Kersten Christianson – Page 2

October 16, 2022October 16, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 41

A farmer begins to weep leaves. A weaver begins to weep leaves, then a bookseller. Finally, I, too, begin to weep leaves, standing in the river up to my knees in water. One can, however, detect a relation between the slim almond shape of the leaves and the fact of their weeping with the slim sound of the harpsichord, each note made by a short quill against a string pulled tight. One night, I look into the harpsichordist’s eyes and see that she is imagining hummingbirds and the honey light over the desert where she had been born.
Gary Barwin, WEEPING LEAVES

As she and I sat talking at her kitchen table in the state she moved to more than 40 years ago, sharing stories about our lives past and present, she suddenly interrupted herself: “Where have the years gone?” she asked, and the question wasn’t rhetorical or musing. It was real. It was a genuine wondering, full of bewilderment.
“I don’t know,” I said, and we were both quiet for a moment. I thought about how, in my own 20s, I understood neither what I was exchanging nor what I would (and wouldn’t) get for it. And now, so much (but not all, not all) of what once might have been can now be nothing more than what was. We’ve had the marriages and children and careers we’re going to have, and she missed much of mine and I missed much of hers. Still, she is as important to me now as she ever was, and in my two days with her time was malleable and stretchy and I floated between past and present in ways that are perhaps only possible when the present isn’t so insistent on being our most important reality.
My days are quiet enough for me to see such things clearly now, and perhaps what I am feeling most is curious.
For the first time in 42 years, I don’t have to exchange my life for money. What does that mean? What might it mean? What will I use my life for now, now that I have more choice than I’ve ever had?
Rita Ott Ramstad, Retirement is weird

It saddened me, killing those things,
and yet I saw no way out of it. The birdseed was
alive with moth larvae, the wrappers pierced and
riddled. Even after cleaning out the pantry, more
moths. And so, my mindfulness for the first dozen
larvae, for their suffering as I crushed them, then
the next few dozen, each time the blessing given
wearing thinner, thinner through my breath until
what had been a blessing became a curse, until
I gave up the pretense, killed them with predatory
pleasure. I didn’t want them to suffer yet gave no
mercy, no more prayers, no thought to their pain.
Lori Witzel, My teachers

stone buddha
greening slowly in the rain
shortening days
Jim Young [no title]

Days when the clock chimes the crying hour, when you have to hide out in the basement of a smile just to feel some relief.
Days when you’re moving forward in a story told in reverse, when you don’t need sad orchestral strings to cue the depression caused by world aggression.
Days poised between gods and bombs, bolt-action aggression fueling a not-so-secret society of snarls.
Rich Ferguson, The Crying Hour

Listen. Suppose there is an America, drunk and unsteady,
made of dreams and pixilated stories, lost and looking for the way home:
a person of sorts. Suppose it’s our job to try to get him home to bed
without damaging himself (or others) more than can be helped.
Suppose he is us, and our every imagining blazes a path
in the flickering net of his brain. Suppose his incoherent weeping
is ours. Suppose
it all matters dreadfully, and we are to hang his mask on our faces
and learn to face the world.
Dale Favier, America

Originally titled “If I could invent a car that runs on depression” and also found in my forthcoming chapbook, The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants, this poem was inspired by a tweet of another poet. Her child had written an essay with that title, which I thought was just a little poem in itself, and I wrote my poem in response. With gas prices the way they are, this poem was inevitable.
Renee Emerson, new poem in One

I am from the waters of the Mersey
dried on the black sand of Ferry Hut
gifted an accent both ancient and indelible
I am from Kingsway Secondary Schooled
to be the fodder of the factory
for a mechanical age slipping into history
Paul Tobin, NO WISER THE SECOND TIME

I didn’t even realize, when I finalized my syllabus, that we’d hit the exact centenary of its original (noteless) publication in The Criterion. Everybody’s publishing articles about “The Waste Land” right now and mostly not insightfully, if you ask me–then again, it’s hard to say something fresh about a poem people have been yelling about for 100 years. Anthony Lane’s recent piece in The New Yorker made me sigh: no awareness, huh, of it as a poem about sexual assault? It only takes a quick look at the original draft in the facsimile edition to realize how foundational misogyny was to the poem’s origins. The contempt for Fresca, the poem’s excised woman writer, is breathtaking. Modernism/ modernity‘s cluster of mini-essays on #metoo and “The Waste Land” still strikes me as a much better account of what the poem means now (that is, if you think women readers matter). My piece on teaching the poem in 2019 is in a follow-up essay cluster at the same journal, and I’m not claiming my comments are original or brilliant–I am far from conversant with all the criticism–yet participating in those conversations was revelatory. It’s a shame Lane cited the new Ricks and McCue edition of Eliot’s poems without acknowledging how disappointing many find it (not glossing the poem’s abortion reference, for example, in SUCH a heavily annotated edition). See Megan Quigley’s preface to the second essay cluster, the “Why Pills Matter” section, for a recap of how Ricks ridiculed women scholars’ readings of the poem. But then, as James Joyce wrote in his notebook, Eliot ends “the idea of poetry for ladies.” It’s amazing to me that eminences such as Ricks are still drawing a line and announcing, There feminist scholars shall not cross. I mean, really? Feminist rereading as a practice is kind of…old. I’m ready for more queering of the poem: it’s spiked with homophobic references, even while Eliot spends portions of it in drag and later claims the centrality of double-sexed (nonbinary?) Tiresias.
“The Waste Land” is an upsetting work with a lot of power. A poem that every generation makes new? That’s a worthy fragment to shore against criticism’s ruins.
Lesley Wheeler, Reading T. S. Eliot’s tarot cards

Since knee surgery in February and then the arrival of kittens in August, I haven’t been getting outside much. I have called my yard my meadow. Now it’s time, or long past time, to break up the irises. They have tripled in number and area, and grasses have grown up between them, grown tall and gone to seed. This morning, I brought out the shovel and realized that I couldn’t tell where the rhizomes were. After pulling some of the grasses out, I could see enough to dig. My shovel went nowhere. My sunglasses (protective eyewear!) slid off. This wasn’t working. I brought out a trowel-claw combination and a hacker tool. The trowel’s tip had chipped off, rendering it not very efficient, but I made enough progress to see some roots. I even broke a piece off. I went back to the big shovel, trying to dig deep and far enough under to pry off a hunk.
The growth, the arrangement of the irises was a puzzle to solve, a mystery, and I thought about writing into the mystery. A poem might start with an idea, or a feeling, or an image, but then, as Richard Hugo points out in The Triggering Town, the poem must proceed from there, venture into unknown territory, or excavate down into the unknown dirt. Most of the time, it’s hard. The poetic shovel might hit a rock or a giant root. In my garden, those impediments must be negotiated. In a poem, an obstacle might become a door—a new direction into the mystery. Lately, I’ve been struggling with my writing. But this morning’s episode in the yard gave me hope. I can just keep trying, from new angles, digging a little deeper each time. Starting over as a path to success!
Joannie Stangeland, Digging into the mystery

What is the order, the protocol
for forgetting? The smell of damp skin before
the length of a toe, the hesitation of a lowered
gaze before a laugh line, every single laugh
line? Or should we forget all at once including
the way purple sheets wrinkle around a
body, asleep inside a dream inside a dream?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 17

I was a teenager. I had, I suspect, been writing poems for a while, but I had – or believed I had, which amounts to the same thing – no outlet for them other than songs for our garage band, and even then I knew lyrics were something slightly different. Why not, I thought. So I sent in a surreal, morbid little poem called ‘Why Birds Fly Into Windows’. (I still think it is one of my better ones). The organisers sent me back a handwritten note saying how much they had liked it, and that I ought to carry on writing – they just thought it wasn’t right for the occasion.
My first thought was if they had liked it so much then they should have given it a prize! Wasn’t the best poem the best poem? My second thought was that they were worried my poem – which, after all, mentioned death – was too dark. They wanted something fluffy and nice instead. I was being censored! My third thought, thankfully, was gratitude – gratitude that someone – anyone – had read and liked it. That’s the thought that’s stayed with me.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying getting the Hampshire Prize at the Winchester Poetry Festival last week was a very lovely surprise. More than anything it was a great afternoon – brilliant poems – including a genuinely disturbing overall winner from Luke Palmer (nothing fluffy here), brilliantly compered by Jo Bell – who had some wise words about prizes and about poems generally (don’t be afraid of short ones), brilliantly run by the team, and with an impressive show of local support, including from local businesses (thank you to Warren and Sons for my very fancy pen). You can get the anthology here. My poem, ‘The Sign Says Hungerford’, is below.
Jeremy Wikeley, Poem: ‘The Sign Says Hungerford’

Due to the pandemic, the Skagit River Poetry Festival, like so many other things has been on hold. But since Thursday, I have been in a small town in Washington State allowing poets and poetry to reenter my life.
The Skagit River Poetry Festival has been called the little sister of the Dodge Festival, or perhaps, I just named it that right now, but that’s how I think of it. It begins Thursday night with a “Poet Soiree” where locals and patrons of the arts eat dinner with poets (2 per table). What I found were the women at the table who weren’t poets were WAY more interesting than I was–so I really enjoyed getting to know them. After the dinner, there was an opening reading then we’re off!
Kelli Russell Agodon, Skagit River Poetry Festival 2022: The Reboot & What I Learned

Cooler air has finally come to Georgia, and I’m starting to feel a desire to return to my creative practices, mainly poetry writing and drawing. […]
I’m going to give myself an assignment to come up with ten different first lines of a sonnet.
If one of the ten lines speaks to me, I’ll go ahead and write a complete sonnet with it. If you want to play along, write your own first lines! I’ll share what I come up with in a few days.
Each line will be roughly ten syllables with five beats, but the lines will not necessarily go together. I’m hoping to trick my ego into not “trying” to make sense of it, at least not in the beginning.
Christine Swint, Finding Inspiration

This sabbatical hasn’t gone the way I expected or really wanted, and I think it’s a fairly good and perhaps necessary reminder that so little of our lives are controllable, that our plans often amount to nothing more than daydreams or good intentions. I’m having to practice flexibility, or grace, in the face of obstacles — and to realize in a real, bodily way that my expectations for myself and others are not always going to be met. It’s a difficult skill to adopt as I’m a natural planner, and I take my writing projects seriously (perhaps too seriously), and I tend to like things the way I like things. But one can’t bully the world into one’s way of thinking, and the world will always disappoint, and we will disappoint the world in turn. Maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s not. I feel oddly ambivalent about it all.
The strangest thing is to feel so ambivalent in the face of so much good fortune — like, how ungrateful can I be?
Sarah Kain Gutowski, How It Started // How It’s Going

So, this week was busy in terms of planning for the new book, Flare, Corona, which will be out at AWP but whose official launch date is May 2023. BOA Editions had a meeting set up with me and the production and marketing team (!!)—something I haven’t had at other publishers—so we talked galleys, ARCs, dates, the cover, the blurbs, everything.
I realized how much work you can do on a book six months in advance—but the nice thing is, this time I’m not doing all the work by myself. It’s a nice feeling to have support!
Given that I might be a little more disabled and chronically ill than I was at the last book launch, I’m considering hiring some help to do more of the PR. I had an intern for my last book, PR for Poets, and it really helped with some of the detail-oriented work I probably wouldn’t have gotten to without her. This time I’m considering hiring a PR professional to do things that might slip between the cracks otherwise and to help set up Pacific Northwest events. Have any of you done this?
It’s surprising how many of the top poets we all know the names of are hiring PR representation, but not really talking about it. I don’t know why this is, or if there feels like there’s a stigma? I have noticed that people don’t like to admit that they do any marketing for any kind of books, even though you absolutely have to do some amount of hustle, no matter what genre or subject, to get any book a decent audience. It’s why I wrote PR for Poets in the first place—to give people an understanding of how a book gets sold. Some people say, “I’m an artist, I don’t want to think about sales and marketing.” And that’s fine if you don’t care about your book selling or have someone else doing that work for you. In my case, I understand the work, I just don’t have the energy and time that I used to.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, More On Skagit Poetry Festival, Pumpkin Farm Visits, Poetry Business for the New Book and the Smoke in October

Do you remember when everything still
seemed possible—when a small vacation
to someplace with wide skies and sunlight
bouncing off white sand and the white walls
of a village felt within reach; when paying for
contingencies didn’t break the bank; when
starting over didn’t feel like privilege or just
another chance to make the same mistakes,
but simply the universe finally recognizing it
was willing to give you the break it should have
given you all those years ago?
Luisa A. Igloria, Objects at Rest Have Zero Velocity

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?
Oh, gosh, yeah, this is pretty much all I think about. Math Class includes a list of sources at the end of the book—quotations that helped me shape the individual segments or that I found later and thought were applicable; they add a layer. I often begin with some kind of theoretical idea… For example, in Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford says something about there’s nothing perfectly circular in nature, and I don’t know if that’s true, but I liked thinking about it, and that launched me into the major plot point of Math Class (as well as its form).
What questions am I trying to answer? The question I’ve wondered about the longest is… well, maybe not a question, but a concern: I’ve always, always been super interested in grammar and syntax (I studied linguistics as an undergraduate), so as I’m writing, I’m navigating and playing around with words, phrases, and sentences through that lens. I’m most curious about “syntactic” words (function words, little words) that don’t really mean anything. What if I threw a bunch of them together? Can I make a sentence that way? A story? The past few years, I’ve been wondering most about math (hence this book) and what mathematical language means. With a number, there’s the idea, the sound for the word, the word written, the numeral, the number in an operation or equation, the number representing objects in the world… It’s a weird little thing.
I’m not sure I can answer this question. The question I’m trying to answer is something like: How can I use language in a particular way to manifest this thing that’s kind of outside language? (Which could be said for any writing? Or most of it?)
Currently I’m wondering about how to render sounds and radio waves.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kelly Krumrie

Precise and unrelenting is how I would characterize the poems in this collection. Webster’s eye is considering her past, a girl-going-woman in a world where it is hazardous to be a girl or a woman or that parlous state in between. She looks at sex with a cool eye, the men who, whether she was willing or not, took her body with their own. She eyes coolly the bodies, the aftermaths. She will not allow the reader to look away. Her parents, her siblings fall too under her considering eye. Herself too. All are culpable in the tumult. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about beauty, and about ugliness. Do we need one to fully experience the other? Or is that one of those false dichotomies. Isn’t it all one: beauty and ugliness, a continuum, a web? There is beauty here in these poems, and the ugly world too.
Marilyn McCabe, Sadness come to my house with a stinking bouquet; or, On H. R. Webster’s What Follows

On the good news front, a week or so ago I happened to check my email at lunchtime on a Saturday, to see that Visual Verse were running a competition – but it was only open for 24 hours. Visual Verse is an online magazine for ekphrastic writing – they post a new image every month and people respond to it. This was a bit different, in that there was only a day to write something and submit. I rather liked the image, so I had a go, and was one of the winners. It’s ages since I won anything so this was a really nice boost for me on National Poetry Day. It was also extraordinary to read the other winning poems and see how different our takes on the image were!
Speaking of NPD, the evening before I was at the Eastbourne Poetry Cafe awards night for their ‘Eastbourne and the Environment’ competition, handing out comments and certificates to the winners. The poems received in the Under 18s category were particularly encouraging, and lovely to see the two young winners take to the stage to read their work. I chatted to one set of parents, who were grateful for events like these to be happening. I know competitions can be seen as problematic, but they do at least give young poets (and potential young poets) a focus and (for the winners at least, but I hope for everyone) encouragement to keep reading and writing poetry.
Robin Houghton, You win some, you lose some…

Earlier this year, I wrote some fiction. I haven’t returned to it full-heartedly since, being more focused on preparations for book and new poem projects and just general writing and editing work, but I am never completely happy with my short stories–mostly horror and erotica genre pieces. I feel like stories require certain things of me–logic, timeline, acceleration, denouement. Poems are like this moment, frozen, which contain the entirety of a story or narrative in a limited amount of space.
While a story goes somewhere, has a destination, no matter how long or convoluted, the poem is just its own world, even when placed alongside other poems to create a larger world. I struggle sometimes when talking about projects or submitting work, which always feels like plucking a few strands out of a rug and offering them with little context.
Or maybe the better analogy is that fiction is more like a river or stream that wanders but does intend on getting to an endpoint, or even having a beginning at all, whereas poetry is a like a lake or small pond or maybe even just a puddle that reflects the sky.
Kristy Bowen, poem as phantom ship

The Poetry Book Awards is an annual, international book award given to the best poetry book awards produced by indie writers, self published authors or books published by small, truly independent presses. I received news last week that SIARAD has been long listed for this year’s award.
SIARAD is published by ES-Press, an imprint of Spineless Wonders Publishing, which truly is a small, independent press. The advantage of being published by small presses like SWP is that authors get to work closely with the publishing team. I worked alongside graphic designer BKAD (Betttina Kaiser), and had input in all the decision making including style of book, (I love square books!) front cover, graphics and font type, as well as working closely with editor Matilda Gould. The process was invigorating and exciting, a real artistic pleasure. I didn’t write and publish this book to win awards. As a team we made the book we wanted to make, a book that gave us creative and aesthetic pleasure. We figured if we liked it, others would too.
Caroline Reid, SIARAD Long listed for Poetry Book Awards 2022

One of my visual poems, an ecopoem called ‘poem with no rhyme or rain’, was selected as a joint winner in a competition for Instagram poems on the theme of ‘the environment’ – which was the theme for National Poetry Day (UK) this year – run by the National Poetry Library. It was also chosen as Poem of the Day and posted on the NPL’s website on Friday (14 October).
I made the poem using sweet william plants from my parched garden during the summer drought in the UK this summer. The handwriting is in blue felt pen.
The poem was originally posted on Instagram @andothermaterials and @andotheritems.
If, like me, you’re interested in finding out more about visual poems, I recommend this wonderful book – Judith: Women Making Visual Art published by Timgaset Press. A pdf is also available – as are many more books by this interesting publisher.
Josephine Corcoran, Poem of the Day at the National Poetry Library, UK.

I’m delving deep into the collection of summer emails this week, maybe in an effort to get organized, maybe still pining for more carefree days. I came upon the notification that Young Ravens Literary Review had published not only a poem about my dad, “Not Harry Houdini,” but a photo I’d taken out at Starrigavin of a raven. I’m thrilled that both have a home in these pages. Editors Sara Page and Elizabeth Pinborough assemble a fine collection of work, so do check it out. They are currently gathering work through December 13th that explores and celebrates womanhood.
Kersten Christianson, Magic Lost & Found: Young Ravens Literary Review

I got back in the car at the end of the day to do a quick grocery store run, and I was just in time for the roll call vote from the January 6 committee, as they voted to subpoena Donald John Trump. It was an interesting book-end to the day that began with commentators thinking about the path to nuclear war over Ukraine.
But the leaves are glorious. During the last part of my trip through the North Carolina mountains, I saw the blazing colors that I had been promised. This morning, I wrote these lines, after reading this provocatively titled essay, “We Are On a Path to Nuclear War.”

We wait on leaves to fall
Or maybe nuclear bombs to drop.
Then I added a line from my list of interesting lines that didn’t see development in previous essays:
I travel with a bag; I may not make it home
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Travel During a Time of Turmoil and Peak Leaf Season

Because a friend asked me to tell her about my morning journal habit, I’ve been thinking about what exactly it is that I do.
Complain. List things-to-do. List things done. Check off things done. Kvetch. Write letters to myself (Dear Wise Self: …). Record dreams. Groan. Write metaphors. List words (windy words, horse words, words pertaining to knots, synonyms for complain). Transcribe passages from books I’m reading. List titles and authors of books I have read (I keep this on an index page). Transcribe poems. Scribble new poems, or baldly terrible lines that might become new poems. Moan. List mean thoughts. List uplifting thoughts. Whine.
I have kept a journal since I was a teenager. There were earlier abortive attempts, for instance, a Christmas-gift diary with a key when I was eleven or so. Then, in 10th grade, Miss Caughey (pronounced Coy) assigned her students to keep a journal. We may have been reading Anne Frank.
I can still picture the image on my notebook (and tried but didn’t find it online). It was sort of a tree, sort of a kaleidoscopic blot with a yellow background. Miss Caughey required that we turn in our journal once a month. She would sometimes write a note to me, responding to a passage, but rarely. She taught five or six sections of English every day. I was confident that what I confided to the journal was more private than not.
My journals are not publishable, not earth-shattering, not gravity-defying. They are a hodge-podge, a mess. I sometimes remind myself that complaining in my journal is counter-productive, and that I should write what I want, not what I don’t want.
Bethany Reid, The Morning Write

Pearl Pirie: […] Speaking of reading, what have you read lately that lit you up? Add a why or how for the shoutout.
Grant Wilkins: The Black Debt (Nightwood Editions, 1989) is one of those brilliant pieces by Steve McCaffrey that manages to be really interesting to read (though possibly best approached in small doses) and really hard to penetrate. There are two texts in the book – one of which is structured by the use of commas, while the other by the complete absence of any punctuation at all. I doubt I’ll ever figure out exactly what he did here – or what he did it to – but I’m going to enjoy trying.
Leslie Scalapino’s Crowd and not evening or light (O Books, 2010) (thanks, Chris Turnbull!) is a production of fragments (which seems to be a recurring theme in my literary interests these days) in which the author has managed to create a really interesting long poem out a series of short, shattered, almost inarticulate stanzas that are themselves constructed out of very short, broken, fugitive phrases & words – accompanied by a series of equally fugitive vacation photos. It took me a while to get into this one, but once I did it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (this edition from New Directions, 2017, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro & translated by Margaret Jull Costa): I’ve been recently getting into Fernando Pessoa – he of the 70+ heteronyms – and am currently working my way through his Book of Disquiet. It’s a fascinating collection of very short, often fragmentary (!) prose pieces that feel like a combination of autobiography (if that notion even works with Pessoa), meditation, diary and essay. They remind me – unexpectedly, at least to me – of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”.
Pearl Pirie, Checking In: With Grant Wilkins

Why is poetry important?
The concision of most poems crystalizes moments of emotions/transitions/connections that humans need to help them through both the everyday and the extraordinary occasion. It’s been wonderful to learn that people who do not ordinarily read poetry turn to it when they need emotional relief during political upheavals or a crisis of illness. We are lucky to live in an area where access to the Internet and online resources in local libraries give people increased access to so many poets around the world. That is important, and possibly unifying, in helping us all move toward understanding that the appearance of differences in culture and creed is superficial; that underneath all of us are similar desires to ease loneliness, give us courage, find love, nourish ourselves with the written word. The poet, Ukrainian-born Ilya Kaminsky, wrote in the New York Times, “I ask how can I help…Finally, an older friend, a lifelong journalist, writes back: ‘Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.’” Kaminsky adds, “In the middle of war, he is asking for poems.”
Thomas Whyte, Diana Rosen : part four

Sometimes watering
looks like weeping
when we’re one stiff wind
away from barren.
Teach me
to remove the stone
blocking your lips.
Rachel Barenblat, Rain

October 2, 2022October 2, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 39

I am trying to focus on the good in the days. What hope survives the hurricane and what small joys it misses entirely: the bones that are surprisingly strong, and the seemingly fragile, tiny wings of things that hide and hold on. Maybe in a world that is so arbitrary, the real good is to walk behind a storm and gather the good. Willfully accepting.
The students are playing in the park this weekend. While they pin themselves, and spirit gum themselves into their costumes to rehearse, I photograph the white mushrooms growing on a tree stump. White, marshmallow ears.
Ren Powell, The Dead are Listening

Each memory—
                 a shattered
puzzle.
      It could be raining
on the inside
      of this skin.
Romana Iorga, Forecast

Experience collects, filling my cracked cup. I hold it tight
between my finger bones. It is all that I know.
Charlotte Hamrick, All the Days Come ‘Round

But back to basics. An A. A W. An ampersand. The Hebrew letter Shin (ש). Ellipses, those no-see-um markers which represent what isn’t there. […] If one wants to edit out the ellipses, one needs to put them back in in order to signal that they are gone.
A door is a door but it is also the Hebrew letter Dalet (ד). Why am I telling you this? I don’t even speak or write Hebrew. But that’s why. As a child, I sat in synagogue and marvelled at the books filled with knurls that were letters. Scrolls filled with them, lung-sized rectangles of close-inked text on sewn-together pages of parchment; letters, crowned exoskeletons both etymological and entomological. Scrolls crowned in literal silver crowns, wrapped in velvet, kept in a gold-lit ark. […] The sounds of chanting, the cantor with a silver pointer in the shape of a pointing finger. And the marvel that these letterforms, these mouthshapes, were unintelligible to me except as script or music. The calligraphic maze. An amazement. The shapes of letters as tactile, aesthetic, their meaning not in their meaning but in their form, the inky music of looking, the region of the brain, evolving with these letters, the calligraphic region, the frontal majuscule, cerebral longhand, the amygdalet (ד), the homunculus not holding a pen but made of language, of letters. […]
Gary Barwin, Language2 or the square root of minus language. [ellipses in original]

It always strikes me, when I finish a sketchbook, how much like a diary it actually is. During this journey through a little more than a year — a year that’s seen a lot of upheaval and emotion and change — the images and the choices recall exactly where I was and what I was thinking, while to the viewer, they probably look like innocuous still lives, landscapes and skyscapes. In some ways, this visual diary is more personal and secret and coded than written words could ever be.
Beth Adams, A Visual Diary

When I first read The Artist’s Way, I didn’t grasp its connection to the modern recovery movement. Each chapter starts with the words “Recovering a Sense of.” Laid out in a twelve-week plan (I later learned that Cameron is a recovering alcoholic) the chapter titles end in positive, affirming words: “safety,” “identity,” “power,” “integrity,” “possibility,” “abundance,” “connection,” “strength,” “compassion,” “self-protection,” “autonomy,” and, finally, “faith.” My favorite parts of the book, however, were the sidebar quotes. From M. C. Richard: “Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance;” from Jean Houston: “at the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.” Read in order, these flashes of insight created their own text.
So how well does The Artist’s Way, and other books in this genre, hold up after thirty years? They are still worth reading, as long as readers understand that there is much more to an artist’s life than what they present. One of the glaring omissions in these books, which strikes me as odd since they’re mostly written by women, is a frank discussion of the obstacles that women face when they attempt to carve out some time for themselves in order to practice their art. Cameron touches on it in Chapter 5, but she muddies the water by toggling between hypotheticals: a man with an interest in photography vs. a woman who wants to take a pottery class. These are not equal entities, but Cameron treats them as such.
As we all know, wives, mothers, sisters, female servants, etc., traditionally did the domestic work, including raising children. This mostly unpaid labor provided male artists with the time and solitude they needed to be creative. As Toni Morrison states, as quoted in Chapter 5 of The Artist’s Way: “We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I’m not sure we deserve such a big A-plus for that.”
Gradually, I outgrew The Artist’s Way, and its exhortation to unblock my creative potential. I’ve come to realize that Cameron’s book, as well as Goldberg’s and many others in the creativity genre, are as much autobiography as they are instructional manual. They tell a compelling story of recovery from a variety of things, whether substance abuse, low self-esteem, or a lack of faith; for that alone, they have value.
Erica Goss, The Artist’s Way, Thirty Years Later

I don’t even know where they are
the precarious trees
colour-coded
she’s taken up rowing
tinkering on the piano
in the darkroom
Ama Bolton, A day at the Dove

I remember being overwhelmed with tears in Venice, thinking, wow, it looks just like its pictures, but it’s REAL and I’m HERE. The same with the Alps. Standing practically nose to glacier, or what’s left of them anyway, or to feel, through that strange clarity and distortion of light and perspective, that I could bend across the balcony railing and the deep valley that separated me from the mountain, that I could like it like an ice cream cone. Or even just visiting the next town over when I haven’t been there for a while. Wow, when did this building go up? Hey, I never noticed that garden before. That big tree is gone but look there’s a woodpecker poking around in the stump.
I rarely write in the moment. You won’t often find me scribbling at some foreign cafe, although I like the idea of it. Travel is the time of intake, of slurp.
Only later will time distill all that I took in and leave the vivid traces of travel. That’s what I may write about. Or use as imagery as I write about something else entirely. Those moments or experiences that have stuck to my skin, have wrinkled into my brain are what I can put to use in the building of a poem, visceral, lively. Or at the very least, travel nudges me to recall in my daily life that sense of being alert and perpetually interested.
Marilyn McCabe, Baby baby baby, baby baby baby; or, On Travel and Writing Poetry

Each day oscillates between what shrinks
and what expands, what I once could do
and what I can, sweet jazz and pounding,
a clock that crumbles into dry ash
or measuring cups overflowing
with uncooked rice and broken nut bars.
PF Anderson, NINES

Is imagism really the goal? It doesn’t have to be, though there is something to be said for the principles that H.D., Aldington, and Pound formulated in 1912, in regard to direct, sensory, concrete description that avoids metaphor, simile, personification, or apostrophe. And it’s a lot harder to do than it initially seems. But there’s also something static about the image, even if ideally it embeds within itself a whole “complex” — and H.D.’s “Evening” demonstrates how to graph movement imagistically (rather than staying stuck in the “instant”). We can also think of the directions in which William Carlos Williams took the thing, the ways in which Lorine Niedecker makes imagism kinetic, or how imagism shows up in the work of a contemporary poet like Harryette Mullen (e.g., in her tankas).

Once learned (true imagism), who wants to stay static, but it is still a poetic skill worth learning. It connects us to the world, to the environment, to non-human animals, to plant life, or even to the concrete concrete of a city. Connecting us to the world, it breaks us out of ego, out of our own heads and feelings, which is sometimes a good thing to do. It is a mode we can return to and maybe interlayer with other poetic modes as our deepening compositional experience enables. Okay, poetics class over — now go do whatever you want.
Michael S. Begnal, A Few Thoughts on Imagism per se

Where do I start? With a winter solstice poetry reading in Brooklyn, in a dark room on a dark night; his poem evoking a Di Chirico painting made my head explode, the work was so much more interesting than anyone else’s. But we didn’t speak that night. I met David before the equinox the following year, at a critique workshop run by the people who had set up the solstice reading: Merle Molofsky and Les von Losberg.
David didn’t have a presence; he was a presence. He read in a growl, with a slight lisp and a Brooklyn accent, and he could quiet a room. The poems were not lyrical or narrative, nor formal, nor confessional–they were jazz-like, full of strange images that sounded like surrealism and yet were not. He wrote prose poems and free verse and tiny little aphoristic pieces that sometimes made me laugh and sometimes broke my heart. He was not famous. He had not studied with well-known poets. But he had much to teach me, I thought, from the first time we sat around a table and read our work to one another.
Ann E. Michael, Poetry mentors: david dunn

“Worrying about the lorikeets” appears to be about another unsuitable marriage between two people who are polar opposites, “He opts for Def Leppard to her Bach,” when they come across a dead bird,
“She saw in his upturned eyes the weight
Of its dumb pain—then it was that she
Remembered what she’d always known.”
His sorrow for the bird reminds his wife why she married him.
“Anamnesis” is a subtle, thought-provoking collection that explores memory both in terms of what’s remembered but also inherited memories and how memories accumulate. The poems are gentle but multi-layered, inviting readers to return and re-read.
Emma Lee, “Anamnesis” Denise O’Hagan (Recent Work Press) – book review

A woman is moved on for holding up a sign.
A man is warned he will be arrested
if he writes on a blank piece of paper.

In the pavilion of continuing hypnosis,
the gentlemen in striped blazers applaud.
An army crosses a river. A bridge not blown up.
The dry season. Hurry, before the rains come.
The morality police murder a woman
because her hair was visible
as she walked in the street.
The wind whips stones into shapes
that say what we need to hear.
When we place stones in a circle
do we shut ourselves in or out?
Bob Mee, THEY WILL FIND A THOUSAND GRAVES

My personal poetry highlight of the summer was listening to Roger Robinson read and be in conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama at the Greenbelt arts festival.
It was a performance of great generosity, humour, anger, humility and power. You get to a stage in your poetry-going/reading life when you can tell when people are phoning it in. There is no more dispiriting a spectacle. This was the opposite of that. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it reminded me of a remark by the conductor Benjamin Zander, when he said that a maestro achieves their power not by making a sound, but by releasing those around them to be the musicians they are meant to be as they interact with the score.
Prompted by the twinkling Pádraig (‘It’s on page 51’), Robinson treated us to a several poems from A Portable Paradise as well as many more from his earlier volumes, some of which are now out of print. Introducing ‘The Job of Paradise’, he spoke of how it was inspired by the sight of a hearse slowly turning the corner of his road in London. He removed his hat, he said, and stood in respect as the hearse passed by. But it made him think. Here was the driver of that hearse, doing his job, suit and shirt pressed, his gaze steady, his pace stately. And here was the hearse doing its job, just by being a hearse, a long, shiny black car unlike all the others in the flow of traffic. And from there he made the point that it is the job of each poet and poem to ‘remind us how to live our days’ by showing readers the ‘paradise’ that is all around them.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: The Job of Paradise, by Roger Robinson

In the last breath of September, it was my pleasure to attend and celebrate Gary Glauber’s new collection of poems, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2022). He read beautifully via Zoom. His selected poems touched upon an array of topics: Love, Mr. Rogers, teaching, poetry, civil justice at Starbucks. It was the perfect antidote to the drumming of the atmospheric river and wind pummeling the windows outside, allowing me to disappear inside, into words for an hour that passed too quickly this afternoon.
With a shelved and bespectacled Homer Simpson over one shoulder and a guitar over the other, Glauber began his reading with his poem, “Blocked,” one he explains celebrates a lifetime of poetry. The poet reminds readers, “Let us celebrate the infinity / of our limited mortality…” It is also one that considers time and the travel of the “…inestimable unknowable” that is “much like a poem.”
Kersten Christianson, Gary Glauber’s Collection of Poems, Inside Outrage

In ancient times, spiderwebs were used as bandages.
Rats laugh when you tickle them.
A dentist invented the electric chair.
It rains diamonds on other planets.
Bumblebees can fly higher than Mount Everest.
Men are more likely to be colorblind than women.
There are a million rivers all around me, but only one of you flowing through my life.
Rich Ferguson, A Matter of Fact

You want to believe it
and you can’t —
that’s the miracle,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (87)

What would we like others to know about our experiences these last years? If you could tell folks in the future in a sentence or two, for example. When I was in a very. dark. space. at one point, I couldn’t articulate it, more because I knew that if I did things would get darker for me personally. But I learned some things in that dark place I’ll never forget. The line by Nicole Brossard is one that has popped into my head a lot the last couple of years: “You have to be insane to confide the essential to anyone anywhere except in a poem.”
Shawna Lemay, Taking the Light into the Dark

After lunch and cake with friends, I spent several hours of my 53rd birthday sequencing Wonder & Wreckage. My goal is to have the manuscript complete by Christmas.
Collin Kelley, Self-portrait at 53

Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is the full-length poetry debut Two Brown Dots: Poems (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2022) by “Kentuckian, a mom, a knitter, and an Affrilachian Poet” Danni Quintos. Her first-person explorations and recollections write around and through a self-determination and self-creation, seeking answers to a space she requires to singularly establish; illuminating lyrics around memory and being, offering answers as best as she is able, in due course, due time. Set in three sections—“Girlhood,” “Motherhood” and “Folklore”—Quintos writes across the length and breadth of lived experience, from watching her father from a distance, summers and childhood crushes and living as an awkward youth, to the experiences of pregnancy and eventual motherhood. She offers stories of her connections to the Philippines, writing of a familial background she simultaneously holds and can’t help but carry, offering, as part of the poem “Possible Reasons My Dad Won’t Return to the Philippines,” “What if he remembers everything [.]” A few lines further, as the poem ends: “[…] the little boy in him left / here with all the cousins, no one / to call nanay or tatay, alone, / the shape of him on a mattress / the version of him that stayed.” She writes of differences, from the ways in which most (if not all) teenagers feel as outsiders, to the consequences of racism, reacting to boundary-making micro-aggressions offered for no reason other than the colour of her skin. “I didn’t yet / understand. And every summer after,” the poem “Brown Girls” ends, “a whirring // reminder that I didn’t belong here, a little song / sung at me by the bodies that slept for years // underground. How we couldn’t see what he saw: / two brown girls under a white couple’s roof.” In certain ways, Two Brown Dots is a collection of poems entirely centred around the body, and how those bodies are experienced, both from outside and within, offering physical responses through the lyric, from adolescence to the fact of living in a predominantly Caucasian space. Her poems are sly and smart, curious and rife with detailed narrative.
rob mclennan, Danni Quintos, Two Brown Dots

I’ve been proofing chaps and reading manuscripts and thinking about October happenings. I have also been proofing the final version of automagic and getting it ready for my first galley in a week or so. I feel when I get back from being gone, there are a couple days of finding my rhythm again.
But yes, here we are on the cusp of October. I not only made chicken soup I’d intended for the weekend, but have had the space heater on since yesterday, but mostly gazing longingly at the shut windows and wishing I could open them again.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/30/2022

Last night at the Library of Congress, Ada Limon gave her inaugural reading as the nation’s poet laureate. A few weeks ago, when I realized that my canceled Thursday night class was the same night, I applied for a free ticket. I got one, but in the end, I decided not to go.
I got an e-mail on Wednesday that advised that we would be required to wear masks, and I would have been wearing one anyway, but I did start to think about the wisdom of this kind of indoor event when a pandemic is ongoing. I did get a booster shot on Friday, but I’m not in a hurry to test that protection.
I don’t know why I didn’t think about the potential of crowds when I requested a free ticket. I’m not used to sell out crowds at poetry events, and the Wed. e-mail advised that we would be at full capacity. The line to get in for the 7:00 p.m. reading would start to assemble at 5:00 p.m., and we’d be let in to get seats, if we were far enough in the front of the line, at 6:30. There would be overflow seating in a hall where we could watch on a screen. […]
So, what did I do instead? I went to the American University library to get my Wesley ID activated to be able to use the AU library. I came home and made myself a dinner of roasted brussels sprouts and a baked sweet potato, which was much tastier than it sounds.
I was feeling oddly exhausted, so I was even more glad that I didn’t go downtown. I was asleep by 8. But before that, I tucked myself into bed. My bed faces west, so I had a great view of a glorious sunset, as I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. It wasn’t the cultural/literary even that I had planned, but it was the one that I needed.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Laureate Thursday, Literary Thursday

               I learned my first prayers there,
waiting for the butcher’s hand to emerge
               from out of the pocket slit in the throat
of a thrashing animal. You said if I closed
               my eyes, sound would be more
terrible than sight. My reward: small
               specks of a sweet inside red-taped
pitogo shells, unburied with a bamboo sliver.
              I wake sometimes with the sense of a footprint
small as a snail’s, pilgrim feeling for a path
              to everything we’ve always wanted to say.
Luisa A. Igloria, In dreams you walk through wetmarket aisles with me again

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Yes. Many times. I thought for a long time that the “I” in a poem should be taken out, obscured, muddied, that the worst kind of poem was a deeply personal poem. My first book (Little Prayers, Blue Light Press, 2018) is filled with fantastical leaps and it takes a kind of sideways look at my personal experience. In 2017, when I started work on the manuscript I’m sending out now, I surprised myself by writing intensely raw and revealing poems about my experience with motherhood and my struggles with infertility, including the life-threatening miscarriage I suffered in 2013. I had to shut off a voice telling me that this kind of writing was bad. It’s been very freeing to write about this stuff, though the challenge, always, is to find some way of moving beyond the myopically personal into more universal territory, and I’m always looking for models. Franz Wright did this beautifully in his writing about addiction, God, and mental illness.
Thomas Whyte, Susie Meserve : part two

tiny people on a tiny screen
even through headphones
I can hear the rain
Jason Crane, haiku: 1 October 2022

I’ve just finished reading Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. It is an extraordinary book, beautifully written. It’s one of those books that you can sink into, and carry around with you, exploring the themes and questions and points of view in your mind. It came at just the right time, as I feel I have been exploring my own, metaphorical islands, some of them abandoned, some of them not so much. Cal Flyn’s islands are real places in which human intervention has stripped and scorched them, the interest is in the psychological attachment to them, and the physical response from nature. My metaphorical islands are grief, writing, friendships. Last week I sent the new poetry collection to the publisher. I know they’re waiting on ACE funding, like so many indie publishers, so I’m really just waiting to see what happens before I can release any details. One nice thing about it was the way that my editor shortened the title of the collection in her response email. Something about that made it feel familiar, wanted, warmed to, and that made me happy. The collection has passed through that strange place, has gone from being a Schrödinger’s collection that exists only when I perceive it to be a collection, and is now a manuscript on a desk in a publisher’s office with a title that is solid and firm, a title that can hold the weight of being shortened for ease of communication. Put simply: It exists as a complete thing, it is created.
And so I bed into the non fiction book. I’ve started getting out and immersing myself in the physical places on which the non fiction book is based. It’s been wonderful. These places are islands of time in which I can almost touch the people who came before me, who lived on this land.
Wendy Pratt, Exploring the Islands

Every part of the country has things everyone knows if you live there, but comes as a surprise to outsiders. Like White Sands in southern New Mexico. I had been to Seattle several times but had no idea that Spokane was known as the Lilac City. If I hadn’t read Talley’s chapbook, I still wouldn’t know that. But you don’t need to know that to read this book; all is soon explained. And the poems here do many good things besides giving information.
Postcards from the Lilac City begins with stories of growing up in a certain place, Spokane, Washington, with change over time: a carousel taken down and later restored, bike riding before helmets were worn, the time when bikes are replaced by a brother’s old car. Already there is good language and some experiment in form; in the later sections the experiments are bolder. In the middle section, “Spokane Postcards,” a stanza of description is followed by a letter from the author to someone from back home – never mind that many of these missives have too many words to fit on a typical postcard. The last section, “After Vietnam” does not return to a historical approach, as one might expect, but presents various moments in a variety of forms from an adult perspective. The whole makes a satisfying read, sharing specifics of experience in poems carefully crafted.
Ellen Roberts Young, Recommendation: Postcards from the Lilac City by Mary Ellen Talley

There’s a good case to be made for October being the loveliest month, in England at any rate; though only really when the sun shines and the plentiful golden yellows are at their best, like Samuel Palmer landscapes before your eyes.
It’s also a month of melancholy, too, which suits me just fine. The ideal time to get stuck into some serious reading, which, in turn, will feed into writing. Over the years, early autumn has traditionally been a time when I will make a concentrated study of a favourite poet’s oeuvre, to see how the quality of their output, and the clarity of their thinking, deepened over time. Poets who, either by choice or premature death (yes, I realise that most deaths are premature in some respect), published in a disciplined and selective manner are ideal for this, Elizabeth Bishop for one.
Like everyone and anyone who loves poetry, I’ve long liked Bishop’s poems. Curiously, though, real, devoted love for them has been awakened in me through an apparently unlikely source, Colm Tóibín. His book On Elizabeth Bishop, published by Princeton University Press, is as fine a critical reader’s study of another writer as any I’ve ever read. I find it interesting that it should be a writer known until recently solely for his novels, albeit wonderful ones at that, who has really opened my eyes.
Matthew Paul, On (Colm Tóibín on) Elizabeth Bishop

This weekend feels a bit like the last hurrah. University starts soon and I know any free time I have will be focussed on that. The weather is beautifully autumnal, leaves glowing with sunlight as if it’s putting all their energy into one last show. It’s infusing the poems I’m trying to write. And I’m writing which hasn’t happened much lately.
This weekend is Zineton, a 48-hour challenge to create a zine. Helsinki Writers are having their second go at it. I’ve discovered a fun AI art site Wombo which is making it even more interesting as I really don’t have any talent for visual art. So I’m writing a couple of poems for that and waiting for the other writers to send me their work. Then the rush to put everything together begins.
Gerry Stewart, Zineton and Scotstober 2022

The cover for Flare, Corona was chosen this week (reveal soon!), and I started thinking about mailing lists, updated business cards, and scheduling readings. Oh yes, and Seattle AWP next March. My PR for Poets book recommends starting six months ahead of time laying the groundwork for the book launch, and that suddenly hit me.
Also, this month is full of literary activity: the book club I host is meeting on Oct 19th, the Skagit Poetry Festival is happening next weekend, and I’m working on an interview and a spooky poetry podcast. Plus, I’ve got poet dates—getting back into social life is gradual for me—because, let’s face it, in Seattle most of us start hibernating in November and don’t come out until March.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Welcome to October: Upcoming Book Launch Planning, Upcoming Book Club, Poetry Festivals, and Podcasts

Pumpkins are all right (in pies, not in lattes, thanks)–but what the suddenly cool, rainy weather makes me want to do is read. It’s also nourishing to be read. Hurrah for the thoughtful attention Sarah Stockton gives Poetry’s Possible Worlds in the Staff Favorites section of River Mouth Review. I love the Octoberish timing AND that it coincides with the second printing appearing at the distributor. This means you can order it again directly through SPD or your favorite indie bookstore. It’ll soon show up on other places you order books, too. A small press book tends to spider along–think of silk threads thrown out, wafting in a breeze, and finally sticking somewhere. It’s both a stroke of luck when it does, and a result of arachnid effort and patience. The first push on this Poetry’s Possible Worlds is done, I think, but I’ll keep spinning.
The small press book I’m reading right now is Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Look at This Blue. I hadn’t realized before I picked it up that it’s a long poem–she calls it an “assemblage”–although the thinking she does about epidemic violence, ecological damage, and inequity is a through-line in all her work. I need and want to read it slowly and not when I’m tired in the evening, which has been my time for page-turning fiction.
Lesley Wheeler, Book season (hours of ellipsis)

who breeds the flowers that hurt so much
whose wound mourns the gun
shall we grow weary of searching when we’ve buried the sun
Grant Hackett [no title]

August 28, 2022August 28, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 34

I remember some key things from psychotherapy. It was a revelation to me when my therapist said:
It’s okay to change your mind.
He didn’t, in that moment, mean about what I was having for dinner, but that’s included in the permission to understand that our words are not always our bond, but our process – a way of getting to grips with thought, emotion, woundedness, intent, desire, the bewilderment of being unsure of what we want because of, well, because of (for one thing) our unique interaction with the world not being taken seriously enough as children. Being squashed down.
The poems: they don’t come out fully formed, you know. It’s usually a bit messy.
So here I am, back in my blog which, I have learned since I announced its demise in June, is a friend I don’t want to live without. Not right now, anyway, when I’m in grief and times are so troubled.
Liz Lefroy, I Step Through The Gate

And a father sells his nine-year-old daughter in marriage to a sixty-year-old man and tells his screaming wife Get back inside, you donkey!
Ah, but this is not poetry, you say.
And a child’s arm is blown off when a guided missile smashes into an apartment block.
Ah, but this is not poetry, you say.
The humiliated stand silently in small groups, waiting for re-education to begin.
Repeat after me: I am guilty on all counts.
Ah, but this is not poetry, you say.
Any minute now, nothing will happen.
It’s always about the unsaid.
Bob Mee, AH, BUT THIS IS NOT POETRY, YOU SAY

watching the storm
from the darkness
of the driver’s seat
Jason Crane, haiku: 21 August 2022

I feel an amorphous weight inside. I think it is because of the new series of poems I am writing. Or attempting to write. Honesty does not come easy. Words that should want to break free of restraint and guilt, sit and stare at you with soft, reproachful eyes. I have backspaced more than I have written. I have written more than I thought I could. There is still a mountain to climb. One step up, two steps down. One poem in. Two poems out. The mornings are weary of my wounds. The night refuses to listen.
I read instead of writing. Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’. I read a little. I backspace some more. I meet friends, people who may be friends. I talk a little. I backspace even more.
Austen’s Anne says in the book, “that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”
I wonder if poetry should be enjoyed safely. I wonder if it should sear and chill and raise and drown. Both poet and reader. Austen in her dulcet voice sounds a note of caution. For both poet and reader. So, I ask myself as Rilke commands. Must I write?
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Survival Guide for Poets

In a previous life, I was a waitress…before that, a farm girl. I spent a lot of my farm-girl childhood pretending to be a horse named Stormy. I think somewhere in time I was a tree.
Bethany Reid, In Your Previous Life

I’m rereading [Rebecca] Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is completely dog-eared from my first time through, so many pages I tagged that had ideas I needed to revisit and think about or phrases I loved or things I needed to go back and write about. Now too I have to pause after every page or two because so much thought is incited in me by her own. This is reading at its finest! “Reading with a purpose,” as it were, as I was in need of food for thought, and this is a feast indeed.
And yet the what the book also is teaching me is that as a writer and as a traveler, I need to learn how to be lost. If I can unclutch the map, not worry so much about where I’m going but focus more on where I am, I could discover more. And don’t we travel, and don’t we write, to discover?
I can feel sometimes my rising anxiety to get where I’m going — I’m speaking here both about travel and about writing, of course. Feel the urge toward the relief of “oh, there it is.” But what is my hurry, and what is the problem with lingering withOUT purpose, with turning and ambling, poking down an alley just to double-back. What is the problem with being a stranger here myself?
What Solnit does so well is just that, diverge, pause, seem to take an odd turn, but somehow she finds her way back, and I, the reader, am perfectly content with the zig and the zag. To wander and to wonder. The word wander is from words related to wend and weave. The origin of wonder is unknown.
Marilyn McCabe, Why am I soft in the middle; or, On Writing and the Unknown

The most important question behind the question is: is reality something we can have a relationship with? Is it something that we can love? Is it something that can love us? And my answer to that, again emphatically — passionately — is yes. It’s not only possible, it’s necessary. We already do love it: it already loves us. To understand and unfold that is a work much larger than a lifetime, larger than all the lifetimes. But we did not step into reality from somewhere outside it. We are not strangers here, looking to strike up an acquaintance. To see the universe as alien and unintelligible — that is a really extravagant philosophical position, a totally untenable one. That we, each of us, popped into existence ex nihilo, and must grope about looking for ways to make contact with an alien universe — that is the default philosophical position of the modern world, and it makes even less sense than God as a patriarch of ancient Palestinian herdsmen. We are not foreigners here. We love, and are loved, from the very beginning to the very end. For better and for worse.
Such a sweeping statement prompts the question, “am I really saying anything? What is this love worth, if everyone has it all the time?” This love isn’t (necessarily) passion, or fondness, or esteem: it’s only a philosophical assertion of connectedness. It’s not what one hankers for on a lonely Saturday night by a silent phone.
In a way, no, it’s not saying anything. But it flips figure and ground. It changes the question of loneliness from, “how do I connect in this alien, unintelligible universe?” to “what must I do to shake off this delusion of separation?” My loneliness is not something I have found: it is something that I make, moment by moment. The task is to not to start something, or build something; it’s to stop something, dismantle something.
Dale Favier, Dismantling

Every so often, I still taste soap from all those years ago when my mom would wash my mouth out for talking dirty.
The taste reminds me there’s a fine line between what is acceptable and unacceptable, and how that fine line can sometimes come in the form of Irish Spring or Dove.
In her own way, my mom did me a favor. At least I didn’t grow up sounding like a drunken sailor with Tourette’s.
To honor my mom, I keep a sweet-talking spot beneath my tongue.
Rich Ferguson, Soap or No Soap

My father died today: the end of a very long, mostly happy, vigorous life. We were with him. I’m grateful for so much, relieved that his suffering was short, and yet still feel like a tree has fallen in the forest: it’s hard to imagine life without him being in it too. But of course, as long as I am alive, he will live in me.
Beth Adams, My Father. December 15, 1924 – August 22, 2022

I finally saw the hedgehog that has taken up residence under the holly bush. Leonard is curious, but fortunately, he hides behind my legs while he sniffs at the air from a safe distance. The creature’s not a hare, he knows that much. It makes me happy to know there’s a hedgehog here again. I can’t even begin to explain why. We will only catch glimpses of him in the half-dark for a few more months before he sleeps for the winter. But somehow knowing he is there… like a weird kind of vague promise of something good.
Unexamined hope.
I keep reminding myself that life is good right now. I am even learning not to brace myself for bad news when a message notification pops up on my phone. T. sends snaps of their new puppy swimming in a pond way up North. I can hear the splashing, and him and his wife laughing softly.
Ren Powell, Unexamined Hope

As a traveler, I understand;
you, a traveler, too,
must travel, we must
say good-bye,
but a drop
of radiance,
a grape
of imaginary sun,
has touched the blind blood
of everyday…
— Pablo Neruda, excerpt from “Ode to the Third Day”
Neruda, were you writing about a day of the week? Or were you lamenting the end of summer, as I hear through the howl of my re-entry struggles? You who understood all things, of course felt the keen sorrow of leaving behind life’s elements — gracious friends, groundedness, sea, sardines, openness. To your odes, we sing along with sweet regret, knowing how lucky we are to touch those values. Loss is the nature of the game!
Back at home, I am resolved to bring expansive “summer” — i.e. human values — into what seems like our never-ending strife, conflict, struggle. I’m modeling my plans after more balanced friends to 1) create the better world of our little garden rather than rail against the one that seems to loom, and 2) to bring lightness to the truth that we’re all flawed, to laugh rather than judge.
Seems rather North American. I prefer Neruda’s continuing language: “we will cherish/ this insurgent day,/ blazing,/ unforgettable,/ a bright flame/in the midst of dust and time.”
Jill Pearlman, A Drop of Radiance has Touched the Everyday

As I was getting ready to leave New York City last week, it occurred to me that much of the art I saw on my trip, from the Statue of Liberty to the majority of the art at the MOMA, was a response to oppression. I started thinking about what it means to live in an age when so much of the work of artists is a form of resistance. Of course, artists and poets have always functioned as truth-tellers, often to their peril, but the intensity and scale of the art I saw emphasized this fact to me in new and thought-provoking ways.
For example, on the Statue of Liberty tour, I learned that the statue was more than just “a gift from France to the people of the United States,” as I’d been told as a child. Its main purpose was to commemorate the end of slavery. Hidden at the statue’s base are broken chains, meant to symbolize the freeing of America’s enslaved people; the statue’s designer, Frederic Bartholdi, “originally designed Lady Liberty holding broken chains, but later deemed the explicit reference to slavery too controversial. Instead, a broken chain and shackles lie at the statue’s feet, delivering the abolitionist message more subtlety.”
It’s beyond ironic that a statue celebrating the end of slavery had to be toned down. Our tour guide told us that Bartholdi took this action, at least in part, to appease wealthy donors whose money was crucial in paying for the statue.
The statue is also the site of one of the world’s most conspicuous displays of ekphrasis: Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” printed at the statue’s base. Many phrases hit me as I read the poem, : “brazen giant,” “imprisoned lightning,” “world-wide welcome,” and of course, the famous lines about the tired, poor, the wretched refuse, homeless and “tempest-tost.” The poem asks the world for these “huddled masses,” indeed demands them. Not the wealthy, the educated, the strong and beautiful, but their polar opposites.
“The New Colossus” transformed the statue from its original purpose to “the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants,” as New York journalist John T. Cunningham put it. On that windy dot of an island in the New York Harbor, I was profoundly moved, imagining boatload after boatload of immigrants being greeted by this gigantic Mother of Exiles, as Lazarus calls her, before they landed at Ellis Island.
Erica Goss, Pictures & Words: My Visit to New York City

Paralyzed by her past, she can do nothing.
She sits on a rock and stares at the junction
of three rivers, this spot that Thomas Jefferson
declared the most beautiful in the New World.
The parents return to a field of calm.
Their boys have recruited other disaffected
children. They’ve created a game with inscrutable
rules. The parents discover that the boys have devoured
the best parts of the picnic. As the sun skips
west, they munch carrot sticks and apples as they watch
the children play, making up rules as they go along.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Harper’s Ferry and the Looming History

Summer’s heat is lingering here in Finland, but autumn is coming up fast. Cooler mornings, the birch turning gold overnight, geese starting to move on in long, noisy threads. My favourite season, but it’s always tinged here with the knowledge that winter won’t be far behind and will last too long. I should probably get out and do something in the nice weather while it lasts, but there are never enough hours in the weekend. […]
This week, I’ve also dealt with the recording the Helsinki Writers Group is doing for Helsinki Open Waves, liaising with the technician and the 3 other poets. I can’t wait to hear the final product, it sounded so cool even without embellishments, but the technician was going to try and add a soundscape behind our poems.
We had a rough theme, Below the Surface, but we each went our own way with it. When we brought them together there were overlaps and echoes of each other’s work that we hadn’t planned or expected. It can be a repeated phrase or image or sound though all the poems’ subjects are very different. We shared our work briefly in the writing and editing stage and I find those chats often bring a poem to fruition. What you can’t quite reach alone is nurtured through sharing it with others. The group has a few poets now, after a long time of me being the only one and these collaborations are so much fun.
Gerry Stewart, The Switch from Summer to Autumn

My son left this week for his senior year at college, which removed a handy barrier between me and working all the time. My writer self, my teaching self, and my role as Department Head are competing hardest for my hours. Teaching and chairing are more deadline-driven so my writer self is hanging on by her fingernails. She has grit, though.
What I’ve been writing during the past few weeks–it actually does have a deadline, Tuesday–is a column for the web platform of a scholarly journal. This longish piece concerns creative scholarship and has made vivid to me how fiercely creative writing and scholarly training are fighting in the colosseum of my brain. Seriously, I’ve published a book of creative criticism and other essays besides. You’d think I’d know how to argue for it by now, but I’m finding this piece very hard for reasons that may be emotional as well as logistical. I think the essay is clicking now, but it’s one of those subjects I had to write too much about before I could cut the thing back to a better version of itself. The throughline kept shifting and I kept finding other sources I wanted to consult. Both creative writers and scholars discover what they think by writing about it–despite animosity between the fields, they have more in common than not–but scholarship places a much higher value on reading all major statements on the subject so far. I think that’s what serious, curious writers should do, learning everything they can if they’re going to make some kind of beyond-the-personal pronouncement, but it’s also true that this assignment is an online column, not a full-fledged article. Sometimes you just have to stop.
Lesley Wheeler, Splitting / creative scholarship

Poet Sonia Greenfield shared on her Facebook page an essay written by Haley Mlotek, “Against August” (The Paris Review) and I think it’s pretty damn wonderful. Yes, August is well-planted within summer months, but it doesn’t carry the late-spring anticipation of May, the giddy affection of June, or the full-blown buzz and hum of July. In fact, my reply to Sonia’s thread consisted of this: August is to muck around in the mire of all least favorite things: summer’s end, teacher in-service, and rain, rain, and rain, at least here. I am especially keen on her borrow of a few lines by poet Marge Piercy to make her point about August. In her poem “Blue Tuesday in August,” Piercy writes,
The world smelled like a mattress you find
on the street and leave there,
or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s
dinner menu and the day before’s.
Perfect!
Kersten Christianson, Not Much Love for August

A thrill to be read so enthusiastically and perceptively by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, one of the three judges of the Singapore Literature Prize English fiction category. She made her thoughts public on her FB page after the award ceremony was over. She has really good things to say too about my fellow nominees, Cyril Wong and Mallika Naguran.
“The Singapore Book Council celebration of the 2022 Prize winners for various genres in different languages was yesterday (Thursday), so I no longer feel bound to discreet silence as one of the three judges for the English Fiction Award. I wrote up my enthusiasm for three of the 33 novels and short story collections mailed to me, and include them here, to share with their readers!
“Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5 P.M.: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet
Jee Leong Koh’s Snow at 5 P.M. may be Singapore first global novel. It is multi-genre, with 107 haiku introducing many of the prose passages. Set chiefly in contemporary Manhattan, with Central Park as the jewel in the setting, the fiction flashes off and on, like red warning signals, to a futuristic climate-changed Singapore Island and planet. The novel is multi-civilizational, the protagonist-narrator being a diasporic Singaporean living in New York City, in quest of his speculative protagonist, a Japanese poet immigrant to the same American territory. The novel is a mash-up of sub-genres. It is a mystery story, puzzling a missing poet known only through the half-burnt sheaves of haiku left in the apartment the narrator has moved into. The fiction is thickened, like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick’s whaling information, with empirical botanical knowledge that offers a different discursive dimension to the haiku images of flora and fauna. Asian American scholarship and displays of literary erudition are scored with erotic gay intimacies. Multitudinous digressive language plays, sub-characters’ lineages and histories, suggest unities in the tradition of Joycean epic works. Snow at 5 p.m.’s hybrid literary traditions, genres and sub-genres, generating complex threads, each digressing and spinning other threads, achieve a tour de force, a globalized Singapore imaginary that dazzles.”
Jee Leong Koh, SNOW AT 5 PM Won the Singapore Literature Prize

Susan Glickman is an artist of words and brush. She paints, edits, teaches and writes many genres: fiction, essays of literary history, non-fiction, children’s books and poetry. She has won a whack of awards for her writing. (I can’t believe her fabulous collection from Vehicule The Smooth Yarrow is already a decade ago. Time to reread.)
PP: Susan, what have you read lately that lit you up?
SG: In addition to my typical diet of poetry (recently a lot of Jane Hirshfield as well as Dionne Brand, Dorianne Lux, and John Steffler), and historical fiction such as Lauren Groff’s magnificent novel Matrix, I have been reading a fair bit of sci-fi and sci-fact. The former includes a deep dive into Ursula Le Guin as well as more contemporary stuff like Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, the fabulous time-travel novels of Connie Willis, and Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, the latter inspiring books such as Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus, Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, and Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild.
PP: Well, my reading list just got a longer. Those last two in particular. I’ve heard very good things about Sea of Tranquility and The Soul of an Octopus was great. Can you add a why or how for the shoutout?
SG: I’m overcome with grief at how humanity has abused this planet. I am seeking a better understanding of other creatures as well as paradigms of alternate ways to live.
Pearl Pirie, Checking In: With Susan Glickman

I’m tired, physically and mentally–a lot on my mind these days–and I feared I was tired of poetry, but, no. Early this morning, I picked up Break the Glass, by Jean Valentine (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), and could not put it down. The poems felt both fragmentary and liquidy, like pieces floating or somehow flowing…with little punctuation to stop the flow. That body of water [on the cover] with bodies in it, which looks like people standing, is an installation in Germany by Antony Gormley, called Another Place (1997, cast iron/100 elements), photographed by Helmut Kunde. The poems dropped me in another time and place, some celebrating Lucy, that early hominid, and who knew I’d find the coincidence of the word Australopithecus in three books this August, two books of poetry and one about teeth.
Kathleen Kirk, Break the Glass

The narrative [CJ] Evans writes across the seventy stanzas, each five lines in length, of “TRYING TO HEAR A HYMN TO LIFE” loop and swirl around a variety of images of wetlands and Lake Merritt, resting in the centre of Oakland, California, the Simon and Garfunkle song “America,” the memory of Sandy Hook, his daughter’s imaginary sabertooth, “Toothy,” and other family moments, connections, memories, dislocations and trauma, all wrapped up and around not only a belief in life itself, but the very act of that particular brand of faith. “I can’t see the lake from here,” he writes, early on in the poem, “but I believe / it still is. Just as I believe in the shellmounds / I’ll never see, the sabertooth, that the flat moon / is actually a sphere. I believe as I do / in this tabletop you can’t touch: wood pulp crushed // in a hydraulic press with glue.” Or later on in the same poem, offering: “I believe in this as much as god / or biology, which is to say, a bit less // than to make a bet with it against a bullet, / but enough. I call it belief, but it’s purposefully, / wondrously unexamined.” There is such a stunning beauty to this collection, one that shows itself as open-hearted while playing rather close to what might suggest a deeply-wounded chest. This is what one might call a darkly optimistic book; one filled with as much beauty as one can muster, and everything one can see after having been in the dark.
rob mclennan, CJ Evans, LIVES

The fig’s branches lean closer to the ground
exhausted from all their summer bearing
My tongue fingers the space where
a cracked tooth used to be
I thought the potted Buddha’s hand citrus
given by a friend had perished in winter
But here it is pushing out its signature
green laddered with fresh new thorns
Luisa A. Igloria, On the Cusp

On Saturday, fellow poets Ian Parks, Simon Beech, Tracy Day Dawson and I walked the route of Ted Hughes’s paper round up from Mexborough to Old Denaby, as described here. Ian, born and brought up in Mexborough, led us on the route which took in the former newsagent’s where Hughes and his family lived from 1938.
At the right-hand-side of the shop is Hughes’s bedroom window overlooking what was a slaughter-yard back then. It inspired his gruesome poem ‘View of a Pig’, published in his second collection, Lupercal (1960). Like most, if not all, English children of my generation, I studied the poems of Hughes more than anyone else’s, except perhaps Owen and Sassoon, and it was the earthier, meatier poems like this one, and ‘Pike’, also from Lupercal, which we read the most. The poem’s last two lines – with the perfectly-judged anaphora, alliteration and simile – ring across the years from an England long-gone:

I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

The route took in the possible setting of ‘Pike’:

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—

Stilled legendary depths:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

The route took in Manor Farm, where Hughes went trapping and shooting with his brother. It’s the setting of his poem, ‘Sunstroke’, again in Lupercal:

Reek of paraffin oil and creosote
Swabbing my lungs doctored me back

Laid on a sack in the great-beamed engine-shed.
I drank at stone, at iron of plough and harrow [. . .]

I should add that Ian has a wonderful poem published today over at Black Nore Review, here, and I’m looking forward to hearing Ian read at Mexborough Library this Wednesday.
Matthew Paul, On Ted Hughes

This morning, as I was lying in bed, half awake and trying to decide if I should just start the day or sleep another couple of hours, I found myself thinking about words and media, about literature and books and all the ways we take in information now. Also the nature of that information, particularly when it seems all is possible and there is an outlet for everyone. How it can be misused and handled badly. How the good has a sturdy platform, but also the bad.
When I was a teenager and young adult, the world touted the danger of televisions..of the downfall of reading and literate culture. It seemed inevitable. Even among people my age, not all were readers, which was strange to me, having had books in my hand since before I even understood what was in them. The same child who scribbled in notebooks and said I was writing when I barely knew the alphabet. The Mother Goose volume I carried around until it fell apart despite not being able to do much beyond read the pictures to discern the story unless I convinced my mother to read it to me.
My parents, especially my dad, who were only high school graduates, were still readers. My mom liked stories and painting, but her reading was mostly magazines. Still, words were something always available in some form. Whether it was mags and novels passed off from my aunt (one of the most prolific readers in the family) or our weekly trips to the library, books were just always present. My dad read the newspaper daily, and books about everything–not just novels. No one read poetry of course, or maybe even knew people were writing it, but words in general were not foreign. I only learned about poems in junior high and high school, though it depends on what you consider poems. We all fought over Shel Silverstein books in the 5th grade, so maybe I guess I just didn’t think of them as poems but rhymes. Poets were like unicorns and outside of some teens who wrote poems and professor, I didn’t see a real poet until my second year of undergrad (in some weird confluence of stars, I later got to publish her.)
Kristy Bowen, words and the world

“Violet Existence” explores issues of class, sexism and imposter syndrome, a sense of being the outsider and not being fully seen. Katy Wareham Morris captures the maternal voice: protective of her children but wary of a society that holds mothers up to an impossible ideal. The poems open to a vulnerability as they spill across the page, presenting contemporary situations with a promise not to raid the myth kitty or assume readers have a knowledge of Greek myths.
Emma Lee, “Violet Existence” Katy Wareham Morris (Broken Sleep) – book review

The typewriter is a recurring theme here and it seems that I’m overdue on sharing some poems about them, about the act of typing, and the music of typing. I love how Clarice Lispector and Annie Dillard and May Sarton wrote about typewriters and typing in their prose and I’ve shared some of their words in a post titled My Most Intimate Friend.
The first poem is by Charles Simic who I’m beautifully indebted to because he allowed me to use his poem “In the Library” in my novel, Everything Affects Everyone. His poem strikes upon the both-ness of delight and dark despair that it’s possible to feel these days.
Next is Australian poet, David Malouf’s poem about grasshoppers and the music they make — you can just hear the typewriter sounds as you read. The poem by Matthew Francis immediately caught my eye because he talks about a blue Smith Corona, which is what you see in my photograph. Adam Zagajewski’s poem is a self-portrait that begins with an image of his writing implements and goes on from there. But honestly, I’ll always share an AZ poem even if it only loosely fits the theme. The final poem is quite shamelessly, my own. It’s also the shortest piece I’ve ever written. I’ve shared it around a fair bit since my book came out and is probably one of those things that I like a lot more than anyone else, but that’s okay! It’s about typing rather than typewriters, but I think still works in this grouping. Which I hope you enjoy!
Shawna Lemay, 5 Poems about Typewriters

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I should say first that I appreciate the use of the term form over the term genre. I find genre largely pointless—recently a brilliant friend of mine told me, If you want to write poems, write poems. If you want to sell poems, call them stories. I’m getting away from form.
Poetry as a form is fundamentally limber. It is a form that attempts to undermine categories of form. Poetry collects, but it does not horde. It is a form of accumulation which constantly is compelled to let go of itself.
I have a deep respect for other forms, other disciplines—they are hard. I don’t wish to say that there is anything that they cannot do. Questions of formal capacity do not seem to me like questions related to Can it? but rather questions related to Is it willing? Poetry is willing. Poetry is always willing.
Thomas Whyte, Evan Williams : part five

Today, Elee sent me a line she thought might be good in a poem.
“I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony.”
Earlier, my friend Donato suggested I try writing a triolet.
So it was good that Elee sent the line—it’s true: it’d be good in a poem.
The line is a quote from the composer John Cage.
And it’s hard not think how it might apply to everything.
For instance, it’d be harmonious to end with Elee’s good-in-a-poem line:
“I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony.”
Gary Barwin, Alternatives to Harmony: TRIOLET with CAGE refrain

As someone who has been entranced not only by the otherworldly song of the seals, but also by the author’s skilful dexterity as a poet, Where the Seals Sing fascinated me from the outset. I delighted in the Pembrokeshire seal-watching cameos and the small but memorable details of the natural world, such as the fragrance of the Elderflowers encountered along the coast. The sections on music and mythology were intriguing. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the reports of cruelty, pollution and plastic were often devastating. I was totally captivated by Susan’s engaging affection for, and whole-hearted dedication to, her Grey Seal subjects. I would love to think that some of her zeal and practical actions might inspire us all to play our part in these uncertain ecological times.
Caroline Gill, ‘Where the Seals Sing’ by Susan Richardson

I recalled a visit in 1984 to Goodrich Castle in Ross on Wye, Herefordshire, England, where we did just that–dropped a small stone into the well–and waited what seemed a long time for the sound to reach us. From what I understand, tourists can’t do that anymore; the National Historic Trust has upgraded the ruins to make them safer to visit. The tourist board doesn’t want anyone falling down wells.
But I digress. I meant the metaphor to apply to how writers listen eagerly for response to their work once it is published. Will anyone review it? Will anyone read the review? Will anyone post about it on social media? Will anyone contact the writer to say those words we want to hear: “I love your book!” –?
Sometimes, yes. And for those who have done so already, a million thanks.
Ann E. Michael, Pebble in the well

I was talking to my family about the careful balance of re-entering the world after two and a half years of basically living in a bubble. Tomorrow, I’m having over a poet friend and I’m looking forward to making friends at our new Woodinville book club at J. Bookwalters. But I have to be careful – I still haven’t gotten covid, though I have friends who are getting it for the first time and family who are getting it the second and third time. I’ve been talking about re-entering the working world a bit more, with my MS vocational therapist, talking about setting limits and boundaries, balancing my ambition and physical limits. I’m cautiously optimistic, I guess – and hoping to stay healthy enough for AWP in Seattle and my April book launch.
But how do we know what’s safe, with the confusing and often contradictory guidelines about covid, and is life ever really safe for those of us who are immune compromised? I nearly died from complications of pneumonia from the swine flu and people barely made a big deal of it of swine flu. I think about how the pandemic will affect art for the years to come – and artists who’ve suffered from complications of covid – the way the 1918 flu affected art and artists. Will people want to read, or see art, or hear music about the experiences of loss, isolation, and anxiety that came with this pandemic? Will people want to stamp out the last few years in denial? Americans don’t like dealing with death, and they certainly don’t like dealing with mass death.
As the summer seems to be drawing to a close, and people are talking about a fall rise in covid cases, new variants, new vaccines and how well they might work, I am looking forward to the natural increase in writing energy I get when it gets a little cooler – the “back to school” feeling that never really goes away.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, More Sunflowers and Dahlias in Late August, Thinking About the Balance of Re-Entry and the Effects of the Pandemic on Art and Artists, and What’s on the Horizon

outside the dentist
gaps in the autumn trees
the numbing of time
Jim Young [no title]

Forever Young
For CB
on my birthday
I light a candle
and watch it burn
down to the dark
this is no time for wishes
time has no hold on you
Ama Bolton, Forever young

August 21, 2022August 21, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 33

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 or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, poets were mostly back from vacation and gearing up for the fall, but life is throwing curve balls at some. I guess it’s the perilous times in which we find ourselves, but there’s a certain feeling of malaise in many of these posts. But exciting new books and works in progress continue to motivate and inspire.

April 19, 2022. 11:35 am. A pile of calendars, datebooks and diaries heaped in the middle of the yard. A red gasoline tank. Gas poured. A match lit. The huge, the huge conflagration of everything that has happened. Also, because represented in the burning heap were days, weeks, months and years that were yet to happen, they too are gone, turned to fire, heat, ash, crackling. My face flushed. Clouds puffy in the sky. The sound of traffic on a nearby road.
Gary Barwin, Thursday

I have this “image” in my mind. Except it’s not an image—I think it’s a sensual memory. Indistinct. Life of some sort in the palm of my hand. I curl my fingers inward to hold it, but carefully. This thing is delicate. Easily disfigured.
Easily killed.
A heartbeat flutters sketching a ghostly sonogram on my skin. It’s a game of peek-a-boo and “careful-careful” and I feel like a toddler not knowing how to control my body with tenderness. I feel like a toddler confronting the wonder of it all.
But these moments pass so quickly. Something shiny just out of reach catches my eye. And “living in the moment” too often means a singular attention focused on this immediate thing. Too often the drama.
And it means something irreparably damaged. Lost before I knew what it was.
Ren Powell, Holding Life Loosely

melt me
like ice in a
cool drink
linger like pie
steaming in a window
haunt me
an explorer for a fool’s
soft lies
Charlotte Hamrick, Small Death

I took the summer off, almost entirely, from any of the familiar measures of writing productivity.
I fought this break early on. (I’m often really hard on myself.) But then I embraced it. As we say in my home state of Maine, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” So, much like the weather (especially the weather *these* days!), my POV on what success means to me in my writing life fluctuates WILDLY.
Here’s my best guess at what happened.
I got close to finishing my Gertie poetry manuscript and had a crisis of confidence. Instead of despairing — ok, I despaired a bit (wherever I go there I am LOL) — I went with it and reflected on priorities, asking questions like
– Why do I want to finish this manuscript?
– What do I want from the writing life?
– What does success look like for me?
– Does it matter how many times you pause and start over?
– Are those separate attempts or part of one long life’s work? (and does it matter? who’s counting?)
I weighed the answers against everything going on — most notably summer vibes and tectonic shifts in parenting — and decided that writing wasn’t currently at the top of the list. It was freeing!
I’ve continued to dabble, taking myself on a DIY writing retreat and tackling a low-stress daily challenge from Sarah Freligh this month. However, I let go of the “musts” and “shoulds” and stopped obsessing over finishing the damn book.
So what did I do instead? EVERYTHING.
Carolee Bennett, what does success even look like?

Today’s feature at Escape Into Life marks nine years of showcasing artists — emerging, mid-career, and established — from around the world. It also marks my last Artist Watch column for the magazine. Nearing age 70, though still without a bucket list, I know it’s time to pass the virtual pen to a new editor.
As Artist Watch editor, I have given significant virtual room to artists who are women and artists who work in highly varied media. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many painters, sculptors, photographers, paper-cut artists, portraitists, installation artists, mixed media artists, collagists, illustrators, printmakers, and digital art wizards who accepted my invitations and generously shared their marvelous work. They made creation of my monthly Artist Watch columns a joyous endeavor and filled with beauty my days (and nights) of looking at art. Joy and beauty, especially as found in art, remain the two essential things I look for each day.
Maureen E. Doallas, New Artist Watch Feature at Escape Into Life

The pandemic has made it difficult to think expansively over these past few years. Our emphasis has been on hunkering down and surviving. But I came into the summer with something like Big Hope, in part because a next nonfiction book (a collection of essays in unconventional forms) has been coming into focus. After the brief spring “tests” of driving first to AWP in Philadelphia back in March, then a literary festival at Clemson University, I lined up substantive summer travel in the form of two residencies–first ten days at A.I.R. Studio in Paducah, Kentucky, and then all of June at the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska. Both offered responsible options for quarantining (if needed) and staying safe, while also furnishing the community I’ve craved.
Those residencies were amazing. Full stop. Storyknife, in particular–we were on the Ring of Fire, with volcanos on the horizon! in the solstice season, meaning, 20 hours of light a day! six women writers, gathering around a dinner table!–took my breath away.
I used my time at these two residencies to read, write, and refresh. So there’s no easy way to segue to what came next: on my last full day in Alaska, I got the call that my husband was in the hospital back in our home of Washington, D.C. He spent most of July in the ICU. Now we’re wrapping our heads around what comes next. I had to resign my Visiting Writer-in-Residence position at American University for Fall 2022. I had to defer a plan to join the faculty of the University of Nebraska’s low-res MFA. I have no choice but to slow down, to be present in the moment, and to be grateful for the company I’m keeping. (And, in a brief nod to the fickle cruelties of the American medical system: to remember, money isn’t real.)
That’s the thing about life–it keeps changing, right out from under us.
Sandra Beasley, Buckle Up

I’ve written two poems about this over the week that we were losing him. I feel like my brain is trying to process his very quick demise. I’ve been thinking about whether it was the right thing to have the operation, to take that risk, worrying that we pushed him into it, worrying that my mum will always wonder what would have happened otherwise, if we’d chosen death by cancer, had turned down the chance the operation offered. But we didn’t make the decision, how could we? No one made a decision for my dad, dad made all his own choices, whether we disagreed or not, and it was him that chose the chance to be a whole person – vital, present, capable of another fifteen years to complete his projects, to have holidays, to build memories. When they tell you the risks in an operation, they are real risks, not just something they have to tell you to tick a box. And this was a very high risk operation. But still, so quick, so hard to align the vital presence of my dad, with the old man who looked so much like my grandad, in the ITU.
When he left us, striding across the car park, he’d removed all his jewellery. The letter he got from the hospital told him to bring nothing but himself. He took them literally and didn’t even take a mobile phone. We had no contact with him at all. I thought at the time how it felt like some sort of religious ceremony, a baptism perhaps; the stripping away of all worldly goods. But actually, it was much more primal than that. Much more like a warrior facing a final challenge. Much more like a man going into the desert alone. Something he knew he had to do himself, a rite of passage. He entered into a place where there were only two outcomes. I don’t see that as losing any sort of fight. His faith gave him two options, not one death and one life. And I have never met a braver person in my life, how brave must you be to make that decision, to take that chance. That was the bravest thing I’ve seen anyone do. He did it for himself and he did it so he could continue to be married to my mum. And he was a warrior, did fight this, with every sinew, he fought to keep the life that he had with my mum. He fought to continue to suck the marrow out of every experience. I like to think of life as a journey, and our job within that life, as we move around it in the vessels; the bodies that we are in, is to experience every part of it, to find joy where you can, to be compassionate, to live a full life. My dad did that. I like to think of him continuing to journey. Journey well, dad, journey well.
Wendy Pratt, Saying Goodbye to Dad

I can frame my own space
now, hear my own voice. But the
universe still reveals no premise for
why something is, why it wants, why
it is denied and why it grieves into
poetry. There is also no explanation
for why a monsoon sky is the colour
of a sonnet, why a heart breaks in
the way day doesn’t, why a moment
shapes the poet when the poet shapes
the moment, but in the reverse
direction, as if time and poetry
are mirror reflections staring at
each other from opposite worlds.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 09

Here in August, during the Sealey Challenge, I love the immersion in lives, languages, and cultures not my own. In this book, The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser (Graywolf Press, 2021), I also loved tracking the wild fox, its brief appearances, its changing meanings…and, as keeps happening, tracking the coincidences–how the books or images in them keep connecting, or how my mind is doing that. I encountered the Tooth Fairy in the nonfiction book, The Tales Teeth Tell, but I was surprised to find her here, in the very first poem, “Hunting Girliness,” “It is not tasteful / to fuck with the Tooth Fairy, baby teeth planted // in the oleanders.” (And I just made the connection that she is “hunting” girliness, like a fox!)
Teeth again, and precise dental terminology, in “Recognized Language,” “Now the words shed from my mouth like deciduous teeth.”
Kathleen Kirk, Wild Fox of Yemen

My favorite line in John Palen’s new chapbook is unpacked in the final poem, “Riding With the Diaspora,” which is the shared title of his book. He writes, “At 6:00 on a winter evening / we’re all diaspora, all a little homesick.” Even in the thick of summer, in the wander-about in full sun and high temperatures, this line takes me straight into the heart of winter, into that collective confusion from where is it we actually hail.
Kersten Christianson, The Great Scattering: Reading John Palen’s Riding With the Diaspora

Another poem I like from the same haibun is this one:

day and night equal:
as celandines close
the stars come out

What I like here is how much is implied, rather than actually stated. The shapes and colours of both the stars and the flowers are there, but not in words! And in the context of the haibun they also colour the prose and bring the landscape and Cobb’s journey vividly to life.

As you might have guessed, it’s been a bit of a haibun week, both in terms of reading and writing. How fortunate I feel, to have reading and writing time. Two weeks to go before the start of term – and believe me it always comes around too quickly. So, I’ll finish with this fun haiku, taken from the haibun ‘The School Christmas Show’:
a child blows
into a balloon
the balloon blows back
Cobb, David, Business in Eden, Equinox, 2006
Julie Mellor, Business in Eden

“The Yellow Toothbrush” is a searingly honest, literary exploration of trauma and the burdens that fall to mothers. The speaker does not condemn her daughter, seeing her as a victim of circumstance, unable to seek help for lactation psychosis due to the fear of losing custody of her baby son who was loved and wanted, after a series of abandonments. Her daughter’s imprisonment seems to be punishment enough. However, the speaker does not abandon her daughter. She still visits. Though the question remains: how much [of the] responsibility for that fatal night was her daughter’s or is blame to be laid at the feet of a society that works against mothers, and what about the baby’s father, the daughter’s father? It’s a tough, non-judgemental read.
Emma Lee, “The Yellow Toothbrush” Kathryn Gahl (Two Shrews Press) – book review

People talk a lot these days about the divisions in our country and our world. With good reason, they lament the brokenness we see among a large swath of the population, and the despair many feel that the “normal” world will never be regained.
I have a different view. I come at this chaos with the idea that we are making a hairpin turn in civilization, and won’t be returning to “normal”. There will be a new humanity to live in a new world. And poetry will record the changes of the heart.
Such abrupt changes in often leave behind a lot of broken crockery. Even broken earth. But within the human heart lies unity. If I did not feel that, know that every day, I could not get out of bed. I would not want to wander such a lonely world. Reaching the broken ones with kindness can go a long way to heal the rifts and fill the gaps in those hearts. It reminds me of the Japanese practice of mending broken ceramics with gold, a substance even more precious than what you are mending. Kindness is the gold to mend our broken world.
Rachel Dacus, Mending Our Broken World with Gold

Some see God
in the suddenness
of the sun
out of a cloud.
Surprised by
an event so much
bigger than
the monotony of
thought (the telling
of the same
old story of
doubt and fear),
they glory in
this brief gift
of external light.
For me
when caught
unawares
I understand
in the moment
that the light
that matters
is always
bright within
and the shadows
are of your choosing.
Dick Jones, Dog Latitudes §22

Last week, I was finishing up a lesson on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, a woman who started off an English major and wound up switching to Biology, the reverse of my trajectory. I was once a bright-eyed 18-year-old convinced she could save the world by saving the oceans. A year later, being terrible at math, I sought other ways to save the world. By the time I graduated I was less bright-eyed and fighting to live in the world, let alone save it. I feel like this happens to most of us.
Kristy Bowen, postcard from a thousand miles

Some years ago now I visited Orford Ness Nature Reserve, a strange and mysterious place on the coast of Suffolk. Strange in the same way as any place with ‘Ness’ in the name, mysterious because of its history as an atomic test site and before that as a place of experimentation in radar and ballistics. Even though wildlife has reclaimed this marginal sweep of land, the area is dotted with derelict structures and unexplained features some of which are still off-limits to the visiting public.
A few months later my poem ‘Searching for the Police Tower, Orford Ness’ won the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2014, fuelling my (long-gone) belief that I was destined to be the Next Best Thing in poetry. I had no idea at that point that a zillion poets had already ‘discovered’ Orford Ness. Those were heady days – that period many poets go through, in which you imagine yourself being snapped up by Faber and consequently winning the Forward Prize. Although I now see the folly of it, I would never laugh at anyone for having such a dream. Rejoice in each and every early or small success! Live for that moment, as it may never return!
Anyway, my point is that even your oldest, earliest successes can have a longer shelf life than you think. A few weeks ago I got an email from someone at the National Trust who had been looking for poems about Orford Ness to display in the Visitor Centre there next year, as part of some kind of festival. She’d discovered my poem on the Poetry Society website and would I mind if mine was one of the poems to be displayed. Why would I say no? It’s so nice (and unusual) to get such a request. Will anyone waiting for their ferry ride over to the Ness in 2023 bother to read my wee poem, up on the wall with plenty of others? And will it enhance the enjoyment of their visit? Will they remember (or even read) my name? Who knows. But there’s no harm in imagining it.
Robin Houghton, Orford Ness

Magma has published my poem ‘Seen while walking: one high-heeled boot, black suede, in a public flower bed’ in its ‘Solitude’ issue. This is my first time in Magma after submitting multiple times. This poem was one of a series I wrote last year while taking part in ‘Walk to Write’ an online course offered by Sarah Byrne at The Well Review. It coincided with a time of being alone or with my immediate family for long periods, during various lockdowns, and going for daily walks around the town where I live, noticing and sometimes taking a photo of things I saw. Apparently there were over 5000 poems submitted for consideration so I’m feeling very lucky to have sidled in this time!
Josephine Corcoran, Two New Poems in Magma Poetry and Raceme magazine

As life has afforded few spare moments of uncluttered mind-time in which to write, I’m back to scribbling notes, phrases, and ideas on random pieces of paper and in my journal. This fallback method works well for me, an old-school pen & paper poet. Quite a few colleagues-in-poetry use various smart phones and electronic devices to write notes-to-self and even to draft poems, but when I resort to that–on the rare occasion that I have my cell phone but not a writing implement or bit of paper–I forget about my ideas, which are filed somewhere “in there” (on Samsung Notes’ app). It’s a good thing I am not considered a significant author whose work is worthy of preserving, because my poet-life drafts and mementos would be challenging to archive.
For the moment, my writing has a work-centered locus: curriculum, to-do lists, meeting schedules and agendas, orientation and presentation scripts, group emails to announce this or that Important Thing that likely 80% of the recipients will ignore. I get home, eat dinner, pick beans, tomatoes, zucchini, and zinnias. And I read. The one thing I always seem to have time for!
Ann E. Michael, There’s always a book

It’s another day when boredom is looking for its passport to have an exciting adventure in a strange land.
Perhaps it’ll visit a house made of hellos.
Maybe it’ll date a crossword puzzle.
And while, at first glance, the puzzle may appear to be blank, just below the surface are wisdoms waiting to be discovered.
Once boredom finds its passport, it opens its front door and looks out upon the land.
A voice lingers in the air:
this is a collect call from the world. Will you accept the dream?
Rich Ferguson, A House Made of Hellos

Moving my way through the stunning new collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase, I had foolishly presumed I hadn’t actually heard his name prior to this, only to discover I’d read his essay “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” included as part of the late Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Moving through that essay once more, the cover price alone. As the press release for On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays offers: “On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.” Some of the essays collected here, truly, are revelatory, and he writes repeatedly, thoroughly and thoughtfully on poets such as Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), John Ashbery (1927-2017) and James Schuyler (1923-1991), among multiple other pieces on an array of literary activity, centred around his attentions across some four decades. […]
There is such a delight in his examinations, offering a joyous and rapt attention and passionate engagement on very specific poets, poems and moments, while simultaneously able to see how the threads of his particular subject’s work fits into the larger fabric of literary production, culture and politics. As he writes as part of the essay “THE LEFTOVER LANDSCAPE,” “Much of art is the struggle to make emotion less embarrassing.” There is something quite staggering in that simple, short sentence that Crase manages to get, and get to. Honestly, go to page 135 and read the whole paragraph that sits at the bottom of the page. It’s breathtaking. And read the whole essay. And then read the whole collection. This is easily the finest collection of prose I’ve read in years.
rob mclennan, Douglas Crase, On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays

[Pearl Pirie]: […] What’s your life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
[rob mclennan]: I spent much of July re-entering the novel manuscript, set aside since November or so, as I worked on poems, until I had to return to reviews again, where I am currently (my list of titles-in-progress include poetry books by Polina Barskova, Krisjana Gunnars, CJ Evans, Gary Barwin, Nicole Brossard, Laynie Browne, Su Cho, Joshua Bennett, Billy Mavreas, Janice Lee, etcetera).
PP: mentally notes: Nicole Brossard and Billy Mavreas have something new?
rm: Our young ladies had various day-camps throughout July and into August, which allowed me a different kind of attention, so I was attempting to take advantage of that, for the novel. I’m hoping I can spend the rest of August pushing a few weeks ahead of reviews on the blog (and periodicities) to be able to return again to fiction come September, once our young ladies return to in-person schooling (something we haven’t engaged with since March 2020).
I’m also working on a handful of further festschrifts through above/ground press, as well as a variety of other projects in that direction, including a third ‘best of’ anthology to cover the press’ third decade, scheduled for release next fall with Invisible Publishing.
PP: Ooh, you heard it here first, folks, probably.
rm: Otherwise, I’m currently spending weekdays with our young ladies at their outdoor swim lessons, sitting a daily hour poolside with notebook, books and pen at Riverside’s RA Centre, a building I hadn’t actually been in or near before, despite years of driving by. Not long before my widower father died in 2020, I discovered my parents actually held their wedding reception there, so it’s a curious space for me to engage with. A very retro-vibe. Very calming, even despite the array of greenery leans up into the back windows of a government building. Perhaps today I might wave up at them.
Pearl Pirie, Checking in: With rob mclennan

As I drove through the mountains from my house in North Carolina to the DC area, I thought about the coming year, how it will be both familiar and different. I’ve taken seminary classes before, so I know that I can slip back into that rhythm. But this year, I’ll be taking a mix of online and in person classes. This year, I’ll live on the campus, where I hope to have amazing opportunities. But I’ll also be living by myself for longer periods of time when my spouse is fixing up the house in North Carolina.
Yesterday as I drove through the mountains, I thought about how I could structure my days and weeks. I want to get back to doing more creative writing. I’d like to do that early in the morning, and then go for a walk a bit later, like I have been doing for the past month. I’d like to do more submitting to journals, if I can still find some that don’t charge high submission fees, which I define as anything that costs more than a few stamps would cost. I’d like to spend afternoons either going to class or getting ready for class.
And of course, I want to make sure I explore DC. The other day, as I read an article in The Washington Post about the re-opening of the Kennedy Center and what it means for restaurants in the surrounding area, I thought, I wonder if there are still any tickets to Hamilton, which is in town for two more months–and there are! In the past, there used to be a way to get great same day prices on tickets that hadn’t sold yet. I never figured out a way to do that in South Florida. I’m going to figure out how to see some great theatre in the next 2 years while I’m here.
I know that I’m claiming a huge gift. I will likely never be able to afford to live in a city like DC again. I want to make sure I squeeze everything out of it that I can.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Move In Day!

My goal this year is to get 100 rejections. You heard that right. So far I’ve managed 98 submissions of poetry, essays, or my poetry ms. And I’ve had (I’m guessing) about 30 acceptances. That means I still have at least 32 more submissions to make — and (horrors!) if any of those are accepted, then a few more for good measure.
Someone else gave me advice — and sent an adorable video of a three-year-old to illustrate it — of what might be called “radical acceptance.” The idea is to spend some time each day saying, “I LOVE my house,” “I LOVE my car,” “I LOVE this plant…this kid…this dog…this ratty old couch….” You get the picture. Just to flip that usual mode of noticing what isn’t okay, isn’t good enough, etc.
I love these rejections and how they’re helping me get closer to my goal of 100 rejections this year.
Well, it all sounds rather silly, now that I’m typing it up. I get bogged down by big stuff — and why shouldn’t I? Just like everyone, I often get caught by the little stuff and do some serious whining. On the other hand, sometimes I already practice this. A grown daughter hijacks a day when I really wanted to get other things done, and I decide to embrace it. My husband gets in a fender-bender, and I’m shot through the heart with gratitude that it was just a fender-bender and not anything worse. I get a headache and a voice from somewhere says, “I wonder what that’s asking you to pay attention to?”
Bethany Reid, Rejection City

I haven’t been up to much this week as we had several days of 90 degrees and not-great-air quality, so it was nice today, a slightly cooler day, to get out and about – I got my hair cut (see left,) walked around Kirkland a bit admiring some roses, and stopped by our local garden to pick up sweet corn. Even that much exhausted me – summer is not a great time for MS patients, as you may know if you have any MS folks in your life – the heat and humidity can feel like a nauseating weighted blanket. I haven’t had as much energy for writing or submitting as I wanted, but I’m hoping to get back in the groove by September.
I’m also considering starting up an hourly PR coaching business, maybe just a few hours a month to start, to help people get going on their books, small businesses, or projects. What do you think? I feel like I want to do more than just freelance writing, something that helps people, and also something that helps me dip my toes back it the working world. Even with MS, I feel like I have more to give than I’ve been giving, if you know what I mean.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Poem Up On Verse Daily, AWP News, Hot Air Balloons, Hot Weather and MS, Woodinville Read Between the Vines Book Club

We’re listening to Ani DiFranco as I wash the dishes following another of Christian’s amazing meals. Talking about the heady days of the early ’90s when we drove from town to town in the northeast following Ani and Andy the way others followed Jerry and Bob. In church basements and college halls and small-town theaters that used to be vaudeville houses we joined in with ever growing groups of fellow misfits, trying to figure out where the hell we belonged. I think of how young Ani was then — the same age as us, just a few years older than my kids are now — and how wise and powerful she seemed. Not seemed, was. Black tape on her fingers, slamming against the strings. Head shaved except for one wild lock of hair. I was probably the squarest person in all of those rooms but that guitar and those lyrics and that voice and those drums started to sand down the corners of my box. Now it’s thirty years later and all that’s left of the box are the occasional lines I draw for myself. The music, sadly, is still as relevant as ever.
Thursday night in Ithaca
dozens of us on a concrete floor
not even noticing
Jason Crane, haibun: 17 August 2022

I am giving up my current day job, no more market research for me…No more data tables, no more questionnaires, no more significance testing, etc. Nope, not for me, I’m now a car mechanic. I will be fixing cars for a living.
This is categorically not true, but I am proud of myself for finally fixing the boot of our car yesterday. It’s only taken me the best part of two years to do it. Four hours of swearing, sweating and repeated viewing of what may be the best video ever on YouTube has saved me the best part of 400 quid. I am happy. Are there any other poet mechanics? Come on people, announce yourselves.
In other news, there isn’t really any. I’m home alone this weekend—Come over if you fancy it—so in-between the mechanicery (I’m getting the lingo now) and the cleaning, drinking, etc, I’ve managed to work on some poems for the book. I think I’m almost…ALMOST…done with the second pass at them all, so it will be time to get them all in order again soon and go again…
I’ve finished a review and sent that off. I was so close to being up to date, and have somehow ended up agreeing to two more, so I now have 4 to do. Bloody heckers, like, Riches…learn the word no..
I managed to “attend” via Zoom/YouTube the launches of Jess Mookherjee, Ramona Herdman and Tania Hershman midweek. All three were amazing. I’ve not managed to buy Jess or Tania’s books yet (I will, I will, Jane…), but I got Ramona’s last week and read it quickly this week. It’s a wonderful thing. I love her work. It’s one of the four reviews I need to do, so I’m looking forward too going back over it in more depth and to revisiting her other work for context (and basically because it’s bloody great).
Mat Riches, Mechanicals, Blade Runner & A Brief Note About Reviews

Barbara Leonhard’s work appears in Spillwords, Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, anthologies Well-Versed, Prometheus Amok and Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women. Her poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, will be published in the fall of 2022 by IEF (Experiments in Fiction). Barbara enjoys bringing writers together and has been sponsoring informal open mics on Zoom during the pandemic. You can follow her on https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.blog.
What are you working on?
I’m currently polishing a manuscript to submit to my publisher, EIF (Experiments in Fiction, a company in England owned by Ingrid Wilson). It’s called Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir. The poetry collection is about my mother and me. Our lives were interwoven in many ways. We each suffered from conditions that affected memory. Hers was Alzheimer’s and mine was encephalitis. Also, she was able to have seven children, but I was infertile because she was prescribed diethylstilbesterol (DES) when I was in utero. As I was the eldest daughter, she chose to move close to me so that I could help her in her senior years.
The trigger for this collection of poetry was my uncle’s question, “Do you love her?” The very thought that my love for my mother was questioned sent me into grief counseling. Throughout my care for her as her case of Alzheimer’s developed, I doubted my worth. To understand our relationship, I reviewed the ways my mother’s life and mine intersected. Could I grow to love the stranger my mother was becoming?
The book title is based on an experience I had in Mom’s last few days. My brothers and I were going to grab lunch. When I was stepping out of the car, I saw three shiny new pennies lined up perfectly on the hot asphalt parking lot. Mom would always pick up pennies and insist that I do the same. However, I would refuse, which caused some conflict. I knew these pennies were a message, and indeed, she died on April 3, 2016.
The book is a poetic memoir, so it has an arc. I set the book up in three sections: Light (my years with Mom before she moved close to me; Dust (her time in an independent living facility and her decline due to Alzheimer’s); and Echo (her move to assisted living and death, and the resolution of the existential dilemma about my love for my her).
Thomas Whyte, Barbara Leonhard : part one

there it goes again
the angst of a long summer
in that one song
Jim Young [no title]

These days are loud, though:
the billow of wind, the sermons
of thunder; the undercurrent of all
nostalgias turning into something
we only think we understand. O trigger
releasing a spring, tensing a mechanism,
seething with too much feeling.
O outrigger. I am an island and you are
an island and everyone else is an island
and we could be an archipelago.
Luisa A. Igloria, Outrigger

6. Yikes. I’m also Department Head (seven-hour chair’s retreat Friday, oy); about to teach two writing-intensive classes; and trying to finish an article on creative criticism, a version of which has to also become an ALSCW paper for a seminar on “confession” run by Gregory Pardlo, to be submitted in early September. Also also, I have a body with limits and a life. My personal and professional to-do lists grow like the reddening Virginia creeper in my garden, to which I am intensely allergic and so are a lot of other people, so I can’t seem to hire someone to dig it out. To do.
7. On the subject of spending money, my son begins his senior year at Haverford shortly, so our house is about to become much quieter. We had to buy a car, which I advise against, if you can help it, in this inflationary, troubled-supply-chain moment. New cars, at least economical, fuel-efficient ones, are not to be had for love or money. We scored a slightly used one after much research and a billion dollars.
8. On the bright side, I also bought a long-wanted new sofa to replace the stained, cat-shredded one. It’s a lovely shade of blue, and velvet, a fabric that cats, they claim, are less interested in using as scratching posts.
9. I’d like to read more poems on my new sofa, #sealeychallenge and all, but it’s been hard, given all the creative criticism I need to catch up on and the state of my in-box. The last I finished is Jenn Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal, which I highly recommend. I think it’s gonna win some prizes, at least if the judges can handle its emotionally intense explorations of motherhood, sexual assault, fatness, and tarot cards.
Lesley Wheeler, To do, poetically–or just some human sleep

The weather has been crazy hot this week, like much of Europe. Finland’s not used to reaching 30C in August. Thunderstorms are promised for today, but it’s still clear blue out there. Need to go water my allotment.
I recorded three poems with Helsinki Open Waves recently as part of a project with Helsinki Writers Group. This weekend I have been going through my takes, choosing how to put the poems together. I’m getting used to hearing myself read my work, but I’m not sure if I’m very good at it yet. I usually only need three takes to get a decent read-through, though we’re lucky that the audio technician is happy to cut and paste bits together so I don’t need a perfect take. What I’m still learning is how to emphasise the poem and read it with some expression that suits the words. It’s strange to hear something that you put so much energy into that by the end your body was a tense mess and to realise it didn’t come across the airwaves like it sounded in your head. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make it sound better with a bit of tinkering.
Gerry Stewart, Back to Busy Catch-up

As we were getting ready to come home, I reminded Cane that I almost didn’t make the trip because of the issues with my back. We had such a rich and wonderful two weeks with his siblings and extended family, a longer stretch of time than he’s had with them in decades. I expressed how glad I am that I didn’t miss it.
“You know,” he said, “if your back had gone out a week later, I’m sure we wouldn’t have bought the house.”
I’m sure we wouldn’t. Life swings on the smallest of chances sometimes, on serendipity and luck and things you didn’t know you were looking for until you found them.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Life is funny. And short. Seize the day.

we broke all the glass
in all the windows
no one stopped us
it took time
but the sounds were so addictive
the crack and cascade of glass
eyeless in autumn
a cold wind hummed in the gaps
the snow went wherever it would
Paul Tobin, SUMMER PROJECT

June 5, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 22

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 or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week found poets wrestling with linguistic unease, Pentecost, the place of rage in poetry, an invented form of English, the language of science, British Sign Language, and other challenges. But how to keep writing when so much in the news is so grim? Read on for some ideas.

Someone I know was pondering a fancy floral table centerpiece she was designing. She showed me a photo of it and said she wasn’t really happy with it. It was a series of vases holding spring flowers, all sitting on a mirrored plank. It was colorful and lively but it did seem a bit over the top. I said that I wondered if the mirror was the problem. She said, “But my intention was to blend contemporary with traditional,” i.e., the mirror was contemporary and the lovely spring sprays traditional. And I thought of the many conversations about poetry in which something similar was said in the face of suggestion or critique: oh, but my intention was X, X = the very thing that seemed not be working. I’ve said it myself many times, and the conversation always gives me pause.
What should win: intention or what was actually created?
I realize my loyalty tends to be with what was actually created. The created thing has its own life, and I tend to think we creators should honor the inadvertent creation rather than try to haul it back into what we thought we intended. I value the misintentions and the subconsciousness of what was actually created, and mistrust the perhaps overthought earnestness of intention.
Marilyn McCabe, A mighty pretty sight; or, On Intention and Creativity

Any reviewer of Denise Riley who has read her 2000 book The Words of Selves, proceeds if not with caution, then with a definite sense of unease. There are two principal reasons for this. One is that Riley’s work is difficult; she is known as a poets’ poet for good reason – her poems contain a lot for those knowledgeable about poetry to get their teeth into, but on a first reading many can appear a little like crossword puzzles to be solved, codes to be broken. And this is intimidating – to review and misread her work would be to expose oneself as an inadequate reviewer. She knows this, and comments in The Words of Selves, specifically on the interpretation of literary references: “When reviewers interpret a poem, they may confidently misconstrue an allusion. Often they’ll think up the most ingeniously elaborate sources for something in the text that had a plainer association, a far less baroque connection, behind it.” (p.74) So there is the concern of making a fool of yourself by over-reading (something I’m sure I’ve been guilty of in this blog more than once); that’s the first reason. The second is that much space is given in The Words of Selves to questioning and problematising the lyric I, and Riley is skeptical, even scathing, of biographical ‘selves’ in contemporary poetry: “Poetry can be heard to stagger under a weight of self-portrayal…Today’s lyric form (is) frequently a vehicle for innocuous display and confessionals” (p.94) And yet, for Riley’s reviewer, the fact of her son’s tragic death and the fact that she has written in prose and poetry about this, leaves the poet’s biographical self very close to the surface, and (the reviewer might feel) liable to breach at any time. How then to know at what point the real Denise Riley steps back and an imagined subject takes over? As one of Riley’s great philosophical concerns is the means by which language creates the Self, the uncertainty that Lurex (Picador) creates in the reader around what is being said and by whom, is unlikely to be coincidental.
And this sense of unease is not entirely out of place. Riley herself writes of the “linguistic unease” of the writer, and so there is some solidarity perhaps between these two unequal partners in the generation of a text’s meaning, the writer-poet and the reader-reviewer. If we can proceed together with a joint feeling of guilt and inadequacy, the job of searching for meaning might not seem so lonely.
Chris Edgoose, Dark yet sparkly – Denise Riley, Lurex and ‘the flesh of words’

My life has been a wonder of surprise and intention. Not so unusual, right? We all experience unexpected events and make decisions. But wonder is hard to remember and easy to lose. I’m lucky—poetry requires wonder. I think my Poet Sisters would agree.
In 2016 I took an online class through The Loft in Minneapolis. That alone was strange because I’d lived 45 minutes away for five years and didn’t sign up until I moved 450 miles away. The instructor, poet Amie Whittemore, guided us to give kind and specific workshop critiques. She helped us build community. By the end of the class, several of us had formed a bond and decided to continue workshopping poems.
We recently celebrated our five-year anniversary as a group. I don’t remember who came up with Poet Sisters. It sounds like a gathering of oracles or perhaps muses. Sirens, even—calling one another to days of writing and reading poetry. Our structure is simple: share one poem a month for feedback via email. We’ve been able to meet in real life, once for a one-day workshop and another time at a writing retreat where we shared a cabin “up north” in Minnesota. We’ve had video-chats during the pandemic. Sometimes we share submission calls, poets and poems we love. We encourage craft and a belief in ourselves as writers. We cheer every acceptance and accolade. Since we’ve begun this journey together, one of us has become her state’s associate poet laureate, three have books in print or forthcoming, and another has a full collection ready to go.
Lynne Jensen Lampe, Sisterhood of the Raveling Poems

We practice separation. Disentangle the cold
waves. The wind pauses, faithless. I marinate days in nights filled with
brine. What happens when an unexpected transformation lets us in
on its secret? I read the poem again, sticking my voice on the words.
Love waits. Silent. ‘Leaving’ sounds the same in every language.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, One of them is real

Words have failed so profoundly that I’m out in the garden instead, or indoors cleaning my bathrooms or reading books. Books–always my solace when my own words fail.
My latest good read is David Crystal‘s 2004 The Stories of English, already out of date in its last chapter–a fact I’m sure he gleefully acknowledges. I adore his love of how language evolves and find his non-prescriptivist approach refreshing and necessary if we are to keep literacy and communication alive. This book gave me so much information, enriched the knowledge I already have about our language, and made me laugh, too. Granted, it is word-geek humor…but that’s how I roll.
And I needed a few laughs this past week or so. My heart aches; I am sore afflicted for more reasons than I care to explain at present, though the headline news certainly has much to do with my mood. Crystal’s book got me thinking about the course I teach (come fall) and how I’ve already toned down the prescriptiveness in order to convince my students they can write and can be successful with written communication; that they are not “wrong,” just that their audience for written work differs, in college, from high school and from text messaging and other forms of writing. Crystal says we who teach English need to get over the concern about split infinitives and pronoun antecedent agreement and focus on clarity and genuine expression. I have no argument with him there–but many people I know would quibble and complain. And the English lexicon offers us so many options for how to say we disagree!
Ann E. Michael, Words fail, & yet–

calm lake
holding a stone
forever
Jim Young [no title]

Today is one of the big three church holidays; today is Pentecost. For those of you who have no reference, Pentecost is the day that comes 50 days after Easter and 10 days after Jesus goes back up to Heaven (Ascension Day). We see a group of disciples still at loose ends, still in effect, hiding out, still unsure of what to do.
Then the Holy Spirit fills them with the sound of a great rushing wind, and they speak in languages they have no way of knowing. But others understand the languages–it’s one way the disciples argue that they’re not drunk. And then they go out to change the world–but that’s the subject for an entirely different post.
You may be saying, “Great. What does all that have to do with me?”
I see that Pentecost story as having similar features to the creative process that many of us experience. If you replace the religious language, maybe you’ll see what I mean.
Often I’ve felt stymied and at loose ends. I think back to times when I’ve known exactly what to do and where to go next. I find myself missing teachers and other mentors that I’ve had. I may wallow in feelings of abandonment–where has my muse gone? Why don’t I have any great mentors now? Have all my great ideas abandoned me? What if I never write a poem again?
And then, whoosh. Often I hit a time of inspiration. I get more ideas in any given morning than I can handle. I jot down notes for later. I send of packet after packet of submissions.
Some times, it feels downright scary, like something has taken possession of me. But it’s a good spirit, and so I try to enjoy the inspired times. I’ve been at this long enough that I know that these inspired times won’t last forever.
The good news: those inspired times will come back, as long as I keep showing up, keep waiting, stay alert.
That’s the message that many of us will be hearing in our churches today. And it’s a good message to remember as we do our creative work.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Pentecost for Poets and Other Creative Souls

Chaplets of roses grew threadbare
like linen; all night a bee drowsed as if stoned on the edge
of an ivory blanket. What else crept under carpets of clover
toward our trim hedges? Every night we went to bed
like apostrophes folded into each other. That is to say,
even in sleep our hands spasmed in terror or prayer.
Call it anything but casualty, accident, or fate
— none of us grown wiser for turning away.
Luisa A. Igloria, Collateral Damage

I have a poem, ‘Accommodation Strategy’, in the second issue, here, of Public Sector Poetry, which is a rather niche journal for people like me who work in the public sector and also happen to be poets. The events of the last two years have already rendered my poem’s content out of date, but it represents a certain point in time. It just goes to show that local government is rather more fluid and dynamic now than when I started it in an eon ago.
Matthew Paul, Public Sector Poetry

Now I’m no huge Eliot fan but I do dip into the Four Quartets every now and then. I’ve never got to grips with The Waste Land, but I’m a sucker for manuscripts that show different versions, crossings out etc. It’s like getting into the poet’s head. And this edition shows every page, with annotations from both Ezra Pound and Valerie Eliot. It’s extraordinary. And I’m now enjoying going back to the poem armed with more insight into its genesis.
Meanwhile our Planet Poetry guests continue to challenge (and delight) me – in the last episode I talked with the effervescent Caleb Parkin and his excellent book This Fruiting Body, and my most recent interview was with Fiona Sampson. I admit I was nervous, interviewing a poet with such a formidable CV (29 books for starters). But Fiona was delightful and fascinating. I’m not sure yet when the interview will ‘air’ but it’ll be worth listening, I guarantee.
Robin Houghton, Currently inspired by…

Yesterday, I woke up to a mild sunny cusp of June day and was greeted with already a dozen or so submissions waiting in my inbox of new things I can’t wait to read. Yes, it’s that time again, the open submissions window for the dgp chapbook series, and one that feels a little less overwhelming now that my inbox is less of a morass and there is a bit more time weekly to devote to the press operations (including hopefully being able to read things throughout the summer as they come in and not just in a mad dash in the fall.)
Today, I devoted an entire day to cover design exploits on handful of books that are in layout stage and it was nice to be able to actually finish what I was intending to do without running off to do other things like work or errands. While my weekend will be focused on my writing and the next couple days devoted to freelance work, I at least will return to editing work mid-next week not feeling quite as behind as before and a couple new things are almost ready to start printing.. Tuesdays are for author copy and order fulfillment and shipping things. While initially I was doing a bit off all things each day, I find I am more productive if I center my days in a certain kind of task, even if it takes the majority of the day.
My enjoyment of different parts of the process has increased, even rather staid unexciting things like copyediting and typesetting feel more focused and grounded now that life is a little less hectic and subject to daily chaos. Or if it’s chaos, it’s more definitely orderly and self-guided chaos.
Kristy Bowen, dancing girl press notes | june 2022

PP: Your poems are dense and agile, pivoting yet holding together in leaps. Do they come together assembled from pieces or come out of a passionate stream-of-consciousness?
SW: They tend to come out in one fell swoop. But it’s messy! I edit very slowly and very particularly. Have you heard that quote? A poet will move a comma in the morning and a comma at night and say, Oh what a day’s work! My friend’s dad told me that. But sometimes there are new waves hiding behind commas, cracks in the rocks, pieces hiding behind other pieces.
PP: Do you have writing rituals that help you into the writing frame of mind or do you write in stolen moments?
SW: Definitely stolen moments for poetry. Middle of the night, subway rides, grocery stores. I want to try the writing desk routine life someday but that day has not come yet.
For editing or prose, I can sit at a desk or in bed and crank something out. But my poetry is much more chaotic. Like catching sight of a bird and having to drop everything to chase it before it’s gone.
Pearl Pirie, Mini-interview: Sanna Wani

I will just continue to spread out flat, letting all the knots work their way out of my body and mind: a pretty little map of thoughts, lyrical as loops of string caught in school glue.
School glue in an amber bottle with a rubber tip, that would open like an eye when pressed. Or a mouth. Or a seal’s nostril.
There was a smell that I can’t quite remember, no matter how hard I try to conjure it.
It is inexplicable what sticks in my memory and what doesn’t. Last night, trying to sleep I remembered when E. was small – three or four – and while his older brother pinned my legs, E. sat on my chest and leaned over my face, inhaling so that his nostrils pinched shut again and again, like some kind of amphibious, alien creature. I laughed until I peed my pants a little.
Isn’t that something? How a memory of uncontrollable, full-body laughter can make you cry?
That school glue I used in elementary school didn’t work well. Nothing ever stayed put. I’d get home and the string had come loose in spots and created its own patterns. I guess it was an early life lesson: everything unravels, falls apart, and reconfigures according to its own mysterious will.
Ren Powell, An Amphibious, Alien Creature

I travelled to London by train and as I approached Wellington, near Taunton in Somerset, I saw an abandoned factory with most of the glass missing from the windows. This set me thinking…
summer project
we broke all the glass
in all the windows
no one stopped us
it took time
but the sounds were so addictive
the crack and cascade of glass
eyeless in autumn
the snow went wherever it would
when summer came round again
there was nothing to show it had ever been there
Paul Tobin, EYELESS IN AUTUMN

I love reading poetry anthologies.
I know they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea–there is something to be said for reading a collection in one voice–but I feel like it’s like being in an MFA classroom again–all these different voices mingling together, bouncing off each other. I love that I find new-to-me poets in anthologies–I always keep a list of author names from the poems I loved best, then look up their collections to read next. I love how it takes a theme and looks at it prismatically, through many different perspectives and cultures.
One of my favorite anthologies is Joy, edited by Christian Wiman. I also enjoy The Child’s Anthology of Poems ed. by Elizabeth Sword (I use this book with my children, but it is good for anyone). Recently I’ve read some anthologies ed. by James Crews, Healing the Divide being the most recent.
Renee Emerson, anthologies

Winner of the 2019 Burnside Review Press Book Award, as selected by poet Darcie Dennigan, is California-born Massachusetts poet and research scientist Angelo Mao’s full-length debut, Abattoir (Portland OR: Burnside Review Press, 2021). Constructed as a suite of prose poems, lyric sentences, line-breaks and pauses, Mao’s is a music of exploration, speech, fragments and hesitations; a lyric that emerges from his parallel work in the sciences. “They have invented poems with algorithms.” He writes, as part of the untitled sequence that makes up the third section. “They can be done with objectivity.” Set in four numbered sections, the poems that make up Mao’s Abattoir are constructed through a lyric of inquiry, offering words weighed carefully against each other into observation, direct statement and narrative accumulation, theses that work themselves across the length and breath of the page, the lengths of the poems. “The first thing it does / Is do a full backflip,” he writes, to open the poem “Euthanasia,” “Does the acrobatic mouse / Which rapidly explores / The perimeter comes back / To where it started / To where it sensed / What makes its ribcage / Slope-shaped as when / Thumb touches fingertips [.]” This is a book of hypotheses, offering observations on beauty, banality and every corner of existence, as explored through the possibilities of the lyric.
rob mclennan, Angelo Mao, Abattoir

In May 2019, we spent three weeks in Sweden. While there we went on several boat trips in the Stockholm area and along the west coast. I took quite a bit of video footage with no particular project in mind. But when I returned home, it came together in this video A Captain’s… using audio samples recorded in an old windmill on the island of Ölund.
The text had been published a while back and uses an invented form of english that captures the sound and feel of old nautical terminology. It imagines a captain trying to justify his privileged, colonialist position, while facing the immense and unknown dangers of the ocean.
The title comes from Australian rhyming slang: “A Captain’s” = “A Captain Cook” = a look. Captain James Cook was the celebrated English explorer who claimed the eastern seaboard of Australia for the British Empire in 1770, almost totally ignoring its long-standing occupation by First Nations people.
Ian Gibbins, A Captain’s…

The language of science is often mysterious, especially to non-scientists, of course. But there’s also often a richness of imagery and sound that feels related to the poetic. A mouth feel that is satisfying. A rhythm that makes us notice and relish in its language. My friend, the film maker Terrance Odette, posted the title of an article noting that “poetry is everywhere.” Well, that’s a challenge I couldn’t resist. So I made a poem playing with the sounds of this title. I mean, sure, heteropoly acid negolytes could enhance the performance of aqueous redox flow batteries at low temperature. Obv! That’s what we’ve all suspected all this time, but isn’t it true that “Follow-through is a poor bedfellow for the beauty of this testimonial”? Right? We poets bring the truths.
Gary Barwin, Poor Bedfellows of Science

Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night has bothered me for many years.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It bothered me more when, in my 30s I sat with my dying father. All my dad wanted in his last days was release from pain. Imagine the sheer tone-deaf selfishness of that injunction in his ears. All I can hear is a young man’s impotent rage against the loss of his father. It makes me wonder about rage and poetry. Among other things. […]
Rage makes you incoherent. Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting. The gift is to find the right channel. I thought I’d cool my head and calm myself down by reflecting on the the rage I feel about the apparently untouchable sense of entitlement that characterises the last ten years of the contemporary Tory Party in power, and then how more or less by accident, I found a way of channelling it. The answer for me lay in the Greek Myths, the stories of the Greek pantheon, and particularly the version created by Garfield and Blishen in The God beneath the Sea.
John Foggin, All the rage

My touchstone here is something I learned in the 1980s, during my junior year at Stony Brook University, when I took my first poetry workshop ever with June Jordan. Both in class and in the individual conferences she had with me, Professor Jordan spoke about what poetry was in a way that touched deeply the part of me aching to tell the truth about my life. I do not remember her exact words, but these two quotes, from her introduction to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, capture the essence of what she said:
You cannot write lies and write good poetry.
Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.
This does not mean, of course, that writing essays is not political, that essays cannot also be about discovering the potential in telling the truth, but it’s hard to imagine an essay rescuing a love affair or preventing a suicide, at least not in the way Jordan seems to be talking about here.
Richard Jeffrey Newman, Deciding whether something should be a poem or an essay

I’m writing these words in the dead of night when destiny is busy sharpening its knives, and the sirens are sleeping.
There is a place we can unname and unweight our burdens, a place we can dig down deep into the ash for those unspent remains of humanity.
In that space, certain syllables defy gravity. Defy bullets and burning.
Hope is one syllable that comes to mind. Dream, another.
Rich Ferguson, When Destiny Sharpens Its Knives

On the one hand, I’m wary of trying to be too focused: one of the things that makes a blog a blog, if it’s just you writing, is that’s it’s unplanned. On the other, the blank screen is as intimidating as the blank page. It helps to have a sense of what you’re trying to do.
Also: however personally fulfilling it might be, keeping all your options open tends to be a pretty inefficient way of finding readers, who tend to want to know what to expect.
On reflection, there are a couple of themes I keep coming back to.
The first is simple: personal responses to individual poems. These are what got me blogging to begin with. They continue to get more hits than anything else on here: so there’s a demand. The truth is they are somewhere between a response and an analysis, which may explain why people go back to them (they’ve Google-searched the poem).
But they are personal, too, if only because I’ve chosen to write about these poems. I increasingly think sharing your enthusiasm for individual poems is central to what this thing called poetry is, and probably the best way to keep the love of it alive (if you believe E. M. Forster, the only way). I enjoy them, too.
Jeremy Wikeley, Back to Basics

I walked into the middle of a Ted Hughes poem the other week. An early morning dog walk, like any other, except that suddenly I was looking at the most enormous fish, the fish of legend, the fish of myth, a fish I had met before but only in my mind’s eye. It was put there by Hughes’s own reading of the poem, from the flock wallpaper Faber and Faber cassette shared with Paul Muldoon. It’s also in my ancient copy of River, the original coffee table edition with photos of the Exe and Taw and Torridge.
But here it was in the flesh, on an ordinary Tuesday, the film of the words I had driven to, cooked and made coffee to, happening actually yards from where I stood in a Devon field not a mile from the city centre. The poem is clear: this is an October salmon, not mid-May. But I swear the fish was the same. It all came back, as we say, flooding. The fish is dressed by death in ‘clownish ceremonials, badges and decorations’, its ‘face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility’, its ‘whole body/ A fungoid anemone of canker’. As Seamus Heaney has said, to hell with overstating it! Sometimes that is what is required.
Other lines quickly joined them as I stared, daring to inch the phone out of my pocket for a surreptitious photo, lest I spook the moment. ‘Ravenous joy’ (‘The savage amazement of life,/ The salt mouthful of actual existence,/ With strength like light’) ghosting a dying fall (‘This was inscribed in his egg’). He was probably hatched in this very pool. Fundamental accuracy of statement (Pound), never weighed more.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: An October Salmon, by Ted Hughes

DL Williams’s “Interdimensional Traveller” explores dimensions, particularly the two dimensional world of poems on a page and the three dimensional world of sign language. There is a QR code link to the YouTube channel where the poems appear in BSL (eventually all of them will) and also QR codes with some of the poems that links to the individual poem. This is not done in a binary spirit, where sign language is put in competition with English, but as a translator and interpreter, building links between these dimensions. An early poem, “Bilingual Poet’s Dilemma”, will be as familiar to translators as to sign language interpreters,
“What’s beautiful in a Sign
is boring in a line;
what’s pretty in a line
is confusing in Sign,
and if the twain should meet,
wouldn’t that be a feat?
So tell me, please,
which language should I use?
Which one should I choose?”
British Sign Language is not English in signs, or Sign Supported English, but a language in its own right with grammar and sentence structures that differ from English. Sign language is not universal, each language has its own version. In languages, words rarely stand alone with the same meaning each time, but pick up meaning according to the context used. A word such as ‘beacon’ may mean light, warning or hope and an interpreter has to judge whether to only translate ‘beacon’ as light or whether one of the other meanings may be appropriate. A phrase in sign language that looks like an elegantly choreographed ballet for hands, can be rendered simplistic and boring on a page. A sentence that starts in the present tense and moves into the past tense to signify a memory, is tricky to render in BSL. These issues throw up dilemmas for interpreters. However, if you are bilingual and can move back and forth between languages, how would you choose one over the other? If decide to use the best language for the poem, how will an audience react if some of your poems are in BSL and others in English? How can you interpret for the part of the monolingual audience who need interpretations?
Emma Lee, “Interdimensional Traveller” DL Williams (Burning Eye) – book review

extracting birdsong from background noise
Jason Crane, haiku: 31 May 2022

I have to admit that I love all the written aspects of writing poetry, of publishing work, but I still fret at the idea of organized readings, even after all the opportunities I’ve had to do so. The idea of talking for 15 minutes still makes me balk initially until I resettle into the reality than time flies when I’m reading, really reading, my poetry. And usually, before I know it, I’ve cleared 15 and am headed into 20. The thing of it is though is overcoming that block, “Oh, I can’t do that,” and instead jump in. When it comes down to it, I’ve never had a negative experience in a reading, in fact it becomes one of those moments in which I’m truly present. There’s great beauty in that, but also in the look-around the room and seeing who is there to hear you read because they want to be there, be it friends, writing group, fellow writers, teachers past and recent, even someone you’re sweet on. There’s a sweetness to it all that can’t be replicated under other circumstances.
Kersten Christianson, Tidal Echoes 2022

Last week’s post on First Loves led to a wonderful discussion during Fridays at 4. This week I want to continue that feeling, but with a later poetry love of mine, the work of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (Vee-ZHWA-vah Zhim-BOR-ska). I can read her work only in translation, and the general agreement is that the best are those by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislav Barańczak. Their versions are the ones that appear below.
I was completely smitten the first time I saw these titles, and then the poems that followed: “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition,” “The Letters of the Dead,” “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself,” “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” on and on. What drew me? The tone of voice, that speaks about mortality with matter-of-factness, even humor. The moments she chooses to write about, from dramatic (“The Terrorist, He Waits,” ) to the minute, the daily (“The Silence of Plants,” “A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth”). That she writes about writing poetry, something not typical of American poetry (“In Fact Every Poem.” “To My Own Poem,” ‘The Poet’s Nightmare,” “Some People Like Poetry.”) The surfaces are deceptively simple, the depths infinite.
Sharon Bryan, Wisława Symborska

I had a good conversation with a friend who just had a book come out. She has been doing a ton of readings—both in person and on Zoom—and was just two weeks into her book’s launch, but was feeling overwhelmed. When is enough enough?
My attitude towards this, when I talked about it in my book PR for Poets, is that no one will ever say “you’re doing enough” so you have to decide. If you love doing readings, or social media, or sending out postcards, do that. Poetry has a longer shelf life than most things, so don’t worry if in the first month you haven’t gotten to everything – interviews, podcasts, blog posts, readings, etc – all of it takes it out of you, especially in the third year of a pandemic and people are just starting to go to bookstores in person again. So be kind to yourself, set boundaries. Don’t say yes to everything. And try to celebrate the small wins.
As I am finishing up my final version of Flare, Corona for BOA Editions, a lot of anxieties have come up. Is this grammar okay? Why did I leave punctuation out of this part of the poem but not this other part? Have I forgotten people I need to thank (probably!) or acknowledgements for poems that might have slipped through the cracks? I really do need to turn it in to typesetting but there is so much you want to all of the sudden fix about your manuscript. Since this is my sixth poetry book, I can say yes, this is also a normal part of the process. I get very insecure about my book right before it goes out into the world. I loved the book so much while I labor-intensively (and money intensively) sent it out to publishers. I loved it when it was taken. But now, I see nothing but flaws.
I also got a few acceptances this week that would normally be big deals to me but it felt hard to celebrate with so much other bad stuff going on. The world feels very dark and dismal (and it’s not just the abnormally cold rain, though that hasn’t helped). If you are struggling, please reach out for support and take good care of yourself. Please remember you are making a difference in the world, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe take a break from social media and news. A friend of mine reminded me to submit poems (which I hadn’t been) and give myself time to write (which I also hadn’t been doing much of). Put at least one positive thing on your calendar just for fun. Wishing you as good a week as possible.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Three New Poems in Bourgeon, How to Cope with a Rough Week, Talking Publicity Efforts and Finishing Up Manuscripts and Other Poetry Things

But magazine can also mean
a chamber for holding cartridges
to feed automatically
into a gun, which reminds me
of the article I don’t need
to re-read — the one where
a radiologist describes
the slim silver line sketched
by an ordinary bullet,
versus the way
one fired from an AR-15
ripples waves of flesh
like a cigarette boat
traveling through
a narrow canal
turning any part of us
into smashed overripe melon,
nothing left to repair.
Rachel Barenblat, Magazine

We are sad on the ground, but still, our messages need to get out, we writers, we artists, we citizens. I don’t know that we will change this world, but our messages matter, they exist and are relevant all the way into someone’s near future. (“Someone told me / of course my poems / won’t change the world. // I said yes of course / my poems / won’t change the world.” — Patrizia Cavalli
Your art isn’t the phone. Poetry isn’t a text message. “Don’t use the phone,” says Jack Kerouac, “People are never ready to answer. Use poetry.”
I’m currently reading Lesley Wheeler’s Poetry’s Possible Worlds, and loving it. (Will write a longer post on it next week if all goes my way). In it she says, “A poem makes a lousy telephone.” Instead, she says, “by reading a poem, you’re entering a transportation device. You interact with the text to get somewhere, but it has a mind of its own and will match its will to yours. Rather than efficiency, you choose a complex, unpredictable experience.”
The message is, Keep sending your messages. Your words are wings; your wings are words. We are living in complicated times. We are living in times where the language and rhetoric of disinformation, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, racism etc are overwhelming. In the recent past, I have thought to myself, what is needed is more nuance. And yes? but also, I was re-reading Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Blue Studio in which she asks, “Can one be rigorous and empathetic? Antisimplistic, but with clean lines? Can one illustrate opacity and confirm clarity at one and the same time? You’d better believe it.” Can we appeal to the larger crowd out there with a message of community still? With a message of doing right? I really don’t know.
Shawna Lemay, Of Messages and Messengers

The three children smiling in the photograph are buried in the kindergarten garden.
A woman tends her allotment to the sound of explosions and sirens.
An ant crosses the table in the garden where I write.
I walk to find peace.
Old bikes propped on bay windows in tiny, slabbed front gardens.
You are somewhere close to the border now.
Yesterday they bombed the tracks.
A pigeon stops singing the way pigeons do
as if they forget the point of the song.
Bob Mee, BLACK WATER

Dream fluff shadows a thousand
skin lathered summers,
whispering sea spray, waxing
ebb shine,
an urge of fingers in hair
and salt on tongues.
Oh summer, bare your dreams
on the wind,
Crush on me again
Charlotte Hamrick, Riptide

May 22, 2022May 22, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 20

Everything begins in childhood.
The song starts there, the poem.
It was a spring morning when I was born.
It was May. My mother’s hair was long.
The animals and earth were waking up,
preparing for a summer riot.
Han VanderHart, Poem with Birth Ledger and Crawfish

Far too many hate mongers strolling gun gardens.
Far too many bullets serving as the nails for other people’s coffins.
Imagine what it must feel like going to the store to put food on your table, only to find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle.
Where is our night of star-spangled joy?
Where have all the maps gone to discover new territories of togetherness?
Far too many young minds trapping themselves in the burning bodies of executioners
with no good excuse for their actions.
Rich Ferguson, When Executioners Wander Gun Gardens

After the windstorms, we wake
to snowslides of petals on the grass,
First loss of the season, these lung-soft ghosts.
Fire-striped tulips affront our sorrow,
waving their wild colors as we walk past.
After the storms, we awaken
to what we should have known,
that the first kiss could also be the last. […]
Dark pools of water show up frequently in my dreams, and they show up in my poems, as well.
Sometimes I see animals coming up out of the water such as alligators. In general, when I see dark, murky waters in my dreams, I think I’m dealing with the unconscious mind, memories I might be afraid to look at.
But if I do manage to sit with the fears during the dream, the water sometimes will become clear and the creatures inhabiting the dreamscape become colorful and whimsical, not at all scary and creepy.
Christine Swint, Equinox Lovesong During Late Stage Pandemic

One thing I have noticed lately – with the new medication – is that emotions aren’t blunted, but they don’t bleed outside of their circumstances. I think it is part of this quiet that has settled.
These last mornings I have done the yoga sequence without music or mantras. I have focused entirely on breathing, as one should, but as I never could. I am content with one single focus, one train of thought at a time. My resting heart rate has dropped. When I am hungry I take the time to cook.
I don’t know what this will mean in the long run. But for now, I am going to take it one bright and shiny day, one hard, sharp day at a time. Stacking them like discrete building blocks. When I teach acting, I tell the students never to try to play love/hate at once. Like red and green, you get a muddy, unexciting smear of whatever. Play one moment of love with your whole body, play one movement of hate. Because that is how we often experience it. Give yourself over (within reason) and allow yourself to feel the fullness of each.
I have caught myself on occasion, wondering if I believed what I was saying.
Now though, I’m beginning to wonder if this is what it is to “live in the moment”.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Ren Powell, An Exceptional Day

We struggle with expressing how we feel – in life and in poetry. As a disabled, sick or cared for person, there may be a balancing act we try to sustain between wanting to still appear independent, positive, in control, and allowing ourselves to look vulnerable and say how bad we sometimes feel.
As a carer, the balancing act may be between wanting to express that we care and love, and suppressing the frustration, resentment, guilt, we may sometimes feel.
There is a pressure to be positive, even when going through hell. Because positive people fight on, put on a brave face, smile through the tears, and are inspirational. If you say the pain is unbearable, the loss of dignity is destroying you, that you can’t cope any more, then you’re at risk of being seen as whining, weak…
I’m not suggesting that positivity is bad – it can provide comfort and hope to many, but it can, unintentionally, mask some very harsh realities and lessen people’s perception that there are a very large number of people who really need help.
There are acclaimed poets who write about these things, and others – often carers – who make no claim to be poets, but write their feelings in poetic form – and both can help others to understand in their own way.
Where am I going with this? Can poetry make a difference? Can the personal show a broader truth? Can the personal be political? Not if poets and occasional writers of poems are not allowed to express how they’re feeling because it’s either seen as whinging or as not good poetry. If people who write poetry succumb to the pressures to be constantly positive, how will anyone ever know their truth? How will people know change is needed?
Sue Ibrahim, Poetry and care

A collection I only picked up recently is Montreal poet Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s full-length debut, knot body (Montreal QC: Metatron Press, 2020), a title that was subsequently followed-up with their second collection,, The Good Arabs (Montreal QC: Metonymy Press, 2021). The epistolary prose poem collection knot body focuses on illness not as metaphor, but writing disability, including chronic and daily pain, expanding the possibility of what has been termed “disability poetics” (following work by Nicole Markotić, Roxanna Bennett, Shane Neilson and multiple others); a body that for merely existing is considered political. El Bechelany-Lynch writes of the many layers and levels of endurance, attempting to comprehend how one might safely and comfortably live within the body. “The pain hovers above an impossible memory.” one piece begins, early on the collection. Writing a pain endured, and even lived, one might suggest. The next piece offers: “I worry that in writing this, I am revealing too much.” Written through a kind of direct and even stark tenderness, the poems of knot body examine the possibilities of a body that exists with constant pain, attempting to negotiate the daily elements of living in a world and culture that perpetually denies their existence. There is something really striking in these prose poems, in the way that El Bechelany-Lynch writes as a way to articulate the self into, if not being, but into an acknowledgment and a belonging; writing themselves into existence that, until this point, perhaps had been pushed into invisibility by just about everyone else.
rob mclennan, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, knot body

It is hot again.
Wooden planks
curl up from the deck.
Piano keys stick.
What if I die
while I continue to wait
to live my life?
Send money,
I sent money
Take care,
I took care.
Send help.
Send help.
Luisa A. Igloria, L’estate

It’s all well and good to say, “just breathe”–and I have moments when I intentionally do just that. But life has been moving swiftly and requiring my brain to attend to many other things. Mostly, I now realize, I’ve been getting through the days with my breath held, preparing for shoes to drop or ducking to avoid them. It’s become habit, and most of most days is really pretty good, so I hadn’t noticed the breath-holding until someone else pointed it out. I suppose it’s why I haven’t had much to share here lately; perhaps it’s because, like the blogger whose post prompted the comment, I have so many words that I have no words about quite a lot of things.
Rita Ott Ramstad, “…with my breath held”

I’ve not paid full attention to the importance of words since the turn of the year, at least in blogging terms. In early February, I received notice from Editor Bethany Rivers that she had selected two of my older poems, “Death by Staff Meeting” and “Strong Voice” for publication in Issue 8. Thrilled to see these oldies build their nest among other related writings. And while my feelings about staff meetings really haven’t change much, I can say that strong voice is a bit like a tide experiencing everything in its path.
Kersten Christianson, As Above So Below: The Importance of Words

Although in theory I love cards and stationary and all things beautiful paper and Papyrus-y, I don’t actually send out cards or letters very often. I had to buy a card for a momentous occasion recently, and I was completely addled by how oddly specific greeting cards have gotten. They had greeting cards for every type of couple, every obscure occasion, every combination of life events, and every age, country of origin, and creed. I had to wade through a ton of cards to find just a general one that didn’t list an exhaustive bio and specify the date of the event in question. There used to just be birthday cards, anniversary cards, and sympathy cards, with the occasional, coveted blank card. I don’t know why there now needs to be card for every type of vacation, vocation, and possible life incident. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but I don’t feel like this speaks well of us as a society. I feel that it indicates a certain lack of faith in our imaginations and our ability to express ourselves. I think it should be a routine practice to buy a blank card, write your own message on it, and send it to a friend or relative at least once a quarter to keep those expressive juices flowing, and to remind people that email and text is not the only mode of communication available to humans.
Kristen McHenry, Dental Shaming, Overly-Specific Greeting Cards, Cat Lady Hero

Those things that we hid from the rest of the world, the shame of it. And those other things, the ones we felt we should have been proud of, even though we weren’t, that we showed to anyone who would look. Things neither beautiful nor repulsive. The things that were soft enough to eat with a spoon, but we used a knife and fork anyway. No one was watching, of course. The things that the paramedics used to stop the bleeding, or the things we used to make a tail for our kite. I’m not sure which anymore, it has been a long time. The kite is gone but no one bled to death. The things we say to ourselves when the night is frightening and empty. Say them quickly. Say them now.
James Lee Jobe, what we hid and what we did not hide

One trait I developed as a shy child was a capacity to listen to others. I wanted to hear their stories, their points of view, their silly songs, their big ideas. What I regret is that later on, when I gained some self-confidence and began telling my own tales or dispersing acquired knowledge and advice, I lost some of my listening ability. It took hard work and practice on my part to feel secure when speaking to groups, and I started with the hardest practice: reading my own poetry aloud to other people. Eventually the shyness wore off, for the most part.
Then I had to get the listening back. Raising children was a tough balance between saying and listening. I fault myself for not listening quite enough. As an instructor, I found it difficult to listen to a group of students: too much cacophony, too many distractions, hard to gauge where the conversation was headed. I’ve always felt more comfortable with one-to-one tutoring, which makes listening so much easier. As this semester has wrapped, I find I am already dwelling on the fall. What did covid-protocol instruction teach me? Mostly that the listening is even more important than I thought. The students still feel freaked out; overwhelmed by, more than excited about, their futures.
Ann E. Michael, Shy

Can a person who is still living haunt a place?
The future speaks to us in widow’s weeds
while I try to balance the accounts.
I am the sea that swallowed the world.
Mangoes rot before they ripen; shorebirds lose their way.
I examine the recipes from my mother’s battered box,
the buttons my grandmother saved.
I keep my powder dry while I knit socks.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Evocative Lines and a Looser Form

Several weeks ago I was full of big talk about challenging myself to write in form. Yeah, I didn’t do that.
I did fall back on one of my old tricks, and that’s to write a little every day about the same thing. (I say “about” but I really mean take the same thing as a starting point each day.) I did that for about two weeks. It’s good fun to do this, because it’s like chipping away facets in a geode to see various angles and lays of light. I’ve left it to sit in my notebook for a couple of weeks and am just now revisiting where my mind was for those two weeks.
Yes, with such a game, my mind does loop around the same things. But the mind does, right? Gets stuck in grooves. And because in this game, the thing I chose to revisit day after day was a small river (brook, might be more accurate, or stream) that I know, it can bring the same things to my mind, the same memories. But of course, the body of water is different every day, as am I, a bit, with each day I think about it.
To have this view of how my mind shifted and circled over those two weeks is interesting. Of course, if my goal is to turn this exercise into actual poems, works of art in themselves, I can’t rest in my fascination with my own mind. I need to dig a bit about how the two things come together: mind and thing.
Art is to be made of the conjunction. If it’s to be made at all.
Marilyn McCabe, Bits of Blue and Gold; or, On Facing the Raw Material

Book launch days bring a weird energy. That combined with the planetary riffs in Poetry’s Possible Worlds has Bowie’s “Space Oddity” looping in my head, which is a pretty good soundtrack, really. Not that I’ve become untethered like Major Tom, but yesterday was full of “Big Bang Day” social media tweets, pre-party anxiety, and a post-party otherworldly feeling. This book really was 10 years in the making and I can’t believe it’s finally out there.
My launch event, surrounded by art and backed by a table of fancy snacks, felt good. I centered it on poetry’s power rather than on myself. Four fellow poetry professors at my university read favorite poems and talked about why they loved them: their choices were Lorca, Amichai, Limón, and Clifton. I spoke last, reading “Faith” by Tim Seibles, a poem that hit me like a lightning bolt before I had any real acquaintance with his work. Each short chapter in my book is keyed to a single poem and prefaced by the poem reprinted in full, in a bid to make Poetry’s Possible Worlds accessible to non-poetry-insiders. Through “Faith” I write about fiction vs truth in a poem’s world-building; the chapter’s memoir element involves my mother-in-law’s dementia, how it processed through story-telling to silence. As I told the audience, I love how Seibles’ angry, loving poem reaches through skepticism for belief in something. I had planned to read “Faith” before the shootings in Buffalo, but it is appropriate to the fear and desperation people feel in many places around the world, near and far. I would like to have a book launch one day that didn’t occur in a time of crisis–last time, for me, it was pandemic, wildfires, George Floyd’s murder–but this is the world we live in, that poetry helps us live in.
Lesley Wheeler, I’m floating in a most peculiar way

For an atheist, I’ve been a religious attendee of the Edinburgh Christian Aid Booksale from 2008 to the present day, and this year’s sale (still in action as I write this – it runs for a week) is the first after a necessary interregnum because of something called ‘Covid’. This sale is an experiential necessity – there’s no-way of describing it to the lay-person who has never queued for an hour in advance of the opening time and then charged inside like an antiquarian berserker.
It’s not for the faint hearted. Basically, it’s the bibliophilic equivalent of the Pamplona bull-run. People queue outside the very stately, pilastered St Andrew’s and St George’s West Church on George Street in a very civilised manner. I’m not sure if people camp out in advance, but I’ve been there a hour in advance and still have been a 100 yard race away from the door. By 9:45 the queue has usually long snaked behind the edge of George Street and out of view. One of my pet peeves is how known bookdealers walk up and down the queue looking for a familiar face to tag on to. Once a conversation is started, you legitimately jumped the queue. This practice is prevalent and, in my opinion, ungodly.
As soon as the bells ring at 10am, the queue gives way like a hypnagogic jerk and we’re off.
Richie McCaffery, Christian Aid Booksale, Edinburgh, 2022: A post-mortem

A couple of years ago the poet Christopher James wrote a thought-provoking blog which asked the question: Can poets retire?
I thought about this again this week when I discovered a friend of many years has stopped writing. It appears to be a permanent choice.
I suppose the level of surprise was a result of my assumption that he would write for the whole of his life. I have never known him not to write, or at least try to. Of course, there have been short breaks when domestic or professional commitments have taken over, but these were irrelevant. We both knew he would write again shortly, and might come back to it fresher for the interruption. He also happened to be very good at it, which perhaps has enhanced my sense of loss now.
Now, though, it seems, he has closed the notebook for the last time, stopped the habit of scribbling some idea or line on the back of a shop receipt, cut away the hours of wrestling with a poem until finally he has thrown his head back with an almost delirious laugh, knowing he’s got down something that works.
Why? I don’t know. I have asked but have had no reply. It’s too easy to paraphrase Louis Armstrong and say Poets don’t retire, they stop when there are no more poems in them.
I have said several times on here that writing is what I do in order to untangle the world as best I can. It helps me make sense of living. And, hopefully, those who read what I write, find something that resonates, something that reaches them.
If I didn’t do that, would writing be replaced by something else? Or would it be a case of not bothering to attempt to untangle it or make sense of it? Would a different kind of meditation descend, a different stillness, the emptiness that some who prefer mysticism seek? It’s possible. Do I really need to communicate?
Perhaps that’s it. That, for whatever reason, my friend feels no further need to communicate.
Bob Mee, WHAT IF YOU STOP WRITING ALTOGETHER?

I was scrolling FB recently and chimed in on a post about ridiculously rigid guidelines for submissions and the editors who make them. While I understand there needs to be some basic framework and procedure to save yourself editorial headaches and facilitate easy reading (esp if you have more than one editor considering), some guidelines are laughably complex and send me, as a submitter, just looking for somewhere else. Obviously, you want to have read what they publish and stay within the length and genre guidelines, not use attachments if they prohibit them, etc. you also want to put it in a readable font, submit only during submission periods, include a bio if necessary or remain anonymous if they read submissions blind. These are reasonable and easy, but some get nitpicky about fonts and page numbers and all sorts of minute details that will, they usually say, promptly get your work thrown in the virtual trash. I always get the impression the editors who love these sorts of guidelines and inflexible rules really get off on their role as a gatekeeper and their ability to dismiss accordingly.
The same day, I was writing about Charles Eastlake and his snooty pronouncements that Victorian decor was overly wrought and ornate and all needed to be thrown in a fire. It was followed by critics saying Eastlake pieces needed to be thrown into the fire. It got me thinking about gatekeeping and tastemaking on a larger scale and how it works. I’ve never felt like editing was gatekeeping, but more just a curating of things I want to show people. But of course, it’s all gatekeeping in some way. What you choose to highlight. What you do not. I am lucky that I get enough submissions, but not too many that make things unwieldy. And can publish enough to accept about 10% of what I get every summer. These are numbers I am happy with, though some might raise their noses and think accessible publication is not quite rare and erudite enough. That by having a more open gate, the prize is not worth it. I always file this under stupid things writers say, esp. when talking about journals and their acceptance rates and whether things are “Top Tier.” I always think you want to be in a journal that has wide reach because people think the work is great, not just because they are hard to get into. The New Yorker for example has great reach and prestige, but I can count on one hand the recent poems in there I actually liked.
The whole zine community ethos, of which I have always felt more in line with, is “Fuck the Gatekeepers!” and in many ways I agree. Gatekeepers are suspect, and I say that fully knowing I suppose I am one. What I choose to publish or not publish is very much based on what I like or don’t like. I may pass on something completely publishable that doesn’t excite me. Something other editors have passed on might tickle my very peculiar fancy. Editing is subjectivism at its core, and beyond some basic principles of quality (ie, your poems don’t deal in cliches or sound like dirty limericks) I will at least read it with interest. I also have weird days where I love everything and days where I hate everything, probably for no real reason that has anything to do with literature or poetry at all.
Kristy Bowen, gatekeepers and community

We build bridges. Bridges between our realities.
Temporary bridges. Retractable bridges. Bridges that will bring us back. Bridges made of dreams. Bridges made of fear. Bridges made of want.
But bridges don’t unite realities. They become an alternative. A sacred middle. Not belonging. Not owning. Distorting space. Distorting distance.
Rajani Radhakrishnan, A sacred middle

when you write haiku
ten thousand rain drops
are filling a lake
Jim Young [no title]

I was very excited that the author Judith Waller Carroll’s sent me a copy of her book Ordinary Splendor from Lana Ayers’s MoonPath Press, which I have the honor of having a cover artist credit on. My photograph of a fox from San Juan Island last year was used as the cover art for the book, and I couldn’t be happier.
I feel like a real photographer now, not just a five-year amateur. I took some real photography classes in high school, but it’s been just the last five years that I spent the time and effort to use a good camera and try to learn the tricks of digital photography beyond my iPhone.
Meanwhile, I’m working with BOA’s designer to figure out what we want on the cover of Flare, Corona. I wish I had a good vision for exactly what belongs on the cover. But that’s why we have collaborations!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Podcasts, First Time Cover Artists, Being Under the Weather, and Real Spring Begins

I was delighted when Neil Leadbeater asked if he could use my Redwing photograph for the cover of his latest poetry collection, The Gloucester Fragments, recently published by Mervyn Linford of Littoral Press.
I first met Neil at Swansea’s First International Poetry Festival, organised by Peter Thabit Jones (The Seventh Quarry Press, Wales) and Stanley H. Barkan (Cross-Cultural Communications, New York).
Polly Stretton in her back-cover blurb describes The Gloucester Fragments as ‘a real treat’ and helpfully informs the reader that the new collection includes poems on the themes of ‘nature’, ‘language’ and ‘myth’. And indeed, I am greatly enjoying poems ‘inhabited’ by the Shoveler (‘Frampton Pools’), poems that ‘play’ with the building blocks of language to singular effect (‘Errata for an English Pangram’), and a clever shape-shifting poem that re-casts the Homeric tale of Odysseus and Circe.
There is so much more: take, for instance, Neil’s clever allusion to nursery rhymes or the way in which he moves deftly from serious subject matter, such as detritus in the Severn, to the magical botanical names of wildflowers like ‘periwinkle’, ‘fumitory’ and ‘hemp agrimony’, which we find sprinkled, or scattered, throughout this vivid and compelling collection.
Gloucester, and perhaps particularly Gloucestershire, will doubtless evoke different images among Neil’s readers. I think especially of Edward Thomas, and am immediately taken in my mind to Adlestrop, which I visited some years ago on a frosty morning when there were certainly no ‘haycocks dry’ in evidence. Neil’s delightful and inventive response to this well-loved poem by Thomas took me by surprise and put a wide smile on my face.
Caroline Gill, ‘The Gloucester Fragments’, a Poetry Collection by Neil Leadbeater

Paige Riehl: Thank you, Ann, for discussing your powerful poetry collection Somatic with me. Somatic is organized into four sections that explore the complexities of illness, in particular the diagnosis of hysteria, through the life and treatment of Anna O, the first hysteric diagnosed by Dr. Josef Breuer in the late 1800s. You expressed your interest in the relationship between the creative and scholarly, so would you tell us a bit about those intersections in Somatic as they relate to your process of researching hysteria and Anna’s case and writing the poems? Was it a more circuitous than linear process? From where does your interest in the subject matter stem?
Ann Keniston: The book evolved from several sources. One was the aftermath of my mother’s death; I actually published a chapbook of elegies about her (November Wasps, Finishing Line), some of which I revised—mostly pretty heavily—for Somatic. My interest in Anna O. and hysteria had several sources: I’ve always been interested in the relation of mind and body, and somehow I stumbled across a bunch of documents about Anna, from the first case study to a radically revisionary article by H.F. Ellenberger published in 1972 to a bunch of more recent feminist and other studies. Anna was kind of a blank screen for critics, it seems, who projected their own interests onto her. Before I ever thought of writing poems about this topic, I compiled a little anthology of those writings as a unit in an honors composition course I was teaching about memory. I just kept reading about Anna and hysteria and got more and more fascinated, and also a little repelled. I began writing poems about Anna, and also in her voice (or that of a more generic hysteric who was also, of course, partly me), and realized that the elegies were in fact relevant to the Anna poems, so I worked to bring those elements of the ms together.
Diane Lockward, Terrapin Books Interview Series: Paige Riehl Interviews Ann Keniston

I am now commuting an extra 30 minutes to our new office at White City, and this is giving me more time to catch up on podcasts and the like. I’m hoping it will give me more time for reading, but the journey is such that every time I start to settle into it; I have to change trains, and this doesn’t lend itself to reading.
However, it has meant I can pick up on my podcast listening. (Aside, as my friend Simon said yesterday, “podcasts are just radio you can listen to whenever you want”). Working from home a lot sort of put the moccers on my podcast listening as I can’t concentrate on them and work at the same time, but I’ve started working my way through episodes of The Verb and Robin Houghton/Peter Kenny’s Planet Poetry.
Recent episodes that stand out are The Verb’s episode about pens with Naush Sabah and Gerry Cambridge talking about, among other things, their mutual love of fountain pens. I love a fountain pen, and use one most of the time, even at work, but I am enjoying writing with the Fisher Space Pen* my friend Mike got me for my birthday.
It’s a lovely thing that makes me think of an alien spaceship, and reminds me that I once started a poem about development of the space pen. It was based on the premise of the millions of dollars invested in the Space Pen and its ability to work in space, but that the Russians solved the issue by taking a pencil. A great apocryphal tale, that sadly, isn’t true. Does it need to be? Maybe I’ll go back to the notes at some (ball) point. I don’t think the “poem” ever really got beyond the idea stage, but who knows what might come of it**.
* I’ve been sing a bastardised version of the Babylon Zoo song every time I used the pen.
**Almost certainly fuck all
Mat Riches, A martian nicks a Space Pen from the stationery cupboard to write a postcard home

My skull is filled with alphabet soup. Occasionally the letters make a word, but mostly they slosh around, defeating my every attempt to make sense of them. It wasn’t always this way. My brain used to be a series of filing cabinets. The drawers were shallow but numerous; an inch of information about any particular subject, miles of breadth. Just enough knowledge to stay in most conversations, not enough to truly master any one subject. That was fine. I liked that. A friend called it “librarian brain.” Who doesn’t like librarians? But “soup brain”? That has neither the same ring nor the same positive connotation. Soup brain means never quite having the details at my fingertips; a blank spot on the tip of my tongue. I don’t think it’s a sign of disease. Rather, it’s a symptom of discombobulation. The circumstances of my external world are so disordered that my internal landscape can’t help but reflect them. My prediction is that the presence of family and friends, along with a place to live and a more stable life, will slowly drain the soup, revealing the long rows of shallow cabinets that have been there all along.
Jason Crane, Soup’s On!

I think, though maybe I’m wrong, that at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people had trouble writing because they didn’t want to write about what was happening per se. We were too “in it” for one thing. It was tricky at the beginning. But now we’ve been steeped in it for two years. We know some things even as we don’t know how things will play out. But we can write about now. On Twitter someone posted a poem by Constance Hansen on Four Way Review that took my breath away. It’s a prose poem that starts off:
“I watered the plants. I plucked their dead leaves. I fed the children and dog. I asked the coffee to raise spirits. I made no beds. I made an inadequate donation to a parentless child, survivor of the car wreck that killed my friends. I paid with my thumbprint. I sent another friend money who sent another friend flowers to celebrate a new baby. I pressed C to confirm my vaccination appointment.”
Honestly, the ending…..wow. Highly recommend getting over there to Four Way Review to read it. Not only is it an amazing work, but gets me re-thinking the how of how the heck do we write at this time. At least this is one wonderful possible way that is real and fierce and in the moment and heart squeezing on many levels.
Shawna Lemay, Drawing Out the Creativity

I left Texas at seventeen. I’ve lived here almost twice as long as I ever lived there. And yet some inchoate sense of time and light and season was set there. And those are different here. It draws me up short.
Every year I know I need to brace myself against winter’s long nights, maybe because the days were never that brief where I grew up. I have to remind myself how to seek the beauty in short winter days.
And every year I swoon at summer evenings, how the late light gilds the green hills and pinks the sky at the western horizon. I text friends: It’s almost 9pm and it’s not even dark yet, what is this magic?!
No magic, of course. Just life at latitude 42.7, as opposed to 29.4. Remember those circles around the globe? I grew up near the Tropic of Cancer. I live now near the midpoint between equator and pole.
I was born on the spring equinox (more or less). It seems appropriate, somehow, that I have settled more or less at another midpoint. And oh, how I love these brightest months of the solar year here.
How good it is to sit outside and listen to twilight birdsong as Shabbat gives way to a new week, and to gaze with wonder at the sky — always changing, always perfect, and at this time of year, full of light.
Rachel Barenblat, Light

Light on the ledge of my lids
or is it the sill’s seepage?
From the trees, cacophony
the birds, no doubt
though I doubt —
a circus, pieces of a gambling
game being turned –
clacking and sparring,
castanets, bingo.
The Creator as croupier?
Each element in joy, in play,
the world depends on it.
Jill Pearlman, The Morning Gamble

Sometimes
in the evening
after the stars
have gotten
comfortable,
the trees might start
to talk to you,
the old monk said.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (207)

April 3, 2022April 3, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2022, Week 13

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 or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, with the start of Poetry Month in the US and Canada (and everywhere else that poets join in trying to write a poem a day), I’ve decided to highlight what people are reading and how we’re thinking about that, as well as sampling from the various writing projects that bloggers are taking on this month. (Me, I’m doing a diary of sorts, inspired by some of my favorite poetry bloggers. We’ll see how confessional I actually manage to get, though. Probably not very much.)

It’s sometimes tricky to know whether or how much to excerpt from people’s NaPoWriMo exercises, since some will undoubtedly get unpublished, re-written, and submitted elsewhere. So please do let me know if you’d rather I not post excerpts from your poems this month. Regardless, enjoy the digest.

As we begin National Poetry Month’s twenty-sixth year, my thoughts turn to the tiny bit of extra attention poetry and poets receive during this time. In April, Poets Laureate revel in their brief moments in the sun, coming up with creative ways to force poetry into the attention of unsuspecting citizens. When I was Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, I asked local businesses to display poems on cardstock in their windows, and roped some volunteers into handing out poems printed on slips of paper to people on the street.
When I look back on those activities now, they seem less like fun and more like desperation. I’ll never forget the looks on people’s faces when I walked up to them and asked if they’d like a poem. Most were polite, a few enthusiastic, even touched, and one man backed away from me as if I’d tried to hand him a dead rat.
Erica Goss, Some thoughts as we begin National Poetry Month #26

Every April I challenge myself to read one poetry book per day—tackling all those books I’ve impulse-bought or been given by friends over the past year. Last year, I went all-out at the blog (see my post about Kathleen Flenniken for a great example), contacting many of the poets and asking questions about how their books were created. This year, I’m scaling down, but I still want to share with you what I’m reading, and at least a poem and some links for each poet. Rather than a review, you might think of these as “appreciations.”
Bethany Reid, It’s National Poetry Month!

This weekend we celebrate National Poetry Month at my church with Poetry Sunday, a sharing of favorite poems and original poems by members of the congregation. We’re a small progressive church, a safe place for all kinds of seekers, and a good bunch. We’re in between pastors right now, with guest speakers from all kinds of places, plus us, so, as one of our resident poets, I’m helping out and have chosen poems for all the readings, recitations, and prayers. Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Christina Rossetti, James Wright, Louise Gluck. If I’m brave enough, I will also share a recent poem of my own, about the day my dad had a heart procedure.
I’m still writing a poem a day for Lent, and, now that April has begun, another for that, in an annual poem-a-day-in-April tradition. I’m glad I will have a jillion drafts to work on all year, plus the handwritten poems in a notebook that keep surprising me by even existing. Also reading a lot of poetry, as usual, most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars, pictured above (cover art: Darn by Mary McDonnell) and available at Terrapin Books, here. Part way through Blood Weather by Alice Friman. These two poets will be reading at my local library, via YouTube Live, on Tuesday, May 17, 7-8 p.m. central time! Join us! And the library has acquired these two books. Perfect for our ongoing Adult Reading Challenge, as April’s challenge is to read a book of poetry. Beautiful array of them, along with April raindrops, on display on the main floor!
Kathleen Kirk, Poetry Sunday

When it first came out, I read Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, but probably wasn’t in the right place for it at the time. I’ve just re-read it and have finally found myself in the right place to appreciate it. I’m still not in a position to argue over the merits of reading this ‘poetic translation’ over reading the original. Heaney covers this in his introduction (as well as the experience of students studying it at university – I was not alone.)
What I have done this time is loved the language and the story, and seen how the best works transcend time, and in the following passage, I think you’ll see what I mean
‘A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.’
Sue Ibrahim, Beowulf today

Shakespeare collaborated, in this play, with an impecunious young playwright by the name of Thomas Painte: Shakespeare was to take a couple of the silliest romances of the age and write the poetic speeches for them, and Painte was to fill in some touches of continuity and plausibility. But poor Painte died of a sudden ague before the work had fairly begun, and — King James having hinted that he wanted something new — the play was rushed to the stage without Painte’s work. “Never mind,” said William. “The audience will never miss it. I’ve got some songs that will knock their socks off.” And so we have Cymbeline.
—
A ghostly Spring comes: faint clouds of new green appear, in some lights, around the bare branches; fruit trees and tulip trees lay out enormous sums on gorgeous designer outfits, which will be ruined by the first good rain. None of it seems real to me. Here, too, we miss the work of young Thomas Painte. One thing was supposed to be connected to another. One Spring was supposed to promise another. Winter was supposed to yield, not to vanish. At any moment Summer is going to stumble onto the stage with his wig askew, blurt out a few lines, and exit, pursued by wildfire.
Dale Favier, The Death of Thomas Painte

The outlandish pink trees
shake their stiff crinolines
and the whole theater stirs.
The audience feels
loved like brides
in a world of divorces.
Too frilly,
too old-fashioned,
the critics huffed.
The management closed the show,
closed the whole theater.
Only the caretaker
sees the pink trees dance.
They still dance,
so out of hand,
so outlandishly beautiful,
to the wind’s applause.
Anne Higgins, Our college reunion is coming up this weekend

I remember being introduced to Charles Wright’s poetry in Intro to Creative Writing. Those enigmatic long lines, phrased in such a way that almost everything sounds so wise, like haiku.
I’m rereading A Short History of the Shadow, and I still enjoy his poetry. I think that there’s this kind of Tennessee drawl to the long lines, a pausing and repeating that you can hear in the dialect. Feels homey to me.
Two things I wonder about his writing though—1. Why does he bring Italy into everything, like a Hemingway expatriot, instead of just letting Tennessee be, with all its Tennesseeness. 2. Why the heavy repetition of syntax / lineation patterns in multiple poems throughout his work—is just style or a rut.
Obviously, Charles Wright’s writing works; else he wouldn’t be Charles Wright. If you haven’t read him, you should! (but be careful not to read one more than one of his books in a row—he’s one of those writers that stains your hands if you’re a poet too.)
Renee Emerson, Reading Charles Wright

The latest from poet Mikko Harvey, following the full-length debut, Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2018) [see my review of such here] and collaborative chapbooks Idaho Falls (with Jake Bauer; SurVision Books, 2019) and SkyMall (with Ashley Yang-Thompson; above/ground press, 2020), is the full-length Let The World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022). A Canadian poet living in Western Massachusetts, Harvey predominantly composes poems in first person lyric narratives that float across the boundaries of concrete image. “Wherever you are is a country.” he writes, at the mid-point of “Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield,” “Touch it softly / to make it stand still. Your hair getting caught / in my mouth all the time, like a tiny piece / of you calling – like a tree trying to speak / to a rock by dropping a pinecone on it. / It is my intention to listen, but my hands / keep giggling while reminding me / I don’t get to be a human being / for very long, as if this were the punchline to a joke / whose first half I missed. I arrived too late.” There is an odd melancholy throughout, and Harvey’s is a lyric of held breath, and structurally echo a loose thread of lyric narratives I’ve seen over the past few years from American poets including Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyk, Emily Kendal Freyand Emily Pettit: sharing a consideration for long, single stanzas, and their subversion of the short phrase. “I don’t / want you / to be / nervous.” He writes, to open the poem “For M,” “Maybe / thinking of / a walrus / would help.”
rob mclennan, Mikko Harvey, Let The World Have You

Mikko Harvey’s wry observations and surreal vignettes pose recognisable situations that ask indirect questions about what the reader notices and decides to take away. There are no wrong answers, but at its heart “Let the World Have You” is concerned with connections, how readers move and relate to each other and their environments, real, imagined and psychological.
Emma Lee, “Let the World have You” Mikko Harvey (House of Anansi Press) – book review

On a spring day as far from ‘late in dour October’ it would be harder to imagine, James Schuyler’s The Bluet surprises and delights. It’s the poem that has kept me going these last few desperate weeks, and not just because it features the bright blue of the Ukrainian flag.
At first glance it is a poem of escape, a wander through the woods to get away from it all. But as Carl Phillips has argued on the Poets House blog, there is more than enough in the poem’s manoeuvres to link it with Schuyler’s familiar presentation of the world as essentially social: the tiny bluet flower is a ‘Quaker lady’; ‘the air crisp as a/ Carr’s table water/ biscuit’; leaves that ‘are deep and oriental/ rug colors’.
But the word that catches my eye is ‘stamina’, placed at the end of the poem’s first line. Stamina seems so unlikely an epithet for a tiny blue flower.
Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: The Bluet, by James Schuyler

I’ve been turning over in my mind what it is I mean by ‘my kind of poetry’. Because there was a time when I wouldn’t have thought that today’s guest was ‘my kind of poet’. Indeed, there was a time, not all that long ago when I would have been puzzled by the idea that poems could be ‘life-saving. Bear with me.
For years and years poetry was always on the periphery for me. There were exceptions. When I was 16 it was the Metaphysicals….sardonic, clever, witty, sexy. Everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. At 18 the Augustans spoke to me. Clever, cool and witty. And I like the craft of couplets. At 20, briefly, it was Hopkins. What they all had in common was visible craft. At 22 I heard Robert Speaight’s recording of The Wasteland’ and it opened my ears and mind to TS Eliot. You can listen to it via YouTube in all its melancholy thespian RP musicality. It jars in a way that it didn’t, 57 years ago. Our ears become accustomed to different vowels and stresses. It occurs to me that it also opened my ears to Shakespeare, for which I shall be eternally grateful. […]
And so it went. As a teacher I liked the textures and evident emotion of Hughes and Heaney, but as a reader it was mainly documentary and revisionist history that spoke to me: ballads and broadsheets, social realism. The 19thC Novel, Orwell. When I was asked to read Robert Lowell I fought it. I wasn’t interested in introspective, reflective late Romanticism (as I saw it). It wasn’t for me. I thought it was self-indulgent. Which is ironic, now I come to think. Anthony [Wilson] notes something in his post that chimes :
“I have also been reminded of Seamus Heaney’s dictum in The Government of the Tongue that ‘no lyric ever stopped a tank’.”
I used to think that was an unanswerable argument to a question I never fully worked out. But now I say of course it can’t. And your point? No tank ever made me happy or illuminated a mystery. A wren landed on the window sill earlier today, and just for a second it stopped my heart. So it goes. The thing was, what I wanted in poetry was stuff that could fill a room, like Shakespeare, that was memorisable and memorable. Most poetry was never ‘lifesaving’, and what I wanted was unlikely to be understated and quiet. We didn’t match. I didn’t miss it. I just didn’t get it..or it didn’t get me.
Something changed, about 15 years ago. Something shifted and if you wonder about ‘my kind of poetry’ it’s what the great fogginzo’s cobweb has been sharing for the last eight years. What strikes me is that while I’ll never have the apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of/familiarity with contemporary and 20thC that Anthony Wilson shares with you in his wonderful book Life-saving poems I’ve gradually being made more open to voices that one time I’d have dismissed. Life changes us.
John Foggin, My kind of poetry: Anthony Wilson’s “The Afterlife”

Alaska poet Keriann Gilson launched her brand, spankin-new collection of poetry today, places I never want to see again (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2022). It’s this beautiful road-rambling follow of a relationship’s ebbs and flows. I appreciate Keriann’s experimentation with haibun, especially its form and how it meanders down the page. She also explained today that the enjambment is a clue into the relationship. When lines flow and haiku are more elegant, the relationship is at its zenith. In contrast, the existence of short, choppy, stilted lines suggests there are problems afoot. It is a fine read, one that should land on a lot of bookshelves for a future reading once it’s been savored. Cheers to Keriann, and not only for this fine read, but also earning her MFA. Exciting news all around!
Kersten Christianson, You Gotta Get This One!

Karen Paul Holmes: I’ve dog-eared so many pages in this beautiful book, A Cartography of Home. Please tell us how this collection came about. I note a thread of homestead/weather/growing things that almost feels pioneer-like, but in a modern sense. And you do, after all, live on a farm. But there are other-located poems too: mini-market, hotel, church, for example. What can you tell us about the sectioning of the book into four parts? How much of the choosing and ordering of poems throughout the collection was purposeful and how much intuitive? Did you write any of the poems for this book specifically or did you assemble poems already written?
Hayden Saunier: I’ve been thinking about place for a long time. I’m a southerner who moved north into cities for theatre opportunities, but I grew up attached to a rural landscape and with an awareness of the innumerable lives that have inhabited a place long before me. Moving to the farm where my husband grew up reignited that deep connection to a particular landscape, but I also wanted to expand on the ideas of home and place to the those “other-locations” you mention (superstores, mini-markets, churches, press conferences, customer helplines) that have become our current and shared cultural landmarks. And when you walk the same fields and woods every day you are confronted by how time is stacked up in layers in a place, like tree rings and soil, so writing about place and home naturally becomes writing about time. That’s been given as an argument for art: It’s a means to stop time. Or a means to enter a single moment and that feels like stopping time.
I love sectioning a book because I think a reader needs a place to rest between poems. I know I do. The way a bench is situated on a walking path to allow a moment to consider the view or tie your shoes or just sit. In A Cartography of Home, the first section begins with concrete considerations of home and habitation, and then those ideas ripple outward in the second and third sections, returning to the concrete and actual by the end. The way a walk works when the mind loosens and makes wider associations between the fixed points of beginning and end.
Diane Lockward, Terrapin Books Interview Series: Karen Paul Holmes Interviews Hayden Saunier

Yesterday morning, I went to a local library to attend a writing workshop on the theme of ‘home.’ […]
I found it hard to say where my home is. Maybe it’s imaginary? Portable? I used to daydream about living in an Airstream trailer. Though I’d need a second one just for books… […]
Which brings to mind something one of the workshop attendees said about feeling at home in a library. Several of us nodded in agreement, and he added that the library–the public library–functions as a kind of matrix. I would add that’s true for one’s private library, as well, books providing a kind of collage of interests and influences and teachings that can be seen as a kind of matrix to the book-collector’s consciousness, loves, and interests. Speaking strictly for me, in this case.
The house I have inhabited for nearly 25 years now, the house my Beloved and I designed, helped to build, inhabited, raised our children in: this is as close to a ‘true home’ as I have ever had. And yet: is it my home, my rooted place, my last place, the dwelling-in I must have to feel stable and secure and surrounded by love and nature? I’m not so certain about that.
It’s beautiful here, especially in springtime. Yet as I consider friends and students and strangers who have had to pick up and leave on short notice, possibly never to return–it would be hard, but I could leave home. And, for now at least, I still have a choice to go or stay.
Ann E. Michael, Home is where?

Visiting the Azores has a strange fusion of ‘Here I am’ and ‘Where am I?’. Call it a confused familiarity. Our host on the island of Terceira presented us with a golden loaf of sweet bread — kissing cousin to the sweet round on Ives Street at the Silver Star Bakery! Back home in Fox Point, Azores banners hang from car mirrors, fisherman sell me their silvery catch from the back of a truck. Living in RI, we’ve been imprinted with the nostalgia of others, our largest immigrant population from Madeira and the Azores.
But the encounter with the archipelago has its own suspended reality — nuit blanche, arriving without a night’s sleep in the middle of the Atlantic on an unknown island. Under the airport roofs birds were singing. A city called Angra do Heroísmo, low church bells intoning. Misty bay, veils of rain. Whatever I was expecting, (small villages, old men and women collecting vine cuttings, tending their fig trees) was superimposed on an impeccable, chromatic seaside capital. White and pastel houses alternate, holding each other from tumbling into the sea. Air playful, soft, doing little arabesques over the dashing Atlantic. A man was etching in the sand a giant heart with the words Ukraine atop.
Jill Pearlman, Azores, Déjà Vu and Olà

I don’t know myself, but it’s not the result of an unexamined life. On the contrary, it is a life so examined that the fabric has been teased apart. I am a collection of discrete elements. And I am trying not to panic.
I recognize something in the line above; I am a loose collection from a poem I wrote in 2016. From the book I wrote wherein the translator described the poetry as my “late style”. I read that as a curse.
How have I survived rattling around these past years? Wide-open, and pinched simultaneously. A sack of bones.
At 4 am yesterday I was focused: writing. At 4 pm I crashed and splattered like a water droplet. Every time this happens I wonder if I will walk away for a day or two. Or for a year or two. Or more.
Identity is a complex issue. Language. Nationality. What they call the “formative years”. The America that shaped my formative years is not the America of today. I have lived here for more than half my life. For more than thirty years. And yet when people meet me they still ask me where I am from. As though answering that tells them anything about me.
I am from roach clips, milk lines, and Stranger Danger
I am from paisleys and bean bags, tv dinners and moon pies
I am from fire & brimstone, and inappropriate touches
I am from kerosene lamps and cinderblock walls
I am from scholastic books order forms and second-hand clothes
I am from guns and gophers and bloody chickens
I am from photographs cut carefully around the shapes of bodies
I am from sudden disappearances, fresh starts, and new names
But I say something like, the West Coast mostly, I moved around a lot. Then they tell me about all the times they have visited America, or the relatives they have there, or how much they love or have much they hate the culture. “Americans are…” and they begin to shape me.
And I go home and dig a little more deeply into the ditch that separates me from the world. I am still too easily twisted by casual contact.
Ren Powell, A Loose Collection of Mixed Metaphors

It’s been one year since my cancer diagnosis and I had a checkup with my surgeon this week. He said everything is looking good but it might be another nine months to year before I see any results from the nerve graft in my face. There’s another procedure that could be done, which requires taking a length of muscle from my thigh and threading it through my face to help restore symmetry, but that sounds horrific. I might explore botox. The droop face really is depressing.
My six month cancer scans in December were clear, but I’ll be having more in June. Fingers crossed for the continued “all clear.” I think I’ll feel and even bigger weight of my shoulders when those results come back.
I’m slowly but surely getting the new & selected together collection. Publication is planned for September 2023.
Collin Kelley, A new poem and a health update

Tuesday morning, the moon startled me on my morning walk. It was just before dawn, and the moon as it was rising looked huge in the very dark sky. It’s at the end of a waning phase, so it looked hollowed out. As I walked, I came up with some lines for a poem, and I repeated them throughout my walk, so that I could remember.
Wednesday morning, I wanted to see if I could see the moon again, but because it’s a day later, moonrise was later, 6:28 a.m. So I headed to South Lake, where I thought I would have a better view of the moon as it rose. South Lake looks out towards the part of the beach with fewer highrises.
I got there at 6:34, which I thought gave me a good chance of seeing it, but at first I didn’t see anything. I walked slowly around the lake, and just when I was about to give up, I saw it, a narrow sliver of a moon in a red-orange sky, just before sunrise. It looked much more apocalyptic than it did when it was in a darker sky.
I stood and stared for a moment. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I likely wouldn’t have noticed the moon–it was just too close to sunrise and too cloudy. I walked to North Lake where I could still see the moon, but it was barely visible as the sky had gotten much lighter.
I have all but ceased sending out poems just now, so let me post the poem that I wrote after my moonwalk mornings. Is it done? My younger poet self would have put in a lot of references to social justice issues. My younger poet self would have made every connection glaringly obvious.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Moonwalking

It looks like that,
the old monk said,
because that’s always
how you see it.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (61)

Speak to any writer and they will tell you that it is difficult to force creativity, especially poetry which is a medium of translation – events, pain, love, happiness – into art. I feel I have burned myself out through striving to get to a place that is perhaps non-existent and more about my need to be recognised as valuable, than about my need to create. All the striving has, though, allowed me to climb high enough that I am now on a platform that I can, to a certain extent, control. I can sit on this platform and grow into myself and my writing. Right now I am working on myself. I feel like I am undoing myself, peeling away long papery layers of habit and compulsion and sitting with each version of myself, asking her what she needs and what I need to do to validate her. I’m addressing all sorts of things, both personally and in my writing. I mentioned recently that my next collection has been put back a year, which feels like a terribly long time but, actually I feel this might be fate playing a hand for me. Without the pressure of the imminent end of year deadline, I have been able to allow the poems to come when they come. I’ve used the last of my Society of Author’s work-in-progress grant to take the time to write when I need to; a change from what I initially planned, which was to set a big chunk of time aside to write write write, which just didn’t work for me. I always felt I worked best under the pressure of a finite time scale, but it turns out that my procrastination is a lack of confidence, the ‘working well to a last minute deadline’ is a way of avoiding having confidence in myself and my work, a way to ‘trust the gods’ and have an excuse if I didn’t do as well as I wanted. The truth is, we don’t always do as well as we want, that’s just part of it. Some things work, some things don’t.
Wendy Pratt, Creativity and the Slow Life

I’m trying to write a poem a day, since I haven’t been writing as much lately, and seeking inspiration inside the world that’s still in a pandemic and a war. So I wanted to connect with some friends via phone and explore neighboring Kirkland, which has a beautiful waterfront with Lake Washington, and seems buzzing and friendly, at least when the sun shines.
I’m not healthy enough to travel or get in big crowds yet but I am, as you may see, making an attempt to get back into the world while covid levels here are low enough. As the UK and Asia struggle with another surge, I’m sure one is coming this way too, but for now, I’m getting out when it’s sunny (even when it’s not warm) and enjoying the flowers. I’ve enjoyed talking to friends this week about AWP as well as their travels and travel plans. Being immune compromised, I can’t be quite as adventurous, but I’m glad to get the news of the outside world, adventure by proxy. Meanwhile, I’m exploring different neighborhoods, capturing signs of spring.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy April – National Poetry Month (and My Birthday Month,) and Seeking Inspiration

Everything feels unfinished. Every thought that comes to mind is a sentence half-spoken. I jot down one clause — “the death of a parent casts a long shadow” — and then I don’t know where to go from there.
Pesach is coming sooner than I think. I start a seder menu, then my efforts trail off. I’ll have one vegetarian, one picky eater, and one diabetic. I can’t think of a good main course to suit all of us.
I open a book I’ve read before, Black Sea, by Caroline Eden. It’s a travelogue with recipes. She writes about how surprisingly Jewish the food of Odessa is. Tsimmes and forshmak are Ukrainian foods.
She describes sunny afternoons, the still air of quiet museums, pastel-colored architecture slowly decaying, literary stories of ice cream. Today the streets are filled with sandbags and barricades.
At the end of the Odessa chapter she offers a recipe for black radishes and carrots with caraway and cider vinegar and honey. I have those things! But what to eat them with? I run out of steam again.
Rachel Barenblat, Unmoored

In 2017 I launched a collaborative performance practice called the Improv Poetry Orchestra (IPO). It’s a simple enough set-up – a poet writes improvisatory poetry on a laptop at a desk onstage, which is projected onto a screen behind her. Musicians onstage read the writing as it’s being generated, and they improvise in response to—and in tandem with—her. […]
Improvisatory writing—and any form of creative improvisation—can be a profoundly connective process. It draws disparate people and/or ideas together (connective), and it’s centered around the act of creation (process) rather than around artistic intentions or a final product.
And unlike other skills which you must master from the ground up, you already have a lifetime of experience with improvising. Each day when you have a conversation with another person, you generate sensible, interesting statements spontaneously. Creative improvisation is similar—it just requires a little courage to be both nonsensical and unimpressive (yet occasionally amazing!), a few tools, and some practice.
Improvisatory Poetry: Making it up as you go along – guest post by Elisabeth Blair (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

Like most people I put up with Zoom readings and events when it was the only thing allowed, and I hadn’t realised how much I loathed it until I started to contemplate the horror of online poetry events becoming a permanent thing. The ‘Zoom factor’ is having a detrimental effect on my decision about whether to return to the University of York to finish my MA later this year: as long as there is any chance whatsoever that seminars will be moved online, I can’t honestly contemplate returning.
Ironic really: twenty-five years ago, as an internet newbie I was basking in the excitement of what the Web had to offer, online for hours every night (this was in the US, where it was free!) and making friends across the globe (yes, actual people – some of whom I got to know in real life). I then spent the best part of twenty years working in online marketing and speaking, teaching, advocating and writing books about the power (and brilliance) of the internet for business, for communities and for communication generally.
And now? After nearly three months ‘resting’ from Twitter, I’m wondering just how much I missed it, if at all
Robin Houghton, At last, some (a)live poetry events

I have always maintained that the raw material for poetry is all around us but that most of the time we don’t realise it. A poet is a person who sees the possibilities and who tries to respond to them. Last Saturday I had the idea that the air is teeming with poems, they circle like airplanes waiting to land. This is what I did with that idea:
Poems Are Everywhere
a complex holding pattern
keeps the free range poems airborne
invisible they circle the world
we are oblivious […]
Paul Tobin, FREE RANGE POEMS

On a day when engaging with the world feels too much like loving a damaged man, I stand underneath our willow’s blossoming canopy and look up. It is like being in another world, one with a sky made of flowers, and I remember that this is how it is:
There is only one world, and we stay because of moments such as this.
We stay because leaving means leaving all of it, not just its barrage of bad news, and we cannot give up spring afternoons when the sun is the right kind of warm and tulips are leaning toward us as if we are the light and passing strangers smile and tell us how lovely our corner of it is. We stay because we see how it might be, how it could be, how, for brief moments, it is, and we let ourselves believe that–if only we love it carefully enough–it can be (it will be) like this all the time.
That we are wrong doesn’t make the moments any less beautiful or true.
*****
This week my students and I read Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Making a Fist” together, from which I borrowed a line to use as the title of this post. I turned away from much of the news this week, but I made myself stay with “Inside Mariupol,” which also contributed to this micro-essay.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Clenching and opening one small hand

I have almost forgotten childhood now. Sometimes I’ll remember something that happened when I was a boy, but I am not sure if I really remember it, or if I have told the story of it enough times that it is really only the story I remember, and not the thing itself. What happens next? Will I also forget how it was to be a man? And then when I die, will I have had a life at all? Memories of memories. Perhaps I was never a boy. Perhaps I was never a man. I could just be a random thought in time and space. Friend, what a wretched thing it is to be getting old and not even know what is real and what is not.
James Lee Jobe, the forgotten childhood

or how at certain times in my life parts
of my body went numb in spring the black
tailed deer chewed honeycrisp apples in the snow
in front of my house her body
the color of elephant tusks
on Shrove Tuesday I ate the cake purple
and gold straight through to the plastic baby
clack clack on my tooth and kayakers
dotted the Stillaguamish River
like swift primary flags like standards
bright narrow countries
yet to be discovered
Rebecca Loudon, April 2.

Euridice’s footfalls so quiet on the rocky path. We should have sung together. I could have listened. What singer needs sight to know?
My Euridice. Dew on early morning lawn. Sandwich meat in the ancient world’s most beloved deli. Lips like an asp bite. Joke maker. It was she who charmed them, though I was a good opener, with my lyre, sweet rhymes, my boy pretty face.
Her ironic bright-light grace. Even when alive she seemed a beam, glinting, as if she’d passed between Lucretius’s atoms as through a beaded curtain or the rain. Euridice, bioluminescent in the dark deep sea.
Gary Barwin, over-the-shoulder beholder: SOMETHING ORPHEUS SAID

Have you seen the dancers who talk while they
dance, no, who talk with their hands, oh, so loud,
in unison, dancing deaf Greek chorus?
How goes the war? Did they clear the streets
of the dead? How many did they silence?
What are the words that stab, cut, slice, fillet?
What are the words soft as the edge of feathers
of steel […]
PF Anderson, Questions

I gather together all the foolish words I’ve uttered.
Give them baths, scrub away the grime, wash their hair, clean away the dirt behind their ears.
I brush their teeth, check their eyes, bandage wounds, provide blood transfusions when needed.
Then I dress them in cleaner clothes, offer each a pat on the head and send them back out into the world—
hoping my words will serve me better next time.
Rich Ferguson, Second Skin

You could open
many things
with a fragment
How easily
it slips into
your hand
Beautiful
detritus
Vascular
scoria
of tiny hidden
cavities
In each one
a constellate
a branching
Luisa A. Igloria, Bricolage

You sense the famine in the empty veins of leaves. Bone-birds summon you from frozen wires. Your restless need for banquets may not be logical, but you understand the hollow tuck in their frail and downy wings. You carry smoke and bells with grace. When faced with complex factors, you draw down mica and paint spirals on all locked gates in sight. Your friends call you ghost orchid, amethyst, cleric of water wheels and bright fat plums. Some are puzzled by your sprawl of bread and lilacs, but still consume your bounty. It’s your nature to know the genus of every hunger, to shimmer in the distance without effort. For you starvation is abstract. If necessary, you will grind the hulls yourself.
Kristen McHenry, Poem of the Month: Themes

a sunbeam
sliding down a cobweb
coffee time
Jim Young [no title]

The author was born in a rainstorm, the sky raven dark. The clouds thick and winged over the midwest. The author couldn’t sleep, at first, for all the thunder. but under the author, the forest writhed in moss and peat. Tethered itself to the author like ship. At night, she’d sail it through and the trees. The author, at first had no mother, no father, only the thin lip of daylight at the horizon. Only a slip of wind to guide her. She’d stack the broken limbs and build a fire and the ghosts would gather. The author would rest, but only in the heart of of an immense, hollowed out oak, where she’d play house with the dark and marry it again and again. Would carry its children up and down the ladder each morning. Would hush them to sleep, each night.
Kristy Bowen, napowrimo #1

A woman is killed as she tries to feed starving dogs.
I try to shake myself free but the image
and my imagination growl and tighten their jaws.
This is not about me, I say, it’s about the dead woman.
The woman is dead, says the image.
You can do nothing for her now.
Her death has invaded your life.
You must live with it.
We pass the cottage where the old couple lived.
In winter they came out one at a time
for they shared the same pair of shoes.
Now it’s home to a woman with winter-coloured skin
who paints a poem called Still Life With Anger.
In the distance we see the towers of the city.
The Government buildings, grey as rain-clouds
where people stand in line in the hope of leaving.
Bob Mee, THE REUNION AND OTHER POEMS

if i return to rest in a seed :: won’t my fields come searching for me
Grant Hackett [no title]

January 2, 2022January 3, 2022 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 52 + New Year’s 2022

The last week of the year always has a kind of aimless, limbo-like feeling, as several bloggers observed, so I was impressed by how many still managed an end-of-the-year post. The selection below doesn’t quite reflect how many of those posts included favorite book lists as well, so really, quite a lot of riches for those with the time to click through.

Here’s hoping 2022 brings a bit of peace and sanity, but if not, there’s always poetry. Happy New Year.

Years ago, I worked for an organization that always closed down during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and as such I became habituated to taking those days off and have made it something of a tradition. Nothing is going to get accomplished in that time anyway. It’s an informal national “down week” as it should be, because these are frozen, dead, throw-away days in which humans are not meant to be functional. Hence no post last week. I’ve been off since December 23^rd, doing nothing but loafing around and making a full-time job of trying to keep warm in the 15-degree weather in our under-insulated apartment, shivering in a turtleneck (thanks, Mom!), a hoodie, a knit hat, and double socks.
Kristen McHenry, Days of Loafing, Re-Discovering Dorothy, History Buff

It’s the break of day, New Year’s Eve. I’m writing from the warm, night-morning-darkness of my living room, the only light is that of decorative twinkle and the snow glow outside. My holiday boon is scattered on the nearby table, gifts that are already page-tabbed and folded open. I’ve finished Amy Butcher’s Mother Trucker, and working through Robert Hass’s Time and Materials by day and by night, Ken Gould’s mystery, Death’s Grip, along with Kerstin Ekman’s Scandia Noir read, Under the Snow. As is the case with readers, these are 4 named titles. Waiting in the background sit short stacks of 24 additional titles, patiently awaiting their own cracks in spine. There is a new blank book awaiting rough writings in chicken scratch scrawl, bright beaded earrings, magnetic haiku and coffee poetry sets, and real coffee from a friend to accompany all of these wild ways to spend winter time.
Kersten Christianson, New Year’s Eve: Closing the Book of 2021

at the end of every verse
leave a promise —
what shall we do with sleep
without a morning to wake up to
what shall we do with rain
when skin cannot endure the wet
what shall we do with all this
longing, without the grammar
of hope —
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Leave a promise

I have begun and started this post so many times in the last week. Usually I really look forward to writing the end of year blog, to look back at the good things that have happened. But this year it fels really different – every time I look at my 2021 diary at the months that have passed I feel sadness at all the things that didn’t happen, all the people I didn’t see, all the times when my daughter missed out, when I missed out. And I also know that I’m lucky because I am healthy and I’ve been able to do some things. I can’t stop thinking about friends who are still isolating, still unable to leave their houses.
It’s hard to look back on a year that has been threaded through with a low hum of anxiety, but I have had some lovely things happen this year. Probably the most obvious one of those is the publication of my second poetry collection All the Men I Never Married. But perhaps more than any other year, it has felt like a year where I’ve been able to try out different ways of my work reaching a wider audience – so I’m going to list a few of them here, just in case there are other people out there with slightly more time on their hands than usual, in this strange gap between Christmas and New Year.
Kim Moore, END OF YEAR BLOG

Today I undertook one of my favorite and also least favorite projects of the year–transferring all my random slips of paper and no-longer sticky post-its into a new sketchbook/planner for 2022. Good because its bright white blank pages are sort of exciting, least because it just makes me remember all the things I never got a chance to get to. I started the post-it system after years of lost to-do lists and actual planners and trying to understand bullet journaling and a million things that did not work to keep my mind organized. The premise was simple..the front pages sort the days of the week, the coming weeks, the coming month, the coming year. As things arise, I write them on the 1 inch post-its and stick them to the corresponding day. Obviously stuff gets moved and transferred to coming weeks and I suppose gets done eventually if if ever does.
I have spreads for dgp projects in the works, including columns–layout-cover designs–proofing–so that I can see at a glance what is happening with each book. I have a section for monthly goals, though as the year goes on, I usually lose track of filling these pages out, but occasionally they help me finish up things. The worst, though, is a section titled “PROJECTS’ where every idea I have –for poems, for art projects, for shop lovelies–usually just sort of go to die, only to be moved to the next planner every late December. I also have pages for the library and things happening there. Admittedly, I didn’t even change books between 2020 and 2021, since so much was just lingering from the previous year. There are ideas for art & design projects that I’ve been moving from book to book since 2013. Also writing projects. Occasionally, like unusual creatures, I finish them eventually, but more often not. I might seem productive on occasion, but not half as productive as I’d like.
Kristy Bowen, new year, new planner

The fae character in my novel Unbecoming was, I now understand, incredibly fun to write because in imagining her, I got to inhabit the person I might have been if I were thoroughly, deliciously selfish, unworried about anyone’s future. I rarely consciously knew what she would say or do next; instead, I would take a break from writing and hear her whisper her next lines. The last dictation I received is her last quotation in the book: “I don’t know what I want, but I want it very much.” Word.
Speaking of traces of the past: one last magazine issue with a poem of mine slid under the old year’s wire. “You Know Where the Smithy Stood by the Clinkers” just appeared in the new National Poetry Review. It’s based on a lecture given several years ago by W&L archaeologist Don Gaylord. It immediately helped me see the buildings I work in in a different way, but I had to revise the poem many times, mostly by paring it down, until its architectural bones became clear. The past is always present, even when you suppress difficult memories.
Lesley Wheeler, Sacrifices, gifts, and a year in reading

It’s become a tradition and a privilege to spend New Years Eve with L. and B.
L. is the one who invited me to eat 12 grapes at midnight. She and B lived in Spain for a few years. I believe that to make a wish with each grape is her own twist on the Spanish tradition. Today I reread the blog post from 2020 and realize that my 12 wishes last night were nearly identical to those two years ago: synonyms and shifted specifics. New perspectives. New approaches.
I’m not sure what to make of that in terms of my personal growth. Walt Whitman contradicted himself because he contained multitudes. I repeat myself. I think that is because I contain a multitude of threads as well, and am on a dialectical path. Where it ends doesn’t seem to be as important anymore. Only that I keep moving towards something.
The word “ease” had come up a lot over the past two years. Maybe the past three years. But this morning I read the word “gentle”.
I lingered on the word gentle.
I read Dylan Thomas’s poem again this morning with more empathy – and a different understanding – than I’ve had before. It’s wonderful, because for the first time I see the specific context of the speaker’s perspective. I see the words “old age” (would that Death allowed us all that experience), and the speaker’s projecting his own fears onto his father, and onto every other old man’s evaluation of their worth in the world. I think I’ve read this poem always making way for the poet/speaker’s greater wisdom, and I read the advice in the poem as a kind of sutra. I am thrilled no one deprived me of this discovery: that this (projected) perspective is not wrong, but is only one perspective. A true perspective, but not the true perspective. And that is not to say that no one has ever analysed the poem this way, explained it, described it to me. But if they did, I wasn’t able to take the lesson in.
Long live the hyper-realistic beauty of the unreliable narrator.
Ren Powell, What Falls Away Gently

As 2021 stumbles to a close, it might be obvious to anyone who was paying attention (and I don’t know if anyone was) that I was not writing in here much in recent months; to be precise, since September. In many ways, September and onwards was a big improvement over the rest of my life since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. I got a new job working with children’s literature – so far, on course to be my best job ever – and before starting, I had time to visit my family in Canada. I also spent September weekends as part of the Sea Reconnection exhibition, which as an art-and-poetry exhibition was a first for me and certainly a highlight of the year.
I haven’t felt much like writing, though. My pandemic experience has avoided the worst that many have experienced (severe illness, death of loved ones, prolonged unemployment, etc) but at times I feel like it’s sort of flattened me out. I hope to get back into more of a writing frame of mind in the months to come, even in small ways, which I think will help.
Clarissa Aykroyd, Ten years of The Stone and the Star

Pull out the drawers,
and balled-up socks
sigh of their own accord.
Throw open the windows
and huddled shapes
of air unfold
forgotten wings. Old
beds of ash retire
into the soil so flint
or a match could strike
a small yellow flame
to brilliance.
Luisa A. Igloria, Encadenada

Yesterday we went for a long walk at Parc Jean-Drapeau, site of Montreal’s Expo 67: this geodesic dome, designed by Buckminster Fuller, was the United States pavilion for Expo, and is now a museum dedicated to the environment. But yesterday we were pretty much the only people on the two islands in the middle of the river, and even though it was a grey day, it was just what I needed. Lots of wildlife tracks in the snow, many birds including a huge flock of robins (what are they thinking?), the St Lawrence roiling along in its winter mood, red rose hips against the snow, junipers loaded with blue berries, overgrown plantings, a greenhouse where large tropical plants were being overwintered, and many odd graphic images from the desolation of winter and the decay or remnants of structures built for Expo that have fallen into disuse. I hope you’ll enjoy taking this walk with me, and I wish you all the best for the year to come.
Beth Adams, A New Year’s Walk

I have got a great deal out of writing this blog this year. The feedback is as immediate as social media, and far more fulfilling. There is always a chance someone will read it, so it never feels pointless. I write about whatever I want, however I want: that anyone is listening at all is a luxury! Yet, having had a month or so away from blogging, I can see how my relationship with it might have some things in common with submitting poetry to magazines, or using social media: that feeling that I need to just keep publishing; that fear of rejection, which only feeds the desire to publish more.
Is there a solution? Jonathan Davidson suggests we broaden our understanding of what sharing poetry entails to include a greater focus on different kinds of reading (e.g., out loud, at special occasions), and on reaching more non-poets. I agree. Davidson’s focus is largely on collections, but I think the insight can be extended to individual poems. Why should the default ‘end point’ be publication in a magazine?
For most people I know, poetry is a marginal art, so it’s a fair assumption that by placing a poem in a magazine you will have a greater chance of finding an appreciative reader (i.e. another poet) than sharing it with someone you know. But the end result of this way of thinking isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy which keeps poetry on the margins: it effects our idea of what a poem even is.
There are ways of rethinking how we share poetry among regular writers, too. I suspect a lot of writers engage with poetry groups and workshops, at least in part, as steps towards publication. But there is no reason why they have to be. I attended a regular poetry evening when I was at university. I have never produced so much rubbish in my life, but I have rarely felt so much like I knew why I was writing.
My own solution over the last few years has been to try to publish less poetry, and more writing about poetry. I can see this wouldn’t appeal to everyone. It may end up with me not publishing any of my own poetry at all (which isn’t necessarily a disaster). But I’ve also found that I appreciate poetry – writing it and reading it – more, not less.
Jeremy Wikeley, A Year in (Not) Publishing

Imagine how it feels when the sky is dark and you’re the first star. That’s Frank’s trusty Tree Service. You’re the first tree. You’re reborn. You’re a tree and you’re reborn as a tree. And soon you’ll be surrounded by a forest of trees reborn in a forest reborn and filled with trees.
Gary Barwin, Rise Up, Trees: Frank’s Tree Service.

year’s end
bald pines hold
the sky in place
Julie Mellor, year’s end

I was sad to read that Kirsty Karkow had died, on Christmas Eve. She was a fine haiku and tanka poet. I had some correspondence with her twenty or so years ago and had been in online kukai groups with her in the late ’90s. She’d lived in Maine for many years but was born and educated in England. On Curtis Dunlap’s old ‘Blogging Along Tobacco Road’ blog, which was always a pleasurable read, you can still find Kirsty’s admirable contribution, here.
Matthew Paul, On Sylvia Kantaris and Kirsty Karkow

I cannot recall where I learned of Byung-chul Han, but I’ve had the pleasure of reading one of his books of philosophical essays (The Scent of Time) recently, and seldom has a philosophy text resonated so immediately with my circumstances. In this book, Han argues for contemplative time. He says it is essential for humans and human society and claims the “acceleration” of everyday life robs us of the value of reflective thought and “slow time.”
Raised and educated in Germany, where he now teaches, Han invokes the works of several German philosophers to provide a starting-point regarding the acceleration of time. He draws on Nietzsche, Arendt, Husserl and, to a larger extent, Heidegger…but Derrida, Aquinas, Aristotle, and others as well. He also quotes from quite a few poets, such as Celan, Hölderlin, Büchner, Handke, Ch’iao Chi, and spends two chapters on Proust (but of course…).
Han posits that the point-like, algorithmic availability of information runs counter to knowledge and wisdom, which require experience, which in turn requires duration and connection rather than arbitrary retrieval: “Promising, commitment and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices. They bind the future by continuing the present into the future…creating a temporal continuity.” He criticizes the very technology that permits a person like me to learn about his work (I am certain I heard of him online somewhere). That criticism says the faster we go, the further we are from our earthiness–the airplane removes us from earth’s gravitational field as well as from the soil, “estranging the human being from it.” He adds, “The internet and electronic mail let geography, even the earth itself, disappear…Modern technology de-terrestrializes human life.”
Strong opinions, large claims. But oh, I thought at once of Whitman and his long expansive drawling poems when I read, “Instead of leisurely strolling around, one rushes from one event to another. This haste and restlessness characterize neither the flâneur nor the vagabond.” The whizzing about leads to anxiety and a lack of durable relationships. People hover instead of connect, swiping left or doomscrolling, feeling bored–which is a kind of empty-mindedness. I observe this trend of rushing and hovering in my students and among my colleagues. I have not found much Whitman-like lounging in current poetry publications, but a great deal of anxiety appears in contemporary poems. Writers reflect the times. Context shapes us.
Ann E. Michael, Slowing time

year’s end
waiting for candy
in the rain
Jason Crane, haiku: 31 December 2021

Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota by Amelia Gorman
This gorgeous chapbook explores the ecological dangers of Climate Change and the emotional impacts of human nature. These poems flirt with the speculative, presenting a near future that feels nurtured by the here and now, offering visions of what could be while feeling anchored in what has been. The pairing of botanical illustrations with these lush poems is the kind of book I love to have and hold in its physical form, so that I can flip through its beautiful pages.
Andrea Blythe, Books I Loved Reading in 2021

The end of the year rolls near and I am just lifting my head towards my blog. It’s been forgotten in the shuffle of working life and as that end-of-year-in-review feeling rolls in I have to be honest with myself about several things.
Where I am at geographically, career-wise, with a view to my family and my energy levels means I cannot place much focus on my writing. And 2022 will be even more difficult. I’m starting my teacher training course in January while working full-time at a school and raising my kids. I’m currently fitting writing in at the weekends, but soon that will be taken over by my course. I will continue to try and do a bit of writing, but compromises will be made.
And it hurts to think I will have to put it aside or squeeze it into the cracks. I would love to be working as a writer even part-time, but I need to focus on a career that I know will give some financial security. I’m finishing off a commission for some poetry this week and coming to the end of an editing job. I hope other small opportunities present themselves, but I will have to protect what little time I have to study and spend with my kids as much as I can.
My book will obviously not be published in 2021. I knew this was the case from early summer as nothing seemed to be moving forward, including communication. Maybe something will happen next year, but I no longer hold out much hope. My book was accepted about the time my decades-long relationship fell apart, so it felt a positive part of my renewal, a reason to look forward and celebrate my hard work. Then Covid and Brexit and Time bulldozed on through and here I am, still waiting, trying to be patient.
Gerry Stewart, The End of 2021 Draws Nigh

2021 was also the year I launched a book during a pandemic! What fun! Strangers came out in April, and was formally launched in May, with an online event featuring Sadiqa de Meijer and Sue Sinclair, and hosted by my editor Luke Hathaway. You can view that here. Unable to tour the book, this summer I took my tour local, with readings around Vancouver (even those were fraught – one was canceled by a record-shattering “heat dome,” another was rained our and had to be moved into the overhang area of an elementary school playground… normal stuff!). I loved getting to hear new poems from fellow pandemic-launching poets – eleven total guest readers over the course of the series. Readings at the Vancouver Writers Fest, Word Vancouver, and the Real Vancouver Writers Series kept me busy all fall, and helped me feel like it might really be reaching readers out there in the world! Reviews of the book and also interviews about the book kept me afloat despite the lack of in-person connections. Thank you to everyone who spent some time with Strangers in 2021 – it meant a great deal to me.
Rob Taylor, the 2021 roll of nickels year in review

I’ve been thinking as I look at my stats for the year that there’s some sort of link between my running this year and my writing. Correlation isn’t causation, etc and I don’t have the charts to hand (the wherewithal to tally up each month to make the chart),but I know that up to June this year I finished 10 poems and was roughly averaging 40-50k a week, and between July and now I’ve finished 5 poems and am averaging about 20K a week.
I’ve also run less overall. Last year it was 1600K, this year it’s just over 1500. I was aiming for 2000K, but
I think the reason behind these declines are that I was up a lot earlier in the first half of the year, and using the time after the runs to work on poems. I was training for Race To The King, and when folks mentioned I’d be struggling for motivation after that I didn’t believe them. How right they were. A combination of injury before the race, and exhaustion after has left me struggling to get back into the right frame of mind. It’s been the same with writing, the mad kick bollock scramble of the second half of 2021 has just left me with no interest in picking up a pen. I have no doubt it will come back. I can see a draft I started a coupe of weeks ago staring at me and I know I want to get to it, so I have faith.
Mat Riches, Run on lines…

When I look back at previous goals and roundups from around this time of year, I can see that pretty much every year I say I am going to cut back work, live a healthier lifestyle, live a ‘less chaotic life’ and have never quite managed it, until this year. My favourite mantra of this year, and one I’ll be taking with me into next year is ‘Everything in your life is a reflection of a choice you have made. If you want different outcomes, make different choices.’ Changing habits, changing learned behaviour, thought habits, unhealthy coping strategies etc is not about will power. Will power plays its part, but rather than being a shield you use to protect you from cravings, will power is tool you can use to reinforce the positive habits, affirming to yourself that you are worth change, that you are worth nice things, good health, a happy work/life balance. This year I managed to over work myself to a point at which I triggered an underlying heart condition and very high blood pressure. In fact, what I’d thought was the menopause turned out to be my body struggling with what I was doing to it. The doctors I spoke to told me I needed to cut down caffeine, alcohol and stress to manage it. Reader, I did not know who I was without caffeine, alcohol and stress. I cut back caffeine consumption to just first thing in the morning and the occasional afternoon cup of tea. Knowing I could still get my Wendy strength coffee first thing meant I was happy to cut back for the rest of the day. The stress and the booze were much harder to cut down. I enlisted the help of a personal health trainer to help me change my terrible relationship with alcohol, which you can read about here and reader, it worked, it continues to work. I had my first hangover in four months this week. I’ve taken the brakes off a little over Christmas and drunk more than I have been doing and amazingly found that I don’t really want to drink much anymore. Which makes me a cheap date and a complete and utter lightweight. This is my biggest achievement of this year. I know there will be people who don’t really understand that cutting back booze is a big achievement, it’s not like I have gone Tee Total, but the change in my health, my happiness, my anxiety and my self confidence is noticeable. I’m not going back. I’ve done this before and never quite managed it because I gave booze up completely without changing my thought process around it. This time it really does feel different. I have altered my thinking, altered my motivations.
Wendy Pratt, 2021 – My Year in Review- Best Books, Best People, Best Moments, Best Foot Forward

even when I did not know your name, sparrow,
I knew your song, the particular way
you break the silence
Han VanderHart, Bird Song Sounds Out of Tune Only to the Human Ear

Do you remember at the beginning of the pandemic there were all the jokes about the line “I hope this email finds you well.” And let’s face it, for the last couple of years, we haven’t been well, or at least not all the time, and certainly not in all the ways one would wish to be well. What even is wellness now? I don’t want any easy and pat wellness advice myself because this stuff is hard and recurring and complicated and we can be more than one thing at once, anyway. One thing I do know, is that what we normally think of as wellness is not this steady stream. Sure we can be resilient but we also get to take breaks from being resilient. (Which is perhaps a form of resiliency). So what I hope for you in this coming year is that you find your way to a wellness, and in the times when things are more crumbly, you find ways to return and return to a space where you feel okay and sometimes even content and happy.
Shawna Lemay, Keeping Your Appointments in 2022

Let me be the photographer staring down into the lens
of a Box Brownie, let me really see my mother’s red hair,
my father’s best trousers, my brother’s barely lived in skin,
our white socks and Start-Rite sandals, or deeper still –
the cotton handkerchiefs in our dress pockets, Dad’s tattoos
hidden under his long sleeved shirt, the sand beneath
the soil and grass under our feet, the scent in the darkness
when we opened the coalbunker door, what we knew then,
what we didn’t know, what we were unable to even imagine.
Lynne Rees, Poem ~ 1963

Palpable: what else to call poems with lines such as “I RUB MESSAGES INTO THE WALL B/C I KNOW / SOMEDAY I WILL BE DELETED.” The urgency implied in the typographical choice to use all caps (here and consistently throughout the collection) brings with it the implication of presence. Words in all caps are emphasized, given more presence before the eye. Such emphasis and presence are more often associated with brand slogans, protest signs, even text messages–a set of seemingly incongruent examples that yet are totally in line with the world interrogated by Abi-Karam. Only that these are poems, and the poetic space is flexible enough to hold a human pulse despite these implications, and resilient enough push back, to voice and be a voice.
José Angel Araguz, microreview: Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam

The first poems in Danger Days by Catherine Pierce (Saturnalia Press, 2020) lead one to expect that this book will be all about end times and apocalypse. The fourth poem dispels this idea: “High Dangerous” is the name her young sons give to hydrangeas. But there is danger there too: the bees in the flowers.
Pierce finds danger in many supposedly ordinary places. In motherhood, for instance, in “How Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel.” (Both find themselves rearranged.) “Abecedarian for the Dangerous Animals” covers five kinds of animal: bees, bats, the cassowary, the golden dart frog, and humans. […]
One set of poems addresses the history of words, in a series she calls “From the Compendium of Romantic Words.” In each poem she explores, deconstructs and plays with a particular word. My favorite is “delicatessen” which begins:
Noun. Notable for a sibilant elegance heightened
by the suggestion of cured meats. Not deli,
a vulgar nickname, a fly-den, a swing-by, but
a long sigh of syllables, a time machine. Inside
its languid hiss: flannel suits, stenographer glamour.
When the word is uttered, a skyline materializes.
Ellen Roberts Young, Recommendation: Danger Days by Catherine Pierce

Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens [by Corey Van Landingham] brought back to me memories from January 1991. I was visiting friends at the University of Maine in Orono (UMO) and trying to rekindle a romance with a boyfriend from high school. He refused to see me, so I met friends in the Bears Den where we ate and watched TV. It was the night coalition forces launched the attack on Iraq. A screen in the corner of the room in the student union broadcast the bombardment. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the moment: “The war marked the introduction of live news broadcasts from the front lines of the battle, principally by the US network CNN. The war has also earned the nickname Video Game War after the daily broadcast of images from cameras on board U.S. bombers during Operation Desert Storm.”
I can’t recall if we were horrified but know for sure we were mesmerized. And, even though I was just 18 at the time, I’m ashamed to admit that I was more pained by the romantic abandonment than by what I saw on TV. Even though the scenes from my UMO visit have stuck with me, I never bothered to include them in a poem. If I had, I’d probably have written about the boy and not the televised introduction to war in my lifetime. It’s a daunting task to consider even now.
I’m still not writing much about world events in my poems, but thankfully my interrogation of our complicity in them has evolved, and Van Landingham’s poems support this necessary and difficult line of questioning. In “{Pennsylvania Triptych},” she writes, “To participate in the demolition is to be a part of history. Is what I tell myself…” She goes on, “As if, ante- / bellum, white and wealthy, with your father’s / father’s sprawling fields, you wouldn’t have let the / house staff serve you pheasant.” We must come to terms with our participation in dehumanizing others if we are to understand how to stop it.
Carolee Bennett, “the body becomes a downloadable thing”

How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It was completely administrative! I decided to apply to MFA programs last minute and the deadlines were coming up. I had to put together a portfolio and figured it would take less time to write poetry than to write prose (ha!). I became a poet thanks to early deadlines. But I kept with poetry because I love its sparseness— it’s a form in which what you don’t say is as important as what you do say. Absence speaks, it’s mystical— a fairytale in itself. […]
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
In writing: act as if everyone is enlightened but you (Sandra Alcosser).
In general: “Dlatego dwie uszy jeden język dano, iżby mniej mówiono a więcej słuchano.” It”s a common Polish saying, loosely translated: “you got two ears and one mouth to speak less and listen more”. In fact, come to think of it, this applies perfectly to writing too.
rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anna van Valkenburg

An interesting poem shows consideration-in-process. To “consider” means “be with the stars,” doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want that from a poem?
Poems in which the poet knows too much at the outset can tend toward flatness, I have found. The movement, if there is movement, in such a poem is of a busy person through a room who gives you a brisk nod. “Oh, there goes old whatsisname. Hunh,” you think. And that’s that. A more interesting poem wanders in, sits down with you, says something unexpected, ponders, ask you something, maybe, tells a tale, perhaps, shows you something, and in some way you share the moment.
You still might think, Hunh. But it’s a lingering hunh, a “I want to think more about this” hunh, or a “I never looked at that way before” hunh. You might want to call that poem some late afternoon and see if it wants to go get a beer.
Marilyn McCabe, Don’t stand so close to me; or, On Poems That Know Too Much

I am feeling forlorn this New Year’s morning. Forlorn weather – 53 degrees and pouring rain, and likely to do so all day.
Last night I went to a New Year’s Eve gathering with eight other old folks – 55+ on the menu at Perkins Pancake House. Very subdued. It was a long table and I was the last to arrive and I didn’t get to sit with the friends I enjoy conversing with. Not even any wine. We closed the place at 8PM. Sigh.
I drove home, remembering the New Year’s Eves of my wild youth: in Philadelphia several with Patrick and his friends, in Baltimore in the apartment at Wellington Gate, and on Barclay Street, even a few in the early years of life in the Daughters. Sigh.
So it goes. I keep teaching Slaughterhouse Five to my Modernity class, now on Zoom due to COVID.
Anne Higgins, The times are nightfall; look – their light grows less

But for today, let me not focus on all that is coming at me/us in January. Let me enjoy one more day of tropical drinks by the pool. Let me focus on reading fiction, since I won’t have a chance to do that much once my seminary classes get underway. Let me enjoy meals with loved ones and views of a different coastline.
And perhaps I will write a poem. A few days ago, I made this Facebook post:”It is oddly foggy on the west coast of Florida this morning. It looks like it snowed overnight–or that something dreadful has happened to a lot of mermaids.”
Since then, I’ve continued to think of mermaids and sea foam and the death of mermaid dreams–or is it the resurrection of the girlhood dreams of mermaids? I came up with this line to begin a poem: Some days it is better to be sea foam.
Yesterday, the morning fog that looks like sea foam was tinted in different colors, which made me think that maybe sea foam doesn’t represent one eternal idea, but many.
A poem is percolating, and I want to remember.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Soft Ending to Vacation

I know it’s a little cheesy, and harder during a pandemic year, but I still went through the steps of doing my yearly inspiration board, and using my hands to cut and glue things makes me feel like a kid again, and there’s something innately…optimistic about putting up words and pictures that make you feel happy and hopeful. This year, words like “friends,” “inspiration,” “magic,” and “happiness” made appearances, along with images of foxes, pink typewriters, blooms and butterflies.
Anyway, I encourage you to try it yourself, even if it’s just a temporary one on a corkboard, or posting inspiring things on your fridge. What could we look forward to? What are the best possibilities? I’m far too good at looking at the dark side.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy New Year! Snowed-In Seattle, Inspiration Board for 2022, Variant Problems, and Late Celebrations

We are born into this life with all its bombs & birdsongs, diseases & deities, poverty & purity. Born into criminals & kissers, debtors & creditors, greed & generosity. Born into freedom & detention, flowers & fault lines, climate change & genocides. Dancing, singing, weeping, raging. Slaving, building, crushing, creating—the beauty & brawl of it all.
Rich Ferguson, Into This

The lines of this poem are a factory that employs
the dead. Ghosts of people that walk
on concrete floors, their eyes
like blank sheets of paper. Do you
have a pen? Me neither.
What is a day? Rows and lines
of broken things – dreams, hopes, love.
No, that’s too hard and I reject it.
A day is you with your shoes off.
You are running toward me
laughing. You are telling me
about some poet from The Gaza Strip
or Kentucky.
James Lee Jobe, Their eyes are like blank sheets of paper.

How lucky the kitchen was stocked with tiny marshmallows and French chocolate
waiting in dishes for guests that would never come…
a list of movies, a fireplace with stacks of crackling logs
six-point crumpled Kleenex fluttering as paper snowflakes in an infinity of patterns
tables littered with bottles —- cough syrup, elderberry, zinc —
and cake vying for room with white test kits
We laughed into delirium when time was a stream of barely noted
notches in the inevitable:
and talked of dreams, Rebbe Nachman, how to organize notebooks
not optimists but expecting each day would get better

New Year’s Eve was a muted affair;
even if historic and global, we could say we did it in our pyjamas
in our own creaturely language
although we were still stuck in the indeterminacy
Jill Pearlman, Merry Quarantine

In spite of this, I’m starting this year feeling more optimistic than last year. Perhaps misguidedly. It’s not as if there’s a safe pair of hands in charge in the UK. But there are signs that the covid virus might be becoming less dangerous, which is something to feel hopeful about, even though we are still far from being in the all clear. On top of this, I have my own creative projects ticking away, and time to work on them, and my husband, Andrew, and our two grown-up children are well, we’ve navigated our way through the past two years and we’re still talking to each other and supporting each other’s plans. I’m so glad we’ve all been here for each other, at the end of a phone, if not always in person.
Josephine Corcoran, Light Ahead (maybe)

So, there we are. A year of recycled poems, stocking fillers, stand-ups, long-delayed appreciations and reviews, and far too much about being unwell and sorry for myself. And let’s be fair. In the world ‘out there’ it was a truly horrible year, a sleep of reason beginning with a failed putsch by morons led by a moron in the USA, and ending with tsunamis of incompetence, criminality and sleaze in what passes for government. What keeps me sane? You do. You and the poets whose work makes the world a better place. Go well. Stay well.
John Foggin, 2021: That was the year that was

You find the edge
of the wind right
where it ripples,
the old monk says.
You can almost
taste the sand.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (93)

the extravagance of sun after a swim
Jim Young [no title]

December 5, 2021December 11, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 48

You are digging a hole in the hard, dry ground. The work is slow. you struggle, and no matter how hard you work, the hole only barely grows. Just a little at a time. You sweat and curse. You are tired, and your back aches. The neighbors are gathering at the fence. Why are you digging? Are things alright? Do you need some help? After several hours the crowd is huge and the hole finally large enough for you to enter. You go down, closing the earth behind you like a door. Now it is quiet. The sounds of the people watching have been silenced. You can hear your own breath. Reaching out, you find that the earth is quite cool to the touch, and that the darkness is a blessing.
James Lee Jobe, This work is slow.

Not to interrupt the darkness
we breathed slowly, exhaling
almost invisible smoke.
We had rolled cigarettes
with cold hands, shared fire.
Nothing happened for a while.
Then the stars started falling …
Magda Kapa, Voices

I’ve eased out of bed this morning and made the mistake of reading the news before sitting down to write. I guess our morning walk and then my run will be all about shaking it off. Jack Kornfield says “After the Ecstasy the Laundry”. But there is also the question of after the Compassion… what then? I suppose it is akin to the obligation we feel to hold on to grief. To “keep a space” for the pain. And there is the guilt we may have when we find ourselves laughing during a period of a new loss.
I remind myself of the obligation to acknowledge the wholeness of the world. I can put down the conceptional understanding of things happening halfway around the world, and I can appreciate the nuzzling of a dog’s snout insisting on breakfast, my husband’s footsteps approaching as he comes in to [sit] in the chair beside me, drinking his coffee while I write.
Heading out now for a run. I’ll be quiet turning near the edge of the lake. I’ll be listening for the ducks, who invariably laugh just before dawn.
Ren Powell, The Weight We Give Things

I once wrote a poem where the first two lines were:
The wind blows Novemberly
to the finger-snap of season change…
( I forget the middle of the poem, but it ends with)
The creek,
a ribbon of tinsel
through the leaf-gone trees.
How sad is that that I can’t remember the rest of the poem, and can’t find it anywhere in my piles of paper?
Anne Higgins, A cold and sunny end of November

Perhaps you were born with this hand like an uneven fence. Clasping, your whistle was as uncanny as an owl. Or you made wings of your outstretched fingers. Bird that has almost but not entirely evaded the gun, a feather’s breadth from near certain death.
Gary Barwin, ABRAHAM JUDA “SHORT FINGER” FUKS

The cluster of yucca plants by my driveway has bloomed twice this year, each time many stems grow tall, bloom and fade and I cut them down. Then this one stalk appeared, but something about the weather or the season prevented it from stretching above the leaves, so it bloomed surrounded by the plant’s green.
It’s a late bloomer, like me. Most people who know me now have no idea how slow I was to learn to think for myself. I got good grades and succeeded mostly by doing what I was told.
I began thinking of myself as a poet in my 20s, but it did not occur to me that there is a teachable craft to writing until I was able to join workshops – not classes – many years later. (I don’t mean things like grammar, which are important to communicate; I’ve known those rules since childhood.)
Once you know the rules of a craft, it’s much more fun to learn how and when they can be broken.
It makes possible surprises like these well-shaped blooms surrounded by green.
Ellen Roberts Young, Late Bloomer

The fall issue of AWS landed in my mailbox today! At 25° my mailbox is usually always frozen shut, so it isn’t a grand unveil without a lighter and some lock de-icer. As a poetry editor I love seeing how work morphs from draft form in Submittable to layout to printed paper copy. The cover photo is titled Open Sky by Becky Strub. Mandy Ramsey’s art is scattered throughout the pages and writings celebrating the celestial. I do enjoy volunteering for AWS for all the good writing reasons and for supporting northern women writers throughout Alaska. If you have an interest in volunteering, drop me a line. We are in need of an organized person to keep our email sorted and our mailing list updated. And you, too, would get to work with an amazing group of volunteers who also life up this sweet, sweet journal.
Kersten Christianson, Alaska Women Speak

It does feel good to have completed it, to have proved to myself that I have been able to write a work of fiction of that length, when I had not thought it possible. Apart from non-fiction books, mostly written to order for money, I have concentrated on relatively short pieces of writing that come within the rough borders of poetry.
Beyond that sense of personal satisfaction, what is there? I doubt I’ll ever read it again but hopefully, over time, some will ask for it to be emailed to them and, again hopefully, they will find something to enjoy in it. (If anyone reading this wants to, you’re welcome to email meeswood@aol.com)
There is, of course, a substantial gap between the writing of the thing and the reading of it. Not just in time, but in the experience of those involved.
Already, when it’s hardly been read, I’m getting on with other stuff. ‘Real life’ things like rolling the land ready for winter, making sure the hens are ok inside their inner pens to conform with avian flu regulations, preparing for the arrival of new pigs. And going off as usual to watch our beloved West Bromwich Albion home and away.
As to writing, it’s been surprisingly difficult to switch from the mindset necessary to create something of length to writing short pieces again. I wrote only one poem in the 79 days afforded the novel. At the time that felt like a huge release of air. Now, though, it’s taking time to settle into it again and find links between thoughts and images. I’ve started and scrapped dozens of attempts.
Bob Mee, SO YOU FINISH YOUR NOVEL… WHAT THEN?

You may have never given a poetry book as a gift. Most people have never bought a poetry book for themselves either. Yet a wealth of excellent poetry awaits, with more books coming out every day, each one capable of creating new poetry lovers. When I give a poetry book, whether to a poetry lover or a doesn’t-really-read-poetry friend, I like to pair the book with a related present. Here are a few suggestions based on books I’ve read recently. (Many are anthologies, a great way to entice readers.) Let these ideas inspire your own ideas. And please share in the comments what gift you’ve paired with a book, or what you’d like to receive in tandem with a book.
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The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink edited by Kevin Young (indie link) is a nourishingly hearty 336 page anthology with works by Elizabeth Alexander, Tracy K. Smith, Martín Espada, and others. It’s also perfect to pair with food-related gifts. Consider gifting it with something flavorful, like locally roasted coffee or spiced nuts. Or really step it up with a legacy gift like these salt boxes made from trees milled and shaped by the crafter. If you have the time, you might instead gift it with something you’ve cooked or baked yourself.
&&&&&
Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod (indie link) explores parenthood, nature, and memory with a uniquely sharp tenderness. Somehow I think a picture frame goes well with this gift, a way of honoring what’s dearest to your recipient.
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Ohio’s current Poet of the Year, Quartez Harris, is driven by his work as a second-grade teacher as well as by his students’ experiences with gun violence, poverty, and racism. I’d pair We Made It To School Alive with a gift certificate, maybe one that allows the recipient to give toys, games, or books purchased from black-owned businesses like Kido, Little Likes Kids, Paper Play and Wonder, or Puzzle Huddle to a loved child or to donate them to an area daycare, school, or afterschool program.
Laura Grace Weldon, Paired Poetry Gift Ideas

It’s been a hell of a week, for reasons I’ll describe in some future post, when I’m not so desperate. For now: an essay of mine on a poem by Cynthia Hogue was just published by The Account. Called “Closure, Irresolution, and Cynthia Hogue’s ‘At Delphi,’” it interweaves meditations on a beautiful poem–contained in Hogue’s brilliant book about chronic pain, The Incognito Body–with narrative about a different kind of pain and crisis, involving harassment and bullying at work while I was serving a difficult term as department chair. Pain alienates you from other people and makes it difficult to speak at all. This essay appears many years after the incidents it describes. It’s gratifying, if maybe slightly alarming, to see it published and slowly receive responses, mostly from women who have experienced similar things. I struggled with how to portray my then-boss’s behavior without aggrandizement or melodrama–and then received brilliant edits from nonfiction editor Jennifer Hawe, very very gently pressing me to be more direct about the stakes. It’s useful, to the writer and often to readers, to be exact about the damage, insofar as that’s possible. My life wasn’t “ruined,” but I sustained a lot of harm, and no one involved will ever apologize or make amends. How to walk through and past it?
Poetry helps. See the poem “At Delphi” here (scroll down a bit). It’s also quoted in full in the essay. You’ll have different touchstone poems, ones that consoled you or gave you company at a bad time. This is one of mine.
Lesley Wheeler, Nowhere to go but through the ruins

before the house sale was agreed
buyers demanded the ghosts be removed
so contractors were appointed, a date set
an amount shaved off the price
and the workers arrived to divest the property
loading reluctant specters into sealed skips
then driving them away to wherever unwanted memories languish
that ambushing taste on the tongue
a face half glimpsed in the crowd
the 4am telephone that rings and rings and rings
Paul Tobin, RINGS AND RINGS AND RINGS

I’ve been writing a lot while I’ve been on the road. Hundreds of haiku and many longer poems. I got on the road after the end of the relationship I thought would last the rest of my life. All this time alone and all these words on the page have been essential to processing that loss and moving … forward? Moving, anyway.
Along with the decision to find a normal job and a stationary place to live, I’ve also decided that the past 25-plus years of living a very public life need to come to an end. I’ve been on the radio and on social media and on podcasts for nearly all of my 20s and 30s and 40s, and I’d like to slide into my 50s with quieter media. I’m going to keep making my current podcast, A Brief Chat, but I’m going to do it much in the style of this blog. I’ll keep putting things out there but not doing much to promote them. If people find their way to what I make, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s just fine, too. I described it to a friend as an attempt to live a quieter life. I think that’s what I mean. We’ll see what unfolds. I don’t have much practice at living out of the public eye. I keep thinking of good Tweets and Instagram photos as I move through each day. I’m hoping that urge will pass soon.
Jason Crane, Saying goodbye to van life

It would have been the perfect time to light the log burner, and I nearly did, except that I’ve got two massive holes in the upstairs chimney breast because a couple of weeks ago a jackdaw got trapped in the chimney. I was sat at my desk, in my office upstairs, when I heard the sound of scratching and frantic wing beats. It sounded like it was just behind the wall, like the house had developed its own heart, had grown something into itself. In the silence of the mid afternoon I listened to it scrabbling about and to the other jackdaws up above calling down to it. I feel like I have a relationship with the jackdaws. They’re a constant, a background to my work. I watch them arrive from their tree roosts on a morning to settle and squabble on the roof top, they nest in the chimneys during spring and summer and in the evenings one of my favourite sights is them returning to the trees, calling and cawing. Occasionally I will look up and see one leaning over the guttering to stare in at me. I watch them attempting to drive the seagulls away, having arguments with the local crows. One crow (is it the same one each time?) likes to creep up on the jackdaws and pull their tails. I watch them moving around the village, living their lives. They have their routine, I have mine. Occasionally I’ll throw food for them onto the shed roof, in the hope that the cat won’t get up there and go for them, because I think he would. He’s a bit of a bruiser. There wasn’t much I could do about the bird in the chimney, to start with. My first thought was to phone the RSPCA but they wouldn’t come out for it, and then I had to teach, so the day got away from me. I realised as I was teaching that I hadn’t heard it for a while and hoped it had managed to get out on its own. Earlier, when I’d gone outside to see what the other jackdaws were doing, I could see them calling down and even dropping bits of bread down to it. They’d been calling back and forth during the day, but then while I was on zoom there’d been nothing. Silence. By the time I’d finished teaching it was dark. The roof jackdaws had returned to their roosts. I switched my computer off. Sat silently for a minute. And then I heard it calling softly. I put my ear to the wall and listened, barely daring to breathe. I could hear it moving about, and then, again, that soft call. It was quite heartbreaking.
The next morning as soon as the sun was up, the jackdaw was moving about and its family were back, calling down to it. I realised they were making the same sort of calls that they make to chicks when it is fledging time, and I guess that makes sense. They were trying to fledge their friend from the chimney, encouraging it to fight against the bricks and twigs and get out into the air. I rang my dad for advice, and rang the Whitby wildlife centre, who were great. But the only real option was to tear a hole in the chimney breast to get to it. Lots of people kept telling me there was no option but to leave it to die, and I couldn’t understand that, or rather I could imagine understanding it, but couldn’t imagine myself doing that as, clearly, there was an option, it just meant making myself and my poor husband uncomfortable and destroying a part of the house. My dad came up with his tools (despairing of my lack of tools), and he knocked a massive hole in the chimney breast upstairs, and the chimney breast was full up of fallen nesting materials. So we started gently pulling it all out as fast as we could until we realised there was no bird in the chimney. The bird, it seemed, was on the other side, in the chimney breast that ran through the other bedroom. My dad had gone home at that point, and I was clearing up the mess. Initially I thought it might have gotten out by its own accord, but soon it became apparent that it was, in fact, still there and not in the chimney in my office, but the chimney in my bedroom. I live in an ex council house. I’d never thought about the amount of chimneys it has before. It has a lot. My dad came back, which was very good of him, (though I do think he likes knocking big holes in stuff, especially if he’s not doing the cleaning up), and we knocked another massive hole in the other side of the chimney and went through the same process of pulling stuff out and then, suddenly, there was the jackdaw, both matt and silk, claws and beak and eyes tight shut. It must have died just before we got to it. I had the chance to look at it up close. Female, I think, not as big as a male, its neck was ruffled, its feet were beautiful, slate clay and each toe ending in a serious hook of claw. It was not in great condition and I wonder now whether it hurt itself trying to get back out, whether it was poorly. I’d used gloves to handle it and disinfected them thoroughly. What strikes me most is how fragile it was, how strange it was to see this vital, clever, sociable creature so still, screwed up tight against what must have been terrifying banging and noise in its last minutes. It made me incredibly sad. But I did the best I could and feel happy about that. My husband is a very understanding person. He says he likes that I stick to my principles. I hid the worst of the chimney holes with bookcases. All pain can be alleviated with books, in my world.
Wendy Pratt, Jackdaws

I’ve been happily ensconced in two books of poetry recently, paging through randomly, reading steadily through from beginning to end, exploring back through. So much of the poetry I read I have nothing more than a vague reaction to, somewhere on the spectrum between hunh and hm. But these give me active pleasure and remind me why I love poetry.
One is Chris Dombrowski’s Ragged Anthem, which came out from Wayne State University Press in 2019. I learned of Dombrowski through friend David Graham’s poem-a-day emails, and I’m grateful. I chose Ragged Anthem of Dombrowski’s three or four collections randomly, and will be happy to dig into the other ones at some point. He writes out of his Montana or sometimes Michigan environment as a fisher, a guide, a father, a lover, a watcher bemused by the world. (Plus he’s buddies with one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Jeffrey Foucault, in a small-worldish sort of thing.) His poems, often long and lingering down the page, cast a spell woven of vivid descriptive detail and lyrical meditation, sometimes funny. […]
The other book is Jessica Cuello’s Liar, a tangle of punch-gut poems of the bewildering isolations of being a child. It’s just out from Barrow Street Press, chosen by Dorianne Laux as the prize winning entry.
Marilyn McCabe, Long Distance Calls; or, On Reading Dombrowski and Cuello

And much of what I’m feeling this week is rooted in my tiredness.
And I feel guilt about my tiredness. It is World AIDS Day in the midst of a different plague, and I am deeply aware that my situation could be worse. My tiredness is temporary. It is the anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.

This act is often given credit for launching the Civil Rights Movement, but what many forget is that various communities had begun planning for the launch, even before they could see or know what it would look like.
In fact, for generations, people had prepared for just such a moment. They had gotten training in nonviolent resistance. They had come together in community in a variety of ways. They were prepared.
Those folks had reasons to be tired in a way that I do not.
So, in this age of a new pandemic and old injustice, let me get ready for the day. There is work to be done, but first, a walk and some time for contemplation and prayer.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tired and Weary

i wanted to post a poem by Burkard. been reading & thinking about his poems, him, again.
& i guess i’m thinking of Michael’s love for notebooks, the mess & flaw & goodness of them. writing without trying to make a publishable thing. i still need that. i continue to need that. and something outside of social media, too, as much as twitter has become a blog of sorts for me. but yes, outside of that, outside of publicness & retweets & likes & “hearts,” all that. a more private space. meditative.
& i guess i was afraid of posting on LJ again bc i’m nervous that it might just go under, go defunct, go away, gone, at any moment, i don’t know. should i be saving those posts? or should i practice letting them go? my wild ephemera? my internet scraps?
Chen Chen, from the archives :: How did I know an angel from denial? / It took me years. / It took me years.

This week has had a couple things dovetail very nicely into each other and it has me thinking about the purpose and approach of the things we make. On Tuesday, we had our panel discussion with Bad Art: Kitsch, Camp, & Craft artists, many of whom wander in installation pieces and non-traditional forms–ie the screenprinted underwear on the 2nd Floor, or the giant dog made out of recycled plastic bags. It came up a couple of times: the idea of being able to watch how audiences interact with such installations and when presented with such work. I was, at the same time, working on my first freelance lesson writing project–for which I had chosen installation art as the subject. (out of many different options in the arts and humanities.) But I spent a few hours doing some research and looking up good examples, and writing about the ways we experience installations, particularly outside gallery/museum settings. A friend talks often how she likes to make the sort of work that is part social experiment–to see what lathers, to witness how the viewer responds.
As writers, it seems a very different thing. I get super awkward when people start talking about my work and how they respond to it. There’s a distance that the page allows between artist and audience. When they creep too close, I just get weird. But we do still like to hear something make contact, just maybe from a distance. A new dgp author told me this week that she had one of my older poems tacked to her wall and it made me so happy on a day that was feeling especially hopeless in terms of feeling like anyone actually reads what I write–anywhere…here, in poems, in books, on social media. But at readings, I usually tried to get away as quickly as I could after reading. When I used to do craft shows, people paging through my zines, my collages, my prints, similarly made me uncomfortable and I wanted to run away, even though I wanted them to look and buy of course. I usually don’t go to the openings of the shows I’m in. When we used to do Library general shows and I kind of had to, I was especially skittish and spent a lot of time hiding in the bathroom and escaping downstairs with my plate of snacks. And we all want to feel like their is an audience and interest in our work. Even at the panel this week, though I had my black velvet pieces in the show, I was more comfortable just being moderator than talking much about my practice.
I guess, moreso, I love building worlds, but how and when you encounter them is up to you.
Kristy Bowen, art, audience, and distance

It is impossible not to delight in the near two hundred pages of American poet John Yau’s latest, Genghis Chan on Drums (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), a book that follows nearly a dozen poetry collections across more than forty years, as well as numerous chapbooks, works of fiction, criticism, collaborations and monographs. This is the first of his titles I’ve gone through, and I’m immediately struck by the clarity of the direct statements in his poems, especially the ways in which Yau returns years’ worth of racist comments, microaggressions and injustices back in the most powerful ways possible. The poem “On Being Told that I Don’t Look and Act Chinese,” opens: “I am deeply grateful for your good opinion / I am honestly indignant / I am, I confess, a little discouraged / I am inclined to agree with you / I am incredulous / I am in a chastened mood / I am far more grieved than I can tell you / I am naturally overjoyed [.]” There is a confidence and a strength here, one he knows when and how to play, push or hold back, from a poet who clearly knows exactly what it is he’s doing, and what tools he’s working with.
Structured via nine sections of poems, plus a prose poem in prologue, and two poems in epilogue, Yau appears to be engaged in multiple conversations, including a section of poems in which he responds to the previous administration, including the former American President, responding to history and culture as it occurs. “There are no words to express / the horrible hour that happened,” he writes, to open “The President’s Third Telegram,” “Journalists, like all fear, should be / attacked while doing their jobs [.]” Weaving in elements of culture and current events, much of which touch upon larger issues of fearmongering and racist dog-whistles, Yau’s is a very human and considered lyric sense of fairness and justice, composing poems that push back against dangerous rhetoric, outdated or deliberately obscured language and racist ideas and ideologies. In his own way, Yau works to counter the ways in which language is weaponized against marginalized groups, attempting to renew human consideration by showcasing how inhuman and destructive language has become. “We regret that we are unable to correct the matter of your disappointment,” he writes, as part of “Choose Two of the Following,” “We quaff mugs of delight while recounting the details of your latest inconvenience [.]”
rob mclennan, John Yau, Genghis Chan on Drums

I have a new poem, ‘Here is Bernie Saunders in Mittens’ on The Friday Poem.
The piece is a bit different from my usual stuff, which generally, although not always, takes the form of a shortish lyric poem. I wrote it around the time of President Biden’s inauguration, when the image of Bernie Saunders became a viral meme. I was intrigued by how quickly the image was manipulated in a myriad of ways, and how responses to these internet memes were received and interpreted. The subsequent down-to-earth responses to the viral images from Saunders and the woman who made the mittens were in stark contrast to the madness around the election and the insurgency at the Capitol. I’m pleased the poem has found a home on the excellent TFP, with a lovely astute introduction from the editors. You can read the poem here.
Roy Marshall, New poems online

The radio
woke us up this morning with news
of another rising wave of contagion,
a winter of pestilence and affliction—
your dark attendants, your retinue
and signature. But tonight,
around a fire in a neighbor’s backyard,
we are invited by a shaman to make
of our bodies a field shook with lightning;
to clear a space for the ancestors to enter
with their gifts of remembrance and healing.
What we pass from hand to hand around
the circle: not just flower or stone, not twig
with its tip of glowing ember.
Loosen the heart, and the tongue
might follow. Loosen the fist and the hand,
and the towering pines lean a little more
away from our small houses on the ground.
Luisa A. Igloria, Dear rumor of recurrence,

The recent death of poet Robert Bly brought to mind his book Leaping Poetry; I have this edition of the famous little book, which I bought in Grand Rapids Michigan in 1978.
My dear friend Ariel Dawson recommended this book to me. I have read it many times–my copy’s pretty beat up. A 1975 book of his prose poems influenced my thinking about poetry’s many forms, too; I love my copy of The Morning Glory: Prose Poems. The thing I love about this book is its open-endedness, by which I mean that Bly embraces ambiguity in poems by suggesting readers–and writers–examine the gaps, the leaps, the surprises that encourage curiosity. Free associations into the unknown can lead to obscure and unreadable poetry; but they may also offer a way in to the unconscious, the emotive, the innate–what, in previous decades, was called the “primitive” and associated with non-Western religion and ritual song-poems. When I was first writing poetry more seriously–as a craft, an art–Bly’s little book helped me to reflect on what I was doing. It gave me new direction.
The Morning Glory poems moved me into researching what poems feel like on and off the page and how poets have used forms in different ways through thousands of years. Haibun, for example.
In subsequent years, I have read persuasive criticisms of Bly’s translations and of some of the concepts in Leaping Poetry; certainly there is much one can criticize concerning Bly–because he wrote so prolifically and took a certain joy, I think, in standing out. I made a point of going to his readings and presentations when I could, just to hear what his latest enthusiasms would be. (I must admit I never liked the way he read his own poems, but I often liked the poems themselves.) I am grateful for his work and have been recalling going to hear him and reading his poems over the years, discussing them with friends.
The book itself is an old, dear friend. I think it’s time to read it again. Each time anew.
Ann E. Michael, Robert Bly

I feel like my blog posts have been especially flimsy of late, which frustrates me, because there is actually a lot going on in my life, but I am not at liberty to discuss most of it. Just know that I am having numerous internal and external meltdowns and yet I am forced to blog about things like tiny popcorn and bad contact lens prescriptions because I can’t tell you what’s really going on. There are days when I just want to move to a hot, friendly Southern state and get a job as a friendly receptionist in a car dealership and live out the rest of my life in relative peace instead of struggling with the relentless and ever-increasing madness of working in an inner-city hospital during a pandemic. In addition, I’ve been experiencing the painful realization that I’m not some big, leader-y career woman. At heart, I’m just a friendly receptionist. I didn’t ask for advancement. I had advancement thrust onto me, and it turns out I’m not a fan. I don’t see what’s wrong with simply being competent at what you do and sticking with it, but apparently no one can leave well enough alone these days.
Kristen McHenry, Choke Me in the Shallow Waters

The helter skelter of others’ sweltering moods discolor our temperament from time to time.
It’s like catching someone’s negativity as if it’s a nasty cold—
our sanguinity suffering sniffles, unable to shake the aches of another’s rage.
Low-grade fever and chills inherited from indifference.
Combative body language invoking unusual drowsiness or lack of appetite.
Political aggressions and conspiratorial digressions causing congestion.
Rich Ferguson, Aches of Another’s Rage

A poem which is a list of remembered former boyfriends turns out to be not exactly a joke at all, but the beginning of something which is both playful and seriously important. […]
I remember hearing her reading it for the first time at The Chemic in Leeds, I remember the way this phrase stopped me in my tracks and stayed with me ever since
.how we lay twice a week in each other’s beds
like two unlit candles
and I remember also the impact of the growing seriousness of the poem’s long incantation, as though the poet were realising something for the first time, learning something essential, or, at least, knowing she had to find out what it meant. Over time I heard her read more and more of the poems at various venues, becoming also aware of the way she was understanding how they challenged her audience even as she challenged herself from the moment it all turned on that one phrase are you judging me yet?
John Foggin, My kind of poetry: Kim Moore’s “All the men I never married”

Well, I can’t tell you my big poetry news yet…but I will post it here (and on social media) tomorrow!
But in the meantime, thank you to Rogue Agent for publishing my poem “Enchantment” in their latest issue, which also has poems by friends Ronda Broatch and Jen Karetnick. It’s a very spooky fairy tale poem, which I thought worked well with this photo of winter apples – which always look so bleak and beautiful to me – and it’s also going to be in my upcoming book from Alternating Current Press, Fireproof.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Poem “Enchantment” Up on Rogue Agent, Winter Scenes and Surviving the Holiday During the 2nd Plague Year, and Big News Tomorrow!

So really, it’s thanks to sandwiches that I’m feeling more myself.
Also thanks to reading this by Adam Zagajewski in his essays, Slight Exaggeration, where he talks about how art shouldn’t remove itself from what is “painful, even ugly, that every quest for clarity, radiance, must proceed through full consciousness of what constrains us. This might be one definition of rapture: rapture means to forget pain, ugliness, suffering, to focus only on beauty. But purely rapturous works provoke only my opposition or indifference. Precisely the endless battle between heaviness, suffering, and illumination, elevation, forms art’s essence.”
You see, I had sort of pledged to meself that I would try to keep this space filled with more joy, more radiance, more goodness, and more uplift! And I still do pledge this very thing. But I also know that to come to something more artful, art-full, that it’s going to need to proceed through that “full consciousness of what constrains us.” Otherwise, it’s just gonna be fake anyway. There’s just no way you can live in this time, (or really any time ever) without experiencing the flip side in one way or another. As AZ recognizes, when we’re only ever fed joy or rapture, it is going to start feeling not so great. And I don’t think we need to belabour things, but just acknowledge the constraints, the black clouds/clods of whatever visiting despair, so that we can get back to the business of uplifting one another, back to joy, rapture, radiance, and yes, fun.
So yah, the black dog came, I fed it a sandwich. That appeased. And here we are.
Shawna Lemay, Sandwiches and Radiance

I don’t remember much of my ancient Greek, but a pandemic project has been to study some of the modern language. When we made our first trip to Greece, I was completely engrossed in sounding out all the Modern Greek signage; and at ancient archaeological sites, I would spend a lot of time looking at bits of inscriptions and was thrilled when I could actually understand a name or a word, but frustrated that I couldn’t communicate much at all. Now I do at least one lesson a day on Duolingo, often two. My first uninterrupted “streak” ended after 200 days or so when, somehow, I simply forgot; today will be day 320 of the next streak. As I wrote earlier in the pandemic, it’s a lazy and not terribly effective way to study a language if you really want to become fluent; I still believe you’ve got to put in the hard and boring work of memorizing conjugations and lists and grammatical rules, and I haven’t done much of that. But I know a lot more than I did when I started, even if I’ll still be tongue-tied if we ever make it to Greece again. I’d be a lot faster now at knowing what I was looking at in signage, be able to read a menu, ask some questions, be polite, but I’m not sure how much useful material I’ve actually learned, and very much doubt I’d understand much of what was said to me, at least at first.
What has kept me at it, I think, is this strange desire to be in the presence of those ancient letters every day and live in their world, which is not the world of Roman letters, is not at all English or French or German — though those languages all owe a great debt to Greek — but a set of symbols, descended from the alphabet of the seafaring Phoenicians, that have been used to write the Greek language since the 8th or 9th century B.C. That, alone, is incredible to me.
Obviously these letters have been used to represent a lot of things over the years, especially in mathematics and science. And now, we’ve got virus variants named for Greek letters, so that geographical places can avoid the stigma of attachment, and subsequent blame. I wasn’t too upset about Alpha, or Delta — both of which are overused letters in fraternity names, and therefore seemed like fair game — but Omicron? Omicron rather upset me. I like the word itself, and am very fond of the letter, which is so…round, simple, elemental. It’s one of the few letters of the Greek alphabet that remained entirely unchanged in the Roman, precisely because of that simplicity and the universal necessity of its sound.
I had better steel myself: we’re probably in for a slew of variants, and Greek variant names. For me, though, omicron will remain first and foremost a letter, a sound, and a form: the universal circle. Something beautiful, written by human hands, almost forever.
Beth Adams, In Defense of Omicron

So, there we were at the hardware store late on a Friday afternoon at the end of the long week after Thanksgiving, facing the same question we’d faced all those years ago when we were buying a stand for a tree for a different house and a different kind of holiday than the ones we now have.
Our choices? A cheap plastic stand for $19.99 and the most solid-looking, no-plastic, old-fashioned tree stand I’ve ever seen for $70.00. There were several left of the cheap ones, and only one expensive one. The box for the expensive one had “Lifetime” printed in large red letters on every side of it.
What is a lifetime? I wondered. How can we possibly we know what we’ll need for a lifetime?
I thought about how so many young families now talk about their desire for “a forever home,” a concept I don’t remember from my own early days of homeownership. Although I lived in one house from the ages of 4 to 18, I’ve lived in and owned five different homes in the past 30 years. I’ve been married three times. I really couldn’t tell you how many lifetimes I’ve lived. Even though Cane and I love the house we now live in, we know we could well be somewhere else ten years from now. Our holidays could (likely will) be different again, our health could be different, our financial situation could be different. We might not have the desire or capacity for the kind of tree that needs a heavy-duty stand. We know, in ways we couldn’t have known when we bought our last stand together, that ten years from now one or both of us could again be facing the tree question alone. Ten years, or months, or days from now, everything could be different.
So, what to do? How to spend our money? What future to bet on? I suppose that for many people, perhaps most young people, a tree stand is just a tree stand, and buying one is only another item on a long list of holiday to-dos, but sometimes, late on an early-December Friday afternoon in the aisle of a neighborhood hardware store, for a couple of more old-than-young people who know that loss and change are the warp and weft of every life, a tree stand can also be an embodiment of faith and hope and love.
We bought the good one.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Lifetime guarantee

That’s not the lunch bell —
it’s time for silence,

the old monk told
the visitors.
Tom Montag, TEN OLD MONK POEMS (44)

September 12, 2021September 13, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 36

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 or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, reflections on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and other losses; spiritual and creative renewal; and more. Enjoy.

And so, the book of the dead and the living are opened, and studied. For reckoning, for reconciliation, for release. The mother swirls watery, a whirlpool in slow motion now. The dead cling to rafts riding whitewater. Me–rafted, too–I wonder. In the oldest sense. At how short it is. How pointlessly brutal, when it is also the unutterable holy name embodied.
JJS, Days of Awe

Many hours I have watched this boy at sleep, wondering at him. A few hours old, having gravely observed every bright or moving object in the room, after studying my face with his deep, wet eyes, having suckled his first milk and bellowed at being cleaned up and weighed, he fell asleep in my arms. I had felt him asleep for some time within the womb, but now I could watch the drowsy process. Now he breathes. In and out. I could not count the minutes I’ve spent watching him; minutes and hours seem extravagant, faithless, artificial things. But breath! And the slight twitching behind the eyelids, and the pulsing fontanel! Only during his sleep could I appreciate these things.
For when he was awake, he was constantly active. In an instant, he could crawl. Another instant, and he ran. Then he acquired speech, the product of which he loved. Talking is what he’s been put on earth to do. For many years the only times I did not hear his voice chattering in the background of my daily life were when he was at school and when he was asleep.
The world opened itself to him. Cautious, sensitive, he was always secure in his understanding that the world is eternally novel, interesting, and eager to receive his attentions. In the mornings he would tell me his dreams. Even sleep was entertaining; he had few nightmares. He felt safe in the cosmos.
I knew that someday he’d meet the bully, the unfair teacher, the irredeemable tragedy, and wondered how he would face such a thing. For years, he came to me, discussed the behavior of other children, talked about evil characters in books and movies, showed me what is wonderful in his life. “Look, Mama,” he said a thousand times, “Look at this new kind of acorn. Look at how the corn is blowing. Look at that big truck. Look—I think that little girl is crying. Look at my drawing. Look at me, Mama—I’m balancing. I’m a pirate. I’m Peter Pan!”
Buildings are collapsing, Mama.
Look, don’t look.
He’s nearly thirteen. No incipient beard, no hairiness or sweaty armpits yet, no break in the tenor voice. He rolls his eyes at his peers’ hormonal hijinks, the schoolboy crushes, won’t attend a dance. But the time is coming—he knows it. He’s quieter, gets lost in books, stands out in the meadow with a whippy stick, slashing at goldenrod and sumac. He lies in bed after the lights are out. He’s thinking. It keeps him awake, kept him awake even before last Tuesday.
He just has more to think about now.
Ann E. Michael, 20 years ago

He carried a small body
and then the next
outside the village,
shoulder ripped by pain, a part of brain telling:
a cage of warm bones
now dead wood,
noisy, defying the lashing flames
like little boys who dart out of a mother’s attention.
Uma Gowrishankar, Home

Hearing my son howl in grief in his bedroom last night was the most terrible sound I have ever heard. It will haunt me my live long life but we are emotionally messy people. He is bereft and I am holding together to absorb what I can of his pain and grief. My son took this photo of Sam asleep in the backseat of his 57 Chevy.
Tomorrow Page heads to his father’s to the orchard and the lake and then I can let myself fall apart to wail my own hurt. Think of us when you can and when you can.
Rebecca Loudon, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Where is our common altar to pray on a day like this? Who is our common god for healing? Maybe the only thing that can save us now is to look at and examine our bodies: “This is our hand, this is our leg, these are our eyes.” We must start from the nil of our common humanity. Not in a sentimental way, but in the way when you get lost and look for a point of recognition in the landscape, a mountain, a lake or a river where you can start walking from.
And that walking will be long.
Magda Kapa, 9/11

A cosmic day is longer
than any of our ordinary
days: delirium of time
ticking in expanding circles,
distributing the slow-built
honey of the universe.
Telephone coil, endless
transmitting chain drive,
celestial ladder: the bounded
seas and rivers’ continuous
movements shadowing
the heavens, partitioning
these puny hours. What
is the actual length
of wars, of the track
by which both soldiers
and prisoners return?
Luisa A. Igloria, The Oldest Light in the Universe

The Nick of Time is a book of mortalities, writing her book-length suite of prose poem sequences and short bursts, each of which are constructed as collages of strands that form new quilts of meaning. “The difference of our bodies makes for different velocities.” she writes, as part of the final poem in the collection, “AGING,” the final poem of the suite “REHEARSING THE SYMPTOMS,” “But gravity / is always attractive, and my higher speed. Cannot outrun the inner / fright we seem made of. Though I gesticulate broadly. As in a silent / movie. Running after the train, waving goodbye.” As one could speak of her writing at any point across her lengthy publishing history, Waldrop writes on language, reading and perception, and the ways through which we think of the relationships between and amid meaning. The poems that shape to form The Nick of Time also incorporate and investigate concepts such as America, mortality and aging, crafting each poem as a furthering of her decades-long investigations into language, theory and philosophy.
rob mclennan, Rosmarie Waldrop, The Nick of Time

It seems these past weeks I have moved even further away from myself in an attempt to know how to move forward. It is true that death brings change, even deaths that do not spawn grief, but end it. I am “over it”. In a way. Past it, certainly. And now what?
We can do this, you know. We can own our own stories, or just give them up entirely. And we can let go of the need to dictate the stories of others.
We don’t need to be “a survivor” with a constructed story arc that makes us the hero. If we “win” all the battles. We can just live in world with no need to construct a dramaturgy that will bring everything to a satisfying end.
That sets us up to fail.
While avoiding writing, either publicly or privately, I have been thinking again about “whose story”. I have been thinking again about my choice to erase myself from the tidy narrative in my mother’s obituary (which described a woman I never knew): to take that name that is not my name, was my name, out of that paragraph with “[…] is survived by”. Because the truth is that the person who wore that name, who lived that life, did not survive but was born anew, and mothered by so many others.
We can do this. We can give up the need to carry a through-line through the days. Can’t we?
Today I will lecture on Antigone. Creon’s story. And I will ask the students to read the play, translated from a translation that was translated from a translation and handed down through cultures that have come and gone, and were born anew. I will ask them: Whose story is this? Why carry it? Will you somehow make it yours? How?
I learned yesterday that Antigone means “against-birth”.
Ren Powell, The Queen is Dead. Long Live the Queen.

Reading Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss, I recall my life in Athens, Georgia in the early 80s and the punk rock scene that was drifting toward the New Wave/Alternative synthesizer heavy music of Brain Eno, Bowie, U2, and Depeche Mode by the time I left for Spain.
Seuss’s poem [I can’t say I loved punk when punk was contagious] brought me back to the times my friends and I drove to New York for a weekend to hear our boyfriends open for bigger bands at CBGB, the Mudd Club, and the Peppermint Lounge.
Unlike Seuss, I was more of a voyeur of the punk scene, a curious suburban college girl who wanted to graduate from uni and study in Spain. For a while, I got sidetracked by punk’s promise of anarchy and rebellious art making, but I never had the need to ‘escape from punk’s thesis.” That was a forgone conclusion with my conservative, Catholic father hovering in the background of my psyche.
Seuss, raised by a single mother, was the real deal.
The 80’s in Athens at UGA was steeped in systemic misogyny that I bumped up against in my creative life, although at the time, I thought this bumping up was due to my own failures as a writer and human being.
I tried to get into Coleman Barks’s creative writing poetry class, but when I approached him at his office he practically shut the door in my face.
Instead, I tagged along with the boys in the band, read their chapbooks, gathered at their art openings, and attended theater presentations at the Rat and Duck, named for the rats running along the ceiling above and having to duck from falling plaster.
Christine Swint, Reading Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss

At this time of year, as every September, my thoughts return to the classroom. Questions such as ‘Can I still teach?’ and ‘Do I still have it?’ are perhaps less useful than ‘Let’s see what happens!’ I think this may apply to reading and writing poetry as well. Earlier this year, I completely lost my confidence in my ability to do both (just one of the reasons for taking a break from blogging). But while I did really lose my confidence, I mean, really, really lose it, it wouldn’t be true to say I gave up completely on both. I found myself re-reading some favourite poets, as well as new work by poets I admire. (More on these in future posts.) And gradually, without really planning it, words began to take shape again, as they always do, on scraps of papers and edges of envelopes, things that may or may not become something, who knows. Let’s see what happens!
I want to inhabit this open state of mind (for teaching, for reading, for writing) as long as possible, even though I know the new term is going to be tough and long, as it always is. The past, including the poems I’ve already written and sent off into the world, aren’t really any use to me, least of all what I laughingly call my career or reputation.
Anthony Wilson, In search of beginner’s mind

I’ve been trying this summer, at least once a week to have more writerly focused content–at least one post per week devoted to solely that, and I find I still have a lot to say on projects and my own process and history, but today, as I sat down on this final day before plunging into a new semester, I found I had nothing at all to say. The world feels heavy and I feel uninspired, so this may be part of it. My focus was everywhere last week, and nowhere good, so while I usually jot down a few ideas for posts, nothing stuck. But then maybe that subject matter is a post in itself. How heavy the world feels and how that heaviness makes it harder to write.
There was some buzz I was barely following on Twitter (because I still haven’t figured out how anyone follows anything on that platform), but the gist was a that a poet seems to have been talking about how poetry matters to no one but poets. Which then was taken as an offense, by, you know, poets. Poets who have a lot of words, thus much buzzing. I’ve been scheduling tweets in advance, so don’t hang out there as much as I do on that old dinosaur facebook and instagram. But I can’t say that the initial poster is wrong, as book sales and public interest in poetry, particularly academic poetry, attest. But then, she is probably wrong about poetry in general, which seems to be having, as I mentioned a few posts ago, a “moment.” (Not my poetry but someone’s poetry.) Poets like to buzz about things like this every so often, and no one is really wrong or right. No, it seems a hard lot when the thing you are most passionate about is mostly ignored in a world where very few people read at all, even fewer read “literature” and even fewer than that, poems. Someone will usually come along and say that poets need to be more (insert accessible, political…etc.) Or that it’s our fault that we’ve wandered do far down this path–our own navel gazing, inaccessibility, cliquishness, lack of audience.
Kristy Bowen, oh, poetry….

How many ways might a scarab threaten death?
How many ways might a poet turn accomplice?
Charlotte Hamrick, Scarabs Crawl Over Poetry Discourse

wet morning
the bin lorry is reversing
in welsh
Jim Young [no title]

I returned home to find a couple poems published in two different anthologies printed by the Australian press, Pure Slush. While this isn’t the first time I’ve published with Pure Slush, my response to doing so is consistently positive. Editor Matt Potter is a delight to correspond with as he’s not only quick to respond to writers, he’s thorough. This is one of the few publications that I’m required to sign a contract for and even its turnaround is timely and efficient.
So I thank Matt and Pure Slush for publishing “One Hundred Bucks for Public Radio” in the Friendship issue, and “The Goods” in the 25 Miles from Here collection. I’m also happy for my writing friend Larry Wright who also published his poem “Lost Boys” and “On Rattlesnakes” in these same anthologies.
As for summer, it is all too quickly coming to a close. I am trying, really trying, to settle into the groove of another school year and winter ahead. But my dreams taking up greater space. They are bright in color and I’m more restless than ever to chase them.
Kersten Christianson, Spinning Into September

It seems I have started to write essays. Why now? I’m feeling an escalating pressure to write down my thoughts, both because the moment feels so urgent, and because I want to remember them. And really, who knows how long I will be able to write? Carpe diem, as they say.
Of course, I’m reading essays too. I’ve been re-reading some of the wonderful essays of Virginia Woolf and I have Zadie Smiths Feel Free: Essays on board. And I’ve just ordered a forthcoming anthology of lyric essays by contemporary essayists, titled A Harp in the Stars.
Risa Denenberg, Getting Your Daily Fix of Culture

I write
so I can
remember
what I wrote,
the old monk
says.
Tom Montag, THREE OLD MONK POEMS (6)

Just like this beautiful harbor seal represents a creature that lives both below water and above it, we writers have to re-enter regular life after spending a week just devoted to nature and writing, going to sleep when the sun goes down, no internet or television or social media to distract you…and then coming home. Not that I hate coming home – fluffy cats and hummingbirds awaited – but it does take a little while to shake off the glamour of small-town island life. Unpacking, getting ready for Glenn’s surgery on Monday, responding to a ton of e-mails, catching up on what’s been going on in the news – well, it’s not exactly the stuff of sparkles and rainbows. But in a way, being a writer during regular life is a more important practice than doing it under special circumstances, right? Because that’s most of life.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The End of the Residency, Re-Entry, and Prepping for Surgery

We went away for a few days last week to my happy place, Ocean Shores, where I am always drawn to when I am in crisis, in need of a deep rest, or on the precipice of some major change in my life. While I don’t always immediately find the answers I am looking for there, it’s always been a place of peace and healing for me. I need the reminder that there is something larger in the world than my minuscule life, that there is a roaring, shining, glorious ecosystem with a thundering heart that goes on without me and will continue to do so even after I pass. Besides all that metaphorical stuff, I am just a plain old sucker for ticky-tacky beach stuff. I love all of the souvenir shops with their bright, cheap, silly wares. I love salt water taffy, kites, renting scooters, and all of the other touristy entrapments. It all delights me and makes me feel uncharacteristically light and care-free. And my creative block was lifted by the lilt of the sea, and I started a new poem for the first time in ages.
Kristen McHenry, Adventuring Practice, The Lilt of the Sea, Commercial Collusion

I’ve had moments of beginning to process this experience of going back to the classroom, but it’s something that feels huge and that I cannot begin to see clearly yet. I don’t think I can really describe what it was, but I will try a little.
It’s a cliche, but it wasn’t unlike riding a bike or skating after a long time of not biking or skating. I felt a little wobbly at first, but then I got my balance back and the wheels flew and it felt so right. Righter than anything has felt for years and years and years. It was hard and fun and exhausting. I have to think so hard when I am teaching–constantly taking in information and processing/assessing it and deciding what my next move needs to be, often in mere seconds. It works my body, too, in a way it hasn’t worked in so long; at one point, I realized sweat was running down my face inside my mask, and I was ravenous by the time I got to lunch. But at the same time, while I was in it, I wasn’t aware that I was thinking hard or that I was sweaty or hungry or thirsty. I was entirely present and engaged and energized and calm.
At the risk of sounding corny or over-wrought, I will say that it felt like my whole being was vibrating, maybe singing. I was very much in the state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow, one in which you become so involved in what you are doing that you can lose all sense of time and of yourself. Being able to experience flow states is, according to Csikszentmihalyi, essential to happiness. While I certainly had moments of flow in my earlier teaching experiences, I don’t remember it ever feeling quite like it did this past week. […]
I don’t know what I will be able to do with the understandings that are only just starting to develop. I’m seeing things about teaching, learning, creativity, struggle, work, and rest that I haven’t really understood before. But I’m grateful to be having them, even as they raise some difficult feelings. As I have experienced so much more joy in the past week at work than I had in all of last year, it’s been hard not to also feel anger and regret. Part of me is furious about how much suffering there is in our schools for both students and staff. In our world. We don’t have to do things the way we do them; our systems are a result of our priorities and our choices. If we truly valued our children the way we like to say we do, schools would look and function in radically different ways than they currently do.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Well, that was a fast week

Regular reader of this blog will have been grooving to the music of Pollyanna recently. I met her via Instagram earlier this year and I have been enjoying her music [and her lyrics] since. I can heartily recommend the LP Polly and the Feathers – it’s fantastic. But enough from me, let’s hear from the star herself!
Music, poetry or film? Which speaks the most to you?
Obviously, I’d say music, but as my favourite genre is songs, I guess it’s a little bit of poetry and literature too.
Why music?
Songs are both verbal and non-verbal. This is what I like about music: it addressesanother part of the brain, more emotional (or more mathematical?) even when you can’t put these emotions in words. What I like with songs is that it is also words, but words are not primary in it. First you get the sound, then the melodies/harmonies and then the words. It’s a bit less intellectual, it doesn’t need to be sophisticated, it’s more humble than “hard poetry”, I’d say.
What do you want to evoke in the reader/listener?
I want my songs to get into people’s mind and heart, and see if we can resonate together. I’m looking for some sort of verbal and non-verbal communication. I believe songs can heal, and can make people feel loved. I also have in mind the courses I had about Virginia Woolf in college. We were studying The Waves and streams of consciousness, and how literature and poetry were also an attempt to find some unity in the world that is, otherwise, a collection of sometimes contradictory perceptions. I believe songs can provide that feeling of unity. Especially when you play an instrument: body and soul are then working together, which is probably something I need. Maybe even for my mental health.
Paul Tobin, POLLYANNA: THE INTERVIEW

I’ll be swamped with teaching work soon, but with all this in mind, I just spent some time on Goodreads, giving stars and occasionally brief reviews to books I read this summer. This is an especial kindness to small press authors. None of us can afford to buy every book we might like by every author deserving more attention, but here’s a reminder to do what you can–Goodreads and Amazon reviews, social media praise, library requests, putting new books on your syllabi, whatever sounds doable for you. That circulation of dollars and attention rarely puts much money in a small-press author’s pocket, but it does enable indies to stay afloat, therefore publishing good writers who haven’t hit it big (yet) and keeping the literary world more lively, quirky, and full of risk. It’s much easier for a writer to place the next book when the previous one has done decently. And, of course, love gives a writer heart. This pandemic would have hurt worse without the company of books.
Lesley Wheeler, Pandemic books, like pandemics, keep coming

My reflective practice begins with me writing my journals. I have two journals at the minute – one in which I record my everyday life and observations, one in which I make notes specifically on the novel and also reflect on my own feelings and thoughts around it. Because I really, really struggle with anxiety and, where writing is concerned, this manifests as imposter syndrome, this journalling around the big project I’m working on helps me to pour out all the angst and address it with my rational brain, before I spiral into a proper pit of anxiety. I then read some buddhist lessons or texts (I’ve just finished re-reading Zen Mind, beginner’s Mind) , then I read at least five poems from whatever poetry collection I’m reading and a chapter of whatever novel I’m reading at that time. I drink my coffee, I eat my marmite on toast. Usually there is some chasing of the cat down the garden at this point, trying to extract some poor dead creature from his mouth. […]

One day this week I did not manage to write anything at all, I just arranged and rearranged post it notes. It knocked my confidence a bit because I can feel the month slipping away from me already and I want to make the most of it. The next day I managed 2000 words, so it all evens out. Writing a novel is not an A to Z process. But I am loving it. I am LOVING it. My anxiety is vastly reduced, I feel content and happy and like I’m ‘working well’. When I get into the writing groove in a project it is a phenomenal feeling. It’s like my brain has been working on this project for a good long time and now it’s ready to bring it out from the bottom of the cupboard to show me. I would not change this for the world. And, weirdly, I find myself more productive on the other work stuff I’m doing. I’m enjoying it more because I am being true to myself, I am prioritising my own creative practice and putting my faith in it.
Wendy Pratt, On Sabbatical: The First Week

Sometimes the Light inside of me is so strong and bright that even the stones by my feet have voices. Life opens up like a present, like a gift, and so it is. Listen to the wind, and listen to birds, for they understand the wind. Unwrap the gift. Is this too fast for you? I can go slower.
James Lee Jobe, Unwrap the gift.

What a gorgeous holiday weekend! I did my reading outside, and today is the Labor Day Parade. The blue sky is mostly lifting my personal blues, despite the simmering frustration and ongoing communal grief. I surprised myself by submitting some poems yesterday. Others are coming out this fall. But everything still feels suspended and slightly unreal to me. It helps to prick my fingers on coneflower seeds, sprinkling some on the earth for next year while tidying the flowerbeds. I leave some up all year for the birds. Next year, it’s possible the blackberry lilies and coneflowers and wild violets will take over the universe of my back yard, while lilies of the valley march down into the shared valley between houses. In the meantime, I do hope walking and gardening will undo my crankiness.
Kathleen Kirk, White Noise

In the meantime, I’m returning to Krista Tippet’s Becoming Wise. One section that popped out for me today goes like this:
“Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day.”
So I guess I’m a bit of a believer in the church of folding towels. (Of course as the recipient of kind attentions, I’m going to be biased). Folding the towels with sweetness won’t change the world maybe, but as the saying goes, it might change yours.
I don’t know what your bandwidth is these days, so to speak. I know that mine has fluctuated more wildly than it ever has. And then, we all live in various parts of the world, and that changes a lot. Where I am, though, things are really not cool, and getting worse.
But I’ve been thinking about my strategy in my garden. Which is to plant enough flowers so that no one notices the weeds. And in my house, we put up enough art that when someone comes over with some luck they don’t notice the dust. (Easier to do when you’re married to an artist of course). I’m tired and I sure as hell am not sleeping well. But. I think I can plant some bloody flowers.
Shawna Lemay, I Need More Grace than I Thought

Endosymbiosis is the evolutionary phenomenon whereby one organism lives within another for the mutual benefit of both. Our mitochondria that provide us with our all energy need via the oxidative metabolism of sugars are derived from endosymbiont bacteria. Chloroplasts that convert sunlight to energy in plants are also derived from bacterial endosymbionts. At some stage in the future we may be engineered to host bacterial symbionts that can metabolise iron or sulphur or nitrogen to supplement our dwindling energy sources.
The Extreme Politics of Adaptive Endosymbiosis presents a combination of high-definition 10K video, industrial audio, and live vocal performance developed specifically for the giant LED screens of The Lab, Adelaide, South Australia. Source material includes my videos depicting dystopian cities, damaged habitats, and readapted life forms; massively re-processed audio samples of natural and urban environments linked with new video animations; and text written especially for this provocation.
Ian Gibbins, The Extreme Politics of Adaptive Endosymbiosis

–At the time, it seemed like a one time apocalyptic event, a day blazed in our memories. As the pandemic has unfolded, I’ve reflected on the difference with a slow motion apocalypse, compared to a September 11 kind of event.
–But as I’ve reflected, Sept. 11 has also triggered its own slow motion apocalypse: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror and all the ways it transformed individual countries and the world, on and on I could go. I feel like I had a bigger list at some point, but I can’t pull it up now.
–As we look back, I’m struck by all the opportunities lost along the way, all sorts of opportunities.
–And of course, I wonder what we’re missing now. When the next apocalypse roars, we will look back and see what? Will it be the apocalypse we’re expecting (then, mushroom clouds and nuclear war, now all sorts of climate change triggered awfulness)? History tells us that the answer will be both yes and no.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, September 11, Twenty Years Later

As we look upward with our confusion, the sky will be clear, light shimmering as it catches little particles. It has blinked and renewed itself.
Matisse looked up and saw, in his 1944 cut-out, Icarus falling from the sky with a shattered red heart. It was World War II, a pilot was falling from the lumunious blue sky. The sky then renewed itself.
Simone Weil said of the sea: ships are wrecked and sailors are drowned. The sea causes grief. But that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.
Jill Pearlman, That Crystalline 9/11 Sky

I’ll never be too old or too young to understand how a tombstone is like an other-worldly paperweight. It holds a part of the dead to the earth, and in our hearts, as what remains of the spirit flies away.
Rich Ferguson, Untitled