Kersten Christianson – Via Negativa https://www.vianegativa.us Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003. Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:53:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://i0.wp.com/www.vianegativa.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cropped-mu-512px-transparent-2.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Kersten Christianson – Via Negativa https://www.vianegativa.us 32 32 3218313 Poetry Blog Digest 2026, Week 1 https://www.vianegativa.us/2026/01/poetry-blog-digest-2026-week-1/ https://www.vianegativa.us/2026/01/poetry-blog-digest-2026-week-1/#respond Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:47:33 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=73537 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

This week: wolf moons, egg-life, the voice of a middle-aged witch, a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker, and much more. Enjoy.

I feel the call of a deeper quiet.
A vibration. A murmur. If I stay still
and silence every thought, maybe
it will speak to me. If I dig my toes into
the soil, maybe tiny hyphae will tell me
secrets. If I learn to let go and rise in
the air, maybe I can test my ambivalent
faith. A pigeon with an iridescent green
neck is watching me watch it through
the window. As if we are both trying
to figure out who is on which side.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Window strike

On the first of January this year I did something that was very rare for me in the whole of 2025… I read a book from my ‘to be read’ pile from beginning to end. It felt good to make the conscious decision to slow down and devote time to simply entering the world of a book, and it also felt fitting given that 2026 is The National Year of Reading. I had already decided that as a nod to this year’s celebration of reading I would re-embrace the joy of reading song lyrics whilst listening to songs I loved. Often, I know parts of songs, but not the whole and I miss out on that full immersion. My ear buds help because they put the music right into the centre of brain (that’s unlikely to be scientifically correct, but that’s what it feels like to me) and I can hear things more clearly. But there’s something about reading the words at the same time as hearing them that sets them down for me.

When January’s wolf moon was nearly full I went out late at night and howled at it just because I could which made me laugh. It was standing under the wolf moon in January 2022 which had me scuttling off to my writing desk to form a poem which was brewing in my head. This then led to my desire to learn the names of each full moon throughout the year and a resolution to stand under each one before writing a poem for it. There was no poem in me asking to be written for this year’s wolf moon, but I took time to admire it rising and setting. Perhaps this is the year in which I just howl under each full moon, and embrace the moment.

Here’s to all the ways we find of being full, complete and whole.

Sue Finch, WOLF MOONS

2025 cost us so much. I almost gave up on writing this blog post—what has become my annual check-in to keep Chicks Dig Poetry from going dormant—but then that felt like just one more thing to be lost. So: hello! & Sal the Wonder Cat says hello, posing on the couch of my home office. (To be more precise, he offers his diffident gaze while awaiting kibble and pets.)

Here are some things that brought me joy:

-Reading at Bowling Green State University (making it despite blowing out my tire en route on the Ohio Turnpike—and using my extra day in town, once my car was repaired, for a quick sidetrip to Toledo), and as part of the Nantucket Poetry Festival (where I experienced the most welcoming, fun home-hosting of my life, and enjoyed a sandwich on the beach + unforgettable light). […]

-Having Made to Explode included in the inaugural selection of LitBox, a vending machine dedicated to books by D.C.-area authors. Though it has been a tough year to live in D.C., I am continually inspired by the makership of this community. I’m also thinking about American Poetry Museum, 804 Lit Salon, the Arts Club of Washington’s Queer Lit Salon, the mothertongue anniversary celebration, and the anthologies put out by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and Grace and Gravity. A huge highlight was the symposium on the life, work, and legacy of Sterling A. Brown, this city’s first poet laureate. Not to mention beautiful, unique acts of protest—from a “Free DC” message crocheted on a Southwest park bench, to the melting “D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y” staged in front of the U.S. Capitol. 

Sandra Beasley, Farewell to 2025

2025 has ended up as another amazing year for my videos! Overall, 22 different videos have been shown in some way in 17 countries around the world for a total of nearly 60 screenings. Four videos – Eviction, DEADEYE, WHY-EEELA and The Exclusion Principle –  won awards or were short-listed for awards at international festivals.

The year began on a big note with The Taken Path, a 6-screen installation made in collaboration with Catherine Truman, exhibited at Carrick Hill as part of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. A different single screen version was exhibited later in the year at the ANAT SPECTRA conference in Queensland.

While most of my work is shown internationally, it has been especially gratifying to have videos screened at different short film festivals around Australia this year, since it is rare for local festivals to encompass experimental film as part of a general program. I will continue to support these events, even if my work does not get selected.

Most of the videos deal with the state of the environment in some way or another: climate change, habitat destruction, and the consequential effects on the survival of plants and animals, many of which we do not fully appreciate. So the videos variously give voices to birds, fish, jellyfish, microbes or plants. An on-going interest of mine is the limits of language: in generating these new voices, I have invented codes, dialects, grammars and more. Nearly all of these works are informed by science.

As always, I’m deeply grateful to the organisers, curators and judges of these events for the opportunity to present my work to a wide audience. Even more importantly, I appreciate the incredibly supportive international community of video poets and experimental film makers that I am a part of.

Ian Gibbins, 2025: Another amazing year for my videos!

Happy new year everyone! I spent new year’s day working on this beautiful jigsaw depicting some of the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. I love fairytales, of course, and they recur throughout my books and poems – in many ways because they are full of such powerful and resonant symbols: towers, fur, hair, glass slippers, fairy fruit, poisoned apples, mirrors, houses with chicken legs, spindles, frogs, wolves in grandmothers’ clothing, tangled roses, spun straw, blood on snow.

I’m very excited to be going to see Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale musical Into the Woods next week at the Bridge Theatre, and will also be teaching a workshop called Into the Woods for the Poetry Business next Tuesday 13th Jan 11-12.30am online, if you fancy it. It’s £25 or £20 concession.

I’ve been looking at my favourite fairytale poems in preparation. What are your favourites? I adore Anne Sexton’s 1971 collection Transformations where she retells fairytales in the voice of a ‘middle-aged witch’, subverting them and bringing suppressed sexuality back to the surface. It must surely have influenced Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber? The poems certainly influenced me deeply – Sexton can’t resist witty, deliberate anachronisms for example, and they have littered my own work ever since. Here is Sexton’s deeply disturbing ‘Briar Rose’, that suggests a darker reason for Sleeping Beauty’s catatonic sleep.

Clare Pollard, Into the Woods

I’m trying to figure out if I need to revamp my current manuscript with the new bunch of submissions. Does it need to be re-written? I am suffering, if I’m honest, with self-doubt and self-criticism. I thought this was a really good book, but have rejections hurt my confidence? For sure. It’s also a book that’s squarely about disability, feminism, and survival. That may not be what all editors are looking for.  Urgh. I hate the part of writing – and it’s a large part – that is rejection, doubt, insecurity, poverty, obscurity. The waiting. The thinking “Maybe I should quit. Maybe I should write detective novels or advertising copy.” One of my goals for 2026 is to find the right publisher for this book, along with maybe a little more travel and (hopefully) better health. Think good thoughts for me!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! A Poem in the Final Issue of The Pedestal, New Year’s Celebrations but I Guess We’re in a War Now?

Today, CLOVEN drops into the world officially. You can get your copy HERE…

I have always been slightly obsessed with the Greeks. It probably stems back to a period of time in childhood, before horror films claimed the top spot, when I fervently loved Clash of the Titans on repeat (we didn’t have it on tape, but it was a popular film in HBO in the years we had cable. ) Later, we would learn about the ancient world in history classes, but the details of the culture were never as interesting as the mythology. By the time I got to college, I had a reasonable working knowledge of major myths and stories, but a burgeoning interest in theater and a many drama/ theatre history classes (where, of course, we spent multiple weeks on the origins of theater.   

One of the things we spent considerable time on was Agamemnon, when I first learned of the doomed daughter who was (or was not) sacrificed to Artemis to grant easy passage to Troy in a war spawned by the famously beautiful Helen. It’s something that stuck in my head like a kernel I would run my fingers and tongue over occasionally. The years passed and I wrote many Greek myth and legend poems, addressing many figures, either directly or indirectly. Daphne. Calypso, Cassandra, Mnemosyne. Ariadne. I even wrote occasional modern retellings, like my taurus project. which was another re-imagining of the minotaur story, but set in the rural midwest.  

I got in my head that I wanted to write a more female-focused epic shortly after leaving the library, at a time when much of the freelance work I was doing was centered on the humanities, including many lessons on theater, mythology, folklore, and Greek culture. GRANATA was born from that in the summer of 2022–what was initially intended to be just a bunch of poems about Persephone, but which snowballed  to include her unfortunate cohorts, the sirens punished for her abduction, It also grew to encompass visual art–over two dozen collages in 2023. When I released in in 2024, I had a vague idea there might be more books–perhaps an interlocked series. There were already a couple of collage series with mythological leanings, including several that dealt with Iphigenia’s story., something that was heavy on my mind, not just becuase of the Greeks, but we’d been re-watching Game of Thrones, and the tragic character of Shireen Baratheon. The young girl sacrificed for men and their wars. It was also on my mind because of, you know, rampant pedophiles in politics and the general disregard for the safety of young girls and women. 

The treatment was, of course, different. While Persephone and the Sirens would eventually embrace their darkness and monstrosity, Iphigenia is fixed in place. She can move a few inches either way and the outcome may be different, but it is still somehow the same. (ie even if Artemis swaps her for a deer, she is still endangered for a hist of other reasons–arranged marriages, childbirth hazards, ongoing wars. And yet she is also rife with power even in her powerlessness. That was the story i set out to write earlier this year, as I added a few more collages to the project and enough poems to turn the whole shebang into the next volume of what I am calling my Antiquities Series.

Kristy Bowen, myth and the female epic

A poem by Basho

(tr. RH. Blyth)

Toshi doshi ya
saru ni kisetaru
saru no men

Year after year
on the monkey’s face
a monkey face

“Mask” some have translated that second monkey face, and yes, sure, but I like the helplessness of that there-I-am-again-in-the-mirror sigh. The slight recoil from an unexpected self in the plate glass window. For are we not unknown even to ourselves?

Walter Benjamin sees in Klee’s “angelus novus,” its nervous eyes, an angel with the past wrecked at its feet, its back to the future. Because who can look at what the face becomes, the one coming, not the old frown-worn, judgey-mouthed, jowly-throated, the Dutch cheekbones broad as a tidal flat, mustache of my black-Irish aunt, but the wide-eyed terrored face of tomorrow, how the world leans on the face, making it a rumpled pillow, and then whatever’s next and its imprint.

Angel, don’t try to hide it with your infernal flapping wings. Step aside so I may see tomorrow’s monkey face, the past reflected behind me in future’s terrible mirror. We will laugh and laugh.

Marilyn McCabe, Toshi doshi ya

Lyn and I seem to have spent a large chunk of our Christmas evenings this year in the north of Ireland, Belfast to be precise, courtesy of watching Say Nothing (Netflix), the film Good Vibrations (2013, on BBC iPlayer) and Trespasses (Channel 4). All three are set during the Troubles; the series both star the brilliant Lola Petticrew; and Good Vibrations is a biopic of Terri Hooley, who founded the legendary Belfast record shop of the same name, starring the equally brilliant Richard Dormer, who was also so impressively fine in the first series of Blue Lights. It seems as though after years of neglect by television and film drama, aside from Kenneth Branagh’s dreadful Belfast, the Troubles have at last become a subject worthy of dramatic portrayal, and of exploring the question of whether all, or any, of that killing was actually worth it. Novelists, notably Anna Burns and Paul McVeigh, and poets got there first, of course.

Anyhow, all this got me thinking about – or, rather, even more about – my years, from 1985 to 1991, living in Portrush and latterly Coleraine. My first published poem, in Poetry Ireland Review in 1987 (I have eternal gratitude to the late, great Dennis O’ Driscoll), was set in Dundonald. My first collection included five poems directly, and two indirectly, about those times, and The Last Corinthians included three more. Of those 10 poems, one, ‘Pietà’, first published in Magma, dealt head-on with the killing of two RUC men in Portrush in April 1987. I’ve written others but never submitted them. I’ve got plenty more to say, if I ever bother to turn the tap back on – a visit over there would no doubt do the trick.

Matthew Paul, A Twixmas Meditation

We’re not robots. We can identify
traffic lights, cars, motorcycles,
stairs, the darkness that wraps
even obstinate monuments in burial
cloths when the sun goes down.
We get a scrambled-up word, a code
to authenticate in at least two
ways and we comply. But in this
kind of darkness, we’ve come to know
the difference between the explosion
of fireworks and that of vessel
strikes in open water, the heat
signatures of drones, their high-
pitched buzzing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Leaps of Faith

This year has been filled with its tender moments and quiet delights. 2025 has also been grindingly awful. Every day’s news packed with official lies, cruel slurs, new atrocities, more bridges to a bright future burned. Still, I am grateful for fervent and often playful resistance, brilliant science, awe-inspiring art, nature’s constant teachings, compassionate people everywhere. And of course for the way books help hold me together even when so much is falling apart. Thank goodness for the restorative, mind-stretching, soul-rejuvenating power of books.

Laura Grace Weldon, Favorite 2025 Reads

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

I think writers help people feel invested in the world around them. It can be easy to develop a sense of apathy in our day-to-day lives, especially when living under the economic, social, political, and environmental conditions we are living in. It can be easy to feel like there are few individual actions we can take, or that those actions won’t matter in the face of large-scale climate disaster, fascism, genocide, and colonization. I think writers help us to be present. Even when we read books that take us out of our present reality, that are escapist or feel “light”, the act of reading and thinking helps us return to ourselves and remember how implicated we are in everything around us.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vera Hadzic

My eldest child embroidered their way through this hard year, so for Christmas they gave me some of my favorite poetic lines on a little panel of violet cloth. They’re from Dickinson’s “Let Us play Yesterday.” “The o’s kill me,” Madeleine remarked about the difficulty of embroidering round letters. This detail seems poetic in its own way. Rhetorical apostrophe–address to someone or something absent or inanimate, sometimes marked by the letter O–can seem, as Jonathan Culler wrote, “embarrassing” and “pretentious” because it marks “invested passion,” an emotional intensity that can make readers and listeners feel awkward about listening in. (You can read his 1977 article “Apostrophe” on JSTOR–it’s worthwhile as well as clearly written, even if you’re not generally a fan of criticism and theory.) Apostrophe is also, he writes, “a fundamental gesture of lyric poetry.” It “makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself.” It presumes to invoke something or someone Other.

This puzzle of a poem by Dickinson apostrophizes someone (lover, friend, reader, god?) through second person pronouns; takes a left turn through politics; and ends in what’s certainly a species of prayer, apostrophizing “God.” The term from “Let Us play Yesterday” that I love most, “Egg-life,” comes to suggest, through a digressive meander of stanzas, imprisonment, perhaps slavery specifically as well as metaphorical captivity in nineteenth-century womanhood, silence, and other states of unfreedom. I’ve nonetheless persisted in taking “Egg-life” personally. I’m always falling out of reserve’s shell into writing what troubles me. I usually feel like a baby bird even at work I’ve been practicing for most of my life, weak from ignorance though ready to squawk. That’s one of poetry’s best qualities, after all. No one can “master” it. Hallelujah!

Lesley Wheeler, 2025 in reading (playing Yesterday)

On the 3rd day of the new year, we wake to sun glimmering snow and the neighbors next door are one part shoveling out the cul-de-sac, one part giving their young daughter time and space to run after days of cold snap and heavy snow. This is kindness in action, not to mention wise parenting. Soon after this post, I’ll venture out and clean my driveway as well in preparation for the scuttle of Monday’s anticipated storm dropping another 6-12″ on this outer coast.

Though my blog has been sorely neglected for several months, my writing has been prolific this year. There are copies of journals and anthologies on my desk from a year’s worth of publishing. Quick glance at my Excel doc shows I sent out work to 57 different submission calls and have placed work with 30 (so far) and received 15 rejections (so far). 47 poems were published in 2025.

One year ago today, I learned that Sheila-Na-Gig Editions had accepted my manuscript, The Ordering of Stars, for publication in 2025. This was wildly exciting news. Not only do I love publishing with Sheila-Na-Gig and its family poets, but the manuscript emerged over the course of two different residencies: Storyknife (2021) and Jenni House (2024). It will warrant its own posting once the copies land, but editing on the final proof was submitted New Year’s Eve and my launch via Zoom is scheduled for January 29th. Please attend!

Kersten Christianson, 2026, Snow, Much Writing

This morning is the time for me to set intentions.  I have four.  Careful readers of this blog might say, “Didn’t you have three intentions that you couldn’t keep for 2025?”  

I appreciate the power of New Year’s Day intentions that tug at me all year long, even if I’m not entirely successful.  This year, I’ll have 2 writing intentions and 2 health intentions.  

Writing Intentions

–I’m going to keep one of my intentions from 2025.  Here’s what I wrote last year:  “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. 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.”

–Always hopeful about having a book of poems with a spine, I also plan to create a new collection of poems, with the title Higher Ground.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Intentions for 2026

I didn’t submit much this year, but publication schedules are on their own timelines, so I did have 14 poems appear in 12 different journals, had one poem accepted for the Stevie Nicks anthology White-Winged Doves, placed a favorite hybrid essay in Whale Road Review, and a piece of flash in Milk Candy Review made the longlist for the Wigleaf Top 50. And, of course, my fourth poetry collection Unrivered was released in October from Sundress Publications.

I placed visual art at Gone Lawn, Doubleback Review, Thimble Lit, orangepeel magazine, and San Pedro River Review. I sold my first piece at a gallery show, which was exciting and a little nerve-wracking.

I have completed hosting and curating the fourth year of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey reading series, although this year’s schedule was a bit more sporadic due to other commitments and responsibilities. We will ring in the start of Year Five on January 8 with Subhaga Crystal Bacon, Kathleen Flenniken, Nathan Spoon, and Cindy Veach.

Rachel Bunting and I completed editing the first year of our journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters. We are so grateful to all of the talented folks who took a chance and sent work to our new labor of love, and we look forward to starting Year Two with the launch of Issue Five on January 20. […]

I have placed no pressure on myself to take on a new writing project for the new year or even to increase my number of submissions. For now I am enjoying reading from Unrivered, trying new things in drafts, and not worrying about whether or not they fail. One goal I do have is to go back to pieces I love that have never been published and take a serious look at revision. What will happen will happen. (And, I will try to be here more regularly, even if it’s once a month… I can do that if I put it on my calendar…)

Donna Vorreyer, Out with the Old and All That

I’ve never seen her land, always moving as I do
from painting rooms and finding flooring
to battling sugar ants who found the kitchen
years ago and like it there. She is a friend in this city
where my children move at a tempo not my own.

The butterfly’s time is short, as mine will be—
just enough to make this last place home
until the day when decisions are made for me.
I’ve promised not to fuss when that day comes.
For now, with the butterfly, I’ll follow the breeze,
feel sunlight and dew, live free.

Sarah Russell, Butterfly

The complement to mindful living is mindful reading. 

I want to learn from what I read. I want to see what others have seen. I want to consciously read what is not standard culture fare. Something more offbeat or deep. I want to learn storytelling and cultural terraforming. 

I leaned more into sci-fi this year. Shocking no one, over half of titles read were poetry but less science and less memoirs, more novels this year. I completed none in French but 9 in translation.

I think I mentioned 49% of what I finished reading was free by library, little free libraries, free downloads, gifts or review copies. This tracking takes credence from the theory that elves sneak books in while I sleep.

Pearl Pirie, 2025 Self-Audit

I started this Substack over a year ago with a poem published by Ink, Sweat & Tears.

I had a second poem published there in September. “Watching, January 2021” is a pandemic poem, written as the second lockdown began to bite. I didn’t deliberately wait until January to post it but things have recently got in the way of doing much writing, so somehow it’s ended up here, now, almost exactly five years after I wrote it, just as the Wolf’s Moon makes another appearance. Looking back at this poem, the cyclical nature of time — especially the Groundhog Day aspect of the lockdowns — seems more evident than ever. A new year is often thought of as the chance for new beginnings, but the old habits are hard to break.

Ruth Lexton, Watching, January 2021

I was lying on my back on the steel table of a linear accelerator in a radiation bunker at the hospital on Christmas Day, looking up at the red laser projecting from the ceiling to align one of my four most recent tattoos with the treatment head, when I had the second auditory hallucination of my life. (I wrote about the first one here.) This one may well qualify as a memory rather than an hallucination: it was, unmistakably, the beloved voice of Philip Levine, speaking the last two sentences of “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”: “No. Not this pig.” I’d wager I heard him, live or in recording, read this poem at least once, but who can say; I know I first read it twenty-five years ago. I can say with certainty that the words came back to me when I may have needed them the most.

This is an unexpected opening for this publication, I guess. I certainly did not expect, when I last hit publish on December 19, that I’d be in the hospital and undergoing urgent radiation therapy five days later, but here we are; having been treated for cancer once, in 2011, the shock wasn’t that it was happening so much as it was that it was happening now. I’ve spent the last seven months learning, on a somatic level, the meaning of now, and the last five relearning my love of poems, and in some ways the timing is exactly right. Before this year I never so clearly understood how little we can control, nor how much we can do in the face of that fact, how simple it is to be present in our lives even if we feel them slipping from us, how meaningful it is to connect with each person we encounter, even when it feels too hard. This is what poetry, I understand now, has meant to me.

What’s to love about “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives”? It’s a dramatic monologue in the voice of a pig, for one, and not just any pig, but a pig of absolute conviction in the face of what’s out of his trotters. He knows where he is headed, yet what pleasure he takes in the movement of his piggy toes and muscular body. He is fully awake to sensory experience, the olfactory imagery conjuring his grim surroundings and his dream life similarly clear-sighted. He knows as well what is expected of him: terror, denial, rage, violence. What he does instead is very simple: he claims his authenticity, he decides to be himself in his own time. In the world according to Garp, after all, all pigs are terminal cases.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives” by Philip Levine

When I first read “Lamb,” I was immediately drawn to the juxtapositions and associative leaps in this poem, which feel close to the child’s mind to me. The line breaks and use of punctuation in this poem slow the poem down, so the details unfold bit by bit. This feels intuitively right to me. When children tell stories, sometimes the relationships between details—the causality—isn’t clear. Near the center of the poem, for example, are these three lines, all and-stopped with punctuation, which slows the reader down:

My dad had a beautiful overcoat.

The lamb’s white fur got smudged.

My brother was a baby,

Here we get three statements, all simply structured (subject/verb: my dad, the lamb’s fur, my brother), but all are possessive, and a closer look reveals the links in the chain. In the speaker’s memory, the father’s “beautiful overcoat” is linked to the lamb’s coat getting dirty. The lamb getting smudged links to the baby brother being passed around to strangers. There is so much vulnerability in these images and scenes. The “one eye” brought up in line two is circled back to toward the end: the child putting his finger into the socket of the missing eye as he would fall asleep. Talk about a vulnerable image! (It’s interesting, too, that the advice about pickpockets in the second sentence of the poems, lines three through seven, is about being stripped of things that are conventionally valuable—money, a watch—but what the child is most concerned about is something sentimental and therefore priceless.)

Having a beloved doll or blanket as a child is visceral—we hold them close, and we remember those smells and textures—and it’s that is made clear in the final line of this poem. Here the lamb is nearly resurrected—brought back from the overhead bin, where we are told her had to go. (Certainly the child would have preferred to keep him close.) The lamb is returned, freezing, but safely back in the arms of the child, who kisses him. Not it—him. There is something so lovely, nearly romantic, in the closing. I’m relieved for both the lamb and the child, that they are reunited. The subtle end rhyme of “bin” and “again” is such a beautiful touch, too.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

In Delmore Schwartz’s story, “The World Is a Wedding,” there is a moment when the protagonist, Jacob, thinks something during the course of an interior monologue that can be applied to poetry as well as fiction, namely: “You have to love human beings . . .if you want to write stories about them. Or at least you have to want to love them. Or at least you have to imagine the possibility that you might be able to love them.” Drawing that out a bit, I would argue that this pursuit of the imaginary conditions (whether accidental or contrived) for loving others that shapes our choices about speakers in poems.

Alina Stefanescu, For Lynne.

There’s a story about Steve Jobs meeting with an ad executive. Steve wanted an ad that highlighted a number of his new product’s new features. This was against Steve’s otherwise-firm commitment to simplicity as a guiding value. To talk Steve out of this idea (no easy task), the exec crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at Steve, who caught it. “That’s a good ad,” he said. Then he crumpled up five pieces, and threw them all; Steve caught none. “That’s a bad ad.” The story has a wider moral. Great Art is supposed to have a bottomless complexity, and Great Poetry is supposed (by some) to be characterized by neutron-star-level densities of meaning: more significance-per-syllable than any other form of writing. I admit to being against this. Put too much in, and all of it is lost. I’m against poetic compression, as a general rule, with exceptions as needed. Thus, the appeal of thought-rhyme, whose repetition is the opposite of compression. (In fairness, parallelism at its best is repetition without redundancy.)

Compression in poetry sometimes entails grammatical contortion: leaving words out, putting words in the “wrong” order (adjective after noun, say). These are sometimes done, I suspect, in response to a felt need to “signal” that one is writing poetry, a need one may feel when writing free verse. In this way metric poetry can be more freeing than free verse: if you’re writing iambic pentameter, then whatever else it is, it’s certainly poetry; you are therefore at liberty to sound as pedestrian, or as conversational, as you like. No need for fancy words, or to make everything a metaphor for everything else. This was Wordsworth’s idea, though he lived up to it poorly—Shakespeare is often better at ordinary-speech-in-blank-verse than Wordsworth. But it was Robert Frost who was truly devoted to this paradoxical ideal, of un-poetic poetry. While there’s a lot of Robert Frost’s poetry that I don’t like, this ideal I do like. It, and his insistence on writing in meter, while living in what he called “an age of mere diction and word-hunting.”

Brad Skow, Found / Things

While the shift from formal rhymed verse to ‘free’ and unrhymed verse in the late-1800s and early-1900s was important, even more significant was the shift from the ‘statement’ as the basic unit of poetry, to the fragment. In a poetry of statements ‘meaning’ resides in the poet, already completed, and it is the reader/critic’s job to decipher the ‘true’ meaning of the poem, in accordance with the poet’s ‘intentions’ (ala biblical exigesis). In a poetry of ‘fragments’, on the other hand, there are always multiple possibilities, di-verse potentials, and no one singular meaning. Sensible signification is abandoned in favour of suggestion. A fragment is always in-between and partial, and can only be completed by the reader in collaboration with the poet. A statement is already finished: a fragment invites the reader to continue, without stopping.

As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1958): “Make of the reader a poet… the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost. At least the reader participates in the joy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation.”

Dick Whyte, Mary Brent Whiteside – 6 Short Poems (1925-28)

Lures by Adam Vine
Alabama Seamus Heaney. Need I go on?
I recently had the privilege of hearing him speak at a local writer’s weekend, and he told this story behind his poem “Coursing the Joints” (and how he wrote 20 drafts over years and years, burnt them all, then went back to the burnt down cabin to see it himself and try again). The dedication to craft shows – I associate him with Heaney because of his tilt toward formalism and love of where he is from, even though it isn’t a perfect place. I guess also the Southern in me connected with this to some degree – hearing him read reminded me of my MawMaw, and the stories his book tells are the kind of stories my dad and all those Tennessee and Mississippi aunts and uncles and cousins would tell – stories worth telling again.

Thin Glass by Christine Degenaars
I really enjoyed this debut poetry collection, a coming-of-age story set in NYC. It delves into love/relationships/mistakes, and the “thin glass” between us and others. That metaphor carries throughout the collection, as the speaker is watching and wondering about people she sees through the window, the separation between herself and others. I liked how her metaphors were often surprising and interrupted the typical narrative. This was my favorite poem in the collection – a fairytale-like poem about her father becoming a fish.

Renee Emerson, Lures, Tigers, Bears, oh my…

Kirsten MacQuarrie’s book Remember the Rowan published by Red Squirrel Press was unexpected. I’d heard of the book Ring of Bright Water, but knew nothing about its author Gavin Maxwell and I knew of the poet Kathleen Raine and had read a few poems, but her life was not something I had heard about. The book charts their volatile relationship. Raine was in love with Maxwell who was a homosexual. He became her muse for much of her poetry and she was involved with the Maxwell’s first otter which was the focus of his most famous book. Remember the Rowan is a big read, well-researched and covering decades of their inspiration and arguments. I enjoyed it, it’s very well written. 

The book is a real insight into the life of a woman who plays a midwife to an artist, not a muse, similar to Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, a woman who makes it possible for a man to succeed, even to the detriment of her own work and well-being. For that reason, I couldn’t feel good about the story. I felt caught up in Raine’s life and turmoil, so much so I wanted to take her for a drink to tell her to get out of the toxic relationship. It shows how intimate and believable a writer MacQuarrie is. […]

Poyums Annaw by Len Pennie is the second poetry collection by the Scots Word of the Day internet sensation. I first stumbled upon her during our Covid lockdown where she shared a new Scots word with a hint of humour and honesty. I love her poem ‘I’m not having children’ and her poem about the Daft Days, but I hadn’t read her first collection or her other works. Len Pennie is now an Scots language advocate, but she also has become a voice for survivors of gender-based violence after facing a lengthy court case of her own and constantly facing internet trolls on her various social media platforms. Her poems cover her own situation and fighting the patriarchy in general, mostly in Scots.  They are honest and acerbic, sometimes tinged with humour. They do not bury the punchline in metaphor, instead they often pack a mean punch. While the rhyming sometimes gets to me, I’m a free verse kind-of-gal, the poems carry the reader along without feeling they are reading literature with a capital L. They are the kind of thing you’d share with your non-poetry pals and the two poems above have been passed on to me from unexpected places. Len often shares recordings of her poetry on social media and her genuine joy of Scots and poetry are infectious. Her poems are really meant to be heard, so if you can get the audio book read by Len herself, I’m sure it’s worth hearing them in the author’s own voice. 

Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour 2025

Literature works through a special force of language.

When he travelled the world on the Beagle, Charles Darwin’s favourite book was Paradise Lost. He thought of Milton as he watched the sea at night. The way the dark materials of creation are described in the poem echoes in The Origin of Species.

The theory of evolution owes an influence to Milton’s poetry, which inspired Darwin to reimagine the universe.

As Samuel Johnson said, poetry is a “force which calls new powers into being”.

Henry Oliver, Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026

as I pick up 
winter wreckage 
from our yard, it sinks in 
no card from her
this year

conglomerate by tom clausen

I’m trying to remember why I started this blog in 2011. I’m pretty sure it was because of meeting Ian Pindar, a poet, at the Bridport Poetry Festival in 2010 when one of my poems was given a prize (runner-up) by Michael Laskey and was published in that year’s anthology. Ian was the person who recommended having some sort of online ‘home’, although I can’t remember the exact reasons for this recommendation – perhaps to create an online presence and a means of showcasing work. Anyway, with my one published poem and a desire to engage with other writers online, I set about creating my own blog. WordPress’ interface seemed delightful to use in those days. […]

Them was the old days, folks. Blogging was fun and interactive. I shared posts on social media and people read my posts and chatted to me about what I’d written. Social media was sociable in those days, and more than a means to promote a book, reading or workshop. But most of us know the adage about all good things coming to an end – and I’m probably only peering at the past through rose-tinted specs, in any case. Eventually, I ran out of blogging steam. And now I’m once again trying to write prose, rather than poetry, and I’ve become older. Time is running out! I’m trying to put my writing energy into something other than blogposts.

Josephine Corcoran, Hello, China

I read a ton, stayed off social media for significant amounts of time, and no big surprise, feel better. That said, I watched this reel on IG of Freya India where she talks about the idea of online communities being a joke. Certainly it’s an important moment to reconsider the idea that social media is social. It feels generally that we’re just unpaid employees, sharing our content for others to profit from it.

It’s no wonder that I’m re-thinking the whole idea of the blog — maybe it’s so old fashioned that it’s worth hanging onto. Or maybe it’s so old fashioned that it’s ridiculous. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about when I started blogging — the idea was to take up space, to connect with like-minded people, and to share things in the mode of the gift — we often spoke of “amplifying” each other, our work, of building community. (Weren’t we all excited by the ideas in Lewis Hyde’s book then?).

Looking for a link to the Hyde book, I come across Margaret Atwood talking about the book in The Paris Review back in 2019. She says, “One guarantee: you won’t come out of The Gift unaltered. This is a mark of its own status as a gift: for gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.”

I’ve generally thought of blogging as something that you give away. You share for free, and then the gifts magically return. And this is so often the case. Writing in this space has given me so much. But as I mentioned in my NY post, it’s time to re-think the enterprise, and probably most everything else we do online. What do we want to give up, and what makes sense to keep? Like, honestly, I’d miss saying, hey, read this you’ll love it!

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Two Books

The boy  stomps   in his boots
in his serious play     as he destroys
snowballs     as he lands two feet on one ball
spraying his lone lot 

with his snow-dusted gusto
his own top spins      so futile  so fun
as the adults inside
huddle     rubbing their so-so heads

Jill Pearlman, New Year’s Spin/Reboot

I’m working to find more time for my inner life. My New Year’s goals include reconnecting with writing and reading. The creative arts help us engage with reality. Writing a book is real—composing music, creating a film, choreographing a dance, penning a play or an opera, painting or drawing.

When we have our adopted grandson in the summer, we take him on outings and try to find ways to stimulate him creatively. We’ve taken him to the LA Zoo because he wanted to see the snakes. He’s at that age when he would like to wander from screen to sugar, but we intervene with books, and once he does a deep dive, he will read for hours. I believe this urge is in all of us.

I am going to remind my body to limit the doomscroll, to live in books, to write often. To remember that this is my one wild and precious life. I don’t eat much jam, but when I do, I plan to get a little jam on my journals, to lean into fig jam on my poetry or marmalade on my novel or honey on either.

Kate Gale, Honey in the Margins: Notes from a Writing Life

I like new beginnings. Every morning. Every step outside. Every “hello”. For the long, linear song of life to be broken up into acts, chapters, narratives, breaks, intermissions, etc., keeps things interesting and novel. Some folks don’t see it that way. “It’s just another day” and its ilk is very well true but also such a yawn. Yesterday, severe winds led to a power outage that rendered everything dark and quiet in my house for several hours. Snow buzzed in the air and the wind droned on through the valley. But eventually the winds will settle. The snow will melt. The song will laze longer and higher in the sky. I like living in seasons. I like the season of beginnings. The season of hunker down. The season of barefoot in the garden. The season of salty skin. The season of the hummingbird. The season of walking in the river. The season of eating straight from the vine. All of those seasons have a beginning, middle, and end.

Happy beginning and ending to you.

Sarah Lada, Annus difficilis

Let time begin again
this one not a river
but a fountain
pouring in every direction
into a pool of itself
at the center
of the sunlit plaza
of the possible

Maria Popova, Cover Song for the Second Law: A Poem for Beginnings

On this New Year’s morning, everything feels metaphorical. The crisp cold air I feel as I stand on the porch waiting for my dog to pee. These sticks. Even this being awake. Awake. In the new year. My wife, asleep. The dog now having assumed my place in the bed. Last night, I figured out if I live to 90, I’ll live into the science fiction time of 2056. It might be science fiction. Hard to tell what it might be like then. And my son (who was with us) would live until the even more science-fictiony date of 2086. Those are “star dates” rather than William Blake dates, or Adrian Rollini dates.

Also, I thought of my daughter, already in the future. She was in Budapest, and entered the new year hours before us. Or Bob and Anne in Cambodia, 12 hour ahead of us. These are new year’s we measure in planetary rotation. Of course, it all is movement. Earth spinning, orbiting. The universe itself making room for itself. Expanding. Time expanding.

The universe writes time as time writes the universe. Or more exactly, the stuff of the universe is both time and space as we know. Hard to conceive of our bodies as both time and matter. A body doesn’t exist except in time. Which means change in some Ship of Thesean way. Is it the same time if each moment is substituted for another? We are make of stardust, but also of the time that stardust exists in, that makes stardust possible. I would say “each shining moment” but that would be eternally cheesy.

Gary Barwin, On the New Year: Four sticks and a band-aid

One thing I ask —
ten minutes to pray
the afternoon prayer
into this poem
while snow falls outside.
Let me look away from the news.
Let this imperfect prayer be.

Rachel Barenblat, A prayer for the first Monday of the secular year
]]> https://www.vianegativa.us/2026/01/poetry-blog-digest-2026-week-1/feed/ 0 73537 Poetry Blog Digest 2025, Week 16 https://www.vianegativa.us/2025/04/poetry-blog-digest-2025-week-16/ Mon, 21 Apr 2025 23:56:38 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=70787 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

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

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

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

Ren Powell, Belonging Away from Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

a leaf falls
I watch
you pick it up
you disappear

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

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

Bethany Reid, Esther Altshul Helfgott: Listening to Mozart

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

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

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

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Dominion of Mercury

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if we had another hour?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

RM Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 3)

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

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

What are you currently working on?

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, The Last Corinthians

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

§§§

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four By Four #39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Good Friday Creations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kersten Christianson, Easter & the Golden Eggs of Writing

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

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

Annette Makino, A haikupalooza for Haiku Poetry Day

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

Julie Mellor, Presence

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

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

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

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

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

Allyson Whipple, Haiku Girl Summer Returns Soon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Mee, THE HOUSE OF EVERYTHING, by ROBERT SEATTER

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Preorders Open for My 1st Prose Chapbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Festive Earworm

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

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist: Rituals and Alignment

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

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

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

Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
sea

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

Alina Stefanescu, Blacktops.

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

as if stones
could be
impressed
by us living
things

Kati Mohr, Butterfly House

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

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

Tim Love, Tom Sastry, James McDermott and Laurie Bolger

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

     from “Proof”  by Emilynne Newsom, Harvey Mudd College

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

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

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

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

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

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

JoAnne Growney, AMS Contest-winning Student Mathy Poems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Crane, POEM: mayflies

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

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

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

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

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

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

The loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.

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

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

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

Robin Gow, new car

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Shimmer, steam, somatic, sciatica

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

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

Limestone painted pink at twilight,
rosemary between my fingers.

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

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

*

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

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

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

Where are these places for you?

Rachel Barenblat, Querencia

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

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, Paul Revere and Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Risen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerry Stewart, The Poetry of Who I am Now

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Mud & connections

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Machine Shop for Humans

]]> 70787 Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 48 https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/12/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-48/ Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:56:41 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=69061 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

This week: looping echoes, words that feel distinctly blue, a claustrophobic fairy tale, 19 shades of untrue, sour milk and fermenting earth, and the cosmogony of you. Enjoy!

It’s December 1 and both neighborhood cul-de-sac and ocean just beyond the edge are dark. A few lights are beginning to illuminate windows here and there, but this most immediate, surrounding world is largely muffled and still this morning.

A friend has mailed me coffee from afar and I’ve saved its opening and taste for this long weekend. Today, I brewed it in the French press. Pulled from the trunk a hand-pottered mug purchased in Homer while on writing residency at Storyknife a few summers ago. It is both the dark and light, dirt earthy tones and golden light creeping in around the edges. I’ve added just a bit of the good Irish stuff to it to enjoy the morning, put a cap on a fine, holiday weekend, and bust through the poetry that needs writing. My to-write list is longer than my arm.

But it is December 1 and there’s much to look forward to. My college daughter and her traveling cat will soon be home in a couple of weeks and Solstice to be celebrated soon after. I thank the editors of The Bluebird Word for including my poem “Tilt” in today’s winter issue publication. It is timely and I’m enjoying all of the poems gathered here in this space, this welcome to winter and December’s return.

Kersten Christianson, Waking to Snow

The day after Thanksgiving, skies
finally clear. One by one, we start

bringing our trash and recycling
to the curb. A light wind sifts

more dry leaves on every house
plot, every yard. Neighbors

take out their leafblowers.
I think of the endlessness of

our labors, and the greater
optimism of infinity.

Luisa A. Igloria, Immeasurables

Welcome to this series of Palestine Advent blog posts.

Each day for the next twenty-four days I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian poet.

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada.

I Grant You Refuge, by Hiba Abu Nada, translated by Huda Fakhreddine.

Hiba Abu Nada was a novelist, poet, and educator. She wrote this poem on Oct. 10th, 2023. She was killed in her home in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023. She was 32.

Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a writer, a translator, and the author of several scholarly books.

With thanks to Natalie Jabbar and Chris Rose for inspiring this idea.

You can donate to the Amos Trust Gaza Christmas appeal here

Anthony Wilson, Palestine Advent 1: I Grant You Refuge, by Hiba Abu Nada

Is it time to draft the poem anew?
No more the pretense and no more the farce.
This poem is nineteen shades of untrue.

Look, the poem has its own point of view.
It must be reflection and looking glass.
Who will come now to the poet’s rescue?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The nineteenth poem needs true rhyme

My poetry collection Blackbird Singing at Dusk is already heading out into the world and landing on the doormats of people who were kind enough to pre order it, but today it officially launches into the world. […]

The beautiful cover art is called ‘Hidden in the Crab Apples’ and is by Little Rams studio, who you can support by going to their shop and buying stuff: Little Rams

I’m very pleased and proud of this collection, written alongside my memoir The Ghost lake, it feels like a kind of sister collection to that longer work. If you enjoyed one, you’ll likely enjoy the other. You can buy The Ghost Lake from the bad place where it has 22% off here or from here, and both books are available in high street book shops, and you can request them at your local library. The Ghost Lake is also an ebook and an audio book, read in my own voice, my own accent.

Wendy Pratt, Blackbird Singing at Dusk Takes Flight

In my academic calendar, Thanksgiving Break is the first full week without teaching or meetings since August, so it’s often a time of reflection for me. We went up to NYC for 3 nights then NJ for 3 nights: downside, lots of driving; upside, we saw a lot of dear people and it was impossible for me to work (much). I thought a lot about the semester that’s nearly behind me and the winter ahead. It’s been hard to juggle grant applications for a projected sabbatical, festival/ conference/ bookstore applications and other tasks toward the launch of Mycocosmic, ongoing health stuff, and the usual heaping plates of academic work. I feel starved for just a little time, even a couple of hours a week, to nudge ahead newer creative projects. Yet dessert is coming.

Lesley Wheeler, Harvest (while still sowing)

Last night we landed back in Picton just in time to deliver the children to father-in-law, and catch the monthly PEP Rally Reading at the local bookstore, curated by Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner of Assembly Press. The reading featured Ottawa poet Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Toronto poet Matthew Tierney and Toronto writer Spencer Gordon, all of whom were reading from new or recently-published books. It was good to catch all three, especially Madhavan-Reese, unable to hear her properly in the spring as part of VERSeFest. Any event I’m hosting or organizing provides me a divided attention, so the ability to focus on her reading was appreciated. Christine and I agreed that Madhavan-Reese [pictured, above] gave the strongest reading, in part due to her poem “Saṃsāra,” from Elementary Particles (2023), a poem titled from the Pali and Sanskrit word meaning both “wandering” and “world.” We appreciated her repetitions, looping echoes as a kind of cycle on progression, loss and connection. “After that,” Madhavan-Reese writes, “we had everything we could want, though / we didn’t want to leave it in the care of strangers.”

*

Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry (2024): “To never be touched again. That line / has a sound. Hear it?”

I’m poolside, attending our young ladies, who take turns doing flips in the shallows. Christine and her father, errand.

I’m still thinking about the effectiveness of Madhavan-Reese’s loops in that particular poem, how her repetitions moved further and around, allowing each phrase and new and singular weight, however many times they appeared.

rob mclennan, the green notebook

Since I haven’t been publishing a lot of my own work lately I also haven’t had a lot of critical feedback, so it was rather thrilling to find that my debut collection, School of Forgery, is mentioned in Andrew Duncan’s new Shearsman volume, Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People: Screen Grabs of British Poetry in the 21st Century. If the title sounds dismissive, that isn’t the intent; Duncan’s starting point is that ‘beautiful feelings of sensitive people’ is, broadly, what people expect of poetry and poets — that any more sophisticated understanding of what the art can achieve has lost its grip on the collective conscience … for now. This is in part due to the sheer abundance and variety of poetry being published, such that any other general characterisation runs into trouble immediately.

His ‘screen grab’ approach is refreshing. Rather than presume to pick out a few poets as the leading lights of a generation, thinning the herd in order to tell a neat story, he accepts that any serious expedition into the landscape of contemporary UK poetry “can last for years”, and involves travelling through many ‘micro-climates’. The book is therefore a series of snapshots from one such expedition. When he comes to School of Forgery, he finds the key to the book is the poem about Bleach dōjinshi (fan comics in which the characters often enjoy intense romantic liaisons), adding:

Stone seems to prefer inauthenticity, but this allows him to jettison the apparatus of realism and moral seriousness, so that the poems have a wonderful lightness, bursting like fireworks.

It’s a huge book, covering 80 poets in all, and so far I’ve only read the entries for about a quarter of them.

Jon Stone, “Like a pair of thin keys”

My low mood seems to have abated, at least temporarily, and I wrote a few poems and revised a few others during the past three days. I’m trying to accept the fact that this year, we will see neither our son nor our daughter for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. So I’m trying to get creative about things to do that we might not have done if we were preparing for family celebrations. Yet we miss the concept of family celebrations. I guess that’s a socio-cultural thing, right? I may need to reassess what value “the holidays” have for me these days.

~

I have also kept myself busy re-assessing a chapbook manuscript I’ve worked on forever (it seems) and am now looking for the sort of small, independent publisher that might consider a hybrid poetry-journalistic/historical work influenced by Muriel Rukeyser‘s long-poem The Book of the Dead. My poem is about a Korean War veteran tried as a traitor upon his return to the USA, a man who was my friend David Dunn’s father. It has been a real creative challenge to figure out how to tell his story, and the resulting text is definitely “hybrid,” with footnotes, magazine articles, military court proceedings, letters, and poems. People who believe that poems simply flow from some internal inspiration would probably take issue with a poem-ish thing like this, but I keep feeling compelled to find a way to tell this man’s story. The unfairness of it, the long-term damage, the people who used him as a scapegoat, his short life (he died at his mother’s, age 39, discouraged and unwell from physical wounds that never healed, divorced, unable to overcome the dishonorable discharge that kept him from gainful employment). David kept losing his father over and over: to prison, to PTSD, to divorce, to death. It’s an all-too-common narrative, but each tale is also deeply and profoundly individual. Hence the need to write it.

Ann E. Michael, Re-assessing

1. ) The earliest poems in this collection were written in late 2021 and were based around TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, one of the most influential works on my baby poet self back in the 90s and something that felt it needed to be revisited, especially amid the modern political, social, and post-pandemic environment. Conversely, the latest poems in the collection were written early in the spring as the broken places series about crumbling houses and disappearing pasts.  […]

3.) This is my seventh self-issued title somehow, which means the process of layout and design is a little smoother and doesn’t take as long mired down in formatting stuff, which I can get close to in place by the first or second proof copy (which means a faster turn around from start to finish and actual copies in my hands faster.) I learn more, however, each time I do it, both about design and promoting a new book amid a sea of other poets and other books. I still feel like it’s much more work than traditional publishing in so many ways, but most of it is work I enjoy and I love having complete creative control. 

4.) The middle, and longest section of the book is memoir in bone & ink, which was basically all about not wanting to write poetry anymore, and yet, here I am. 

Kristy Bowen, 5 facts about my newest book

Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar: Selected Poems is a very substantial volume bringing together work from her three collections published in Australia. Its sumptuous production chimes happily with the style of her writing: culturally sophisticated and highly intelligent as she clearly is, it’s above all the seemingly effortless sensuous evocativeness of her work that makes an impression from the beginning. Bloodaxe’s generous spacing and the poet’s fine rhythmic sense allow these impressions to flower in the mind.

‘Exhaustion’, from Aria, the first collection represented here, can illustrate the physicality of Holland-Batt’s writing at the basic level of literal description:

One afternoon I went into his silent study
and found, behind the tidy compartments
of paper-clips, rubber bands and push-pins,
an old, red tin – the relic of my grandfather’s oils,
wedged at the back of things. Horse-hair brushes,
graphite stubs, a frayed bit of string. And nestled in
the smudged stippling of china white and cerulean,
a solitary tube of cobalt blue, its crimped end
folded over and over until nothing was left.

Well written and promising though this poem is, it seems to me to have limitations of a kind that are not characteristic of Holland-Batt’s work. We’re to learn more about Holland-Batt’s grandfather – an English architect and artist – and much more about her own father, whose study this perhaps describes. And of course the contents of the tin, particularly the folded and refolded paint tube, metaphorically express the idea of exhaustion in general and invite us to reflect on its different manifestations. However, the relation between the literal and the metaphorical levels of meaning in this poem is relatively static, and you need to read the poem as a whole for it to emerge, as it does in that haunting last line. What’s already exciting about most of the poems in this first collection is how sensuous perception is heightened and vivified by the transformative power of the poet’s imagination and by her ability to fuse differing modes of perception.

Edmund Prestwich, Sarah Holland-Batt, The Jaguar: Selected Poems – review

Living in such a visual world, our most accessible sense, sight, can become tired and jaded. Annie Ellis’ Tempo of Colour (Beechwood Press, 2024) is the perfect tonic to awaken the reader to the visual spectacles in our natural and urban environments if only we took the time to look.

It is not surprising given this passion for landscapes to find this expressed in the collection through a number of ekphrastic poems. I believe the best of this genre should stand alone as poems and not depend on the painting for meaning. However, they must do more than merely describe what the onlooker sees. They should offer a response and convey something fundamental about the work of art. Ellis’ Market Day, based on the painting ‘Market Scene’ by L.S. Lowry achieves both. She captures the essence of the painting, the artist’s interest in the hustle and bustle of the scenes he describes. He is not a social commentator, exploring the hardship of mill town life, his interest is in the activity and variety offered by the scene.  Ellis’ poem captures this through her use of four line stanzas, each line consisting of generally three or four syllables: ‘Men stand tall/ hats on heads/ long skirts keep/ ladies warm.//Women chatter/ watch their children./ Three dogs follow/ one on a lead.’ The resulting staccato rhythm is perfectly in keeping with how one’s eye responds to a Lowry picture, darting from the depiction of one activity to another.

Another example is one of my favourite poems in the collection, No-one Turned to Look, after ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by Pieter Bruegel. This skilfully captures the solipsistic nature of humankind. Significantly Ellis chooses to describe the angler with ‘a cup of grubs by his side’ and the ploughman as cutting the soil like ‘sliced meat’. There is a sense here of our tendency to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others as we pursue our own ends. The fisherman is prepared to sacrifice the grubs in pursuit of his supper, and associating the ploughman’s actions with the slaughter of animals suggests a similar willingness. So, when Icarus falls from the sky and drowns and the poet asks the question ‘Did the boat’s creaking timbers/ hide the sound of the splash?’ we know the answer. The bystanders are too wrapped up in their own pursuits to bother about the tragic event offshore. The poem becomes a chilling statement of humankind’s inhumanity and callousness to the suffering of others.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Tempo of Colour’ by Annie Ellis

Shash Trevett’s debut full collection, The Naming of Names, published by the Poetry Business and available to buy here, follows on from her 2021 pamphlet From a Borrowed Land, with more poems relating aspects of the Tamil experience of the civil war in Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009 and some on other, ancillary matters: British colonialism and racism (including that of the UK government’s immigration policies). Readers may also know that Trevett was one of the three co-editors of the exemplar and acclaimed Out of Sri Lanka anthology, published by Bloodaxe last year.

Estimates, disputed by the state’s Sinhalese majority, suggest that more than 100,000 Tamil civilians died during the conflict, many as victims of brutal violence, including sexual violence, bombings, massacres and/or dismemberments. As the title indicates, Trevett’s collection aims to put names to some of those victims, to reanimate them as real people, so that they aren’t just statistics. As a refugee from the war herself, Trevett writes with understandable passion, though in spare language which allows the individual and collective stories and incidents to speak for themselves without embellishment. It’s necessarily a difficult read, as any bearing of witness to war crimes is, as in ‘And on the Ceiling, a Lizard’:

When he rested his gun against the wall
and told me to lie down.
When he placed a grenade by the pillow
and unbuckled his belt

I watched the dust motes hang
in the air and the lizard freeze
on the ceiling, and knew that words
had never had the power to save me.

This almost matter-of-fact recounting magnifies the terror far more than any liberal sprinkling of adjectives could do. It’s hard in reading this fine collection not to think of Gaza, Sudan and other places where State-inflicted warfare inevitably kills thousand of civilians as collateral damage. Above all, though, it shines a light on what very specifically happened to the Tamil people, the ramifications of which are naturally still being felt. (When I worked for Kingston Council, in the Student Awards team, in the early 1990s, I saw a good number of customers who were Tamils living in exile in Tolworth and some of whom revealed the circumstances of what they’d seen. That Tamil community is still going strong.) This brave, elegantly crafted collection doesn’t flinch from the horrors, yet somehow also finds a sense of beauty among them […]

Matthew Paul, (Other) November reading

Old swingset and a refrigerator full of apples
one bite taken out of each
Fermenting earth and sour milk
a pile of pecan shells to mark your passing

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem Fragments from April

The idea of lives of the dead altering the lives of those they have touched in life is familiar enough, though I was working on my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke around this time and I’m sure his influence is in here. It is not just the remembering of a friend who has passed away, but also that our own perceptions of ‘a house, a street, a flowering tree’, for want of a better word, spiritualises the material object, giving it a life, a light, an existence, beyond the ordinary. […]

At 790, I leafed through life and death
in Ancient Egypt for her older brother:
how they wash their dead in water and oil,
then bind them in linen smeared with gum
and priests wrap lucky charms inside

in hope that none will break the seal
till the dead themselves in time of need.

The ‘lucky charms’ idea naturally led the poem on to what I myself might place in a good friend’s sarcophagus and gave rise to a list of his multifarious likes and loves, concluding with the heartfelt wish that his (prematurely unhirsute) head might – even in death (though he had no religious belief as far as I know) – remain somehow protected. The image on the underside of Laurence’s umbrella is a truth!

Then I’ll wrap Homer for you, Wolves black-
and-gold, your Micra, Marvel, Blockley
and booze, moist, sweet cake for the road,

Frederick Leighton, Sir Frankie Howerd,
Wisden, The Smiths and that Italian umbrella
you flourished one day and thundered open –
behold! the Sistine roof appeared
to keep your bald head from the hissing rain.

‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ was originally published in An English Nazareth (Enitharmon Press, 2004).

Martyn Crucefix, On Revisiting Blockley

What does it mean to have a literary community? What do people want from such a space? Is it necessary? Can it hinder one’s progress, if one feels their writerly identity is tied up with certain people, a certain place? Can you ever return to something you’ve left behind?

These weren’t questions I was conscious of asking myself. But, on some level, I must have been. In many ways, I was continuously searching for a means to reconfigure what I felt I’d lost.

These questions became even more urgent for me in 2021. We had to move again, from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, for my partner’s post-doc. By this time I’d come to love Pittsburgh. But now I was leaving another time, which meant once again parting ways with a small literary community I’d found, as well as good writer-connections and friends I’d made.

At the very same time that we were preparing to leave, the Bad Art Friend debacle broke out. (I won’t get into it here. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you can look it up.) This situation highlighted profound differences of opinion and ethics between me and the remnants of the Boston community I still had. I cut ties. Boston was officially over. Sadly, now, Pittsburgh was over too.

What does it mean to have a literary community? What is the foundation upon which that community is built? Does the foundation itself matter? How do you find community? What is it that writers want from such a space? More questions, the same but different, circling, circling. At the same time, I found myself more alone as a writer than I’d ever been in my life.

But, in fact, as it turned out, that was not true.

Becky Tuch, Thank you. Thank you.

In Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt 9, 2024) Cameron Anstee ponders the relationship between sales, connection, the gift economy and capitalism. (Only 80 copies printed. Get it if you can.)

It raises valuable questions. What is a cut off for what “counts” as meaningful? Who decides? Is it a numbers game or a long game among peers in a historical chain? Is poetry to disrupt mainstream default easy thought? Is it to participate in something less bound and directed than product placement, clichéd shorthand relationships, closed narrative arc with commercial breaks?

I used to publish in seasonal cycles as if were a press with staff & interns, marketers and pitch sessions with book selling chains. A few titles each spring and fall on a commercial model, even if take home is lucky to break even on material costs, the printers and Canada Post the only clear economic winners. Now if there’s something I can’t not do, sporadically I will publish.  But it’s still either way about connective tissues of ideas, of ligaments of community. Not a bestseller or award winner. An exploration. Of sharing what delights or tickles as a ping to see if there is an answering ping of me too.

The usefulness of published words isn’t A + B or an A to B route. It’s more: Here’s some thing niche people might find welcoming to read under the flap of their freak flag. Or wow, this person is ahead of my curve or has been on my curve and now I get something that eluded, or don’t feel so alone. All reading is one person to one person.

In this model what is the sense of awards season and ward’s culture or best of the year lists? Best for what purpose of whom? Isn’t that inherently a capitalist frame for a chaos factor of poetry? […]

To consume and not make, cuts off the roots of creativity feeding everyone. To write and listen to the makers is part of building the society we want to make on a granular level. Consider the words of David Hurn, “record it because it may not happen in 50 years so record it as accurately and as honestly as you can”. He was speaking on factual photography  as evidence for the future but it applies as well to writing your inner and outer world.

Pearl Pirie, Cost and Rewards

I’ve been facilitating this “legacy writing” workshop, even as I’ve been trying to figure out what the heck “legacy writing” is, and if I myself were to do such writing, to whom would I be leaving this so-called legacy? And isn’t all creative effort toward making something anyway a kind of legacy creation to some unknown reader/viewer/listener? One of the things we do in legacy writing is look back at our lives and think, “Hm, what was THAT about?” Or, let me say, that’s what I do in MY legacy writing anyway. I looked back at some of my choices and found myself, well, bemused, I guess is the best way to put it. I seem to have had this pattern of doing things that seemed to make some bit of sense at the time, but I remember thinking, well, I’ll do this and hopefully figure out along the way why I’m doing it, or if I should be doing something else. Hoping for enlightenment, in other words. I’m still operating this way. Still waiting for the light of understanding to radiate. Or at least come up with a damn fine idea as I potter around. Ideas come, ideas go, realizations come, then I forget them. Rationalizations too. “What was I doing?” I think. “What am I supposed to be doing?”

Here’s a poem I’ve been sitting with. I don’t really get it; and I like the way in which it operates, just beyond my grasp, the images vivid, the intent pretty clear — “satori” meaning enlightenment — but everything’s all topsy turvy, looking for enlightenment in all the wrong places, finding light in the dark. I come to the end of it over and over and think, Hm, what was THAT about? And it pleases me.

Marilyn McCabe, the pile of dirt

I feel like my mind has always naturally worked via collage. Maybe I’m ret-conning here, but at the very least, there has always been a strongly visual aspect to how my mind operates, and it’s one I’ve suppressed—sometimes for good reason. In fact, when I first tried writing in a literary way, I was guided by a weird synaesthesia: the words that felt right to me were distinctly blue, and I felt a powerful need to avoid words that felt red or yellow. I eventually had to get over this, and this added layer of extreme subjectivity in my relationship to language has caused many difficulties, but it also is the source of much of my love of language. I’ve spent many years trying to sort out how to control my language use while still finding inspiration in it, and feeling that that inspiration was distinctly related to something more visual and play-oriented. […]

This appreciation for chance, surprise, and visual play is something I struggled to express through writing. I simply couldn’t make the connection between this random play with pictures and the more self-conscious handling of language. Partly this has to do with my own temperament, but it has also to do with the nature of language itself. Language operates sequentially in time: one word follows the next, building sentences that begin and end, telling stories or communicating thoughts that have a point, an end. Whereas collage offers a vision of pre-literate simultaneity and indeterminacy, writing is profoundly linear and determined. One can learn to overcome these factors of the written word, to an extent, but as a young writer I was constantly struggling to do that—or even to recognize that I needed to do that. […]

I think it’s good that I struggled as long as I did, as eventually it forced me to really learn the rigors of grammar and syntax, as well as the delicate interplay between these factors and a poem’s lines. After years of writing promising, intriguing poems that all felt stifled in some way by their awkward sense of form, I eventually got pretty good at writing rather straight, linear poems— I guess I needed to prove to myself that I could. but this was a rather hollow satisfaction. The real breakthrough for me occurred when I began to write in a more chaotic, collage-like style, using highly visual material, citations and fragments, in which to arrange linguistic objects. And this is when my first “mature” writing emerged: writing that others seemed to like, and which I also liked—what’s more, it was writing that excited me.

RM Haines, Going Into the Collage

I used to call it being grabbed by the short and curlies. The expression seems quaint but being hijacked is real. Here’s my dilemma. Go back on social media I hear, because I’m without a publisher for a poetry collection in waiting. I left after seeing friends torn apart, brought down, then my Instagram account was cloned. It took weeks to get the clone (using my name to ask friends for money) off the site. And I was happier not being there, not comparing myself to golden award winners. Visiting Linked In occasionally satisfied an urge to ‘get out there’ that never used to exist but is now present in my system like pesticides. And because I’m old, because I’ve been distracted by life demands, writing has felt like scratching at dry earth but I can’t believe my last book is my last because I’ve always believed in reading and readers. So I went back to Instagram, to show I’m here. 

For a few days it was fine and then the rain, Storm Bert, and with it the floodwaters of advertising until now I see nothing of the people I started to follow. It’s become a rather terrifying and claustrophobic fairy tale, swatting away manic voiceovers, close ups of faces selling me stuff I don’t want. A cautionary tale, a parable, a fable. I noticed the same on Linked In, incessant promotional shite, including (what algoryhythm was this?) one for a weapons company.  And so what do I do? What do you do? Caught in this sting, giving away likes and dislikes, neighbourhood ramblings, personal quirks, idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, our tastes and opinions. Is that what it’s all about? Do I stay or do I go?

Jackie Wills, Should I stay or should I go?

Reading the news
is like
waking into
still having
dead parents.

Microplastics
and wars
persist.
Permafrost melts.
Hillsides burn.

Soon, in charge
of health:
a guy
who doesn’t trust
vaccines.

No limbic system
was made
for this.
I am
a cracked jar.

Rachel Barenblat, Cracked

Does this sound familiar? You’re doing something boring and repetitive, maybe folding laundry, and an idea pops into your head.

When this happens to me, I drop the shirt I was just hanging up, grab a pen, and write the idea down. I know this seems obvious; after all, I’m a writer. But it wasn’t always so.

Until just a few years ago, my immediate response when an idea would occur to me was to judge it. My criteria were simple: the idea was great or it was terrible. I only recorded the ideas that seemed “great” and ignored the others. As a result, a lot of my ideas flitted away, lost forever.

But then something happened.

On October 19, 2019, I wrote, “I went to St. Vinnie’s to donate a few dozen books I’d removed from my office. It was cloudy and threatening rain. I wore my ‘Oregon’ blue flannel shirt which I bought at St. Vinnie’s last year.” 

I’m not sure why those sentences made it past my binary judgment filter. After I looked at what I’d written, I shrugged. There was nothing in those lines that wowed me. Not terrible, maybe, but surely not “great.”

A day or so later, however, I went back to those lines. There was something in their very ordinariness that begged me to try and fix them up. Hmm, I thought. How can I change these lines from dull to dynamite? From trivial to terrific?  From flat to fantastic?

As I experimented with those lackluster sentences, something weird and moody began to emerge. It occurred to me that the sulfuric odor I smell some mornings might come from a nearby paper factory, which made the donation of books crafted from paper seem like a small but significant act—as if I were giving something back to Nature (or, more realistically, to new readers). Not only that, but I live in Oregon, whose main industry for most of its existence as a state was timber. Surely some of those trees became the wood pulp used in producing paper. 

These thoughts came together in my brain and led to the poem, “Donating Books to St. Vincent de Paul,” which was published in 2021 at Blue Unicorn.

Donating Books to St. Vincent de Paul

I surrender them, loose in 
grocery sacks. When they 
shift it sounds like whispering.
I cannot seem to leave. […]

Encouraged, I started keeping track of all my ideas, including the ones I deemed so-so. I quickly discovered that my less-than-great ideas greatly outnumbered my great ones. I filled more and more notebooks.

Erica Goss, What happened when I stopped judging my ideas

When E. and I do distance runs, he always speeds up at the finish line. He says knowing it’s almost over motivates him. But for some reason, seeing the finish line slows me down. Self-help indoctrination tells me that this is because my mind believes the task at hand is already completed: a premature celebration, of sorts. But I honestly think it has more to do with savouring.

The ending of things, all things, has always felt anti-climactic.

How often do we reach a satisfying point before the sudden raveling? When we’ve rung the bell and stepped away, letting the heavy sledgehammer pull our arm towards the ground until we have to drop it? Can we be satisfied? Or are we attentive to the aching muscle’s memory of the weight of the sledgehammer, and our immediate powerlessness?

They say that grief is the price we pay for love. But when the pain we feel at the end of a love affair overshadows the exquisite past, how is it better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all? What are we measuring and why?

I guess I’m talking about purpose. And avoiding those so many Regrets of the Dying. I don’t think purpose can be found in, or via, accomplishments. Purpose has to be in the moment. In verbs, not nouns.

Ren Powell, Enter the Baroness

Recently, on a long walk, I realized that my life is like a poem in another way, too: My life, like a poem, is small and enormous.

Let me explain. In a poem, counterintuitively, compression creates expansion. A single image or metaphor opens up into a wide open space. Less is often more. The more I edited down my life to the essential elements, and the more I revised away the extraneous, the bigger it got.

It occurred to me on this walk that for me, this is happiness: being clear about what matters and taking my red pen to the rest of it. It amazes me now to think about how simple my life is right now, and by simple I don’t mean easy; I mean pared down. It’s people I love, work I love, and experiences that excite and inspire me. Love. Art. Community. That’s it.

The people that don’t bring me joy or peace? Edited out of the poem that is my life. The work that felt like it was not the best use of my time and talents? Edited out. (As my dear friend Saeed Jones says, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.”) All of this editing means setting good boundaries, and not making decisions out of fear, anxiety, or a scarcity-based mindset. It means taking risks and trusting my gut. If I feel negative or even just meh about something, I let it go.

In my experience, the risk is worth the reward. I’m living the most compressed life I’ve ever lived, but it’s the biggest and best life I’ve ever lived. The smaller I made it, the bigger it grew. It feels like magic. 

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

I stumbled across The Way of the Fearless Writer: Mindful Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life, by Beth Kempton, maybe in March. I picked it up, to begin with, at my local library. After a couple chapters, I ordered my own copy and returned the library’s (with a hardy recommendation to the volunteer at the desk).

In other words, I knew almost immediately that Fearless Writer was a book I had to mark up.

To write in service of the writing, not the ego, is a radical act. (p. 24)

Kempton is a Japanologist, who has also sojourned to China, and somewhere along the way met herself on the path. She invites us to do the same—not to study Japanese or the Tao Te Ching, but to embrace writing as a way of being. The passage quoted above continues:

What if we gathered up all the energy we usually spend worrying about what other people think and poured it into our writing? What if we really lived our lives, moment to moment, and wrote about that? What if we wrote to release what is burning inside us, allowing that to be enough for now? (pp. 24-25)

Kempton arranges her book around three gates (a symbol that has, for some time, spoken to me). When I reached her chapter on the gate of emptiness, my mind flew open. I was sitting in my writing cabin, my old dog snoring beside the door, but I felt, literally, as though I were poised on a threshold, about to embark on an entirely new way of being with my work. What if we wrote in service of the writing, not the ego?

It matters that I began reading this book around the time I was finishing Red Pine’s translations of Tao Yuanming’s poems, and, before I finished Fearless, I saw the Capitol Hill premier of a film about Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to see this film, produced by Ward Serrill, and available now on-line; I have watched it three times.) Taken together these texts—these transcendent works of art—were transforming.

Bethany Reid, Books for Writers

Much of the best advice about writing poetry has been expressed in terms of the body. This might seem paradoxical at first: poetry is the least embodied art, words plucked from the air, to be read in the head or aloud. But the simplicity of its medium means that poetry is also intensely embodied, because it only needs a body to happen. “I made it out of a mouthful of air”, said W.B. Yeats — and I remain confident that AI will never write a really memorable poem, because it doesn’t have a mouth: [see] Smoothing Google.

Making poems with a mouthful of air isn’t just about sound, either — it’s about the whole feeling of communicating something across space from one body to another. Ben Lerner defines “poetry” with a story about “rolling [a] word around, as it were, on my tongue”:

I remember walking around as a child repeating a word I’d overheard, applying it wildly, and watching how, miraculously, I was rarely exactly wrong. If you are five and you point to a sycamore or an idle backhoe or a neighbor stooped over his garden or to images of these things on a television set and utter “vanish” or utter “varnish” you will never be only incorrect; if your parent or guardian is curious, she can find a meaning that makes you almost eerily prescient […] And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry anymore— that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.

This describes the exact opposite of what Large Language Models are trained to do: for ChatGPT, the satisfying click is all. Liquefied language would rust its circuits. [,,,]

There are no physical descriptions of the South Korean poet Lee Seong-bok in Indeterminate Inflorescence (Allen Lane), a collection of 470 “notes from a poetry class” made by his students and translated by Anton Hur. But Lee’s programme for the would-be poet is all about cultivating an almost-physical attitude towards pen and page. Throwaway your theories, he seems to say, and be. “The brain is deliberate and social, but the hand is closer to desire and the unconscious. A poem is like a finger that breaks out of your head.” It’s easy to imagine the lecturer’s emphatic gestures.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #25: A Finger That Breaks Out of Your Head

When and how were you introduced to haiku and Japanese-related poetry?

I was an avid reader of poetry 20 years before I learned about Japanese short form poetry on Twitter/X. At the time, I was writing micropoetry and enjoyed the challenge of precision in word choice ‘back in the day’ when tweets were limited to 140 characters. I loved exploring the depth possible in that limited space. I didn’t have a mentor and (until fairly recently) rarely shared my poems with anyone pre-publication. I just read and analyzed how and why poems work. Sometimes a kind editor would provide feedback. My first haiku (in retrospect, its own kind of birth place!) was published in Hedgerow issue 11 in 2014:

my birth place
a distant memory—
fireflies

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

Through poetry, we can express what cannot otherwise be expressed. I enjoy the awareness and centering that comes with conveying a big experience in a tiny poem. The number of words is finite but the meanings can be infinite, so the space between words is included to help create meaning. The tools available to us can turn haiku into tiny powerhouses that are bigger on the inside than the outside.

I like that I can write haiku in my mind while I’m doing other things. A haiku can become a series of words that I repeat in my mind until it clicks into place. This was particularly helpful when I had young kids. I would sometimes walk around with a satchel containing a notebook or WIP to take advantage of an odd minute for writing. A haiku can be a companion in which we ruminate on a poem then need only a moment to jot it down.

Jacob D. Salzer, Kat Lehmann

I taught language and literature (in English, Latin and Greek) for twenty years and I always thought about teaching — whether it was an elementary language class or a doctoral student — as helping both others and myself to read better. There are so many ways to do this, both as a reader and as a teacher, but one thing that comes up quite a lot is the difference between a purely personal response and a critical one. A line of a poem might move me because it reminds me, for example, of a nursery rhyme that my grandmother used to say to me. The particular memory of my grandmother and all that that brings with it is entirely personal to me; but the way that the line echoes a well-known nursery rhyme is not. On the other hand, if I am struck by a piece of writing because it happens to use a word that my grandfather or my first school teacher often used, that might make it very moving for me, but it probably does not have much relevance beyond myself.

As sophisticated readers, we know that coincidences or echoes of this latter kind are not really critically significant in themselves. We teach students, and learn ourselves, to sift them out of formal writing. But all the same, these sorts of associations can be very important to us as readers, and are quite often part of what draws us into a work of literature, even if they are not what keep us there. And perhaps we can talk meaningfully about how literature may provoke such associations — the way that some kinds of poetry, for example, seems designed to elicit them.

These sorts of private associations only multiply, I find, when reading across languages. I’ve mentioned the contemporary French poet Gérard Bocholier before (most recently in this post), as I’ve been reading him slowly but steadily for a few months now. Today I thought I’d offer you one of his poems which I found particularly powerful in the way that it prompted, for me, both the sort of associations which I think we’d all be happy to acknowledge as allusions or part of the poem’s frame of reference, but also a series of other, increasingly personal or specific ones — the part that, perhaps, we don’t usually “say out loud” when we are talking formally about poetry. I can’t speak for M. Bocholier, but it seems to me that the strength of his poetry lies partly in the way that it creates space for these reactions as well.

Victoria Moul, Bocholier, Horace and the nuchal fold

Rob Taylor: The poems in your third collection of poems, 2020’s Governor General’s Award finalist Orrery, largely focused on outer space (an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system), as do many of the poems in your new book, Asterisms. That’s not the standard preoccupation of most poets! Could you speak a little about what drew you to writing about space, and writing about it via poetry specifically?

Donna Kane: I grew up surrounded by a landscape where other-than-human life vastly exceeded human, so the natural world has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. Northeast BC is quite prairie-like (as Lorna Crozier, one of my favourite people and writers, once said, “It’s the closest BC gets to Saskatchewan.”). As a result, the sky takes up a lot of room. On dark, clear nights, the stars are the main feature. I also grew up during the Space Race. I was ten when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The night sky, space, and the natural world were formative parts of my early years, and they have remained not only of interest, but places of solace. 

I also write about these subjects in my non-fiction work. I’m currently working on a prose manuscript that chronicles my experiences sleeping outside (I’m heading into my fifth summer of sleeping on an old cast iron bed on our uncovered deck in Rolla) while exploring subjects related to the nocturnal world, astronomy, and light pollution.

RT: In both Orrery and Asterisms, you write poems directly about outer space and the science that underpins its study, but in Asterisms we see that scientific language working its way into poems about animals and objects here on earth: a butterfly flies as if “nicked by a gravity well,” a can of Bartlett pears is no less than “the pivotal moment when the first star / formed… deep within their cosmic dawn,” and even the speaker of your poems is transformed, becoming, in one, an “interstellar object / on a mission to a glass of wine”!

I think the instinct of most poets would be to go in the opposite direction, to use more earth-bound, familiar objects (butterflies, pears, wine) to describe the complexity of the wider universe. (He says, knowing full well that metaphors always end up flowing in both directions.) In reading Asterisms, it felt as if the firmer, more grounded of the two worlds for you was not the earthly, but the cosmic. Would you say that’s true? Do you see deep space around you in the forest, just as others might look up at the stars and see, in their patterns, animals?

DK: Great question. It reminds me of the first four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

I do feel that. And it’s important, I think, especially now, in the face of climate change and an often-divisive world riddled with fake news, to remind ourselves of the discoveries made by science, and how we understand much better the connections between ourselves and the larger universe because of these discoveries. I also think it’s good to be reminded that not only do we depend on the natural world for our survival, we are nature. Our bodies are comprised of one of the universe’s first elements—hydrogen. There is no element in us that does not also exist in the cosmos.

My interest in and knowledge of the night sky and astronomy has deepened since I began to sleep outside. With the stars and the movements of other planets more viscerally a part of my nighttime experience, I have been reminded of the night sky’s natural and cultural significance, and it has inspired me to learn more. When so many of us live in urban centres where light pollution blocks out the sky and where access to natural spaces is limited, we may not always be aware of the deleterious effects of being disconnected from nature and darkness. A study in 2023 claimed that only one in five North Americans can still see the Milky Way. It’s unsettling how our connections to the night sky are being lost, not to mention that with more animals active at night than in the daytime, the greatest impacts of light pollution have been on other-than-human life.

Rob Taylor, The Hinge Where the Mysteries Lie: An Interview with Donna Kane

We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular soul across billions and billions of blind steps each one of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.

Azita Ardakani offers a lyrical antidote to this self-expatriation from our cosmic inheritance in this breathtaking piece she has kindly let me publish on The Marginalian — part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.

Maria Popova, The Cosmogony of You

A common theme that has come up throughout these first couple of days of activism is a refusal of the idea that we must suffer for art, that we must suffer in life. On Day 1, Laura Bates talked about it in the Q & A, that as writers we don’t have to reproduce our trauma for consumption.

I’ve never felt an external need to do this, more a kind of fire in my belly to talk about domestic violence and to use poetry perhaps to make people think differently about it, but more importantly, to make them feel differently. To make myself feel differently about it.

A more pressing concern for me has been to ensure that in the portrayal of traumatic events, I am not retraumatising myself, or others. That the event of the poem transforms the experience into art. That it no longer exists as merely pain, but is instead held by language, framed by language, broken apart by language or shaped by it or fragmented by it or illuminated by it or made exactly the size that it is by the white space and the language.

On Day 2, Clare Shaw also talked about the importance of realising that we don’t need to reproduce trauma or pain, and that poetry is for them a tool of connection and hope. There is a wonderful interview with Clare over at aAh! magazine, which you can find here. When I read this interview, even though I know Clare very well, and have to put up with them randomly turning up at my house, peering through the window and making possessed little snowman on my windowsill, it made me cry. I can’t imagine the power of reading these words as an 18, 19, 20 year old at university for the first time, and navigating the complexities of gender and bodies and love and desire.

In the interview, Clare saysText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I think what poetry can invite us to do, whether it’s through words or through form or through performance, is to connect with and to feel the realities of violence, the legacies of violence, but also to feel the realities of our own agency and power. It’s about asking people to connect with violence, and this is a difficult ask, but it’s also about connecting with hope and connecting with the drive or recovery, or connecting with resilience or connecting with the power that we find alongside each other.

This connection with hope, with recovery and resilience is so important and we need to keep it not until the final day where in a token gesture, we try and finish on a positive note, but running throughout the 16 Days, a thread of light that weaves through everything.

Kim Moore, Day 4 – 16 days of activism against gender-based violence

Let us crown ourselves
with mud. We of the stinking mines (mine. My own.)
We of the town of mines. The town of little gold
mushrooms growing out of wet ash
to fill our winter bowls
with cold.

Backstory

Back in 2018 the small, forested town of Paradise, CA burned up in the Camp Fire that devastated Butte County. Later it was determined that the Camp Fire had been caused by a faulty power line that had been neglected by PG&E. The whole fire and subsequent deaths and destruction could have been prevented for $15 worth of updates on PG&E’s equipment.

Some of you may know this, but I was raised in Paradise, CA. I hadn’t been back to the town in many, many years. But, needless to say, I started thinking about that town again, my time there, and what the fire meant to me. Then I started doing research on the town, its history, and what I uncovered intrigued and disturbed me.

The town, which was ultimately destroyed by a greedy public utility company that refused to prioritize human life over profit, was also built on greed and the destruction of human life too. In my research I realized just how vicious the pioneers who settled the town were to the Chumash Natives, to the land, and even to each other.

I generally don’t write a lot of political poems, but I found myself writing a lot of poems exploring the history of “Paradise.” This is the first of many, which was published by Emerge Literary Journal. My thanks to Theresa Senato Edwards for selecting this poem.

Tresha Faye Haefner, My Most American Poem So Far

In following my previous post about seeking to do positive things that will help lift our spirits, we visited the holiday lights – somewhat non-traditional – at Bellevue Botanical Gardens, which features dragons and flowers made of lights, as well as a very cool underwater scene. Video of dragon below pics.

This year they also had concerts every weekend, and this time they had a jazz quartet, so we listened to a concert of jazz standards by Cole Porter and the Peanuts Christmas theme. We hadn’t seen live jazz in a long time, so it was a fun bonus.

Tomorrow I’m doing a class for a university on the East Coast early, and later in the week I’m going to meet a friend downtown for drinks and then go to the SAL event featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whom I’ve known since we started blogging in….2003? So it’ll be nice to go be social a bit. I hope you are also keeping your holiday/election blues at bay with whatever makes you feel even a little happier.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Post-Thanksgiving, A Season of Rejection, Holiday Lights with Dragons, Seeing Friends and Winter Birds

i became
a disciple of the cob webs. a caretaker of dust.
that is what it means to be a poet. someone has
to tell the truth about how we came apart.
i sometimes wish i was a different kind
of cartographer. not one who wrote about
hunger but one who wrote about wholeness.
about finding the foot you’ve been missing
& sewing it back on with beading thread.

Robin Gow, 911
]]> 69061 Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 42 https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/10/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-42/ Mon, 21 Oct 2024 23:11:00 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=68583 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

This week: a head full of dreams, the stillness of a bell, big magic, an impish shadow, and more. Enjoy!

We have forgotten how to
make our hands behave, and hold

a cup of tea. We forgot
the sun on polished wood floors
in homes we no longer own.

Once upon a time, we laughed,
in a red convertible
with the top down, and the wind
blowing wild across our skulls.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 38

In the dark times will there be singing? There will be singing of the dark times.

People often ask why I get up at 4am to make work and all I can say is I love the magic and the silence and the foxes and the first signs of light and life and dawn. I love to watch the light change from season to season. I love to write with a head full of dreams, full of the illusion of limitless possibilities.

Writing. Listening. Watching for first light. I feel like a surfer waiting to catch a wave on night oceans. Waiting for the tide to turn, or for a favourable wind to blow my sails in the right direction to finish a big thing that must be done. I don’t know why I sometimes take these lonely pictures at my desk, maybe to document the isolation, the process of being in here working intensely on this big thing that must be done that has nothing to do with anyone else, that sacrifice, it has nothing to do with reviews or sales or hearts and likes. The pure feeling of making art that is like no other.

Salena Godden, Notes from the 4am writing club

Sometimes I feel the darkness touching my sides. It hugs me, not in [a] loving way, nothing sensual, not even in a caring sort of way.

It’s not a darkness with a mood overhead. It’s not a darkness with the twinkle of stars above. It’s not even the darkness with the expectation of a gradual lightening into a new day.

It is an aloneness that compounds your very existence. It’s a kind of blindness to everything that surrounds you.

It takes your balance away. It takes away joy. It surrenders you to an uncharted surrounding. It’s an emptiness that is missing vibrance that it has not forgotten.

Michael Allyn Wells, I Hear Only Myself Breathing

On the noise of the street, I found myself thinking about New York and all the money rushing by. In the subway, the noise feels like being inside a machine. 

When my kids grew up, we gave them no television. I wanted them to experience life without noise, because the best part of my childhood was the quiet. Yes, there were beatings and adults with sticks, there were whistles, and we all rushed to prayers and classes and chores. But there were also hours when we disappeared into the woods, and the only sound was the ticking of the stars. When we listened to deer and porcupines. We slept in sleeping bags by streams under the Milky Way.  

When I took my kids out to the redwoods, it wasn’t only to learn how to make a fire and put up a tent, it was because the life of the imagination ignites in silence.  

All those years, I pitched a tent in my head toward a future of bookcases and love and joy. I lived in my head, which is why I still live too much of a life of the mind. 

The imagination is how we find our way toward cultural transformation. We who are writers, who work in publishing: we are threading our way toward stories that might change the world, but we need our cave time, our dream space. I plan to wander back to the place where the sky was built and find my pulse again. 

Kate Gale, We Live in Noise

I’m taking a break from the garden and from the news cycle and indulging in a different form of work: “Making Poems, Making Books,” a 4-day workshop with poets Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM. Yes, I’ll be making my own book–a small accordion book. There are about a dozen of us in the workshop, which is centered around the idea of color. Autumn in northern New Mexico offers a range of hues somewhat different from the post-equinox colors of eastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps that will inspire me. The last time I took a workshop here was in 1993, and I learned how to draw/paint in chalk pastels. A long time ago–and yet, walking around the dusty alfalfa field in the center of the Ranch’s office and dorm buildings, I felt completely at home. As if I’d been here just last year.

This week differs from the artist residency I attended at Joya-AiR in May because I’m part of a class getting instruction in how to make a hand-made book and also participating in feedback on our writing. Nonetheless, every afternoon there’s a nice stretch of time to work on solo projects, hike, drive to some nearby sites of interest, or nap. I will admit I have been doing more napping than I had hoped. The high altitude, dry air, walking more than usual (on rocky trails) and the emotional energy it takes to learn a new skill and meet new people have conspired to creep up on me some afternoons.

Ann E. Michael, With color

Although I work in many media, I sometimes think printmaking is the most satisfying. There’s something both elemental and almost magical about rubbing the back of the paper and seeing the image emerge – human beings have been doing similar things ever since the first artist painted their own hand and pressed it against the wall of a cave. I also love the ability to make copies of a work of art that are neither photographic nor digital, and not mechanical in any way; each one is its own small, slightly unique entity, on a carefully-made piece of paper that feels natural and of the earth.

Beth Adams, Making a Print

There is so much to talk about right now, stuff that i think would be helpful by sharing, but right now this minute I feel like a lightbulb without a shade, and to be honest I want to put the shade on again for a little while. And so I am choosing instead to write about this moment, where now the sky is beginning to clear to a perfect, cold blue, and a flock of pigeons is moving through that blue and I can hear their wing beats in the air, and a thin checkerboard of clouds is now appearing high up, and someone down the village is chopping wood and yes, scent of wood smoke now through the open window

and I am writing.

Wendy Pratt, Between Sleep and Awake

I spent the morning submitting poetry to various publications and their calls for this or that. I also wrote up an application for a $500 writing grant possibility. I’m not sure what my chances are of being awarded such a gift, but I certainly have some ideas on how to use it this winter. First, I’d like to order a Little Free Library for my front yard to assemble and install, only, I’d name mine the Little Free Poetry Library. I’d go wild in its kit design and colors, maybe even install a tiny disco ball from the interior ceiling. First and foremost, I’d love to stock it well with the work and words of northern poets before moving onto the equally beautiful work and words of poets from Outside. Such a Little Free Poetry Library would certainly require its own Instagram page, just to keep everyone abreast of stock. My neighborhood can be tricky to find without a proper street sign. […]

The sun bright in my eyes, I set writing aside when the afternoon beckoned me out to the yard. There I cut back my raspberry patch, pruned the Japanese Maple, and cleared the porch of summer plants and pots. I hauled four leaf bags of clippings out to the overflow and feel pretty good about this first step in putting the yard to bed for winter. And of course, the drive yielded all kinds of sights: Humpback whales, migrating swans, snow creeping closer on the mountains.

October delights. Enjoy every moment.

Kersten Christianson, October and All Its Finery

I am SO EXCITED to reveal the cover to my sixth poetry book, MYCOCOSMIC! It’s also available for preorder from Tupelo Press at this link, and it officially marches forth on March 4th, 2025. The cover art is from a series entitled “Radiant Void” by Pearl Cowan, whose other works you can also see on Instagram and at Good Naked Gallery. I’m in awe of Cowan’s weirdly lovely combination of the spiritual and the fungal. As I was processing changes in my life, especially my mother’s death and the terrible freedom it brought to tell the truth, I was reading in Merlyn Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and elsewhere about how hidden mycelial networks enable trees to talk to each other–connecting us all–as well how fungus eats decay, preventing death from overwhelming the world. That’s when my book about grief and change began to thread together, when I noted the mycelial motif threading through it like fungal hyphae.

Like mycelium, this whole project has been seething underground for a while, and what a miracle to see it fruit. I feel so happy about it–light of heart. Now my mission is to maintain that lightness throughout the labor of getting the word out, which always involves a mix of successes and failures. Rationally I think rejections and inattention are just part of the writing life, nothing personal, plus lord knows there’s this big corporate publishing machine doing its best to dominate media coverage. Yet poetry is a whole-heartedness business, so it’s not easy to stay logical. I hereby vow to do my best, not just about trying for my slice of that attention, but at maintaining grounded peace at the randomness of it all.

Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic cover & pre-order link!!!

When I (used to) read poems to audiences, obviously I hoped the reading would touch them in some way. But I often wondered why I could never remember the poems well enough to recite them. Partly my own empty-headedness, perhaps. (I’d have been a useless actor, too, because I’d have never been able to retain the lines in my head from rehearsal to rehearsal.) But also I think it was because once I had written them, once I had read them aloud to others, they had left me. And it was a process repeated through each reading. They were no longer mine and so reading them again was like visiting an old acquaintance or friend. The experience was sometimes warm, sometimes a little unnerving, sometimes disappointing.

Yet I publish the poems on here and transcribe them back into long-hand in a series of notebooks, it seems in a need to preserve them in their original state, as if to reclaim them. Occasionally I might flick through them – and reading them often brings me up short. I find myself asking ‘Did I write that?’ I don’t remember it.

Bob Mee, EACH POEM IS OF A MOMENT – AND IS SOON GONE

After a short round of D&D and dinner with friends today, I found myself alone for a few hours at home while J hosted his usual Saturday night karaoke. I was determined to push off my other writing work til tomorrow to get the wrangling mass of RUINPORN edited for the final time, as the design schedule is creeping up on me if I want to at least have things finalized by the end of November.  So much happens before the official layout begins, since it’s easier to make rearranging and changes in the text before I start sizing and formatting the final version for printing. I have gotten speedier with each new book, much in the same way of chapbooks. The bulk of any chap these days is edits and back-and-forth more than the initial design. There will also need to be 2-3 passes through before I finalize, then possibly 2 or more after I have a galley in hand. To avoid ordering and paying shipping for proofs, it’s best to have everything but minor tweaks in place now before I upload. I am using the same printer for a couple upcoming chap projects that needed different trim sizes than I can do at home (one, a very boxy 8 x 8 inches) and it’s much the same process, just in collab with the author. It’s not something I can afford to do with every chap, but it’s nice to have the option. I am also very close to having everything from GHOST BOX in hand to release both the e-version and the artist book/box project that will be available in the shop, possibly by Tuesday. There are some fun elements going in, including the above lil’ baby Ouija boards I found on Etsy that are so fun.  There is still more coming for #31daysofOctober over on IG, so look for the launch of it there. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/20/2024

I decided to do the tech things before the writing things this morning:  getting essays graded for my online classes, getting material submitted for seminary classes.  When I return to North Carolina tomorrow, I won’t have in-home internet.  My smart phone can function as a hotspot, but this is the week I discovered that unlimited data doesn’t mean a) unlimited data or b) unlimited hotspot.

So, once again, I spent time on the phone with Spectrum, my internet, home phone, and cell phone provider.  I have requested unlimited hot spot use, in light of the fact that Spectrum hasn’t restored my internet.  The very nice customer service person put in a help ticket.  Will it work?  I don’t know. […]

I’m trying not to feel stressed about all the work that needs to be done in the coming weeks.  Most of the time, I’m successful.  Of all the things that I thought might make my jam-packed schedule difficult this term, having a hurricane in the mountains of North Carolina was not one of those things.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tech Weariness

I haven’t been to Western NC since the storm—strangely, I was there just one week before it happened to participate in the Punch Bucket Literary festival—so I’ve been reckoning with the devastation there through supporting those closest to me. My sister’s family, yes, but also my husband who traveled with my brother-in-law and niece for one of the supplies-delivery trips and was shaken by the enormous and sudden changes to the landscape, and also my dear friend, the climate photographer and journalist Justin Cook, who has been traveling there to document the destruction and impact on lower-income residents of Swannanoa, NC. I understand through these loved ones that being there, on the ground, is heavy. 

I believe we should all be using our talents and other resources in whatever way we can to reduce both current and future climate harm, while also taking care of our own nervous systems as much as possible, since a regulated nervous system can be a huge gift to those in distress and those most impacted by climate disaster and injustice. For the past two weeks, in addition to supporting relief efforts financially and making phone calls on behalf of my sister’s family (to help find them temporary housing and schooling, etc.), I realized that the best gift I could give those in distress around me was to stay as grounded and regulated as possible. For me, that meant limiting my consumption of news and digital media, taking up an embroidery project to have at hand in the evenings, and baking bread and granola for overwhelmed loved ones who might need a snack. It meant being available to family and friends who needed to share about what they’d seen, to express their grief and rage. 

Krista, my other sister and partner at The School for Living Futures, and I have been talking a lot recently about our purpose with SfLF and what it means to be working for culture change when the future is so uncertain. In our biweekly gatherings to discuss the book Hospicing Modernity this fall, our group has been reckoning with Vanessa Andreotti’s observation about how our imaginations are limited by modernity so that it’s nearly impossible for us to imagine what life would look like outside of its thrall. What future can we work toward when we can’t see the future? How can we reconcile the sense of urgency we feel in finding solutions to the climate crisis, when both urgency and the idea of fix-all solutions to complex issues are manufactured by modernity itself, the same system that created the climate crisis? 

There are not, in fact, easy or single answers to these questions, but reading Hospicing Modernity has been helping us explore the questions more deeply. As a writer, I believe one of the gifts we artists can offer is our ability to bring our full senses to the present and remain open to possibility and uncertainty. As a curator and community-builder, I believe part of our work in this time of atomization, polarization, and fear is to practice radical hospitality: to welcome each other, break bread with each other, form and strengthen connection both within and beyond our habitual clans.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Troubled Regions

Almost everyone I’ve met and gotten to know in the literary world in the last 15 years I met because of The Rumpus. I started there when blogs were still the dominant form of online discourse about poetry—my initial gig was to write a weekly roundup column of what was happening in the posts and comment sections—and that quickly progressed into writing and editing book reviews and then to curating the National Poetry Month series and running the poetry book club. Back when I went to AWP, my name tag always had The Rumpus in the organization spot instead of the university where I taught. It’s been the biggest part of my professional identity for almost as long as I’ve had one.

The Rumpus has had some financial ups and downs over the years, with the ups never really being that far up. It’s always been tight financially because there’s no institutional support and no big donor behind the scenes. The people who make it happen do it because they love the site and the work and want it to continue to exist.

And while money is always a problem for any independent media outlet, it’s especially one for The Rumpus right now because the people who do the most work for it are still digging out from Hurricane Helene. The Rumpus is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina. I’m going to let Alyson tell you more about that part of things.

I don’t usually do this kind of thing in my newsletters, but this situation calls for an exception. Please forward this message to people you know who might be willing to help, and if you can afford it, please either become a supporting member of The Rumpus or make a donation to help the site recover and keep going into the future.

Brian Spears, It’s a relay, not a sprint

It’s interesting to note that Poetry London have closed to submissions for a period. According to the editor, Niall Campbell, there’ll be more info when we decide how best to proceed. 

Poetry London, of course, use Submittable, and have been inundated with poems over the last few months, in an experience that’s shared by many major journals. The current dynamic feels unsustainable, that’s for sure, if we don’t want to burn out our editors and embitter our poets.

Matthew Stewart, Poetry London submissions

Most literary magazines and competitions include mention of AI nowadays. It’s a rather loose term (I’ve seen it used for computer-assisted tasks that involve OuLiPo procedures, anagram generation, or randomness) but usually people have a chatgtp-like facility in mind, the computer producing the poem.

The process can be more collaborative than that though, the human keeping control. I’ve heard a leading mathematician say recently that he uses chatgtp to bounce ideas off of, like chatting to someone over coffee. I use Google in rather the same way, to see what happens if (say) I search for “sheep and chess”.

“AI Literary Review” is a new home for such work – “a journal of new poetry, created by humans, utilising artificial intelligence”. The poets describe the process that led to their poem. See Issue 1 (Sam Riviere, Harry Man, etc).

Tim Love, AI

One of my favourite places to browse for new poetry is Good Press, a workers cooperative in Glasgow who run the best online bookshop I know (each item is photographed with sample pages). I found Vivek Narayanan’s The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror there, as published by Hanuman Editions, a project which, according to its website, continues

the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Our books are designed as a contemporary homage to the playful kitsch and small, object-like format of the original, evoking the Hanuman Chalisa, a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold in the bazaars of India.

The Kuruntokai and Its Mirror is “a fractalized translation and reinterpretation of a classical work in the Tamil Sangam canon, an anthology of 401 short poems composed between 100 CE and 300 CE”. After (NYRB Poets), Narayanan’s epic reworking of the Ramayana, was one of my favourite books of 2022. It’s fascinating to see him working with lyric miniatures now, translating and improvising across playing-card-sized pages on which gapped words “chank shell beads on a string”. The “close-fitting translations” are on the left-hand page, with Narayanan’s improvisations on the right.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #23: Good Stiff Ink

“Signs, Music” is a tender, compassionate look at fatherhood and the arrival of a new baby. The poem’s speaker explores connection with someone so dependent, fatherly concerns, the worry about communication and how his own father might or might not influence the speaker’s attitude and approach towards being a father. Refreshingly it queries the new father’s sense of self, now a couple have become a family and what new fatherhood might mean in terms of work and relationship with the child’s mother. Although she is not the focus, she is acknowledged and appreciated. “Signs, Music” strives to give a voice to those doubts and rewards of parenthood.

Emma Lee, “Signs, Music” Raymond Antrobus (Picador Poetry) – book review

I love this chapbook by Bellingham poet and printmaker Sheila Sondik. I read it before publication and wrote one of the cover blurbs. I read it again during the Sealey Challenge in August. And again, today. New delights and discoveries each time.

“Duff” is the fungi and decomposing leaves and other detritus that sifts to the forest floor, that stuff you scuff through when you walk on wooded trails. The other term you need to understand in order to make your way through these poems is “Golden Shovel,” a poetic form invented by Terrence Hayes in which the last word of each line is taken from a single line of poetry by another poet. Lighting Up the Duff perfectly and playfully marries these two ideas, while paying tribute to Sondik’s influences: Linda Pastan, Kenneth Rexroth, George Oppen, Philip Levine, Maxine Kumin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Kaufman, William Carlos Williams, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy.

Bethany Reid, Sheila Sondik’s LIGHTING UP THE DUFF

I was lucky enough to read James McConachie’s first collection from Black Bough Poetry Press before it was launched, and to record some of my impressions. Here they are.

It is extraordinary, an earthy, sun-drenched tour-de-force, peppered with the language of his home in rural northern Spain.

He takes the reader to remote wooded mountains, and brings us so close to animals, wild and tame, that we feel their hot breath.

Beyond his breathtaking descriptive powers, James McConachie has an unerring ability to unveil brutal injustice, to present us with human hurts, past and present, with a kind of poetic rage that is always finely controlled. This is a mountain storm of a collection. I heartily recommend it.

In some ways, though, it was a bittersweet read for me. My mother lived in Spain, at the foot of a mountain, for the last twenty years of her life, though she was far south of where James lives. But the language he uses, the pungent descriptions of countryside and rural Spanish life touch me in a raw place, of affection mixed with grief.

Lesley Curwen, ‘Consolamentum’ by James McConachie

The poet stands inside the poem.
The poet marches inside the poem.
Waves a flag. Punches a fist.

Oh, that pounding of the podium.
Oh, that insistence, that crescendo.

That hush.

The poem itself is made of fragile words.
Like a cloud. Good only for one rain.
But the poet imagines a whole monsoon.
A flood myth. An ark. A rebirthing.
Two by Two. A rekindling.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The eighth poem is wounded

Rob Taylor: Quiet Night Think brings together poems and essays, which felt like a rarity in Canadian publishing until very recently (in addition to yours, new titles by Jonina Kirton, Nick Thran and Wanda-John Kehewin all mix the two). Why did you choose to bring the two together? 

Gillian Sze: I intended to write a book of essays, but, in the end, I found an important relationship between those pieces and the poems I was writing during that same period. So much of Quiet Night Think is about fragmentation—across identities, languages, times—and it made sense to embrace those fissures and leaps between genres. I think the point of the hybrid form was to give readers that same sense of halting, slowing, and quickening that I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. The winding of the sentence, the hiccups of the verse.

RT: Did you receive any resistance from your publisher about mixing genres in this way? 

GS: No. I’ve worked with Michael Holmes at ECW on two other books, and he has always been supportive. Panicle, for example, also has a bit of everything: prose poems, long poems, creative translations, sketches… Quiet Night Think seemed like a natural place to go in our writer/editor relationship. 

RT: In the book’s titular essay you quote William Carlos Williams, who defined a poem as “a thing made up of… words and the spaces between them.” Later in the book, you provide your father’s counterpoint: looking at your MA thesis of poems (and all the space around each poem), he declared “There’s nothing here – it’s empty!” Throughout the book, you embrace the “space between”—between words, between languages, between cultures. It’s even right there on the cover: those big gaps between each of the words in the title! 

At the same time, your move towards essays feels like a filling in of that space, that “emptiness,” which bridges a gap between your father’s expectations and your own. Was that part of your motivation towards non-fiction? Does it allow you to navigate, or fill in, the spaces between languages and cultures?

GS: I certainly felt more exposed when I was writing the essays. Even on the page, the essay appears as solid blocks of text. I felt like there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t disappear into thin air. The words string along into sentences. The research is revealed. The history is told. In that sense, I think the essay was useful for me. It was a form that best suited the telling of all these threads: history, research, and memory.

I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way.

Rob Taylor, Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze

I Don’t Know, is featured in Gallery 2 in my second full poetry collection, Welcome to the Museum of a Life. This gallery is a gallery of the unspoken which seems fitting for a poem which is about the grief I experienced when my Nan died.

I thought of it as a quiet, contemplative poem when I selected it for publication and was surprised and pleased when both Julie Stevens and Susan Richardson engaged with it shortly after the book was released.

The poem began in a workshop with Kim Addonizio. When I become fully present in a writing workshop it’s as if my pen is conducting my thoughts onto the page. I think quite fast during this process and enjoy watching the words flow and fill the lines. I also have moments of just being and waiting, and this helps me to stay in the moment and see what comes next. It is as if my brain is scanning my memories and thoughts, and filtering for the important bits.

Drop-in by Sue Finch (Nigel Kent)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” […]

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. 

rob mclennan, Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone

I will be reading from a second experimental sequence of my own poems at the launch reading for Steve Ely’s anthology called Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press). My poems, a sequence called Olga Liking Sunflowers, roam through the pandemic experience, the work of David Jones, my local landscape and the delights (or otherwise) of social media. Contributors were encouraged to generate visionary responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene in the context of landscapes important to them. I will be reading alongside Steve, Jill Abram (who is organising the London launch for the book), as well as Katy Evans-Bush, JP Seabright, Anita Pati, and Caroline Maldonado. Steve Ely is also reading from his book Orasaigh, a collaboration between Steve and photographer Michael Faint, inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale.

Martyn Crucefix, A Run of Readings in October/November

I admit to a steadily creeping sense of fuckit with regard to this effort toward poetry, toward “being a poet,” my so-called life in poetry. I’ve worked hard at it. I liked poetry as a kid, wrote a bit in college although not much nor with any seriousness, took it on in my 30’s settling into a serious autodidactic study, got my MFA at — what? — 50? I like what I’ve written, am still interested in it, think I’ve done good work. But — I mean, AND — I wonder about this desire to be heard. I wonder how much that desire is born of old wounds from growing up in a situation in which being quiet was the safest way to be. I admire the work I’ve done toward poetry, in poetry, admire the steady attention I’ve given it. I’m happy with the attention I’ve gotten, but wonder at this sense that it’s not enough. Never enough? I don’t know. I don’t trust the desire. But I do trust the work. But I find I’m not so interested in doing the work any more. Is that born of frustrated desire, or of a natural shift? I don’t know. But something about this poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly got me thinking along these lines. Note its title: “The Leaving.”

Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work often gives me The Shivers. She speaks out of some deep and strange place, as if of dreams or the deep chasms of the oracle. This poem is on the lighter spectrum of her work, the narrator self-directed and the feeling one of forward, confident movement than of inching slowly through mystery, or standing struck by strangeness. Although there is a bit of all of that. And, of course, life itself is a bit of all of that.

I find this poem an antidote to my stuck feeling, although I don’t know whether I’m feeling urged toward renewing my work in poetry or toward some other work entirely. There are things to discover in all directions, I guess, is what the poem is telling me. That making effort against odds, within doubts is rewarded, sometimes strangely. Surprises everywhere as light changes with every passing moment, as a bell speaks to silence and the echo and the waiting for the next toll.

Marilyn McCabe, and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses

Like most shadows coming from eastern Europe, mine is furtive and mischievous. An impish shadow, filled with shadow thoughts. I suspect some of these thoughts are meant to erase mine and I don’t know how to fight them. Shadow is way braver and more strategic than I am, which she constantly tells me in her own shadow language. This might be enough for anyone else to turn their back on shadow, except. Like me, she loves trees and dogs. The smell of lilac and quince. The sunset. And the rain. […]

Shadow doesn’t cut corners. 
        It bends them like the pages of a book.
Like the tin roof of a hive.
It crumples them in her fists like rogue poems.
        Like bees that have outrun their usefulness.

Romana Iorga, What I Learned About Shadow

So today’s post is going to be a little trip down memory lane, as we go back to 2011, when I was still working full time as a peripatetic brass teacher for Cumbria Music Service. I’d just finished a day’s teaching in a primary school in Barrow where the whole of Key Stage 2 learnt to play an instrument. All the kids had just left, and I was packing up my trumpet in a state of exhaustion, probably with my ears ringing from the sound of thirty Year 3 children playing the cornet, when I got a phone call from Ann Sansom, one of the editors at The Poetry Business.

At first I thought Ann was a double glazing salesman, but when it became clear that she wasn’t, that she was in fact, ringing to tell me I’d won the pamphlet competition, I don’t remember what I said in reply. y ordinary life, which had become predictable in so many ways with the rhythm of the school year and the repetition of teaching, the starting again each year with a new class – suddenly it was as if a bolt of lightning had shot through all of it and changed everything. As I looked around the classroom, I felt so happy. It was as if everything was bathed in a kind of strange buttery glow, as if that lightning bolt had left a kind of afterimage behind itself.

It was my third time entering the competition, and though I hadn’t got anywhere the previous two times, I’d used each disappointment as learning, and replaced and revised the poems in the pamphlet. The year before, my best friend David Tait had won the competition with his pamphlet Love’s Loose Ends. We sent each other poems constantly during those days. I knew his pamphlet almost as well as I knew mine.

Before David’s pamphlet won the competition, he referred to it by its title. I remember at the time realising that this pamphlet was an object, a real made thing already, that David wasn’t waiting for permission or acceptance. The magic of naming it and calling it by its name had called it into being in the world.

I remember being honest with myself and realising that my pamphlet was not ready and that was why it wasn’t chosen. I wasn’t calling it by name, it was too shimmery, too ghostly in my mind. I resolved to start and went around for another year whilst I worked on it, calling it by name, calling it into existence, as if it was a dog that needed to be trained. It slowly assembled itself in my own mind, and then in the space between me and the people I talked to about it, and that act made it solidify, firstly in my own mind, and then in the minds of those around me who I talked to about it, and then I entered it again into the competition, and this time it won.

Kim Moore, Putting together a pamphlet (1)

I haven’t cracked open Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert in ages. But I’ve been thinking about “art as a way of life” for well, a very long time. (Thus the category “Live like an artist.”) As a young person writing, I used to yearn, I mean, fuckingyearn, to be a full time writer/artist/maker/whatever. But I’ve also never wanted to write those things (or tbh had the ability to write those things) that would be popular enough to allow that even for intervals. I’ve always known I would have to fit my “live like an artist” bit into other streams of employment. Okay, all this to quote from page 6 of Gilbert’s book, where she talks about the importance of Jack Gilbert in her life, a man she never met. (He died in 2012). They shared a last name (though they’re unrelated), and she held the same job and sat in the same office after he did. You might know his poem “A Brief for the Defense,” as it’s been widely quoted from time to time.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

I think it’s a different poem these days which isn’t a bad thing.

Elizabeth Gilbert writes that it was said “he had seemed not quite of this world.” “He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged [his students] to do the same. He didn’t so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why, because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of the world.” And this, to do this, required utmost courage, utmost bravery.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – The Why

I left college with my English degree and some experience at harsh workshopping and revising poetry. I started teaching high school English. And slowly, slowly, writing poetry faded because who did I know who was writing? Who would I talk with? Who would I exchange work with? How would I find out, with my three different high school teaching gigs to support my then-husband’s nursing school, that there were exciting new books of poetry out?

In the late 90s, the internet saved me. Much maligned, sometimes for legitimate reasons, the internet saved me. I could find poetry books. I could read reviews. I could dip my toe into a burgeoning poetry culture without having to live in a big city. Fast forward nearly thirty years, it’s possible for me to be “social media friends” with extremely successful poets. I can watch their readings over Zoom. My low-residency MFA program gave me the opportunity to tap into a whole community of writers with whom I stay in touch via email and social media. The internet allows the far-flung writers of Alaska to celebrate our new Alaska State Writer, Vera Starbard, and support each other’s book launches.

But I will tell you that poetry desert of my childhood and 20s into my 30s, has left me far behind. Coupled with living in a beautiful, but completely off the writing circuit place and the fact that I am not part of academia, I have made my peace with the idea that my work will find its readers slowly. That publishing will be an uphill climb. That I will not be invited to teach at out-of-state conference or in-person readings. That I will gratefully spend my life nurturing other writers (especially Alaskan writers) in a way that I did not receive until I was in my forties. 

But this is not for complaining, this is for celebrating! Next time you think of signing out of social media forever (which I have from the wicked platform that is now filled with horrible people), next time you want to complain about keeping up your Substack newsletter or your website, remember that these tools connect us in ways that weren’t possible except for those in academia or in big cities. Rejoice in all the weird little online eddies and nooks where writers gather. Take some time to lift up books you’ve read and authors you admire. Not just the famous ones, not just your real-life friends, but also the quirky poet whose work you ran into because someone else lifted it. Be part of that beautiful community that is growing larger and larger that you might not ever have known about except for that @#$! internet. 

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Thinking of the writing community

My friend Rachel Bunting and I met through poetry, though our friendship extends well beyond the literary at this point. We have both, over the years, helped as readers and editors for other journals, and we have both run a reading series. So when she said, “What do you think about starting a new journal?” I didn’t hesitate. I said YES.

Will it be a lot of work? YES. Will it be just the two of us on the masthead to keep the process streamlined? YES. Will it help us shine a spotlight on writers and artists whose work we enjoy? YES. […]

Right now, the website is live at asteralesjournal.com. You can find a list of Issue One contributors as well as sub guidelines (which will open in January) and a little about each of us as editors.

Donna Vorreyer, A New Sensation

The best donut in a box of store-bought donuts
is not glazed but plain, like a plain-spoken poem.

In the farmer’s market, the best donut is the one
which doesn’t smell like apple cider or pumpkin

spice. It’s the one that isn’t dusted with sanding
sugar or a cinnamon-cardamom mix. If it’s sweet,

its sweetness lingers like the space where a hole
has been made in something that used to be

whole.

Luisa A. Igloria, Shape and Substance

柿吊し終り井水あたたかく　波多野爽波

kaki tsurushiowari imizu atatakaku

            I finish hanging

            persimmons to dry

            the well water’s warmth     

                                                            Soha Hatano

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

Fay’s Note:  Soha Hatano (1923-1991)

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (October 15, 2024)

]]> 68583 Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 28 https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/07/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-28/ Mon, 15 Jul 2024 21:05:30 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=67434 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).

This week: the seeds of books, glamour and poverty, a gull funeral, the green of geckos, and more. Enjoy.

It’s summertime and the writing is all the sweeter. In fact, new poems, reading, and all the writing endeavors are pushing up fireweed.

When I last blogged, it was February. Really? Really. How can that be? I had just submitted then an application for a Jenni House Residency. I hit send on Valentine’s Day evening, about a minute before deadline. I had my nose in bell hooks’ book, All About Love, and I hit send. It was dark, snowy, and even though there were still a few months left in the dumpster fire of a school year (and it was a doozy), I clearly was dreaming of warmer times ahead.

Fast forward to July, and I’m waking up in a sublet apartment in an old Cold War DEW-line station, rattling around in a kitchen that’s not mine to boil water in a pot (no kettle to be found) for Yukon blend coffee. When finished, I’ll drive into Whitehorse to Shipyards Park and open up the Chambers House for the day, first the door, then windows, and the shutters. I’ll switch on the twinkle lights, add mint and orange essential oils to the stink pot, and write. Yes, this is the Jenni House Residency that I applied for in February and was granted, and I am so grateful and giddy to be here for the month of July.

Kersten Christianson, Writing from Yukon

Hello from Ann Arbor. I’ve been here for eight weeks and have four more to go. Unlike last summer, a heat wave sent temperatures well into the 90s and taxed the window unit AC in my apartment. That coupled with storms and power outages has made it seem more like Atlanta weather. 

I’ve been doing the day job, exploring Ann Arbor, making forays into Detroit (including the beautifully restored Michigan Central Station, pictured), and also quietly starting to work on the fourth Venus novel, expanding the trilogy into a tetralogy. I’ve got a rough outline of the novel, more detailed outlines of specific chapters, and I’ve started going back through the first four chapters I’ve already written. 

While preparing more material for my archive at the Georgia State University Library, I came across my original treatment for Remain In Light. This dates back to the late 1990s or 00s when my then-agent Roslyn Targ told me to get cracking on a sequel because she was certain Conquering Venus was going to be a big hit. Then 9/11 happened. You can actually read more about this in a new interview I did with ShoutOut Atlanta last month to celebrate the publication of Wonder & Wreckage.

The original treatment for Remain In Light is vastly different than the book that was published, but there are some tasty ideas and scenes in there that I’m going to bring over into the fourth novel. Poet/Assassin Juliette Lacombe (introduced in Leaving Paris) is the main protagonist, but Diane is there and you’ll see what has become of Irene, Martin, and Christian, too. 

Collin Kelley, Hot Michigan Summer

This was the place where everything really started for me. I came on a course here in 2007. The tutors were Nigel Jenkins and Sarah Kennedy. In those days, participants worked to create an anthology to take home at the end of the week. I’ve just dug mine out to have a look at what I was working on.

I’ve got four poems in the anthology – three I can see now are sketches for what would become All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021) nearly fifteen years later. A love poem, a poem about a terrible ex-boyfriend and an elegy for a male friend who’d died that year. The fourth poem is an attempt at a sonnet called “Trumpet”. In that poem, I’m trying to write about the complicated process I was going through of leaving my trumpet behind, of wrestling with performance anxiety, of realising being a musician was not something I wanted to dedicate my life to anymore. The poem fails in its attempt to capture all of this – but what I was trying to write about became, fifteen years later a whole book What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop, 2022).

The seeds of whole books were in those poems – and that both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me. To go on a residential course for a week, to take a week out of your life, to commit the finances to do that – magic can happen during those weeks – but sometimes the magic doesn’t show itself for years, or if you’re lucky, the magic does show itself and then keeps growing for years afterwards.

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. a poem by Olivia Tuck

What a whirlwind week or two. The last time I spoke to you I was just getting ready to head to London for the Harper Collins Author Party at the V&A. It did not disappoint. It was beautiful, full of light and cocktails and speeches and writers, so many authors gathered to celebrate. I met my agent for the first time in person, and my team at Borough Press who have brought The Ghost Lake into the world. These are the moments that MUST be celebrated, the moments of making it, when all the lonely hours and isolation and compromise finally pay off.

On my return, a box had arrived. The books themselves. I placed them on my kitchen table and left them there, wondering how to approach the anxiety. Then a photo came up on my iPhone that showed me, four years ago, tentatively setting out and up to Seamer Beacon, and a bronze age cemetery complex near my home, finding my connection points and the idea for The Ghost Lake forming, the idea for the pilgrimage to self, forming.

Here it is then, the next journey marker, the next gateway through which the book has passed. Next stop: launch day.

In stark contrast to the excitement and glamour of the last couple of weeks, this has been my worst month work wise as I’ve needed to devote time to work I won’t be paid for for a while. The eternal circle of being freelance, of being an author is that some months you will get paid for two or three jobs at once, and some months you will get paid for none. I made less than £4 an hour this month. I’m hoping that as an average it will work out a little better, but I’m not sure I’m quite making minimum wage this year.

Wendy Pratt, Two Sides to the Author Life

Because of my daughters, I completely restructured my Ph.D. I chose advisors who were parents (two of them women who had children while in graduate school). I was in 19th century American literature studies; the centerpiece of my dissertation was Nathaniel Hawthorne, but other chapters included two women authors who remained childless, a woman author who abandoned her children, and a woman author whose only child died young. Realizing this, I added an introductory chapter on Anne Bradstreet — if AB could get up early in the morning, given her eight children, “stealing the hours from household duties,” and write, then surely I, with my paltry two, could get up early and write. For years a version of “shehad8” was my computer password.

When did I write? I have a vivid memory of sitting in an outdoor cafe with two babies asleep in the stroller beside me while I worked on my Bradstreet chapter. I discovered that if I took them for a drive they would fall asleep and I could pull the car over and write.

Bethany Reid, Random thoughts about daughters

As a nearly 70 year old daughter of a 90 year old woman is there a time when I might stop feeling like a daughter? And what would that imply? In between long days on the allotment when the sun’s out, one of them a 10 hour stretch, which was a stretch and re-set, I began to respond to Girl, a prose poem by Jamaica Kincaid. 

It shocked me when I first read it, but then I re-read and re-read and began to understand its rhythms, the depths it reaches in the relationship between a mother and daughter, the mother’s fear, the daughter’s rebellions, the information a mother must pass on, the necessary bluntness. 

Jackie Wills, Girl, daughter, Uncertain Futures

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.

The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Art in the Light of Conscience (public library) — the wonderful essay collection that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to ideas.

Living in a political atmosphere that banished the divine from human life — the same state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria — Tsvetaeva writes with an eye to the prayerful poems of her beloved Rilke:

What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays (except Rilke’s… I know of none), it is not because we don’t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to — there is something and there is someone — but because we haven’t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we’ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.

A century later, in the atmosphere of Western consumer capitalism with its cult of the self, it is even more countercultural to speak about the soul — perhaps the last human holdout against commodification, too private and furtive to be turned into a marketable data point. And yet if art is what we make to save ourselves, to cotton the shock of living, then the soul is the only studio we have.

Maria Popova, Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine

You could say the sunflower
is one of my emblems—for how it tracks
a brighter beacon across the skies
through the day, for how it angles its head
toward some hidden aspiration.
There is another, smaller flower:
bright yellow and orange, but broom-
brittle. Women string them into garlands
and sell them as a kind of amulet
against time. Their name, the echo
of promises made by lovers. Or a life
sentence—how faithfulness ordained
can become the fate the flower
petals into, that roots it to the ground.

Luisa A. Igloria, Maps

Sometimes a single word is hard to separate from the context in which we first encountered it. In our private linguistic landscape, a word can remain linked all our lives to a particular book, or person, or place. Perhaps this is most common in a second (or third, or fourth) language: we tend to feel differently about words we have consciously acquired, which happens more often in a second language. Whenever someone says zut! — quite a common if perhaps slightly dated French expression for damn! — I still think, every time, of the character Zoot (so named because this was the only bit of French he every mastered) in a sad and excellent children’s book called One Green Leaf published in the 1980s by Jean Ure. And because I read almost nothing but Proust for the best part of a year not long after we moved to France, I associate an awful lot of actually perfectly ordinary French words and expressions with his distinctive style and atmosphere, which lends a strange and rather intoxicating effect to everyday conversation. (Though if anyone else is tempted to learn-French-from-Proust I can report that it also tends to lard your vocabulary with some pretty obsolete items, leading to baffled expressions in the boulangerie.)

Victoria Moul, On a single word

the ocean has always been just
a mania away for me. i remember
parking my car in jersey once just
to look for jellyfish, i found none
but i did find a funeral the gulls were having.
in my religion, a parking lot is always
a holy space. a shrine to longing.
& waiting. a stolen mouth.

Robin Gow, 7/10

This morning herring gulls are calling in the scent of salt on a sea breeze. It is fresh with floral elements and the sun promises heat.

Alt text provides an accurate description of this week’s photo: A red clock with white numbers. I say it is the actual clock that played a part in inspiring one of my recent poems.

The poem is called ‘The Clock Ticks Louder Now’ and it was selected by Alan Parry for the inaugural episode of The Coffeehouse Podcast. I do love being on a podcast. Alan reads the poem beautifully and it was wonderful to listen to it featured there as one of the ten poems. I loved the fact that the episode made the perfect accompaniment to a lazy breakfast of tea and toast.

Sue Finch, The Clock Ticks Louder Now

Monsoon is summer’s coming of age story:
how June becomes December. Rain is its
thoroughfare, its river Styx, its parched
desert, which you cross because something

waits on the other side. Rain is the solid
form of memory.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Except one July, at dawn

Some might see the Azores, islands aboriginal and tending back to pasture green, as a perfect chance to return to the garden.  The undeniable lushness, the backing track of cooing doves, the garden both arid for grapes and tropical for papayas.  

But green is so restrictive!  Here in Terceira, there is an excess of what human eye, ear and skin can take in.  A more updated model would be a collage of a garden in constant becoming, where nothing is excluded from the party.  

For what of porous black lava, off-black and red and gray as open sockets; what of the wandering mist in interior moonscapes, the headlike blooms on slim tall stalks?  What of the green of geckos that rush through time like toy dinosaurs?  What about white-washed cottages that speed behind us like white notes on a black page?

Jill Pearlman, Beyond the Green Azores Garden

I like walking barefoot on the beach
even though the sky is always out of reach
the seals stay in the blue green below
and never whisper what they know
as the tide gives then takes away
the transient land on which you cannot stay

Paul Tobin, PERFECT IMPERFECTION

To kick off E.’s vacation, I took him to the wellness center at the nearby beach hotel. There are saunas and a cold pool, a swimming pool and jacuzzi. The space is warm. When you lounge in a chair with your eyes closed, you can image it’s evening, somewhere in the Canaries, with the white noise of the pool rather than the softly grumbling sea.

The wall facing the sea is glass from pool to ceiling. It’s a kind of triptych: tall panes of glass. To the left is a bucolic and nautical scene, far enough in the distance to look more like a painting than reality.

The center window frames the granite that juts out of the dunes to block the view of the sea. Between the granite and the window are the moss-covered remains of a Nazi fortification. I’m not certain, but it seems to be some kind of gun turret—maybe 3 meters in diameter.

The window that we “read” last—to the right—is a view of the shore. People are walking their dogs. Kids are running. Someone is kitesurfing. I know that, out of sight, there are a few surfers in wetsuits, and joggers like we had been just a few minutes earlier, dodging dead, orange jellyfish rimmed with white foam.

The triptych struck me as ways to view the world, with even attention to idealism, past hurts, and the complex present.

I just wish the complex present was more than 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ren Powell, Vacation

It was super-hot for our holidays, so we mostly hid indoors and ate homemade cherry frozen yogurt, but we went to the Willows Lodge for our anniversary (blessedly well-air-conditioned) and had cocktails and salads (too hot for anything but that and ice cream!) We walked in the small garden only after it got dark, checking out the blooms and visiting their cute pair of pot-bellied pigs. […]

I don’t usually do much political blogging here—I try to stick to the writing life and living with disability and chronic illness, as well as pictures of my (mostly Pacific Northwest) surroundings. I can understand how people feel confusion, anger, frustration, and disenfranchisement with America and its systems right now. I try not to give into despair even in seemingly endless lists of end-times events.

Perhaps focusing on small beauties in the best thing to do. Not to squeeze our eyes and ears shut, but to open them wider – to the wider world around us, not just the news that social media and television scream at us in increasingly alarming tones. To the person who lives across from us, to the birds and flowers, to the cherries at the farm stand or the friend who needs a visit who’s been in the hospital, or the relative across the country who’s been fighting with cancer.  Because we are not powerless, though at times we can feel that way. We can do small kindnesses, donate to charities we believe in, treat each other with understanding. Hug our cats and our loved ones. Tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us, but in the waiting, we get to decide what we focus on, what we spend our energy on, what we place into timelines or gardens.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, 30th Anniversaries, Birthday Celebrations, Small Beauties, Losses, and American Troubles

After The Swimmers, I read Grief is for People, by Sloane Crosley, checked out from the library at the same time, and also the right book for the right moment. She’s writing about randomly connecting the loss (by theft via home invasion) of some jewelry and the loss (by suicide) of a dear friend. “Grief is for people, not things,” she says early on in the book, but the connection remains understandable all the way through. She does some risky things–her own detective work, going to Australia to jump off a cliff–but they make perfect sense, too. I really liked her prose style, and will seek out her fiction and essays.

Did these two books suddenly release me? I haven’t been writing much lately, nor submitting poems, but this weekend I finished revising a short play and submitted it and also sent 4 poems to a contest. By chance, these submissions both had deadlines days away. Maybe not by chance? Have I become a procrastinator, motivated mainly by deadlines? Or was I inspired by Spenser Davis, who gave a lively, funny, and informative talk about playwriting at Heartland Theatre on Thursday night?

Kathleen Kirk, Grief is for People

The wooden chimes clatter
like a child hitting sticks, then stop.

They’ve tangled, as if pulling arms to chest,
leave the wind itself to alert the house.

Wind more powerful than chimes can sing
blows the watering bucket past my window.

Ellen Roberts Young, Poem

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, The Transparent Body, came out in the Wesleyan New Poets series in 1989, while my second, God in Her Ruffled Dress, came out from the L.A.-based publishing collective What Books Press in late 2023. That 34-year gap made the two books feel significantly different. I went from young poet to way older, indie singer-poet-songwriter who still wrote poetry for the page. My first gave me joy, jitters, and relief at a stamp of legitimacy as poet. And satisfaction that what I envisioned, after what felt like a long slog of submitting the manuscript, came to pass. As it turns out, I had no idea what a long slog really was. Though I kept writing poems and seeing them published in journals and anthologies, and submitting my evolving poetry manuscripts, by the time my second book came out, my focus had shifted a great deal to the music world, as I had released seven full-length albums since 1999 while the music scene itself kept shifting (indies pouring into the music marketplace, CDs, mp3s, streaming, pandemic) and I had practically given up hope of publishing a second poetry book. With the new book, I feel as if I’ve parachuted back into a poetry scene that sure looks different in 2024 – essentially, much more academic, more award-focused, and with many more poets. But I appreciate the relative collegiality of poetry publishing and its focus on art versus commerce. It’s easier than the music scene to navigate, at least for me. As for my work, it’s wider-ranging, newly including inspiration from music and vocalizing and newly reflecting the interests and revelations from studying clairvoyant reading and healing and then launching a career in 1993 as a professional psychic reader. […]

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 dislike poetry that wears on its sleeve a concern with theory of any kind. I’ve been a socialist feminist lefty since I was a young teen, and that was many decades ago, so I find myself rather bored by the repetition of political theoretical concerns that I’ve been reading and thinking about for so long. By all means be faithful to your journey in all its dimensions, but make it new, concrete, and musical, and not self-indulgently intellectual even when you’re thinking through it.  My current questions seem to be remarkably of a piece with my initial questions, having to do with how to be both a body and a spirit and how to keep growing as myself. But that sounds so reductive and simple. I guess I still follow William Carlos Williams’ “no idea but in things,” meaning honor the concrete image, to which I would add, “Does it sing?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa B (rob mclennan)

Is our job seeing? Is it seeing how others see? How do you as an artist see? How is your seeing unique? What are the limitations and constraints? How could you see better? What is your relationship with clarity? with blur? What is your night vision like? Your day vision? How will you get others to see what you see or want them to see? How do you leave room for others to see?

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Thinking About Seeing

‘inspiration has to find you working’
the ideas would not have come
if I had not first made the book

it works from the middle outwards
square works better than narrow
we’re still inspiring each other

Ama Bolton, ABCD July 2024

All the world belongs to this cat, as it does too to the cardinal, who flings itself from tree to bush and off across the neighbor’s roof. Poor human me must stick to sidewalks, so aware am I of trespass. When the cat darts catty corner across the yard to hop the fence, the dark between the forsythia and the house hides its progress; I pace the square of the block in slant light of early morning for all the eyes to see.

Imagine if of a morning a neighbor found me lolling on her deck eyeing the undergrowth. Or what they would think if I suddenly took off in flight right over the roof.

The possibility of ordinary miracles is what I’m thinking about, of the everyday magic of a cat’s bum in the morning. The daily flight of imagination. Can you imagine not imagining? Unimaginable. I probably imagine something every day but day after day don’t realize it.

Marilyn McCabe, As I step past a wall of blue

The ugly thing is winging its way to a laboratory somewhere for inspection & definition. I’ve always been solidly in the “expect the best” camp so I am expecting it to be benign. I’m putting this out into the universe because….well, I don’t know why except maybe there’s a little tiny smidge of “the worst” hanging around I need to kick out of my head.

Lately, I’ve been reading a poem from 3 books of poetry every morning. (More on that in a later post.) This morning I read the poem “Life on Earth” from the book Life on Earth by the great Dorianne Laux. It begins:

The odds are we should never have been born. Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be exact. Only one among the 250 million released in a flood of semen that glides like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles of possible people, one of whom may or may not be you…

And it ends:

When you think you might be through with this body and soul, look down at an anthill or up at the stars, remember your gambler chances, the bounty of good luck you were born for.

And I think I was meant to read this poem on this day-after. Doesn’t it put everything in perspective?

Charlotte Hamrick, Ugly Things & Beautiful Things

Tico/Tica is a Spanish language suffix that denotes affection. It basically means, affectionately, “little one,” or “sweetie pie.” The way in English we sometimes add y at the ends of words to make them more precious, so mom becomes Mommy, and dog becomes doggy. In Spanish the way you do this is by adding the suffix Tico or Tica. Native Costa Ricans add the suffix “tica” and “tico” to everything, including themselves. And so the name stuck. […]

It’s the kind of thing that a language nerd or a poet like me would glom onto. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.

I know it sounds silly – calling everything by its diminutive, affectionate name, but in a world that is so dehumanizing and distancing, I find it charming, restorative even. It puts me in mind of what I’ve been reading from Robin Wall Kimmer who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. (You can listen to a talk with her about the book here.)

How people of various Native American tribes never used to refer to the plants or animals as “it,” but instead referred to them as “he,” and “she.” It shows respect for the elements of the world. […]

I’d imagine that like with any other idiom, people eventually start to gloss over it. They forget what it means or why they use it. But I’d like to think the intention behind the word remains. Maybe on some less than conscious level people feel more affectionate towards one another, like they belong to one another, like they are family. Not just the people, but also the plants and animals too. […]

To try to live a more Pura Vida life, I try it on for size myself. I go for walks down the sweet little road, look at the sweet little birds, sit at the restaurant and look over that sweet little ocean, which is becoming more and more familiar to me each week. I ask the sweet little waiter if I can have a sweet little cup of coffee and when he brings it to me I drink it slowly. Sweet mother coffee, nourishing me and waking me up to this adorable, adorable world.

Tresha Faye Haefner, How Costa Ricans Make Everyone Feel at Home

a walk seaward
caught in a repeating loop
everlasting life

Jim Young [no title]
]]> 67434 Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 8 https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/02/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-8/ Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:25:50 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=66183 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack.

This week: active hope, the anti-ship of Theseus, knocking the brain off its pedestal, smutty Persephone poems, slow stitching, and much more. Enjoy.

I spent time today sitting with noise — the husband noises, the mice in the ceiling, the cluster flies bopping against the lampshade, and I walked alongside the river today, its noisy winter fluster that, once my path turned away from it, was masked by the fumpswish of my boots in ankle-deep wet snow. I heard, and felt as well, the rumble of a truck shifting gears on the road. I spent time in the silences — woods quiet of birds, windless, the house empty for a little while, even of mice. I took it all in like nourishment, to try to remind myself to be fed.

Marilyn McCabe, Our echoing lives

The full-length debut by Chicago-based poet Willie Lin, following the chapbooks Lesser Birds of Paradise (MIEL) and Instructions for Folding (Northwestern University Press), is conversations among stones (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023), a collection of meditative lyrics composed in clear narratives with direct purpose. “A knife pares to learn what is flesh.” the two-line poem “Dear” offers, “What is flesh.” There’s a remarkable way Lin’s poems unfold, unfurl and slowly reveal, offering an intriguing patience, pause and cadence. “The things in my life / I remember with perfect clarity:,” she writes, but I’d offer that these poems themselves are wonderful examples of that “perfect clarity” she suggests, as Lin composes first-person intimacies of thought and narrative that work to comprehend the world, both internal and external, and how one finds and secures one’s place. There’s a lot of considering within these poems, and a lot to consider. “Now when the wind comes,” she writes, to open the poem “Brief History of Exile,” a six-page expansive lyric set at the heart of the collection, around all else is structured, “I lean into it. / I’m learning to be that pure, relinquish or carry without // seeming to.” This is a book of tethering and of feeling unplaced, untethered, attempting to better comprehend those connections, and the very notion of belonging, instead of automatically attempting to latch on to what might come along next. “I thought if I / could desire less / I could be happy.” she writes, to open the poem “Gauntlet for the Left Hand,” “I was moving toward / an idea.”

rob mclennan, Willie Lin, conversations among stones

I’ve been thinking about, and reading, poetry, rather than writing it, lately. I’ve been looking back at lots of my old poetry and wondering how I manage to have such an inconsistent style of writing. I didn’t come up with an answer. Nor to the question why so many different types of my poetry have been published – and so many haven’t. Right poem, right place, wrong poem, wrong place, rubbish poem, etc… 

Sue Ibrahim, Different versions of me

I tried to return to my skating class nearly two weeks ago, which marked the beginning of this challenging run. I made it through 2/3 of the Monday morning class, but by that evening I was in the beginning of a headache that didn’t clear for 6 days. I really, really miss skating. (I know it tried to kill me, but I still love it.) Walking, though, I can do, and this week we had some sunny weather, and I can see the beginnings of buds on trees and shrubs, and the very first little flowers have begun blooming.

Honestly, that’s about it, and I need to get off screens again because that seems to be the most reliable way to keep headache away. I miss writing even more than I miss skating. I miss reading and interacting with writers online.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Small comforts

This is not my favourite time of year I confess, although I love all the early signs of Spring – the first sunny days, the first buds, daffodils and birdsong. Just look how grand the beach looked the other day! We even had breakfast outside on Friday! But this month in particular I’ve been plagued by asthma. Struggling to swim, or jog, or even walk uphill is a bit depressing. I’m managing to do a little yoga, and I’m still singing, although my chest sometimes hurts afterwards. Roll on warmer and dryer weather.

But what about the writing, you might ask. I’m kind of in a no-man’s land at the moment. I’m not writing poetry with any great intent. But I feel as if I might be moving towards writing something. Hard to describe the feeling really but it’s there.

Robin Houghton, And there goes February flying past… 

Mariame Kaba isn’t a poet. She is an activist who talks about hope. She has said that hope is not an emotion, nor it is the same as optimism. She describes it as a discipline. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, writers and activists, have coined the term “Active Hope”. They liken it to Tai Chi or gardening, “something you do rather than have.”

Every morning now – in my simplified life – I focus on the energy as I flow through the 18 moves of shibashi. I hope that the discipline will ground me. Open me. That this will allow poetry to flow into me. And through me.

A flower is a poem of beauty. And a scorched earth is a poem of hope.

Ren Powell, Hope is a Round Thing

First, consider the sentences and line breaks. The sentences are perfectly formed, varied in length and syntactic complexity (from ‘We drifted in silence.’ to the first and last sentence, each of which spreads over four lines). The line breaks do not disrupt the syntax, rather they complement it, or accentuate it. In terms of lines and sentences the poem is structured as it could be if it were smooth free verse. But it’s not: the line-sentence structure additionally serves a metric pattern, iambic pentameter.  Sentence and metric line are working together.

As for the metre: I’d say, L1, L2 are perfect iambic pentameter. So are the lines beginning with ‘as if’, ‘in undulating’ and ‘The paddle’. The other lines have various substitutions (a trochee instead of an iamb here, an extra unstressed syllable there) which are never irksome, are always easy enough to read over, or through.  

Surely the final, perfect line would not be quite as beautiful and affecting without all this rigour?

Stephen Payne, Finding Jeffrey Harrison: a reading of ‘The One That Got Away’

how fragile is the house of now
a time of endings
our finals farewell

the walls will hold our sound
the floor our footfalls
the air our breath

we will never end
though all come to stillness
energy translates

Paul Tobin, WITH LOOKING GLASS STEPS

I don’t really know what translation is. It carries one thing to another place that is perhaps the same place after all. Reminds you of it. Or it carries it across a river from one bank to the other; sister places, brothers beside the river. Translation is a tricky mirror. Someone’s tongue in another’s mouth. 

Here are two texts about translation. The second presents E. Pauline Johnson’s The Bird’s Lullaby and my “translation” of it. It’s a translation by reordering the words, keeping the sound, the tonality, the elements of its world. A kind of antiship of Theseus. The universe is made of the infinite juggling of finite atoms. 

The first is about translation within English. What is it that the world is possibly or impossibly Englishable? 

Gary Barwin, Translations as the Anti-ship of Theseus

I always find listening to someone who is both an expert and enthusiast captivating and today was no exception. Simply enjoying poems for their own sake is easy to forget – especially in this social media age when everything is comment fodder.

I feel not “better” but certainly less scattered. I think perhaps the answer to this current state of disquiet is either to get away from writing completely (the garden is whispering a soft song of spring) or perhaps to engage in more focused, tiny writing tasks. The big picture is unwieldy and overwhelming sometimes. Perhaps the next few days need to spent exploring and enjoying form – creating structure despite the sense of internal chaos that I’m feeling. Perhaps for now the sonnet will be the box for my dreams.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Creative Tuesday

Lately I’ve had evenings with long stretches of alone time as my husband’s season as a track and field official has begun. […] I’ve found that these times have been relaxing and creatively useful in ways I wouldn’t expect. After all, I’m retired from teaching, and I have long stretches of time most days where I can read, write, make art, workout, go for walks. The time itself isn’t anything new. Maybe it’s the darkness outside the windows. Perhaps the strange sense that the person that is usually next to me at this time is not. But free time in the evening hits differently. Whatever the reason, I find myself being more open and able to engage: with writing projects (particularly organizational tasks like researching and sending submissions, completing materials and plans for workshops); with difficult or deep reading material (craft essays, lectures for a class I’m taking online); or simply with entertainment that brings me joy. (Who knew there was a whole series of Pixar shorts centered on Dug the Dog from Up? Now I do, and they are all delightful.)

Donna Vorreyer, Alone Time

We live in a green house fronted
by a pair of Japanese maples, with a bright orange love
seat in a room wall-papered with books and the hearts
of plants spilling generously out of themselves. Laundry
unsorted, coffee and noodles in the pantry, the entry
adorned with favorite coats. We remember the thrift
store find of a coffeetable, what we wore when we
stood on the boardwalk that burnished day. Cake
slicer in the drawer, file folders of the bankrupt years.
Keepsakes we can’t bear to throw away. Everywhere,
evidence of undimmed desire for life in this world.

Luisa A. Igloria, Anniversary

I’m a writer who likes to knock her brain off a pedestal. I don’t want my brain to be so exceptional that it is unlike anyone else’s, just as I don’t wish to believe that my worries are entirely unique, or for that matter, that my accomplishments are singular and isolated examples of greatness. I signed up for a human life, and that means a life in community.

I say that in case you’re wondering why a newsletter called Poetry Today focuses so much on the brain. The poet’s mind is in a relationship with this—and every other—precious organ. Each of us is a constellation, a finely tuned feedback system between the different layers of our human experience. I’m drawn to books that offer a narrative approach to the brain, telling the story of its idiosyncratic functions and revealing how we might better acquaint ourselves with its programming to live more consciously.

Maya C. Popa, The 1% Rule: A Poet’s Take on Atomic Habits

in the warmth of the sun i offer the sun my warmth

Grant Hackett [no title]

Yes, Valentine’s Day is nearly a week past, but I’m just tomorrow sending cards and greetings to friends near and far, mostly to put a dent in the Love postage stamps recently purchased through USPS. All those kitten and puppies and doves accessoried with tiny hearts and red accents need to fly, even if late in their arrival. I’m a sucker for such seasonal postage, even if my efforts are less than timely.

I’m happy this morning to come across the recent publication of The Wild Word’s issue, Love. Their fine editors have included three of my poems in this issue and I’m over the moon at this odd little gathering of three: poetry as a lover, the wonder of scallops, and a hodge podge of Valentine ephemera haiku. The issue promises of all kinds of good reading. The editors are good humans to work with in this world of words and publishing.

Kersten Christianson, The Wild Word: Love

I had no recollection of ordering George David Clark’s Newly Not Eternal, published this year by Louisiana State University Press, though obviously I must have done since it arrived here in Paris last week. Whatever late-night whim prompted me to put in the order and then immediately forget it, it was a good one. This is a very good book of poems: I was moved and amused as well as admiring — these are satisfying poems to read or to say, in which form, theme and rhetoric truly come together.

I suppose most of my readers already read quite a bit of poetry in English, but even if you don’t — if you’re here more for the Latin, or thoughts on translation, or because you’re my mother (hello!) — I’d recommend this collection. It’s accessible I think in the best way, and actually perhaps more accessible to people who don’t think of themselves as big readers of contemporary poetry than those who do. If you read the piece about verse for children a fortnight ago and thought, to be honest, Julia Donaldson and Peepo are about my level, much past that I don’t quite get it: well, for a start, you have a good ear since Donaldson, as was much discussed in the comments, is a fine poet, and secondly, George David Clark is just the sort of “adult” poet you might want to try. I mean that, like Donaldson, he is putting his very considerable set of technical skills and expertise at your service as a reader: though many of these poems deal with the most difficult of themes, there is nothing at all difficult about the verse itself. Several of the best pieces here, a little like some of the best of Wendy Cope, distract you with the nursery-rhyme pleasures of the form so much that the wit and wisdom of the ending lands like a blow.

Victoria Moul, Letter from America

Gould’s prose is much more limpid than his often quite Baroque poetry, and he relates his adventures and failures with a convincing honesty. This is reinforced by his repeated admissions of memory failure, of not knowing how or when certain events took place. This has the effect of calling into question the very genre he’s working in; how does a memoir work when most of us have only hazy recollections of our own pasts? Regardless of the story Gould has to tell, it’s this awareness of his limitations that makes the book so interesting.

In New York, Gould sees a newspaper article on Mick Taylor’s leaving The Rolling Stones and decides that here, at last, his destiny can be achieved, so off he sets to London on a wing and a prayer, so to speak. Here he falls on his feet, finding off-the-books work with some very well connected people. He actually meets Mick Taylor, then Keith Richards and finally cuts Cat Stevens’ grass. But I suppose I’m not giving anything away if I tell you he doesn’t get the gig and the world is spared from his musical vision. In the end, he’s back in Providence and back in time to tell us the story of how he ended up in hospital in the first place.

Billy Mills, Poets in Prose: A Review of Holy Fool by Henry Gould and The Making of a Pure Poet by Augustus Young

Once we become aware of something, we start to see it everywhere. The long-ignored thing, which existed but meant little to us, asserts itself with a vengeance, a passion of the slighted and overlooked.  

Thus my relationship with chapbooks, small book-objects, often handmade, that slide in your pocket, call to you whimsically because they’re cheap and they can.  

A panel at AWP literary conference sparked my appetite, reminding me of my days when I preferred indie records to corporate labels.  Last week when I uttered the words aloud – “How can I get into this world?” – it seems the chapbooks heard me and said, let’s give the chick a ride.  I sparkled to wonderful names such as Carrion Bloom, Eulalia, Small Orange, Sibling Rivalry, Ethelzine and my favorite name, Rinky Dinky.  

Jill Pearlman, Passion of the Slighted Chapbook

Yesterday, I was doing the things that you do when you’ve been gone from your home – cleaning, laundry, getting ready to start the garden seeds. In between, I was reading the latest issue of Poets & Writers, looking at social media, sorting my books, reading poetry. 

To be honest, I’d also been doing some work for Storyknife and for the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Suddenly I was struck with a certain amount of anxiety that the joke that I’ve been making in the past couple of years, I’ve been an emerging poet so long that I’m now submerging, isn’t funny anymore.

I won’t be going on any residencies or trips or guest teaching at colleges this upcoming year. Instead, I’ll be providing those experiences for other people. Gladly. I love this life I’ve crafted for myself. I love being able to make manifest those gifts for others. But the gnawing desire to do these things myself is still there. 

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, The Thread

On Tuesday, I attended ‘Making A.I. work for writers’, part of a series of workshops organised by ARU’s A.I. working group, in collaboration with my own Cambridge Writing Centre. The emphasis here was on Lynda Clark’s concept of A.I. as ‘creative amplification’; that is, as a tool to use in conjunction with one’s own writing practices to produce new and surprising effects.

For the second half of the workshop, we wrestled with Max Woolf’s GPT2-Simple, a Colaboratory Notebook for training your own pet text-generating A.I. Think of it this way: freely and commercially available language-modelling software like Google Gemini and ChatGPT 3.0 is trained over months, using vast swathes of harvested data so that it can produce statements and respond to prompts in human-like fashion. We trained ours over the span of 20 minutes, using about 50,000 words (or, in my case, almost everything I’ve written in the past decade), so that each one could produce random assemblages of text which crudely resemble the work fed into it.

Jon Stone, ‘Creative Amplification’ and A.I. poetry

Yesterday’s mail brought the proof for granata, which meant spending today, free of other writing projects, marking it up and fixing any margin issues inside Any pesky remaining typos or off punctuation. This one was a little less tricky with lineated lines instead of prose blocks, but the lines do run a bit longer than I usually go, which meant some additional adjustments. There was also some small movement of images that were a little too far over, and some final typography touches that were simply cosmetic. It’s always a joy to feel the final project come together and bound so neatly, especially this one, that started as an indeterminate shorter series of poems in summer of 2022 and eventually grew into a considerably longer project that incorporated over 20 pieces of visual art as well. Amazingly the cover was absolutely perfect this time (I have a hard time centering text when you can’t readily see the trim lines in action.) It’s even more beautiful on the back cover where you see more of the images. […]

As I was working on them that summer, I kept calling them the “smutty Persephone poems” even though I already had the working title in place. Reading them now, they feel very lush and sensuous, more so than a lot of what I’ve written in the intervening year and a half. It’s of course, not just Persephone’s story, but also that of the Sirens, who were punished or gifted with their transformation depending on who you ask. I begin with a quote from Ovid, who frames it as a gift. But then Ovid may have been wrong.

Kristy Bowen, doomish and beautiful: writing about myth

My first full length book entitled A Godless Ascends published by Lithic Press is now available for pre-order. Tremendous thanks to editors Danny Rosen and Kyle Harvey for the impeccable design and quality printing. The book is divided into four sections with beautiful artwork by Nancy Smith, including the cover art. A Godless Ascends will be officially released to celebrate the vernal equinox, March 19, 2024.

You can pre-order from the Lithic Press website or if you’d like a signed copy with a bookmark, contact me here. Those who order signed copies before March 19 will be entered in a drawing to win an 11×14 print of one of the paintings used as artwork in the book.

Trish Hopkinson, My new book “A Godless Ascends” released for pre-order!

Now that the news has officially been announced, I can tell you: my next collection of poetry, Her Dark Everything, will be published April 2025 with Riot in Your Throat. Her Dark Everything grapples with the loss of a friend to suicide and the continued survival of my best friend, despite her battles with major depression. It’s about hope and joy and sorrow and loss and survival. The Riot in Your Throat 2024-2025 lineup is fantastic, every single one of these books is amazing and I promise, you’re going to want to read them!

In other news, I survived AWP and showed some real restraint by only bringing home ten books. Seriously, this is impressive since I essentially have an unlimited budget for books — life is too short to not buy poetry!!

Courtney LeBlanc, Exciting News

Although I missed AWP this year, I did try to make up for missing the bookfair by picking up a few books at our Seattle all-poetry bookstore, Open Books, today, during a windstorm. (A tree fell in a car in our neighborhood while we were away, the 520 was closed for construction, and I was nearly blown over walking down the street. Still, we would not be stopped!)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Early Cherry and Camellia Blossoms, New Poetry Books and a Rattle Podcast Where We Talk about Poetry Submitting

It can be dispiriting when you see a writer post that they had a book rejected because the publisher “didn’t feel their social platform was big enough”. However, that might not have been the actual reason for rejection or the writer might be better served viewing it as a dodged bullet: a mismatch between writer and publisher. A publisher should be a partnership otherwise you might as well employ a printer and do all the marketing and promotion yourself. Yes, it’s a good idea to be on social media, but not to the extent you’re doing so much promotion there’s no second book.

So how can writers achieve that miraculous balance between writing, promoting on social media and other commitments which may include caring and/or a day job without burning out?

Emma Lee, Writers and Social Media Platforms

Sometimes I struggle to find a connection to the world, to people, to whatever it is I read or watch, either in real life or on television. And writing reflects that. Each line, each thought seems isolated, struggles to connect to the next.

Now it’s no great revelation to say that these days I live apart from the general run of things. This does happen to some of us from time to time as we get older – reference points become increasingly obscure. Just now I feel about as relevant as a Tommy James And The Shondells tribute band who have forgotten the tune and words for Mony, Mony.

And on the plus side disconnected thoughts, lines, images are sometimes the key to finding something unexpected, as with this small piece. It’s short because it connected to nothing else but maybe that’s its strength.

FOUR LINE POEM ABOUT EARS IN A TIME OF WAR

It was the night my ears, with a twist and click, unclipped themselves from my head.

They enjoyed how light they were when freed of the weight of my head, my body.

They floated on the breeze, up above houses, above trees. My ears rose above clouds.

I don’t know where they ended up. They just never came back. I miss them.

Exclusion and disconnection, then, can be a positive state, but it’s still disorientating to feel the world is travelling along on a parallel line, always just out of reach with rules that might be understandable but which still seem unreal, the work of mad folk.

Bob Mee, WHEN NOTHING CONNECTS…

not one word wasted
daffodils in the sunshine
in a blue pot

after the rain had gone
after i had had coffee

Jim Young [no title]

I am in a warm house on a quiet day aware of the suffering in Yemen, Syria, Darfur, the Congo, and what clutches me most of late, Gaza. How is it possible the children I adore are safe when children just as beautiful and just as precious are exiled, starved, shot, bombed, buried under rubble? Many survivors are left with the world’s newest horrific acronym WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family. I know a moment’s trauma can take a lifetime to heal. I cannot imagine the relentless ongoing trauma for people in Gaza.

I am fortunate to host family Sundays here. Each week I plan out the day’s breakfast and lunch, making as many dishes as possible in advance so I can play with children and follow conversations on the day itself. This week I’m using beans I canned in September and the remaining potatoes harvested in October. I’m using pear sugar I made last summer and hot sauce I made last fall. I use eggs from our chickens, jam from our elderberries, tomatoes canned from our garden. There’s deep satisfaction in nourishing others with the food we’ve grown. Food, in nearly every spiritual tradition, is sacred and meant to be shared. Yet legacy olive groves are relentlessly bulldozed in Gaza. (Since 1967, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli authorities and settlers.) Gaza’s orchards, greenhouses, crops, and fishing fleets are intentionally destroyed. And the nourishment lost, too, when libraries, universities, and museums are bombed into dust.  

One child suffering is too much. The news that over 12,660 Palestinian children have been killed and more than one million displaced from their homes is impossible to imagine. The suffering too, of the 36 Israeli children killed by Hamas and the child hostages Hamas still imprisons. Each number represents a whole person, as unique and amazing as a child you love, as the child you yourself once were. 

Laura Grace Weldon, Warm House On A Quiet Day, Disquieted

What is the colour of your poem? What
is the colour of too much loss? What is
the colour of a rain that cannot fall? All our
hands together, every single one, pushing a
skewed world back where it belongs – what
would be the colour of immeasurable love?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What if you looked through another’s eyes?

Tamsyn Farr read a fabulous poem of her creation in the lovely community space of the library.

Behind, you can see the gift bags of cookies I made up, some gluten free, some gluten-rich each with a poem from Adding Up to This attached. I made 60 or cookies (gingerbread, freezer cookies and thumbprint cookies), some of which made it so far as the event. 30 bags and I took no pictures.

Some book sales were made and donations, which is sweet and encouraging.

I test read a couple poems from a new manuscript which went over well. And one of Gertrude Stein because never pass up on a Stein.

Pearl Pirie, Love was the theme at Poetea

Ah, the manuscript process! It interests me even when I’m not in the midst of putting a collection together, because it seems there is no consistently efficient way to go about it–no matter what people claim. It’s fascinating to read, in interviews, articles, and blogs, how poets decide on the poems to gather into a book; I have put together three full-length collections, and yet I can’t say that I have developed a method I can rely on. Each volume seems to have had different inceptions and different means of getting to an end.

My first approach is to choose several dozen poems, about a third of which have been published in literary journals. After that, no system: I ponder possibilities. My last two books had titles early on, which helped a little, and my chapbooks have had themes that guided me about what to include or exclude. Not so this time. The process this time reminds me of how I put together Water-Rites, which evolved from my MFA thesis in 2003. In other words, I don’t really know what I’m doing! Which feels edgy and uncomfortable, and is probably therefore a good thing. I don’t want to get too confident or at ease with writing. Creativity sometimes thrives on obstacles, or on the prompting to do more, to try new things, to solve problems.

Ann E. Michael, Process: shosin

Today’s post is a destined to be an old timey ramble, where I share just a bunch of stuff I have been inspired by or enjoyed of late. Enjoy what you enjoy, is a line from Woolf, that I endorse. Take your inspiration where you are able!

The first thing that I’ve found to be inspiring is the following quotation.

“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. ”

— Doris Lessing

Perhaps it was this quotation by Lessing, and the persistence of Rilke’s line throughout my adult life “you must change your life,” and the following by Enrique Martinez Celaya that finally spurred me to change my work circumstances last week:

“Launch yourself recklessly towards your dreams. Wake up and be desperate. Desperation demands action. As an artist you must always be desperate. Try anything. Be careful with your calculations. Calculations become a habit. A calculated life is seldom radiant.”

I’ve left my position for something more precarious and lower paying, but for something that allows me to be more reckless and desperate perhaps. Different calculations. Impossible ones. But memento mori and all that. Time to get radiant.

Shawna Lemay, Whatever You’re Meant To Do

i watch my neighbor fill
the little free library with bibles.
he pulls each previous book resident
from its shelter. puts them
into a coffin he is carrying on his back.
in a country of squirrels
i do not mean to be a prophet. i always
seem to witness these fissure moments.
i think about what it would look like
to stop him. the box
a little word stomach.

Robin Gow, little free library

As I read, I kept writing out passages in my notebook. “My revision process is, overall, one of inquiry,” Rose McLarney writes in “Identifying Gems” (p. 57). In “Finding the Language, Finding  Story” (a gorgeous essay that is also about raising a child), Joe Wilkins shares a strategy I honestly had never thought of:  “I usually write in couplets (you can’t hide anything in couplets, all that white space forces you to interrogate every word)” (p. 18).

In “Emptying the Zendo,” Shin Yu Pai admits that she doesn’t revise very much, then elaborates:

Revision, for me, is like polishing a gem to bring out its beauty. However, this working and reworking of the stone also changes its rawest qualities and alters its energy. The place where I decide to put down the pen and stop fussing with the poem is not the place another poet, teacher, or scholar might choose to end. Ultimately, we find our own relationship to our voice and our objects through reading, practice, and deep listening. In this way, we are our own teachers.

—Shin Yu Pai

This might be good advice for life, as well as for writing. We find our own relationship through using our own voice, but also reading, practice, and deep listening.

Bethany Reid, THE ART OF REVISING POETRY

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. I am up tending to my old dog who howls from downstairs in the middle of the night when he is feeling anxious and wanting me. I keep a few books on the coffee table and I pick one up, M Train by Patti Smith, and read a few pages. A passage reminds me of the time years ago when my husband and I bought a pot of bamboo. 

A sudden gust of wind shakes the branches of trees scattering a swirl of leaves that shimmer eerily in the bright filtered light. Leaves as vowels, whispers of words like a breath of net. Leaves are vowels. I sweep them up hoping to find the combinations I am looking for. The language of the lesser gods. 

We once were at a garden show where we became beguiled by an exhibition of bamboo. The grower had pots of all kinds of bamboo but the one that demanded our attention was the Giant Bamboo, the possible eventual size of which we didn’t grasp at the time. This is where my  husband’s and my memories divide. He says he knew that fact but I don’t remember it at all. It was so beautiful that we purchased a pot of it on impulse, not considering whether it would fit in our yard or if we had a place for it. 

Charlotte Hamrick, The Dog & The Bamboo

winter thaw
a sigh returns
to the pines

Tom Clausen, four views in situ

I started my workshop with the Economics, Leadership & Governance masters class at Universidad de Navarra with a premise: every morning starts as a negotiation between your present self and your future self (the past is just a reference point). 

I was in the strange place of walking the line between my poet-self and my professional-self: asked to speak about my experiences that led to the current place in my career as a corporate lawyer specializing in sustainability, I chose to use poetry to frame the discussion. 

It was a negotiations class so we negotiated where the discussion would go. It was up to each party to make the most of our time together. I gave them a packet of poems and asked them to prepare one to read. My plan was that the poems would prompt a discussion about my life experiences, taken out of order, but with a thread woven through the stories. We started with a meditative poem, Lost by David Wagoner. I told a story about getting lost on purpose only to find my way back to purpose.

Cathy Wittmeyer, Negotiating What We All Get Out Of This

My first poetry reading was at the main branch of that same Brookline Public Library, a formidable building I have loved forever. In 1994, I was lucky enough to be a featured reader for the poetry and prose series hosted by Edith Pearlman. It was in the fall of 1994 and my father was still alive, but not well enough to come out to his daughter’s first ever event. Instead, an angel appeared in the guise of my friend, Michael Sheridan and he came equipped with tripod, video camera, and lights! This was in the day before smart phones or any common mobile phones. Michael, now a documentary filmmaker, was more a brother than a friend. The video meant that my father would be able to see me read my poems after all, just a day or so later. Not only was this my first reading, but it was being memorialized on tape!

As Pearlman introduces me to the audience she adds to my name, “a prize winning poet,” (reader, I had no prizes, no books to my name). And then she did a remarkable thing, she winked at me. I remember her face so distinctly. White hair, red lipstick, sparking eyes. She must have been in her mid-50’s at the time. I had never seen a more beautiful “older” woman.

Susan Rich, Edith Pearlman

The best thing this week: my poem “Sex Talk” was featured by Poetry Daily. Lots of friends and a few strangers sent or posted lovely notes about it. This poem came not long after my mother’s death, if I’m remembering right, as I worked through the grief and freedom that follow the death of a beloved, suffering, usually kind, sometimes hurtful parent. Even on the day of initial drafting, it felt like a big poem for me, but it was rejected many times before Mark Drew, after some judicious edits, accepted it for what turned out to be the last issue of The Gettysburg Review. Big thanks to him and everybody else who has cheered me on. […]

Meanwhile I’m rereading Jan Beatty’s powerful 2020 collection The Body Wars, and it’s so resonant with my internal struggles. That old battle–to what extent I’ll let work devour my hours–still rages, with health stress increasing the strain. My theory is that my body is working through hurt I cognitively processed long ago. That’s probably good in the long run, but for the moment, it’s not easy. I often feel maxed out the way I did in the pandemic or during episodes of more personal grief: a certain amount of bandwidth is always devoted to background noise so there’s just less energy for, say, writing that midterm exam or teaching another roomful of distractible undergrads.

My understanding is that panic attacks can happen without any immediate cause, but anxiety attacks are clearly connected to real stimuli. If so, I’m experiencing the latter way too often. Recently I attended a university forum on the war in Gaza: good speakers, devastating subject, and an audience full of inconsolably angry people. I could hide my symptoms even from my husband sitting next to me, but I became short of breath, my heart palpitating uncomfortably, and had to do surreptitious breathing exercises to remain in the room.

Lesley Wheeler, Three of swords time

I have just come back from a very enjoyable ‘slow stitching’ workshop locally. Before I went I thought this was simply stitching slowly without pressure, but I have a better understanding now. It’s about stitching as meditation, stitching for well being and relaxation. It’s also a great way to use up small scraps, and odds and sods of thread, ribbon, net, buttons and so on. […]

Apart from the company, it struck me that slow stitching was similar to how I work as a poet. I am constantly trying to tap into my subconscious mind, get away from the world of ‘ideas’ to the world of instinct and going where the mind wants to wander, not worrying over word choices while at the writing stage. Before the writing comes the pondering and mind-freewheeling. Then comes the tentative scribbling down of phrases, half lines, sometimes if one is very lucky, a couple of lines. Those lines might end up anywhere in a poem, or not at all, but they are all gifts from the subconscious brain.

Angela Topping, Slow Stitching

Nobody wants to talk about the breakdown of bodies.
The way finger joints become tulip bulbs beneath frozen ground.

How a thyroid can burn itself out like a star or a spine
can collapse like a sinkhole.

I drink coffee at the kitchen table,
thumb through seed catalogs, pray my winding road

of a back bends to zinnias one more season.

Carey Taylor, Ode to the Cooper’s Hawk
]]> 66183 Poetry Blog Digest 2024, Week 1 https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/01/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-1/ https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/01/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-1/#comments Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:58:44 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=65737 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack.

The first digest of 2024 is a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short. (And yes, I know that expression dates me. I am an old.) Ten inches of snow fell and then were partly washed away again as I compiled this post today, which is quite Janus-faced: half looking back and half looking forward, half summarizing and half summoning. Let’s begin.

Whether we feel like we’re gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It’s hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation – not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I’m hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it’s more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I’m trying to do is think about what’s real, and that’s probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here — a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year’s Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year – we’ve had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself — its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance — remains very real and very much itself.

I’m still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I’m comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don’t have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say “look at me!,” with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

Beth Adams, What is Real?

All we need is a list, a
table: who will do what, when — names,
places, actions, dates — all adding up to
less than 1.5oC. And maybe one more
grid: who will pay how much, when —
names, places, actions, dates — all adding
up to the billions required for loss and
damage, for mitigation, for adaptation,
sorted by historical burden. Now, that
would become a poem. But what do we
do with pages of unmetered language? With
unwieldly metaphors and no rhyme? Without
totals? Without a safety net?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Phase-out/Phase-down

The sunflower
tore off its petals,
the rainbow
slumped,
the pink and purple
cut to white,
the morning sun
melted
and when night came
the stars
had lost their reflections.

Sue Ibrahim, Sea star mass mortality event

To answer my question about how poets write about literal and existential risks to life on Earth, I started collecting “apocalypse poems,” a term I used broadly. My list is below. Many of its poems address end times head on. Others are less explicit but have (in my assessment) apocalypse vibes. They are “end-of-the-world adjacent,” using apocalyptic or dystopian settings as a backdrop or simply gesturing at demise and so I’ve allowed their metaphors to work within this list of apocalypse poems.

In these poems, poets speak to what may be coming and flirt with a kind of inevitability fueled by our complicity and impotence. They issue warnings that beg questions: Can we be saved? Do we want to be saved? Who’s driving the bus? What’s worth saving? Are we willing? What does it mean to survive?

Carolee Bennett, The One With 50+ Poems for the End of the World

The too-short truce was all the time
they had to bury the dead boy lying

in their rubbled apartment. Already
they’d waited four days, the body

of their 10-year-old wrapped in
a blanket providing no warmth,

his last rites un-mouthed, never
to be heard amid the later bombings.

Maureen E. Doallas, Gaza Funeral (Poem)

I haven’t been writing much—not enough mental energy—but I do think about the idea of “wintering,” or that we need to sort of make our way through winter gingerly, at least making some awareness of the need for warmth and hibernation. I’ve been sleeping at off hours—awake at 3 in the morning, asleep at 5 pm—which means I’m only watching weird stuff on television and reading in stray catches of awake time. “Winter just wasn’t my season,” as the song “Breathe (2 AM)” says. […]

I was thinking of two great writers we recently lost, Louise Gluck and Colleen McElroy, how both had disabilities they rarely talked about (Gluck had epilepsy, Colleen had RA), both were fiercely devoted to their work. Gluck was born into a lot of privilege; Colleen had to struggle more against a world less friendly to women, especially women of color, as a young person. I feel Colleen didn’t get enough recognition for her gifts as a teacher and writer and was the kind of person you instantly trusted—she radiated energy and warmth. Gluck wasn’t warm—even her obituaries seem prickly. I wonder about the value of our writing and our personhood after we pass away—how will we be remembered? Will time be kinder to one than the other? I wonder about the value of work versus the value of relationships, how often women are forced to choose in a way men are not. I am lucky I had a husband who was just as supportive when I was working ninety-hour weeks at Microsoft as when I now spend hours submitting poems to journals that don’t pay enough to cover the cost of submission. I never had to choose between a marriage and work, or a child and work (since I couldn’t have kids in the first place). As I get older, in the cold January months, I think harder about the choices I’ve made in my life. It will be later in life that I’ll be able to see if I made the right ones.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Wintering: The New Year So Far, Honoring the Season, and the Choices We Make

We’re browsing because I want a new jumper, distracted by Shetland, cable knits, elaborate nordic and traditional patterns which women once knew as a matter of course. And then distracted by Stitchcraft and taking phone pics, until I go off on one about the New Look and Jane disagrees with me saying some women found it offensive in its excess. No, Jackie, she says, it was celebrating a way out of poverty, wartime. And yes, of course that’s right. I’m a little on my high horse with the champagne and tired, and maybe too attached to the old dichotomy, the masses v the rich. 

So we carry on reading the box that is reminding us of a fraction of what women did, the stitch counting, fair isle, arran, bonnets, shawls, evening dresses and skirts, kids’ coats, darts, gathers, ruches, smocking, pleats…

I began my blue coat on Boxing Day and will finish it a few days into 2024. It’s been a good use of the limbo time at the turn of the year when my notebook remains untouched. That and the odd walk with Bambi, reminding me of what matters – those waves battering the sea wall at Saltdean, and this, Noah’s Ark, beached there, police tape fluttering in another gale, a warning of sorts. 

Jackie Wills, The Poetry of Domestic Arts and Sciences

I don’t mean isolation is necessary in a physical sense, although pottering about doing jobs on our smallholding, looking after hens, pigs, woodland and a four-acre field can mean spending hours alone in whatever the weather might throw at us.

I don’t mean isolation from the news either. I want to know about Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, what’s happening with the state of the planet. I want to know what the ‘leaders’ of the world are saying, even though I understand they’re just performers on a stage, mostly anxious to protect their own power. The reality of the misery of the victims of their actions or in-action is of little consequence to them, unless it causes their wealth to be de-stabilised. The world is as mad as it always was.

Politically, the older I get, the more radical I get, the more intolerant I get of the lies or half-truths (the half that suits them) politicians tell as a daily routine.

No, the isolation I’m interested in is the healthy isolation of being a writer. With a very few exceptions, I have no friends who write – anything, let alone poetry, or something close to it – and seek out none. It’s not a case of banishing people to the fringes of life as it rolls along, just an increased need to write free from the influence and society of others.

Yes, there are occasional, welcome email conversations that are a result of what is published here, or what others publish on their blogs, but these days that’s about the limit of it.

Bob Mee, THE OLDER I GET, THE MORE I PREFER ISOLATION

2024 has entered with wet, wild winds. Ice everywhere underfoot. The world is slippery and precarious. This kind of weather isn’t unheard of on Kachemak Bay at this time of year, but it is unwanted. It tarnishes all the brightness of snowy landscapes and makes getting around outside difficult.

And so I turn inward. Spend evenings in a pool of lamp light near the woodstove. Consumed already this year: two books of poetry, Some of the Things I’ve Seen by Sara Berkeley and Earth House by Matthew Hollis, as well as Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and Stag Cult by Martin Shaw. Last year, I read fewer books that I usually do, and I am wondering at the reason.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Welcome 2024 – Whatcha reading?

In my annual tradition since 2012, I share my self-audit of what I read and favourite reads. Throughout the year at instagram I have posted all the reads and some of the quotes from books I liked.

I aimed to read more fiction proportionally this year, setting aside some obsession with poetry. Intention didn’t translate. 57% of titles were poetry, so all systems stable, with 1% more poetry than last year. A fifth of reads were chapbooks (56 of them). I read 20 fewer titles than 2022. This year I reread 15 instead of 24 titles. […]

The source hierarchy for 2023 was Amazon, small press fair, free online, used book store, review copy, then library at 8%, with direct from author 6%, and direct from publisher another 6%.

I persisted through diminishing returns more often, valuing 4% at one star out of 5, instead of 1% the year before,  but for that I blame the cat sitting on me more, with nothing else in reach.

Pearl Pirie, 2023 Reading

I was delighted that the Englewood Review of Books invited me to contribute to their year-end Favorite Books of 2023 podcast! A link to listen and a complete list of recommended books is available at this link.

I gave a shoutout to These Walls are Starting to Glow by Karen Bjork Kubin and Box Office Gospel: Poems by Marissa Glover.

Katie Manning, ERB Year-End Episode

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. […]

I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar ‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction, or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I remember that this list takes a full day to compile and post, so there you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that, I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting work being produced right now?

rob mclennan, A ‘best of’ list of 2023 Canadian poetry books

In 2023, I read 100 books. That’s according to Beanstack, where I track my reading now. I read all kinds of things, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, murder mystery, young adult, and even a children’s book, the marvelous Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo, which I had heard about for many years. And I gave some books as Christmas presents, favorites from the year or from the recent months spent escaping, slothlike, on the couch, covered in fleece blankets. Speaking of sloths, I have already earned a sloth as a “completion prize” in the library’s winter reading challenge, set up as a bingo card, where I have scored a Bingo from slothliness. […]

All my poems these days are about my mother, even if they are ekphrastic or written on poscards. “Grief deranges,” says Gish Jen in The Resisters, a book I read in January, actually. “Healing is slow.” It sure is. I am participating in a solstice-to-solstice poetry postcard project and have sent 8 postcards and received 3. (Maybe that will pick up after the holiday mail…) Some have gone to Santa Cruz, CA and Portland, OR, where I have family, and one went to Japan! I love the random coincidii…

Kathleen Kirk, 100 Books

Lushly, thickly
a polar bear hibernates
under our infinite skies, 

in our midst:
bristling white 
visiting behemoth.

From my tiny pane,
I see its heavy
lugubrious

breathing 
see its lungs, and fir
rise and fall

in branch 
and mind
and rise again.

Jill Pearlman, Winter’s Other

I’ve been trying to make a summary of last year without slipping into the negative, so I’d like to single out a wonderful thing that happened in 2023: my second book of visual poetry was accepted by Sarabande. Boy, I started that sentence on a down note but typing to the end made me happy.

For the past three years or so I’ve been working with “Classic Crimes” by William Roughead, considered one of the first books of the true crime genre. This is a hefty NYRB book of around 600 pages about murders in Scotland more than 100 years ago. They are base and grisly murders, though the writing can be staid and sticks with the facts. I hope my erasures and collages give the pages a good airing.

Sarah J. Sloat, Crime of Passion

On a personal level, 2024 was a very busy year, which largely explains the sparse posting! In addition to writing and teaching, I served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Fraser Valley in the winter, and then returned to campus to coordinate the Fraser Valley Writers Festival in the Fall. I also wrapped up edits on my next book, Weather, a companion piece to my 2016 collection The News, which will be published this Spring from Gaspereau Press.

Rob Taylor, the 2023 roll of nickels year in review

Whatever You Do, Just Don’t has been chosen by The Yorkshire Times as one of their Books of the Year 2023. Thanks to Steve Whitaker, the literary editor, for his selection. Here’s a quick quote from the article… “…Whatever You Do, Just Don’t is as warming and as compelling as the fine Spanish wine that Stewart blends…” And you can read the feature in full via this link.

Matthew Stewart, The Yorkshire Times’ Books of the Year

As I usually do at the start of the year, I look back on the data of a calendar year of writing. 16 poems in 12 paper copy journals or anthologies. Humbled that one of my poems landed in an anthology not too many pages away from poems by the writer Sheila Bender and Joseph Powell, one of my creative writing professors at Central Washington University. In 1993, he published his collection of poems, Winter Insomnia. I attended that launch and in the copy of the book I purchased after, his inscription encouraged me to “keep up the fine writing and send me a copy of your first book.” I made true on that in 2017 when I mailed him a copy of Something Yet to Be Named. I still have the letter he wrote in return.

Additionally, I published 18 poems in online journals. I am so very grateful for all editors who take a chance on writing and move it from a page in a writer’s hand to a greater reading world. 

And because I’m an absolute believer in seeing the whole picture, 2023 landed me 23 rejections and 15 still-waiting-for-confirmations, or in the words of Submittable, “Received” or “In Progress.” And that’s all bundled up in the beauty of writing as well. 

Kersten Christianson, Rolling in 2024

In reference to a recent post, I’m coming to my poetry in 2024 with a great deal of curiosity and openness. I’ve been rather myopic in the past–out of necessity, as we’ve gone through some difficult times–but now I’m wondering these things:
1. Who is my ideal reader?
2. Where does this ideal reader, read? What literary magazines, which presses?
3. Who is my ideal reader already reading? Which writers and poets?
4. These writers and poets–what contests are they winning? What conferences are they attending?
5. Which poets can I look to as career role models–both those who are far ahead (60+ years of writing), those who are a little ahead, those who are my peers?

I think this could give me some direction as to where to focus my efforts this year. What questions are you pondering in 2024?

Renee Emerson, 5 Questions I’m Asking

In December, I participated in an annual poem-a-day challenge. This is my happy place. It is also my anxiety. What if I can’t think of anything to write about? How, or with what, do I start? That concern begins on the first day–even when I come equipped with prompts and a project, an idea for a series. It’s the fear of facing the blank page.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Paul McCartney. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the documentary The Beatles: Get Back, Part 1. The footage includes a lot of bickering, but one moment stands out in my memory. While other musicians are arguing about, probably, everything, Paul is working on a little riff, maybe eight or ten notes. He plays it, then he plays a slightly different version, and again, and again, and again. He keeps playing with it, refining it. He didn’t come up with a genius phrase; he came up with a starting point and kept experimenting with it.

The word that comes to mind is noodle, to noodle around with something. The idea that you don’t have to come up with the right image or line or phrase on your first try. Get something, anything, down on the page or the screen, and then keep playing with it, keep noodling. See? Much less pressure.

If we’re going to revise through multiple drafts anyway, why should the starting point contain so much importance? Instead of the starting point, it’s just a starting point.

Joannie Stangeland, Not just the fresh start

It’s Monday, the first day of the new semester and I am on sabbatical: sitting in a sweet café down the hill from my house–a place I have intended and failed to visit for the last year– having a slow, intentional, delicious coffee, listening to jazz music from the speakers and car music from Second Avenue, and staring into the wide open space that has opened up in front of my exhausted body, brain and spirit.

This is precious.

What will I do with my one wild and precious sabbatical? Well, Mary Oliver, let me tell you: I am going to savor it like I’m savoring this cup of coffee. I don’t precisely know what that savoring will look like, though. I am not traveling much outside of some events to promote my new book in March, and while I did propose a specific project in my sabbatical application, it’s been three years since that application and the project I proposed has morphed into something very different.

Sheila Squillante, A Wide Open Space

There’s a physiotherapist on Instagram who specializes in breast cancer “survivors”. She says that technically, in Australia at any rate, a person is a cancer survivor from the moment they are diagnosed until they die. She points out that a lot of “cancer survivors” don’t like that designation. It sounds like some kind of loud rally slogan. I feel that way, too. I would really like these 8 months to fade into the wallpaper. It’s there, but I don’t want cancer to be a part of my identity, as much as it has been conspicuous in every aspect of my life for a while.

I know there are many women who have managed this.

I have changed. But not as significantly as being a mother changed me. Probably not as much as any of or all the mistakes I’ve made in my life have changed me. As travel has changed me. As having lost a friend has. As love – so many loves. As so many things I don’t want to write about here.

If I let myself carry these new changes forward as I return to my “real life”, I believe I can find a different kind of peace than I had before. My ambitions are softer. While I used to believe that my writing was about the doing, about the in-the-moment flow, I don’t think I was honest with myself. I was still whipping myself more than I was allowing myself to just enjoy what comes or doesn’t come. I was still looking for approval as much as I was wanting communication. this applies to me teaching, too. Even some of my relationships.

It’s not that I’ve lowered the bar of “good enough”, really. I’m doing away with the bar.

Ren Powell, The End of Active Treatment

I am a tumble down mess red in tooth and claw like the tumbling tumbleweed of yore my body a ghost town with dust and saloon doors flapping open and closed and my neck feels funny and I need to drink more water don’t we all just need to drink more and more and more water until they have to cut a hole in our guts to let it stream out at our end. But I am PRESENT I am inside my body. I am notating Jerusalem it is lovely inside my face a red sky sloop down weepweepweepweep stained beyond anything that might occur in the bathtub.

Jupiter sits on my chest and begs me to stay I will stay because she is the Magiker sleek black we are dizzy with mustard pricks. When my phone rings I fling it out of my hand. My throat is a yellow eyeglass. My lungs are wasps but in spite of all this I baked a goddamn gorgeous cake feral in its chocolately gnashy truffle goodness.

Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report king tides & A High Wind In Jamaica edition

When I first re-visited the video so that I could write this blog, I have to admit I cringed a little. It’s tempting to apologise for my double-chin & jowls, thick torso, my awkwardness and kind of arty-posiness. But I won’t apologise, because making these things visible is the point. By showing the cracks, the fat, the visceral textures & racing sky I believe Patrick has captured something far greater than me in this video poem, so much so that I recede as protagonist and become just one of the textures woven into time and space. I really think he’s made a video poem that could read as a meditation (in the same way that Pamela Boutros did in the video poem LOST)

FUN FACT:

We filmed in Patrick’s bedroom in an old house in Melbourne, Australia. But first we had to prop his bed up against one of the walls so we had enough room to film.

Caroline Reid, VIDEO POEM: To Touch & Taste a Comet, featuring Caroline Reid in a bedroom in Melbourne

This little beauty is a sneak peek at the GRANATA project now in the final stages of proofing that will be topside near the end of February. The series of text pieces were written (the bulk of them) in the summer of 2022, so there is definitely a lot of summer about them, as is fitting for a book about everyone’s favorite goddess. But it’s also a book about the Furies, which many believe were the punished friends of Persephone who failed to save her from abduction (or conversely, were gifted with wings and a craving for vengeance to help find her.) It’s a book about lost innocence on all fronts, about sensuality and sexuality, about the girl world and all its monsters and ghosts. 

The art pieces that appeared were actually created a year later and mostly over the course of a single week, sometimes several a day. While I initially had planned the book to be a text-only cover, this summer’s spurt of visual work prolificness had other things in mind. Once I started I could not stop, until there were around 20 collages that accompanied the text pieces perfectly. 

Kristy Bowen, cover reveal

This January’s first round up of PoetryRx is for treating the winter blues.

Now, as you know, I don’t believe in plastering joy over sorrow or spring poems over winter ones. To paraphrase what I said about poetry in a previous post, poems offer solace by inviting us to feel our humanity activated and witnessed. They share truths that resonate with our experiences and make us feel less alone. They articulate a present reality that, through the luminous clarity of its wording, provides relief.

I hope these poems will deepen your curiosity in the season and in your own feelings about it. My own relationship to winter is a work in progress, but it’s a relationship I’m infinitely grateful to have the chance to cultivate and nurture each year.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The poems in Maya C Popa’s book, Wound is the Origin of Wonder, ask big questions: what can we learn about ourselves from the religious systems  and mythologies we created in the past? (Whether they’re believable or not isn’t the point here – Popa is looking for patterns and archetypes). What’s the world like when we’re not looking at it? What would it be like to be inside someone elses head? It’s risky territory. Poets must ‘go in fear of abstractions’, as Ezra Pound put it. But then all artists who create successful art take risks. Does Maya C Popa pull it off and, if so, how? Yes, she does – but it’s just that here and there, I found myself wondering. Then again, one thing I learned from reading the book was that the joy is in the wondering. You can read my review of it here at Stride Magazine.

Dominic Rivron, Wound is the Origin of Wonder

“Indeterminate Inflorescence” is a series of aphorisms from Lee Seong-bok’s creative writing lectures and collected by his students. Lee Seong-bok has published eight collections of poetry, academic and mainstream literary criticism, books on creative writing drawn from his career at Keimyung University, interrupted by a period of living in Paris studying the post-structuralists and tenets of Seon Buddhism.

Books on creative writing seem to largely fall in two camps, they’re either laden with academic and theoretical jargon so as to be borderline unreadable or engaging, questioning pieces that illuminate and make writers (whether professional or hobbyists) think about their practice. George Sander’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” is an example of the latter. This is is also the camp Lee’s work falls in. […]

From “Writing”,

“A poet’s notebook is often better than their poems. Some do say to write poetry as if writing in one’s notes. Once there’s an awareness that ‘writing’ is being done, a kind of stiffness goes to the shoulders and the language becomes unnatural. The back of a pianist often reveals what they playing will sound like. Just like in golf or tennis, it’s only through relaxing the shoulders the ball can really be hit hard.”

Emma Lee, “Indeterminate Inflorescence” Lee Seong-Bok translated by Anton Hur (Sublunary Editions) – book review

I take comfort from this poem, which may seem strange. I love the time sweep of it, and yet its timelessness, how it wings out dizzyingly and then settles beside us in life’s tedious waiting room. How it gathers dust and whatnots — shells, poems, quotes, bits of intellectual and scientific history, an ever hopeful dog (itself having a strained [straining at the leash?] and estranged relationship with “time”). I love how the poem takes its time meandering through thought, picking things up, putting them down, souls and corpses.

Marilyn McCabe, That’s My Bag

‘Happiness writes white,’ said Larkin, abbreviating Henry de Montherlant’s maxim, ‘Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches’ [‘Happiness writes in white ink on white pages’], but there are exceptions to all generalisations. The end of 2023 saw the publication, by Vole Books, of My Family and Other Birds, Rod Whitworth’s long-overdue first collection, full of poems which largely, though not exclusively, celebrate life and its myriad joys. Hats off to Janice and Dónall Dempsey at Vole for recognising that it needed to be out in the world. It’s available from them, here, or from Rod, here.

Rod asked me to write one of the two endorsements for the collection, which I very gladly did, but here’s a sentence from the other one, by Peter Sansom, which truly nails the book’s qualities: ‘The work of a skilful but unshowy writer, it is imaginative, open, honest and shrewd, and many other things besides, like funny and angry and loving – a chronicle in fully realised individual poems of lives and times.’

Matthew Paul, On Rod Whitworth’s ‘Mr Knowles’

I know, I know – not that Julian of Norwich quote again, I hear you say. But it’s the start of the year, I’m looking out at blue sky, and this is the first day since November 8th that I’ve felt properly well, and that the three colds I’ve had back-to-back since then are finally wearing off. Life is good and all shall be well.

Julian of Norwich was really just a name to me until poet friend Antony lent me his copy of I, Julian by Clare Gilbert, (Hachette) which is a fictionalised autobiography of the medieval anchoress who wrote ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. I was interested in finding out more about Julian’s life, and actually I found it un-put-downable.

At the other end of the spectrum I’ve been converted to the Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths which I’ve been hoovering up on my kindle. They’re great fun, perfect for long waiting times in airports and hospitals, and a good example of (ahem) how to write not a single novel but a series.

On the poetry front, Janet Sutherland’s The Messenger House (Shearsman) has risen to the top of the TBR pile and I’ve made tentative progress through it. The book is a hybrid of prose, poetry, memoir, travelogue. So far I’ve found it intriguing and exciting. Janet likes to push the boundaries and her work is never predictable.

Robin Houghton, All shall be well

I was up early this morning, listening to the precipitation, trying to determine if it was rain or ice or sleet.  I thought of Epiphany, read T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” remembered a poem I had written in response (go here to read it), did some internet wandering, came across an idea in a blog post of mine, and wrote a few lines in response.

Two years ago, I wrote, “I am thinking of the angel warning Joseph in a dream to flee to Egypt, and he does. Did other parents in Bethlehem that night dream of angels with strange messages about their infant boys? Did they remember their dreams? Were they haunted by the memory?”

This morning I wrote about being frozen in place, unable to escape what’s coming.  Part of me wants to turn it into a poem that references Gaza; part of me thinks it will be stronger if it’s more universal. 

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Epiphany Ponderings

Last year, my January challenge was to do a post a day on the blog. It was hard, but it went reasonably well and I did manage to complete it. I thought I might try to do the same this year, although I wondered if this might be setting myself up to fail. So, I’ll just aim to post more frequently! In the meantime, I’ll leave you with those ghostly mute swans, those ethereal snow clouds, the movement of feathers and snow flakes, and all the entrancing sounds Polona Oblak’s haiku contains.

Julie Mellor, The Haiku Calendar

My current slow-read is K. Setiya’s book Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. While there are many aspects of this philosophical book that interest me and pertain to current or recent experiences in my life, something that gained my attention regarding writing is the author’s suggestion that the concept of failure as a loss is bound up with cultural narratives. If we imagine our lives as arcs with the aim of goals, journeys’ ends, attainment of heart’s desires, finding true love, and the like, Setiya argues, it is too easy to feel that we are failures, and to despair or grieve. Maybe we should not be so caught up in narratives, he suggests.

Hmm. As a poet who writes a good deal of what may be termed “lyrical narrative” work and as a human who loves a good story, I’m more drawn to theories of story-as-essential-to-humans; I’m thinking here of Daniel Dennett and Brian Boyd, about whom I’ve blogged in the past (I will place those links at the end of this post). Nonetheless, poetry is often writing about what is NOT a story; some of my favorite poems have no story per se to tell, yet they move me to reflection and/or to emotional resonance. Hence they feel deeply significant.

And if you have happened to click on the links to the right of this page that lead to my poetry online, or purchased and read my books (thank you, dear readers!), you are sure to find several pieces that are not even remotely narrative. As someone who has struggled with self esteem and ambition, and often felt myself a failure, Setiya’s philosophical undoing of the concept that a well-lived or meaningful life entails having “successes” comes as a relief. Whether one decides to accept his idea–I guess that’s up to you. It’s a book worth reading given how anxious contemporary American citizens seem to be and how powerless and despairing we often feel.

Ann E. Michael, Life story

making a living takes so much time
three acres of colour
galloping after us

the Coventry Carol
packed away
and left in the dark

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2024

I started this last year with the intention of posting once a week. That didn’t last long, as evidenced by the fact that I don’t think I’ve posted anything since September. I could feel badly about this, but honestly I don’t. No one is paying to read this, and there’s no law that says I have to be consistent. But it’s good for me to take the time to write something that doesn’t hold the tension or pressure of writing a poem. So here I am, starting up again with the same intention as last year – one post a week – and I will do my best to follow through.

When I was a teen playing on the high school basketball team (until the rest of the team grew and I stayed five foot three and mostly useful as someone who would go in and foul people), my coach always encouraged us to “follow through” on our jump shots, to maintain the arc and momentum, to give ourselves a better chance at scoring. My father and mother were always insistent about following through on commitments as well, which is probably why I still find it so difficult to cancel plans, even if I’m ill.

So what does follow-through look like in a creative life? For my writing, I am still working at not self-rejecting, not holding back on submissions or opportunities. Once I write the work and feel it is ready to be public, I need to follow through by putting it out into the world if I want others to read it. (I have started the year well in that regard – five days into the new year, I have submitted to four journals, one book prize, and one residency. Gulp.) As a newbie visual artist, I have even more impostor syndrome, but 14 pieces of my work are currently adorning the walls of my beloved local library for the month of January, a step that I wouldn’t have taken a year ago.

Donna Vorreyer, In Which I Humbly Resolve…

It is a week today since we lost him. Last night I dreamt that he is on the bed and I was telling him how beautiful he is. I keep catching him out of the corner of my eye, entering the living room, or in his bed in the kitchen. I have yet to venture down the lanes that we walked for fifteen years, it doesn’t feel right. I hadn’t realised how much I constantly chatted to him – about our day, about our plans, about him – and I miss his attentive face, always ready to engage. I miss loving him, and I miss being loved by him because he had huge capacity to love, his whole being was about love, and joy and innocence. He was the most loving dog I have ever know. You all think you have the best dog, but you’re wrong, I had him. He was mine. I was his.

I would have him back. But I can’t, he was on loan to us, and has now gone back to wherever it is he came from. I hope it is this: a field with filthy ditches, and dead pheasants to roll in and rabbits to chase and an endless blue sky to run under. Or a wide, flat beach of yellow sand, rock pools to dip in and out of, some cliffs to run up and down, other dogs to roll and run with. This is how I will imagine him.

Wendy Pratt, For Toby – the best worst dog that ever lived

Last night we ate a dish of green.
Basil and spinach, a pesto. Citrus
zest binding the grains of orzo.
The kitchen window overlooks
the yard, where the persimmon
and fig are still wintering. Sometimes
we crave a cleansing. But keep the fire
alive in the grate, the quiet smolder
inside, honey softening in the comb.

Luisa A. Igloria, Correspondence

What do you want your future to taste like?

I rather like the idea of my future tasting of jam doughnuts and candy floss. Mixing in a tinged of chip shop chips, hot chocolate and garlic butter would be good too. And then my future would taste of satisfaction with the welcome twang and tang of vivacity.

I definitely don’t want it to taste like elastic bands, but I do have an interesting passion for them which will continue into my future!

Here is one of my favourite #ElasticBandPhotos. It has now become the cover art for a ‘coffee table’ book I have worked on which puts together a year’s worth of full moon poems alongside a selection of my elastic band photographs. I loved being able to work with Jason Conway to bring this book, Vortex Over Wave, into the world.

Meet The Poet: Sue Finch (Annick Yerem)

When MoonPath’s Lana Hechtman Ayres told me Patricia Fargnoli had been her teacher and mentor, I went looking for her. Winter, the sixth volume in the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, was the first to arrive, and is now on sale for $9 at Hobblebush Books (use this link: https://www.hobblebush.com/product-page/winter).

I have fallen hard for this book, and this poet. In “The Horse,” she begins:

I let the horse into my apartment,
pushed back chairs,
shoved the rattan chest
up against the tall bookcases…

Horses abound in this book. What’s not to love?

In addition to any other praise I might dish out, it’s a perfect book to read on a cold and rainy January day. Yes, New Hampshire, snow, but it works its spell here in the Pacific Northwest, too: “[I] found a sad music in the fork of an ash tree, / a music made of wind and the tuning forks of stars” (“Glosa”). As Meg Kearney tells us on the back cover, Fargnoli has “listened deeply to the silence of winter.”

Many of the poems in Winter are about dreams.

Bethany Reid, Patricia Fargnoli (1937-2021)

i am so hungry for goodness
that sometimes i read the “good news” website.
a little girl becomes a pilot. a man
eats his weight in teeth. there is a scientist
who turns tears into fossil fuels.
hope is a thing with no feathers
but tells you “i will be a swan.” i do not
want hope. i want a jar of nutella.
i want a burning police car.

Robin Gow, 1/8

Joni Mitchell sang into
an open piano

when she recorded
her first album

because David Crosby
thought it would

enhance her voice —
and it did,

but it also magnified
the other sounds in the room

so they were forced to
strip away the high frequencies,

leaving a flatter beauty,
and this is why

I am careful when I
look at you

because the universe
has limits.

Jason Crane, POEM: The Many Worlds Hypothesis & Song To A Seagull

When I’m asleep, my books venture out into the world.

They sneak into other people’s homes, trade amongst one another—a Jim Carroll for an Anne Waldman, a Joy Harjo for a Juan Felipe Herrera.

Some books run off on their own: Bob Kaufman stays out all night, composes love poetry to the cosmos. Bukowski visits his old Hollywood place on DeLongpre, cracks open a beer, sits by the window, watches all the women walk by.

Patti Smith and Rimbaud wander downtown streets, creating the dreamiest of mandalas from memories, while Claudia Rankine and Wanda Coleman don’t take any crap from the cops.

Come morning, most of my books are back on their shelves, along with a few new ones.

Rich Ferguson, Independent Books

open up
peel back your ribs
expose what’s inside
see the child
crying

feel
start with pity
or compassion, then
become responsible
if you can bear it

if he is like you
if (you think)
he is not like you
this is how
the journey begins

Rachel Barenblat, Open
]]> https://www.vianegativa.us/2024/01/poetry-blog-digest-2024-week-1/feed/ 2 65737 Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 38 https://www.vianegativa.us/2023/09/poetry-blog-digest-2023-week-38/ Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:54:01 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=64852 Continue reading "Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 38"

]]> A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week: the equinox, telepathy, stream-writing, list poems, and much more. Enjoy.

It is peak bramble time, jam-making, pickling, apple cake and plum crumble time. The first geese are here, and the last housemartins are lining up to leave. The bird population in the garden has changed – the sparrows are mostly in the fields just now, so the blue tits have a chance at the feeders. The magpies are mostly bothering something else in the woods, there are starlings along all the roof tops, and the robin is noisily staking out his winter territory in the hawthorns over the burn. The temperature has dropped ten degrees over the last week, and I’m about to pick the last tomatoes and move the lemon verbenas and the scented leaf geraniums into the greenhouse before the frost. I’ll be stripping out the spent annuals, and sowing the seeds I’ve saved to jump start next summer’s flowers, and I’ll be making pot pourri and some dried flower arrangements to give us scent and colour through the dark days.

Because next week is the equinox, one of the tipping points of the year, and we’re heading for winter. I’m having a tipping point of some other kinds too. I seem to have shifted from ‘learning about’ this new territory, to ‘getting to know’ it. I am aware, not only of new facts as they come to my attention, but how they impact things I already know. I understand more about why some plants are thriving and some aren’t, how taking out all the stones from the front garden changes not only the drainage, but the feel of the soil, and I can hear when there’s a new bird in the garden. It feels like a more mutual phase, as the garden responds to what I’ve done – and not always in the way I expect. I had no idea the marshmallows would grow so tall, or how much shade the lilac tree casts.

And in writing, too. I’ll be in the house more than the garden, in my head more than the world. I’m out of the note-making, researching, puzzling, planning stage and into the real words on the page. Unwilding is still very short – less than five per cent of the total, but there are actual words! And more importantly, as it turns out, the next poetry collection has begun to happen. It is tentatively called The Midsummer Foxes but it is also going to have bees, weather, music, herbs and the moon. I have always wanted to do a ‘four elements’ collection, and this may well be it. I am embarrassingly excited about it!

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Tipping Point

straw bales
a lonely tractor giving birth
to autumn

Jim Young [no title]

On Eurostar from the Netherlands I wrote two poems about returning home and a poem about forgetting. I haven’t knowingly written a poem for a while. I had hoped I could, after bike rides, visits to museums, spending time with Giya. I felt refreshed by being away. I saw new things, including Snow White and the Broken Arm by Marlene Dumas, a South African by birth who lives in Amsterdam. And Snow White is holding a camera. When I went to visit mum and showed it to her she laughed. That was the response of a writer, I realised. It was subversive. 

There is lots to do now. It’s a question of pacing, breathing and breaks, I’m told. 

I want to think more. I’ve been in plant mind all spring and summer. Autumn’s provoking a change. 

Jackie Wills, Coming home and thinking more

In Latin, the word equinox means equal night—
there are two times each year when day

and night are the same length in all parts
of the world. On one side, she was dying.

On the other, she was already dead,
her breaths having slowed until

they could not mist the mirror anymore.
The three women who cared for her until

the end folded the sheets and prepared
her body for its last ceremony of fire,

for sifting into an urn bearing her name.

Luisa A. Igloria, Death in a Different Time Zone

A CBe event at the Barbican scheduled for Wednesday this week, the 27th, has been postponed (to 31 January next year) because of poor ticket sales. How many tickets were sold? As many as a tree-surgeon friend could count on his right hand, after having lost two fingers on that hand to one of those chopping machines into which fallen branches are fed.

Ouch. It’s dose of realism. Event organisers who schedule Ian McEwan or Zadie Smith or Marie Kondo or Michael Palin can stroll into the box office, quids in; event organisers who schedule small-press writers have to run ten times faster for often, as here, zero result.

The Barbican event was ticketed. They pay the writers. Many book events don’t. This is tricky: earlier this month I heard a librarian speak about her unease at having to charge £3 for an author event when for many of the people she wanted to come that was a barrier. The regular charge for book events in London is £10, which equals 2.5 Costa coffees and the food budget for a week for many. We want open access; we want writers to be valued; and it’s depressing how often money gets in the way rather than helping.

Once, a friend and I were the only people to turn up to a stage adaptation of Kafka in a pub theatre and they put on the show just for us.

On the plus side: for publishers whose authors cannot fill stadia, every reader matters.

Charles Boyle, Postponed

21st June 2017, a sweltering day in London, was a significant date for me in two respects. The number one reason was that it was the launch of my first full collection, The Knives of Villalejo, at the LRB bookshop. But the second reason is that at the same event I met my mate Mat Riches for the first time.

On that back of that reading (and a fair few pints after the event itself!), we exchanged a couple of poems by email, gave each other feedback, found the feedback useful, realised we also had a fair bit in common apart from poetry, and began a WhatsApp chat that must now have thousands of messages in its archive. It soon stretched well beyond poetry to the key issues of dodgy craft beer, dodgy football teams, dodgy knees and dodgy tastes in shirts.

In fact, I’d argue that every poet needs a mate like Mat, and I feel hugely fortunate to have found him. He’s seen all the poems in Whatever You Do, Just Don’t at multiple stages in their development, and has given me feedback on every single one, from first draft to reassembly after Nell’s ritual dismembering of words, lines and stanza of numerous poems that we had thought finished. Just as I have for him, of course. His development as a poet has been massive over these six years, and his forthcoming pamphlet, Collecting the Data, will be a terrific calling card.

Mat and I are very different poets, but I’d suggest the key to our successful mutual support is that we never attempt to get the other to write in our aesthetic or voice. Instead, we strive to understand, respect and sometimes push each other gently towards a stretching of our self-imposed limits.

Perhaps the only bad thing is that we now can’t ethically bring ourselves to review our respective books.

Matthew Stewart, My mate Mat

Rex Jung is a neuroscientist who studies creativity. He defines creativity as what is “novel and useful” [emphasis mine]. By choosing to live a creative life, by choosing to seek out the poetic in the humdrum details of our daily lives, we can use writing to gain the perspective we need to become the person each of us wants to be: we can live deliberately.

We can cultivate attention and gratitude. We can create stronger connections with the physical realities of Earth, and with each other. If we look inward, but aim toward art—and if we are fortunate—we can transcend ourselves.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
– Oscar Wilde

We construct our narratives. Which story are you choosing? Because this choice is who you are.

Ren Powell, Metaphor as a Present Tense Manifesto

Kierkegaard suggests that we’re depressed, in modern times, precisely because we’re trying to live in the present moment: we have emptied the past and the future of all meaning. “Everything is cut away but the present; no wonder, then, that one loses it in the constant anxiety about losing it.” In these conditions McMindfulness is more likely to exacerbate depression than to relieve it. Relying on the present moment to supply all our meaning was already overloading it: piling more on is not likely to help.

I still think most people will need mindfulness practices (very broadly construed) to have a life worth living. But I’ve joined the rebellion against locating the present moment as the place where reality lives. There’s a lot of reality. Some ways of reaching out to touch it are historical, and some are soteriological. The fact that “we look before and after” is a feature, not a bug. Sure, it can get us in trouble. What can’t? Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

A quiet Fall day. I have failed in everything. And still no rain.

Dale Favier, “Everything is cut away but the Present”

One of the gifts of lyric poetry is the way that it can hold space for a full range of truths as well as ways to access understandings of truth. I often tell writers that what we are after is awkward human utterance. This can be interpreted both as craft as well as content. Figuring out what needs to be said as well as how it needs to be said–this is the gift and animation of engaging with poetry and its truths.

These thoughts are on my mind after spending time with the digital album Songs For Wo​(​Men) 2 (Hello America Stereo Cassette) by Mugabi Byenkya. This album’s narrative arc centers the experiences of a disabled body navigating an able-bodied world as well as the themes of intimacy and love and their role in survival. What charges through the listening experience is Byenkya’s lyric sensibility.

The opening to “Tina,” for example, sets a scene deftly then quickly makes clear what the stakes are:

Housekeeping keeps knocking on the door telling me to open up. I sit and listen. I’m the reason that the towel rack lies mangled askew on the chalky linoleum floor, wondering how much this is going to rack up in charges, wracking my mind for a convincing enough excuse, because I had a seizure while getting out of the shower is a little too much truth, a little too much awkward silence, a little too much shifty eyes, a little too much tiptoeing past the room but barging in when the fork clatters to the ground, a little too much.

The scene here depicts the liminal space of having to negotiate around vulnerability. The physical vulnerability of the moment runs parallel with the emotional vulnerability behind the speaker’s voice. Reading the words alone makes clear the mind at work; the wordplay of “open up” can be appreciated and lingered over in text, such a poignant note to hit before moving forward. Listening to Byenkya’s voice behind words, however, adds a further dimension, makes clear exactly the “opening up” to come.

The idea present in the phrasing “a little too much truth” lives at the core of this album. Byenkya’s awareness and ability to evoke for listeners moments of “a little too much truth” is a gift to watch in action.

José Angel Araguz, microreview: Songs For Wo​(​Men) 2 by Mugabi Byenkya

Geoff Bouvier’s first book, Living Room, was selected by Heather McHugh as the winner of the 2005 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His second book, Glass Harmonica, was published in 2011 by Quale Press. He received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 1997 and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University in 2016. In 2009, he was the Roberta C. Holloway visiting poet at the University of California – Berkeley. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his partner, the novelist SJ Sindu, and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t remember the first book I ever read, but it fundamentally changed me. The mere fact of words – lines of little scribbles that were somehow signs of meaning – shifted my basic understanding of everything.

The first book I wrote – “The Cake Who Lost Its Crumbs,” when I was three – taught me that I could sculpt those little significant meaningful scribbles. My audience was my mother and father, who were quite encouraging.

The first book I published, thirty-three years later, relined my confidence. Though Living Room found only a modest audience, it did earn me some inroads into academia, where I’ve been able to cultivate a life of the mind.

With my new book, Us From Nothing, I wanted words to again shift my basic understanding of everything. I had to try to understand who I am, why I’m here, where I came from, and where I might be headed. It took me 7 years to research and revise what became a serial epic prose poem about the most important milestones in human history.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Psychologically, from the moment I learned to read, it was the words that got me, first and foremost. The mere fact of words. I didn’t care about stories or characters. Those words were drawing attention to themselves as words. That’s the poetry. That hooked me.

Factually, I grew up in a house full of books – my parents were both teachers and readers – but the shelf with the poetry books was the only one with cobwebs on it. I think I gravitated toward it because no one else ever touched it; the poetry books could be mine, all mine.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Geoff Bouvier

My latest poetry book has an unusual backstory: the pandemic and my telepathic parents.

My parents communicated telepathically — mostly when my father was at work. She was a stay-at-home Mom; he was a shipman in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and had no access to a telephone.  When I was too young for school, she’d ask me to play quietly and then converse with him. Naturally, I thought all married couples could transmit thought messages.

I inherited this useful ability, which granted me access to communications “across the miles,” so to speak.  For example, I could reach my father while he was driving and insist that he turn around and come home. I kept this channel open so the dead could reach out, too; My Dungeon Ghost is a memoir poem about an elementary school classmate who became a paid assassin, died behind bars, and telepathically requested “a boon.”
 
With outsiders, this was never discussed, even though my family considers telepathy to be a normal thing even children are expected to do. Though I’ve had my share of uncanny conversations and experiences, I deliberately excluded these from my writing. Then the pandemic arrived with a panicked lockdown — and the silken privacy of isolation granted permission to open a locked door. I decided this collection would be different: a conjuring of the literary and speculative, the familiar and the alien, with judicious sampling from other poets.

Drop-in by LindaAnn LoSchiavo (Nigel Kent)

This was the first in-person reading I’ve done in a long time. I’d forgotten how bad the nerves are when I read out. Getting the collections off the bookshelf and going through them, choosing what to read was like going backwards in time, like looking through photos and seeing images of previous selves. I literally had to knock the dust off them, especially the early ones. I have five collections in all: three full and two pamphlets and I have another full collection coming out next year. You’d think by now I’d feel reasonably confident in my abilities as a poet but for some reason, poetry is probably my main area of intense feelings of imposter syndrome. Often I get so nervous before a reading that I’ll spend the whole day beforehand stuck in ‘waiting mode’ feeling sick with nerves. But I think something might have changed this year, the nerves are definitely not as bad. I think it’s since I signed the book deal contract on my nature-landscape-memoir. I have spent a year writing about belonging and what it is to belong, to feel you have a place in the world. I feel like I have spent a year validating my right to exist in the arts sphere, and other places, my own landscape, my own skin. The difference between having a poetry collection published and a main stream trad published non poetry book is immense – I’m going to write a post about it in the future – and it helps that there’s a team working with me, all of us working towards getting the edits finished, getting the book landed and absolutely shining. I don’t know what it is I’m trying to say – something about being taken seriously as a writer, but also, that self recognition, the finding of inner value in your own work…you have got to have that to grow.

Anyway, I think because the nerves were less debilitating this time, and because I didn’t have books to flog or a course to sell, I think because I was simply taking part (not organising for a change – the relief!) I was able to enjoy the evening more fully, I was fully present. I chatted to poetry friends, I got the gossip on other sectors of the arts world, I enjoyed, oh fully enjoyed, the readings by the other poets and when I came to read I felt a genuine connection with the audience. As I sat watching the night draw in on Northway, listening to the musicians between sets and watching the good folk of Scarborough going out into the town, or coming in and out of the SJT theatre opposite, the shop lights and the street lights glittering, the sound of traffic moving through the town, I thought – this could be anywhere. We could be in London, we could be in Manchester, but here we are in Scarborough.’ It pleases me to see cultural events like this springing up in the town, and I’m pleased to just be a tiny part of that.

Wendy Pratt, Knocking the Dust Off – Reading Out

I have a live reading as part of an Acumen evening coming up this week […]. Do pop in if you find yourself in Dulwich on Thursday. I liked what Wendy [Pratt] had to say about not having to organise the reading so she could step back and enjoy just reading. I liked her note about not having books to sell as well— this will be my last reading before I do have to start thinking about that.

However, what I really liked was the poem that Wendy included at the end of the post. It’s her lovely ‘Love Letter to Scarborough on a Saturday Night‘ from her most recent collection, ‘ When I Think of My Body as a Horse‘ (reviewed by some knobhead here). Maybe it’s the fact that I have family in Scarbados—NB, I don’t think it is, but I love this poem.  The whole collection is a moving feast, a marvel and  just moving, so if you’ve not read it please do.

Now, I could just cheat and tell you to read the Scarborough poem and call that it, but oh no, dear reader…I want you to have more…

Mat Riches, Nationalising Breaking Glass and Rood-Screens

On Thursday evening I did a reading with Catherine Kyle Broadwall (she read from her fun new book, Fulgurite—full of fairy tale poems!) and read from Field Guide to the End of the World and Flare, Corona, which I think went pretty well. Had a good crowd, it was a super cute store—great eclectic magazine sections, great fiction and poetry sections, and a stuffed narwhal hanging from the ceiling, and we sold a lot of books, which was fun. It had been a minute since I’d done a reading, so I was glad it went pretty well. […]

I got a total of four rejections and two acceptances this week – and one was from a place I’ve been trying to get into for years, JAMA, or the Journal of the American Medical Association. I’m not a doctor, but I do have a pre-med biology degree, and I write medically themed poetry all the time, so it seemed like a natural fit—but the first poem they took wasn’t at all medically related, ironically. Ha ha!

Fall always means new pens and notebooks, catching up on paperwork, starting the academic year—so even those of us who don’t work in academia will be affected by the increased work at literary magazines or invitations to come read at classes, all that sort of thing.

Although I am still recovering from my antibody infusion from almost two weeks ago, I’m starting to feel a little more productive as the days get colder and shorter.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, It’s Fall Witches! Autumn Equinox with Glass Pumpkins, a Reading Report from Edmonds Bookshop and an Upcoming Zoom Reading, Exciting Acceptances

Such a joy last weekend to attend one of a few readings organized by Editor Cassandra Arnold to celebrate her release of Alchemy and Miracles (Gilbert & Hall Press, 2023). Everyone read so beautifully! This collection is filled with nature poems written by 83 poets from all over the world, including three writers from right here in Southeast Alaska. Yes, I’m over the moon to have work in this compilation with fellow Blue Canoe writers Mandy Ramsey from Haines and Bonnie Demerjian from Wrangell. If you get the chance, give Cassandra Arnold a follow on Instagram (@cassandra_art_and_stories) where you’ll surely be inspired about all things poetry. And yes, she designed this lovely cover, too! Alchemy and Miracles may be purchased through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Happy Autumn, all! In true, Southeast Alaskan form, termination dust on the high peaks yesterday morning.

Kersten Christianson, Autumnal Alchemy

You can’t see in the photograph that the speaker is sitting on her hands, nor can you see her feet, described later as “thick toes, accustomed to field” that are squeezed painfully into borrowed shoes. And the face gives no evidence of physical pain, but that makes the speaker even more believable. She has prepared for this moment, this unveiling, and nervous as she is, she will not allow something as minor as discomfort to ruin it.

Smith turns the poem in the second stanza by changing the verb tense, moving into second person, though it feels more like the speaker is talking to the picture or into a mirror rather than talking directly to the reader. It’s a fantastic use of the second person, because usually the effect of the move is to grab the reader by the shirt, so to speak, and demand their attention, but here it’s more introspective.

Tell me that I have earned at least this much woman. Tell me

that this day is worth all the nights I wished the muscle

of myself away.

The “tell me” is a request for validation or acceptance, but again, the speaker isn’t asking for it from us. She’s asking it from herself, which is important because she isn’t sure that she’ll receive it from anyone else. The end of the poem leaves this uncertain:

Here I am, Mama, vexing your savior,

barely alive beneath face powder and wild prayer. Here I am,

both your daughter and your son, stinking of violet water.

The “vexing your savior” combined with “wild prayer” really hits hard for me because of my own experiences of estrangement from family over matters of faith. I feel what’s at stake and why she still needs to be this person no matter the cost. There’s an ache here that stays unresolved, and I think that’s why it sticks with me.

Brian Spears, Sitting for a picture

Wow, I felt a lot of love for RS Thomas after my last blog post.

I wonder if we need more spirituality today, generally I mean. I speak as a moderate atheist. I think I used to call myself an ‘agnostic’ – wanting to leave the door open I suppose – but we all grow older, and so our thoughts and beliefs mature one way or another. I now love a lot of things about the church of my upbringing (although I hated it as a child!), but it stops well short of faith. The only church service I enjoy is Evensong, but I love the architecture of churches and can’t resist going inside any I come across. I’ve often sung the services in cathedrals with my choir the Lewes Singers: I will sing anything, but I never say the creed. It’s always a moving experience, but perhaps that’s the feeling of being in the presence of faith: people who truly believe. I don’t just mean those participating in the service, but also the thousands of souls who have worshipped there for centuries, right back to the stonemasons and labourers who built the massive edifices. I respect all that, and feel privileged to be a part of it.

But spirituality feels much wider, more inclusive than religion as such. My impression is that RS continually questioned his faith. Isn’t that what many of us do, even the atheists? What do we believe in? Surely it can’t just be Gaia, politics, football or reality TV?

Robin Houghton, On spirituality, a submission and the wonder of lists

The Days of Awe open on Rosh Hashanah and close on Yom Kippur. When my birthday falls on Rosh Hashanah, it gets lost in the birthday of the world; when it falls on Yom Kippur, celebrations turn sober and thin. Gallows humor when fasting, enacting symbolic death? Fat chance! 

This year, the birthday fell smack in the middle of the Days of Awe – and I got a day or two of awe. When your walls come tumbling down (Rabbi Alan Lew’s image), as they did unbidden during this season of introspection, you get some light in the gaps of the rebuilding. That happened mid-week – all in betweens! – in a New England-y place familiar and known (Maine) but charged. I cleared the slate and came with heightened sensibility; came to the sapphire sky with such a mind. Something came to meet me. 

Everything got renewed by the sea, standing on the deck of a fishery
in the presence of a rope coiled, braided, stiff with the sting of fish iodine
and rusted wires woven together with gates, doors, traps
and floats bulbed in mottled white and bright fuchsia 
hanging like a bunch of radishes. 

Yes to Paul Eluard: “Is there another world? Yes, in this one.”

Jill Pearlman, All the Days of Awe

Do I read Emily Dickinson because she speaks to me directly and clearly? In truth, no. I’m very often mystified. And I think this is a point worth making: we don’t always read the writers we love out of a profound sense of familiarity or comprehension. But where I don’t understand her, a different kind of understanding steps in, a knowledge layers deep that I would not otherwise have activated that day. Dickinson makes me experience what she herself described here:

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

Dickinson’s social quickness and wit is often overlooked in favor of her reclusive tendencies. If you don’t believe me, read her letters. I have just flipped to a passage at random and found a letter to her brother Austin that I had marked years ago. It reads:

Your welcome letter found me all engrossed in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!

Yes, she included five exclamation points. Later in the letter, she tells her brother she’s eager for a Valentine—all the other girls have received them—so, where is hers? She insists that Austin tell Thomas she’s pining for one.

Maya C. Popa, Wonder Wednesday

Since learning that yoga is not, in fact, a sinister cult but a really useful way of caring for my back, I regularly breathe out deeply. This is something I’ve done both in classes, and in front of ‘Yoga with Adrienne’ and her free YouTube videos. 

When younger, I did breathing exercises for wellbeing by default when playing the flute. A lot of my lessons were spent with my teacher encouraging me to develop breath and diaphragm control. I had no idea how useful a life skill this was as I channelled a column of air into a top C. 

More recently, I exhaled deeply on opening a box of copies of Festival in a Book – A Celebration of Wenlock Poetry Festival. I had been holding my breath for two weeks: between the moment of pressing send on the final proofs and lifting out the first book. I breathed even more freely when Anna Dreda, Festival Founder, said she loves the anthology created in honour of her Festival and its legacy. 

It has struck me since that the publication of a book of poetry is, in some ways, an exhalation, a letting go. A breathing out of thought and word and music into the world. Breath and word. The word made paper. It can’t be taken back now. And it will become part of other people’s breathing, internal and external, when read. 

Liz Lefroy, I Exhale Deeply

I know sometimes a poem can simmer away for years before the poet feels it’s done, or at least in a state competent enough to be abandoned. I know some people feel writing slowly and meticulously, working on the placing of words in relation to each other, how each fits or alters the metre, a rhyming scheme, or the demands and rigours of the particular form that is at the heart of the attempt, is the proper way to pay respect to poetry as a craft to be learned. Sometimes this process allows time for an exploration into what the poet actually wants to say – because it’s not always obvious to the poet at the outset. I appreciate this, and have written this way.

And of course there is the question of feedback. A poem might be sent to a trusted poetry friend for appraisal, even for thorough workshopping. Bits might be lopped off, the tense altered, adjectives questioned, the lines rejigged to the point of a new opening or closing line. And if the poem ever becomes a part of a collection, then the publisher’s editor, who might or might not be the same person, might well want to suggest even more alterations. This is normal enough stuff. Some thinner-skinned poets seem to struggle with it but after many years of working for newspapers, I understand the role of the sub-editor and the value of a good one. Far from it being bothersome, I appreciate the effort and generosity of those who take the time to offer their thoughts.

However, not all poetry is written as methodically and meticulously as this. An obvious point, perhaps, but in poetry’s case ‘rules are not always rules’.

More recently, or at least recently more frequently, I have felt more confident in the technique of stream-writing, not simply as a warm-up exercise, but as a valid form of delving into what the mind contains and wants to share. When I begin I have no idea what will come out of it. I might have one line, one image, and I usually feel calm enough to shut everything else out and let the words, images, phrases, chunks of conversation maybe, emerge and work out their own order. It’s an exploration, without prior warning, of the recesses of the mind. Sometimes, as I’ve said in the past, the result is completely disconnected rubbish because I’m unable to think or connect thought and so it is deleted. Other times, it feels as if I may have hit on something, that the words have a relationship to one another, a rhythm that might alter and swing around, but that forms a whole that contains some kind of meaning, in the strict sense of the word, as in an emotional connection not simply a logical process. The validity of this way of doing things is a matter of opinion and it’s certainly not something I would do every time I sat down to write, but I’m finding that with more practice comes more consistency, as I suppose is the way with any technique.

That is not to say the ‘end result’ cannot stand editing. There are poets who employ stream-writing as an inviolable technique, valid only if left well alone as the produce of the mind at that particular moment in life or time. I see the point in this as a principle but the obvious danger is that it may end up as a stream of self-indulgent drivel, a celebration of egotism in a string of boring sentences.

Bob Mee, Untitled

There can be beauty in a list: its specificity, also the rhythm and sound–which order does the poet choose for each word? That matters. Chronology perhaps; category, like the scientist; or else sound, such as alliteration; or possibly by the thread of some concatenation that gradually creates associations. The logic of a list poem differs from other forms of lists.

I always think of Whitman as an early and consummate “list poet,” though a great many of his poems do not rely on the strategy. There are list poems that employ anaphora and those that build through phrases. Others rely on modifiers that escalate or change tone to surprise the reader. In my own process it has been useful to begin drafting poems through listing, though often I abandon the list when I revise.

Also, I teach myself about the world and its people, environs, and ideas through lists.

For example, having strayed temporarily from my home region, I’m getting acquainted with a “new” place by making lists of birds, trees, flowers–yeah, the naming-things approach so basic to human beings, like when my children were just learning to talk and conversation with them consisted largely of naming objects or actions.

This is not a poem:

Pygmy nuthatch, juniper titmouse, pinyon jay. Gambel oak, Abert’s squirrel, pinacate stink beetle, skink. Quaking aspen, limber pine. Common raven, Woodhouse’s scrub-jay, fireweed, globemallow, bear corn, oak gall, crow. Pinyon, cholla, Ponderosa pine, alligator juniper, Apache plume, sandwort, groundsel. Gneiss, granite, gray oak, spotted towhee, rabbitbrush, bajada, arroyo, muttongrass, mesa, schist.

Ann E. Michael, Lists

Somewhere a chair is waiting for us. Maybe at home. Maybe at the doctor’s office. Maybe in an empty lot beside a busy street where a sparrow sings in the thicket.

Carey Taylor, Off Killingsworth


When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. In Hard Drive a prologue and epilogue hold six parts of almost equal length. These poems take the reader through the journey of grief: Signature, Officialdom, Clearing Shelves, Covered Reservoir, Intentions, Attachment.

‘A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints’, Paul also has a talent for intriguing titles: Other people who died at 38; Better Verbs for Scattering; We weren’t married. He was my civil partner.

There is a great variety of form: erasure poems, use of indents and columns, haibun, prose poems, alongside the narrative poems which range in length from three lines to the five-page poem Your Brain.

Fokkina McDonnell, Hard Drive

A little while ago, I read a pamphlet by Nikki Dudley. It was about her Nan, Greenie, and about how Greenie´s dementia had a huge impact not only on her, but also on Nikki and the whole family. At the time I was reading this, my father had died after living with Parkinson´s-related dementia for the last years of his life. And my mother, who was (and still is) alive, was living with dementia as well. The book meant a lot to me and I came back to it again and again. It is a mixture of poetry, CNF and visual poetry, the latter illustrating perfectly that dementia is not a linear thing, but something scattered, murky, out of reach for those who live with it and those who are their witnesses in this process. When I wrote my own book, St. Eisenberg and the Sunshine Bus, Nikki’s book helped me to think outside the box in describing my father’s dementia.

So when Beir Bua Press closed down and it wasn’t clear what would happen with all the books, I approached Nikki and asked her what she thought about Sídhe Press re-publishing her book. We agreed on working together and on September 15, Just One More I Go, was re-published by Sídhe Press. It is, of course, the same book it was, but I hope we have added and improved to it in a way that honours Greenie. As well as an additional poem, we now have photos of Greenie not only on the cover, but also tucked inside the book- one more thing to illustrate who she was and is to Nikki, and once we read it, to us. And it slots in seamlessly with Our Own Coordinates- Poems About Dementia, which was the first book I published with Sídhe Press.

Annick Yerem, Just One More Before I Go by Nikki Dudley

母と娘（こ）に生れあはせし花野かな　正木ゆう子

haha to ko ni umareawaseshi hanano kana

            our fate of being

            a mother and a daughter

            flowering field …

                                                            Yuko Masaki

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

Fay’s Note:  “hanano” (flowering field) is an autumn kigo.

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 25, 2023)

Two of Trish Kerrison’s sons have Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which triggers progressive muscle failure and usually limits life to eighteen years or below, although they are now in their late-twenties. The poems are an honest, and occasionally humorous, look at life as a mother and carer. The short introductory poem takes the image of four lines drawn in sand to make a box, “to put people in// to live,/contained,// until the sands shift.” Children are life-changing events but also a tickbox on a life’s milestones: job, marry, children, etc. A disabled child can leave parents feeling as if their life’s foundations have slipped away. No one pictures themselves with a disabled child. There’s not only the extra care work involved but battles to get the support parents are entitled to, the juggling of carers and work, and the feeling of constantly fighting the same battles over and over. But parents keep going, as “The Ground Beneath Our Feet” concludes as parents

“laugh, even as the sands are shifting.
We walk on unsteady feet, unsteady ground.
We don’t look down.”

Emma Lee, “Beyond Caring” Trish Kerrison (Five Leaves) – book review

Today, riding back to the city, and drinking my first PSL of the year, I noticed some trees were somehow bright yellow amid still plentiful green and remembered we had crossed that official threshold into autumn–the equinox. That early dark creeps in slowly, but starts racing toward December about now, helped along by the time change that will come in early November.  I have not started my fall decorating or swapped out my summer clothes for cooler weather but possibly this week I will do both. 

This week is less thick with writing than last week with lots of deadlines and the first draft of the poetry study guide trial assignment. In addition to the usual lifestyle and design stuff, it was really nice to spend some time, deep diving on a single poem (Sharon Olds’ “Rite of Passage)” and putting all that literary analysis education I paid so much for to good use. There were chapbook orders and layouts on new books that will be coming. There was one new poem in the cryptozoology series, but it feels halting and stiff like I haven’t written enough in the past couple of months, poetry-wise, sort of like clearing your throat after a long silence. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/25/2023

I sometimes laugh when I think back to my NY post and declaring 2023 to be the year of my ALL. This year, and it’s only September, has already exceeded expectations. I’m looking forward honestly to January when I can write down the plot of this past year, and call forth the next. (Carefully, very carefully….)

But also, don’t worry, it seems with every amazing thing that’s happened, there’s been a balance check. But I still believe in the unsaid, (a post I wrote in 2017), I still believe in the words of Nicole Brossard who says, “You have to be insane to confide the essential to anyone anywhere except in a poem.” 

Still, life is wonderful, still life is wonderful……My book on that subject and the art life will be coming out in January, and I remain very proud of it. More on that soon…..

In the meantime, our garden season is coming to a close, the poetry of fall is upon us.

Shawna Lemay, Another Season of Seeing

I often sort of felt like I was the only stranger at a party where everyone else were lifelong friends. Much hugging and exclaiming around me while I stand awkwardly smiling and clutching my wine glass. One of the many great things about online learning though is that I don’t have to be there in the room with the awkward smile and the wine glass. I can be HOME with the video turned off, my brow furrowed, thinking wait…what? […]

And no, I’m not going to tell you which poet, because I’m sure you love love love their work and might be a tad judge-y of me for noooot really being tuned into it. I’m hoping, though, that sense of not-getting-it -even-though-you-want-to resonates. I’m happy to be reminded that I don’t need to love it all, that I can just keep reading on. And that maybe there will come a time when this poet’s work is exactly what I’ll need.

The poetry mansion has many rooms, so it’s okay that I slide out of this one and wander into some other room, or lurk in the hallway for a while. I’m sure there’s another party I’ll feel more comfortable in. Have wine glass, will travel.

Marilyn McCabe, You don’t know what love is; or, On Learning and Appreciation

Famished for good fortune, well fed on the hungers of the needy, we can name all the saints but cannot bend their mercies so one size fits all.

To sing, to seek, to rosary old stones.

To regal and re-gold tired sunrises.

Scatter worries for the birds feasting on hard times.

For the ones flying south in winter, scatter hopes so joy may expand.

Rich Ferguson, Blessed Light For the Dying

For the Earth,
both hands in an arc.
A fist for the moon.
Gravity a rope,
unseen in the dark.

Palms up for the tides,
both high and low,
the hands raise and lower
as they ebb and flow.

The planet spins,
the pull taunts,
the moon is what
the water wants.

Jason Crane, POEM: Describing A Satellite

island: the moon
that swallowed the moon
a mouth that gathered clouds

Grant Hackett [no title]
]]> 64852 Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 24 https://www.vianegativa.us/2023/06/poetry-blog-digest-2023-week-24/ Mon, 19 Jun 2023 20:59:33 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=63946 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week: mortality, masks, summer reading, road trips, and more. Enjoy!

Pushed myself to take a 10 minute walk with Leonard last night, but that was a mistake. I crawled into bed with a migraine.

But I woke this morning without one – for the first time in six days. I’m taking the morning slowly. I don’t even dare move this head through an asana sequence. Coffee and water. And prophylactic paracetamol. I have a long day of writing ahead. It will be good to focus on something besides my senses: an imaginary world where the smell of chemicals, body odors, and dog breath really don’t come into play.

The “cancer hour” I promised myself has bled into the long days of this past week. I distracted myself with sitcoms and slept through half of every episode. The exercise and activity chart I made for myself before I started chemotherapy is still hanging on the refrigerator. I really should take it down. At this point, it’s just mocking me.

I hear the birds outside. And the train passing by every now and then. Leonard is sprawled on the floor, taking up more than a square meter of this little room. He’s got his head on a stack of books. I hope he’s not drooling. Here I sit. In my tiny room with the French doors, because I still believe elegance is more about attitude than scale, more about framing the parts than interrogating the whole.

Ren Powell, Que Sera Sera

Change equals living: no life without alterations of one kind or another. My current situation is one of those so-called Life Events: I have retired from my position at the university where I worked for about 17 years. I suppose it is A Big Deal (see how I’m capitalizing?), but I must admit that so far it doesn’t feel terribly fraught, major, or even bittersweet. It just feels appropriate. Part of the reason for that is that I’m not a person who has defined herself by her career. Thank goodness, since it was a fairly modest career. I enjoyed my work with students; and I was part of a terrific team of earnest, funny, and supportive folks. So yes, that’s something to miss. However, I have many interests beyond work at the college. Time to pursue those, methinks. Time to spend with my mother as she wanes. Time to travel with my husband and on my own and to visit our far-away offspring. Of course, there are all those things that will keep me unexpectedly busy…gardening, house maintenance, trying to get the metaphorical ducks to line up (as if they ever will). And then, poetry; I want to devote some serious brainpower to revising, reorganizing, drafting, reading, learning more about the art I love. Maybe even submitting more work, putting together another manuscript or two. Who knows what changes are ahead?

When I note the fewer numbers of fireflies, I do not mean there are none. It’s just that some years, by June 18th, the back of our yard simply dazzles; we don’t need fireworks! Because they pupate in dampness, such as in rotting logs or underground, and because they need moist earth in order to feed (on soft-bodied invertebrates, according to the Xerxes Society’s informative page here), a spring drought can limit their numbers. And I miss them, the way I miss the little brown bats and the green ash trees. Those types of changes may be more or less inevitable, but I can’t help thinking that such transitions feel less timely than my departure from running the university’s writing center. The ash and the bats are still around, but in vastly decreased numbers. I hope the lightning bugs bounce back.

Ann E. Michael, Lightning bugs

It’s June and the rhododendrons are in full bloom. From my window, shades of scarlet, blush, magenta, neon pink. These colors remind me of the various lipsticks my Ballard grandmother would wear and I explored this in a poem I’ve been working on all morning. There’s no shame in too much coffee and pajamas at noon, especially when the rain pours and the drive to write is hot. But I’m also leaving soon for roadtrip through Yukon, British Columbia, and Washington. So a blog entry before my departure.

Kersten Christianson, Approaching Solstice

My last two uncles died a couple of months apart, at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. At one of their funerals a cousin expressed the same idea that Linda Pastan so eloquently describes in the second stanza of her poem: we are the older generation now. 

The idea of being next in line ‘to die’ does not bother me. I am deeply grateful for all of my own ‘torn scraps of history’ and I do not feel alone on any shore. I don’t know what lies ahead and I have no need to imagine what it might be. Not believing in any kind of afterlife, or second chance, is a comfort rather than the source of any fear. Having survived to be a part of the older generation feels like a gift, not a burden, or riven with loss. 

While we were waiting outside the chapel of rest for Uncle Michael’s coffin to be taken inside I heard the ubiquitous, unintelligible call of the rag and bone man along the main road beyond the cemetery’s gates. The juxtaposition was both startling and somewhat reassuring. Is there always some use for what is thrown away or discarded, what is unwanted, abandoned? Even our bones and flesh, once our consciousness has departed?

Lynne Rees, Reflection ~ On being the next in line to die

Penny kept him safe from the other pigs; dragged
him off and buried him each night, sat
jealously near his dirt hole,
until she dug him up again, rolled
him with her overheated tongue, and
shook him in her mouth as though to snap
his rigid little neck. After a week
he was a pockmarked mess, his brows
mottled with teeth pricks and his
blob-shoes dull with grime.
Penny had made him his own. Broken him in.

Kristen McHenry, Penny the Pig

As I move into the last leg of writing the book, or at least the first draft of the book, and prepare to start working with the editors to bring it to a shine, I am beginning to look back at this stage of the journey with something like nostalgia. I’ve learned so much about myself as a person, and as a writer, on the way. One of the things I have learned, a skill really, is to trust my own voice and my own story, to ‘shut the door’ and write. There were times when I felt blocked, and the block came from me worrying about the validity of my story; comparing myself to other writers and their intimidating, blazing talent. Whenever this happens, my writing starts to thin out, my voice starts to peter out like the thin waves at the edge of a lake. I have to pull myself back and back, remind myself that the passion is always what saves a story, that writing authentically, about what interests you, is the way to make your writing sing. To write freely, as if no one is watching you, as if social media doesn’t exist, as if no one will read your book; that’s the key. I’ve stepped back from social media in an attempt to nail the final stretch of the book. I am ‘figuring out what I want to say’ and how I want to say it, and it is like solving a glorious puzzle. I haven’t missed social media as much as I thought I would. Stepping back has allowed me to embrace the life I want – writing, thinking. I hope I look back on this time and recognise the absolute joy of existing in this moment; getting up, writing, walking, writing. I shall miss writing this book, I shall miss the discoveries, the journey it has taken me on. But I’m ready for the next part of the journey too. How strange the act of writing, that a person could exist entirely in words fished from the air.

Wendy Pratt, “Write like no one is looking over your shoulder…”

I’m not sure what provoked so fluid a flow. I’d had the opening section – headed Superstructure in this draft – hanging around for several years. The original notion was an anecdotal account of experience working in a mental hospital laundry, but it never got further than a description of the huge gothic edifice that housed the institution. In spite of the fact that my three months in that dreadful place were full of incident, the anticipated graduation to a depiction of what actually went on never occurred.

As so often happens, it was an entirely unconnected stimulus that sparked off the next stage of the poem. During the ongoing (and seemingly never-ending) process of unpacking and sorting documents after our house move, I came across some research and planning notes I had drawn up for a projected production of Peter Schaffer’s play Equus. I had homed in on the play’s central theme – that of the psychiatrist Dysart’s growing fascination with the perverse, amoral theology that has driven his 17-year-old patient Alan Strang to blind several horses with a hoof pick. Appalling though the act is and in spite of the explanatory pathology that emerges through analysis, Dysart becomes increasingly aware of the sacrifice of visceral passion and engagement that Alan must make in order to be liberated from his compulsions. Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created, observes Dysart. And later, as a cri de coeur: All right! The normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes. There’s also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills, like a god. It is the ordinary made beautiful, it is also the average made lethal. Normal is the indispensable murderous god of health and I am his priest.

The planned production never went ahead. A combination of concern about suitability for an all-ages school audience, probable casting difficulties and a sense that Schaffer presents his compelling scenario just a little too tidily had me tucking the notes away and moving swiftly on to something more negotiable. So rediscovering them so long after their compilation gave them a renewed freshness and impact. But instead of causing me to reflect wistfully on the production-that-never-was, I found myself thinking about the poem-that-was-yet-to-be. And I realised within a moment of revelatory shock that aspects of what I had seen and heard in that mental hospital conformed precisely to the informing agenda of Equus. I realised – maybe for the first time fully – that I had been witness to a demonstration of that nexus between the limits of conventional human behaviour and the abandonment and chaos that lies beyond and that it had shocked me to the core. The poem investigates – as maybe only a poem can – the true nature of my perception of the event witnessed at the time and what, with the understanding that only comes with time, it meant to me now.

Dick Jones, BINNERS

I had another recent poetry acceptance, this time for a poem about my mother that is also about the time I played Marjorie in the play Marjorie Prime, a few years back. I played an 80-year-old woman, and afterwards 1) everyone mistook me for my mother 2) I cut off my long hair streaked white that I wore in a braid (just like my mother) and 3) people asked what I did with makeup to look 80. Basically, the answer was “no makeup.” For those not so familiar with theatre, the stage lights will wash you out, so wearing no makeup did make me look 80! But still. So now it helps me 1) understand my parents and 2) brace myself to be reading Successful Aging, by Daniel J. Levitin! I like it a lot, and I hope I am aging successfully!

I found this book, and got it through interlibrary loan, after I read his book This Is Your Brain on Music, which I discussed with the Stranger Than Fiction non-fiction book club. It meets in a wine bar! Our next book, already in progress, is I Live a Life Like Yours, a memoir by Jan Grue, about living with a disability…and just living his own life, which is like…yours, or mine. The Levitin book on aging is delightful in its examples, many of whom are musicians that he met in his other work! Joni Mitchell, Sonny Rollins.

Kathleen Kirk, Acceptance

I love the way the poems in Terminarchy build on the work in Angela [France]’s previous collection, The Hill. And the (not-so) gentle reminder at the end of this poem that it’s likely to be the funguses of the world and other plant matters that will inherit/repossess our planet if we don’t buck our ideas up. There are plenty of other poems in Terminarchy that act as such a reminder. Can a poem make us buck our ideas up? Possibly not on its own, but it was timely to see this article about whether art can change attitudes towards climate change. I think if we can present the issues in contexts such as France has done then we can look again. That seems to be the gist of the article—he says having skim read it so far.

I’m guilty of having slept on my copy of The Hill, and it’s been a while since reading Hide, so I’ll get them back into rotation ASAP. Oh yes and find the work that came before them.

Mat Riches, Spores, the Pity

The title of Tim Allen’s The Indescribable Thrill of the Half-Volley is both gloriously on and off topic. It’s not a book about football, indeed not a single ball is kicked, although one or two are thrown, but it does hover around the indescribable. The book consists of 97 four-line poems, in couplets, each numbered ant titles. The titles all consist of the word ‘invisible’ followed by a noun. Here’s number 25:

invisible politics

A simply dressed man clowning around
For no one in particular in a general street

The man goes home to paint his face
In the mirror the stillness of his world suspends all fear

How do you render the invisible visible in words? Obliquely and through suggestion, perhaps. The contrast between the man’s dress and behaviours evokes an image of politics as farce played out under a surface veneer of conventional blandness.

Billy Mills, A Basket of Small Delights: June 2023 Pamphlet Reviews

One of the unique experiences of being a poet / poetry reader is becoming accustomed with the creature known as the “selected poems.” The closest equivalent from outside the poetry world comes in the form of the “greatest hits” album. Yet, the novelty and nostalgic flash of such an album doesn’t exactly feel right with poetry.

Perhaps a volume of selected poems allows us to tap into a similar experience Italo Calvino speaks about in his essay “Collection of Sand”:

“I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.”

This idea of glimpsing “a foundation and model” for literary experience through engaging with a writer’s collected body of work is, for me, an apt guide into the selected poems experience. Just as Calvino invites his reader into a communal act of assessment and study, readers of poetry are invited into a similar communal act, only one that includes celebration as much as reckoning.

Which is another way of saying: selected poems allow us to catch up.

It is in the experience of catching up that I encourage readers to enter What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems (FlowerSong Press) by Roberto Carlos Garcia. Across the three poetry collections gathered here in this volume, one can see Garcia establishing a foundation and model for poetic experience, meditation, and interrogation that ranges in depth and practice.

José Angel Araguz, microreview: What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems by Roberto Carlos Garcia

The first I’ve seen from Montana poet, as well as 2015-2017 Poet Laureate of Montana, and ferrier Michael Earl Craig, the author of Can You Relax in My House, (Fence Books, 2002), Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006), Thin Kimono (Wave Books, 2010), Talkativeness (Wave Books, 2014) and Woods and Clouds Interchangeable (Wave Books, 2019), is Iggy Horse (Wave Books, 2023). The poems in Iggy Horse have a crispness to them, and the poems hold echoes of elements one might also see in the works of Canadian poets Stephen Brockwell and Stuart Ross: a slight narrative distance, as the nebulous narrators of each poem slowly form as each poem unfolds. As the poem “SPRINGTIME IN HORSE COUNTRY” begins: “Lady Aberlin of the oarlocks. / Colonel Mustard in the cherry trees. / Lady Aberlin with a custard, / Lady Aberlin in waiting. / Colonel Mustard in the pantry with an almond.” Perhaps it is but a single voice throughout, or perhaps the differences between them are there, and perhaps it doesn’t, in the end, actually matter. “One leg looks to have been swung / the way wooden legs often were,” he writes, as part of the poem “PORTRAIT OF THE WRITER / MAX MERRMANN-HEISSE,” “up and over a real one. / Or even over a second one. / It’s hard to tell because it’s Berlin / in the ‘20s, all those wooden legs / coming in from Rumburk / on the Spree, with good hinges / and shellac jobs that could stop / a luthier in the street.”

Composing poems around voice, character and examination, Craig’s poems offer a kind of folksiness, composing intimate portraits of ghosts, individuals, landscapes, techniques in medieval and modern paintings and other small moments.

rob mclennan, Michael Earl Craig, Iggy Horse

After a short break it’s good to be writing reviews again and I can think of no better debut collection to resume with than Alexandra Fössinger’s Contrapasso  (Cephalopress, 2022). These fine poems explore the themes of incarceration, loss and survival, but above all, perhaps, offer a unique take on the nature of love.

The collection is split into two sections: the first begins with a quote from Dante’s Inferno: ‘Through me the way to the city of woe,/ through me the way to everlasting pain,/ through me the way among the lost.’ The quote together with the title signposts the reader towards the nature of the poems in this section: they focus on punishment, namely the impact of a period in which lovers are separated due to the male’s imprisonment. Section 2 deals with the period after his release. Again it is prefaced with a quote from Dante: ‘Now I shall sing the second kingdom,/ there where the human soul is cleansed’. This time the poems concentrate upon a period of readjustment and resolution, as the lovers come to terms with the ordeal once it is over.

The poem Cell in Part One deals directly with the psychological, physical and emotional impact of imprisonment. It begins with a sequence of numbers. It also describes the cell in terms of the number of square metres of floor space and later specifies the number of hours in the day, the number of days of the sentence and the number of letters despatched by his lover. This emphasis on numbers suggests prison is a place where the incarcerated have no control, sharing a cell with ‘a stranger you/ don’t know a thing about/ but let reign over the remote control.’ Counting and measuring is a form of compensation for that lack of agency: it makes the infinite finite and the makes the unfamiliar familiar and manageable. It is also a place of hardship and danger. Fössinger writes: ‘that which rages / outside will eventually/ creep in/ one morning you wake up/  with a tooth next to you/ lying on your pillow’.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Contrapasso’ by Alexandra Fössinger

Publication is over-rated as the end goal of your work because so much of the publication process is out of the writer’s control. Decisions are made by agents, publishers, editors, marketing staff, possibly, but not always by consulting the writer. An editor leaving or a publisher changing their focus can mean that an acceptance turns into a withdrawal and the process of submission, rejection and trying again can start all over again. My first collection was accepted by a publisher who sadly and unexpectedly passed away before publication so I had to start over.

A first book has had years of work behind it. The author has had to learn their craft along the way, there may have been several false starts, significant structural changes and then the publisher’s edits. Seeing the published book is both a triumph: finally something to show for all that effort. Please do celebrate your name on the cover of the book you’ve written: have a party, go out for a celebratory meal, buy yourself a treat, do something meaningful for you.

But it’s also not the end of the journey. What it signifies is the beginning of the next stage: marketing, promoting, getting the book reviewed, keeping in the public eye. And, above all, writing the next book, if you haven’t already started.

Writing is the bit writers have the control over. During the submissions process, start the next project. As your first book nears publication, your next project is your future goal.

Emma Lee, Publication and Writers’ Mental Health

At some point in the past twenty years, a shift happened. Funding was cut, readership declined, costs rose. Rather than trying to innovate, the indie lit world turned inward. Mechanisms to profit off of writers became the norm, the go-to. Want to be published? Pay. Want to meet other writers? Pay. Want to succeed? Pay. Want to study writing at University? That’ll be an arm and a leg. Nom, and nom.

What I am saying is that with so many juicy writers to squeeze for cash, why the hell would any corner of the literary world spend their money targeting readers? […]

Rethink funding for magazines. Read, support, purchase magazines. Tell friends. Create local Lit Mag reading groups. The ‘funding/grant’ model is broken. At Chill Subs, we want to create a way for journals to collect donations and sell subscriptions through our platform. Many have this option on their website. Donate what you can. This is often the only way fledgling magazines can stay running.

We will also soon create an affordable submissions manager that doesn’t charge as a magazine grows. And we’re working on a way to help journals present their work beautifully and connect them directly to audiences. (Others working on this: CLMP, Moksha, Oleada, Motif, crowdfunding platforms.)

Reduce pay-to-play costs for writers, and maybe help them make some money. Editors, consider linking to contributors’ books on your magazine site. Celebrate your writers. (Some are very good about this. Others, not so much. Great example: Points In Case). Support their ongoing publications. Help writers earn money from outside sources. Subscribe to newsletters of writers or entities that encourage transparency in the literary world. Substack has made this easier than ever.

As long as we continue down the path we’re on, indie-lit will never find new methods of profit-making. But if we can shift gears, have standards for market participants, and encourage innovative use of funds, we have a chance. The money is out there. The creative energy is here. Let’s try to harness it as a community. It may take a long time. And if we fail spectacularly and the wide world rejects the idea of literary magazines having a place in it, well, we’re all used to rejection.

Benjamin Davis, Are We Eating Each Other Alive in the Indie-Lit World?

As a disabled and chronically ill person, most residencies are not built for me. If they require ladders to loft beds, or building fires, or steps, or even providing food that isn’t food-allergy safe (I’m allergic to about nine things, the most dangerous of which is wheat, in almost everything)—yeah, they’re not a good fit. I stopped applying for most residencies years ago when I realized—hey, they’re not built for non-perfectly healthy, able-bodied people. They’re not built for me. But I hear from a lot of people that they can’t do “normal” writer’s residencies for a variety of reasons besides their health—kids, jobs, or caretaking roles among them. So, here’s some ideas for people who can’t do the “normal” residencies.

Build your own! I live in a lovely area and there are a variety of places to stay at a variety of prices (yes, they tend to be higher in the summer as that’s our high season, but not always). If you can housesit for a friend going out of town, that can also count as a residency. Renting an AirBNB down the street. Anytime and anywhere you can get away—even just for a couple of days—to focus on your craft, your art and your writing, that counts as a residency in my book. I’ve got one planned in a couple of weeks, and I’ve already printed out poems for my next book to look at and started some relevant reading to prepare for it. Just this last week I spent over fifteen hours sitting in (virtual) doctors’ offices. Health problems are time-and-energy-and-money consuming. If I don’t set aside time (and energy, and money) for art and writing, it won’t happen—everything else will swallow it up. I’m sure you know how it is—if it’s not doctor’s appointments for you, it might be your family’s needs, your job’s needs, or the seven things you volunteer for (hey, I used to be addicted to volunteering, too).

Residencies should involve down time, too—you don’t have to spend the whole time reading and writing—you can goof off, sketch, visit local things you don’t normally get to, have a picnic, listen to music at full blast—anything that helps you get into your writing groove. And you can involve writer friends! Inviting a friend might help your residency to be even more productive, as you can get together and talk shop, plus friend time is important for artists of all stripes. Think about as building space for your creative self. It is just as important as any other aspect of your life, and deserves time, money, and attention. You know how, if you’re married or living with a partner, you reserve “date nights?” It’s the same for your creative self. So, think about creating your own personal artist’s residency. Good luck! And leave a comment if you’ve successfully done this!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Visiting (and Supporting) Local Lavender Farms, Building Your Own Residency, and When You Know You’ve Done Enough for Your Book

It’s valuable to just do the work and build practical habits instead of waiting for a muse.

But my perpetual exhaustion in the face of small crises, one after the other, can’t handle routine and habit-building. I mean, I’m trying, but I feel derailed quite frequently. I’m so discouraged by the slightest bad news, and it feels like there’s a lot of “little” bad news, even when faced with evidence of all that is good and right in my life (maybe not the world).

Trying not to make this a crybaby post. Now that the apocalypse fires in Canada are blowing smoke in another direction(!!!), the weather on the island is beautiful and skies are clear and I should be feeling naturally optimistic with so much Vitamin D and fresh air coursing through my system. Right?

Sarah Kain Gutowski, Feeling Stabby and Full of Foul Language (This Too Shall Pass)

Like many poets who write because they can’t not write, I started in my youth writing poems of my feelings or ideas and was very literal, using I when I meant myself and the past tense when I was writing of what had been.  Having no poetry courses, it took me a long while to grasp that the person of the poem is not necessarily the writer, and the time of the poem is what fits the poem, not some external reality.  This poem, another from the old workshop files, is one where a major part of revision was putting that second realization into the service of the story:

Desire

When Billy Joel sings
“You may be
right, I may be crazy,”
I sing along,
off key longing,
not for him.

I ache for
the caged creature
mooning
under the mask
that shapes my
good behavior.

Come on, I say,
crash my party,
leave a great hole
I can walk through,
to go riding,
if I want to,
in the rain.

The mask does not tear.

Ellen Roberts Young, Poem in Present Tense

The neighbor boy’s mask was supposed to make
him look like a warrior or hero,
but he couldn’t pull it off, the bully.

I knew my mask wasn’t working quite right
because all the teachers kept on talking
to my mom, asking me to repair it.

I kept stitching new smiles onto my face
and checking them in the mirror. Smile. Not smile.
Smile. Not smile. There weren’t remote controls yet,

so these were manually operated,
and one got stuck in the smile position.

PF Anderson, MASKS

Unexpected delays has meant the publication of Look to the Crocus has yet to materialise and, quite honestly, I’ve no idea when it will… Putting together the collection now feels like a project from the distant past.

However, my writing is moving on. I’ve moved into dabbling with writing creative non-fiction essays over the last few months and I’m thoroughly enjoying the space to write in essay form yet with the feeling of the work coming together in a way not too differently from when a poem comes together. And I may be finding my way into writing poems in a different way from before too, it’s too early to say if the poems are working out but I’m enjoying the process. 

I suppose I had become quite bored with my usual approach to writing, it was becoming ‘samey’ / repetitious, no sense of tapping into anything new. 

Marion McCready [no title]

I noted with a little bit of horror that we have crested the middle of June. Part of it is that summer, real summer, seems slow in coming, since my windows have more often been completely closed against rather cool and ungainly weather this far into the summer (at least the meteorological designation of its beginning.) There’ve been a couple days where they were all open, but then a couple days where I had to run the space hearer for a minute. I open the windows. I close them. I put on a sweater to run packages to the mailbox. I got a new quilt at the beginning of the month that is less bulky than my duvet, but seriously thought of pulling the other out of the trunk a couple nights recently when I was shivering.  It’s not rainy or wet really, just breezy.  

I wrapped up the governess series last week and have embarked on a new little something that still murky in its nature, though I am liking what I have so far. They are wild little poems about cats and cryptids and heartbreak. My main writing goal for the rest of June is to get COLLAPSOLOGIES at least to the point where I have a physical galley in hand, which will vary in timeline depending on the printing and shipping, which can be as long as a few days to over a couple weeks. Once I have that, I can make the final adjustments, one final sweep for needed edits, and maybe have a book in hand by mid-July if all goes well. I loaded in the cover (see the post below) and she’s looking fabulous so i cannot wait to see the finished product. 

Since we are technically halfway through the year, I’ve been plotting what I would like to see happen before the end of the year. The new book, obviously, but also some image/text zine projects I’ve been planning (the governess-inspired series, the home improvements stuff, technogrotesque), a video chap similar to what I did last year, an advent project with art for December. I feel like once we hit the 4th of July, summer slides down the hill at a much faster pace into autumn, so I want to be ready and not flailing about quite so much come September.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 6/18/2023

I am delighted to announce the publication of The Wind and the Rain, with Blue Diode Publishing.

You can buy the book and read sample poems from it here

Thank you to Rob Mackenzie for accepting the manuscript and doing such a fabulous job with the production of the book.

Thank you to Lucy Runge for permission to use your stunning painting for the front cover of the book.

Thank you to Helena Nelson for your endless editing advice, wisdom and patience. The book would not exist without you.

And thank you to Tatty. Without you, nothing.

Anthony Wilson, The Wind and the Rain

On May 30th, Dead Mall Press began accepting pre-orders for MJ Stratton’s new chapbook, River, Our River. This collection of poems was written during a single month and comes from a place of fluent imagination and feeling. Moving through a variety of forms, the poems are both dreams and exposed nerve ends, asking us questions about identity, need, suffering, and the body, while revealing a garden of cinders, moons wrung out into jars, and bees singing in the chest. MJ’s poems draw us into a river of language, at once gentle and cruel, that accepts fluidity and refuses to claim anything for itself as final.

Recently, MJ and I had a chance to discuss the book a bit over email, and you can read our conversation below.

DMP: Thanks for doing this interview, MJ! Maybe we can begin with some basic context for readers who are unfamiliar with you. Would you mind giving us a brief sketch of your background?

MJ: Oh no, thank you so much for having me! Genuinely, the pleasure’s all mine. The basic facts are that I live in Providence, RI, and I work as a receptionist. It’s a Pam Beesly situation without the love story or boss that hits people with their cars. I also write, of course, and you can read a bit more about it at my website. Beyond that, though, I struggle to answer any question that even vaguely resembles “who am I?” I’m the authority on that particular subject, right? And yet I can never get over the fact that really, I don’t know—at least not completely (we’re always changing, myself included). I’m also not particularly interesting, and I don’t like having “the floor” when there are so many better, more deserving dancers I can/should be standing behind while aggressively clapping them on. Clapping, or fist pumping.

DMP: I know you are quite prolific, often writing multiple poems a day, and have well over a thousand pages of poetry in manuscript. And River, Our River contains nineteen poems selected from a larger crop of writing from July 2022 alone. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process in general and how you write so much?

MJ: I think it involves both external privilege and internal need. It takes time to write, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that I’m very lucky to be able to devote some of my time to something I love. That’s the privilege aspect, or a fraction of it. The “internal need” I mentioned is harder to characterize, probably because it doesn’t have societal or economic infrastructure you can point to and trace with your finger.

A large part of why I write is because I have to—and I hope that doesn’t sound grandiose or pretentious or insincere. I picture it like this: I largely live in a state of white noise; while I’m very self aware, I also really struggle with revealing myself to myself. I don’t know what I’m thinking or even how I’m feeling unless I write it out, usually abstractly. The pen serves as both a translator and a processor for me.

There’s a Joan Didion quote that dissects the body I’m vaguely pointing at and cuts out the beating heart of it: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Really, writing is how I step out of my own blankness and exist. Then, luckily, hopefully, I can go a step beyond existence and connect.

R.M. Haines, Interview w/ MJ Stratton

all alone
with the monotonous voice
of a fan

Jim Young [no title]

Much of my poetry video is set up to work at different levels. In general, I don’t mind how they are interpreted by others – that is an essential aprt of the process. But when someone really gets into the multiple layers of a piece, it is incredibly satisfying. I did an English / French version of my video Palingenetics / Palingénétique that was accepted for the 2023 edition Traverse Video Festival in Toulouse, France. Each year they produce an annotated program of the event and this time it includes an article about Palingenetics / Palingénétique by Simone Dompeyre. The original poem is very complex, and refers to evolutionary and developmental biology, ancient number counting systems, discredited social theory, and climate change (!!!!). But as you can see below, Simone Dompeyre gets it as well as the visual / audio aspects… I was quite overwhelmed by her words. Merci beaucoup!

Ian Gibbins, Palingénétique at Traverse Video, 2023

Storytelling outside the square: prose poems, haibun and other experimental forms is the panel I’ll be on Friday 6/16 at 4:30 pm CST. Since many of my readers here are poets, I wanted to invite you to watch if you can and care to. Roberta Beary, Haibun Editor for Modern Haiku, is also on the panel, among others. The entire flash festival is great with participants from all over the world! I hope you can drop in.

All events are being live streamed on Flash Frontier’s YouTube channel and can be viewed there afterwards if you can’t make it. You can also see what’s happened at the Festival of Flash so far (it began last weekend) as well as everything coming up.

Charlotte Hamrick, You are invited….

This year, after I announced Haiku Girl Summer (my limited-run online haiku journal), a haiku friend asked me if I’d heard of the Buson Challenge. I had completely forgotten about it! 2022 was a terrible year for my creative life, and writing 10 haiku a day for 100 days was not going to work with everything else I was juggling. But now I’ve settled into a job I like, the house is getting more organized, and I have the brain space to actually write again.

As of this writing, I’ve successfully completed 12/100 days. I’ve definitely written more mediocre and genuinely bad haiku than good, though since most of the haiku are still in my notebook and not typed up, I don’t have sense of the overall proportion so far. But I’m surprising myself; the overall quality each day is better than anticipating. Most days, I manage at least one haiku that has potential.

Preferred notebook: Field Notes

Notebooks filled: 1

Places I’ve written:

So far, I’m having a fantastic time with this challenge, and feel optimistic that I might actually get all the way through!

Allyson Whipple, Buson Challenge Days 1-12

But you too may be of an age to have inflated your pyjama bottoms while engaged in Bronze / Silver / Gold awards in school swimming lessons. 

I walked with my schoolfriends to the Swiss Cottage baths. This memory came up for me while holidaying with my Longest-Serving Friend in North Wales. 

Did you wrestle with your pyjamas while treading water and fifty years later wonder why, if it was even possible?

Liz Lefroy, I Inflate My Pyjamas

Almost always, entering a library feels like coming home.  My earliest memories are of going to the library, and libraries haven’t changed radically in appearance in my lifetime, so it makes sense.  Libraries have more stuff now–computers, meeting rooms, non-book media/items–but libraries still have books, shelves and shelves and shelves of books.

I got my card with no trouble, since I now have a North Carolina driver’s license.  The librarian asked me if I’d ever had a Buncombe county library card before, and I said no.  Suddenly I realized that I’ve had a library card in almost every state south of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River.  I have no particular desire to live in the missing states (Mississippi, for example), so this might be the end of my run.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Library Love

Good thing this wasn’t a full-on poetry pilgrimage. Mostly my family enjoyed fine, cool weather during our week’s vacation in midcoast Maine, and I’d planned a stop, as we drove away, in Edna St. Vincent Millay territory, just for an hour, before visiting the Farnsworth Museum. Enter heavy rain and flood warnings. I insisted on paying the park fee anyway so we could drive to the top of Mt. Battie and I could imagine Millay there, cooking up her famous early poem “Renascence.” As the plaque at the summit says, rather melodramatically and with imperfect comma usage, “At the age of eighteen, a frail girl with flaming red hair left her home in early morning to climb her favorite Camden hills where so deeply affected by her surroundings, she wrote ‘Renascence.’ The poem received Immediate public acclaim and was the inspired beginning of the career of America’s finest lyric poet.” I’m putting aside the latter assertion because I don’t think “who’s the best?” arguments are worth having, but I have to observe that Millay wasn’t so frail if she hiked that high.

I’m a Millay fan and sometime scholar, but while I’m glad “Renascence” won the young poet some prize money and a scholarship and the beginnings of fame, it’s (shh) far from my favorite of her works. The poem is full of beautiful turns of phrase (“To kiss the fingers of the rain,/ To drink into my eyes the shine/ Of every slanting silver line…”). I’m moved by her awe; I’m interested in the poem as a representation of something like a panic attack, an overwhelming physical and mental response to the largeness of the world and the pettiness of human ambition in the face of suffering. But much of the poem’s intensity strikes me as funny; I’m trying not to use the word “adolescent.” I don’t have any right to condescend to a woman who faced serious headwinds yet climbed so very many mountains.

It also struck me as hilarious that when I retraced her steps–by economy car–in the aged half of middle age, with plantar fasciitis and a pulled muscle in my back, after repeatedly shaking my head at ticket-takers who asked if I was eligible for a senior citizen discount, what met me was not “three islands in a bay” but drippy pines and a sea of fog. I could have been anywhere. Ah, the grand view from my fifty-fourth summer on the planet! There’s a poem in there somewhere.

Lesley Wheeler, For rain it hath a friendly sound

At Nanyuki, they say, the equator runs under asphalt
and bush. I imagine it like the seam of a cricket ball,
six rows of coarse stitches, acacia trees and thorny

scrub sewing the path. Two unequal halves held
together. Somehow. The me walking on water
and the me wrecked at the bottom of the sea.

The me going through the rituals of being and
the me talking in binaries with the moon.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 51

What I’m listening to: My Goldenrod playlist from summer 2021, The National’s new record, and a lot of music that my kids and I agree feels like summertime: Superchunk, Nada Surf, Harry Styles (Rhett is obsessed with “Watermelon Sugar” right now), New Pornographers. We’re looking forward to a summer full of live music: boygenius, Metric, Nelsonville Music Festival, Old 97s.

I also recently listened to the incredible Julia Louis-Dreyfus read my poem “First Fall” (from Good Bones) on her podcast, Wiser Than Me. Julia’s mother, herself a poet, shared “First Fall” with her. Just…wow. The whole episode with author Amy Tan is terrific. The beautiful reading of my poem is in the first couple of minutes.

Best reads this month so far: Elise Loehnen’s On Our Best Behavior and Airea D. Matthews’ Bread and Circus, which are both out now; Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone and Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, which you can and should preorder; and Jedidiah Jenkins’ Mother, Nature, which you will definitely want to read and share with a friend or family member, so preorder one or two.

Just a handful of the books I’m planning to read between now and August (and may be seen with in a chair at the pool): Monsters by Claire Dederder, The Twelfth Commandment by Daniel Torday, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane, and early copies of Psalms of Unknowing: Poems by Heather Lanier and How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

Ten Toes Coffee, Somerset St, was the venue for this spring’s pre-press fair reading. Apparently it’s been open a few months. What a sweet little spot for coffee, tea, snacks, or laundry in the back apparently. A green and orange and stained glass and retro glass decor. Next time I’ll have to try the matcha latte. Their bathroom has a wooden sink, which is fun. But do I digress or bury the lede?

The reading. Yes, the reading. It was super fun and super full, probably over 2 dozen, some familiar faces, some faces new to me. (Although they have all owned their faces for decades obviously.). I haven’t been to many reading over the last 5 years since concussion then Covid-era starting. I was glad to see some masks in the room.

Some nice conversations had, catch ups and getting to hear aloud a chapbook I loved reading, Fossils you can Swallow by Vera Hadzic (Proper Tales Press, 2023). You can get your copy at Stuart Ross’ table on Saturday.

The audience was beautifully open and attentive to all. Option of zoom is lovely but there’s something to be said for live energy in a room.

Pearl Pirie, Pre-press fair reading

A song can be carved from stone, river, or wind.

A fist and a heart can fit into the same size clothes; it all depends if you’re going to a wedding or a war zone.

Ashes to passion, dust to desire.

Keep my casket open when I die. Nightmare gallows are no match for these singing bones.

Rich Ferguson, At the crossroads of my lips

The strawberries are only available for a few short weeks in June, a gift fleeting as that month’s green grass, mild sun, and rose blossoms. I used to try to make the gift last longer, boiling the berries into jam or freezing them whole. I had fantasies of perfect June berries in my January yogurt, a spot of sunshine in the cloudiest time of year. The jam proved to be no substitute for a solid berry, and the whole ones I froze defrosted into a sloppy mush. I threw them all in the compost bin the next June, after thinking all winter that I would surely do something with them, and finally admitting that I wanted them only the way that I can have them in June, or not at all.

I now have them only once a year, for a few short weeks that are never enough and always so much.

This week my friend Lisa brought Hood strawberries and angel food cake to an impromptu dinner. We talked of many things that are changing: our bodies, our work, our environment, our world. “Enjoy avocados while you can,” she said as we discussed diminishing water supplies and schemes to desalinate ocean water and pipe it to southwest states.

I used to want to dole the berries out and eat them slowly, as if that might somehow make them last longer. Or, I’d only get them when I could make them into some dish worthy of their greatness. Or, I’d only eat them when I could savor them, fully appreciate them. I was afraid, if I ate them too quickly, that I wouldn’t have them when I really wanted them. Inevitably, some would rot while I was waiting for the right time, or I’d end up getting only one carton in a season.

Now, I buy them whenever I see them and eat them while they are fresh. I’ve given myself permission to take a few each time I open the refrigerator. I get them as often as I can, because the season is so short and nothing is guaranteed. For all I know, this is the last year I will get to eat Hood strawberries. I know for sure it is the last year that this version of me will. Next year’s Rita might not be able to enjoy them in the same way that this year’s Rita can.

Life is so full of big, hard things we can barely swallow. People lose their land, their names, their loves, their lives. The more I lose the more determined I am to eat all the sweet things that I can, while I can, with love and appreciation and gusto.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Fleetingly sweet

After the warning
sirens, egrets come back
to fish in the shallows.

A man takes off his shoes
to walk in the flooded street.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evening, with Hailstorm and Tornado Warning
]]> 63946 Poetry Blog Digest 2023, Week 18 https://www.vianegativa.us/2023/05/poetry-blog-digest-2023-week-18/ https://www.vianegativa.us/2023/05/poetry-blog-digest-2023-week-18/#comments Mon, 08 May 2023 21:04:48 +0000 https://www.vianegativa.us/?p=63590 A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive, subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader, or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack. This week: trees, book tours, literary envy, in defense of reading fees, and much more. Enjoy.

I watched the coronation of King Charles yesterday with my parents. My father remembers watching Queen Elizabeth’s coronation as a child in South Africa. What if we crowned a leaf? Made trees our king? Or better, leaves as our elected representative, a river as the head of state. What if winter made legislation, or springtime was the judiciary? Let’s make butterflies our police force, an army out of photosynthesis.

Gary Barwin, THE NEW KING

We broke that word. We let it fall, let
it shatter into infinite sounds. When
a word is destroyed, a tree grows
from every whisper, bearing
poisonous fruit. When a world
is destroyed.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 45

Let the trees give the valedictory
and the billows confer their tasselled caps.

Let the noon heat gild the heads of those
who’ve labored bravely, even with no prior

guarantee of reward. Let the procession
of bodies shimmer like a promise

that kindness and comradeship will keep
rising up like wildflowers in the fields.

Luisa A. Igloria, Commencement Day

I wrote 30 poems in 30 days again this April. As my writing partner, Heather, can attest–it was tough. There were some days I doubled-up, after missing the deadline the day before. There were some days where what I sent her was less poetic than some texts. At the end of the month though, I have 30 poems.

I’ve only just now started sifting through them. I had set out with the idea of writing a group of poems about You’ve Got Mail (the movie). I have already written 3 or 4 in that vein, and I wanted to explore it further. Instead, it looks like I mostly wrote about angels, scars, and birds. Ok. Who ever knows what will pop up when one is writing every single day?

Renee Emerson, NaPoWriMo Wrap Up

I am looking forward to writing full-time for a while now. Weeks or months, I’m not sure yet. I am literally compartmentalizing my time. I’ve started a new blog to write about how I am handling cancer treatment. And I’m continuing in this space (and there, too – and in so many others) with what makes me honestly feel happy and alive in the moments as they come. I once wrote a poem that said it was absurd to say that imagination is a good thing. But it really can be. It can be a source of good things.

Ren Powell, Rumors

May is much like the interior of my email inbox right now; varied and eclectic. It bridges this spring with its publication notices, publication opportunities to come, and the business of the day that needs tending.

I published “Of Paper Moons, Glimmered Words” in the Spring 2023 issue of October Hill Magazine. I’m happy to publish with them again. They assemble a sweet journal, and it was three years ago that I not only published in their winter journal, but was invited to read my work at an online reading. It was a cozy assembly and the kindness of editors during Covid is certainly an event and aspect that lingers even today. A wonderfully warm reading all the way around.

I have shared gratitude for the editors at Cosmic Daffodil Journal who published three of my short poems: “Untitled,” “Early Spring,” and “This Pot” in their Buds & Blooms issue.

My advice to you? Write on through all the delights this month will bring. Summer is all too short. Find all the ways necessary to collect, savor, and share those words.

Kersten Christianson, May and All

Spring creeps in a little further each day, raising my mood even if it’s still a little too chilly to have the windows open for long. I have been devoting some time to submissions and collages and procrastinating on final edits on the home improvements series of poems I worked on earlier this year (thankfully the NAPOWRIMO ones only require minor modifications but I have no idea what sloppiness I was victim to earlier in the year.) I’ve been finalizing the cover design for the next book and making fun little reels about inspos and aesthetics. I’ve been researching Mesopotamian bloody baby-eating goddesses and writing about Celtic Queens and cupboard doors and bathroom towels that won’t make you hate your life. In other words, much the usual.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/6/2023

I am listening to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which I only usually do “when the skies of November turn gloomy” (to borrow a phrase from the song).  But Gordon Lightfoot has died, and it’s a gloomy May day, so the song fits my mood.

Of course, Lightfoot was 84 years old, and from what I can tell from the various news stories, he seemed to have lived a good life.  He wrote amazing songs and had a good run as a performer.  Lots of people will be reflecting on his life and appreciating him today, and plenty of us have been doing this for over 50 years.

His music is the background of my childhood, along with Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkle, and John Denver.  Yesterday on my drive back to my seminary apartment, I heard John Denver’s live version of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”–what a great song.

He also wrote songs that other people made more famous, like “Early Morning Rain.”  I’ve been listening to some of those songs this morning.  At some point, when I don’t have seminary papers to finish, I might do more reflecting on how this folk music formed my perception of what it would be like to be an adult–not because I listened to it as a child, but because I continued to listen to it in adolescence.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Gloomy Skies: Goodbye to Gordon Lightfoot

There are many blossoming trees in this glen – it started with blackthorn and plum, and is just about to hit its peak with gean and bird cherry, pear and apple. The celandines are coming to an end, but the yellow on the gorse is thickening up, there are wild violets on the Cairn footpath, and I am watching a clump of wild arum which is just about to open. It isn’t a rare plant, but I’ve never seen in elsewhere in Scotland, and judging by my instagram feed, it seems to be having a moment just now. The trees are in the first flush of bright green opening leaves, and the birds are louder each day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many goldfinches in my life! The rain has brought on the garden enormously in the last three days, and I’ve been planting and sowing tomatoes, courgettes, chillis, dill and coriander. […]

A big part of my poetry practice is connecting with the territory, and though I mostly concentrate on the plants wildlife and weather, I have become very interested in the history and the engagement of the community here, which seems much livelier than in the Forth Valley. Every spare bit of ground that lies unoccupied for more than a few months seems to have trees planted, and as I get to know the area, I am becoming aware of a lot of organisations dedicated to keeping the urban sprawl much greener than you might expect, such as the Friends of Holmhills Wood Community Park, or the Friends of the Calder. There is an active ramblers’s group, and plenty of walking routes, from the Clyde Walkway to the Rotten Calder path, which I mentioned in a recent post, and a lot of interest in the landscape and archaeology of the area. […]

I am writing more thoughts about poetry than actual poetry just now, as there seems to be some activity around Ceasing Never, which I hope to share over the next week or so, and a revised edition of my translation of The Charm of Nine Herbs is going to happen at some point, but after a much longer lull than I was expecting, new poetry is finally happening – look out for moon and fire poems, and some weird mythology.

Elizabeth Rimmer, Blossom Time

If there is anyone still out there who reads my stuff on here, thank you. I’ve been through many stages of hell the last few years and am slowly starting to get myself to a place, a new place that is more about creativity and shaking out the demons from my bones.

I’d love to start a newsletter as well as have you subscribe to my substack (which I plan on updating soon as well). […]

I want my work in your hands, eyes, teeth.

To me, it’s not so much about surviving to create. It’s creating to survive. I am here to be creative, and to share with others so that they know they’re not alone.

Jennifer E. Hudgens, I Don’t Know Where I’m Going.

After I’d spent time at my desk, tinkering with poems, writing a bio and acknowledgements, collating blurbs, giving feedback on a possible cover, I was happy to press ‘send’ and email everything to Helen Eastman at Live Canon.

“Thanks for giving me time and space this weekend,” I said to my husband, Andrew. “I’m pleased with my work and I’m sending everything off to Helen.” “You don’t want to sleep on it and send it tomorrow?” “No, I’ve done loads of work on this, it’s all done, I’m sending it off.”

Then time for some gardening after being deskbound for hours, stretching my limbs and planting sunflower, nasturtium and cornflower seeds saved from last year’s plants, plus some new seeds, basil, gypsophlia, sweetpea, cosmos, salvia. Who knows what will grow. The garden’s ready for No Mow May, my semi-wild flower beds are already bursting with forget-me-nots, dandelions, honesty, daisies, celandines and (I think) borage, herb robert and other not yet identified species.

Then, a good night’s sleep a little interrupted by doubts arriving in the night. What about that lockdown poem you haven’t managed to publish anywhere yet? Wouldn’t this be the perfect opportunity to include it? Could you swap out a couple of those small ‘seen-while-walking’ poems and replace them with this two page poem? Is this really the best order for these poems? Is that really the best poem to end the collection? Back to my desk and my manuscript for some rearranging. A hasty note to Helen to disregard my first email. Andrew’s saying nothing. Note to self: always sleep on it.

Josephine Corcoran, ‘Love and Stones’ my new chapbook coming soon

I’m once again a featured poet at the Gaithersburg Book Festival, an absolutely wonderful festival that is FREE and open to the public and has a wonderful list of authors who will be reading and discussing and taking questions. […]

On Sunday, 21 May at 5:30pm I’m reading with Reston Readings, a local reading series that is always delightful.

And last but definitely not least is my official book launch party at the end of the month!! […]

May is going to be wildly busy but I’m so very excited about it and hope to see you at one of these events!

Courtney LeBlanc, Book Tour: May

Hereverent has been thoroughly and lovingly launched!

My poetry & jazz book launch was fantastic on April 20 at PLNU. We had poetry, music, drinks, and dessert in this little parlor that makes me feel like a wealthy great aunt has invited me to tea. :) I’m so grateful to Brenda Martin for her gorgeous music and her fun improv collaborations! (And thanks to Emma McCoy for the photo!)

Then my virtual book launch for Hereverent on April 21 was also lovely. What a gift to hear poets I adore read my poems alongside theirs. I’m so grateful to Agape Editions for publishing and celebrating my book! […]

Finally in this countdown to launch, 15 of my favorite local poets read with me in my church’s sanctuary this past Saturday night, and I brought my favorite brownies (a recipe from my beloved dissertation advisor, Marthe Reed), and many more dear friends and delightful people came to celebrate my new book too.

Katie Manning, Hereverent Launches!

Yes, all the waiting is over – if you pre-ordered the book, or were waiting for the book to be available from BOA or Amazon or you wanted to review it on Amazon, the 9th is the day! That’s tomorrow!

In celebration, I’ll be taking over BOA Edition’s feed on Instagram May 9th, 10th, and 11th so keep your eyes out for that! I’ll talk about inspirations, making cocktails, playlists, and more. I’m a little bit nervous because I’m not the world’s most confident Instagram user, but hopefully I have respectable posts and stories. Isn’t it funny that now Instagram videos are part of promoting a book? That wasn’t true the last time one of my books came out. Ah, how things change!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Ready for Launch? Flare, Corona’s Official Pub Date Arrives, an Upcoming Open Books Reading with Martha Silano, Instagram Takeovers, Plus More Pics of Tulips and Parties

Here’s the truth about envy, judgement, and comparisons: the other person feels none of the bitterness, defeat, and ire you feel. You—exclusively you—feel the discomfort, and it’s a slow poison you mix with your own particular brand of injustice and insecurity, then self-administer.

At various misguided moments, we can come to believe that envy is a motivator. If that were true, feeling it just once would do the trick to skyrocket us into productivity and success. More often what happens is this: we feel discouraged, then immediately seek to buffer the feeling. Judgement, Netflix, potato chips: all effective buffers. None of these, however, is a catalyst for growth, development, or change. None is half as powerful as reading a book, sitting with a draft, or going for a walk.

You alone can make a conscious effort to ease yourself of these unnecessary feelings in 2023. How? By noticing them and calling them what they are. Then, by diffusing them by focusing on yourself. What is my envy/comparison/jealousy telling me about what I want? And how can I take the step towards what I want, instead of sitting here paralyzed by indignation, elbow deep in a bag of Fiesta Doritos?

Maya C. Popa, Progress Report: Literary Resolutions

Many agendas may drive the urge to bash particular writers or their works, among these envy, attention, pride, status, self-preservation, righteous indignation, or a sense that one needs to scramble to make space for oneself in an already small environment (“the literary world”). Even, dare I say, ignorance. I could speculate on reasons for unkindness until the proverbial cows come dawdling home, but I suppose it can be attributed to a kind of social Darwinism. People can be mean-spirited when threatened. Though exactly how the writing of poetry poses a threat to other poets remains a mystery to me.

Maybe I am a Pollyanna (entirely possible), but although I can recall some incidents and critiques that have stung me, there have been far more instances of generosity from fellow writers. While contemplating writing this post I sat back and decided to count how many fellow writers have extended courtesy, respect, useful advice, helpful criticism, networking and publication leads, encouragement, and the sense that I’ve “been seen”–acknowledgment as a writer–and I found the list was long. I considered listing names, but there are so many…and I was afraid I’d inadvertently overlook someone. I consider this an excellent “problem” to have.

Granted, some stings have been…memorable. However, I’ve been writing and publishing poetry and related prose since the early 1980s, so there have been many years during which I’ve had the joy of connecting with other writers in generous ways. Writing is both a large community and a small one, depending upon where I am in my own life: local at times, semi-isolated other times, and then–thanks to social media platforms, with which I have love/hate relationships–national and international!

As I get ready to pull back a bit from my work in the realm of higher education, I hope that the lessons I have learned about being generous to my students, gently encouraging while pointing out areas to keep working on, will stay with me. My feeling about poetry is that there’s certainly room for more of it in a world which can be harsh, and that acknowledging other humans’ urge to express their awe, fear, grief, passion, love, anger, and perspective won’t actually harm many of us.

Ann E. Michael, Generosity

Publishers aren’t charity operations (though it often feels that way), despite the enduring myth that there is something noble and good about the literary industry. It’s still a business, and it’s still operating under the same suffocating tenets of capitalism that writers are. Lumpenproletariat or not.

Alas, the writer’s personality consists of the yin and yang qualities of self-hatred and self-aggrandizement. It is the latter quality that so often comes into play when they submit a piece. They think their writing is special or “god’s gift” and that it should therefore not only be immediately accepted, but that the publisher should waive any fees for the sheer pleasure of reading their work. But newsflash: reading submissions is not a pleasure. About five percent of the pool will actually be enjoyable. It’s that five percent that keeps the publisher going. Fighting the fucking windmills while the schlock in The New Yorker is touted as some sort of literary high standard.

Genna Rivieccio, On Submission Fees and the Belief that Publishers Are Pirates

This particular advert, however, seemed seriously weird. It wanted an exceptional poet and tutor to be a part of a happy and successful team. Happy kept cropping up. The school, it said, is a happy place. It provides a happy environment.

The candidate it said would be an established member of the literary world (so one of the boys and girls, then) with an excellent academic background, a PhD in English or Creative Writing (naturally, what else would you expect?), and experience of teaching at graduate level. Blah-de-blah. Highly skilled. Blah-de-blah. Supportive, Understanding. Blah-de-Blah.

Ok, fair enough, I wouldn’t get in. I’m not qualified. I don’t mean academically, though that’s true. My ancient BA Hons is nowhere near good enough, even if I knew where the proof of it was. No, it’s the happy bit I couldn’t do. I doubt I could even do it at the interview (not that I’d get one).

I grew up in journalism, grew middle-aged and grew old in journalism. We knew what happy was, especially when we’d had a drink or four. We knew what angry, passionate, bad-tempered and noisy was too. When we wrote, we wrote alone. We wrote in doubt, asking ourselves questions, trying to get what we wanted to say down as best we could and as truthfully as we could. We were alive. Are these people in that supportive, understanding, positive, constructive, happy world really alive?

Bob Mee, THE POETRY ACADEMICS vs JOHN STEINBECK

Back in August of 2022, I wrote the blog post, Browsing the Archive on a Summer Afternoon, in which I talk about my pleasure at revisiting my collection of journals that have published my work over the years. I realize that I neglected to point out something very important: writers should read all of the contributor’s copies they receive.

I do mean all. If you primarily write poetry, then of course you should read all of the poetry, but don’t stop there. If the journal includes fiction, reviews, and essays, read all of them too. If you write prose, read the poetry! As Virginia Woolf wrote, “The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself.” Woolf wrote prose, but she definitely “got” poetry. Poets dream of readers who appreciate their craft with such deep understanding.

Reading every page of your contributor’s copy, whether in a physical journal or online, connects you to a community of writers, because each journal is its own community. I sometimes imagine the other writers who sent their work to a particular publication at the same moment as I did. What were they doing just before they hit “send” or “submit?” It’s entirely possible that some of us sent work simultaneously, our words traveling through the ether and arriving at the magazine’s inbox at the exact same moment. There’s a kind of mystery about this process that’s always intrigued me.

Erica Goss, You Should Read Every Page of Your Contributor’s Copy

I will be reading next week at Shelton Timberland Library with poet friends Cathy Warner, Gary E. Bullock, and Dan Coffman (and maybe a few other Washington poets if it works out!). Cathy Warner and I have been friends since 2012 when we both found ourselves new to Bainbridge Island. While she and I have both moved about since then, our poetry friendship has stayed intact. Gary and Dan are new poetry friends who I met in a workshop class with poet Gary Copeland Lilley and whom I have not met in person due to COVID, but will now be able to meet in person! It is not hyperbole to say all my poet friends and connections are what got me through those long three years of isolation. Come and hear us read. Come celebrate our connection to poetry and each other.

Carey Taylor, Upcoming Reading!!

It’s not just the practical blocks – lack of time, being interrupted etc – it’s the psychological blocks, and the societal blocks that prevent people, particularly older women, from writing. There is a prejudice in society that says that older women are, at best dull, at worst invisible. When I searched the stock photo database, pexels, for a header photo for this post, I searched ‘older woman writing’ and found virtually nothing. When I searched ‘older man writing’ I found plenty. When I searched ‘writer’ I found plenty of young women with beautiful nails holding pastel notebooks, and lots of older men at gnarly wooden desks grumpily screwing up pieces of paper. I use this as an example because these stock photos are the pictures that the media uses as an example of what is present in society: as examples of products, as examples of aesthetic lifestyles to strive for, as examples of, you might even say, what is the acceptable face, or the seen face, or the most associated-with face, of a product, a person, a genre, a section of society.

We know older women writers exist. Just looking at my own over filled bookcases I can see them everywhere – Hilary Mantel (God, I miss Hilary Mantel so much) Margaret Atwood, Maggie O’Farrel… but somehow the perception still seems to be that older women at the beginning of their careers, those not established yet, do not exist.

Wendy Pratt, How to Give Yourself Permission to Write

But the important part here is the student loans, because those things literally made it possible for me to go to and stay in college. See, that full-time job paid maybe $10 an hour, which was okay money for working in Hammond, Louisiana in 1995 but not enough money to support a family and pay tuition, and really wasn’t enough money to support myself as a newly-single person, pay tuition and pay child support.

So I took out loans, every one I could get, and for the next four years as an undergrad, I would start my semester in line to pay my tuition, get two checks for the balance over what my tuition was, and immediately sign one of those checks over to my ex-wife. Pretty much the same for my grad school experience.

So now it’s 2005. I’ve got my MFA, I’ve just done two years at Stanford as a Stegner Fellow and I have my first full-time university teaching job. I’m a lecturer at Florida Atlantic University teaching a 4/4 and making $30,000 or so a year, which is more than I’ve ever made per year in my life at the time, and which is not enough to live in south Florida, not really, so I go into economic hardship deferral until that time runs out and then forbearance and at some point in there, there’s a program that allows you to pay based on your income and also we move to Iowa because Amy gets the job she has now at Drake University. I’m making payments, but they’re not large enough to even cover the interest and if this part of the story sounds familiar that’s because there are a lot of people in similar boats.

Brian Spears, A little personal news

What appears to be a simple poem covers so much ground…Masculinity, memory—both positive and the (I think) implicit nod to poverty at the end in ‘the hungry roots beneath’. It’s an entirely different poem, but it puts me in mind of Paul Farley’s poem about Treacle. I love the musicality of the poem, particularly in the first stanza, and I raise a pint of Kingfisher (NB I mean cup of tea—it’s now 7.30am) to the internal rhymes of ‘furnaces’ and ‘curry houses’. We’ll also give ‘curve and ‘trove’ and ‘pucker’ and ‘nutter’, a respectful nod too.

I bought this book from Andy via Facebook a year or so ago, so my apologies it’s taken me this long, but I was hooked in by him saying it was pretty much his last copy. Take note: I’m an absolute sucker for that so, so make sure you use the scarcity bias[.]

Mat Riches, High and (Mar)mighty…aka A Toast To Marmite aka Boys For the Black Stuff

M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a stunning collection of poetry. Inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, a transnational black feminist text, Gumbs envisions humanity at the end of the world. While there is struggle, this is not the typical depiction of humanity as viciously and violently struggling for survival, but a vision of humanity as transformational. As the environment and world shifts (due to human causes), humanity takes to the dirt, sky, fire, and sea, creating new communities and ways of being. It’s a beautiful, compelling and hopeful depiction.

Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: April 2023

‘Snow’ does all the right poemy things. The sounds match the sense. The world is busy, busier than we realise and so is a phrase like ‘soundlessly collateral and incompatible’. Then there’s that tangerine. The words come down to single, propulsive syllables, so that you almost have to spit to say ‘spit the pips and feel’. But there is a deliberate unpoeticness to ‘Snow’, too, an awkwardness of phrasing and language, and this is one of the things I like most about it. (That and the refusal to explain: why is there more than glass between the snow and the roses?)

Jeremy Wikeley, incorrigibly Plural

This poem began in my car with my kids sitting together in the backseat. As we sat at a traffic light, watching some workers cut the limbs off a tree, my daughter said the body of this poem in almost these words exactly. I don’t recall if I wrote it down (or typed it into the notes app on my phone) right away, or if I remembered what she said and wrote it down later, but the process involved paring down the description to its essentials, looking carefully at line breaks and opportunities for music, and maintaining her voice the best I could (“the sky’s like finally” is one of those moments, but I also love the long I assonance in that phrase). I think the pauses after “branch” and “blue” are doing a lot in the poem. Those line breaks slow down the pace and give the reader time to reflect. I see the break between “branch” and “hits the ground” as enacting the branch’s fall and landing.

I found this idea comforting when my marriage ended: When something is gone, it makes space for something else. In this case, the tree losing its limbs made space for the sky. The view changed. My perspective changed with it.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: Two Related Poems

This is observational humour at its best: the humour of recognition. Waldron catches those unguarded moments that betray our weaknesses; he observes and reports the embarrassing that we would rather not admit to; he exposes those frailties that make us human. For example, The Sweet Smell of Failure is a cautionary tale which shows the romantic consequences of not changing one’s underpants regularly;  Digging in my Archives explores a life of pretensions; Valentines Day tells of a major romantic failure; and Shop (lift) Local exposes the limitations of our moral compass when we’re offered a bargain. There is something of us all in these poems. In his drop-in Waldron describes the imagined persona narrating the poems as a ‘37-year-old man’. Yet there is something universal about these poems. When we laugh at him, we are laughing at ourselves, man, or woman. In fact, there is something of ‘Everyman’ about these poems, but without the moral imperative!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘My C&A Years’ by Roger Waldron

A follow-up to the creative non-fiction and poetry title Album Rock (Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s NL: Boulder Books, 2018) is St. John’s, Newfoundland poet Matthew Hollett’s full-length poetry debut, Optic Nerve: poems (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2023). Through an assortment of first-person poems set in a lyric simultaneously narrative and cinematic, Hollett offers a descriptively-thick and finely-honed intimate portrait of east coast space. “It took two of us to haul the river out of its box / and wrangle its segments together like vertebrae / or slabs of sidewalk. As rivers go,” he writes, to open the poem “Waters Above and Waters Below,” “this one had been / stepped in more than twice, its leisurely ripples and eddies / scuffed with footprints from small armies / of schoolkids.” Hollett works his lyric as a way of examining small moments of time, comparable to how Michael Crummey wrote contemporary and historic Newfoundland through his Passengers: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2022) [see my review of such here], or how Michael Goodfellow wrote his personal Lunenberg County, Nova Scotia through Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. One could say that all three of these poets are simply following elements of Newfoundland-based poet and editor Don McKay [see my review of his 2021 collection Lurch here], and that would be entirely correct, each writing their own small perceptions through carved lyric observations. Weighed down through the dark, there is significant and even pragmatic light in these lines. “If you find yourself lost,” the poem “Coriolis Borealis” begins, “try not to walk in circles. A forest / is an aura of revolving doors, every spruce or fir is / a celestial body that wants you in its orbit. For the first / twenty-four hours, you’d be wise to stay put.” Across his densely-packed Optic Nerve, Hollett writes short moments and scenes, fully aware of the differences in seeing and perception, writing narratives many of which are centred in and around Halifax. “In Halifax it greets me like a gauntlet of bear traps.” he writes, to open the poem “Shipshape.” “Sidestepping swollen potholes on Quinpool, I pass a traffic island / with its mascara of snow, a bicycle wheel crushed into a taco, / a bird’s nest asquint with icicles.”

rob mclennan, Matthew Hollett, Optic Nerve: poems

There’s a primarily Anglo-Saxon obsession among so-called experts with attempting to turn wine into a dry, dead subject, to reduce it to exams (WSET/MW stuff) and points (Robert Parker, etc).

And then there’s the marketing ploy, often used by pubs and restaurants, of flogging wine by grape variety. This supposedly makes everything easier for the consumer to order once they’ve decided that they like, for instance, Sauvignon Blanc, in an impossible struggle to simplify things. Of course, such a strategy ignores the vagaries of soil, climate, grower and winemaker, all of which mean that there a huge gamut of Sauvignon Blancs. Many of them barely resemble each other in a comparative tasting.

Much the same could be said of poetry. It too is a slippery, incredibly complex subject that defies repeated critical and academic attempts at pigeonholing and classification. Poets are categorised but they defy those labels on a regular basis because the genre is alive and constantly shape-shifting.

In both poetry and wine, the more you know, the more you realise you know nothing. 

Matthew Stewart, Pigeonholing in wine and poetry

Sure. The whole project misconstrued or misconceived.
Thunderstorm at dawn: deep dark with lightning,
and now a morning pretending nothing ever happened,
but a gore of draggled blossom spread across the walk.

Dale Favier, Making My Heart Beat

My chalkboard poems alternate now between humor and sad nostalgia with images from the natural world, spring blooming all around, and a subtext of the long goodbye. Last night, a woman asked if I was still writing poems and if I had ever been in the New Yorker, which reminded me of a fairly recent personal rejection from the New Yorker asking to see more, and my inaction upon that. Uh oh. “I want to see you in print,” the woman said, and I realized again how few people, even those who love me, know that I am very often in print, or in online magazines, and have several chapbooks out there in the world. But I do feel loved and appreciated, especially for the chalkboard poems, which are short and connect to people’s lives. I love those people back.

Kathleen Kirk, Candy House

when there’s
no memory of
the moment of
passage and
tissue and salts
have gone to
the denizens
themselves now
gone to earth
those feathers
make a brave
show folded
still into the
intelligence
of flight as if
they might still
know the air

Dick Jones, wing.
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