapped or stalled, I sit in a space (pub, coffeeshop, whatever) with a stack of reading to flip through (poetry books, fiction, non-fiction whatever, as I’m always behind on my reading), with notebook + pen + nowhere to be for a couple of hours and no expectation, beyond flipping through reading; it always triggers even a sentence or a thought or a something into the notebook. From a spark, one can build, certainly.

Also: attempting to write to a particular prompt might also force an idea, beyond one’s usual structure or comfort zone. I know Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen composed a novel based on taking words-as-prompts for each section; one hundred short sections from one hundred short words. If you can imagine, she wrote a whole novel out of that.

I’m currently working a poetry manuscript from weekly prompts that Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany has been offering since January, but I’m using less as forced-prompt than simply a structure to stretch my boundaries; he’s only doing this year, so I’m hoping I can get a manuscript of something somehow coherent and publishable out of it.

Denver poet Julie Carr said she was feeling stalled during early Covid, so I suggested a call-and-response; I wrote a poem and sent it to her; she wrote a poem in response; I wrote a poem to her response poem; and so on; we each manage a dozen poems over a year and a half (I produced our immediate results into a chapbook, but she later rewrote hers into three poems, which landed in her 2024 collection, whereas I’d initially hoped we could get a full collaborative book out of it; my side of our conversation, thus, appears in my spring 2026 book with Caitlin Press).

rob mclennan, How to break through a writing block:

winter wind
the voice of one tree
after another

three of a kind by tom clausen

The evening in York was a memorable one: Janet Dean and Ian Parks, whose new collection we were celebrating, read beautifully, and Jane Stockdale’s songs and tunes were delightful. I stuck to my usual set of poems from The Last Corinthians, tempting though it was to read different ones and even some from my previous collection and/or some new ones.

Five days after York, having been invited by Katie Griffiths to read in Walton-on-Thames alongside Sophie Herxheimer, I skedaddled down south for what was perhaps the most enjoyable gig for me since the one in Nottingham in September. Sophie is a force of nature, an artist as well as a poet, whom I could’ve listened to all evening. She got everyone making zines during the interval. Katie herself read a poem; it’s excellent news that Nine Arches will be publishing her second collection next year. There was also a short open mic, the readers including marvellous Jill Abram.

As Walton is only a few miles west of Kingston, I tailored my set accordingly, with more locally-set poems than I would normally read, though I decided – wisely, I think – against reading one, ‘The Blue Bridge’, which features Sham 69, who came from the neighbouring town of Hersham. In all, it was a joyful evening, and a good way to end this year of readings, which has seen me appear in eight cities and towns in England within the space of six months. It’s been more of a meander than a tour, and two of them were serendipitous invitations at fairly short notice; nonetheless, it’s been lovely to read my poems out loud in front of attentive listeners, not all of whom are poets themselves. I’m thankful to everyone who’s come along, whether because of me, my co-readers or both.

Matthew Paul, Recent readings and reading

On 7th Dec I attended a CB1 poetry event at yet another new venue – the Brew House. About 40 people attended. I hadn’t heard of either of the headline poets. Leo Boix read from his book of 100 sonnets. Stav Poleg lives in Cambridge and has been in The New Yorker among other places. Her work sounded more substantial – rather heavy going for a reading, but a name worth adding to my reading list. Her “Memory and Geography” poem was excellent.

The open-mic readers took up over half the evening and were more varied than ever. A few of them had never performed poetry before. One person read a piece that they hadn’t looked at since they wrote it in 5 minutes. Another read his piece that has just won 2nd prize in the Bridport (£1000). I read an old piece that I think I’ve read before. It’s about time I read something new.

Tim Love, CB1 – Stav Poleg and Leo Boix

This past week I facilitated a workshop called “The Gift of Poetry.” In it I and some of my poet friends, Jon Pearson, Kim Malinowsky, John Brantingham, and Robbi Nester all shared prompts they use to write poems for special people. Some of these ideas incorporate visual elements, making the poems more like art pieces. Some of these prompts involve writing to a specific person, incorporating telling details about them in the poem. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure how things would work out. I find it really difficult to write poems to people I love without getting too squishy. I have to say though, I was truly blown away by the fun, funny, tender, beautiful things people shared in our workshop. Everyone walked away with great material to make into poetic gifts for loved-ones.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Poems and Prompts from Our Community

Many thanks to Kathleen Mcphilemy for including three of my poems in episode 37 of Poetry Worth Hearing or you can listen on Youtube, Audible and Spotify. […]

The theme was hiding and/or seeking. The episode is 60 minutes. The first half hour or so is an interesting interview with poet Nancy Campbell who talks about her residency on Greenland among other things. The interview and Nancy’s poems bookend poems by Guy Jones, Zelda Cahill-Patten, Lesley Saunders, Pat Winslow, Richard Lister, Dinah Livingstone, and Sarah Mnatzaganian.

Fokkina McDonnell, Poetry Worth Hearing

Home across the Wolds again, the sky now is a winter-dusk sky of pink with a moon as fine as lace. Mum is feeling better after a terrifying couple of weeks. She chats all the way back. My siblings and her friends take over her care now. I can come home.

The next day I try and write but instead I catch up on sleep; deep, dark sleep, the kind without dreams. It is recovery from days of ambulances and terrifying illness and wards and worry. Today I have a meeting about the Arts Council application which is so close to being finished, but for which I have done absolutely nothing except open it up and listen to my brain trying to run away from it. The application is a priority, but so is listening to what my strange brain needs. It needs to sink into writing the book, have a few hours disappearing into the world I have created there, connecting to something that is primal: the urge to create, to write, to transform and today I shall do this. Tomorrow is for questions about impact and audience, numbers and timelines, today is for me. I can feel my protagonist like a ghost at my shoulder, waiting for me to draw her path for her. This has nothing to do with grinding towards a word count and everything to do with the creative brain enjoying its work.

But how do I fight the fear? How do I stop feeding the roots that cause me to worry about being left behind? What will I do when I can’t rely on my work ethic, when the sacrifice of time needs to be made to people, not pages? I fight it with the secret, shy knowledge that it is not the grind that has led me to this point in my career. That is a factor, but the other, more important factor is ability. I have crossed out ‘talent’ so many times in this sentence, it is just too cringe. I will settle with ability. The ability to create in a unique way, unique to my odd brain and way of thinking. No one can write this book but me, not because they wouldn’t know how to write it, or because they wouldn’t get there first, or aren’t as dedicated, but because they are not me. The root that I need to feed is the one that values my own ability, my own differences. Difference is uniqueness. The work, the book, will wait for me. It can’t be written without me.

I’m sitting in my writing room watching the seagulls crossing a lavender sky. Early morning. Good coffee, the laptop singing to life, the work ready to be done.

Wendy Pratt, The Fear is on Me

Weather continues dizzy
with fatigue, slowly floating
drifts forming of white dust: snow,
ash, the evaporation
of poison rain, something else?

PF Anderson, On Resilience

I love art for its embrace of the not-knowing. That sense sometimes of sliding one foot forward slowly in the dark, then the other; or of feeling along the wall for a light switch. I know it’s here somewhere. I like that the advice offered in poems can be both wise and suspect, both silly and true. Can be understood by the body, but not necessarily by the brain. Yes, something in me says. Yes, that’s true, even as the rational brain may say, Now, wait a minute, hold on here, what’s this now? And I appreciate artists who speak out of the not-knowing, the I’m-not-sure. The artists who say, Let me show you what I saw, tell you what I heard, and you decide: what does it mean?

Marilyn McCabe, the eloquent purple, those heart shaped leaves

The final few lines reference an interview and performance John Cage gave on television in January, 1960 which has always stayed with me—his way of being seems so gentle and loving—and remains an endless source of inspiration to me in my own approach to poetry and life: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”

Dick Whyte, Maude Uschold – 2 Short Poems (1926-1935)

I wonder about the vacuum
that grows inside me
like an ancient bonsai.
Pruned and constrained.
Yet sometimes daring to offer a miniature flower.
Or to break through skin —
as wound
as weapon
as poem.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Honeycomb

For the video below, I took the first twenty or so sections of Oppen’s poem “Of Being Numerous” and transformed them into this new text (a process involved alphabetizing, and multiple Google translations and then editing) which is haunted and speaks to the spirit of the times, somehow. Then I made this video which is all about absence and haunting. I recorded myself playing alto recorder and then tranformed that into MIDI harp and ceramic bowl sounds which I transformed through delay, reverb and displacement.

Gary Barwin, On “Forgetting”: Turning One’s Back on Turning One’s Back to the Future

Something you may not know about me is that I sometimes wander onto eBay to hunt for things I’m convinced belong in the Poetry Museum I curate in my mind. Some people binge-watch Stranger Things, some people look for lost ephemera.

In my searches, I found this letter written by Anne Sexton, which I found charming. Not because I am a fan of cucumber soup, but because of the P.S. at the very end. [image]

Here’s my cucumber soup recipe AND I won the Pulitzer Prize—all things being equal.

I’ve always loved letters and postcards (you may have noticed I’ve renamed this Substack Postcards from a Poet, because for me, this feels less like a “newsletter” and more like a small check-in from me to you: Hey, how are you holding up? Here are a few things bringing me joy.)

And here’s something that delighted me this week: I did not know that people (and kids!) write postcards to Emily Dickinson via the Emily Dickinson Museum. While many were mailed, this one, I’m guessing this one was penned in the moment and handed over to museum staff. And well, it warmed my heart: [image]

“Thank you for writing a soft sea washed around the house”—Come on! What a way to say thank you! It reminded me of William Stafford’s quote: Everyone is born a poet. . .I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

Kelli Russell Agodon, Anne Sexton’s Recipe for Cucumber Soup…

I stopped writing poetry at a certain point, good party though it was. Coulda been the whiskey mighta been the gin, coulda been the humiliation coulda been the freeze-out. I kept moving toward where the love was. Maybe poetry left me, and maybe it’ll come back some day. What has always seemed perverse to me though is that poets could form inhospitable communities. But in the end I’ve found my own small community of hospitable and openhearted writers and that has made all the difference. […]

I think most of us stopped imagining that the creative life would ever get easier, but suddenly it seems like it will be getting harder than ever. And it’s still hard for me, 13 or so books in, 35 years or so in. But I worry about the young writers, all of them. The ones who haven’t even begun to imagine a writing life for themselves. The ones who live in a world with drugs that affect your appetite, making you feel hungry when you’re not, and others that make you feel sated when you might need nourishment. And it makes sense to take drugs for depression, anxiety, diabetes. It does. It makes sense to be afraid right now. It makes sense that many are in a recurring flight or fight response mode which elevates cortisol levels and which according to Harvard Health could in a chronic case cause, “brain changes that may contribute to anxiety, depression, and addiction” and weight gain.

One must continue to ask as Woolf did, “Now what food do we feed women as artists upon?” What new considerations are there? As a white woman writer in my 50s in the mid 2020s, of what use can I be? Is it helpful to tell my story? Or is it better just to get out of the way to make space for others to articulate theirs? How do we make meaning of our own ongoing stories at this particular historical moment? How do we balance the needs of our stomachs so that our small eyes can imagine an enormous and nourishing future?

Shawna Lemay, Artemisa Gold – an Essay

Ramisha Kafique updates the role of flâneuse to today’s world, taking in streets and cafés both local and distant. In the process, she also subverts the original role of a white male strolling city streets and recording what he observed to that of a Muslim woman, recording what she sees and how people observing her react. As the title poem, “Postcolonial Flâneuse” observes,

“Neutral positions clash with colourful scarves and turbans, veils, bands, and bracelets. You can’t tell them what not to wear, here. Is it my faith that is silencing me or your gaze? Is there a lack of me in the spaces I inhabit?

“Give space. deep breaths, sighs, long strides, fingers fiddling in laps, chins resting in hands. Alhamdulillah. I can walk where I like.”

England’s bland, grey streets where everyone was in business uniforms or a casual uniform of sweatshirts and jeans, are being opened up to colour and signifiers of different religions. There’s a challenge too as the speaker asks if those observers who see her as different are assuming her faith doesn’t allow her to walk alone or visit a café without a chaperone or their attempts at intimidation, even unintentional, are trying to push her out. The poem’s speaker, however, is not deterred. She records in “Book in Hand”, “She has become part of/ the mass. She is him, and her,/ and them.”

Emma Lee, “The Postcolonial Flâneuse” Ramisha Kafique (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground and hadn’t been impressed. More than unimpressed: he had actively taken agin it, he had wanted to stand in the middle of the carriage and say in a very loud voice: ‘Read that – does anyone think it’s good?? That’s the kind of poem that can put people off poetry for life.’ He sat down next to me and googled the poem on his phone and insisted on reading it aloud, exasperated by every line, and this was funny because I know his exasperation. My encounter with two recent, widely praised novels followed a similar trajectory: I began reading slowly, respectfully; I became impatient; I did some skim-reading; I placed them on my pile of books-to-take-to-the-Oxfam-shop.

The chorus of approval surrounding many new books begins pre-publication with puff quotes for the cover from other writers, with ‘books to look out for’ features in the Guardian, and with excited freelance reviewers posting pictures of their advance copies; post-publication, if there are good reviews and author interviews and ‘profiles’, the chorus can feel wraparound. Stifling. Airless. In this context, negative reviews have a thrilling whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church. Not negative reviews of books (and films, TV shows, restaurants) that are widely agreed to be pretty terrible, because their target is low-hanging fruit and the reviewers are saying little more than see how witty I am, but well-argued negative reviews of books that been praised elsewhere and get ‘likes’ all over the place and have won prizes. These are different; they feel personal.

Charles Boyle, Teeth: On negative reviews

I admit to personal bias here: Andy Fletcher and I go back more than forty years, could be nearing fifty, if numbers matter. And in my view he’s one of the best poets I’ve read in all that time. Like so many others, he should have had more recognition, but thankfully – as his new collection the uncorked banshee rebellion bottle demonstrates – he’s still hard at work, crafting his tight, lively, profound, sometimes mysterious, sometimes tender and always entertaining poems.

He tends to take an image or circumstance, explore it, twist it, find the life in it and then pare it to its essence. He’s rarely if ever wasteful with words, or loose in his construction. With each poem, there is a sense that here is a poet who knows what he wants from the piece – and knows how best to achieve it. This is a skill not easily learned.

Take the poem my work, which is typically absurd in its expansion of an image, yet holds a darkness, a feeling of being overpowered or controlled, as so many do. It begins the teacher examines my work/and says it’s the worst she’s seen// she picks me up bodily/ pushes me into her pencil sharpener/ and turns me until my head’s pointed

In another poem, time, there is an echo of childhood scraps when the narrator’s jumped and knocked over by the grandfather clock in the hall. He fights back but in the end admits defeat – ‘you win’ i gasp. And as we know, time always will. the clock stands upright again/ and chimes loudly

Some poems are very short, just two or three lines, some are blocks set out as prose without punctuation, most are tight and fit into one side, which makes them deceptive. On one level you can take them at face value, enjoy the fun in their ideas, read them quickly. On another you can re-read and consider the depths of understanding of the human condition they contain. 

Bob Mee, ANDY FLETCHER

Bodies of water with a menace of teeth
beneath the surface.

Silvered arms of trees, unleafed, suggest
a longing for taxonomy—

How to remember origins,
where we began.

Luisa A. Igloria, Long Night Moon

It’s December and I have enjoyed reviewing many excellent collections and pamphlets during the course of this year, but the subject of today’s review, Katrina Moinet’s State of the Nations (Atomic Bohemian, 2025), must rank as one of the best. I have a penchant for poetry that pushes the boundaries of language and form and that engages with the challenges of contemporary society. State of the Nations does this and much, much more.  

The collection begins with poems that reflect upon the state of government in our country and perhaps internationally. Demockracy as the title suggests paints a picture of a system of government that makes a mockery of the ideals of democracy. The poem takes the form of a list, each line describing the actions of government often in apparently contradictory statements. For example, Moinet writes ‘Demockracy/ …is arresting/ arrests no one/ rises in solidarity with no one (for fear of arrest).’ This is government that has lost its way: it represents no one, the exact opposite of what a democracy should do! The notion of ‘arresting’ makes the system sound more totalitarian than democratic, and in order to resolve the contradiction in the line that follows (‘arrests no one’), the reader imagines the non-arrest of corrupt political leaders and their friends so characteristic of such states. Perhaps unsurprisingly earlier in the poem we are told ‘Demockracy…is going for a walk…is taking a hike,’ suggesting an abdication of responsibility. As a result, it ‘will find itself on the police national computer/ may one day appear in court.’ The idea of a democratic institution being guilty of illegal acts is frightening.   No wonder the poem ends with an appeal: ‘incites people to read/ incites people to read/ incites people to read it for themselves.’ Moinet is asking us to exercise our sense of individual responsibility: to take note of what is happening, because only through the aggregation of  individual action can we protect democracy.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘State of the Nations’ by Katrina Moinet

In the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MA program, a common topic of debate was what it meant to write “political poetry.” I’m sure my memory has reduced the positions people took in this debate to their lowest common denominators, but there were, as I recall, two basic lines of reasoning. One argued that poets had an inherent obligation to write about the political and cultural concerns of the day—that the vocation of poet, essentially, demanded it. The other asserted that the debate itself was a red herring, because poems were political by definition. The linguistic, formal, and expressive choices a poet made were inescapably and ineluctably already embedded in the poet’s politics. I was just beginning back then to figure out what I had to say as a poet, but my sympathies were with the first group from the start. I knew I wanted—that I needed, actually—to write about my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence, but I wanted to do so by locating that experience within a larger cultural and political context.

My touchstone for this desire was June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights,” in which she connected the fear of sexual violence that kept her from walking alone whenever and wherever she wanted not only to the systemic nature of sexual violence itself, but also to other systems of oppression like racism and colonialism. I don’t know if I could have said it this way then, but making those kinds of connections seemed to hold out the possibility of healing in a way that nothing else did. The sexual abuse of boys was barely recognized as a phenomenon at that time. No one was talking about it because it was assumed to be so rare that it didn’t merit much attention at all; even the therapeutic wisdom in those years was grounded in how uncommon this kind of abuse was believed to be. I didn’t learn this until decades later, but therapists were trained back then to assume that when a boy or man revealed he’d been sexually abused he might very well be reporting a fantasy of some sort, not something that had actually been done to him.

The feminist strategy of making the personal political, in other words—which is fundamentally an ethical stance rooted in the assumption that people do not lie when they relate their own experience, and which “Poem About My Rights” embodied—offered me a way to give meaning to what the men who violated me had done to me beyond the simple fact that I had been their victim. Still, it took me a long time to figure out how to do in my own work what June Jordan did in that poem, primarily because bearing witness to violence and trauma in poetry inevitably confronts the poet with an ethical paradox. A poem, by definition, is a beautiful thing made of words; trauma, on the other hand—in my case the trauma of sexual violence—is anything but beautiful. How can you ethically use the former to represent the latter without in some way falsifying what the person who experienced the trauma went through?

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Poetry to Violence and Trauma

For the last 13 days, Kim and I – mostly Kim – have shown how poetry can help us to survive and speak out against gendered violence; how it can help us to make sense of shattering experiences, to comfort and heal ourselves, to reach out, to offer help, to create communities of recovery and activism. Poetry can invite us to walk in another shoes, to inhabit our own experiences more deeply, more clearly, to find new depths of understanding, empathy, and strength within ourselves. Poetry can deconstruct social systems, old patterns of thought and behaviour, it can highlight injustice; it can demand reparation and inspire action. It can expand and reshape our sense of possibility, it can change the world.

In “Writing about Trauma/ Writing Saved My Life”, I draw from my faith in poetry to examine why writing about trauma is a powerful experience, which can hurt as well as help us. There’s plenty of evidence to support the therapeutic potential of creative writing – but without the right support and structures, writing directly from the experience of trauma can be upsetting, triggering, even retraumatising. Catharsis, in itself, is not therapeutic. Instead, I look at some of the poetic devices we can use to maximise safety and control in the process of writing – metaphor and imagery, rhythm and form – and how these devices can help us to sing in the darkness, about the darkness. This chapter was first published Nine Arches Press in 2021, in “Why I Write Poetry”, a collection of essays edited by Ian Humphreys. It ends with a short writing exercise – and on Day 16, I’ll share a link to a more comprehensive writing resource for those wanting to write about trauma.

Clare Shaw, Day 14: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence

The distinctive scientific curiosity and optimism of Cowley, Ewens and Grove, reflected also in Dryden, is one of the most attractive features of the literary culture of the 1660s. These are unignorably political poets, all written by royalists, but their scientific curiosity is never reducible to politics, and, if anything, the extraordinary freshness of their style — in both Latin and English — seems to have been shaped or facilitated as much by the civil war and interregnum as by the Restoration.

No-one reads any of this stuff now, but if you look across Europe there is plenty of Latin didactic verse from the 1660s: these projects were not in themselves unusual. The most obvious comparison for Cowley’s poem is René Rapin’s Hortorum Libri IV (‘Four Books of Gardens’), for instance, published in Paris in 1665 — but Rapin’s staidly elegant Virgilian pastiche has nothing at all of the urgency or oddness of either Cowley or Ewens. Rapin’s beautiful but ultimately slightly tedious Virgilian imitation is typical of the wider genre, and of the kind of description often offered for ‘neo-Latin’ poetry as a whole. But it’s very far indeed from what you find in English scientific poetry of the 1660s, the urgency of which seems to emerge directly from the ravages of civil war and the hope of a lasting peace.

Victoria Moul, The heart of man, what Art can e’re reveal?

A whistling that freezes more deeply
the spines of icicles
goes on and on like a siren.

Out of the fog and the thunder
and the smoke and my shadow
a figure as pale as milk comes tottering, sloshing
staggering.

[…]

This is part of a sequence called ‘Second-Hand Kite Feathers’, all but one of which is genuinely derived from the Japanese.

I can’t speak or write Japanese, but using a combination of Google Translate, Wiktionary and existing English versions (in this case Robert Pulvers’ translation from Strong in the Rain: Selected Poems of Kenji Miyazawa), I sometimes write down versions of Japanese poems in English. I published a few in School of Forgery because the underlying theme of the book was ‘the volatile relationship between fakery and invention’.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” goes the well-worn Eliot quote. It continues: “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But isn’t the defaced object automatically made different? Did he mean that it should no longer bear any resemblance to what it once was? That is has to have been pointed to a new purpose? One thing I like about remakes and readjustments — the principle of them (something which seems to occupy film-makers more than poets) — is how they make it seem as if the paint is not yet dry, as if nothing is really finished.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Icy Advent Calendar #5: Shadow from a Future Zone

In her July 2022 essay “On Erasure” for the Poetry Foundation, Leigh Sugar claims the “erasure poem may be defined by inclusion and/or exclusion—both actions will produce an effect. So, rather than define erasure poetry as a form that solely reveals what may be hidden, we might well understand it as a form and action that, when engaged consciously, can illuminate, for the purpose of celebrating, condemning, revealing, or interrogating, that which is otherwise invisibled.…”

We agree with Sugar’s definition since the poems included in Oversight: Erasure Poetry are, in effect, translations of the original texts. In some cases, they are translations of translations. And with each translation—whether it is the English adaptation of Veronica Franco’s Venetian capitolos or Marie-Sophie Germain’s theory of elasticity published in a French academic journal—the collaborator is effectively creating a variant of the original. Each new translation, each new variant, offers new insight, our purpose, as Sugar says, to illuminate, celebrate, condemn, reveal, or interrogate, that which is otherwise invisible, to lift women’s stories from obscurity.

Oversight: Erasure Poetry – guest post by Carina Bissett & Lee Murray (Trish Hopkinson)

Seeing the End-of-Year lists of fellow writers can make a person feel…all kinds of ways. Yes, it can be inspiring. Yes, we can be happy for our fellow terrestrials as they achieve their intergalactic goals. Yes, it is great to see hard work, hustle and talent get rewarded, especially in a cultural climate that every day seems to squeeze artists into a vice-grip of ever-higher hurdles. (Yes, that was a bizarre mixed metaphor. Blame the vice-grip! And the hurdles!)

Also, though, seeing what other writers have achieved can lead to us looking inward, feeling like what we did, what we got done, what we accomplished simply doesn’t measure up. The happiness we feel for others may invariably lead to a diminished feeling about ourselves.

In therapy-speak, this is often referred to as comparing one’s own insides to others’ outsides. When someone lists their accomplishments in a neat bullet-point list, that’s all you see. The awards. The recognition. The bullets.

What you don’t see is that person’s insides. You don’t see the doubt, the self-recriminations, the anxiety. I once met a writer who got a six-figure book contract for her first collection of short stories. A huge deal, by any measure. This writer was known as an “It Girl” for a good while in the literary sphere.

In a private conversation with this writer, she told me she found writing so hard that she wept in agony through almost all of her revisions. She sat at her desk for hours, typing and crying.

This is not a judgement on that writer’s process. No doubt that writer was working through some serious issues. And she got the work done, which is extraordinary. But are those tears of agony visible to anyone reading about her “It Girl” status? Did the Publishers Marketplace announcement of the book deal include the fact of this writer’s pain?

Of course not. End-of-Year lists rarely mention such things.

Becky Tuch, Q: What are your (intangible) end-of-year accomplishments?

My desk at the synagogue is cluttered: books, binders, folders, piles of sheet music, one of my son’s tallitot, siddurim, printouts from a recent text study session. After Hebrew school the other day (which means: after early nightfall) my eye lingered on this corner of the desk. I love the small framed print, especially at this season of the year.

The print is by Beth Adams of The Cassandra Pages, who I first met in the early days of both of our blogs, probably in 2004. Beth published two of my books of poetry. I think she gave this print to all of us who had work in Annunciation, an anthology of poetic and artistic work exploring the figure of Mary, which Phoenicia published… wow, ten years ago now.

The jade rosary was a gift from Seon Joon, who I first met when they were blogging about Buddhism and preparing to move to South Korea to ordain as a Buddhist nun. We met in person for the first time at a blogger meet-up in 2005. They wrote about their ordination back in 2012, and I posted about getting to meet up then, too — A rabbi and a nun walk into a bar.

Both of these friendships began via our blogs. We read each others’ posts, we commented, we emailed each other. For a time there was a list-serv for literary, artistic, oddball bloggers who felt akin to each other; some of us met up in Montréal in 2006. I miss those days of the internet. The vibe was entirely different from today’s outrage-driven social media sphere. […]

Today’s internet rewards quick takes and clickbait. But all of these objects link me with a slower speed. Relationships built over time. Sacred items that are familiar to my fingertips — the jade rosary, the wooden coin emblazoned with a quote from a second-century text (Pirkei Avot 2:16.) Even the photo of my son, evoking the slow shifts of parenthood.

Maybe it is the poet in me, the contemplative in me, the artist in me. Maybe it is a function of being in my fifties. Maybe it is the impact of my strokes and heart attack. I am far more interested in the slow harvest of mindfulness than in heated social media arguments. I want to be reflective and steady. Not a blaze, but the lingering warmth of coals.

Rachel Barenblat, Still life

I learned to avoid planning anything the next day or two after our annual amusement park visit. It wasn’t just me. The kids needed time to chill out too. They’d lie on the couch reading or play in the backyard or draw pictures while listening to audiobooks. They didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t want friends over, they just needed to BE. We were like those creatures from Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book, the Collapsible Frinks.

That’s what this year has felt like to me. Like post amusement park visit syndrome. Every day’s news packed with atrocities committed in our names against people around the world and people down the street. Gut-punch news about this administration’s war against the environment, healthcare, education, civil rights, even civility. Nearly everyone I know is beyond overwhelm, no matter if they voted for or against. I’ve barely been able to write this year— no essays published and only a few poems. Here’s one of those poems, this one published in One Art: a journal of poetry:

[…]

My sister and father are at the table, all of us
unaware we’re in my dreamworld,
unaware we are inexorably moving away
from each other the way stars grow more distant.
Stand still she says as she fastens a tiny rubber band
at the bottom of each braid so I don’t turn around
to hug her as I long to in my dream. I want to hang on
for dear life as galaxies move apart ever faster
in a universe widening toward absolute zero.

Laura Grace Weldon, Post Amusement Park Visit Syndrome

I dreamed of wolves and the moon they howl at, and now, everything takes me back to understanding the world through stories. My life is a myth. America is a myth. We are bringing the wolves to Yellowstone. We are bringing them back to life. We are finding new stories, changing our outcomes.

In the spring, I plan to visit Yellowstone and see those wolves in all their glory. In 2026, I want to get out more, engage with the world to face my own fears of shame, darkness, failure. In the darkness that has become America, in the desperation of keeping a nonprofit arts organization afloat, it’s easy to feel like you are wandering through a forest of hungry creatures. But they, too, are finding their way through their own stories. They, too, might be seeking miracles.

Shooting stars. The wolves are coming back. We live mythic lives. In 2026, we will do big things. This was our egg year. Next year is our comeback, our hatch year—our flight to the moon.

Kate Gale, The Myth of the Wolf: Surviving One’s Story

This winter, the back door won’t swing open just for the dogs or to catch a few snowflakes on my fingertips. No, this year, the yard will not be cordoned off by frost locks or lattices of ice. I will resume relishing in the real estate. Tour the garden of grays. Shake off the pelt of snow. My body will follow me for the rounds. Snow is but a measurement of time and frequency just like summer’s trumpet vine. I will arrange snowflakes into a poem to read to you. You will watch my voice carry off into the sky without me.

Sarah Lada, Old Bone

This week: gods of brokenness, a hollowed-out hosiery factory, end paper mood-matches, quokkas sleeping in the shade, and much more. Enjoy.

There’s something energetic about having vibraphone and parachute in the same poem. Is the opening too seemingly glib in its absurd surrealism? Or is it a good way into the more emotionally more real element of the poem? […]

I do love this failure.

Gary Barwin, ERRATA: how to know if a poem “works” or if it’s finished

Something weathered in the voice that greeted me, a bit creaky, like worn mahogany. Pin-point sharp, too. Trained by my father as a child to guess the voice of a speaker without it being announced, I plumped straight away for Margaret Atwood. She said:

This was Canada. You didn’t think you were going to be successful. You thought you were going to be dedicated. It wasn’t considered a career, it was considered a vocation, like a priest.

Margaret Atwood, Woman’s Hour, 5 November 2025

And I thought: that’s it. That’s all I need to listen to. Nothing can improve upon its wisdom. (I was wrong: the whole interview is studded with such nuggets.) Thank you, Radio 4, I take it all back. My other thought was: that is a proper poet’s answer. It’s basically the same thing a prizewinning friend of mine said to me a thousand years ago: ‘I don’t write for prizes. In the end, the process is all any of us have.’

The coffee now made and the stairs climbed, I shuffled back into my chair, took a sip, and reached for my notebook. Where had they got to, those lines about the [———-]? Could they be worked on for a moment? Could I remember again my vocation and commit to being dedicated? I gazed out of the window. This was not Canada, but Plymouth, in the rain. It turns out I could.

Anthony Wilson, This was Canada

This month is always a tricky one. Some of the best things in my life have happened in November, but also some of the worst. It always feels like an unruly month anyway, posed between the spookyness of Halloween and the festivity of Christmas.  With the end of daylight savings time,  the dark comes even earlier and stays so long.  I am never sure what to wear or which coat to bring. How warm or cold spaces will be. The other night I made sure to wear tights for the first time this year, but still found myself burrowing under my coat while we watched Frankenstein in the chilly theater. I can’t just throw on my shoes and run downstairs or to the alley to throw out trash. Leaving the apartment requires preparation. Tights. Coats. Boots. Many layers. When I stay home,  hours after 4pm are dark and strange and I never quite know what to do with myself. It’s too early to stop working but way too early to just go watch something. It feels like midnight but its only 8pm. 

Still good things can happen. In 2000, I managed to land the library job that changed the course of everything and brought me back to Chicago and settled into the place I worked for two decades after that. I came in for an interview on November 1st, was hired on Veteran’s Day, and moved over Thanksgiving weekend to the city I had left after grad school a year and a half before.  In 2005, I received a call one morning from the press that wanted to publish my very first collection of poems and floated on a cloud all day on that momentum alone.  Other Novembers are hazier. Some delightful. Some darker. Like the one in 2019 where I moved out of the studio, sad that it was no longer financially doable due to rising rents and salary stagnation, which had been supplementing my shop income for the 12 years I had the space.

Kristy Bowen, novembers

The title and first line establish the situation of the poem: a tour guide is showing us around the labyrinth; we infer pretty quickly that this particular labyrinth is the mythic home of the minotaur: the “it” that was kept here. The pathos is quickly established as well, the hard rhyme of “their own” and “soup bone” providing an ironic conceptual rhyme—one typically doesn’t require their kin to subsist on scraps—and the shorthand of “beneath the stair” for the dungeon beneath the palace shrinking the scale down to human domesticity. We need not dismiss this story as yet another expected excess of royalty: instead, Stallings encourages us to think of our own kin, our own homes.

The passive voice that opens the second stanza introduces another sort of ironizing distance in “When howls were heard.” The suffering of the imprisoned minotaur, chucked down into Daedalus’s basement funhouse, is perceivable, sure, but no one’s here to own up to it. Instead it’s presented as an agentless action, the language of academic and corporate writing, employed as abdication from accountability, a means of distorting or mutating language to obscure the active cruelty. Again the scale is reframed, and the king and queen of Crete are imagined as your average upper-middle-class couple sipping sherry after dinner and politely excusing their guests so that they might go manage the monster in the basement.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Tour of the Labyrinth” by A.E. Stallings

Laura Theis’ Introduction to Cloud Care is physically slighter than the Finlay and Kinsella books, but it has its own heft. Theis is a German poet who lives in Oxford and writes in her adopted language, English. The poems collected here offer a series of windows into a world that melds the private and public, domestic and natural spheres. For instance, the opening lines of ‘There Used to Be a House Here’ moves the reader quickly from observation of the world to a meditation on natural magic

but now it’s a tree-walled
ruin under an open sky

she has learned that
the generosity of birds is

a witchcraft beyond
pendulums or sage

But Theis is not indulging in a kind of nostalgic longing for some kind of pure nature, as she calls out in ‘Oak Coppice’, a coppice being a kind of technological intervention in natural process:

Poets have told me over and over about sitting in nature,
staying away from screens. But I am typing this on my phone.
I wish I had not looked up
the meaning of coppice.

Coppicing is, in its way, a form of imposed metamorphosis, and shapeshifting is a central concern of many of these poems, from tips on dating a were-hare, through a lover who it seems is being unfaithful with trees:

She returns home to me with leaves in her hair,
her cheeks flushed,
always satisfied, serene.

to a prose poem called ‘I Wonder How Ovid Dealt with This’ in which the work itself is the thing that shapeshifts.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading November 2025: A Broken Sleep Special

Tourists scale the tumulus and find,
at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo,
gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite
centuries of disregard. Extinct.

Ann E. Michael, Magnificent

I started studying this parsha last week in preparation for writing poetry about it and teaching it this week. I had drafted a line or two, but it just wasn’t flowing. Last night I woke in the middle of the night and suddenly realized: I was going about it wrong. Instead of trying to put myself in Ya’akov’s shoes, I should put myself in Rachel’s. The combination of that spark, and this teaching, brought the poem through me.

Of course it’s anachronistic to imagine the Biblical Rachel quoting psalms, which wouldn’t be written for a few thousand years. But that’s no big deal in the garden of Torah interpretation. As the saying goes, אין מוקדם ומאוחר בתורה / ein mukdam u’m’uhar baTorah, “there’s no before and after in Torah.” In God’s time perhaps it’s all simultaneous anyway.

Rachel Barenblat, Rachel speaks

I just finished proofing some poems (a poem in the Jan/Feb issue of Poetry, two in Sugar House Review) and an essay called “The Unfenced Field and Poetry” (forthcoming in Third Coast), and winter is so in the air here in North Carolina. I’ve been binge-reading Susan Howe after reading her gorgeous new Penitential Cries (so. good.) as well as 100 Years of Solitude, and feeling surrounded by good books, if nothing else.

Han VanderHart, Poetry, Poetry for November and December

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?

Well my most recent work, IRØNCLAD, an illustrated hybrid collection, is coming out mid October with Spuyten Duyvil. I always try and approach a new work from a fresh angle, and IRØNCLAD is my first book that was not written on a typewriter or in word-processing software, but directly into the layout program, InDesign. The reasoning was to try and take advantage of the actual typography of the poem or prose piece. The book is set in the fictional world of The Iron Plier Society, who themselves are trying to make sense of their own archeological record. Fragments uncovered in the geological strata inform the book and the narrative. As you move deeper into the book, you discover, fragment by fragment, artifact by artifact, what appears to be the evolution of a civilization—yet, you can never quite be sure that what you have discovered in the damp earth faithfully represents your progenitors intentions (every interpretation comes with its own set of biases also). And, it is easy to misinterpret those too!

My previous collection, which came out with Unlikely Books in May this year, is the poetry collection Spells for the Wicked, which certainly informs IRØNCLAD. In fact, you might say that IRØNCLAD is the culmination of many years of addressing the subject of mythology and how it informs the later narrative and structure of a given society or culture.

How does it feel different?

Although they are two entirely different books, narratively, linguistically, typographically even, they do address some of the same principles in their own fashion. I consider myself a writer of books rather that a writer of individual poems or pieces of fiction. Much of my more recent work crosses the boundaries between fiction and poetry. In my earlier work, I may have been more concerned with presenting a given poetic form. These days I allow the book to inform me, rather than lying down rules in advance. Essentially though, I always try to approach each book project with a slightly different angle: be it the method for writing it (i.e. handwritten, typewriter, direct to computer), the environment I am writing in, or in some cases with a collaborator, the collaborative process itself. All of these things can significantly influence the outcome and inform the work, sometimes in surprising ways.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marc Vincenz

Now I am standing at the little window on the landing watching the weather and there the magpie is again, sitting in the sycamore, staring straight in at me. I have no fight to argue with a bird today. I’m watching the weather. After driving all the way out to the cancer hospital this week, full of nerves and strategy for sitting through five hours of treatment, they cancelled the chemo and rescheduled. The day the chemo is supposed to happen has snow and ice warnings, the Wolds might be thick with snow and I know we’ll struggle to get across, so we’ll have to cancel and move it to next week, unless my brother can get away from work and take his four by four. If it’s cancelled, my mum will be relieved because she is dreading the treatment like nothing I’ve ever seen. But it will be yet another delay, the clock ticking. Her precious days taken up with all this bullshit of waiting and driving and waiting and driving.

I work on the poetry commission. Finish it, sign it off. A job well done. I’m excited to see it in its next evolution. The simple pleasure of artists working together. The sparks of excitement over idea exchange. I make a big pot of tea, return to the desk.

Snow. But it doesn’t last long. I feel it before I see it. The room darkens around me, the sky pushing down on the trees, then that silent strangeness of snow falling. Frida and I stand at the window and watch.

Wendy Pratt, Blotmonað: Month of sacrifices

I’m happy to share the third poetry video from my book Temporary Shelters. The poem, Gunpowder Homestead, explores my fascination with the old house ruins and foundations I sometimes run into on woods hikes in my home state of Pennsylvania.

Whenever I encounter a place like this, I think about the people who lived here once 150 or more years ago–how their lives were different from mine, how the land and the world may have been different, and what happened that the place fell into ruin.

Grant Clauser, Video for Gunpowder Homestead

Well, I probably shouldn’t write a review of Christopher James’ new pamphlet, The Ice Sonnets (Dithering Chaps, 2025), given that my endorsement appears on its back cover, but I can recommend it thoroughly and suggest you get hold of a copy for yourself by visiting the Dithering Chaps webshop. To give you a flavour of this top-notch collection, here’s that aforementioned endorsement…

‘In The Ice Sonnets, Christopher James tells the story of Shackleton’s expedition via a collage effect of juxtaposing exquisitely drawn pen portraits of its participants, interweaving the characters, drawing out the group dynamics that develop in extreme conditions. These poems tell a highly specific tale with universal ramifications.’

Matthew Stewart, Christopher James’ The Ice Sonnets

In effect, it’s a sequel to The Penguin Diaries of 2017, which dealt with Robert Scott’s ill-fated attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912.

Inevitably, The Penguin Diaries, though similar in that it is a 65-sonnet sequence, had the mood of an elegy, because the expedition ended in tragedy with Scott and his final team dying on the ice just a few miles from safety. While Scott’s story has taken on the legend of heroic British failure – they reached the Pole, only to find the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beaten them to it, then died on the way back – The Ice Sonnets is a celebration of survival against enormous odds.

Once again James chooses to give each member of the expedition a sonnet to themselves. Each acts like a snapshot, a pen-picture, of what made each man remarkable. After all, it was a bonkers idea. Having worked in Canada in winter, I know how horrendously cold it can get – and I was nowhere near the (North) Pole. It seems to me just plain weird that anyone would bother to freeze themselves to death, in Scott’s case, to go to the extreme point of our planet and plant a flag in it.

Exploration of the earth is not something we bother too much about, however, in 2025, because it’s been mapped, scanned, analysed, explored physically and psychologically in intense detail. Any one of us can see satellite images of the tiniest scrap of land or sea. This is obviously a vast contrast to how the ‘globe’ appeared to our ancestors. Britons were fed the idea of Empire, of ‘Darkest Africa’, of a world to be conquered and colonised. Men like Scott and Shackleton captured the imagination – and did, because they took the immense risk of travelling into the vast, frozen unknown, provide us with a greater communal knowledge of the planet on which we all live. Their achievements, as strange as they might seem to some now, remain impressive, their lives enigmatic, worthy in themselves of exploration.

What James has done here is provide, by dedicating to each individual a poem of fourteen lines, a distilled impression of who they were. In doing so, he delves into the character, teasing out detail, giving each a separate identity within the whole, and so providing a convincing insight into not only an individual life but how that person fitted into the overall ‘team’. About how we human beings work individually and collectively.

Bob Mee, THE ICE SONNETS by CHRISTOPHER JAMES

For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.

Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.

And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”

Names

The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.

In these poems, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.

Alina Stefanescu, Nominations in Christian Lehnert’s poetic forms.

Frost left its edges on the deck and steps but I find a dry spot to sit, my coffee’s steam seeming to fill the gray sky. I try to still my mind’s constant conversation and just breathe in the damp cold, hear the barrage as individual songs, ignore the intrusion of should-have-cut-back-the-lavender, of next-year-I’ll-dig-up-the-lizard’s-tail. Study again the difficult present, amid the uncertainty of tomorrow, of the next hour, next minute. It takes work to be in the world like this. To be an extension of it, not a mover through it. But of course, I am both. As I am an impatient observer of my species, and inescapably, one and the same.

I admire this long poem by Barbara Tomash for its unreined wander but its careful containment too. There is no escaping itself.

Marilyn McCabe, to hide the sound of the groaning enormity

Kujō Takeko – 11 Tanka (1920-1928), by Dick Whyte:

All the blood in my body is frozen;
Only the cold sword of reason
Flashes within me.

The Forgotten Poets Newsletter, from which this tanka is taken, “is dedicated to out-of-print, obscure, and generally under-appreciated poets and poems, particularly from the late-1800s and early-1900s.” Dick Whyte, the person who curates and writes the newsletter also has “a specific interest in the intertwining histories of tanka and haiku, both in Japanese and English, and their relationship to the beginnings of free-verse.” The issue from which the above tanka comes is about Kujō Takeko, a woman whose poetry would be a “significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements in Japan. The tanka I’ve quoted above, along with all the others in this issue of Forgotten Poets, were translated by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki. (There is a slightly more detailed bio of Takeko here.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #50

3rd Wednesday has published my poem “Le Plus Ça Change” on their website.

I am very pleased with this small poem because it was formed by looking at two poems which were not quite working and taking the best parts of each (the images, of course) and combining them. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to try connecting these pieces, since they were both about things French. But the brain gets into ruts of thought sometimes; the process is a great pleasure when something breaks through.

Ellen Roberts Young, Poem On Line

I’m pleased to have five poems and verse translations in the new issue of Literary Imagination (volume 27.3, pp. 299-304). Literary Imagination is the journal of the American Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers and is unusual in publishing a mixture of scholarship, essays, poems and translations accessible to writers, critics and teachers outside as well as within academia. The new editor, Paul Franz, is doing something really exciting with it — the long piece in this issue by James Tusing on Alice Monro is really superb and has already garnered a good deal of attention.

The five pieces I have in this issue are quite varied: the first is a translation of Ancient Greek prose into English verse, from Julian the Apostate (readers who read this post about Greek a while ago will recognise the extract). The second is a poem of my own linked loosely to that passage, called ‘Reading Julian the Apostate on my late father’s birthday’. The third is a verse translation of a Pāli poem from the Therīgāthā, a collection of poems written by early Buddhist nuns. (I wrote briefly about this collection here.) The fourth is a loose and experimental version of Horace, Odes 1.10. The fifth is a poem of my own called ‘Latin didactic’ that is in part about reading the Georgics.

Victoria Moul, Five poems and translations in “Literary Imagination”

If you haven’t heard the term, a beta reader is someone who reads an early draft of a book and provides feedback. They are not editors. They don’t provide line-level changes or suggestions. Instead, they answer questions and give overall impressions.

If you ask ten people for an opinion on poetry, you will get ten different answers. For that reason, I chose to keep my pool of beta readers very small, sticking to only four writers—Heidi Fiedler, Jillian Stacia, Michelle Awad, Elise Powers—and my mom and husband.

It’s a strange thing to share your work with beta readers. You’re not just putting the book out there for people to read. You’re sharing it and asking the hard questions: What’s working? What isn’t? What would you cut? Etc.

My beta readers’ reflections helped me see the book more clearly than I could on my own, and most importantly, made me feel less alone in it all. After years of working on the poems in this collection, sharing it felt incredible. I’d chosen my readers with great intention, and they treated my work with care and respect.

Allison Mei-Li, Behind the book

I’m thrilled and deeply honored that my poem “Clutch” was selected for today’s Poem-a-Day series by The Academy of American Poets, curated by the incredible Tacey M. Atsitty, author of (At) Wrist (University of Wisconsin Press, November 14, 2023).

This recognition means so much to me, and I’m grateful to Tacey for championing voices and poetry that connect us all. Make sure to check out the other poems she selected in the month of November. Each poem includes comments from the poet about the poem and an audio recording.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Clutch” selected for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series!

cloud gazing…
I thought about it
but wasn’t sure
what I’d do
with an empty mind

cloud gazing by tom clausen

I’ve been writing a lot about the Firth of Forth. I live near where the estuary opens into the North Sea, and when I look south across the Firth, it’s easy to imagine that this is a scene from thousands of years ago. In certain lights there aren’t many visible traces of human presence. What’s more difficult to picture is how the Firth looked during the Last Ice Age. Immeasurable tons of ice flowing out to sea, scraping away at the land. All vegetation, all animal and bird life, all traces of early human habitation erased. The islands and hills of today are what remain of larger geological forms eroded to stubs by glaciers.

It makes you feel small, thinking on this timescale, reflecting upon the massive impact of the ice on a landscape which you might assume is unchanging. I wanted to explore this feeling in a poem – a long poem, almost in essay form, which progresses incrementally and implacably. I was interested in how human history might be understood alongside a vaster geological history, not least because – from the point of view of an individual – the drawn-out events of human history can themselves seem like unstoppable forces.

Like an essay, my long poem ‘Glacier’ makes a lot of use of quotation. This was influenced by Marianne Moore’s marvellous poem ‘An Octopus’, about a glacier-topped mountain in North America. I like the instability created by the intrusion of other people’s words upon the poetic voice, and the frisson when terminology from other disciplines is put under pressure in a poem. Glaciers pick up all kinds of debris, from grit to huge boulders, finally depositing them far from their original context. I want the quoted phrases in my poem to be repositioned in a similar way.

Garry MacKenzie, Glacier

I know this last year has been a lot for many of us (personally, I’ve felt in some sort of crisis-mode since May 2024!) But I read the other day that the opposite of anxiety is creativity (I always thought it was calmness, as I am highly creative with my anxiety and worst-case scenarios!) But what the author shared was that we can take all those uncomfortable emotions and make something from them—write a poem, journal, paint something, or even string fairy lights in the laundry room just because. Make beauty where there wasn’t any. And I like that idea—leave the world a little better each day. Create when you can. […]

The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi — I just finished this book and I adored it! Gabrielle does something in these poems that reminds me why we read in the first place—to feeeeel (yes, with five e’s). If you’re someone who has one toe dipped in sadness, but who also walks through the world noticing the small miracles of being alive—this may be exactly the book you need right now. Its opening line is: The days I don’t want to kill myself are extraordinary. From there, the book keeps opening up into how temporary everything is, and yet somehow it keeps choosing wonder and finding joy. It’s my current favorite read—the book I keep returning to, the one that keeps returning to me.

Kelli Russell Agodon, My *Favorite Things* List

Publishing a chapbook starts with encountering a mind.

There’s a lot of poetry in the world that can take any shape or position. Authorial summary, imagist embroidery, foregrounding feelings or ironed down lessons, or poet voice’s uniform containment, unshaped lashing, formal, anarchist, anti-hierarchy, storytelling, language-y foregrounded.

Here was a mind questioning and admitting how things don’t quite reconcile. There’s the considered footstep of word choice, and risk of embedded emotions but an exploring mind as if talking to itself not performing an established script. This is a mind that can be self-deprecating. Observant, humble, vivid, self-questioning, That is an exciting brain. 

At an open mic, Tamsyn’s poem (and I don’t recall which, it being a couple years ago) stood out in glittering neon sparkle of aha. What is this alert mind here? Hm, hm, think I might need to meet this person.

Could I see more poems?

These poems reflect a world of citizens I want to live in, to make more of. These are poems I can hear and feel. Ideas and posture relative to the world that make sense to me. Ones that take risk, that can sit with thoughts not all categorically pre-filed for the reader.

So, I got the poems, which I will then sit on as a dragon’s hoard. Read, rest, reread.

I look at line length, poem width and length, consider the potential size of container. Next or simultaneously: Looking at the poems as a critic, call out what is particularly fabulous and goosebump-making. Let it sit, reconsider.

Meanwhile I consider paper types, end paper mood-matches, cover stock options. What sort of cover image would complement the poems? Brainstorm that. Look and draw and make images. That’s a fun imagining stage.

While waiting considering paper stock, reconsider fonts. Doing a few layouts. Give suggestions for edits. Dialogue. Sending a proof of concept for approval and edits.

Pearl Pirie, Process of Chapbooks: for Farr’s

A couple of years ago, Joelle Taylor took part in the contemporary poetry archive project that I was involved in at the University of East Anglia. Her creative response to the project was “dust kings. tough kids”, a “queer crown of sonnets” written in memory of murdered butch women. Here is part of her note on the sequence:

While writing I stared at a cheap plastic snow globe that imprisoned a gold angel. Occasionally, gold glitter rained down on the angel. The snow globe was given to me in the early 1990s by my girlfriend’s brother, Richard. He was the first gay man I personally knew to die of AIDS, and he left behind him a collection of snow globes for the mourners to take home with them from his funeral. As I worked, I thought about the snow globe, about the idea of the vitrine in general, about emergency, about memory, safety, love, and friendship. This Crown of 15 Sonnets is written in response to the idea of the snow globe as an archive within itself.

“dust kings. tough kids” has now been republished as part of Maryville: 1957—2007 (Bloomsbury) […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #38: A Crop of Frost

When I first read Chaucer Cameron’s In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered (Against the Grain, 2021) I was reminded of Mexican writer and activist, Cesar A. Cruz , who said ‘Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.’ In other words literature should provoke strong reactions, jolt the reader out of his/her complacency, force them to confront uncomfortable truths. Cameron does just that by taking us into the lives of women who work in the sex industry: prostitutes, cam girls, strippers.

She shows us that this is a world in which women are treated as an expendable commodity, their value dependent on their looks. In Erotic, a poem written from the point of view of a pole-dancer, she states: ‘ But here/ tonight/ a pint glass/ does the rounds,/ half full:/ loose change/ that clanks/ against the sides/ is a sign/ I’ve lost./ Skin no longer/ tight against my frame/ fixes me/ at half price./ Doesn’t it?’  The consequence of ageing is a drop in remuneration. There’s something tragic about a woman who describes herself in monetary terms, as ‘half price.’ Her job has undermined her self-image, her self-worth. This is developed further in the symbolic description that follows: ‘My dressing/ room/ has dwindled/ to toilet size./ No door locks/ grime-smeared/ floor tiles/ cracked.’ The squalidness of the environment and its comparison to a toilet suggests the humiliation she feels and the contempt with which she believes she is held. She also feels very vulnerable. Significantly there are ‘no door locks’: she is defenceless. Her position is a precarious one, subject to the whims of her employer.  As a consequence we are told she ‘cower(s) in a corner/ until the owner comes to check.’ She goes on: ‘This time/ he shows pity,/ dresses me/ in finery./ takes me to his table’/ he likes/ the meat,/ the tuck, tuck/twist of me.’ The image ‘he likes the meat’ is shocking in its resonance with its associations of death, carnal appetite, and violence. This is a man who enjoys his life and death power over her: ‘He likes/ to see/ the light/ in my acid eyes/ go out/ just before/ they/ close.’

These notions of male power and exploitation permeate virtually every poem in this pamphlet.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘In Ideal World I’d not be Murdered’ by Chaucer Cameron

Bex Hainsworth is a poet whose work I’ve skirted the periphery of for a while, always enjoyably so. Circulaire has given me the chance to dive in and explore at greater depth, and I’m so glad I did. Hainsworth has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Wales and bath magg, among others. While her debut pamphlet, Walrussey, is described as ecopoetry, Hainsworth says of this collection, in an interview with Sam Szanto, “Circulaire is my confessional era”. Confessional feels right. The poems are corporeal, intimate; concerned with the domestic stage and the everyday dangers of being a woman.

The opening poem somehow reminded me of Colette, who, in her memoirs, gives us a poetic, personal ethnography of the domestic interior. Speaking of her grandmother’s ‘semi-detached’, Hainsworth says:

“It shook knitting needles

and ration books from its cellar,

ready for new visitations.”

(All houses are haunted by women)

A few poems in, in Arcs, she speaks of a first apartment;

“Tucked away in the hips

of a hollowed-out hosiery factory”

and

“the rosy bones of our chilly homes”

There is a repeated merging of the interior space of the home with the interior space of the child, then “almost-woman”. The poems loosely follow a narrative arc from childhood to adulthood, charting “the cycle of female experience” (another interview quote).

Victoria Spires, Tender excavations

I am poor and I owe
an incalculable debt
to the world— I have taken
more than my share of what
it has given, and still
it does not begrudge another
chance to secure my so-called
fortune. […]
And I am rich with
a surplus, always, of feeling.
There is so much, I often
don’t know what to do with it;
and other times, it saves me
from thinking I am completely
bereft, empty as a pauper’s purse.

Luisa A. Igloria, Pauper’s Purse

I came to the cafe thinking I would be able to tap into something creative and instead I found a (nother) way to self-critique. I need to try to use this as a spark (a cattle prod?) to inspire something more. Does this count as writing, this post wherein I complain about not being able to write? What would I tell my students?

I guess I’d remind them that writing is a muscle that you have to work regularly or else risk weakening. Not losing—you can always get it back—but it does get harder the longer you sit on your metaphorical butt.

I’d also tell them (and by extension, myself), not to be too hard on themselves. Life is hard enough. (Especially lately, good lord.) Be gentle. Give grace.

But also: get going.

Sheila Squillante, What Counts?

I cannot wait, I cannot wait, I cannot wait
until we can talk about all of this in the past tense
I cannot wait for these to be the old days
[…]

This week I’m sharing this poem from a wonderful event we did together this month down at STATUS FLO at The Brighton Dome Studio Theatre. This regular poetry night is incredible, with fabulous curation and hosting by Aflo Poet, one of the UK’s rising superstar poets. The evening also featured poetry and vivid story-telling from the excellent Pablo Franco. Both of these poets delivered phenomenal sets and you should check them both out. This film of my poem was kindly sent to me by Gray Taylor. The night was electric, the audience so warm, responsive, which you might hear here, thank you to everyone there. Thank you for inviting me to join you.

Salena Godden, I Cannot Wait To Breathe

Best Small Fictions 2025 is now open for pre-orders on the Alternating Current Press website here. I’m thrilled to be included for the third time & in this 10th anniversary edition! Many thanks to Jeff Harvey’s Gooseberry Pie for nominating my Microfiction “After Reading A Newspaper Clipping Of Emily Dickinson’s Obituary Online” and to judge Robert Shapard for selecting it for inclusion. Thanks to the anthology editors and readers for their hard work. Congrats to my fellow flash writers. I can’t wait to have it in my hands! Please consider pre-ordering which determines the print runs. Thanks!

In other book news, I received my signed copy of Patti Smith’s new book, Bread of Angels, and look forward to beginning reading today. Two of her previous books are among my favorites, Just Kids and M Train. I’ve read them more than once which is a testament to how much I like them. Patti’s is the first Stack I subscribed to a few years ago. I really like her low-key impromptu videos that make me feel like we are having a chat about ordinary and extraordinary things. She spoke about this book as she wrote it so I know it will be brilliant reading. I’ll let you know what I think.

Charlotte Hamrick, Book News!

I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post.  I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I’m listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Patti Smith–the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.

Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list).  I hadn’t even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated.  Some years are like that.  But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011.  I probably wouldn’t have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation.  It showed me what poetry could do, and I’m glad she’s now gained wider recognition for her poetry.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life

A book which has been on my shelves forever is A Wild Patience Has Take Me This Far by Adrienne Rich. I’ve culled my books a number of times but this one remains. However, I hadn’t taken it off the shelf for ages. Lately I’ve been saying in my head a lot, I don’t really think I have the wild patience for this. But then I laugh and do the thing anyway. You know? Anyway the book’s title is the first line of a poem titled “Integrity.” In it she speaks of her selves being both “anger and tenderness.” She speaks of how the light is both critical and critical. In another poem she says, “If you can read and understand this poem / send something back…” I’ve always loved her poem “What Kind of Times Are These.”

Shawna Lemay, I’m Giving You a Free Pass (and a side of wild patience)

Once, in Spain, I saw a two pet meerkats on a lilo floating down a bright river, chattering loudly with what might have been excitement, or perhaps more likely, fear. Sometimes, in the bright, sociable suburbs of Perth, I feel like a meerkat on a lilo.

But when I walked into The Moon Café, with its long bar crowded with bottles, its stage and its rainbow flags, I found my footing again. And to open the reading, an Acknowledgement of and Welcome to Country which made me feel, for a moment, like we all belonged to this one moment in millennia of human history, to all the ages of this dizzingly ancient land.

More of that another time. Because now, I want to talk about quokkas.

And Cath Drake. Since the Moon Café, I’ve been reading her collection “The Shaking City” published with Seren in 2020. It’s unusually thick and accomplished for a first collection – and I read it slowly in these baking hot days of wild distractions. By the time I reach the second section – a sequence of fantastical and quotidian character portraits, each equally magical – I return to the first section, and find new narratives in each of the rich, dense yet accessible poems. It’s a collection which deserves to be more widely acclaimed – but it’s the third section – “Far From Home” – which comes alive for me in 30 degree heat, facebook full of pictures of the snow falling back home, Australian Ravens wailing like babies or peacocks, or mating cats, .

The day after the Cath Drake’s reading, I was due to visit Rottnest Island or Wadjemup, the Noongar name of the island. It’s referred as ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’ – the resting place of the spirits, as well as the bodies of the Aboriginal men and boys who died in the island’s prison and forced labour camps between 1838 and 1931.

In her reading, Cath described how significant the island is for anybody raised in Perth – how quickly and drastically it has changed; how she loves it regardless. I was only on the island for five hours, and my engagement was brief, shallow, and wildly enthusiastic. I loved the speed and breeze of cycling down its tracks and deceptive hills. I loved the snorkelling; the fish like silver flames, the shy and sandy flounder. I loved the white beaches, the rough vegetation, the peeling gum trees and the old buildings; the gulls and oystercatchers. But most of all, I love the quokkas, sleeping in the shade near the shops, climbing into unattended bags, begging under benches, stealing ketchup from our table.

Clare Shaw, The Strange and Shining.

It took several days for me to settle into a travel mode, and leave behind the sorrows and concerns of my daily life. I checked my messages, looked at the Guardian once a day, kept up with Duolingo (switching from Spanish to Italian), but I stayed away from social media and any threaded conversation scrolls, posting only a couple of pictures myself and one blog post. We ate out some, at pizzerias and simple trattorias, and we also cooked. At first I was unable to draw or write much, but eventually this loosened up and I managed to keep a basic written journal and worked in my sketchbook; every day, I looked for ideas for future paintings or writing.

We had a lot of remarkable experiences, and I’ll try to share some of them here as the next weeks unfold. I’ve come back feeling like the creative discouragement and inertia of the last few months has lifted, and I feel inspired to write and do artwork over the winter. This is a relief, and I hope it lasts. But in order to do that, I realize I have to be online less, to be less focused on political news, argument, and the negativity I can do nothing about, to say “no” a little more often, and to determinedly focus my energies and time on the areas where I can actually make a difference, both in my own life and in others’. Distraction is everywhere, and it’s there for a reason — and not a benign one. Resistance, on the other hand, also takes many forms. One is to set a meaningful direction for oneself, and stick to it. That’s never easy. It’s the path with greater challenge, and greater potential serenity too.

Beth Adams, Re-entry

Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted 
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.

Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine.  But as any parent knows, kids grow

competent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:

they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.

Jill Pearlman, The New Thanksgiving Travel

I was thinking about how to make this season brighter—with all the political ugliness and Trump and his horrid party boys trying to kill the arts (defunding the NEA means a lot of presses and lit mags shutting down and struggling)—and I came upon this idea. If you have a favorite press or literary magazine—we may not be able to replace a $25K grant from the government, but maybe we can give a little and if it happens from many of us, it will be enough to count. I know a lot of us are struggling with money these days—more than usual, given the layoffs and the inflation—but giving during the holidays has always been a tradition that usually comes—not from the wealthy, not from the billionaires—but from the little people, from the middle class. There are a lot of people who don’t have enough to eat. Animal shelters need donations of pet food. Even cleaning out and donating from your pantry may do more good than you know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, How to Give a Little, Making the Holidays Brighter…Literally

I know that it’s an incredibly challenging financial time for many, as prices continue to rise and economic inequality deepens. And, there are also so many worthy causes and organizations in need (and even more so with many ends to federal funding), but if you’re able (and don’t forget to ask if your employer offers matching donations) and so inclined, I’d like to offer a couple of ways you can support the arts this season.

First, Black Ocean, where I am editor, is celebrating its first year as a nonprofit publisher and about to celebrate 20 years in publishing in 2026, and is trying to raise money to meet its annual fundraising goal to support its books and translations. Find out more here.

Also, please consider supporting Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), where your gift will enable meaningful arts education partnerships for students, teachers, and teaching artists in Chicago and West Chicago. Find out more about their programs and how to donate here. (What’s more, your gift will be matched by the Wildflower Foundation.)

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Few Reasons for Gratitude

Happy Thanksgiving! Isn’t is amazing that we have a whole holiday dedicated to gratitude? (With a side of cranberry sauce.) There’s so much I’m grateful for, but a key element is the sense of purpose I gain from my Makino Studios work. It turns out that being an artist and poet doesn’t bring in the big bucks—who knew?! But unlike hedge fund managers, I get to regularly hear from people how much my offerings touch them.

This weekend a friend told me that one of my cards was perfect for a difficult situation: her brother is in his last weeks in hospice. Another wrote that she was so moved by a poem that she sent it on to family and friends. And there are hundreds of people who make a point of giving my haiku calendar to friends, family, book club members, caregivers and coworkers every year. It’s a real gift to have that impact as an artist and poet. Your support helps my dreams take wing, so thank you all!

Annette Makino, On grateful wings

it was snowing & the sky was bare.
we both stopped. no porch light,
just the glow of white snow lighting
our faces. maybe he saw the creature
staring down at us. maybe he was looking
at something else. i could not make out
the beast’s full body. eyes. claws.
wing tips like mountains.

Robin Gow, 11/22

the view from what happens decides there’s a road. or a fly

on the wall of winter. all things to be done will be done

over. the dark in a dog set to howl.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you read each water anew.

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Harrison, Everything I have not written

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Where am I?

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

sacred shrine
worshippers raise
their selfie sticks

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

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

rice paddies blurring into the past bullet train

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

Annette Makino, Three wayfarers in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Rich, A little story of birds and birdbrains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

james mcconachie, A Vein of Abiding Mineral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, October Reads

It started with a joke in a direct message… 

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

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

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

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

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

Nope. Now more than ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Solemn-sinister wreath-rubbish

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

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

Jill Pearlman, On Seeing Kara Walker in Mary Janes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You never see all of yourself.

Explore the places you’ve never been”

(Wolf Eye)

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

“Have you

seen the faces of flowers? …

What wallpaper did you choose for your face

before you went out?”

(Have You)

“What is the smell of mirrors?”

(Mirrors)

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

Victoria Spires, Alchemising the mundane

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

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

But look, you say, she is smiling.

And she is.

Her long hair floats out
like golden pondweed […]

Sue Finch, No Terrapin Today

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, Captain Haddock in Monte Carlo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejections to Treasure

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

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

“Like what?” we asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, curation vs gatekeeping

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, The Power of Celebrity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Stone, ESSAY / The Amalgamist’s Workshop

old encyclopedias:
I buy a complete set
for collaging

Bill Waters, A Collection of Moments: Library Book Sale

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, The poem within the poem

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

Bound Voices #001: A Conversation with Victoria Moul

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

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

https://sheilabender.substack.com

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

Bethany Reid, Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Blessing” by James Wright

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

I want to read those writers.

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Writing Prompts & Working Class Writers

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

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

Sarah Lada, We All Become Just Bodies

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

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

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

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Being present in grief.

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Landfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Jewish Heretics and Wild Writers

old skin. thin.

one can see through it to a future.

crows feed on the sunflower’s eye.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: 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