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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

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

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

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

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

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

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

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

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

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

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

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

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

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

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

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

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

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

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

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

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

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

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

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

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

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

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

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

Robin Gow, 5/31

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

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

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

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

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

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

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

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

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

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

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

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

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

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

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

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

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

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

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

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

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

This week: becoming a living ghost, getting football fans to recite poetry, advocating for stupidity and vagueness, letting chaos turn to insight, and other adventures. Enjoy!

Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.

Dale Favier, A Compost Prayer

let’s wait for the accident to get cleared out let’s lie about our diagnoses let’s watch amerikka’s lunatic leaders preach like Aimee Semple McPherson back from the dead in a white shirt flapping her wings I dropped the script on the floor they gave me a loaded gun I slithered on my belly toward my car then stopped in the marram grass don’t forget your permission slips don’t forget the right side of my mouth all my teeth aching

Rebecca Loudon, Deconstructing the panic

In March, traveling in Ireland, our guide mentioned almost in passing that the Irish were proud to have had a poet lead them. She meant Seamus Heaney’s friend Michael D. Higgins, the poet and sociologist who served as President of Ireland from 2011 to 2025, and who was known to quote Neruda in speeches and has written movingly about the duty of the imagination in public life. Our guide said it with a kind of quiet satisfaction, as though this fact alone said something essential about Ireland’s values.

I have been thinking about that remark ever since, more urgently since Air Force One landed in Beijing.

Consider the contrast. In the United States, the executive branch has long been dominated by two professional tribes: lawyers and business executives. This was true when I delivered a paper at a remarkable conference on the spirit of cities in Shanghai many years ago — a transformative experience that left me with a question I have never quite been able to shake: why does one of the world’s most powerful democracies hand its government to lawyers and businessmen?

Leanne Ogasawara, How To Rule The World

In 2020 I wrote a considerable number of posts, both prose and poetry, for a series I called “Musings in a Time of Crisis.” Below, the twentieth post in the series, is one of the poems I wrote (I wrote another about George Floyd, who was murdered on Memorial Day that year). It seems more than fitting to post the poem again.

The poem references “the man in the White House”; the same one currently occupies “the People’s House.” That fact alone defies all reason, continues a crisis I could not have imagined would define the state of our country in the last third of my life.

Today, I also remember my father, who received an honors burial at Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where he has lain with two infant children since his death in the summer of 1990. Beside him now is my mother.

I honor my father today. He served in World War II in the famous all-volunteer group Merrill’s Marauders (a Time correspondent suggested the name), who were deemed “expendable” as they fought, commando-style, behind enemy lines in China, Burma, and India, who, lacking medicines, fought disease of all kinds, suffered a lack of food, and generally experienced all the horror that is war. It was a time my father did not talk about. My father would be appalled by the crisis his America faces today.

A tiny American flag marks every grave in Arlington on Memorial Day. May wherever it’s flown have meaning.

Maureen Doallas, Memorial Day

the museum felt like it was holding its breath.
clean. white. guards with ear pieces.
i wanted to see the declaration of independence
mostly because of the movie, national treasure.
i hoped it might have a golden map.
instead, the document stared back at me
from behind its glass. i asked in a whisper,
“is that it?” a piece of skin & a tissue box.
dull & worn. not like an elder fish’s gills but
like old stockings. like polyester thrift store bras.

Robin Gow, declaration

It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence.

That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).

Maria Popova, How Not to Dwell on the Past

I chose this poem because it represents that feeling of holding on a little too long to something you know you should let go of. At its essence, Dream Logic is a collection about heartbreak, but with a lower case ‘h’. The poems are quiet and long-suffering.

It is also about the way the mind can split off and begin rewriting the story, creating a kind of “what might have been”, blurring the lines between memory, nostalgia and dreamscape. I have always had an overactive imagination, and writing has been a healthy way to express that. I am often haunted by Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, waiting all those years and becoming a kind of living ghost.

Drop-in by Satya Bosman (Nigel Kent)

I wrote this poem in 2022 in Vamvakou, Greece, where I was introduced to the hawk moth (also called sphinx moth) after running from planter to planter thinking I was watching a rather drab hummingbird at work. Its caterpillar form is called a “hornworm.” None of these delightful facts fit comfortably into the poem, but I wanted you to know. I also—up until six months ago—had a grammatical error in the poem (dangling modifier) that no one had brought to my attention. Thank goodness for the copy editor that caught it.

Maya C. Popa, Four New Poems

Much-needed rain has arrived, and therefore I’ve been inside all day instead of out in the yard and gardens. I thought maybe I would feel motivated to send some of my poems out into the wider world. Turns out that the motivation was a decided maybe, leaning toward lethargy. Instead, I curled up with a cat and Jeff Burt’s collection The Root Endures (Sheila-na-Gig Editions).

Actually, I read this book a week ago but decided to take a closer look so I could post about it, because I like it a lot. Jeff Burt’s poems contain nature-images and close observations of creatures, plants, and weather yet keep reminding the reader that there’s a decidedly human component here, an interior character who speculates about what human beings are doing here, thinking about, recalling. And how the world is constantly in flux. The rural Wisconsin of the speaker’s childhood feels vividly authentic, and I learned about lime bogs and de-tasseling corn. (I love it when I learn things from poems.) The book seems autobiographical in narrative but never becomes as specifically personal as a memoir would.

And frankly, I guess I might identify more deeply with this book than other, perhaps younger or more urban readers would. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic suburbs, but I spent all my childhood summers in the Midwestern small towns where my parents’ extended families lived. I infer that Burt is pretty much my peer, age-wise; some of his remembered details conjure up a kind of resonance I enjoy. What I’d like to learn from this collection is how to sustain a longer poem, which he does quite well. Not a strength of mine, though I’ve attempted it once or twice with some success. A poem that has numerous short stanzas and travels several pages needs to keep my attention, whether I’m reading it or writing it. Burt’s title poem (the last poem in the book) does this, as does the poem “As If Copper Wire Sang the Unleashing of Time” and “Into the Standing Grain.” Maybe studying writers like Jeff Burt and others can teach me how to write better medium-long poems when a longer poem seems necessary to whatever I’m trying to express. I don’t think I’m interested in writing really long poems–think A. R. Ammons, C. K. Williams, Robert Lowell–but I’d like to explore length a little more.

Ann E. Michael, Rainy-day reading

Vasiliki Albedo & Lucy Holmes – Sardines (Dialect Press)

“but we hesitated at the prospect of jumping out of our tenuous

skins, of dampening the fervour to sample the oily salmon curve

of yet another Bandol Rosé.”

My goodness, I am a bit of a fangirl of these two. Singularly, of course, but together is also something different and quite special. Sardines is a gorgeous exploration of artistic friendship and collaboration. It’s brilliantly put together, with the email exchange between the two poets being just as fascinating as the poems themselves. Being let into these two minds at work, and at play, riffing off each other and their influences, felt like a real treat. It is, as they call it, both intimate and expansive, and it has made me look at collaboration in a new way, as well as introducing me to Frank O’Hara.

Victoria Spires, The thing is… books!

Sze writes measured, considered poems with a focus on the natural world and nature’s ability for re-growth after winter or human-made disasters. Humans here are ciphers, following orders or keeping to a narrow path without deviation. Nature follows different rules with respect for natural cycles, seasons and the ability to bloom after loss. There’s a quiet assurance here too. The tone is unjudgmental, even when observing that humans are the authors of their own misfortune.

Emma Lee, “Into the Hush” Arthur Sze (Penguin Books) – book review

I was very struck this week by an early poem by Tennyson which I don’t remember ever reading before, ‘The Palace of Art’. This poem is — rather brilliantly, I thought — the very final poem in the superb New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (OUP, 1994), edited by Jerome J. McGann. McGann’s anthology prints a very rich mixture of verse dating from between 1785 and 1832, in chronological order, under the year of publication. ‘The Palace of Art’ was first written and published in 1832, in Tennyson’s Poems — a collection that also included ‘The Lady of Shalott’, with which it has some obvious similarities. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is much more famous, of course, and on the whole I think deservedly so, since its fable of solitude, the soul and the insufficiency of art (“I am half-sick of shadows”) is so much tighter, mysterious and self-sufficient.

All the same, ‘The Palace of Art’ is an extraordinary poem. Tennyson started out as a romantic poet, and this poem is his leave-taking of it: a sort of peak-romanticism that is also the end of it. McGann aptly describes it as his ‘hail and farewell’ to romanticism. It’s a little bit like Milton’s ravishingly lovely imitation of Virgil in the Epitaphium Damonis, a poem that similarly ends by bidding farewell to the style it has so perfectly inhabited.

Victoria Moul, I have found / A new land, but I die.

I take the 75 bus, the service from Withernsea, back to Hull. The automated announcer says, ‘Next stop: Hull Prison.’ Do not pass go. The delightful 1932 East Hull Fire station has a motto painted above each of its three arched vehicle doors: ‘Ready Aye Ready’.

I get off at the interchange, next to Hull Paragon Station, location of both the well-known statue of Larkin and the Royal Hotel featured in his Symbolist-ish poem ‘Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel’, completed in May 1966. In his biography of Larkin, James Booth claims that the atmosphere of the hotel is largely unchanged since the poem was penned, despite a major fire in 1990 and subsequent restoration.

It’s a sonnet, of course, with the turn coming after the ninth line. Although far from being the only poem in his oeuvre to prominently feature light, it starts with ‘Light’ and includes the word ‘lights’ twice, as though hammering the point that this hotel is, and maybe hotels per se are, very brightly lit: ‘In shoeless corridors, the lights burn.’ I love hotels, and I love poems, novels (e.g. Troubles by J.G. Farrell) and films (e.g. The Consequences of Love, Some Like It Hot and The Grand Budapest Hotel) which are at least partially set within them.

A curious part of ‘Friday Night’ is ‘all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, / Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.’ Few of Larkin’s mature poems mention smoking – is ‘Essential Beauty’ the only other? – even though he smoked throughout adulthood. In a dissection of ‘Cut Grass’, in which ‘Mown stalks exhale’, Tom Paulin conjured the perfect phrase, ‘the anxieties smokers know’; not all smokers are necessarily anxious (do Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever get anxious?), but the overlap in a diagram by Mr Venn must be very considerable. All of this is a roundabout way of declaring my surprise that Larkin didn’t touch on smoking in his poetry more often.

The part of the poem which is undoubtedly the most intriguing is Larkin’s pressing-home of the point about the hotel being a bastion of ‘loneliness’ by adding the curiosity ‘How / Isolated, like a fort, it is’. Was he thinking of Fort Paull here? Or maybe Bull Sand, one of two Great War forts built in the Humber Estuary, visible from the end of Spurn Point, which is implicitly featured in ‘Here’ .

Matthew Paul, A bit of psychogeography

Mid-May is college commencement season here in the United States. It seems fitting, then, this week, to feature a poem about graduation. And our readers may remember George Moses Horton (1798–1883), whose “On Summer” appeared last July, as a poet whose own biography makes for the sort of triumph-over-adversity story so often embraced by commencement speakers.

Born into slavery, the sixth of ten children, on the plantation of a William Horton in North Carolina, George Moses Horton was an autodidact, teaching himself to read through hearing the Bible read aloud. He was the first African-American writer since the nation’s founding to publish a book of any kind (Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral had been published in London in 1773), the first writer to publish a literary work in North Carolina, and the only writer in American history to publish a book with an American press (J. Gales & Son, of Raleigh, North Carolina) while enslaved.

As a young man, sent from home to sell fruits and vegetables in nearby Chapel Hill, Horton began to make pocket money by composing love poems for students at the University of North Carolina. The students in turn supplied him with books for the furthering of his education. Today’s Poem, while not a love letter written for a college student, instead constitutes something like a love letter to the idea of The College Graduate and more: to the bittersweet appropriateness of leavetakings.

The verse itself, in abab quatrains of two tetrameter lines bracketed by trimeter, feels forced in places, with syntax inverted and the passive voice resorted to, to make the rhymes. Yet even where the poem strains to fulfill its form, there’s something compelling and charming in its voice. Adopting, at least in the first stanza, the persona of The Graduate, but inevitably conscious of the gap between that graduate’s future possibilities and his own, Horton writes of graduation as a kind of transcendence, as if the departing seniors were bodily assumed into heaven. One day, they’re at college; the next day they’ve simply vanished, “here to be seen no more.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Graduate Leaving College

Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness’s tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. A Romanian-Hungarian poet, she learned English (her primary language of writing) later in life, moving fluently between prose poems, haiku, and free verse, often channeling the feminist surrealist currents of Leonora Carrington, Aase Berg, and Aglaja Veteranyi. In 2020, she released a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of haiku known as While Dreaming Your Dreams (Mano Ya Mano Books) which received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She then released her debut full-length poetry collection, Moon Flogged, in 2024 through Broken Sleep Books, and recently released a chapbook through Ethel Zine called With a Swan’s Nest on Her Back. Her second full-length poetry collection Split / Game of Little Deaths will be out with Piżama Press in May 2026.

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

My first book, While Dreaming Your Dreams, is a collection of poems written in the haiku genre. A small independent publishing house in Spain published it in 2020, when I was already 43 years old. Even though my life did not change in a material sense, this debut proved I was resourceful and capable of turning abstract dreams into a tangible reality. Winning the Touchstone Book Award validated my work, but it also introduced an immense pressure: from that moment on, both publishers and readers expected nothing less than exceptional poetry. While writing a haiku seems deceptively simple, crafting a truly resonant one is a difficult feat. I realized quickly that I might not surpass the specific quality of the poems in my debut volume within that same form. Consequently, I put haiku on hold and transitioned toward short, lyrical prose, first in collaboration with my good friend Alan Peat, then independently. In essence, I have integrated a fragmented narrative arc into the surrealism and lyricism of my haiku roots. In comparing my recent work to my previous, I find that while the form has expanded, the core remains unchanged. No matter how much I experiment with structure, lyricism remains my second skin. Brevity and conciseness continue to define the sinews of my style.

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

Poetry is an intrinsic part of me. I wrote my first pieces —if I can even call them poems— while in grade school, writing in Hungarian, my mother tongue. At the time, I found them utterly silly, yet they must have possessed some merit as they were published in a children’s magazine. However, following a single rejection letter, I retreated from writing for a significant period. I briefly resumed during my university years, still in Hungarian, but abandoned it again, sensing my work lacked authenticity; I was merely attempting to mirror the voice of a well-known Hungarian poet. For a long while, I set poetry aside to focus on reading—interestingly, primarily novels rather than verse. Then, on a snowy day in 2018, a fully formed haiku suddenly emerged in my mind, composed in English, my third language. That moment solved my dual dilemma: it defined both the genre I was meant to inhabit and the language in which I would finally find my voice.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Réka Nyitrai

I went to find poetry, or those who might inhabit poetry, at a football match. It was a Friday night in Hull. And Friday night in Hull is the last place you’d expect to find poetry which is precisely why I thought I might find it there. There was of course a poem, Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel by Hull’s adopted laureate Philip Larkin. Larkin went out of his way to disengage from what you might describe as a poetic life, living instead as a curmudgeonly librarian in a rather remote corner of England, writing of absence and detachment with exquisite precision.

My idea was to get football fans to recite his poem. The Royal Hotel in Hull is now a temporary home for those seeking asylum and has been the focus of protest from both sides, the send-em-backers and the let-them-stayers. I’ll let you use your own prejudice to decide which group you think football fans are more likely to fall into. I felt the poem, written in the 1960s about a hotel in decline from its victorian splendour, carried new potency, might add some nuance, allow people to think differently, consider this delicate situation poetically. Lines like “writing home / if home existed” and “letters of exile” took on a different significance.

I had imagined skinheads with bitten off ears weeping and switch bladed hooligans grimacing, all delivering lines of poetry with passion or menace or unexpected sensitivity. It didn’t quite happen that way. I recorded a lot of footage and the fans were generous but most of them regressed, became nervous nine year olds at school being told by teacher to read out in class. They’d all much rather be at the football than making fools of themselves with poetry.

WATCH FULL FILM

I knew there was something in this project, a film of a poem being read by those who inhabit a different kind of poetry. I asked an actor friend and Chelsea fan Mike Grady to help it along, to offer a more considered reading himself. Mike’s done a tonne of Shakespeare, movies, TV and audio books across the decades and has that voice, you know that voice, the voice you’d listen to even he was reading an itemised bill.

Mike is calm and gentle and delivers the poem beautifully. Although he’s spent his career on stage and in film I believe he’d prefer his life to be as drama free as possible, that a poetic life is not one that he has any desire to aspire to. I’m beginning to think that most people probably feel this way. On my poetry walks I find I’m drawn to the poets who lived gregariously, lives punctuated with spilled drinks and broken hearts, knife fights and mad houses. Perhaps I need to redraw my map.

Jan Noble, Nº65 Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

This poem was a sort of whim I had, which I wrote down, then laid aside. I often saw the title when inside explorer, but didn’t open the file again, then called, “I Asked AI,” until this afternoon. When I read it again, I thought there was something there, and as I edited and rewrote, I ended up somewhere entirely different from what I would have guessed the poem would be. Which is what poetry is really, right? The journey you take while you move through it.

And I must say that my own ambivalence about the current conversations about AI certainly came out in this poem. I could write a long, long discussion about AI and I may one day, but for now let it suffice that I am a diehard Trekkie before all other things.

Here it is, thoroughly redone, with a new title. Let me know what you think.

Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

I asked AI
the price of milk.

She gave me a baby.

I asked AI
for breakfast.

She gave me
a potted plant.

I asked AI the time.
She gave me
a ball of string.
[…]

Rebecca Cook, Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

Adjacent to my current writing/ researching around memory, I’ve been thinking about the difference between intimacy and immediacy as both affective experiences and as literary/ artistic techniques. In the realm of experience the gulf between these two states feels immeasurably wide: the former is a slow foliation over time; it is predicated upon mutual vulnerability and care. One grows into the intimate. Immediacy, on the other hand, is a synapse-sparking collision in-the-moment. It’s the risk of exposure, the giddy high of arousal. Immediacy is instant and kinetic. Intimacy is profound. Both are vital components of what we might rather pompously call “the human condition”, but either on its own produces an emotionally and experientially lopsided life.

Within art and literature, things look a little different: inside of review-space, I see intimacy and immediacy used as virtual synonyms a lot (cards on table, I suspect I am as guilty of this as anyone), while stylistically, the former often feels sacrificed on the altar of the latter. In poetry – the one area I’m actually qualified to talk about – this appears as, but it not limited to: direct address, and a posture of unfiltered disclosure; a plausible musicality of language, often valorised under the rubric of “accessibility”, that presents little difficulty by way of intellectual assimilation and understanding. Immediate poems make a broad appeal to the emotions through the urgency of their themes and what I guess we might call the melodic “flow” of their delivery; they excel, I’d say, at their best, in evocative moments of lyric phrase-making. They tend to centre a stable-speaking lyric subject, and are often concerned with notions of embodiment and authenticity. Intimate poems, on the other hand, are slow-growers: they slightly resist readerly efforts to enter and understand; they might take a little time to parse, to locate who is speaking, where, and to what purpose. Which is not to say that all intimate poems are “difficult” or “obscure” – Michael Donaghy’s poems are intimate, but they also operate within tightly turned and self-contained conceits – I mean only to suggest that we cannot make the same kinds of ready assumption about authentic and unfiltered writer-to-reader disclosure within an intimate poem; there’s masking, play, a teasing-out required to identify a speaking voice and its relationship to ourselves. These poems are not necessarily in or of the moment; they posit other places that we have to work to access. I think the best intimate poems are those less concerned with the “flow” or “beauty” of their lyric phrasing, than they are with judiciously weighing each word and its placement within a line; this often produces slightly strange syntax, and a feeling that pressure is being applied to language in some way; that language is being thought about as substance and structure, not only as a delivery system.

To be clear, this list of tendencies is not exhaustive, neither are these two toolboxes mutually exclusive: there are plenty of amazing poets living and dead who deploy both sets of technique within their individual poems and across the broad corpus of their work. I’m not picking a side here either. I read both. I write/ have written / written with both. I like both. Ascribing a moral or political value to a set of stylistic and structural techniques is limited binary thinking that serves absolutely no one and is impoverishing to poetry as an art. What I will say is that we are at a place, in Space Year 2026, when the immediate is in the ascendency, that is, as a dominant style on page and on screen, and as the signal nature of our experience under late-stage blah de blah.

Here I do have a problem: because immediacy is a condition of capitalism. It is manufactured by capitalism, and it serves the aims and interests of capitalism. What is immediacy, after all, but a denial or a loss of mediation? A desire for the frictionless assimilation of ideas and experiences without the necessity to collide with opposing and obstructing otherness. I follow Hegel and Kornbluh here: the world – of things and ideas – only becomes what it is through its relationships with and to (the) other/s.
Knowledge and understanding require a process of moving through and bearing with difference and contradiction – it’s dialectical, duh.

And this is self-evidently true, isn’t it? No one is legitimately going to argue that abdicating thought and choice to an algorithm has enriched our lives or experiences of art, or that the ceaselessly scrolling echo-chambers of social media have benefited anyone but ket-cooked billionaire tech bros, are they? Okay, fabulous. On some level, then, we do acknowledge that social conditions replicate themselves in consciousness, profoundly shaping the ways in which we relate to the world and ourselves. Immediacy as a poetic/ writerly technique can be a useful tool; when used consciously it can also perform a critical reflection of neo-liberal conditions. A problem appears only when this particular technique is granted an undue supremacy (which, to be clear, it has been), owing largely to the dictates of a publishing marketplace driven by demand for zeitgeisty and easily-assimilable dreck – by capitalism’s endless cool hunt, and its race-to-the-bottom populism. So far, so icky, but so much worse than a prevailing style is when immediacy becomes a manner of reading, the dominant manner of reading, the way in which editors and publishing professionals are now trained to read – this, for the practice of art and literature – is absolutely fucking disastrous.

Fran Lock, “GRANTAGATE”

I’ve become lately very wary of ways of reading poems that assume an overall meaning, or that the poem has established images in it. I need language and articulation to play a role, almost from a dugout. This stanza really answered that need this morning.

A syllogism relies on simplified language, reduced vocabulary, simplified acts. Then it can assert a truth claim and test it logically. But this stanza isn’t doing that. I can spot bathos in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, for example, because the images, argumentation and narrative are clear, so it’s more like a farce, with twists (the clown unexpectedly doesn’t fall, the vicar does). In Pope, the play of etymology is clear and the diction under control so much that it’s like maths (vide D Davie). In this late Hill stanza, Hill is recognising that he has collected vocabulary in order to make Hill Poems in perpetuity. But he catches himself doing it, and throughout the sequence advocates for stupidity and vagueness. Hence the metal detector line. Showing what rings true, and also too automated. And then there is a sad sense of age throughout the sequence and in this stanza, hence that kind of career-bathos. The theme throughout the sequence is “life is a dream”, and so there are hallucinations and sour wakings and also glad wakings, both still alive and ailing.

Ira Lightman, Brief note on late Hill

I blame these threads on Roland Barthes, and his “rustle”, that sound of fabrics swishing against each other within a sentence or phrase, the position that welcomes friction, as he puts it in The Rustle of Language (italics mine):

“I am putting myself in the position of someone who does something, and not of someone who talks about something: I am not studying a product, I am taking on a production; I am abolishing the discourse on discourse; the world no longer comes to me in the form of an object, but in that of writing, that is, of a practice; I’m going on to another type of knowledge (that of the Enthusiast)” . . .

Elsewhere, Barthes mixes his musings, always imagining that projected work (ultimately, the Proustian novel that never happened). Under the title of “Book projects”:

Incidents (mini-texts, wrinkles, haikus, notations, playing with meaning, everything that falls, like a leaf).

What does that mean?

A non-book could be conceived: one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning . . . 

Incidents kept throwing palimpsests before me, to double the trouble of my overly-entangled interpretations.

Alina Stefanescu, The two-faced self-portrait.

It was only a few years ago that I first read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband. She writes at the end, 

“Well life has some risks. Love is one. Terrible risks.
…
On a June Evening
Here’s my advice,
hold.

Hold beauty.”

When I was in undergrad, back in Miranda House, I hated men so much that my friends gave me the nickname of spinster. Before Carson, it had never occurred to me to think of men as beautiful. These past few weeks, my Instagram algorithm has been showing me reels of a woman handing out compliments to men and I thought I have been called beautiful so many times in my life but I have never called a man beautiful even though I have seen the beautiful Flemish painting like hands of men making espresso behind coffee bars in Rome, or the statuesque pose of waiters in Parisian cafes, or Michelangelo’s David, their noses and day old beards, Caillebotte’s paintings of men rowing boats or working a wooden floor, their strong forearms seducing women. Their faltering voices over phone calls, their shy disarming smiles, their bicycles, and new sneakers, their excuses to have conversations or to hold a woman’s hand, their new crisp cotton shirts, or summer haircuts, jackets, and watches, their heads turning in corridors, or attempts at making witty charming comments. Their eyes full of weight and sadness, having seen life pass them by, the undereye bags after a night of insomnia, or throats almost choked with tears. Their fear, cowardice, and exhaustion. Their helplessness and repressed anger. They, too, were children once. Their restless fingers and nails and mouths that sometimes say things I barely hear. If one looked at them long enough, they seem almost as beautiful as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. 

Saudamini Deo, On seeing men

I imagine the shape of air, the way the air moves with the wingbeats of birds. How the air vibrates when it is moved by birdsong. I imagine how the air might remember those movements it was once made of, that it was once the medium for. Lost birds. Birds that once were. Their flight, their song. The geometry of a place: its birds, trees, voices, rocks, water, air. I imagine as scaffolding for time and space as time as space are scaffolding for those things. The air is and stands in for possibility. What was possible in the past, what is possible now, what might be possible in the future. What we still have and what we have lost. How might I consider it as an instrument to play, an archive to explore, and medium to live in. I frequently consider Walter Benjamin’s angel of history and the wind of history that blows it away from history. But I think also of the entire space it is in. The wind that blows the angel back into the future is somewhere. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a somewhere. I think of this somewhere as having multiple dimensions: time and space, certainly, but also memory, and possibility. This is the place where I find myself. Like the self, it is both a medium, a concert hall and a harp to play.

Gary Barwin, Ghost Birds: memory and the shape of life

Shield of Mnemosyne is not my first extended, large-scale poema (Russian term for such things). I’ve written around 10 of them over the last 40 years. What is the primary, underlying literary impulse here (aside from all the other forms and phenomena of motivation)?

I am traveling a path opened by Hart Crane. His path, in turn, was opened by Walt Whitman. Hart followed Walt down that Open Road into America… and built a Bridge for it. I am trying to build a poetic House (or Temple, or Church) – a way station along, or at the never-ending end of, that cosmic trail.

There was another modernist “epic” poet, who like Crane formally announced his Whitman affiliation : Ezra Pound. And a few of my few though very fit readers have noted Poundian echoes in my efforts. But it is the gift of Hart Crane, not Pound, which has offered me the closest aesthetic model and deepest poetic inspiration. My long poems are buildings. Humble shacks, homes, temples… made with song.

I have been an outlier in American literature for so long, it’s become second nature. But I think our literary and intellectual culture simply does not know how to pigeonhole, bracket and brand me to suit its (generally commercial/ephemeral) purposes. I’m not so easy to read : you have to climb into the rafters. You have to put two-&-two together. But my idiom is music – which itself comes to me from a deep well of air, a basic joy of breathing. I mean this in very a literal sense : because when I was four years old, back in 1956, I contracted GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome), a rare disease similar to polio. I was paralyzed up to my neck, and kept alive by a breathing apparatus called an “iron lung”. So I’ve had a special appreciation for the breezy river of air that is poetry ever since.

As it happens, I composed my first known poem later that year, in 1956 : a brief ditty about work vs. play, addressed to my father. He scribbled it down on a little cardboard key card, on his way out the door to work. My mother saved that little card; she put it in the mail to me, sometime around 2006.

Henry Gould, Behind the SHIELD OF MNEMOSYNE

I have a broader idea around what a ‘successful’ writing life might constitute for a poet. To have five or six poems that last a hundred years already includes you in the highest rung. Three or four, is sustained brilliance, and far beyond your generation. One or two, is the goal for the most of us – to have made the hours, the life’s commitment, somewhat worthwhile. Auden is very clearly of that second group. But I cannot help but now see an infecting slackness to the majority of his verse.

Before collaborating with Stravinsky, Auden also worked with Benjamin Britten on the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941). What rigour did he bring to the project? First, let me show the rigour he demands of others. Here is Auden writing on Hamlet:

Hamlet has many faults – it is full of holes both in action and motivation. The sketchy portrayal of Fortinbras is one. We hear early about his plans, when Claudius sends word for him to stop. Fortinbras agrees, but wants permission to pass through Denmark on his way to Poland. We see him pass across the stage on the way to Poland, and he returns when everyone is dead. This subplot is needed, but it is not properly incorporated into the play. The action involving Laertes also poses problems. When Laertes returns from France the second time, why hasn’t someone told him Hamlet killed his father, and when he storms the palace, why is all the excitement over in a few moments? Polonius is secretly buried. Why? Polonius’ death is necessary to get Laertes back to England, but again the subplot is not really knit into the action. And why does Claudius delay in killing Hamlet and make elaborate plans which could miscarry? Ophelia is a silly, repressed girl and is obscene and embarrassing when she loses her mind over her father’s death. But though her madness is very shocking and horrible, it is not well motivated. She was not so wild about her meddling Papa, nor was she tremendously interested in Papa.

We have arguments about the deftness of sub-plot integrations, plot inaccuracies, and, of special note, issues with character motivation. In fact, Auden’s series of Shakespeare lectures display numerous instances of sensitivity towards character actions and motivations – those of Iago and Othello a particular standout.

How does this compare then to his self-critique of his own opera, Paul Bunyan:

Babe, the blue ox who gives him [Paul Bunyan] advice, remains a puzzle; I conceive of her quite arbitrarily, as a symbol of his anima, but, so far as I know, one explanation is as valid as another. Nor have I the slightest idea why he should fail to get on with his wife, unless it signify that those who, like lumbermen, are often away from home, rarely develop the domestic virtues.

Here, we have the librettist confessing an ambivalence as to both why the characters exist and, also, why they act in the manner that they do. How do we begin to square the discrepancy between the two stances? On days that I am feeling unkind, today is one such day, I think that Auden felt the latter statement was allowably, flippantly brilliant because, well, it came from Auden.

On more objective days, my relationship with Auden is similar to my thoughts on Hugh MacDiarmid. Admiration tinged with a weary dissatisfaction. Yes, yes, there are those wonderful few pieces, but look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross… Countered by: yes, yes, look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross, but there are those wonderful few pieces.

I wonder what the community thinks. Does all the poor work even count when we consider a poet and their legacy? Or does this not matter, and do only the brief heights that a poet reaches count?

Niall Campbell, Being Frustrated With One of the Greats

Spring cleaning seems like an obvious metaphor for revision and assembling a poetry ms. It’s not unlike casting a hard look at the poems you’ve accumulated and clearing out the debris that clogs their pipes, whatever elements might interrupt their force for a reader: cliché, unproductive digression, wordy moments.

I’ve done some beyond-the-ordinary cleaning this year, too, as a person on sabbatical tends to–and maybe a person winding up the whirlwind of a book launch, too. First ritual is clearing junk out of the office, which is both helpful (what have I lost track of?) and restless procrastination (I think of a dog or cat circling around before settling into a comfortable position). I also clean, literally and metaphorically, between hard writing pushes. For a few weeks I keep my head down and focus; then I get tired and fuzzy, unable to see the project, so I do a variety of chores. This includes professional stuff like reference letters; personal stuff like getting a haircut; and home tasks such as tackling a closet that suddenly looks dysfunctional. Visiting my kids as they struggled also meant tackling cleaning tasks that overwhelmed them–hard work but genuinely helpful, unlike some other parental behaviors in face of crisis. While I sorted and scrubbed, I thought a lot about cleaning my mother’s home during her final illness five years ago. Sort the pills into a dispenser, throw out expired foods and buy new, and shine up the sink because you can’t shine up the future or make medicine actually cure a person–that sort of desperate labor standing in for all that I could not do.

While polishing poems is a good and necessary step, though, I’ll make a case for dirtying them up first. At least for me, first drafts usually hide something important. It’s hard to dig into the real mess of my thinking and feeling. That stuff is ugly, burdened with shame, jealousy, misdirected anger, lazy illogic, and other emotional and intellectual habits that make me look bad. But poems become more valuable to others when I’m willing to do the work.

Lesley Wheeler, Getting dirty for poetry

Then I was right in there
amongst bouncy pond weed, 
straggly ribbons of leaves
and those shades of brown and black in close-up.
Oh, the depths of it.
I was so cold amongst the stale green smell
but happy.

They shouldn’t have ripped me from it
just to wrap me in a stranger’s dog blanket.

Sue Finch, FINDING THE SHAPE OF THE GARDEN

Poetry in part is a way to impose order, or find and highlight order or patterns. It is skill of finding significance and meaning, but if you try too hard, are too attached, remember that meaning isn’t hard to confer randomly. Try “he’s such a ___” and add a random noun. {cucumber, cummerbund, paper cut}. Meaning isn’t hard. It’s near unavoidable with our meaning-addled brains.

The danger in poetry is to hard-close, to soothe too soon, to give a satisfying shape before the work. It is to speak like a bland or witty horoscope containing no actual thought, but flattering appearance of it, thereby manufacturing a patronizing poet voice of authority.

A risk is to make the work the packaging words and poetic devices, the hook and the resolution, instead of the deeper work of changing self, disturbing system defaults, growth, depth, letting chaos turn to genuine insight into systems or witness the discomfiting. 

As hard as it can be to be published, with 1% to 3% acceptance rates, the hard part of writing, the most active time is the making, the improving, the shaking up your own practice, the expanding or leaning into the weirdness of your brain. The sporadic hurry-scurry of pitching poems is work but is not The Work.

Pearl Pirie, The Work

I am not being dishonest when I say I don’t like waking up at 6am.  It makes me negative. I hear stories of high-achieving friends waking at sunbreak to write, to lift weights at the gym …different species.  It’s only the leaking of the sun through the blinds that stirs me – I take in the morning’s emanation, all objects like clay just thrown and still wet in that bluish light, waiting to be fired.  My nerves, like theirs, also quiver… 

If I have no obligations, I will drift asleep at 7 into a savage world of my own interior, my dreamer standing at the glass, eavesdropping and observing myself with such precision I am often aghast.  I have dreams that enact social satire about our tourist class – ‘What actually IS a Rhode Island?” – to appalling tests of motherhood – I’m really eating live flesh?  – to surprises of who’s in bed with whom in what country – the full screen of entanglements.  Then there’s the Russian doll metaphor.  Walking into a Banana Republic while living in a Banana Republic — oh images on the screen, how crisp and precise!  Get out your pith helmet, your jeeps, your fake smiles….

Jill Pearlman, Savage Truths of 7am

I’m planning for a writer’s residency and thinking about what makes for a successful residency – crunchy snacks? comfortable pants and shoes? Inspiring reading material? A set of goals? I want to work on my book that I’m still sending out and write some new work – either essays or flash or poems. I haven’t felt very creative the last few months for some reason.

So I’m hoping this time away will give me some new perspectives, some time away from social media, television, and the routine.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Green Herons and Goslings, AI Lit Mag Scandals, Planning for Writing Residencies

It’s been a long time since I did a guest slot reading – my own fault, I withdrew following a now-long-ago (first) heart attack – but I’m really pleased to say I’ve been pencilled in for the excellent Buzzwords in Cheltenham on Sunday, February 14, 2027.

Yes, it’s a long way off but that shows just how popular the Buzzwords set-up is – held upstairs at the Exmouth Arms in Bath Road on the second Sunday of the month except, if memory serves me well, for August.

I’m already looking forward to it. I read there years ago and tried to contribute to the open mic session when I could, but as I said, fell out of the habit.

Now, with the publication of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark (see image of cover below), I have a responsibility to get off my behind and do readings again and anything else I can to promote it.

I’ll get out to do some open mics where I can. It’s sad that Stratford Literary Festival no longer caters for poetry – ancient or modern – but I’ll see where the new determination to socialise leads. It’s brought back fond memories of reading at a variety of festivals, poetry groups etc over many years, so this, I suppose, is something of a comeback.

Bob Mee, OF POETRY READINGS AND MINDLESS FOLK WHO STEAL CHICKENS

It feels like the first week of summer, although it’s hard for me to pin down when summer starts precisely.  The last day of in-person class feels like a demarcation line, as does turning in grades, as does graduation.  I want to spend some time this week planning for ways to get back to creative writing, the non-seminary, non-sermon writing.  I want more poetry.  I also want to remember that this summer is the time I planned to put a new poetry collection together.

Here’s what I wrote in a December blog post:  ” I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly. I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground. The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.”  That blog post reminded me that I had looked at past manuscripts–do I want to use one of them as a skeleton/scaffolding or start by looking at files of individual poems?

I also want to return to my New Year’s resolution, which was also my 2025 resolution:   “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

Here’s hoping for some white hot writing streaks this summer!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Writing Intentions

The cusp of summer always means summer projects, which, despite my not being beholden to academic calendars any longer, still seems like a nice time to try to get some things done, although not with as much fervor and doggedness as that which comes with autumn. This summer, after I finish a couple of play scripts that are in various stages, next up will be my next installment in the Antiquities series. I have only been in research mode of late and made a few collages a couple years back, but I am determined to get at least a good first draft by September on a series of Calypso-inspired poems. Considering one of the first unpublished poems I wrote in my very first year of writing seriously in the late 90s, a poem called “Plentitude” that is probably way too bad to share now, it seems fitting this is where I go next. […]

My other goal for the summer is to start dipping my toe into submitting plays to theaters and contests once I’ve built up something of a body of work to actually show off. Things have been going well, and just this weekend, I was able to put a bow on the final version of my Macbeth witches retelling, as well as get the first act roughly rendered of something else that mixes 90s culture, teen dieting, and demonology that’s turning out to be a lot of fun.

Kristy Bowen, May Paper Boat

I have to say that the research I’m doing on the novel I’m writing about libraries and card catalogues and the future, is so much fun and taking me to the coolest places. In the old days, I’d probably share some of that here, but it’s the new upside down secretive world of writing that we now inhabit I suppose and it seems folly to speak about one’s projects. But one essay that pops out is by Umberto Eco, on censorship. He wrote it in 2009 and it feels like he knew what our times would be like, because it was a lesser version of the noise filled world then. This is when the world began filling with digital noise, “an excess of information.” He says, “This great need for noise is like a drug: it is a way to avoid focusing on what is really important….” He refers to Saint Augustine and “Redi in interiorem hominem,” return to the interior (hu)man.

The thing I find most interesting is that he also says that even when people are oppressed by “the most censorious tyrants” they have been “able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth.” And this is why he says that the biggest “ethical problems we face today is how to return to silence.” He calls for a study of semiotics of reticence, a semiotics of silence in political debate, in theater, and in other forms of communication. He asks us to consider the long pause, “silence as creation of suspense, silence as threat, silence as agreement, silence as denial, silence in music.” […]

We are in an imagination battle, as adrienne marie brown has said in her book on emergence. We need to invent new ways to see, to write, to be. Or maybe it’s a reclaiming of the old ways. I’ve been embracing my film camera, I always write with a fountain pen. I’m going to be on social media a bit less, I swear lol, or at least be there more on my own terms. I’m planning a reset time, turning it off for a week or so here and there. Maybe even a month at some point in the near future.

O’Donohue talks about the imagination. It is like a lantern, “it illuminates the inner landscapes of our life and helps us discover their secret archaeologies.” How to see the mystery and beauty ever-present?

We can cultivate the “grace of innocence” and tap into our “passion for freedom.” Our hearts are wild, naturally. We can still answer the call to a creative life for we know instinctively what that is. The imaginative life is one of mystery, ecstasy, joy, possibility, delight, revelation, and with some perseverance, perhaps transcendence.

Times are always changing; let us use this time, we creative souls, spirits, to reinvent what creativity is even. Let’s find new ways to share our work, new ways to create, perhaps more secretly or word of mouth. Let’s share with those who approach with reverence. The others never wanted our offerings anyway.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Talk About Word of Mouth, the Unforeseen, and Delicious Trouble

When I have created art that denies my authentic self—whether by erasing my shadow self, over-extending anchors, over-clarifying my interiority, self-questioning my patterns and symbols, or cleaning up language so that it doesn’t feel “too obscure” for the reader—I have felt a primordial sting of shame.

But when I’ve generously translated the creative currents within me without diluting them, I felt an existential, euphoric liberation.

What I have learned is that the writing doesn’t need to come with a map or key. Trust that the human heart will know its way. Indulge the mystery. Bend time. Let blue be green be garnet be gold. Resist the need to hold everyone’s hands, & to have your hands held. Let the underbelly speak. Get lost in the process. Push past the illusory. Relish in the lostness. Quiet the noise. Descend and translate. Look for the big fish in the deepest of waters.

You also never need to explain or justify your process. It’s not really about you or me. It’s bigger and deeper than us all. We are a splendid conduit when we get out of the way.

Lisa Marie Basile, The poetic permissions of dream logic & otherworlds

I keep trying to break
language into patterns that will mean something

beyond myself. I think of the mulberries I picked
from a friend’s garden, how even as half of them

sank into swift ferment, their skin still gleamed.
Night, too, presses its blue bruise against

the house walls. Everything can fold back into itself,
and my ghosts slip back like leaves into the pages of

a book. After, the air feels like it does after someone
has said something so real, it becomes unrepeatable

Luisa A. Igloria, Veined

Because we’ve lived in our house for forty years, my garden has suffered many changes of mind. And because roots can be very persistent, sometimes my older ideas re-emerge. This poem is the story of one of those reappearances, told in the classical meter known as the Sapphic stanza, one of my favorite ancient rhythms. […]

Stand there still, O vegetable love. Grow taller.
Soar and soften out to a ferny greenness
feathered open, branched to adorn these hoped-for
armfuls of roses.

Maryann Corbett, Asparagus

It’s the toadflax that gets me; those clusters of tiny violet flowers, pushing through gravel and tar. It’s the plaintain and horse tail ferns too, the black merrick, its optimistic puffs of yellow; it’s the dandelion, stonethrift, wild clary. It’s the beautiful bright things growing where they are not valued, or wanted; which insist on existing. A single purple Columbine, tall and conspicuous: I think of my trans friend in the Church reading hate mail signed In Jesus’ Name. All the people I have known who have grown in hard land, who flower, who were sometimes cut down much too soon.

I think of what lies under the tarmac; a cool world of roots, roots reaching to mycelium, a fungal network stretching far beyond the reach of each plant. I think of community, interconnection, mutual aid – the plants and mycelium network exchange sugars and minerals, water; how the network protects the plants from drought and disease. I think of pesticides and diggers: the best way to kill a flower is to take away sunlight and rain. The flowers will grow regardless of what laws are passed, what anyone thinks of us.

I think hard times are upon us and ahead of us. But we are flowers. We will continue to bloom.

Clare Shaw, Wildflowers and transphobia

This week: a lion-faced serpent god, the preserved body of a billionaire, memories of tap dancing, a brown-paper-bag existence, and much more. Enjoy.

The first bird I hear as I wake this morning is a wood pigeon; the promise of spring in its echoing tones. In the damp morning the cheerful chorusing of many birds is welcoming the day, and the air brings the scent of rosemary and twigs.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a beaver in a muddy puddle. I say it is a capybara sitting in the mud at Chester Zoo. I photographed it during a visit back in 2015 and the photo came to mind this week after a conversation with a wonderful friend.

Part of our conversation centred around the importance of being able to sit with someone when they are in the emotional equivalent of a muddy puddle. I loved the analogy… being alongside the person, acknowledging that it is indeed a swampy place, sitting with their thoughts and feelings for a while without rushing them to get out, without offering to try to solve it… bringing presence not solutions… simply being there with them in that muddy puddle.

I love a metaphor and after our chat I spent some time thinking about the times I have sat in muddy puddles of my own as well as the times I have meandered off my path to sit with others in their puddles. Those puddles have held a lot. Times of pondering, times of deep thinking, time to respect the need to be still for a while, times of silence, time to figure out the feelings and what is needed right now.

Sue Finch, SITTING IN THE MUD

At one point yesterday morning, a sea turtle patrol truck drove down the beach away from the sunrise, with one young worker guy hanging out the window taking pictures.  I assume that the workers get to see a beach sunrise every morning.  The fact that one of them went to such an effort to get a picture made me happy.

I’ve said before, and I’ll continue to remind myself that the human capacity for wonder makes me think that humans may survive after all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Beach Sunrises

Recently, I enjoyed/endured a string of late nights (I’ll only do it for poetry), first in New York, where I heard extraordinary poets including Richard Siken, Ilya Kaminsky, and Ocean Vuong, and then in Chicago, where I heard debut writers including I.S. Jones and Noa Micaela Fields. I love the mix of improvisation and preparation that goes into introducing a poem—I learn as much about the poet from those candid moments as I do from the work itself.

This week, I attended a wonderful dinner for the National Poetry Series, which does invaluable work in support of poets, and had the pleasure of sitting alongside three former teachers: Deborah Landau, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Meghan O’Rourke. Fifteen years after my MFA, it feels especially meaningful to find myself working alongside them and still learning from them.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Recently, I posted about some poems of mine published in Creative Writing Department’s Print Journal. They were a set of seven pieces, all of similar style, called “Rat Heart Nebula.” Below, I’m sharing three more sections of it, rounding out the set to ten. I am eventually going to collect all these in a chapbook, but I’m not sure how many of them there will end up being. They are extremely fun to write. […]

Monstrous child of Sophia in the Gnostic cosmology, Yaldabaoth is the lion-faced serpent god who created our insane world. It does not matter if you think about this or not when reading.

R.M. Haines, BLUETOOTH SPEAKER YALDABAOTH

This is “Cupid and Psyche” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) by Jacopo del Sellaio, from about 1473. Fifteen scenes from the same story are merged together, Psyche appearing 11 times. A tree in the foreground of one scene may form the background of another.

Time goes left-to-right along the lower part of the painting. Higher up, more liberties are taken. This style is called ‘continuous narrative’ – because, I suppose, there are no dividing lines between the different scenes/times.

I think it’s an idea that’s sometimes replicated in poetry, the same phrase representing a cause in one moment of time, and an effect in another. Recall and foreboding are intermixed with the present.

Tim Love, Continuous narrative

After the art gallery I had
skin tags removed
at my dermatologist’s office.
where I bought the most expensive
cosmetic I have ever bought.
I decided not to feel guilty about it–
my birthday was in two weeks.

This was the day after
the day I’d had
two poetry groups
back to back
where I wrote
poems
as vigorously
as a Baptist pastor
can preach
hell fire.

Rebecca Cook, The Sound of The Ocean

A gorgeous day as I rode the waves of a county road up from the river and into the glacial-carved bays and fjords of this county, rising into the air to crest a blind hill, easing past the slower vessels, a horse and buggy, a man in a flat brimmed hat pushing a bike, all sparkling in spring sun and new leaves pattering in the wind. Arrived lakeside, a park spread like its own picnic. A windsurfer coursed the chop of the dark blue lake. And I entered the community of food-bringers, of neighbors and friends, mostly strangers to me, chatting, no real laughter yet, as people assembled in slow spurts, some signing the guest book, some leafing through the photo albums, some pausing to hug hard the bereaved. I’ve done this a few too many times in the past six months. A spate of funerals and memorials. This one for a man I’d only known as a towheaded boy flinging himself around the yard, pausing briefly to pee in the bushes, too busy to bother with the niceties of a bathroom, or settling beside his tiny little sister to smooch or tickle. His mother, my friend. After we wailed together briefly, struck senseless by the simple devastation of her loss, broke apart to hold each other at arm’s length, enjoying seeing ourselves much unchanged after all this time. “He grew up to be a nice person,” she assured me, knowing I’d been a stranger to him, as we do not live near each other and had drifted apart. I will never know. Sudden death or slow, predicted or out of the blue, the shock of it remains much the same. Wait a minute, we wake to realize, day after day. Wait a minute.

Here is a poem by the ancient Japanese writer Isumi Shikibu, as translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani.

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

Marilyn McCabe, into empty sky

What I am referring to here is my long, missed diagnosis of OCD.

I have found myself fully tethered to Larry, so I resist forming bonds with anyone. It’s too painful. I don’t want to lose someone else. Yet I want a witness. We all do.

There is a feeling of duty and obligation to ensuring his work stays out there, so his presence stays…present. I want people to see my love for him. I want people to keep loving him and appreciating his work. Yet I am in a loop. Often, I cannot leave my apartment. It takes me awhile to detach myself from him as I am convinced he is with me (his ashes are in my apartment).

Via repetitive tasks, and mind-numbing repetition and panic, I do things that provide a false sense of comfort that life is moving on without him. Since he died, I’ve been legacy building. Because he was a poet and so prolific, such a talented writer, a beautiful soul. Because I love him and my connection to him is through poetry.

And if I repeat myself through these posts it is because I am re-processing, meta-processing, or processing things for the first time now, with some—albeit very little—distance. It’s only been 15 months.

The book I am working on of his, for example, had to be pulled apart and re-laid out. All 800 pages of it (long story which I will detail another time). So after I painstakingly worked through thousands of pages of his hard copy poems to get them organized, labeled, edited, and collection into an 800-page volume of never-seen-before poems, I had to read them all again, reliving each love poem, each drawing, each haiku.

And my algorithm feeds me more grief, I feel more grief, feel guilty for not feeling more grief. On repeat. Constantly in grief mode.

And then there is the very accurate notion in grief that we don’t experience just the one loss, it is loss over and over. Every time you hear, see, or feel something that triggers you, you miss your person and your brain has to adjust and say to you: “Remember? They are not here anymore.”

It is looping loss upon loss.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, To play with catastrophe.

The grammar of archives, of our accounting—
     more than just the language of the incident report

Dalamhati— grief of the deepest kind, 
from the Malay root for interior, something seated
      in the liver or the heart

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Luisa A. Igloria, Souls on Board

i asked myself what i thought grief was. i used to know. or else, i used to think i knew, when i was young and young-in-grief, when grief felt as immediate and instinctive as arousal. when i thought i could name it; could call it by any single name. i thought that grief was an absence and an urgency. which it is, but not only this. it is also an accretion, a thickening in time and texture. grief has a taste, a colour and a shape, is shaping – reshaping – my attachments to others, to the world, to the body, to the “self”. yes, it is reshaping still. against the implied trajectory contained within much of western thought, that says beyond its immediate moment, your grief will diminish or fade. i used to dread this as betrayal and failure; found ways to – as i saw it – keep my grief alive and livid, insisted upon it as an ethics: that which we owe to the dead. silly girl, grief does not diminish. grief, if we allow it, is intimate, metabolic, and slow. grief is transformative. that is, as it transforms us, grief also transforms: from the emptying distress of acute personal hurt, to a rich and weighty way of being with. i think we are looking at healing through the wrong end of the telescope. perhaps we are using the wrong word altogether. supposing the aim was to acclimatise? suppose we sought not to reduce, but to deepen? to lean into this deepening.

Fran Lock, ON MEMORY #2

(Art unburnt in the pyre—a Cornell box carousel.
The chorus of little birds in the yard, psychopomp
for our cat’s last breath rising like smoke. Tears
I’ve kept close, waiting to share them with you.)

Lori Witzel, Smoke

Tom Sastry has published one pamphlet and three collections. Carol Ann Duffy said he “makes friendships and love affairs new and strange” and Hera Lindsay Bird call him “a magician of deadpan”. His poems have appeared in The Guardian and Poetry Review. His latest book is Life Expectancy Begins to Fall is described by Jonathan Edwards as “the most important – and certainly the most entertaining – book about the end of the world I’ve yet found”. Tom himself describes it as the perfect birthday present for someone with a sense of humour about their mortality.

The title poem – a sequence of six titled poems, each consisting of six couplets – is at the core of the book. It is linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and government decisions.

The collection is also a short master class on making titles work:

• How to tell the apocalypse is happening when you get all your news from Instagram
• Navigating the Peri-Apocalypse with Radical Self-Care
• The preserved body of a billionaire slowly defrosts in a devastated world

[…]

As I was preparing this post, Tom wrote to me: ‘You can be pessimistic about the drift of world-historical events and still hopeful about human nature and human connection. You can be hopeful about what might happen next week or about the reception of your friend’s new book.  There’s no link between optimism and virtue or between pessimism and cynicism. So that’s really the moral centre of the book – the belief that an age of pessimism doesn’t condemn us to live mean lives. We can live well as pessimists.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Life expectancy begins to fall – poems

Big workday today for me. And an exercise in joy. One of the greatest happiness an author can experience in the process of creating a book is receiving the first “proof” from the book designer, assuming you have a brilliant and conscientious designer, which I do in Mark Melnick who I recommend. Today I’ll be proofing my 2027 book COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES which, to my relief, pulls off one of my most ambitious literary structures to date. That is, I first wrote a novel. Then I had one of the novel’s characters create a poetry collection. Both are featured in CDB.

It was an arduous process over the past 3-4 years to create CDB. I first wrote another novel that wasn’t good enough (yet) to leave my files where it’s shelved as a “trunk novel.” I wrote a second novel, and from that novel birthed CDB. Literally a poet-novelist I am. From my Author’s Note, you’ll see that CDB has something for every type of literary reader.

The featured doll by my manuscript is the avatar for my novel’s primary protagonist, Kris–an orphan, a spy, a lethal killer, former head of the C I A, a community organizer, and a lover. He’s stared at me in my writing studio for the years it took me to create this book. He’s been ensconced over my computer to encourage–and pressure–me to finish this project. I look forward to the day I can present the actual book before his nose and hear him say, “I told you so!”

And someday I hope you will read CDB, which critiques Empire by going right to its root source: Sargon of Akkad, known for his conquests of Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (last image). He’s been identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire.

And yet this is also a rom-com. So: something for everyone.

Eileen Tabios, PRE-RELEASE NOTES: COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES

As I’ve been getting ready to get a final version of my next collection, MARRY | KISS |KILL together and issue it this summer, I’ve been thinking about my own experiences with self-publishing my work (at least the full-length projects, but this applies to chapbooks as well)  and how that might be of interest to other poets if they are considering doing the same in this age of dwindling publishers, slashed funding, and general upheaval in the arts. 

While I spent many years waffling over the logistics and benefits of self-publishing, there were many benefits once I took the plunge. One was more control over timelines and design (including books, like GRANATA above, with an art element, not always welcomed by other presses)  Another benefit is a greater share of the list price. This happens in a time when poets, even publishing with traditional presses, often share the brunt of promotion anyway for any collection, so that was nothing new under the sun. I also was producing work at a steady clip, impossible to publish all of them with the press that had issued my last three books. I also did not want to go through the work and expense of entering manuscripts in open reading periods and spendy contests, having already played that game earlier in my career. I was also in a great place to make it happen, having my own imprint and book design experience, as well as an existing audience for my work this many books and years in.

When I was initially contemplating self-publication in the early aughts, it was still very much a no-no if you wanted to be taken seriously and be seen with legitimacy (though I wonder how much of this was just the poets I was in community with.) Other communities had different ideas about it. There were spoken word poets who regularly issued their own work to sell at readings. The zine makers I knew regularly published their own editions of new work. When I started DGP, the first trial chapbook was my own, and when that went well, I moved on to publishing other authors. As time went on, there were more chapbooks and zines, but I still entrusted other presses with my full-length manuscripts. While I loved the presses and editors I worked with, it became steadily apparent over the years that traditional publishing, while nice, was not always ideal. My first publisher issued one book and accepted a second, but shuttered before it bore fruit. Ditto with another I later published with–same situation, one book released and another in-progress and abandoned when the publisher closed (I later issued this one myself, first as an e-book and now in print.) Other books closed out the print run after a decade (I have a handful of copies of these, but they are only available direct from me now.) 

Since 2021 or so, I’ve been happily typing and designing away since, issuing 1-2 projects each year on my own, usually available to all, though there are also some Patreon-only offerings.  But there are a few misconceptions I have often come across that bear mentioning when discussing self-publishing your poetry. that seemed fruitful to discuss.

Kristy Bowen, Self Publishing Myths Dispelled

To found the publishing company New Directions, James Laughlin invested $100,000 of his family’s wealth (about $2 million today) into the company. While he ran New Directions, James Laughlin lived on family property in a large country house in Connecticut. He lived off his investments in the stock market, as well as his generational wealth. Over time, he kept investing his family’s money.

I like New Directions; it’s a revered press. But Red Hen Press has no family money. Last night I was at a dinner, and someone said, I would never want to work at a nonprofit. Too unstable.

I know what you mean. It is too unstable.

There are many things I don’t understand. Can I make it from Point A to Point B? Why is Point B always so far away?

For me, Point B is the amount of money I need to raise for Red Hen to make it to the end of the fiscal year, June 30^th.

In this struggle, people might care, but no one is coming to save me. Despite some incredible ongoing donors, no one can guarantee the survival of Red Hen; few people have been able to connect me with new foundations, donors, or sources of income.

When I was in my fifties, considering the path of James Laughlin, I looked into the stock market. I didn’t put any money into it then or since, but I did look into it. It was another thing I didn’t quite know enough about. What exactly was the stock market doing over there? What was it up to?

We recently decided to sell some of our personal books that we didn’t need. I said to Mark, if you had a tiny amount of money, what would you do with it? Savings account? Stock market? Get a car that won’t break down?

I started without generational wealth. I did not have any investment income. Out of the cult, I had nothing. Later, I was earning wages teaching, writing, and speaking. Then, I started a publishing company. That’s when everything shifted.

I thought that publishing was an enterprise worth saving; that the building of literary culture was an enterprise worth keeping. I still hold this belief, still say this to myself, but maintaining the physical reality is harder. Nonprofit publishing in the U.S. comes from a small batch of people who decide to build literary culture. Most of them are writers. Those without pre-existing wealth often give up their own literary lives and are written out of the story.

My goal this fiscal year is to get Red Hen fiscally healthy. My other goal is to get myself an additional job so that I can be fiscally healthy. To be fiscally literate and stable, I need to make a living, and I am going to figure it out. I am going to carry Red Hen forward.

Kate Gale, What We Know, What We Weather, What We Climb

Starting a poetry press was always going to be an education, but I didn’t expect to be learning quite so fast. Headless Poet is dedicated to the art of the introduction: you can read about the idea here, and an interview with Victoria Moul, editor of our first pamphlet, here. The response so far has been really encouraging, and there’s a lot more to look forward to.

One question, rather obvious in retrospect, which has been preoccupying me recently: how exactly does one go about promoting poetry that has been (in the words of my mission statement) buried by time? Time isn’t the easiest material to shift. Come to think about it, how do you market poetry at all? Perhaps you just keep writing blogs. That was always the original plan.

Today, Headless Poet publishes Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong. Alex is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both from Carcanet Press. He has also previously selected from the work of Victorian writers A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell. When I first approached Alex last year, I didn’t have a particular writer in mind: he brings such a deep reading of and appreciation for the poetry of the era that we might have gone in any number of directions. But soon as he mentioned Hood, I knew it would have to be him.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) hasn’t so much been buried by time as dismembered and deposited in various places — known for the odd anthology piece, but rarely read as a whole. I Remember, I Remember might be familiar to some (and it is a far stranger poem than it seems) but it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the sheer exuberance of Hood’s comic verse or the astonishing, sing-song social criticism of poems like The Song of the Shirt. And yet: Hood was also a contemporary of Keats and Shelley, and could write a sonnet with the lyric intensity of either of them.

Jeremy Wikeley, New to Headless Poet: Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected & introduced by Alex Wong

What I loved […]

was the man, out of place like the rest,
telling a bawdy story of standing

at the urinal many weddings ago,
when something drifted from his inner coat pocket

as he stood pissing beside an editor —
his poem, having escaped confinement,
landed in the froth.

The gentle man, already zipped up,
delicately picked the page up by its corner

and published it.

Jill Pearlman, Wedding Miracles

There is an actual Lake Isle of Innisfree. The note that accompanies the photograph says, “It is difficult to imagine scraping a living on the unpromising terrain of this island.” (Wikimedia Commons)

For most of the poem’s twelve lines, that place does exist, shining and almost reachable, in the evocative liquid sounds of its hexameter lines, dropping to tetrameter at the end of the first two abab quatrains, and resolving in pentameter in the poem’s last line. There’s a quality in these longer lines of, simultaneously, languor and urgency: the timelessness of the place, the exiled speaker’s haste to get there.

But can such a place exist? This poem, despite its maker’s dyspeptic later opinion of it, saves itself from the poisoning of nostalgia in its last lines. This Innisfree is real, more real even than the physical islet in the actual Irish lake — but only in one man’s “deep heart’s core,” where he carries the memory, which has become his own creation. It exists, but nowhere in external reality. You might want to arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, but you can’t get there from here.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Ricky Monahan Brown, taken from his recent pamphlet, Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).

The piece I’ve chosen is titled ‘Drawer’, so its significance within the manuscript as a whole is pretty clear. I don’t tend to be a fan of poems that use the passive voice a lot, nor of poems that don’t contain any main verbs. However, those two devices are actually used to terrific effect here, holding back narrative details that the reader is allowed to fill in, such as the identity of the protagonists. Meanwhile, progressively tweaked repetition is clearly a driving force, used deftly, moving us forward without any punctuation towards the poem’s emotional core. 

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

Anthony Barnett is a kind of one-man cultural institution, poet, editor, publisher, translator, musician and scholar. He has published, amongst others, the original Collected Poems by Jeremy Prynne, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Collected Poems and Translations. He has also co-edited and published the journal Snow lit rev since 2013.

The first two volumes here display something of his range as a translator. ‘Whoever Has Found a Horseshoe’ is significant for being a rare unrhymed poem by Osip Mandelstam; it’s also his longest poem. Subtitled ‘A Pindaric fragment’, it reads to me, in Barnett’s version at least, as a meditation on the difficulty of art, of making things that are not, to echo David Jones, valued for being utile.

Barnett presents the poem’s ten parts one per verso page, each with a facing recto page illustrative drawing by Lucy Rose Cunningham, drawings which strike me as being integral, not decorative. The opening section, facing a drawing of a tree, presents a view of woodland as raw material:

We may face the forest and say:
Here is a forest with ship masts and timbers:
The pink-tinged pines
Freed from the weight of their clumps to their crowns
Should groan in a gale

Straight away, the utilitarian is undercut by the aesthetic; nobody will build a ship from a drawing of a tree, and for the shipwright, that ‘pink-tinged’ is entirely superfluous.

The fourth section addresses the difficulty of art, specifically the art of poetry:

Where shall we start?
Everything sways and splits,
Similes quiver in the air

While the next section addresses its value:

Thrice blessed whoever enshrines a name in a song,—
A song graced with a name
Outshines those that are not—

The penultimate section revolves around the title line:

So
Whoever has found a horseshoe blows away the dust,
Buffs it up with wool
Until it shines.
Then
Hangs it over the door,
To rest,
No striking sparks on flint again.

The polished horseshoe hung over the door has transcended its utilitarian origins to become, in its own small way, a work of art, of the impulse to make things over for no end beyond the pleasure it gives. The final section emphasises the poet’s identification with the finder, the trouvère, whose words are like objects dug from the earth.

In an afterword, Barnett describes the process of translation, this being his fifth version of the Horseshoe poem. He describes it as still potentially not finished, but it’s hard to imagine how he would come up with a more enjoyable version.

Billy Mills, A Basket of Barnetts

Mekyle Ali Qadir is a Pakistani poet currently pursuing his Master’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. His writing explores the negotiation of culture and ethnicity he enacts in his life as an immigrant from Pakistan. Writing in both English and Urdu, his emerging work explores South Asian cultural traditions, migrant identity, mysticism, and intertextual art. […]

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

My writing is probably too theoretical. I’m very occupied with intercultural knowledges, negotiating my home traditions with Western modernity. My writing interrogates the assumptions that come with intercultural dialogues, especially in a place like Canada with all its performative multiculturalism rhetoric. I draw much of my inspiration from postcolonial thinkers who challenge hegemonic and Imperialist epistemologies, especially Edward Said, Fanon, Cesaire, Iqbal, and Shariati. I’m just regurgitating their words and adding personal anecdotes along the way. Aside from that, though I don’t count it as a “theoretical concern,” my writing is steeped in mystical thought and teachings. As I repeat throughout my answers, the Sufi traditions give me inspiration beyond these great thinkers. Mystical inspiration doesn’t work in the question-answer structure because it’s beyond language so it’s hard to say what questions I answer when I write through this inspiration. But a tangible result of it is a keen sense of empathy that pushes beyond personal and cultural barriers and lets me capture intense personal and social experiences.

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

I think there’s more creative writers operating at multiple levels of culture than we tend to acknowledge because they don’t call their work ‘creative’ even though it is. I think writers always find themselves in strange ‘moments’ in history, but now especially their work has been threatened by AI and slowly, their value is starting to be remembered in the wake of AI’s disappointing capabilities. I also think writers should see their work beyond its political impact. It’s a result of Eurocentric reductionism that writers are encouraged to think only in terms of political, material ends. I don’t think all writing is or should be political, though you can stretch definitions to fit your argument as much as you want. There are truths that transcend that, which all writing, but especially poetry, can uncover. I guess that’s what writers should be chasing after, to unveil Maya and reach the Gha’ib. […]

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I see what he means I guess, but I don’t like to think of it that way. Writing for me is one form of art that has to coexist with others. The creatives I admire most are creative in multiple ways, it’s only now that we’re siloing ourselves into discrete ‘disciplines’. I like to draw and play music, both of which make their way into my writing. Poetry is a mathematical activity, sometimes a scientific one. Poetry for me is tied to my religious expression concurrently with all of these other forms. Defining poetry through delimitations leads to dead ends, I think.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mekyle Ali Qadir

The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year
that friends forgot what affection felt like.
The sky above them grew so tight-fisted
that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop.
The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears
was the only water anyone could find.
If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent,
it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief.
I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved,
each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish.
The orchard and the mountain, both were bare:
locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts!

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: A Noble Man Suffers With The Victims of a Famine

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing a couple of different books about Homer and his “afterlife” — the myriad ways in which the Iliad and the Odyssey stand behind and within so much of our literature but also off at an angle to it. Texts can be both foundational and also irreducibly strange and distant. (The Bible is another good example of this.) Very few people can read Homeric Greek, let alone with real ease and pleasure. But at the same time more people, I would guess, know something of the Homeric myths than any other classical work. Stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey are a popular basis for children’s picture books and early readers as well as the fashionable mythological kind of fantasy aimed at older children and teenagers. This just isn’t true in the same way of the story of the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses (though those poems incorporate Homeric material, of course), and even less so of, say, Herodotus, Livy or Lucan. Homer occupies a peculiar cultural space: both almost entirely unread (in Greek) and at the same time familiar, friendly, even cosy perhaps, in a way that is unlike most other “classics”.

Victoria Moul, Bifold authority: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

In the years since his death, no age of English poetry has been without its tributes to Shakespeare. Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” written in 1616, the year Shakespeare died, graced the prefactory material in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and John Milton’s “On Shakespeare. 1630” appeared in the 1632 Second Folio — which is praise from a pair of poets hard to match. And on the tradition goes to the 21st century with, for example, Wendy Cope’s lighthearted 2016 “Shakespeare at School.”

The centuries between saw plenty of work in this line, but, curiously, only Today’s Poem, “Shakespeare,” seems much anthologized — a sonnet written in his twenties, which appeared in his first collection, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, in 1849.

I haven’t managed to decide what I think of [Matthew] Arnold’s poetry. His reputation declined in the 20th century, partly with the rise of awareness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but the 1939 study of Arnold by Lionel Trilling, a critic I admire, took the poetry seriously, as I have grown to suspect we must. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we have looked previously at only two of his poems, “Dover Beach” and the strangely constructed “Growing Old.” And I find, in my teaching and lecturing, that “Dover Beach” comes easily to mind, easily to hand as a way to convey the sense of something lost in the rise of modernity — something that large swathes of 19th- and 20th-century artists felt.

The argument of the poem is that Shakespeare stands alone, and the tremendous opening line, expressing that thought — “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” — is probably why the poem joined the standards of English verse.

(A test I use for literary reference is whether P.G. Wodehouse would use it for comedy, with an expectation that his readers wouldn’t scratch their heads. And sure enough, it appears in such stories as “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald”: “At imitating a hen laying an egg he was admittedly a master. His fame in that one respect had spread all over the West-end of London. ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free,’ was the verdict of London’s gilded youth on Archibald Mulliner when considered purely in the light of a man who could imitate a hen laying an egg. ‘Mulliner,’ they said to one another, ‘may be a pretty total loss in many ways, but he can imitate a hen laying an egg.’”)

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Shakespeare

In “Material Witness” Edward Ragg turns his forensic eye towards material details often overlooked or taken for granted, e.g. rock formations, coral reefs, bower birds, an old photo, and what these artefacts might show or reveal. The specific details of a small starting point widens out to a relationship, family history or connection to the natural world, giving an universal appeal to a personal starting point.

In “The Tap Dancer”, a photo of a dancer “with a Nazi stamp on the back” is revealed to be the poem’s speaker’s mother.

“My father recalled bright-faced GIs breakfasting.
So enthusiastically polite. How they’d throw kids
sweets from their jeeps (candy they called them)
before most girls and boys knew to brush their teeth.
My father wept for those pearl toothed men until
his death. My mother remembered tap dancing
and often said: I was always so lucky, so lucky.”

The poem shows the different attitudes towards the war. The father remembering candy thrown at children from soldiers facing going to war. For him, the war is a tragedy of these men who never returned. The mother, the girl in the photo, focuses on memories of tap dancing. She is not being flippant, however, as she considers herself fortunate to survive. Her attitude is one of fortitude and survival. The war is something she’s put behind her.

Emma Lee, “Material Witness” Edward Ragg (Cinnamon Press) – book review

Taken as a whole, Mountains that See in the Dark is a striking collection in which the austerity of the desert becomes a means of exploring emotional depth, endurance, and renewal. [Regine] Ebner’s imagist precision allows her to distil large truths into brief, resonant poems, revealing a world in which beauty and hardship are inseparable, and in which hope persists even in the harshest conditions. The collection confirms her as a poet of remarkable economy and insight, one whose work transforms the physical landscape into a profound meditation on what it means to survive, to love, and to begin again.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Mountains that See in the Dark’

I was having one of those dumb human hissy fits wherein one believes she will never again encounter another example of a beloved thing, i.e. a poem that seems to have been written specifically for her, when, lo and behold, Bob Hicok’s latest, Breathe, appeared unbidden in my mailbox last Saturday, courtesy of one of those remarkable human treasures, i.e. a friend who doesn’t actually know what is wrong with you yet seems to know the cure. These are the third and fourth Bob Hicok poems to appear in this publication, so I guess it qualifies now as a Bob Hicok appreciation vehicle, and that’s fine with me, especially since Breathe contains its own Gerald Stern appreciation vehicle in “A little wave of my hand goodbye,” my own love of that poet being decidedly well–established. Ideally those warblings have also made Gerald Stern one of your favourite poets, but just in case: “Logic” felt to me like a perfect Hicok poem, one you need not possess any particular poetic affection/affliction to appreciate.

Vanessa Stauffer, Two poems by Bob Hicok

I love the specificity of the blue tits, Lookout Hill (the one in Greenwich?), wild thyme, the Sphinx moth, the evening primroses, the turtledoves – it’s exemplary in how these are deployed without seeming in any way fake or outlandish.

I love, too, how ‘a rich lentil stew’ will replace ‘the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse’ (and not just because I haven’t eaten meat since 1982). My 1978 edition of the Collins Concise English Dictionary gives ‘leavings’ as an alternative for ‘leftovers’, but I suspect it’s an anachronism now – I wonder if it’s still used in Wombwell/Barnsley where Sue is from, though despite the places’ close proximity, my Sheffield-native wife Lyn says she’s never heard it. Either way, it looks and sounds just right, doesn’t it? When I attended ‘Poetry from Art sessions at Tate Modern from 2008 to c.2014, Pascale Petit exhorted participants to ‘use all the senses’, and that’s certainly what Sue did in this poem.

Above all, I adore how Sue ends the poem so beautifully, with ‘the crooning turtledoves’ – one of our most extinction-threatened bird species – and invites us readers to hear their song instead of the tomcats on their night-time prowl.

Matthew Paul, On Sue Riley’s ‘Cats’ Meat Man’

14 May is #dylanday, a day to remember Dylan Thomas. I am posting this as part of a Facebook celebration initiated by Lidia Chiarelli of Immagine e Poesia. 

Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at The Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May 1953.

Please find below some lines from my poem in memory of the poet. My poem was first published in Places within Reach (2006), an anthology from Indigo Dreams Press, edited by Ronnie Goodyer.

Tycoch

Tall rows of rainbow tulips line these ways
where poets, lovers, dreamers stoop to gaze
upon the mirror of the pool. A sudden spark
shakes up the surface like a burning coal.
We jump, and vow to leave before the night
sweeps down from Kilvey Hill: a rook in flight
spreads shadows on the bay and bares its soul.
We climb the hill where ponies used to roam
and reach at last the red, red walls of home.

Caroline Gill, 14 May is #dylanday

I promised a review of Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poetica, which, as the title promises, is a lot of poems about poetry—kind of a slim volume, not that many poems, and an unexpected large chunk of prose in the middle, talking about attending antifascist rallies where violence breaks out, being threatened by the ex of a friend with gun violence at her workplace and consequently going to the shooting range and thinking about a bulletproof vest—probably the most interesting part of the book. Juliana is seven years older than me but still in my age group (Gen X), started blogging and such around the same time I did, lived a large part of her life in Ohio (which I also did), and she’s a feminist who struggles with what that means. She also has some privileges—a lot of famous writer friends and a steady paying fancy academic job—that I don’t have, which she makes pretty clear in her acknowledgements, all ten pages of them (!). Is it worth reading? Probably. Is the best book of poetry I read in the last year? Absolutely not. (I would give it to Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal, such a searing book about dying of ALS, or Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic, such an intensely intelligent meditation on mushrooms and death. I think the people that choose the Pulitzer Prize are probably picking friends from their own cohort of academics, not reading too far outside their comfort zones, and boy, do they love poems about poetry. (Remember Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets also had a lot of poetry talk, though her style is pretty different than Spahr’s.) I absolutely adored Marie Howe’s Pulitzer winning New and Selected Poems, which had a totally different flavor, which won the year before, so I guess it just varies by year. If I was a judge, I would have probably fought for a different book, but no one has asked me yet, LOL.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Personality and Poetry, Hummingbirds and Goldfinches and Butterflies, Surviving Root Canals, and Melancholy Seasons

This sort of critique has been around forever: https://themagialipoetryshow.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-pool-of-poetic-mediocrity. I recall such chat when I was 20 years old and all poetry was print; there was much to-do about whether being a poet associated with a university was the only way to be taken seriously or at any rate recognized at all. There were complaints that celebrities got books published while excellent un-famous writers struggled, waiting for rejections by SASE*. Poets often complained of cliques, of infighting and pettiness. There was a certain railing against mediocre free verse and “overly-confessional” poetry; writers threw barbs at those deemed too political or not political enough, or too feminist or not feminist enough, or writing that was deemed too formal for contemporary times. Recognition was a term I heard often in the 1980s. It was what mattered, apparently. Needless to say, I did not attain it. I think, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.

Author Ali Whitelock’s points are not all off the mark, in fact; who has not suffered through listening to some embarrassingly bad (well, we have to learn somehow) or, worse yet, egotistical/narcissistic readers at open mikes? All I can say for myself is that when I was starting out I recognized my work was not brilliant–but I needed the practice and tried not to overstay my welcome on stage. Even as a featured reader, I tended not to fill the time allotted. Granted, it helps that I don’t write epics! But I’ve heard these criticisms of open mike readings and about gate-keeping literary magazine editors for decades, and also the charge that poets are aiming more for recognition (today read: “likes”) than for highly-crafted work. And also the claim that there’s a sudden proliferation of “half-arsed poetry” in the world. Nope. Not sudden or new.

Whitelock’s essay is likely meant to be a bit provocative. Otherwise why use such freighted language, or make sarcastic remarks like “Poetry, as we all know, is competitive…”? And her bullet points about how to know when you’ve achieved a poem worth publishing–Eh. Not objective or even particularly actionable, and what if the writer really feels that her mediocre poem meets those points, even if few others agree? Taste, after all, is personal. However, I do like what she says about writing poems: “The poem itself – and the process whereby it is achieved – is the reward. Not the likes, not the prizes, not the comments – true, false or otherwise.” I’m definitely into the process. “Likes” on social media are nice, I suppose, but they tend not to mean much.

Ann E. Michael, Complaints, critiques

A poem that disappears. A poem you can hold. In this self-interview, writer and artist Josh Medsker opens up about his evolving practice and the intimate, tactile world of his Container Poems—art objects built around a single emotional or thematic thread. As he puts it, each one is “an art object built around a theme — every element of the piece supports that theme,” a definition that becomes richer the deeper you go into his process.

What makes this conversation especially compelling is how it mirrors the work itself: personal, reflective, and rooted in relationship. Medsker traces the surprising connections between his Disappearing Poems and these new physical pieces, exploring how ephemerality and permanence can answer the same artistic question from opposite directions.

This guest post dives into the origins of the project, the emotional labor behind each object, and the way making physical containers has reshaped his understanding of what a poem is—not just text, but an experience.

Trish Hopkinson, Inside the Box: A Self-Interview with Josh Medsker on Container Poems

Prose, a punch in the face, a feather in the armpit, a snake that sticks its tail in one of its ears so it doesn’t hear too much music. I want my prose to be as tricksterish, as surprising, as osmotic as is my experience of the world, not just from A to B, but all points between and also those points that are not on that line. I want my prose to be as quicksilver as a mind and as tawdry or broke, as rich and as broken, as plain spoken or baroque. A passage of prose could be a various as what might happen from morning until night. I wish my prose to be as vivid and changeable as weather, as a drive through a city, sometimes with your eyes closed, sometimes with everyone else’s eyes closed.

Gary Barwin, Prose like a feather in face, a snake in the armpit

Two fairly different haiku of mine, both published by Tinywords over the last few days. I consider myself blessed with good fortune! That sort of thing doesn’t happen often with my poems and there are often long periods when I get nothing but rejections. That’s good too though – all part of the process. And polishing them up to send them out is also a necessary part of it too. I’m always learning new things, about the craft and myself, which is what keeps me interested.

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

Some of my early poems (in books now out of print, in online magazines that have disappeared into the ether) contended with my feelings about the general rebelliousness of our then-college-age children. Those feelings are now part of the deep past, but I can easily recall the self-questioning of that time, which lies behind this poem and others like it. […]

What business did I have
aiming the star-eyed young at physics departments,
at nights in mountain observatories
listening for beings who might not even have breath,
when all I want from the night
is whatever the psalmist heard, that shout of glory?

I know this much: the cosmos
is flying apart. The old drift off the signal.
The children have reached lightspeed.
The galaxies move away
in search of work in a more exciting city.

Maryann Corbett, Failing Astronomy

I’m sitting in a Bentley on Brick Lane eating a bagel from a brown paper bag. I’ve always been more of a brown paper bag kind of a guy than a Bentley man. You’d probably say I live a brown paper bag life. I would reply that you’re more likely to find poetry in a brown paper bag than in a Bentley. I may be wrong. I’m generally wrong. Sometimes I actually like being wrong. I think that’s my problem. I try to convince myself that wrong is where the art is. Isn’t that where you’ll find it? At the wrong side of town. In the wrong bar. At the wrong time. With the wrong people.

We’ve just been sitting in the right kind of place with the right kind of people. All of the beautiful, young and buzzing, hip and hopeful East London creatives. This place even has a sober open mic night. I’m sober but the idea of a sober open mic night brings me out in hives. Is that wrong? “Ya know what?” I say to Rob, “If there’s anything that’d make me want to pick up a drink, it’d probably be going to a sober open mic night.” And I know that’s wrong.

What I’m doing right know feels wrong. Rob has ‘got me in a room’ with a guy who might be able to help me navigate away from a brown paper bag existence and I’m pitching (I think I’m pitching) a poetry project. I’m pitching a poetry project to a guy who’s also done everything wrong but ended up with a Bentley. I need to qualify this: There’s a difference here between wrong and bad. He’s not done bad things (I try hard not to do bad things too). What I mean is wrong, as in being told “there’s no way that’ll work” and trying it or hearing “Oh, you can’t do it like that” and doing it.

Wrong is e.e. cummings dropping his caps, is Joyce abandoning commas and fullstops in a novel, is Kit Marlowe busting free from tight rhymes into blank verse then passing the mic over to Shakespeare. OK so Marlowe did a bunch of bad things too but all that other shit is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s good. It’s wrong and it keeps poetry alive and vital. It’s wrong to break the rules. But it isn’t bad.

Jan Noble, Nº64 What the hell is wrong with you?

I’m not a natural runner, but I have become a habitual one. I like the almost weekly feeling of surprise I experience when I turn up at 9am to the start of a run (not a race) with 100s of other participants. Finishing, however, is never a surprise because I’ve made that my only goal. Were I more of a risk-taker, more hare and less tortoise (to borrow from Aesop), I might run faster earlier, but then I might have to give up (so my thinking goes) and nap en route. As soon as I reach the home stretch, especially when I can see the finish flag, I feel confident and pick up speed. 

I’ve had several other finish lines to cross this week. These finishes have included the usual ones for teaching sessions at work; a printing deadline for the 2nd edition of a poetry collection I’ve edited for a friend (more on this soon); my own poetry submission for a collaborative exhibition in Girona in the autumn (more on this soon); a mid-May aim to get sweet corn planted in the new badger-proof section of my allotment (more on this now): [photo]

This flurry of finishes has been satisfying but also perturbing- maybe my motivation levels are shallow, and it’s only a deadline which results in completion?

But reflecting further on what I’ve learned from all those Parkruns leads me to think a little differently. I had, after all, to do the first 199 in order to complete the 200th. Slow and steady. The sight of the finish each time has been the measurement I need to judge the equation between the resources at my disposal and the task in hand. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sprint to the Finish

 I don’t think my desk or study has been messier. I keep meaning to tidy it up, make a plan, figure out what to do with the accumulation of books. And I will but I wonder if subconsciously the books that are piling up are an encouragement, a comfort. There are all these amazing books still being written that I am excited to read. I feel like I need to read them! So the books are shoring me up a little against despair.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Just Title This Random Notes and See What Happens

this desire to just be
alone
with all these poems
swept away again and again 
by the bigger poem of my life

Tom Clausen, matrix

Little Woolden stole my heart. Follow the sat nav, and it might take you through a network of uneven roads, their surfaces alarmingly cambered by the old bog which sinks below them, or up a small, rough track, to an unmarked space for around 6 cars, and a burnt-out portaloo. Or walk there from Caddishead Library, down the dusty Old Moss Road, through wide open landscapes of wheat, low hills on the far horizon.

This is Greater Manchester, and the city centre is just ten miles away, but it feels like a different country. Directions to some of the smaller flashes, or areas of restored bog might read like follow the road through the estate, down the cul-de-sac, park up by the old folk’s home and take the path on your left. I’d walk down paths only trodden by dog walkers and find myself transported from the sort of depressed Northern towns I grew up in, to a sea of cotton grass, or a stretch of shimmering water where you might hear a nightingale sing.

I think magic comes in many forms. Waking to a snowy day, falling in love, stars. When I started my residency in 2021, I realized that Lancashire was full of secret doors, tucked down cul-de-sacs, next to schools, nursing homes, takeaways, off the main road, round the back of the estate. Gateways and tracks too often go unnoticed, but if you pass through them, you enter a different world and you leave transformed.

These words are taken from an audio trail I wrote as part of my efforts to open those secret doors so that more people can enter. Because if you’ve heard of Wigan in the last week, it’s probably because 24 of the 25 council seats up for election were taken by Reform. If you’ve heard of Leigh in recent years, it might be the murder of Brianna Ghey. And in coming weeks, the old cotton-and-coal town of Ashton-in-Makerfield will be the site of frantic campaigning and speculation as Andy Burnham seeks election in a local struggle that might decide the next PM.

But my concern is not party politics: it’s the bog. The bogs held my grief and my fear, and the surface of the flashes shone with hope. Call me obsessed, call me naïve (I’ve been called a whole lot worse) but if everyone felt a connection with the live green singing world around them, many of our divisions would melt away. As part of my residency, I took groups of young carers, asylum seekers, schools groups, onto those bogs. For a short time, what mattered most was how the ground shook when we jumped on it together, how the sky told the story of our loss, whether we had biscuits. How a stick could be a wand, how stones were precious.

When we connect with the land around us, we belong. When we listen to a bird, we are still, we are together, the environment is present to us in a living, singing form. It matters, and we matter within it. When you are digging, or cooking, or carrying a heavy load, difference melts away. When you are picking litter, or planting cottongrass, you start to see the land, and it sees you. When we are outside, or in the warm shared spaces after walking or work, there is air and light enough for all our stories.

The work of connecting everyone to our land is slow, sometimes so slow it looks like nothing. It looks like a cup of tea outside, or shared food. It looks like walking slowly so someone can catch up. It looks like teenagers swimming in Pennington Flash on a hot day. It looks like what we need to do, regardless of whatever we see it as success. It looks like light on the water. It looks like hope.

Clare Shaw, BOGS AGAINST FASCISM

after the rain
sunshine dripping
from the fig tree

Jim Young [no title]

This week: fists of will-be-blooms, a delicate crepuscular pinky grey, parrots nesting in the rain tree, the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue, and much more. Enjoy.

A word drops off my fingers,
hits the floor, shatters. Words
shatter not into letters
and sounds, but into sharp shards
of reflection and color,
memory and movements, dance,
hollows where meaning was home.

PF Anderson, Wordless (#NaPoWriMo 29)

I have begun to teach myself to draw with my left hand.

I have started what I hope will be a book. I haven’t written much prose in a long long time. I learned a lot writing my novel, CLICK, and by learning a lot I mean a lot of what not to do.

I haven’t been hearing poems lately and when that happens I tend not to force myself to write them. I do write them when I’m in poetry circles where we get to write and share with each other but other than that I really haven’t felt like writing poetry. It will come back when it comes back. I think I need a lot of quiet space to let my brain run across the pastures and go wild. Then the poems will come.

Rebecca Cook, Life Update

We had a beautiful full moon right on my birthday, too, and we had lovely sunny weather, so we got out and gardened and Glenn power-washed the deck, so we were ready to entertain. The full moon always gives me insomnia, and this one was no different. I was thinking about an interview with Meryl Streep about the first Devil Wear Prada and how she was thinking of retiring from acting when she was offered the job at 56. I am 53, so it made me think about when we retire as artists. I’m not making the kind of money Meryl is, and I’m much less in demand. If I retired, there probably wouldn’t be as much of an outcry as there would be over Meryl (who was not only great in Devil Wears Prada 2, but if you’ve seen her, she’s terrific in Only Murderers in the Building). It’s surprising to me that she was thinking of retiring but then spoke openly that she did the movie that was so beloved because of the large paycheck it afforded.

I’m also thinking about retirement because Microsoft is offering early retirement packages next week. Glenn still loves his job and enjoys working, so it’s not very attractive to him yet. They’re doing it to invest more in AI and less in humanity, which seems depressing. I guess poets can work until they die or decide to do something else, and we definitely won’t be offered a nice paycheck to quit, and AI may try to take our jobs anyway.

This week EcoTheo re-ran a photo I took for them a while ago, and Rattle re-ran an older poem in their newsletter. So it was nice to be remembered in these ways on a week I was feeling discouraged and thinking about quitting.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Birthday Week, Full Flower Moon, Open Books, Seattle’s Japanese Garden, and More

I’ve been observing my mind lately. It’s been such a gadfly. In five minutes I’ll have searched five things on the internet, gotten up and splashed some paint on paper, written my little 100-word daily challenge (more on that in another post), sat back down and picked up a book, put it down to look something else up, started one thing only to interrupt myself with another. Is it spring that’s making me so flighty? Life in these times? Yes and yes? I’ve been busy in spurts and listless the rest of the time, aspiring to grand ideas but too scattered to think them up, or I think them up and immediately reject them. It’s spring and not-quite-spring, some trees are dangly with their bright catkins and some are well into their leaves. My lilacs are just showing their fists of will-be-blooms but someone’s three blocks away are in full purple. On my walk up on the ridge, no jacks in no pulpits, but flocks of marsh marigold in their fancy dress. A tiny speck of eagle high in the sky circling; in a field the very earthly dark mound of a turkey vulture, its terrible red head bent to its meal. I tried to write a poemish thing based on the crazyass mix of headlines in the Guardian, the whiplash of turning to witness democracy’s demise in one article, the ridiculousness gravity lent to some fashion “controversy” in another. But Rilke said poetry was no place for irony. I disagree. Except when I agree entirely. There’s my mind again, changing, changing. But here is the venerable Don McKay, with a poem from his book Another Gravity. I’m not sure I entirely follow the line of thought of the poem. But given the state of my mind, I think it’s okay.

Marilyn McCabe, there must be a door — a door

nothing grows here, the sanctioned and expatriated seed, scoured from yr latitudes, yr gravel hemispheres. flowers: pacified fixtures, bracketed to buildings. tree: hi-vis bros administer enjambment. i bring with me only this body, idealised and desperate. it is the weed and the worm, dankly questing prole, the writhing of its reach, opaque with strain. fungus. assemble myself inside the open sprawl of it: worklife, yr city. the empire is setting. like aspic.

Fran Lock, THE MUSHROOM IS NOT A PLANT

You may be lucky enough to not feel stress or anxiety before a reading or public performance. In general, I usually get excited nerves, rather than debilitating nerves. Yesterday however felt very different. I spent the whole day in a state of extreme anxiety, worrying about everything. I knew I was being illogical because I was worrying about nobody turning up (even though ninety tickets had been sold). I was also worrying about people turning up and being bored. I spent a full hour thinking about my book and regretting writing any of the poems and publishing it in the first place.

On Saturday night, we had a power cut at midnight which lasted till midday on Sunday morning. This meant we couldn’t make lunch so we all went down into town for lunch on Sunday, which now I write it, sounds like a relatively simple thing to do, even a pleasant one! However, by this point, my ADHD symptoms were in overdrive, making simple decisions and even eating something feel completely overwhelming.

Because I usually don’t get like this before a reading, it took me a while to identify what I needed which was some time on my own to relax and work out what I was reading. I went and had a very long bath, made a list of the poems I was going to read and then left for the venue with my sister.

As Jody and I pulled up to the venue, my friends E and S were also getting out of their cars. They’d come early because E knew I was anxious about nobody turning up! When I got to the green room, my colleague Reuben from work was there with Malika – he’d met her at the train station to make sure she got up the hill ok. Carola was already there, Amanda was in mid-flow organising everyone and then Clare strode through the doors with a box full of The Book of Bogs to sell and I felt instantly calmer.

I silently thanked past Kim for the genius idea of filling this event with my best friends and my sister, of surrounding myself with friendship and laughter.

Kim Moore, HOW TO HAVE A MAGICAL BOOK LAUNCH

My poem Interior with a Table has been awarded equal Fourth Prize in the Kent & Sussex 2026 Open Poetry Competition. I was delighted, especially as the competition was judged by Mimi Khalvati. She describes the poem as a ‘sensitive example of ekphrastic poetry’. You can read her Judge’s Report here.

The poem was inspired by the 2021 painting of the same title by Vanessa Bell. The date put me in mind of WWI which enters the frame.

You can read the poem here.

Fokkina McDonnell, Interior with a Table – poem

Earlier today, as I made adjustments in the galley for GRAVEYARDS OF CHICAGO, I was thinking about my acquaintance with this particular urban legend and source materials. In particular, Resurrection Mary has been an obsession that took root when I was 12 and checking out stacks of ghost story and paranormal books from the tiny Cherry Valley public storefront library with its rickety floors, precariously leaning stacks, and questionable green shag carpet in the children’s area. It’s probably natural that I would become obsessed with ghosts given my love of horror and gothic leanings. This one seems particularly interesting from a regional standpoint (not Rockford necessarily, but suburban Chicago, though another spooky urban legend from my hometown makes an appearance in the play).

When I was taking a class back in the MFA program way back in 2005 that was devoted to writing Chicago poems, it seemed like a no-brainer, to take my obsession with this urban legend and see what bloomed. There were also great ways to bring in history and class in the city in interesting ways. The result of course was Archer Avenue. Initially, it was a small print edition that I mostly gave away and traded in the year leading up to my first book’s release. Later, those poems would fit nicely in the context of IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, my second book. 

Certain things informed that project, and by extension, the play i just wrote two decades later. In addition to in-depth research on sightings and lore, I did things like go on ghost tours and wandered around the historic State St. Marshall Fields (which was on the verge of becoming a Macy’s soon after.) Class and the idea of pauper/unmarked graves was at the forefront of my mind, as was Depression-era economics. 

While the poems wander in their p-o-v and thematic directions, the play places Mary’s story as I imagine it alongside a cab driver decades later, using music to mark the shifts in time and weaving their stories together, including one scene I really hope works that changes decades mid-scene.

Kristy Bowen, roadside ghosts and writing your obsessions

Between Marshal Pétain’s capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, and the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the French wrote over three million letters of denunciation to the authorities. After the war, some denunciations were deemed, retroactively, criminal acts: the crime of “indignité nationale.” Fascinated by their surface and their substance, I set out to write a poem based on those letters. While I admit to an interest in the more standard heroic possibilities of iambic pentameter, here my aims were Frostian. The letters are a fascinating mixture of “tones.” Rarely were the writers trying simply to convey information. They were just as keen to signal things about themselves, to the agents of the Vichy state: patriotism; sophistication; alignment with its (sick) values. They wanted to denounce “traitors,” but they wanted to sound appropriately bureaucratic in doing so. Bureaucratic tones are underrepresented in metric poetry—I’m not aware even of Robert Frost trying—but poetic they can be, when they contain an undercurrent of terror. Also poetic, in this case, is the fact that these writers’ mixed goals did not mix well: because virtue and vice do not mix well. Nor, and this is no coincidence, could the writers quite carry it all off. Their sophistication is often sour and out of tune.

That’s how it struck me, anyway. This may be serendipity, but I have leaned into it. For I should say, the letters were written in French (of course), and discussions of them referred me to a compliation titled La Délation sous l’Occupation, of which no English translation has been published. Unable to pay a real live French person to produce one, I have relied on machines to do it, machines which are, despite recent advances you may have read about, not entirely reliable. But their unreliability was, in this case, poetic, in a way worth explaining. It’s familiar enough that modern English is a mixture of German and French. Because French was, in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, the language of England’s ruling elite, French words that came to English tend to have a “fancier” meaning in English, than their originals have in French. For example, “travail” in French means (simply) “work,” but in English it means “painful or laborious effort.” Computer translations from French tend to “transliterate” French words, rather than replace them with simpler non-French words that are closer in meaning: “travails” may remain “travails,” and not be translated as “labors.” The denunciations, therefore, in my eyes, appeared to try quite hard to use the fanciest—and so, Frenchest—English words they could, even when those words were not well-suited to their intended meaning. This was, sometimes, quite amusing, as was the contrast between these elevated stylistic aims, and the sometime pettiness of the “infractions” being reported. And then, here and there, through this curtain of administrative and euphemistic malaprops, some plain and brutal language would protrude. In a poem, this could be magnified into something grotesque.

One story about World War II, is that its great evils should not be wholly blamed on a few monstrous men; shares should also be distributed to the masses of collaborators, each of whom perpetrated his or her own microdose of evil. These letters are among them, and they smell of it.

Brad Skow, The Spirit of a Broken People: French Letters of Denunciation

I was absolutely delighted yesterday to receive my contributors copy of a new poetry anthology, The New Sentience: Reimagining Animal Poetry, which is just released from Trinity University Press with a Foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It’s a beautiful book! The editors, Ashley Capps and Allison Titus did a wonderful job putting it together, and I’m marveling at the Table of Contents, which is full of such greats as Mary Oliver, Linda Gregg, Mary Ruefle, Mary Oliver, Nikole Brown, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Camille Dungy, Ross Gay, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Ada Limon, as well as yours truly.

The poem of mine that they’ve selected to include is “Dr. Harry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory,” from my book Darwin’s Mother, which takes the perspective of a monkey forced to participate in Harlow’s famous (and chilling) wire mother and cloth mother experiments from the 1950s. Thinking about those experiments and what it must have been like for the baby rhesus monkeys who were deprived of maternal care and familial connection still makes my heart feel as heavy as stone.

But the anthology is also rich with hope—poems of connection and kinship, of observation, odes to interspecies friendships, to entanglement, wildness, and mystery.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Reimagining Animal Poetry

Jen Feroze lives by the sea in Essex. She writes about motherhood, shifts in identity, and love in many forms, frequently finding wonder in the seemingly everyday. Her work has appeared in publications including Magma, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, and Under the Radar and her debut pamphlet Tiny Bright Thorns was published in 2024. And in news very hot off the press, Jen has just been announced as the winner of the 2026 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition.

A Dress with Deep Pockets is a book that takes us in its confidence, and talks to us candidly over the kitchen table about friendship, motherhood and ageing. Jen writes with a quiet confidence – the poems are not fussy, preferring to leave a deep imprint through their frankness and vitality.

Here is a poet who is able to bring us the essence of a character and a stage of life in swift, bright sketches – like her teenage friend, in Hare Girl, “tawny and watchful in corners, / boys staring owl-eyed from across the room.” Or the speaker of the poems, caught mid-realisation in Boxing Day Swimmers, of her own ongoing process of transformation;

It’s the strangest thing, lately,
I open my mouth and my mother falls out –
a mournful clockwork woodpigeon on the kitchen table.

Boxing Day Swimmers

What I enjoy about these poems is how lightly they wear their ‘poem-ness’. They are full of craft – clever little turns, pin-sharp images, genius line breaks – yet they are carried along with an immense warmth and wit, a voice that feels so natural and completely itself.

Victoria Spires, Fictional bats, stolen vodka and bobble hats

There are periods when I’m reading for work, others when I’m reading for pleasure. Sometimes, they overlap. At the moment, I can firmly say that my reading life feels expansive and enriching in a way that lands firmly in the realm of pleasure.

Last week, I reread Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, which is one of my favorite collections. This week, I’m reading two extraordinary books, ’s forthcoming Middle Slope and Karen Solie’s T.S. Eliot-prize winning Wellwater. I wake up excited to read, which is a wonderful feeling.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

The private detective is closing the file, dusting the mirror to move on but the woman at the heart of the case is living rent free in his mind. It suggests how experience shapes us and some memories can never be left behind.

Polly Clark has a skill for taking apparently ordinary moments, working on a piece of art, attending a funeral, finishing a job, and invests them with layered depths, showing how these micro connections shape individuals. She asks readers to look again, challenge their knowledge of how they might think this scene pans out and asks what if you focus on the less obvious, what if you were less complacent? It’s a fine balance between a relaxed, colloquial tone and a thoughtful, darker undertone and invites a reader to re-read the poem. If you’re not familiar with Clark’s work, “Afterlife” is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “Afterlife” Polly Clark (Bloodaxe) – book review

A couple of years after I met this poem, I met its author at the Dodge Poetry Festival. He gave a reading and I queued up to have On Love signed, and told him that “For the Sleepwalkers” was perhaps the first contemporary poem I had loved, and that I had read it in Fifty Years, and he looked at me very seriously and said yes, he remembered that anthology, and he was very glad to know it, and thanked me for telling him, and then he signed my book “We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.”

“For the Sleepwalkers” is a simple poem is another funny thing I almost wrote in the spirit of earnest classification. Is it simple? It leapt off the page and into a seventeen-year-old, so make of that what you will. I suppose I continue to feel guarded about my beloveds after such a long estrangement from Poetry at large: the sneaking suspicion that I do not like the right things remains hard to shake, especially when I make the mistake of picking up the latest issue of whatever. But, Dear Readers, I’ve so far only gained more of you here, so perhaps that’s a kind of empirical argument for not being all that wrong.

What’s to like? Tercets! The load-bearing stanza form: I like to imagine Hirsch, inevitably, thinking Dante, maybe even making a stab at terza rima early on—wonderful / invisible, faith / path—but that may be autobiography; I can’t count the number of times I’ve set out to write terza rima and abandoned it after line five. It’s handsomely constructed, repeated phrases and constructions weaving a subtle net of sound and sense: “so much faith . . . so much faith” in the first stanza, “stairs instead of the window . . . doorway instead of seamless mirror”in the second.

Alongside, and in conjunction with, these syntactic pairings, I love the strangeness of some of the figures, how the poet doesn’t quite ask us to rethink our assumptions as much as declare them rethought. Sleepwalking is most often employed pejoratively; one who sleepwalks through life misses things, but Hirsch’s sleepwalker is the one who truly sees. Stairs in the context of somnolence denote danger, yet here they are a preferable path to a window, a safe way down, and also out; the gaping door is not a symbol of vulnerability, but preferable to the mirror’s endless echo chamber. I love the night-soaked beauty of hearts flying off and returning, the clipped percussive music of “thick black fists,” the solid sound and sense of “glove of our chests.”

Most importantly, and I think most like Hirsch—the poet laureate of insomnia—is this notion of generative dark, of insight arriving not on a beam of light, but in the wild darkness: in shedding the self and actively seeking the unknown, even though we are so often told, and so often tell ourselves, it’s dangerous.

Vanessa Stauffer, “For the Sleepwalkers” by Edward Hirsch

James Matthew Wilson has noted Ransom’s prosody in these late poems:

the falling, slant-rhymed, rhythms . . . which Ransom borrows with so much else from Mother Goose, are coupled with the mundane and the parenthetical, rhetorical, Latinate grandeur, and these all conspire to create poems immediately amusing to the ear; grotesquely jerry-rigged so as to compel us to ponder their inner-workings; and finally insistent that life in this world is a long defeat, where what is most precious, beautiful, and humane merits our reverence and study even though it will, in God’s time, fail us.

In “Blue Girls,” a number of pentameter lines, specifically the internal b-rhymed lines of stanzas 1 and 3, do contain these falling rhythms, ending on such multi-unstressed-syllabic words as “seminary” and “contrary,” which casts the short concluding lines in those quatrains, with their final stressed syllables, in higher relief. The effect, then, is something like rolling down a hill and hitting a fatal wall.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Blue Girls

Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative Anatomy”, describing a hawk moth, is an ethereally thinned version of a reversed sonnet (one in which the sestet precedes the octave): it’s written in short, irregular lines, and has only a few highly attenuated rhymes. The irregularity and attenuation both suit the idea of the moth’s fragility and erratic flight (itself brilliantly captured by the line end pause in ‘cleverly / erratic’). I think they have another important effect. The whole poem is brought delicately to rest by the way the last two lines move to the iambic pulse of the dominant tradition in English metrics and of the traditional sonnet in English. However, the unpredictable rhythms before that point seem to contribute to its lightness of imaginative touch and the consequent extremely open way in which its suggestiveness works. This gives it a vast imaginative reach with many overlapping circles of suggestion. Short lines isolate images and phrases, letting each resonate in the pause or blank space at the line ending. Shimmering between overwhelming extremes of light and darkness, between poles of miniaturist empathy and geographical or even cosmic vastness, and between anthropomorphic and naturalistic imaginings of moth and bat, glancing in its imagery at archaic and modern industrial techniques, at marine, submarine and aerial navigation and at the mechanics of making music, vividly evoking both the cruelty and the marvellous intricacy of the natural order, it doesn’t push the reader towards a conclusion but opens multiple vistas of reflection that he’s free to follow or not as he wills. The whole poem gives a beautiful sense of completeness, but this is entirely a matter of artistic shaping, not of the expression of an idea, and it seems to me that the abstention from any kind of intellectual conclusion that would have limited the reader’s freedom of response is as much a beauty of the poem as its shaping is.

Edmund Prestwich, Jamie McKendrick and sonnet form. Comments on “Alternative Anatomy”.

[Edwin] Muir was a Scottish poet who died in 1959. According to my note on the flyleaf, I bought my Faber edition of his Collected Poems as a student in 2000. I’m not sure how much read Muir is these days but his poems seem to me to have stood the test of time particularly well. He assumes some scriptural and classical knowledge in a way that is less common now, but his poems are never ‘learned’. You always feel that he is putting his gifts at the service of the reader — that he writes to be understood.

In this poem, for instance, there’s an obvious allusion to the story in Genesis, and also to two Gospel parables — of the wheat and the tares (in Matthew 13) and of the workers in the vineyard (in Matthew 20). ‘Tares’ is a now largely obsolete word for vetch, a kind of weed that grows easily in wheatfields. Recent translations of the Bible tend to use ‘weeds’, but ‘tares’ is the word in the King James Bible, and I would guess that for most mid-20th century readers — for whom it was no longer in common currency — the word itself was strongly associated with this particular parable. But even if you have never read the New Testament, and don’t know what ‘tares’ are, I don’t think you would have any difficulty following this poem.

Muir uses scripture (and also some parts of classical mythology) in a natural way, to clarify his meaning rather than hedge it around. This is much harder to do than it looks, and the apparent straightforwardness of Muir’s style is perhaps his greatest achievement. It is very difficult indeed to write lyric poetry which is both beautiful and straightforward to understand, and which also has something to say — a clear and specific message or argument. These seem like they ought to be the basic virtues of verse but it is a rare poet who can put all three together as consistently as Muir.

The clarity and (for want of a better word) ‘accessibility’ of Muir’s style derives to a large extent, I think, from how deeply rooted his poetry is in what we might call roughly ‘popular’ verse, including songs and hymns — the kind of verse that is shaped by use for maximum clarity. 

Victoria Moul, When will all come home?

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I’ve been reading this one for several months. Did you know Leaves of Grass is quite long? The first (self-published) book wasn’t so bad, but the one I have, one of the later editions after he had added and added to it, is a bulky 400 poems.

Some parts are great! But some not so much. For example, should anyone, poet or otherwise, use the word “promulges” this much?

“Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself,
And the dark hush promulges as much as any.”
(from Song of Myself, 45)

Not to hate on Whitman – his work is obviously inspired by the cadences and repetitions of Biblical poetry, notably Ecclesiastes (which I was also reading at the time – interesting pairing) and the psalms. However, instead of centering around God, he centers around himself, in a universalistic way. What a tiresome subject.

Often a famous poet will be known for one or two of their very good poems, but there is a treasury of much better poetry that no one ever reads – but in Whitman’s case, I think the well-known poems are the poems you should read.

Renee Emerson, Does anyone ever finish Whitman?

Simone Weil was, to all who knew her, intense. Over the course of her shortened life, she gave herself up to an evolving sequence of political, ethical and mystical philosophies, and pushed herself and her body to great physical extremes in order to live them fully. This was her praxis, her public self.

Tom Pow’s new collection of poems has grown out of several years of immersion in Simone’s writing, augmented with visits to places which advanced her thinking in some way, or were the site of revelation, of a sudden clarity. By deepening his concept of her by encountering her in these places, he invests his poems with a directness and intimacy that comes from working with primary source material, including the places in which it was formed – the sounds of the building, the light on the walls. We encounter her in these places. It is this sense of presence, of being with, that charge these poems with such authenticity, that makes them ring true.

Lesley Harrison, The Vulnerability of Precious Things

There is no single reading of a poem. We cannot be done with it in a single pass as we might with a novel. (I don’t mean later re-reading, but the initial or single encounter.) Even a joke poem, a limerick, a short form, a couplet, requires more than a single read: it lingers and echoes in memory. Something about itself is always drawing our attention. Most verse is dross because it lacks this quality, not for any merely formal reason. When I first read ‘Filling Station’ I did not understand it in a literal sense. Some barrier existed because it is American and the lingo was obscure; some words needed looking up; some of it is simply difficult, not the sense that it is hard but in the sense that you must mull it before you “get” it. Not all difficulty makes itself known on the surface.

Late James is poetry in this sense. There is this sort of poetry in the heart of Austen, too, whose sentences roll in our minds. Not poetry in the way Dickens drops into pentameter, but in the lilt of her prose that becomes almost like the long lines of the Psalms. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in the country of Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property… We might hear Cowper behind this as well as Addison. We might have to read the novel several times before we think to ask why it matters that the residence is in the centre of their property.

Austen can be read as an easy novelist or as a difficult one, not difficult in the way Joyce is difficult, but not easy in the way Wodehouse is easy. Some novels have their difficulty submerged, like Brideshead, which I read three times through on first encounter. Just as the first time we read a great poem and it will require lots of attention, so we might need to read a novel that looks easy. But the “standard” way of reading a novel is straight through, maybe going back a little, but mostly linear. If we rate literature according to pleasure, the more linear the better. Zing! So when people discuss difficulty, a lot of their arguments might depend on how “poetic” they like their literature.

For some poets, like A.R. Ammons and Wallace Stevens, keeping you in the state of difficulty is almost the point. To reach a full explanation is almost to miss the point—these poets are trying to put something into words that cannot, fully, be expressed. The sense of difficulty should be where we understand that. We will only ever be able to get so close to reality through words.

Henry Oliver, Out of all the indifferences

Whenever people ask, “Which poets inspired your own work?” I end up saying that my poetry is largely influenced by prose writers—maybe even more so than the poets. Clarice Lispector is part of my holy trifecta (others include Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras, whose work I also practiced bibliomancy with).

Lispector, a Brazilian writer whose family origins trace back to war-torn Ukraine, lost her mother as a child (I am always interested in writers whose childhoods asked them to raise themselves, in a way—writers who operate through and within a kind of lack). I’m also married to a Brazilian person, so there’s one slightly familiar doorway through which I enter her work.

Despite genre classifications, her work is a poetics of nonlinearity and interiority. On the line level, it is positively delicious. Água Viva—a “meditation on the nature of life and time”—asks you to surrender to a sea of questions, desires, prayers, thoughts, to the very mysteries that make up our world, to the spaces in between. And I fucking love that. If there’s anything I hate in literature, it’s being hand-fed.

Água Viva is an exercise in constructing meaning, but it’s collaborative between author and writer; it feels as though the author is whispering directly to you. Or that you’re watching a prayer as it’s being transmitted to the heavens.

Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Clarice Lispector

A poetry prize that we are lucky to have in the UK is the Michael Marks Awards. Founded in 2009, it now has four categories recognising small-press excellence: Poetry Pamphlet; Publisher; Illustrator; Environmental Poetry Pamphlet. This year’s shortlists have just been published, with the winners to be announced in June.

The only shortlisted title that I currently have on my shelves is Hugh Foley’s Recent Poems (The Fair Organ), which is a pamphlet in the tradition of small, simple printed objects that I particularly enjoy as a way of reading poetry: a paper-wrapped, pocket-notebook of 28 pages, stapled and hand-stamped on the back with the publisher’s logo (I wrote about my own small-press experiment with this format here).

Of course, the downside of reading this way is that wafer-thin publications easily get lost at the bottom of the book-shelf food chain, pressed flat by the paperbacks and hardbacks they can sometimes end up tucked inside. […]

In a statement about “The Importance of Poetry Pamphlets”, the Michael Marks Awards observe:

Traditionally, pamphlets have provided a vehicle for new writers to emerge, as well as offering established poets a focused, short structure that is ideal for exploring themes […] Historically, and still, often small presses have been labours of love, individually crafting each pamphlet.

This got me thinking about which pamphlets on my shelves I value not only as short and portable early gatherings of poems that later have ended up in “full” books, but specifically those which are themselves my preferred (and sometimes only) way of reading a particular work.  [Click through for Jeremy’s selection of a half-dozen memorable pamphlets (AKA chapbooks).]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #42: An Outside to Language

8 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

It has been a natural state for me to move among poetry, translation, critical work, and fiction. I may spend months or years focused on one or two, toggling between them, and then find myself drained. Other genres rush in to fill the space left and reinvigorate me. Translation, especially, recharges the mind for my own poems. There, you are both creating and kneeling at the mercy of existing language, balancing between fidelity and estrangement, mimicry and imagination, domestication and foreignization, to mold a poem in English that does to an English speaker what the original did to readers of that language. Switching modes feels like stepping out of an airport in the tropics and taking off your parka. So I never have writers’ block per se. There’s always some other kind of writing I could be doing if one type is coming up dry. And the genres necessarily challenge one another. Is this really a narrative poem or a story that hasn’t been completed? What form best serves this idea? What can this form do that the others cannot?

9 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

With a “9-5” job, I write when I can: a snippet in the early morning, something after dinner, a few hours on the weekend. The trick for me has been to keep the mind engaged with the literary, with the way a poet attends to the world, at least for a few dedicated moments every day; that may not be actual writing, but it keeps the writer in my mind alive.

10 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn to international writers to pull me out of the milieu and habits of U.S. literature.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Moysaenko

like any poet, i am always
fighting the moon. i want to have her
over for dinner. i want to use
my phone flashlight to find her face.
in a dream, the house catches fire &
i turn into a diamond in the heat.

Robin Gow, battery life

According to #FemkuMag, “In September 2017 Rowan Beckett Minor coined the term “femku” in the subtitle of their first book Radical Women: A Book of Femku. Since then, the term has resonated throughout the Haiku community, thus pioneering a movement and this journal, the safe space Rowan created for women, trans, and gender-expansive Haijin to share their work.” I’d like to learn more about your first book, Radical Women: A Book of Femku. What are the main subjects and topics that you focus on in this book and what inspired you to write it?

I didn’t yet realize I was non-binary when I wrote Radical Women: A Book of Femku, so many of the poems are about navigating the expectations of gender roles in society, the sexual pressures women face, and my love-hate relationship with my body. These poems are raw, gritty, and very underdeveloped in traditional technique, so I’m not sure you can truly call them “haiku,” but they certainly have a senryu spirit and laid the groundwork for my entire poetic career.

I’m also interested in learning more about #FemkuMag. What do you enjoy the most about serving as the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of #FemkuMag?

Oh, that’s easy. I most enjoy the community I’ve built. There are many poets who tell me their submitted work was written specifically with #FemkuMag in mind, or that they would only trust me with certain topics. Unfortunately, women and transgender folks are often scrutinized for speaking their truth and most people just want someone, anyone, who will listen to their unique stories. I think it’s important, crucial even, for underrepresented voices to have a platform; all I do is secure the space and hand them a microphone.

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

My haiku journey began shortly after moving to Detroit, Michigan in 2017. I discovered the Evergreen Haiku Study Group at Michigan State University, run by Michele Root-Bernstein, and attended several meetings. Mike Rehling of Failed Haiku regularly attended the meetings and was kind enough to give me a few haiku history lessons over some delicious Japanese cuisine. Failed Haiku was my first haiku publication credit, the H. Gene Murtha contest was my first placement, and I had a haiga featured in the 2017 Michigan State University “Haiga Around the World Exhibition,” so I owe a lot to Mike and the Evergreen Haiku Study Group.

Jacob D. Salzer, Rowan Beckett Minor

Zoeglossia is a literary organization seeking to pioneer a new, inclusive space for poets with disabilities.  Launched in 2017, Zoeglossia is the first such organization in the poetry landscape. The idea is to provide an intersectional community open to a wide range of disability poetics, encouraging conversation and support.  This link leads to a wide variety of poems that explore the experiences and consequences of illnesses and disabilities . .. and I offer a the opening portion of a sample from that collection below.

Number Twenty by Jonathan Mack

This, the story that brings me to you, is one story in twenty. In the other nineteen I am dead. In five stories I’m dead of AIDS, having suffered every possible infection and died at home, in a variety of hospitals, and in the toilet of a theater. There are seven suicides between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. There are two terrible car accidents — one involving a drunk driver and one that is entirely my fault. In one story I live only three days and  . . .

Jonathan Mack’s poem is from This New Breed. Copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Mack.

JoAnne Growney, Resisting Disability with Poetry and Math

Over the past few years, I have interviewed over one hundred journal editors. Some lit mags want work related to specific themes such as war, social justice or the environment. Some focus on showcasing certain writers, such as women over sixty or Canadian poets. And, of course, many have specific genre parameters: creative nonfiction only, or prose poetry only, flash fiction, long fiction, hybrid works…

Yet if there is one commonality among what a majority of editors look for in submissions, it is related to voice.

Stephen Beeber of Conduit: His magazine is a “venue for voices that aren’t ready to be recognized by the mainstream.”

Cherry Lou Sy of Adroit: “A strong voice gives a story its soul.”

Michelle Lyn King of Joyland: Her magazine “is most interested in a distinctive voice.”

Jennifer Acker of The Common: The editors are “looking for really strong voice.”

Courtney Harler of CRAFT: “Does [the work] express and capture a truly authentic voice?”

Anthony Varallo of Swamp Pink (formerly Crazyhorse): He is interested in “the voice and energy of the piece.”

Sheila Squillante of Fourth River: Regardless of the genre, it is “incredibly important that the voice of the piece is strong and idiosyncratic and fresh.”

What exactly does all this mean?

In fact, the more I think about the concept of “voice,” the more fascinated I find it as a literary element. On YouTube, the question “What is voice in writing?” yields many results, ranging from the obvious to the nuanced and enlightening.

However, these videos and most other queries related to voice tend to clump together two strands of the concept. One strand is The Author’s Voice. This is your unique stamp as a writer, the singular thing that you and you alone do. This is the Hemingway story you can spot immediately; the Anne Sexton poem you recognize in an instant. This may just be another way of referring to an author’s style. Yet “voice” encompasses more. It’s bigger than style—it’s the author’s worldview, their vision, recurring themes, favored images, vantage point, social position, the very wellspring of ideas that could only come from them.

The second strand is The Voice of the Work. Many writers are admirably consistent in their works. They write about the same sorts of things in more or less the same way. I, perhaps like many of you, am not one of these writers. Some of my stories lean lyrical and are deeply serious. Others are bright and wacky. Some are violent; some are light-hearted. If there is a unifying quality that connects all these works to one another, a larger Author Voice umbrella under which my stories gather, someone else might recognize it, but I’m not sure I can.

So, in talking about voice as a literary element, it would seem important to tease out these two strands. Invariably, writers would want to know whether voice is something that can be learned. Can you strengthen your writing voice? Can you sharpen it? If so, how? What does it take to shape the voice of a particular work? What does it take to shape your own voice, as a writer?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are editors talking about when they talk about “voice”?

I’ve been moved by the sound of mourning doves, their plaintive call. Plangent, but somehow unsentimental. A kind of straightforward sound of mourning. How does the resonant coo evoke our human sorrow or mourning. Of course, for the bird, that’s just the sound they make. They are not more mournful, despite the delicate crepuscular pinky grey of their feathers and this hollow and hollowing song.

We often read the natural world assuming its signs signify our signified, as if these signifiers were human. A pathetic fallacy, but also a deeply felt cultural interconnection. Our human world has evolved in dialogue with these signs. Dark skies, brooding clouds, joyful birdsong, joyous brooks. Here we find voice for our feelings.

Gary Barwin, Bird=flute, egg=stone: Mourning and pathetic fallacy

He said, writer’s block is a myth, look around, the city will provide words for your poem

And the city spoke to me in red.
All instructions and warnings.
Private Property. No Entry.
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
Do not urinate here.
Right Arrow. Left Arrow. Straight and Right.
U-Turn. No Free Left.
Vote for __ . Or maybe for __.
Residents Only. Beware of Dog.
No Parking. Tow Zone.
Speedbump ahead.

And I imagined these signs instead:
Shhh. Parrots Nesting in the Rain Tree.
Take Left. Jacaranda tree in bloom.
Look up – full moon tonight. (And Venus!)
Free books: Take one. Take two.
Pin your poem to this board. (Poets, This Way!)
Hang your art here.
We are not busking. Sing with us.
Feel the grass. Take off your shoes.
No swimming from 2 to 4 PM. The fish are napping.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -5

There is a poem written by Frank O’Hara in April 1954 titled after Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” In Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff refers to O’Hara’s poem as a “loose adaptation” of Rilke’s. David Lehman has called it a “deliberate mistranslation.”

Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘translation’ has to do with O’Hara’s poem at all.

If I had to find words for it, I’d say O’Hara borrowed the structure of Rilke’s poem and cast it into the shape of Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” The title acknowledges this Aus-Einem-April mode; there is no epigraph pointing to Rilke because the pleasure of an O’Hara poem (much like the pleasure of an Ashbery) comes from reaching the reader who recognizes the source. Even the way O’Hara closes this poem — “and out there everything is turbulent and green” — shares almost no bones with Rilke’s quiet glistenings and “still” details ordered by awe.

Alina Stefanescu, “Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded…”

I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me to translate classical Persian poetry if an Iranian friend hadn’t asked me in the early 2000s if I’d be interested in working with a now-defunct organization called the International Society for Iranian Culture (ISIC). ISIC, he said, was looking for someone to write the text for a website that would help counter the axis-of-evil caricature of Iranian culture and history that had been current here in the United States since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The focus of the website would be classical Persian literature. My job would be to make that literature and its place in Iranian and world culture accessible to an online American audience.

I was immediately interested. Since my wife is from Iran and my son is therefore Iranian-American, I had a real stake in the cultural awareness about Iran that ISIC wanted to engender; and, as a college professor and a writer, not only did I think the educational value of the project was self-evident; I also saw it as an opportunity to learn about a literature I knew next to nothing about. When I asked my friend if ISIC might see that ignorance as disqualifying, he told me not to worry. They actually wanted someone who would approach the literature from well outside the specialized and scholarly contexts in which those texts were usually read and studied.

My friend put me in touch with the man who was pre-screening those people who’d been identified as viable candidates for the project, and then he, after a long conversation of which I remember very little, told me I would hear within the next week or so from ISIC’s executive director, Mehdi Faridzadeh. When I met with Mr. Faridzadeh, however, the project he described to me was not only radically different from the one my friend had told me about; it was one I knew right away that I was not qualified to take on.

“We want you to produce,” he said, “book-length literary translations of selections from masterpieces of classical Persian literature. All told there are ten. We’re asking you to do five at a time.”

I did not hesitate. I immediately rejected his offer. While I spoke some Persian, I did not read it. How could I possibly presume to translate from it? Surely, I asked, there were bilingual poets and writers capable of doing this work. Why wasn’t he talking to them? He’d reached out to them first, he said, but, with very few exceptions, none were interested in working on classical texts, and the ones who did had either not responded to his query or had told him outright that they had other commitments. Since he wanted work to start on the project as soon as possible, he’d decided not to wait for them.

I pushed back. Given my lack of the obvious minimum qualifications, I said, I did not see how I could accept his commission or do the work with any integrity. Mr. Faridzadeh responded by pointing out to me something that I already knew, the long history of poets translating works from languages in which they were not literate by relying on informants and what are known in the field of translation as “trots” or “ponies.” These are literal or near-literal versions done by native speakers that the poets then use as a basis for the literary translations they produce. ISIC would provide me, he said, with English-language versions of the original texts that were widely recognized as valid, as well as access to scholars who could answer my questions and help me with any difficulties. Moreover, he went on, since he wanted the translations to stand on their own as contemporary American literature, as something a general readership might actually enjoy reading, he preferred the idea of working with someone like me, a native English-speaking poet, to working with someone who was bilingual but had neither a poet’s ear nor a poet’s way with words.

I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of earning myself a footnote in American literary history by producing these translations did not appeal to me. What ultimately persuaded me to accept ISIC’s commission, however, was a point Mr. Faridzadeh made about the generations of Iranian Americans who did not read Persian and for whom translations like the ones ISIC wanted to publish would be their only access to the classical literature that was part of their heritage. I thought about my son and others like him. They deserved, I thought, access to a version of that heritage that would “sing” in their dominant tongue the way the original “sang” in Persian. So, I agreed to produce a sample couple of pages from Saadi’s Gulistan, and when Mr. Faridzadeh called me a week or so later to tell me the project was mine if I wanted it, I accepted, though I was not at all prepared for the politics of the terrain I was entering.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On The Trail of a Tale – Part Four: How I Came to Play a Very Small Role in Saadi’s Travels Through the World

There were times I wished
I’d apprenticed to a sushi chef and learned
to wield a sharp, clean blade, and times I wanted
only to walk the marbled length of museum galleries,
opening window after window on the centuries.
What I know now came mostly from learning
to sit still, opening books and letting language
take me out of myself and back again until I
could find my way to some shore resembling
knowledge, and there at last make my own fire.

Luisa A. Igloria, Some Labor

Bezos, Musk and Branson strapping the rich to rockets and shooting them at the moon is, in theory, quite appealing. They won’t send poets up there even though poets and astronauts are the same – it’s just the pay-grade that differs. Both reach out into the vast nothingness, return from the overwhelming emptiness with similar sentiment: the world is fragile. And beautiful. And insignificant.

Most poets prefer to stay grounded, don’t stretch to such perilous missions, play it safe, take what earthly succor they can. It seems the further out you are prepared to go the harder it is to attach value to your assignment. I could put on a vest, jog a few laps around the local park, say that I was doing it to save the barn owl or a rare breed of newt and I’d easily raise a few quid. If I told you I was taking a journey, a voyage into the great unknown of a poem, that this odyssey was taking place inside my head, a venture into the unmeasured depths of the imagination but for a similar cause you’d be far less inclined to part with your hard earned.

The first few times I got paid for my writing taught me a lot about how we calculate the value of such work. It was a lesson that came in three stages. I understand it’s a common experience. On the first occasion I didn’t feel worthy of the fee, I felt a little shame and embarrassment. The second time the money felt about right, I was comfortable, confident, assured but by the third time I realised that no matter what you paid me it would never be enough. This is not to say that I thought that my work was astonishingly brilliant just that there was a spectacular randomness about putting a price on it. There was an absurdity to it. It couldn’t be done with any sensible measure. I mean what do you pay for a poem?

Footballers earn more in a week than nurses do in a year and there aren’t riots in the streets. A diamond is just a see-through stone and poets go to places astronauts wouldn’t think to visit. In a parallel universe, somewhere beyond the moon, kids are tossing jewels into mill ponds as wealthy wives string common rocks around their necks.

Jan Noble, Nº62 Diamonds are (not) forever

It’s been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

–In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn’t remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn’t remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

–I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

–As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had reviewed a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven’t circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

–On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80’s, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It’s not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

I know the unseen work behind my writing, my learning, my community building—but I also know that my “score” does not necessarily matter in a subjective field. I might have the same “stats” on paper as an award-winning, widely-published writer, yet feel invisible. And someone else might be looking the same way at me, though that’s harder for me to imagine, of course.

But I also know for a FACT that I do not do a fraction of what other writers do to seek those opportunities and awards. I spent 36 years of my life working as a public school educator, often putting the needs of others before my own. As a retiree, I get to decide how I spend my time. And though that freedom has indeed given me the gift of ample time to focus on my writing and literary endeavors, it has also given me other freedoms.

Most importantly, I have the freedom to spend more time with people I love—my family, my friends—for laughs and meals and concerts and movies and general ridiculousness. To move my body and spend time in nature. To explore new creative outlets with visual art. To travel outside the timeframe of a school year’s constraints. (TL/DR: The way I choose the spend my time is not always devoted to my writing life, but to my LIFE life.)

I may not get the accolades I see my peers receiving, and maybe I have a little pity party every now & then. It feels good to be acknowledged, after all, but that isn’t why I write. So I’m good. I will celebrate my writing wins. And I will celebrate yours.

But I will also celebrate the heron returning to the local lake. The little boy racing his mom down the hill at the forest preserve. I will sing with my husband at a concert or yell at the contestants who annoy us on Top Chef or Survivor. I will talk on the phone with my son to discuss movies, or his upcoming wedding and new home. I will celebrate a friend finishing chemo, a sunny March day after a week of gray and snow. I will celebrate the beauties of the wider world through traveling while I am still able. I will celebrate each small kindness shown to me and try to show the same in return.

This is kind of keeping score that matters.

Donna Vorreyer, Keeping Score

Frankly, it’s all too easy to find metaphors for life in the garden. Nurturing seeds with a sense of hope, even expectation, sure. Endeavoring to control outcomes though one cannot control the weather? Yep, that too. Culling, thinning, weeding in an effort to produce abundance, clarity, or beauty? Yes; and waiting and working under hot sun or in the pouring rain and being surprised by hail or hurricane or drought. (You can pop any of those words into the “search” bar on this blog page and find times I have written about said weather events.) In the thousands of poems I’ve drafted during the past 45 years, garden topics and metaphors abound. Lately, though, I’ve been dwelling on how change–inevitable in the garden–presents problems to solve but also lovely surprises. And yeah, there’s metaphor in that as well. Though people tend to avoid change, change brings a wealth of education in its wake.

It’s true that education is often humbling. We work our butts off only to discover we’ve been doing things wrong, or ineffectively, all along. That’s one of the things I learned when I began trying to grow things in earnest, and it is also true of my experience writing poems. You have to be willing to make mistakes and accept that you made them if you are going to improve; it doesn’t mean you have to solve each difficulty in a prescribed way. You can invent! As long as you know that invention sometimes fails, you can learn from it. Create a nonce form for a poem, for example. Or an improvised trellis for a squash vine that got a lot larger than you’d planned.

Every year in late winter, I devise a garden plan and order seeds. Every year in early spring, I revise the plan in some way. Every year in mid- to late-spring, the garden looks very different from those designs…it helps to have a flexible nature, since nature hates rigidity and thrives in its own way. Often unexpected. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes quite a charming surprise to which I’m more than happy to adapt–I welcome the variation! It’s a process that reminds me of writing. No wonder my gardening and my poems are so connected: the processes are so similar.

Ann E. Michael, Process & metaphor

Above the creeping-charlie’s faultless blue,
a chalk-white smudge of contrail arcs
across a sky by Watteau. Everything stills.
For now,

driver-attention holds, and brakes are firm and good.
Ducks cross in danger and care, those ancient, storied laws.
Early light spangles the cottonwood.
A flowering crab confettis its applause.

Maryann Corbett, Mayday

I just roughed out an early draft of my next poetry manuscript (and finally figured out how to automate the Table of Contents in Word—ha!). It’s a long way from done: a little short, so I have more writing underway; there’s a section that might be relatively weak, we’ll see what I think later; and I will just generally need to revise individual poems and think about the flow within sections. I’ll take my time with all of it. But the basic structure makes sense, hitting the beats and ideas I have in mind. Plus I’ve been drafting new poems toward the gaps and, at least for the moment, feel good about most of them. The working title is Spiral Hum.

It’s Friday here and I fly out on Tuesday, so I’m in the home stretch on the Storyknife residency. I’ve had a couple of down days for a variety of reasons, all of which seem inevitable. It rains a lot here in April and gray skies wear on me. Social anxiety in the company of people I’m just getting to know: for sure. The ms contains tough material and spending time with it can be hard emotionally as well as in craft terms. Sometimes drafting a poem is a total joy, an episode of absorption that leaves me exhilarated. Other days it’s a grind to haul the stanzas up the hill. It’s certainly demanding intellectual work to analyze a sheaf of poems and figure out how they could be better versions of themselves. A stretch of two or three hours can burn me out. On a larger scale, I periodically question poetry’s whole enterprise. A question from Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems” always haunts me: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?” I’m still tracking world news as well as the struggles of my loved ones. What gave me the notion that writing is a good idea, in the face of all that?

Well, the fellowship itself suggests that I should be writing–that at least a few people in the universe want me to. This interval is a rare gift, so gratitude picks me up and set me on my poetic feet again.

I’ve also been reflecting on what about my residency has nourished my desire to write, because in general, it has. For the first time in ages, I have utter privacy to calm down and focus. I know for sure that no one will disturb me all day, though I can wander out and talk to whoever’s around, if I feel like it. Mostly I don’t, until five, when we gather for dinner. We do the dishes after and almost always go out for a walk. Then I’m back to my cabin to write and read. It’s a nice rhythm. And I would like an excellent lunch delivered to my doorstep every day for the rest of my life, please. (I have eaten very well generally, both here and in town—special shout-out to Maura’s salmon, chicken soup, and bison meatloaf; Katie’s baked goods; and the oyster restaurant on the spit.)

An equally important factor is Alaska itself. Awe is some of my most powerful poetry fuel. I crack my door and hear owls and eagles. Scary moose are marching around (don’t even talk to me about bears, who are waking up all over the state and feeling hungry). Yesterday I jumped on one of the staff’s twice-weekly errands to town so I could walk along Beluga Slough and Bishop Beach. I was hoping to find a hag stone, which I did. I filled my pockets with a variety of other pretty rocks and shells, too. I watched sandhill cranes, newly arrived. I found a mysterious feather, now on my windowsill, although I’ll leave it here, especially after learning it could be from a juvenile eagle (illegal to transport). The long stretch of sand and tide pools, distant rollers, and the Aleutian mountains beyond were gorgeous, even on a cold, cloudy day. Once, when my head was down, a raptor’s cry caught my attention. I looked up to see a bald eagle—they’re huge—perched on a carcass only several yards away. It was a dead otter and the eagle was plucking out his eye. Jesus, this is a stark, fierce, awe-inspiring place.

Lesley Wheeler, Ephemerals pt. 4 (awe and otters)

Grief has chiseled its name in me
like a bored kid with a penknife.

Then again so has love, and
I yield willingly to that inscription.

My heart is a lacework of runnels
etched by a million attempts

at gratitude, even when
I am a canyon flooded with tears.

[…]

I haven’t posted a Torah poem here in a while, so here’s one that I’m working on this week, arising out of the second part of this week’s double Torah portion, Behar-Behukkotai.

The Hebrew word חָקַק means engraved. Hukkim are the mitzvot that don’t make intellectual sense (as opposed to mishpatim, justice-commandments.) Sometimes these mitzvot are literally “inscribed” on or in us, as in brit milah.

I started thinking about inscriptions, carving, the ways in which we do or don’t yield to being changed. The grooves we carve on ourselves through habit, and the grooves life carves on and in us. That’s what sparked this poem.

Rachel Barenblat, Carved

Have you ever done something genuinely kind and beautiful and then chose to deliberately keep it to yourself?

Is there anything soft, gentle that is kept inside — not necessarily hidden, nor embarrassingly put aside, but rather something to be proud of, and yet untold?

And what about a day when we do not reach for the phone, for the camera, not even for the pen. A day when we see, feel, touch, taste and do not have the need to tell, when the experience and its briefness (however long it may last) shall be enough.

Luciana Francis, The Anonymous Life

On the first day, the woman making my reading pass had warned me, “the days will start blending into each other” and so they have, to the point that I am only half sure that I am writing this from my bed, with Rastafarian music and weed smoke from the pavement below wafting into my room through the window, and not the reading room of the British Library because how can I be really certain that, like Alice, I hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole, in another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again the rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next, 

What happened next was that as I was reading the manuscript, the almost endless repetition of the cursive letters made me wonder if I was not hallucinating all of it, the letters, the writer of those letters, myself, my life, the people around me, the building, the garden house of 19th century Calcutta, or the screeching ambulances of 21st century London, and if I did not exist at all, then who was it that I sometimes saw in mirrors or windows, and who was the I seeing it? Was I really in London in 2026 because if I were, how could I simultaneously be in the suburbs of Calcutta in 1873, and if I were somehow here and there, could I walk out into the garden in Chitpore with cobras, mangoes, litchies, and cats named Baguette, how she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.” For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

At exactly 5 pm, the reading rooms of the library close. Outside the archives, the world seems strange, less and less itself. The bitter pint of Guinness in the Irish pub outside the archives taste like mangoes of a long gone Indian summer. 

Saudamini Deo, Mal d’archives

                      my heart is broken
it is worn out at the knees
                       ~ Suzanne Vega 

I have forgotten how 
     to do this. 

How to sit with myself
     on a Wednesday morning 
     and pay attention. 

How to resist
     the Breaking News. 

How to resist.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot poem 29 April 2026

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo

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

A poem takes us into a waiting room.

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

Then we look up.

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

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

Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music

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

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

Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…

With Birds and Duduk

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

Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.

I say to the tree growing inside me

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

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

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

Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

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

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

Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graphene

Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building

it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;

hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.

And before that, did it come from a star?

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

stronger than steel.

Exceptional.

Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW

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

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

Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES

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

Sarah Lada, Rich Rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, 52

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

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

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

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

Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

#evolutionarypoems

by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis

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

Yes & Now

by Yvette Nepper

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

Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, On marriage

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s the Gilonis take:

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Celtic Matters

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

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

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

[…]

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

Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day

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

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

Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54

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

Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist

The Heart of American Poetry

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

*

The Modern Element

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

Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns

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

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

Maybe simple isn’t the word.

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

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

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

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

Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ama Bolton, When I forget

Tell me, how are you surviving this April day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water is trapped in mudflats, but there is also

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Living in the In-between

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Spring

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

Mat Riches, Here’s mud in your eye..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, A beautiful compulsion

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

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

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

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

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

JoAnne Growney, April — Celebrate BOTH Mathematics and Poetry

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Loudon, Jupiter at rest

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

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

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

THE WATER DIVINER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, warehouse

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

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

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

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

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

Maya C. Popa, The Head of a Smart Stranger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, On poetry competitions and personal taste

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Saraswati Nagpal (Nigel Kent)

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

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

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

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

Sarah Lada, Finding the World

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

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, On our small marble

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

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

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

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

‘Are you here with someone?’

‘My mum, she’s having chemo’.

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

‘Stage four.’

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

‘Thanks’

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

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

Wendy Pratt, Much of what happens here is about waiting

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

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

Matthew Stewart, Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s The Deeper Read

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, the savant who believes mustard stains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, A mystery of bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Nicole Gulotta.

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

A few weeks later, she sent me an email.

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

Allison Mei-Li, Slow Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think the main concern behind my writing is how to make sense of being human. I think about writing poetry the same way I think about parenting: It’s my job to illuminate the complexity of being human, to say, here is what is hard and here is what is beautiful about being alive and now you have to decide what to do with that information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, A ROAD TRIP TO NEVERN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Beyond & Within

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is also about acorns and making cookies.

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

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

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

PF Anderson, Barnacles (#NaPoWriMo 11)

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, We made it

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

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

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

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

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

Kati Mohr, Beads

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

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

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

– Marwan Makhoul

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

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

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

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

AFTER

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

Gary Barwin, Scaffolding for the Alphabet

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Ugly Spring

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

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

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

Kati Mohr, Writing—because.

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

Do you hate me? she wrote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, NaPoWrimo-ing along…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magda Kapa, Der Laden

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

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

Ali Thurm, Saying goodbye

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

Lori Witzel, The abrasions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Thousand Wings

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, What news there is

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

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

Happy National Poetry Month!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we reveal when we ask? 

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

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

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, David Lloyd and Cassandra Moss: A Review

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Good Spring Returns

surviving
the collapsed house
an old baby carriage

Tom Clausen, carriage

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

Topology by Jeffrey Branzburg

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

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

JoAnne Growney, Scientific American Shares Rhymes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Ode to a (former) office,

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

PF Anderson, X (#NaPoWriMo 4)

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

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

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

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

bursting
to tell someone
magnolia

—Susan Constable

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

Pearl Pirie, Openings and Closing Calls

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, Contemporary hauntings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, Sam Renda

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

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

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

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

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, How to memorise poetry

Bot, thank you for joining me in this conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The prompt was, Make something from nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

What is the editorial process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, Scientists, Wizards, and Poets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Kathleen Flenniken, DRESSING IN THE DARK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathleen Jamie, Before Hatred

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Announcing Recover, from Bayit

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, Does it help to be religious?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Metamorfosen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 4 April 26

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

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

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

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

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

Salena Godden, Our Anarchy

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

*

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Air So Still

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

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

Shawna Lemay, On Seeing a Different Picture

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

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

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

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Notes on Translation

Last week, I flew to Portland for poetry.

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

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

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

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

Allison Mei-Li, I flew to Portland for poetry

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

Robin Gow, 4/3

一人降り春風乗りし過疎のバス　稲井夏炉

hitori ori harukaze norishi kaso no basu

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

                                                            Natsuro Inai

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

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

This week: odes to mushrooms, the greenness of grief, a city of mirrors, the wayward compass, and much more. Enjoy.

Almost March-end. It’s a bright, squally day. High clouds are topping out into pure white domes.  I love these big expanses of sky, feel great joy watching wild weather rush in from the Atlantic. One cumulonimbus becomes a nuclear mushroom. White turns to grey. My stomach twists. Hard hail is hurled at my attic window.

All month snow has come and gone to greater or lesser degrees. One or two calm, frosty days have been sandwiched in between many hours of iced gales and raw cold but light persists and grows stronger. I feel spring in my bones, hear it in the lark-song.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, March, and memories

I’m carrying a heavy sense that something is going to happen, something not ephemeral. Lots of news-checking and kid-checking: each of my adult children is going through a hard time. The cat was squinting through a pink left eye this morning, vomited his breakfast all over the place, and I had to hurry him to the vet. He seems okay now, but twice-a-day eye drops will be an epic battle. Clouds hang over House Mountain and the neighbors’ dogs are barking.

I read another book I loved. Anne Haven McDonnell’s new poetry collection Singing Under Snow is the perfect partner to Forest Euphoria [by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian]. I don’t think the authors know each other, but their work connects: both books concern awe and walking in the woods; funga and queerness; solitude and interrelation. A kind of hush seems to hang over most of Singing Under Snow, which contains a gorgeous series of odes to mushrooms—a disposition to awe. Smell and taste and touch are vibrant, as opposed to the visual detail that dominates much poetry. A sautéed Agaricus agustus has “browned base notes in butter, high hint / of marzipan.” Inky caps “stink of squid.” Truffles emit an “intimate funk, maybe old cheese, oak, sweat, rot, maybe sulfur or leather or brine…it’s a low cello starting in the feet.” All this mushroom sniffing is entangled with memories of beloved people, who sometimes accompany the foraging. “Every love I’ve known,” Haven McDonnell writes, “I remember by her smell—maple syrup, soap, salt, moss, fur, cinnamon, yeast, sap, snow.”

Lesley Wheeler, Spring ephemerals

How does it feel in the body to be seduced by the unknown?

What darkness are you avoiding in your creative work?

In the Venn diagram of fear and desire, where do you fall?

What are your monster aspects? How might you share language with the beast?

Lisa Marie Basile, Bibliomancy of the week: Bram Stoker

I spent part of yesterday afternoon sitting a table as part of a “career day” at Rose’s school. One adult per table, most of whom are other parents from the larger school body, there to answer questions on what it is each of them do. Roughly twenty tables spread out through the gymnasium, others included a family doctor from Richmond, a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a lawyer, a woman with a big fluffy dog who works with training rescue animals, a chemist and a table full of people from the Embassy of Barbados. I was the poet, apparently, a table I littered with books and chapbooks, so students could get a sense of what it is I might do. With handouts, naturally. Beside me, a man who works with national security, his table empty. Everything on a need-to-know basis, I suppose. As he said, but what would he even bring? He answered questions, and showed them a picture from his phone of the building where he works.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

I’ve been really struggling to come back here and know what to say. Blame it on the cognitive dissonance of our current moment. Within my little cocoon of a world, things are well. The birds are starting to wake me up again. The plum and cherry trees have big buds growing. The crocuses have already shown their light, and Maya the cat can’t get enough warm afternoon sunbeams. But all that winter healing feels self-contained. Everything else is on fire. We’re angry, sad, worried, scared, and nervous. And, I’m just out of energy. It’s even harder to say, Here, care about my little poetry book.

So, instead, I’m going to give you some of my kind of comfort. Read on below for a handful of haikus for the season and a Gen X-style taco recipe (but meatless). As well, I hope to see many of you in person at the events below in the weeks and months ahead—not for me and my book but for poetry and community and what we can give to each other.

Carrie Olivia Adams, The Spring of Our Cognitive Dissonance

I thought anger burned too bright for me to be able to write ever again. I have felt guilt good pure catholic guilt for not showing up here. For not doing the thing I have always loved.

How can any thinking person not be angry right now or anxious or frightened? National Poetry Month is coming and I have signed up but I can’t stop thinking about the children hidden in the Monster’s private diary or children torn from their parents’ arms because of the color of their skin. Men murdering citizens in the street. Families who have lost their SNAP benefits for no reason whatever. Survivors of rape standing in front of those monuments still not being believed. What the awful fuck. Even tapping into this much anger makes my hands shake god I’m such a coward. Here is my attempt at a poem off the cuff so to speak even though it’s noon and I’m still in my Christmas jammies though they have been laundered. […]

a wooden spoon
makes a good weapon if you don’t
have flour
stir rocks with your hands
you’re going to need them
make a noise in your bowl
make it a drum
pound it until you bleed
make a noise in your throat
growl learn to bark

Rebecca Loudon, March 26 26 Where has she been?

As a kid, I spent time every summer at a place called Knowlton’s Campground. Located on the coast near the easternmost part of Maine (and the U.S.), it was wild and stunning. We dug clams and “shopped” fresh fish out of the neighbor’s boat. My sister and I had the freedom to explore entire peninsulas and islands accessible only at low tide. Non-stop, kid nirvana. The land where the campground was located is now a nature preserve, and we visited this winter. Can confirm: It’s still wild and stunning (as you can see from the photos above). For today’s prompt, write a poem about a place from your childhood that doesn’t exist anymore. / Recommended reading: “My Kink Is Distance” by Amorak Huey and “when the world did not feel like a crushing weight” by Jill Kitchen.

Carolee Bennett, 30 Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2026

I have been writing quite a bit this month, spurred by some inspiration at AWP, lots of reading, and some ideas that have been sitting in a document titled Things to Explore at Some Point. (So original, I know.) I’d like to keep that momentum going, but much of what I’m writing has not been poetry. So instead of writing a poem a day in April, I’m going to ask myself to try and write something each day. No labels. No forms. No limits. It could be a sentence. A paragraph. A new line for an old poem. A piece of flash. To just write a THING.

Just putting that down in print feels right, like a weight off my shoulders. Like I can celebrate poems by reading them, and MAYBE, just maybe, writing one if I am inspired to do so. But it also feels correct that I should at least attempt writing everyday—this will be a success of its own.

If you complete a 30/30 with some good poems as a result, I am in awe of you. If you complete a 30/30 at all, I am in awe of you. If you, like me, are simply trying your best to connect with the page as often as possible, I am in awe of you. You created something where there was nothing.

Donna Vorreyer, Under Pressure…or Not

Here is the latest round of links to pieces dealing with the US-Israel war against Iran and related issues. I am also adding to these notes a second section. As you know, I have published several books of translations of classical Persian poetry, among them Selections from Saadi’s Bustan. Saadi, a 13th century poet from the city of Shiraz, is among the most important writers in the Persian literary canon, and his work has been translated into many languages worldwide. In light of the damage already done to some of Iran’s most important cultural and historical sites, and since my Bustan has been out of print for some time now (and is likely to stay that way), I thought a worthwhile thing to do would be to share with you some of Iran’s rich literary history. (I am writing more extensively on a specific connection between Saadi’s Bustan and United States culture in the series “On The Trail of a Tale: Benjamin Franklin’s Persian Parable.” Parts 1 and 2 have already been posted. Part 3 will post on April 3rd and Part 4 is coming in May.)

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Of Note: March 29, 2026

Yesterday I had a poem idea. We do Passion Sunday, which means we read the whole Holy Week text. This bit from Good Friday (Matthew 27: 50-53) leapt out at me: “Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split.  The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.  After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”

Is there a poem in those lines?  I keep thinking about those holy people, long dead, rising up and wandering around Jerusalem.  Do I want to update it to a modern capital city, D.C. perhaps?

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, One Last Look Back at Quilt Camp and Palm Sunday

The opening poem of Dan Albergotti’s collection Candy (LSU Press 2024) is what got me thinking of our current moment in these terms. The title is “Kick in the Jaw” and it opens with the line “Sometimes the zebra wins.” That’s kind of a jarring line if you don’t know much about zebras. It’s a common mistake to think they’re similar to horses in temperament because they’re part of the same family, but no zebra has ever been domesticated. They’re too aggressive. But even if you know that about zebras, it’s still an interesting contrast to Albergotti’s next lines. Here are the first four together.

Sometimes the zebra wins. And the sound
of the savanna goes on—birdsong, frog croak,
beetle chitter, snort and grunt of a warthog
hard panting of the cheetah after chase—

Sometimes the zebra wins and nothing is different. It’s as much a part of the natural world as the predator winning. Even the cheetah in this scene isn’t feeding. It’s panting, gathering its energy for the next attempt. But if the zebra just managed to dodge the cheetah for now, that doesn’t seem like much of a win. The poem continues:

as the lion walks slowly away, bleeding from
the mouth, staring ahead, looking for a place
to rest and await a slow starvation. Sometimes
the savanna’s ambient song is interrupted
by a sharp crack that sounds like a gunshot,
the zebra’s kick finding the lion’s jaw.

I’d be anthropomorphizing to say that the zebra is brave here. This is just nature, cruel and violent. The zebra kicks because it can and it connected with the lion and more often than not, the lion is probably going to win this encounter and it doesn’t mean anything larger than that. Albergotti says as much in the final lines:

Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes
the lion dies. Always the sound goes on.

It’s the first two sentences there that really grabbed me, and it’s why this poem has stuck with me and why I decided to write about it. “Some stories get rewritten. Sometimes the lion dies.” Just because you’re not a predator that doesn’t mean you’re destined to lose no matter how much the predator wins in the stories. Sometimes the zebra breaks the lion’s jaw.

Notice that the world doesn’t end when the lion’s jaw is broken. It will end for that lion, but there are other lions. It will eventually end for that zebra, but there are other zebras.

I’d bet that Dan didn’t have any particular political or war-type situation in mind when he wrote this poem. I’m stretching this metaphor pretty tautly, mostly because I need to remind myself that no situation is hopeless, that there’s always a sound in the background continuing, and that I can find a way to be brave if I remember that.

Brian Spears, Being Brave

After I got a degree, I worked in a job laying
basketball courts. After this, I got a job
collecting debt. It was strange to me,
having to wear a tie. There were reports
that showed the team leader how many
minutes you were late. It’s a vibe that after
everything you are destined to live this way.

This section from the title poem of Stuart McPherson’s The Aureate Trophies of Profit & Loss is almost a summary of the entire book, in a way. McPherson is primarily concerned with the dehumanisation that comes with late-stage Capitalism and the modern workplace where humans are a resource, and resources are to be exploited. In this sense, the poems gathered here are a set of responses to what we are asked to accept as ‘normal’ in our decaying civilization:

We should be asleep now but there are
      choices to make between the draws

of long-shot fanaticism, or a life bereft
      of hope. That clouting fist on a door

is a precursor to necessary dignified rest,
      some basic standards of humanity.
(from ‘WISHLIST’)

And those basic standards are precisely what’s absent from a world dominated by projects, PowerPoint decks, performance reviews and ‘competitive modern office chair/hierarchies’. What these poems do, amongst other things, is take this jargon and embed it in a flow of disjunction that serves to point up the machine’s perversion of language […]

Billy Mills, Two Broken Sleeps

The children had empty eyes, so they got dogs.
The children poured love into their dogs like funnels.
The dogs followed them everywhere. They sent
each other pictures of the dogs climbing into their beds,
blankets and couches, riding in cars and trucks.
When one of their dogs is killed by a stranger,
the children cannot consume the darkness
of their deeply un-searched mud thick love.
The dog’s death is all the broken bones
of their childhood, every fist to the face,
every cigarette butt to the arm, every belt stroke,
every night without food; the children howl.
Bystanders watch their outpouring of grief.
They say, it was a dog!

Kate Gale, For Jasper: Finding Courage in the Dark

My ten-year-old daughter protests and complains, she summons all her suasive efforts, but I remain an Elvis fan. Not limited to songs by Elvis, my appreciation extends to songs about Elvis, for example, “Calling Elvis,” by Dire Straits. It’s the lead track on their final album, On Every Street. About this album there are two schools of thought, both visible on its AllMusic page. “A disappointment,” asserts William Rohlmann, the site’s professional reviewer: “low-key to the point of being background music.” But the people think otherwise, and give it, on average, 4 out of 5 stars. Sophisticated subtlety, or bland lifelessness—it’s a fine line, and fine taste is needed to see it.

Timothy Steele’s poetry is on the good side of this bar. It is rewardingly subtle, in both form and content. The poems tend to start small, with close attention to tiny details in a mundane scene:

The lizard, an exemplar of the small,
Spreads fine, adhesive digits to perform
Vertical push-ups on a sunny wall.
(“Herb Garden”)

By placing in its path an index card,
I catch an ant that scurries round the sink.
(“For Victoria, Traveling in Europe”)

Sometimes, this attention is all: at the end of “Herb Garden” we’re still among the herbs, where, “quarrying between the pathway’s bricks, / Ants build minute volcanoes out of sand.” Other poems expand, and concrete details yield to something higher, or more abstract. The beach in “Starr Farm Beach” is named after a farm that’s named (I presume) after its owner, but that name inspires the fancy of “stars / … sown and grown and gathered for the sky,” and the poems ends thus:

We loved swifts that performed wild swoops and swings
Over the lake in unobstructed air;
We loved fish that, in sudden surfacings,
Nabbed supper with quick piscine savoir-faire.
But we best loved stars rising here and there,
Whether from hopes of something we might sow
Or from a lonely impulse to declare
The kinship of the lofty and the low.

As delightful as the what of the poems is the how. There’s joy in seeing each thing fall perfectly into place. Not just, for example, the rhyme of “savoir-faire” with “air,” but the slotting of the complex and foreign phrase “quick piscine savoir-faire” into the iambic template with exactness and precision. Steele asserts, in All the fun’s in how you say a thing, that “the chief sources of variation in metrical composition reside within the norm”: good iambic pentameter, he holds, rarely contains anything but iambs, and this, he argues, is less of a restriction than one might think.

Brad Skow, Dionysus and Apollo

Just read a poem by Lee Harwood. Two lines jumped out at me and felt unbelievably poignant. Trains run through a town, he writes, ‘staring in at the bare rooms and kitchens / each lit with its own story that lasts for years and years.’* Wow. It just caught me off-guard. Funny how often, when you like the music of a poet’s work, you find that they also deal with the sorts of ideas and ways of seeing, too, that appeal to you.

*A Poem for Writers by Lee Harwood

Dominic Rivron, A Poem for Writers

Over at A Poetry Notebook, Jem has a nice discussion of Larkin’s ‘The Trees’, a poem he always thinks about at this time of year. It’s one I know by heart too, though it never occurs to me until later in April. Jem feels ambivalent about the poem. […]

I have always loved this poem and found Larkin’s dismissal of it startling when I read his letters. (He complains about writing something so mediocre on Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and perhaps one can understand that, when measured against Hardy’s best work, it feels disappointing.) The greenness of grief seems obvious to me, first, as an invocation of Eliot, something of a silent bête noire throughout Larkin, as the poem is presumably “set” as April turns to May; but it also invokes the sense of tears at renewals, such as the “happy funerals” in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. That poem contains a sister image to “something almost being said” in “someone running up to bowl”. Life is an attempt, which seems to come so easily, so naturally, to the tree, but not to us. The rings of grief have no parallel in ‘Whitsun’, which actually leaves out the wedding rings, but perhaps relates to the rain at the end.

what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give

This is part of the ongoing theme of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” in Larkin, which sometimes takes the form of new lambs and sometimes of the memory of “the strength and pain of being young which cannot come again.” Somehow the trees do find a way of being young each year, though it hurts, like growing pains and the pains of seeing the past “smaller and clearer as the years go by”. 

Henry Oliver, Larkin’s trees

Amid the enormous wealth of texts addressed to Elizabeth I, it is nevertheless rather unusual to come across one speaking to her “woman to woman”, as it were. In fact, [Olympia] Frontina’s poem, though addressed to Elizabeth, is mostly about her own struggles and suffering as a Protestant exile, and how the defeat of the Armada gives her some hope for the Protestant cause. It draws a clear parallel between Elizabeth’s courageous resistance in the face of Catholic Europe and Olympia’s own trials.

Funnily enough, the book in which this poem appears has been cited a couple of times by scholars as a particularly rich source for the depiction of Elizabeth I as a virgo mascula, ‘manly maiden’, a kind of virtuous Christian Amazon. It’s true that several of the poems in the collection (though not Olympia’s) do mine this seam at considerable length. But it’s striking that none of the scholars who have been interested in the book from this angle noticed that it also, and very unusually, contains a poem by a woman about her own experiences. […]

Are Eleutherius and Olympia Frontina two women, or one? It would need a much fuller study to make a proper assessment, but I think it is quite likely that they are the same person: the tone in which Eleutherius addresses the queen directly is rather similar to that in Olympia’s poem and there are a series of overlaps in the use of certain Latin words. There are also a handful of set pieces which are treated in a similar way. Such correspondences could of course be explained by close friendship, family relationship or belonging to a literary circle in which members were regularly sharing work. But at this point I would hazard a guess that Olympia (if that was in fact her name) adopted the pen-name ‘Eleutherius’ for the grander and more stereotypically masculine genres of Claudianic panegyric and major Horatian odes with which she opened her book, but dared to leave the more personal elegy under a female name. It is ironic indeed that having concealed her identity once, it was then unwittingly concealed again by the careless error of an early cataloguer.

Victoria Moul, Hiding in plain sight: two (?) new women poets from 1589

I’m very grateful to Vivek Narayanan, editor of Poetry Daily, for the invitation to write about a poem and its “spark”. I’ve always found “Cook Ting” works like a charm when introducing students to contemporary poetry that doesn’t immediately make sense in the way they expect. Its emphatic rhyming and collaged imagery encourages them to curiosity about what it’s doing, which then leads into a discussion of the connections we make as readers, encouraged by the leaps of rhyme — and then finally we look more closely at one or more of the sources that Langley used when writing the poem. […]

In the Poetry Daily piece I concentrate on the poem’s use of phrases from Cage’s essay on Rauschenberg (as you can see, “Cook Ting” was originally called “Rauschenberg”). But Langley also copied out other observations from Cage which inform the poem’s thinking about what art does to the world in a more general way. Here are three:

Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.

*

[Rauschenberg] is not saying; he is painting […] The message is conveyed by dirt which, mixed with adhesive, sticks to itself and to the canvas upon which he places it. Crumbling and responding to changes in the weather, the dirt unceasingly does my thinking.

*

Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity. (It is no reflection on the weather that such and such a government sent a note to another.)

I’m struck in particular by the mention of “weather” here twice as an aspect of reality which is not human, not social or political, and yet as changeable and contingent as thought itself. The inclusion of the natural world in the poem — through Mark Cocker’s nature diary for the Guardian newspaper about seabirds feeding near the Sizewell nuclear reactor — is also “a situation involving multiplicity”. The only direct evocation of Cocker’s diary in “Cook Ting” is the sentence “The gulls are a / white flap over sprats in the foam”. But the whole piece describes a more complex ecosystem of gulls, long-necked divers and marine skuas — the latter being “highly opportunistic” birds who feed through kleptoparasitism, or piracy; that is, they wait for other birds to catch a fish, and then harass it until the fish is disgorged.

What strikes me about reading Cocker’s seabirds back into the lines of “Cook Ting” is how the “sources” of a poem are much more than the choice words that a poet (like a piratic seabird) plucks from the mouth of another writer. The two pieces of writing fall into conversation with each other, suggesting further analogies between the behaviour of birds and the imagination.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Zip! Zoop!

In this short poem, the reader is pulled from a secure place and made to “fall in love with the void” – the unreachable, the unsayable. The poem ends with the sweep of the “merciless arc of the lace-edged skirt,” taking the reader into a void of a different kind. “Lace-edged skirt” implies society, time, restrictions, human physicality, desire. “Merciless” is a strong word choice here. O’Hara could intend the reader to take this as time’s relentless force – even Leonardo, great embracer of life, came to dust. He also could be making a statement about sexuality – and here read society’s restrictions and expectations about who and how we love, a different sort of window – the lace boundaries of conformity and roles. Either way, the poem ends with an upward sweep into a puzzling but fecund unknown.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Frank O’Hara, “Windows”

In rhymed tetrameter quatrains, Blake excoriates the evil of the place: how the cries of the poor blacken the churches, how the existence of girls forced into prostitution stains the institution of marriage. Interestingly, “London” appears in Blake’s Songs of Experience but has no counterpart in his parallel volume, Songs of Innocence. That might suggest that Blake cannot imagine an innocent human city — at least not till the New Jerusalem prophesied in the Book of Revelation, which forces us to remember that in the Bible’s account, the humanity that began in a garden ends in a city.

And yet, to read “London” carefully, to think about its diction and narrative, is to come away unsettled. Oh, there’s an easy reading, the kind of high-school English-class account, that takes the poem as straightforward revolutionary rage against power: The human condition in 1794 London is nasty and brutish, filthy and immoral, with the Palace and the Church forging mental restraints that bind us in our misery. The poem is Blake’s indictment of the urban social order, the Industrial Revolution, the economic and political arrangements that have created this damnable state.

All that is certainly in the poem, but a sense of unease ought to touch us when we find ourselves in self-congratulatory agreement with the angry narrator. Blake is involved in something deeper, I think, for the narrator is not entirely a trustworthy one. Under the poem’s indictment of the social order is a hidden indictment of the poem’s speaker as someone who does not have the answer to what he sees and hears. If the city corrupts us all, it corrupts as well the man who observes the city’s evil.

He is, in other words, one of those who “feel they know not what but care; / And wish to lead others when they should be led.” That’s from the very curious poem “The Voice of the Ancient Bard,” which Blake initially put in Songs of Innocence, then moved to Songs of Experience — a poem that is, admittedly, so strange and ambiguous as to grant no certain use. Still, as one critic pointed out back in 1986, there’s something there suspicious of the observers who wish to lead others toward some imagined future.

More suspicion comes to us from Blake’s word choices, emphasized by the technique of repetition that pervades “London.” The repeated “charter’d” in the first stanza of the four-quatrain tetrameter poem was merely “dirty” in an earlier notebook, as “mind-forg’d manacles” was originally “german-forged.” Both of these changes push the sense of constraint into something systematic, written into the minds of city-dwellers — which includes the speaker of the poem.

But it’s the last line of “London” — “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse,” an astonishing oxymoron — that most suggests the speaker is equally bound in the charter, the mind’s manacles. He has risen a half step above the ordinary, suffering bounded people, as he observes the vile city: a nasty cauldron of woe. “How the youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the new-born Infants tear.”

We might dwell on how much of this is aurally driven: He hears the infant’s cry, the soldier’s sigh, the whore’s curse. But what he gains from all that is only an observation of life (from birth to marriage to death) as collapsed down into a single monstrosity. He needs to make the step beyond that, to a vision of the city as a light unto the nations — a vision of the New Jerusalem that Blake knows is beyond the appalling cry.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: London

London is hungry, it isn’t greedy, it simply demands repayment for your tenancy. Some respond by making money, some by making a tonne of money, some make poetry. Others give up their souls, have their life blood siphoned from their wan bodies. The machine needs feeding. London is a great hole that must be filled.

It is no wonder that John Keats retreated to Hampstead, that heaven on a hill, not the exclusive suburb it is today, one that has followed the same trajectory that many poorer or affordable boroughs on the fringes have done, an outlying state attractive only to misfits and migrants, artists and writers, desirable once it’s been described as a ‘colourful neighbourhood’ and Samantha and Lucy and Tom decide to rough it there for a while. Then they tell their friends about it. And then one of them opens a chic, vegan restaurant. And then… I digress…

The London Keats was born into was recovering from the ‘gin craze’, a Hogarthian epidemic of anarchic alcoholism. With industrialisation and empire expansion London had become the wealthiest city in the world. With this wealth, at its untended edges, came horrific poverty, an almost unparalleled depravity. With reforms to the licensing laws there wasn’t even the ubiquity of gin to drown the misery out. We’ve not entirely emerged from this staggering hangover and Samantha and Lucy and Tom will talk of urban regeneration.

There are two kinds of poverty, a poverty of opportunity that keeps people stuck in one place and the poverty that slowly kills them there.

On the night before I came home, I walked across Rome and at each turn, on each corner, there was treasure cut in stone, water and marble and a drama of columns and domes, arcades and arches, churches and piazzas. You can walk across any city for free or for the small expense of warn shoe leather but in some cities having no money matters less.

London is a different beast. Increasingly it has become a city of mirrors, of glass facades, of endless reflections, of vacuity and self obsession. Stare at it for too long and it will show you who you are or what you are not, it will reveal what you have, and show you what have not got.

Jan Noble, Nº57 The secrets of Swan

And then those pastures, tourmaline green
dotted with hundreds of lambs. The eagles
scavenging afterbirth during lambing season,
filling the whole round world with auguries.

Lori Witzel, Auguries

I’m writing this Substack post looking for a favour – or more particularly, for suggestions. In a couple of weeks, our little family will be walking a portion of the old pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago. Our portion of the route will be around 120km over six days, which should translate to around five or six hours walking per day. There’s something appealing in the simplicity of this schedule: waking around 6am, leaving the hotel at 7:30, walking the countryside roads until after lunch, and then being free in the later afternoon and evening to take in whatever village we stop in overnight.

A big part of the reason for undertaking it is that my son has recently turned twelve, will start high school in the summer, and is a typical kid of this generation – in love with screens, his life filled with impulse and impetus. The idea was to try something to shake up his life, and to slow things down for him. Will we still be talking after this holiday? Comments are open to discuss this – but also for something else. With five or six hours’ walking time, I thought I might set myself a target of trying to memorise a poem every day. Doesn’t it feel like a natural fit – to walk and to commit something to memory? The rhythm of the steps, the rhythm of the poem. So I am looking for suggestions for what poems to commit to memory.

In my earlier life I worked as a debt advisor for a charity; I would write out poems to memorise between speaking to clients. The job could be quite bleak, and I found the process of internalising a poem to be a few minutes of escape or reprieve. Later I would read this feeling described in the introduction to Harold Bloom’s Possessed By Memory, one of his more sentimental and vulnerable works:

When you have a poem by heart you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your dwelling place. Because the poem possesses you.

In the office cubicle, beside my pad and pens, my scraps of budgets and cost-cuttings, I had tried to memorise Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. I still have most of the opening half quite clearly in my mind: I went out to the hazel wood/because a fire was in my head. What is perhaps strange is that in remembering the poem I can also recall the view from my old desk, my colleagues, their small talk, each part all the clearer when I recite it – as though I wasn’t just committing the poem to memory, but also the place where I’d memorised it too.

Niall Campbell, What Poems Should I Memorise?

In “Of Power and Time,” Mary Oliver calls the internal force that pulls us away from our own work “the intimate interruptor.” She doesn’t dwell on why this inner voice distracts us, but she’s unequivocal about the need to ignore it, even at the cost of unstocked pantries and unreturned phone calls.

In Oliver’s description of this internal antagonist, I recognize my own intimate interrupter. How she “helpfully” shows up to remind me of tasks when I’m mid-thought, almost as if—could it really be this—I can’t stand the intensity and reverberations of my own mind.

Creative work requires solitude. “It needs concentration, without interruptions,” as Oliver advises. “It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.”

And that can feel uncomfortable.

I sometimes feel I need a break from the pressure of my own creative energy, that very thing I covet but sometimes fear once it’s in my grasp. Now it really is up to me.

Now that the game is on, I might let us both down.

Maya C. Popa, Advanced Techniques for Avoiding Writing

Last night I gave this workshop at University of Toronto’s Hart House. I was in a wood-pannelled room overseen by a former Warden of Hart House, replete with vest and pipe. Walking through U of T campus, it really struck me how much I love the literally “old school” architecture: ivy-covered buildings and stone buildings in some kin of Gothic style. And yes, colonialism and patriarchy, but there is something about the gravitas of such architecture, a notion (even if it is just an illusion) of “learning” having its own space outside the marketplace. I can’t examine this idea too deeply or it all falls apart (shouldn’t learning be in the agora, how can we separate it from class, do we want to protect and ritualize learning and put it in the pipe-holding hand of a special group of hierophants…) Despite this, walking in the dark and pouring rain, I was charmed.

Gary Barwin, TRUTH’S SUPERB SURPRISE: NOTES FROM A CREATIVE NON-FICTION WORKSHOP

And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.

We are here
to lose our way.

Maria Popova, Corrective for a Broken Heart

This morning the air brings me the notes of new carpet off gassing in a Premier Inn and mixes in essence of chilled seaside town air. A soundtrack of traffic plays like urban waves in the background.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookcase. I say it is me visiting the National Poetry Library in London and not being able to resist a photo with my second full collection of poetry Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. I also say this feels particularly apt given that I am a guest on Helen O’Neill’s Coach Write podcast this week. We had a wonderful chat about coaching, poetry and the journey to having books in the world, and it felt good to be a guest. I like listening to people talk on podcasts and I like being asked to talk too. It also makes me chuckle that the episode will air on the first of April!

The main focus of the visit to London was seeing the Manic Street Preachers headlining at The Royal Albert Hall for Teenage Cancer Trust. It was a fantastic concert opening with Motorcycle Emptiness and ending under a raining down of confetti during If You Tolerate This. That opening song was a moment of absolute tingle for me as I realised I was standing in the now, watching the band perform live, while also watching the original music video from all those years ago projected onto the screen behind them. A wonderful mingling of right now and back then.

Sue Finch, A TRIP TO LONDON TOWN

I cannot tell you how taken I am by Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back. I have read an advanced galley, but you can pre-order online or at your favourite indie. Honest, vulnerable, insightful, poetic, authentic, meditative, are all words popping into my head as I prepare to win you over to this book. It’s also uncomfortable in parts as it asks questions in a consideration of a life well-lived but not without inner turmoil. How do we look back on who we were as young women? What kind of generosity and grace might we offer our younger selves?

If you’ve always wondered about women depicted in paintings (and you know I have, beginning with my first book All the God-Sized Fruit), and the effect of the male gaze on women, this book gives you another view. As a young woman, Kishkan posed as an artist’s model. “I see him taking me in,” she says, then asks, “Was I taken in? I was.” Years later she looks back with wisdom and clarity and examines her relationship with the artist, with the paintings of her, and with her own self, now and then. She says, “I am trying to find out who I was in the light of that gaze, and before it, what foundation held me in place in the whirling years…”

We have been on similar paths of interest at times, perhaps, though we’ve never met. Interested in art, probably reading the same books back in the day — Ways of Seeing by John Berger was such a big one. So it’s interesting to see where we converge and where we diverge. We’ve both written in various genres, are of similar age. I felt reading this book that looks back so keenly, so delicately, to be cathartic. It helps to dwell for a while, before asking, what next?

Shawna Lemay, Three Books

I’m seventy-three now;
you, forever past fifty-nine,

your body resting with
my poem and the photo

I tucked into the pocket of
the suit they dressed you in,

too hot for that late Florida day.

Maureen Doallas, Missing You

The reaping to which I refer in the title of this post is metaphorical, as spring isn’t a big time for bringing in the sheaves, though in a few weeks the winter wheat will be ripe. I feel I have reaped some joy from a recent poetry reading I gave at the library of my former employer, DeSales University, and how often do we feel that way? It’s a gift! Dr. Steve Myers invited me to read with three of the alums of the MFA program DSU now offers, and last night I found myself back in the library where my office used to be (once I finally escaped from the basement where I’d been located for 17 years). The audience was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students and friends who were kind enough to show up on a Wednesday night. It’s wonderful to feel appreciated now and then. 

I haven’t been giving many readings lately or even attending open mics. Evenings and nights are not my best time, but the college is very nearby and I really was pleased to be able to participate…Best Beloved drove me there and back, so everything was manageable. I read some quite old poems and some quite new ones, and a few in-between from my books. And I sold a few books! Always a thrill. I am dwelling in gratitude today.

One of the best things at the event was seeing a former student who was one of my writing tutors and who now works at DeSales. She’s also lately enrolled in the MFA program. What a joy to catch up with a person I met as a bright 18-year-old with a natural talent for writing, who’s pursuing creative writing now–as a mother of two, and nearing 40–not so different from my own circuitous path in poetry. Such are the rewards of teaching…occasionally, I do miss it.

Ann E. Michael, Sowing and reaping

Thank you to Quibble Lit for publishing my poem “Physics of a Marriage” in Vol. VII. I love journals that still produce print copies (in addition to online publication) and it was so exciting to get a copy delivered to my mailbox.

I also love “themed” submissions and find it helps me focus on what the poem needs to say. In the case of this poem, the prompt was right outside my office window, on his hands and knees digging in the dirt.

Most of my poems come from the lived reality of my life and writing poetry helps me understand what this life means to me. As many of you know, my husband is a physicist and I am the one who loves to garden. Somehow over the long arc of a 37-year marriage, we’ve each become a little of both.

Carey Taylor, Physics of a Marriage

Drones fly over gardens,
tankers barrel through straits on fire. So much

has changed. Or so much has merely changed
hands. Yet power stays put. Spoils of many

conquests, we’ve been trying to survive in
the margins, in the aftermath of the last

aftermath and the last. Imagine freeing river and
forest and plain from maps into their old names.

Luisa A. Igloria, Old World, New World

I couldn’t stop thinking about many things: the elegant movement of the hands of servers behind espresso bars, like hands of Michaelangelo, Galileo’s telescopes that proved heliocentric view of the universe, the pistachio gelato at Giolitti’s covered with lightly sweetened mascarpone cream and at Perché No in Florence, the sound of the choir echoing against the richly decorated walls of the Saint Peter’s Basilica, the electric candles that one had to light, the paintings of Caravaggio, their visceral violence, the gushing blood, its rotting fruits, the invitation of Bacchus, the perfect teeth of a screaming Medusa, the Montepulciano and the Chianti, posters of a Hokusai exhibit, the mineral white wine I drank inside the ruins of an ancient Roman theatre whose name I do not remember, the Aperol spritzes, the two negronis inside a bar, the view of the Imperial Fora, the gravity that can make anything fall. 

Saudamini Deo, Beware the Ides of March

I stretch my hand out
and the quiet sits on my palm
like a question:
Are you enough?
Can you be enough?
Are you predator? Or prey?
Can you feel the inky wetness of your severed wings?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Because she said I must stop doomscrolling and write a feel-good poem

This week: picnicking on ice, clock-time vs. earth-time, the enormity of the world’s grief, the sound of a fountain, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m sitting here, still in bed because it is my birthday and on your birthday you get to work from your bed. It’s a misty morning in North Yorkshire but the sun is breaking through.

Spring is arriving.

Wendy Pratt, Dawn and Dusk Chorus Write Along Sessions

This lake surface is flat-with-rising-places. These are mini alpine mountains, where expanding ice has pushed itself into Mont Blanc-resonant peaks to alleviate the pressure that comes with expansion. There are fissures too and in some places, there are small portholes to the next layers down, and these are mysterious with interlacing crystals and thin pastry layer accumulations. 

We sat, P, L, and I, and talked of rootedness and our lives (which, I’ve just thought, add up to a small-large 188 years). We ate and drank, looking outwards. It was peaceful, and there was a white silence as backdrop to these connections. 

And all the while the sun warmed us without the interruption of a single cloud.

Liz Lefroy, I Picnic On Ice

“April is the cruellest month” is the first line of TS Eliot’s Wasteland, which has always puzzled me. April is bluebells and swallows and hares, the dawn chorus, waking in a downpour of song. April is life returning, showy and cheerful and loud after the white silence of winter, the muted February gloom: “Lilacs/ out of the dead land”.

Which is, I think, the speaker’s problem – he prefers the silence, the soft, quiet protection of snow. Especially when the snow hides wreckage and ruin – Eliot wrote the poem in 1921, recovering from a breakdown whilst Europe reeled in the aftermath of the first World War. And yes, the March insistence of crocus and daffodil can seem at odds with world events, but oh my God, how welcome is that March sun, warm, soft, golden; the first buds on the willow, like tiny paws? So much so that my third collection, “Flood”, contains a response to Eliot’s famous line – you’ll find it at the end of this article.

Clare Shaw, The Cruellest Month is over!

There is no one left to sing to so I
sing to the water: From where do you spring and
how will you slake me?
How long must I return
with jar and tattered rope, bearing
the dry sockets of my bones?

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 4

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.

And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” […]

If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry.

Maria Popova, Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

I have a bit of time here and there to do the activities that nourish me:  reading and a variety of creative work.  I have time to see friends.  My family members are in good shape.

We are bombarded, day after day, with stories of women who have not been so lucky, reminding us that we still have work to do.

I’m thinking of the multitude of poems that I’ve written about gender and history and all of those intersections.  Here’s a poem that I wrote years ago that says a lot about the life of a certain class of women in modern, capitalistic countries.  It’s part of my chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

The Hollow Women

We are the hollow women,
the ones with carved muscles,
the ones run ragged by calendars
and other apps that promised
us mastery of that cruel slavedriver, time. […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Poem for International Women’s Day

Time accumulates and erodes as we spread ourselves thin over work, people who don’t deserve our energy, constant complaints, addictions, and pettiness. Those who step out of Kronos (clock-time) and into Kairos (earth-time) may find that time slows and stills like a warm, shallow sea. Here, when you pay the currency of your limited attention, you will feel how the sun shines down on your face. With your valuable attention, you will notice that the waters are warm and the creatures, they just do their business of making the first pathways on this earth. Please do them no harm. And look at those clouds. Look at how they come undone in their becoming. Soon enough, as always, and forevermore, something big will happen, with or without you. It is all a continuous happening. A continuous genesis of building a becoming and initiating an ending. All of us. Every one. And all the ones after.

Sarah Lada, Orogeny

broken, broken world
or is it me
seeing cracks on still water
seeing wounds instead of flowers
seeing blood where sunset
should drip behind the ears of trees

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Broken

I keep seeing discussion online about how artists and writers function in a world that is, if not completely falling apart in front of us, in danger of toppling.  On one hand, you have those who find the terrors of everyday living have a dampening effect on productivity (even for fun things), a lack of concentration, and a lack of purpose. On the other hand, and this I see too in myself, the drive to keep on going. To keep making and loving and creating something beautiful or interesting in a world that not only doesn’t seem to want it, but fights its very existence. Either through distraction or making things like art less likely in the struggle to survive (metaphorically or actually.)

And yet, art can be sustaining. It can often be the only thing which seems bearable. It may feel like playing the cello while the ship sinks or straightening the beds while the world is on fire, But it is also, in some ways, an act of persistence and resistance. 

I’ve been channeling my energies into the press. Into poems and plays. Into art experiments that have lesser to more degrees of success. These things are surely harder than they would be not under duress, and yet I do them in spite of a world that seems unbearably cruel and deeply stupid.  I suppose that is all we can do…

Kristy Bowen, creative life amid the doomscroll

Maggie talks about poems as a stone we carry in our pockets. I’ve had this one in my pocket a lot lately. It’s a poem by Derek Mahon. He writes:

There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.

I love that line because it doesn’t shy away from the suffering. It names it directly. Loss is real. It’s always been real. But Mahon doesn’t let that truth swallow the whole poem. He refuses to.

I tend to do the opposite. I take the hardest thing I know and carry it into every room. I rehearse it. I turn it over until it fills the whole day. You might do something similar. Most people I talk to do.

But we are not able to solve the entire human condition before lunch. (Probably not even by dinner.)

Eric Zimmer, Guest Pep Talk (Maggie Smith)

The one hundred sixty girls
won’t be watching the long-armed

yellow-bodied machines scooping
the dirt from between white lines

that lessons in geometry would show
make rectangles from imperfect ground,

or how the diggers know just how big
to make the depth and width of every hole,

or even why the digging must go on
once time for talks has ended and azan

— the call to prayer — has come too late.

Maureen Doallas, Who Counts

Updating Descartes: I travel so I can talk to strangers.  Updating Descartes again: I travel so I can reality-check the words of writers’ against the wisdom of Uber drivers.  Using that as a measure, AWP was stupendous!

No wonder we pay drivers to sit in their cars for twenty, thirty minutes, through traffic snarls and horrifically inflated rates.  One driver, slung back in his seat of his Toyota Corolla, reeled off a lovely phrase about not recognizing what privilege is when we have it.  That line could stand in any poem, I said, as I’d been sitting through a lot of poetry readings.  He told me his line was borrowed; I added that we pick up a lot of folk wisdom through pop songs, rap, movies.  He upped me: through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.  

Getting into another Uber, I asked the driver how he was.  “Any day I’m still alive is a good day.”  What an opening line, even if we’ve heard it before. I got to hear about Mamma in rural South Carolina, his 94-year-old mother-in-law, the whole array of sisters down there, the food and beverage that comes with visitors, the testifying, the cigarettes and coffee that fortify the old lady.  He was beaming the whole time.

When I told the first driver about an award-winning book of poetry written about conversations written by a taxi driver, he was incredulous.  “Are you telling me that book won awards?” Indeed.  “Bor-ing,” he said.  “I’d shut that in a second.”

Jill Pearlman, Uber Drivers at AWP

I’d like to so say a huge thank you to Stephen Claughton and Mark Randles for having Matthew [Stewart] and me in St Albans to read at Ver Poets. if you look now, we are at the top of the news page. It was an early kick off (I think to avoid crowd trouble, and not to avoid me having a few liveness/straighteners beforehand – Thank you for that suggestion, Matthew Paul)…I think it was probably the earliest I’ve read, but very civilised. Lovely to read in a library, and to a warm crowd. We both had two slots, one at 20 mins and one of ten, which was a nice way to do things.

Matthew leant into his two collections, including some of the wine poems form Knives. I leant into CtD, including some that rarely get read like Tea Hut. I also tried out some newer poems…including a longer one (for me) that I think acts as a complement to Clearing Dad’s Shed (in a way). Not sure if it’s not too long for a reading, but we live and learn.

We also had an open mic, including a poem from Tim Love who’d made the journey up (Thanks Tim). I did take notes about the readers, but they seem to have got very wet in my bag on the way home, so alas they are illegible…Nay, more illegible given my handwriting. Sorry folks, but I enjoyed you all.

Mat Riches, And roast of all, thank you to you for coming

It might be an obvious thing to say but as far as poetry is concerned… well, my poetry… truth is an awkward subject. Every poem I write has what I believe to be a truth at its core. If I sense that anything I’ve written is dishonest, or in some way fails to tell the truth I intend it to tell, I chuck it out.

That said, the truth in poetry is often hidden behind masks, stray voices, even downright lies. A reader might have to search for it (if you can be bothered). The key, I suppose, is to write something that people feel they want to explore and discover what the particular truth might be.

That’s part of the attraction of poetry for me. OK, I can lie and deceive. Take the Ezra Pound’s Trombone poem I wrote a while back about visiting a museum in Genoa and seeing the legendary man’s trombone in a glass case. It was a piece of fun if you took it at face value but the truth, not too hard to see, was in our need for a quest, in the way we need to find things that feel of value to us, to honour people we might (even begrudgingly) admire. At no point when I was writing did it occur to me that somebody might be so excited by it that they would want to travel to Genoa on an actual quest to find the trombone. When the person contacted me to ask for the name and address of the museum I sheepishly had to admit I’d made it up, I’d never been to Genoa and as far as I knew there was no trombone…

Diane Wakoski had a similar experience when a radio interviewer gently asked her for the background to her poem Some Brilliant Sky from 1972 which begins ‘David was my brother/ and killed himself/ by the sea’. The interviewer was probing for the effect the death of her brother had on her – and on her poetry. She had to admit she’d made the poem up and she had no brother. The so-called ‘facts’ of the poem aren’t the point. They’re the tool which the poet is using to tell their truth.

Bob Mee, TRUTH IN POETRY? WELL, YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT…AND EVEN THEN…

Eavan Boland, one of the most important voices in Irish literature, was as strong a presence in poetry as one can read. Her gift of craft is evident in every poem. Her use of language, blending the historical, mythical, and the personal, is beautiful and startling – adept at drawing in the reader.

The speaker’s voice in “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” is muscular and convincing in creating a moving, lingering ambiance for the piece. The work is the closing poem in Boland’s brilliant collection, In a Time of Violence (W.W. Norton, 1994), and serves as a perfect glance across the acute observation of the human condition that precedes it. A consideration of a poetry that is a manifesto:

“This is not death. It is the terrible
suspension of life.
I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”

Boland forces the reader to consider the world and culture – like the “hammered gold and gold enameling” in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” – that left these fine lines of art among the “curios and silver / in the pureness of wintry light”. The narrator’s voice in Boland’s poem is declaring the “terrible” act of any attempt to confine or limit women to any state short of real.

This is the holy grail of all poetic endeavors – a poetry that defies time, place, and history. A poetry that lets us live in the grandeur and in the tedium, and – yes – lets us die.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

Some of the most enduring poetry in the English tradition draws on classical myth, literature, and folklore. Daniel Hinds’ New and Famous Phrases (Broken Sleep Books, 2025) participates in this lineage with remarkable originality. Although deeply informed by literary history, Hinds never imitates; instead, he revitalises inherited forms and narratives through a voice that feels strikingly fresh, imaginative, and contemporary. His encyclopaedic knowledge of language and literature serves not as ornamentation but as the foundation for ambitious poems that operate simultaneously as homage, dialogue, and innovation.

The Siren Star offers a clear example of Hinds’ distinctive approach. By echoing the seven‑day structure of the Book of Genesis, the poem presents a cosmological reversal: a creation story rewritten as an account of extinction. Each day charts a further step toward the end of human life, beginning with the death of an astronaut and the suicide of another, who “Downed tools / Unlatched the white umbilical cord,” a moment that suggests both the inevitability of mortality and the futility of technological mastery in the face of cosmic forces. As the poem progresses, the erosion of human presence becomes stark—by the fifth day “there were no seeing men left,” and by the sixth, “no women.” These apocalyptic developments unfold within an unmistakably contemporary world, one populated by children with telescopes purchased by affluent parents and dominated by “concrete Cities.”

It is in the seventh day, however, that Hinds turns decisively to myth. The final human encounters “three copper women,” figures who recall the ominous sisters of Greek mythology but are reimagined as “citizens of the sun,” their bodies marked by “three black holes at their necks.” This fusion of classical symbolism with astrophysical imagery evokes the terrifying grandeur of a dying star pulling Earth into its expanded orbit. The title’s reference to the sun as a “siren” encapsulates this duality of allure and annihilation. The poem culminates in the haunting image of extinction described as a kiss: “She lifts his heavy glass mask / And makes first contact with her lips.” The moment is at once intimate, inevitable, and profoundly unsettling.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘New Famous Phrases’ by Daniel Hinds

Maybe this is about darkening pink things, and the power of raspberry jam to evoke involuntary memories. Maybe it’s all in the imprint. One could say the unexpected photograph is a segue into thinking about how poetry moves, or how the distance between the poem’s opening line and the poem’s closing can narrow into a specific yet unexpected place. Maybe I need the ellipses of William Heyen’s “The Berries” to wound their way through me.

Alina Stefanescu, Imprints in absence… and a motif in raspberry.

Darkness pervades each couplet—the atmosphere of fable, of fairy tale—each compact narrative moving inevitably toward the word home, each repetition of this single-word refrain adding resonance to the narrator’s ambivalence about the very meaning of home.

The third couplet features ravens. Given the company this ghazal is keeping—Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson—this reader feels the presence of Poe, subtly established in the previous couplet: “A leaden shadow is tethered to the heart.”

David Meischen, No Porch Light On

“Something In Nothing” uses fairytales, often dismissed as children’s stories, to explore their original purpose: as warnings of the darker side of humanity, as the title poem suggests,

“All the world revolves in it
and it is no more than a grain of sand.
For that is all I have –
a story that is something in nothing.”

That’s what the best stories are: a handful of characters, a few words that conjure an entire imaginary world. How many daydreaming children have been told they are ‘wasting time’ when they were creating a rich inner world and trying to make sense of something that was strange to them or finding safety in a world that felt dangerous.

Emma Lee, “Something In Nothing” Zoe Brooks (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Henry Gould’s work has always been suffused with Christian hope and love, but here it’s becoming ever more urgently the surface of the poetry. There are moments when the writing takes on the quality of prayer, as in these lines from the end of ’17 Fahrenheit’:

It’s taken me forever, to reckon the price
of ancient JUBILEE. Beyond my ken.
God is divine kindness : we must be kind,
cease making war against our kind… and then
restore our sunlit planet – for they praise!
So chants your silver turtledove, O smiling Moon.

Gould’s physical location in Minneapolis has long been central to his work, and this has become even more the case since the ICE invasion. Mayflower Table, a single poem in 22 numbered sections, is at heart a response to this situation, with part 12 dedicated ‘i.m. Renee Nicole Good’ and 17 ‘to the people of Minneapolis’. 12 ends with lines that restate Gould’s ongoing belief in the potential of America:

Sulfurous tyrants grieve us – but we shall not fear:
for we the people are created equal – in the mind of God.

Billy Mills, Two Pamphlets by Henry Gould: A Review

The Rose is the fifth collection from the wonderful American poet Ariana Reines. In the UK, Penguin are publishing it and I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. This is what I like to call a desert island book – a book that you could take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island for twenty years because there are enough layers and ideas to keep you going for a long time. It’s a book that interrogates and reinvents our ideas and preconceptions around female desire, power and submission and argues for the possibility that sometimes there is no easy or single answer.

The figure of Medea (who in the most famous version of the myth murdered her own children after being abandoned by her husband Jason for a new wife) haunts this book in a sequence of poems with the title Medea – none of which tell her story, or at least not in a linear way. The Medea in The Rose is utterly contemporary and mythic. In the first poem called ‘Medea’ of the many that run through the collection, she says “I’ll find another woman / Somewhere inside me /I’ll humble myself / I’ll try”. There is a beautiful recording of one of the later ‘Medea’ poems on poems.org where Ariana explains ‘I kept asking myself what it would mean to be the worst woman in the world.’ I loved this poem for the way it lists all the good things that must be forgotten in order to both endure violence and to carry it out.

One of my favourite poems is ‘Hellmouth’ with its repeated insistence that we must build a secret room inside ourselves. The first iteration of this has such a surefooted line break ‘If you fail to build in yourself a secret /Room’. We must build secrets in ourselves and secret rooms. Later in the poem she writes ‘The little / Room in the middle / Of me. Where I see / What I can’t say’.

Many years ago, I had ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my arm – inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay of course – I longed for a physical room of my own that would be my writing room, but I also wanted to have a room inside myself, a place that nobody else could touch, that could not be controlled or known or owned.

Kim Moore, February Reading Diary

Last week we were away for five days, and just before leaving I picked up a few books to take with me, almost at random, including Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Years (very enjoyable) and C. H. Sisson’s English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (first published 1971). Sisson is always a bracing and engaging read and I was struck by this paragraph from his first chapter, on the 1890s:

Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, John Davidson and Yeats himself were workmen of importance by any standards which would be reasonable in a history of fifty years, and their technical practice was important, in varying degrees, for the writers who followed them. The vague and notorious aura of the period matters less.

None of Johnson’s poems are included in any of the anthologies of English verse I had to hand, and if anyone mentions him now, they generally do so for just those ‘vague and notorious’ reasons to which alludes, and which he then dismisses. Johnson was a sensitive Englishman who wished he was Irish, was taught by Walter Pater at Oxford, became early on an insomniac and an alcoholic, converted to Catholicism, ‘notoriously’ introduced his friend, Oscar Wilde, to Lord Alfred Douglas, and then died suddenly of a stroke brought on by excessive drinking, aged only 35, in 1902. A more wholeheartedly 1890s biography is hard to imagine. Nina Antonia’s 2018 edition of Johnson’s selected writings (which I haven’t read, though the free sample of the introductory biography looks quite fun) is accordingly titled to hit as many of the ‘vague and notorious’ targets of high decadence as possible: Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel. The Amazon summary makes Johnson sound, frankly, unbearable.

A vague sense of all this had in the past rather put me off Johnson. But I was interested by Sisson’s focus, not on any of the seedy drama of decadence, but on his ‘technical practice’. What makes Johnson’s poetry of interest in a technical sense for the literary historian?

So this week I sat down and read Johnson’s complete verse, and found rather a different poetic personality from what I had expected.

Victoria Moul, The saddest of all kings: reading Lionel Johnson

A recent read I have thoroughly relished is this memoir by my friend Sally Evans.

I first met Sally when she invited me to read at her 70th birthday party in Dunblane. Many poets were invited, and the idea was that there would be short reading slots for invited poets, so plenty of variety. It was one of the best parties! The food was fantastic, as was the company. Sally offered me a day of bookbinding lessons with Ian King, and that was my first visit to their incredible bookshop on the Main Street in Callander. So I knew very little of Sally’s earlier life, how she came to be a bookseller, how she met Ian, apart from the fact they had Grindles in Edinburgh, a very well known second hand bookshop, and had ‘retired’ to Callander. So it was fascinating to hear about her earlier life, her work as a librarian, how she came to meet Ian, and how they started their business.

Sally is a very generous person, and this comes across in her writing, as well as her annual Poetry Weekend hosted in Callander, to which many of us flocked year on year, finding the most attentive poetry audience and best book-buyers, as we all supported each other. For me, it was an extension of the 70th birthday party, and many of the same people attended. They were all good poets. When I first went to StAnza in 2014, invited to bring The Lightfoot Letters up by then director Eleanor Livingstone, I had felt rather shy. However, I soon found the streets and the venues were full of people I knew from knowing Sally. (in that way it resembles Whitby Folk Week). People like Judith Taylor, the late Sheila Templeton, late Brian Johnstone, Elizabeth Rimmer, as well as friends from home. Sally is generous about the people who come into the shop, dealing with irritating customers firmly but politely.

Angela Topping, Driving in the Book Lane, a memoir by Sally Evans

You authored a unique collection of haiku and illustrations, titled Faunistics. Would you be willing to tell us more about this book and the inspiration behind it?

Faunistics was my way back into haiku, essentially. I’d had a brief foray in my early twenties but hadn’t quite mastered it and then I got sidetracked with other things. Fast forward to my mid-thirties, and I’d been through a very long period of not being able to write and/or writing trash. I’d always had this goal of publishing a collection of haiku, and had an old manuscript, which I forced myself to dig out, redraft, and publish. As a result, I ended up completely immersed in the haiku community and soon learned to write it properly. The more I wrote, the more embarrassing my old haiku became and most of the original haiku were discarded. The ones that were any good were related to animals, so I made that my focus. I began grouping them by animal type to get a roughly equal amount of each, then grouping them as per their native continents, if not where their population is the highest. Within these continental groups, I divided them up into countries, so that the book is ordered like a page-by-page worldwide safari. I’ve always loved writing about nature. So, this was a good excuse for a deep dive. I think maybe one haiku from my original manuscript survived, but even that was redrafted.

You also co-authored an interesting book with Hifsa Ashraf titled Infinity Strings, which explores much of humanity’s attachment to modern culture, space, and technology. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project? What inspired you and Hifsa Ashraf to write this book together? What did you learn from the experience of writing collaboratively?

A big part of haikai is collaboration. I’d written with a few haiku poets at that time who I’d connected with online. With Hifsa, we started writing on spontaneous subjects. Then, I introduced her to the tan-renga and I recall her getting really excited about the form. We tried our hand at something more experimental in terms of subject and liked the result, and so it snowballed into a potential sequence, then a potential pamphlet, at which point we felt we might as well take it to collection-length. We became obsessed with how far we could go down the rabbit hole and push the collection to its limits. Infinity Strings is the polar opposite to Faunistics. I think it’s fair to say it’s an outlier amongst both our repertoires. It has its own personality entirely, and every now and then we meet someone brave enough to follow its disconcerting path.

Jacob D. Salzer, R.C. Thomas (Richard)

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

Uche: My first book, Dark through the Delta, was inspired by oil exploitation in the Niger Delta and the environmental devastation that followed. Writing that book convinced me of literature’s power to spotlight various forms of plunder of both human and nonhuman worlds. My most recent book, We Survived Until We Could Live, is different, in tone and theme. It’s less ecological and much more intimate and explores postwar memory, historical and family traumas, domestic violence, grief, healing, and love. In some way, both books are still very much about devastation. While Dark through the Delta examines the devastation caused by an oil behemoth and its effects on both human and nonhuman life, We Survived Until We Could Live reveals the devastation of war and its toll on human lives and relationships. I think this book is my most ambitious and certainly my most vulnerable. I couldn’t have written it without the generous support of the entire team at the University of Calgary Press.

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

Uche: I came to poetry by accident, in my late uncle’s house – a biochemist, but an avid reader of literature. He had a storage full of books, including British and Roman poets and playwrights. One day, I went to the storage to get something and stumbled upon a small book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I opened it almost at random, and the rhyme scheme, its imagery, and its lyric intensity captivated me. It’s funny, because before that, I’d never been particularly interested in literature at high school. That Shakespearean moment, or rather, encounter, is what really started me writing poetry.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

i come wrapped in
plastic. tear here. tear here. the tongue
is stuck in the gutter. i fish it out.
i don’t bother scolding it anymore.
instead we go into the kitchen
in search of salt.

Robin Gow, cheese pull

I had an interesting experience recently trying to write a braided essay, that is, an essay that intersperses subject matter such that each thread sheds some light on the others. I had it as an open file on my desktop for two weeks or so, and when thoughts occurred to me on any of the threads, I jotted them down. After a while I braided the whole thing, snipped out some stuff, was kind of happy with it, but thought it might be confusing or confused. Trusted Reader took a look and didn’t like the illogic of it all, so reordered it into more of a sandwich than a braid, and I realized two things. One was that the braid itself lent, to me, interesting energy to the piece, and two, that, all in all, the energy was undeserved, as I really hadn’t logically said much at all. So, I’m walking away from it, wiser, but still like the approach I took, and maybe could use a few bits and pieces again. This is writing work: Look around, think stuff, try stuff, let it sit, revise, wait, snip, relook, get a different perspective, turn it upside down, ask yourself what you think you’re up to, repeat.

I hate the precious idea of a “muse.” Ideas may float like waves of pollen or surge up like the snags of skunk cabbage, they’re not sprinkled on you like fairy dust by some fucking lady in a diaphonous gown. You have to be alert, maybe on the hunt like a mushroom tracker, or a garbage picker looking for discarded treasures. You have to squint your eyes, rest your mind, look to one side of the dim stars. You have to listen through the din for a faint peep. And then…and THEN…you have to figure out how to make something of it. And then make it.

The muses were the daughters of the head god dude and memory. (Which is actually kind of interesting, memory as a mother of muse.) But mythology is just a bunch of made up stories. And those ancient Greeks were just more misogynists who made up female gods but kept real flesh and blood women well under control. So I say to hell with the idea of “the muse.” And yes to the inspiration of being a body-in-the-world, flailing about. And a restless, doubt-filled, querulous, messy, glorious mind.

Marilyn McCabe, Still, I listen. I search

Against the backdrop of Emersonian philosophy, albeit from the vantage point of thirty years’ hindsight, Today’s Poem, written around 1867, becomes, like nature itself, an extended metaphor. It offers a description of the various behaviors of water, but its true burden, like the true burden of nature itself, is to analogize the human mind in all its constructive and destructive potential.

Its twelve trimeter lines begin to resolve, by line 3, into rhymed couplets, only to dissolve again — or to mimic the widening ripples in the surface of the water — by way of an envelope quatrain at the end. In the course of these twelve lines, water, that fundamental element, accumulates sapient qualities, for good or for ill. It begins in understanding. Ask the water what it knows about “civilization,” and presumably it will tell you, if you have ears to hear. Its physical qualities are dispatched in the first rhyming couplet; yes, yes, it can make you wet and cold, but “prettily” and “wittily.” It doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, it’s downright cheerful. At least, it’s neither “disconcerted” nor “broken-hearted,” as the second rhymed couplet, in pleasing feminine rhymes, has it.

Its natural state, in other words, is to be good and ordered toward “joy,” as the third rhymed couplet emphasizes via its repetition of that word. But water’s capacity to “deck” and “double” joy is bound up — as the next rhyme suggests — with its destructive potential if “ill-used.” Its power can tilt both ways. Its beauty should not reassure; “elegantly,” with “a look of golden pleasure,” it may sweep everything you love away. And in the face of the water, as the poem tacitly implies, being of a piece with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the human beholder may find a mirror for the state of his own soul.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Water

Keats was born on the fringes of the city, at Moorgate, spending early years in present day Hoxton, but his school in leafy Enfield and his grandmother’s home in Edmonton close the River Lea provided a rural idyl flush with bubbling springs and swimming pools. Think also of the Fontana della Barcaccia in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, the sound of its waters soothing the poet on his deathbed and offering the source for his epitaph. From his room, restored in Keats-Shelley House, I do not hear the sound of the fountain. By day it is drowned by the bustle and mutter of tourists flooding the piazza. By night, where I am staying, in the room above where he died, it comes, gently and I sense all is well.

I take a shower, wash the journey from me. In the square glasses are being filled and raised, toasts to health are given, drink is taken. We are familiar with the first part of the motto, “In vino veritas,” but less aquatinted with the second, “in aqua sanitas.” While in wine truth may be revealed, in water we find salubrity and I, I have come to seek clarity, to pursue restoration through poetry, to wash the drudgery from me.

I rise early, before the crowds come, before the police whistles sound out in the piazza. I walk a little, ascend the Spanish Steps, alight on one of the landings, lifted but not yet arrived, rising from the civic, between the public and the sacred.

Jan Noble, Nº54 A postcard from Rome…

the breadth 
of a water breath
a sky breath
a mountain breath of
a shore line’s breadth
it was all there
held in a held breath

Jim Young, on looking at a mountain lake

A so-called FB friend (who will remain anonymous, so no fishing!) told me to my face the other day that my promotion of my books was far better than the poetry inside them, implying that I was less of a poet for getting my stuff out there. I can fully understand why a poet might feel uncomfortable about promoting their work, but I can’t comprehend how this might then lead to their denigrating other poets who do so.

I was stunned by his words, though I recovered sufficiently to reply that his attitude was representative of the worst of U.K poetry. Which reminds me. Anyone up for a signed copy?! If so, just drop me an email. The address is in my blogger profile…

Matthew Stewart, Less of a poet…?

I was very pleased to see my poem Canada is as far away as bibles are on After. Many thanks to Editor Mark Antony Owen. You can read the poem here.

After publishes ekphrastic poems and my poem was inspired by The Avid Reader, 1949. Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) was a visual artist, painter, and musician. He made the lightbox in 2011.

‘We see the middle-aged man / carrying a hat, smoking a pipe, / because Graham inhabits him.’

The Avid Reader, 1949 was one of the works on display at Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, the Netherlands in the major exhibition of Graham’s work titled That’s Not Me. An ironic title as Graham appears in all the works – as a builder having a smoke, a lighthouse keeper, historical figure.

Voorlinden is a fabulous museum – more about it some other time.

I was struck by the attention to detail and the scale of the works. The woman is ‘his wife, swing coat, high heels, walks past on the right.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Canada is as far away as bibles are

I collect phrases I like, ones that I hear or read in books. The trouble is I usually do nothing with them. The other day though, I decided to use one that has been knocking about for some time as a writing exercise. I do not remember where the phrase the unpopular provincial museum came from but it sparked this. […]

This one it is claimed won a Bronze,
another a cap for his country,
here it is secure, pinned to the wall,
for the few who visit to see.
It all adds up to a feeling
that nothing has ever happened here,
which given the times we live in,
adds to its attractiveness
and makes it a desirable and safe place to live.

Paul Tobin, THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

After that, we visited the Museum of Things Left in Cars Overnight—

books, random receipts with poems written on the back.

Smells of vinyl and dust preserved under glass.

The Museum of Instructions Without Context was far too confusing,

and we got totally turned around in the Museum Without Exit Signs.

A stranger on the street recommended we visit the Museum of Objects That Remember You—

a chair that recalls your weight, a mirror that reflects an earlier version of your face,

a key that insists it belongs to you.

Rich Ferguson, I’ll Always Remember The Day

My trip to Baltimore for the AWP Conference Book Fair didn’t happen; my immune system decided otherwise, with a resurgence of a nasty respiratory virus and a flare of fibromyalgia. I guess I can look on the positive side and say I saved a lot of money, right? Plus I can purchase most of those poetry collections online, I suppose. Still, there really is nothing like browsing through thousands of luscious books for something that grabs me, that takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Ms. Dickinson. Through social media platforms, I can see colleagues-in-literature making connections and meeting one another face-to-face, which is what conferences are for. Another year, maybe.

And after days of necessary spring rain, drizzle, and fog, the long-awaited thaw eradicated most of our snow. Crocuses bloomed, and bees came out to visit the snowdrops.

I felt much better today and was able to take a walk in the mild sun, listening to robins, mourning doves, song sparrows, woodpeckers, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, house finches, Carolina chickadees, American crows, Canada geese, mockingbirds, cardinals, bluejays, masses of starlings…I watched the high-flown antics of redtail hawks and turkey vultures.

In other regions of the world today, people listen and watch for fighter jets, torpedoes, drones. There but for fortune may go you or I (Phil Ochs). Meanwhile I remain grateful for feeling slightly better as the days lengthen into spring. It’s March–we could still get snow! But the spring peepers sense the warmer temperature and trilled a bit last evening while the great horned owl was hooting. Here’s a poem I wrote in 2012 about DST. […]

I am glad for the extra hour
among long shadows as my dog
chases a woodchuck, as the wood-
pecker pounds in metrical progressions:
trochee, trochee, spondee. […]

Ann E. Michael, Snowdrops

Despite the misleading cherry blossoms at the top of the post, we’re supposed to have cold rain AND snow this week, so spring seems like a false hope at this point, a thing which will never arrive. Winter Blues are a real thing for me in November, February, and yes, March. I wish for some dry warm days to shake up my physical miseries (colds never seem to be made better by cold wet weather, I notice). I missed AWP and saw all the happy pics on Facebook and sighed to myself. I don’t go every year—I don’t have the means, as a non-academic, to do it, even if I wanted to. But the news has also been so miserable, the weather, the fact that we’re planning a trip home to visit a very sick family member…it’s hard to just snap back to my usual cheerful self. I wrote a few poems about how I felt about America. Will these poems change anything? Probably not, but sometimes you need to write them anyway.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Time Changes and Winter Blues with Cherry Blossoms, Academic Women in Pop Culture: Vladmir

We didn’t really plan this, you know. We began, and indeed still persist as, ‘Thrums Chums’ (blame Glenday) – an informal workshop organised around little more than that we are all old pals, and all more-or-less in driving distance of a kitchen table in Kirriemuir, Angus. For your geocultural orientation: immediately behind us is the cemetery where JM Barrie lies buried with Peter Pan; just behind that, the frozen storm-surge of the mighty Cairngorms. From kailyard to eternity.

The advantage of our being friends first is that we don’t feel the need to agree on everything, or indeed anything. We’ve no common political stance or aesthetic. None of us give a toss for ideological compliance, and we would rather run on trust. Differences are good. Besides, what we have in common is far more important: poetry, for some reason, has placed itself at the centre of our lives.

As North Sea Poets (with the indispensable help of Miriam Huxley, our wonderful administrator), we’ve sought to extend that circle of friendship and share what collective expertise we’re accumulated in our many years of avoiding the right margin – whether as poets, tutors, workshop leaders, essayists on Substack, or just as fellow readers. Despite what London or Edinburgh or NYC might tell you, poetry has no centre. Not even Kirriemuir. It’s wherever you’re reading this. The best gift of the digital age is that being remote needn’t mean feeling remote. Now we can all gather in the same place, and yet still be anywhere. While I bang on and on about metonymy.

Don Paterson, A Year of North Sea Poets

Although I try to stay connected with my readers, I haven’t written you in close to three months. The truth is, with all the upheaval in the world these days, it has been hard to know what to say.

On the one hand, I know I’m not obligated to say anything about the news—no one really expects artists and poets to analyze the political events of the day. Somehow the New York Times still hasn’t phoned for my take on the war in Iran! On the other hand, it seems oblivious at best to chatter about my creative projects and my happy little life while the regime is locking up children and murdering US citizens in broad daylight.

How to navigate these dystopian times? I know many of us attend protests.* We’ve got our reps on speed dial. We donate to help people in Gaza, Ukraine, Minnesota. We stay informed as best we can without drowning in the horrors of the day. Yet faced with the shocking cruelty and corruption of this administration, it never feels like enough.

Still, I take heart from these words by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, interpreting a part of the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief . . . You are not expected to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Under an administration that stokes fear and hatred of “the other,” I believe that connection, creative expression, and celebration are all forms of this work. Whether it’s taking in a beach sunset, writing a poem or petting a stranger’s dog, joy is an act of resistance.

copper-tinged waves
trying to fit the ocean
into my camera

Annette Makino, How to move through a broken world?

                            Without 

having known what it’s like to fumble 
through darkness, would the pearl-

light of morning feel less of an 
astonishment? Bodies that bore 

a hundred hurts, that carved of 
themselves an offering. A warbler 

balances on the tip of a branch, 
its weight barely enough to break it.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Blessing

This week: death stuck in traffic, puritans vs. mermaids, an inflamed labyrinth, rain falling on asphalt, and much more. Enjoy.

Today I prayed upon waking
in weak morning light, on this
ordinary day, unkempt
in flannel and cotton.
Peace descended
like a still, insensible animal
laid on my lap, a strange
species I don’t know how to take care of.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 3

To quote T. Swift:

“ All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.”

But things are happening amidst a world in utter chaos and absurdity, a place where I and I imagine other creatives are holding on white-knuckled to artmaking and routines and fighting the urge to run away into the woods forever. I saw someone quoted the other day that it was important to go on making art and devoting time to creativity, that besides the things like protesting, making calls, writing letters, could be one of the most important things you do. Also a documentation for prosperity.

Kristy Bowen, February Paper Boat

I’ve also been wedging my foot in the door poetically while thinking, like Plath, that there are so damn many of us trying to push up through the earth. The poets are using Canva to design posts summarizing their busy AWP schedules: me too. The poets are announcing their publishing milestones via social media and MailChimp: me too. Mycocosmic was published a year ago this week and the “book birthday” post/ newsletter has become a standard publicity genre. That’s fine, poets deserve any little morsel they can scrape out of the attention economy, but it’s hard to do the work lightly. First and foremost: the US is in the middle of an illegal war because a reckless pedophile president needs to distract people. Even without apocalypse (are we ever?), it would be a tonal balancing act: here’s me putting a very slight twist on a “content” cliché. Now here I am asking you to pay attention to my book in a way that needs to be a little wry and humble, because no one likes a pushy writer. Then there’s the tech: good lord, I’ve spent hours trying to format a simple email, is MailChimp going to make me upgrade to paid now?! Curses.

Lesley Wheeler, So many of us!

I have been home in Hastings, looking after my mum and my kid sister. It’s been a tough winter. I’ve been making soup and feeling time plays tricks, how fast it all catches up with all of us. My lovely mum will be ok, but she gave us a scare. My lovely sister is more than ok, she has got all the sticky toffees and caramel promises out of me she can in mum’s absence. I’m now back at my desk madly trying to catch up with books and admin and stuff. It’s a juggle navigating this time of life, this big scary world, this terrible age of distraction, and all this patriarchal fuckery.

Take a deep breath. Here’s a walk along the beach and something from the archives. A love letter to Hastings and those 1980s teenage years. The poem ‘Under The Pier’ was originally written for a walking tour of Hastings, where you would have poetry playing in headphones at different historical and tourists spots in the Hastings area. ‘Under The Pier’ was also the title poem of a pamphlet published by Nasty Little press in 2011. Then later in 2016 this poem featured on the LIVEwire album, a solo performance poetry album, released with Nymphs & Thugs and Matt Abbott – The video was shot on location in Hastings, East Sussex in 2016, the video was filmed, directed, and edited by Jordon Scott Kennedy of Idle Work Factory, and it accompanies audio of a live performance of the poem recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre.

Time is such a trickster, somehow this all feels like last week, and also so long ago now. Ten years have passed, so much water has passed under the pier. I’m gonna see my friends soon, excited to do a show with Matt Abbott and Toria Garbutt next week, so, if you are up in Yorkshire and local, I’m at Barnsley Book Festival on March 2nd, please come, details below, it will be lovely to see everyone again.

Salena Godden, Under The Pier

Acrobat, by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated from the Bengali by Nandana Dev Sen:

Poetry flies away as well,
if you let go of the thread—
it flutters in space like a lost kite.
The poet floats in an infinite void, desolate,
like a spacecraft disconnected from earth,
with no destination.

I’ve chosen these six lines from a poem called “And Yet, Life,” which appears towards the end of this volume—a collection spanning a sixty year career—because their subtext, the idea that poetry is that which connects the poet to the world, is the thread around which my experience as a reader cohered. Read carefully, each poem in the book reveals itself as something that needed to be written, not because the world required it, but because the poet’s consciousness and conscience did. “This Child,” for example, which opens with the line “One day this child too will die,” confronts a question with which children by their very presence ask of their parents: Why did you bring me into this world. Dev Sen’s speaker, “Choking with fear, with ignorance,” tells us this question will make her “run away/to a dark cave, numb and empty” because she has no satisfactory answer to give. In “Growing-up Lesson,” she addresses a boy who fears the requirements of manhood—the most interesting line in the poem, to me, is “Are you terrified of plucking virginity?”—and then offers, as (a perhaps ironic) alternative, the kind of strength and maturity and analogous manhood that can be found in the use of words. In some ways those different but related spheres of concern—that of a parent responsible for a child’s life and that of a woman turning a critical eye on patriarchal gender roles—are the poles between which all the poems in the volume move. In her moving introduction to the volume, Nandana Dev Sen, the poet’s daughter and translator, offers a quote from her mother that I think speaks to what makes this book worth reading as more than just an interesting volume of poetry in translation: “I speak of poetry as being central to woman’s freedom. Yes, I am partial, I cannot be and do not wish to be objective…”

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #52

And then the siren gets closer. There’s nowhere for
the ambulance to go. Cars inch to one side as if the
road is stretchable. As if the vehicle is marshmallow.
Someone jumps off a Suzuki and waves his hands about,
directing the melee. The paramedic shakes his head.
The lane clears. Like a break in the clouds. The
ambulance rushes ahead to the next signal. Death
stuck in traffic. Life wanting a better place to die.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Monday traps

I recently spoke with David J. Bauman on the In Three Poems Podcast about Jehanne Dubrow’s book The Wounded Line, how having a “container” (in poetry, a form, like the sonnet) can be helpful when approaching the difficult subject, though it may not stay in that form in the end. And it’s not just the difficult subject that benefits from limits. Other constraints can push language in previously unmapped directions.

Here are a few constraints to try:

• syllabic limitation (for the poem or the line)
• sound limitation (i.e., an alliterative or anagrammic word bank)
• nonce forms (creating your own rules you must follow)
• grammatical patterns (check this post for an explanation)

When I put constraints on myself, I often discover something: a pleasing color palette or a surreal feeling in a collage. A juxtaposition of words or a rhythm of language that are not in my usual wheelhouse. And allowing those limits to sing in their own way opens up so many possibilities, much more so than a prompt that might ask me to write “however I want” or “explore” a topic. In this way, constraint leads to an expansiveness of thought.

In this way, the limit becomes the sky.

Donna Vorreyer, The Limit is the Sky

Again, I was surprised and encouraged. I’d never seen anyone else write like this. I decided to keep going. I wrote pieces where each word started with the next letter of the alphabet, where specific letters could be lined up to make other stanzas, poem codes where each nth word of a poem could be combined to make a new poem, and poetry using music notation letters that could be played on a piano. Some of these are forms that, as of now, AI writing tools can’t even replicate.

I wrote hundreds of symmetrical poems and kept discovering new forms all because of that first day that I tried something impossible and didn’t give up on it until it was finished. These new “impossible” forms opened up new publishing opportunities for me. Dozens of the poems have been published in various magazines, and I won an award and was interviewed for one of them.

Not only that, but my writing style overall has improved. Writing anything else seems easy in comparison to these “impossible” forms.

I heard recently that in some professions, even more important than consistency, is persistency. A refusal to accept ‘no’ as an answer. If you believe in your work, don’t give up on it, even if—especially if—people think it’s crazy or impossible. Sometimes, as the Wright Brothers found out, stubbornness pays off.

Joshua Kepfer, Try Impossible Things

She sits on the cliff watching the water.
He is a rounded head buoyant in the centre.

Something on the air tumbled by the wind
interrupts him;
eyes and nostrils flick open
revealing stone-black depths.

Sue Finch, SEAL AT ANGEL BAY

It’s a chemo week, so when I say I’m tired: I’m really tired. In the spirit of “letting myself be tired,” as those zany docs like to suggest, this week I’m sharing a poem that first appeared in The Missouri Review. Its companions are paywalled, but you academic types can get to them via JSTOR if you’re interested. (If you’re an editor, you can get to the whole looking-for-a-home manuscript through me.)

I don’t remember much about the writing of this poem and have never felt compelled to keep anything resembling archives, but my email oracle reveals that I foisted it on my favourite first reader in June of 2018, which sounds about right. I was thinking about power, about who constructs the narrative, about who is left out and why and what a piss-off it is. I’d wager I’d recently read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey: Scheria is where the shipwrecked Odysseus is discovered by the youthful princess Nausicaa, who helps the wanderer on his way.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Scheria”

Dear ***** , Arrived last night, on the anniversary of the funeral, when (and do stop me if I’ve told you this story before) in 1821, a small cortège made its way through these very streets at dawn from Piazza di Spagna to the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome where the mortal remains of ‘the young English poet’ John Keats were interred. Yesterday the sun shone, “for the first time in months,” according to a local. I’m quite sure he was exaggerating but his friends seemed to agree, draining their espressos, adjusting their shades in expectation of better weather ahead.

Today it’s cloudy, overcast, just as it was when Johnny K first arrived. I thought I might be overdressed, coat, jumper, hat, still wrapped for a long London winter. I’m told it’s warmer there now I’ve left. I’ve brought the colder weather with me it seems. The sun comes out when I leave, goes in when I arrive. I pull my collars up, think of John, on these steps, out here, on one of his better days, wondering if he’d make it through, last until the better weather came. He brought the clouds with him too. I wonder if he ever considered if it had all been worth it, if he should have stayed home, done the decent thing, got a proper job, been a doctor, married Fanny, raised some kids, slipped quietly into obscurity.

The Piazza is full of tourists. They are all out filming each other, all trying to manoeuvre to a spot where they’ll just get a shot of themselves on the steps and no one else in the frame. None of them are successful, they are all in each other’s photos while posing for their own. Later they’ll all star on each other’s social media feeds. Some pictures will get one hundred ‘likes’, one may go viral, others will get no reaction at all but they will all look the same, more or less, just people standing around in a crowd, being bland and simultaneously incomprehensibly unique.

I begin to move around the steps just to see how many pictures I can appear in, how many videos I can star in. I don’t do anything daft, I’m not photo bombing, I’m doing background work, just filling in, milling around, trying to be as natural as I can. I take it seriously. It’s like writing, it’s like finding that line, trying it out a dozen times until it feels authentic, until it floats unnoticeably just above the ordinary. That’s what I’m doing here. This is what I decide I’ve spent a lifetime doing: floating unnoticeably just above the ordinary.

Jan Noble, Nº53 In a region of mists…

Last night, I wrote this Facebook post:  “In my younger days, I wanted to be a reporter. In my older days, I am so grateful to have a job where I don’t need to stay up for the State of the Union address, although when I teach “Antigone” tomorrow, I may wish that I could make more specific references to the speech. Nah, it’s probably better to keep that class conversation more general: what do we do when our moral/religious beliefs are in conflict with what our earthly rulers want us to do?”

I didn’t need to make a conscious choice.  By 9 p.m., when the pageant started, I was already asleep.  Instead of watching the State of the Union address, we watched A Fish Called Wanda. […]

This morning, my brain returned to the State of the Union address and my Facebook post.  I also thought about my department chair asking me if I had ever taught a journalism class.  I wrote about it in this blog post:  “Before she assigned me the Journalism class, my department chair reached out to me by way of e-mail to see if I’d be open to teaching it. Here’s what I wrote back: ‘I am open to that, although I haven’t taught it. But long ago, in my Newberry College undergrad days, I was an essential part of the student newspaper. We went looking for hot stories, a la Woodward and Bernstein. We never found them, but we had fun just the same.'”

This morning, I’ve been trying to write a poem that combines threads of my Facebook post and threads from my blog post.  I still need a third stanza, so I’ll let my subconscious brain keep working on it while I get ready for my working-for-pay day, the teaching of “Antigone.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, What We Watched When We Didn’t Watch the State of the Union Address

I didn’t set out to write this. I began this piece with the rainless days of 2025 so that I could tell you how they brought a hedgehog to my door, skinny and dehydrated; how I took him to a local sanctuary who nursed him back to health. I intended to tell you how the “Full of Joy Animal Sanctuary” runs on entirely on donations, how I decided to help by running a fundraising poetry workshop to celebrate the more-than-human lives which surround us. On Sunday, 36 participants showed up, raising half of the cost of an incubator for hedgehogs and other small animals – so I decided then to run another online workshop on March 28^th, from 10-12.30: click here. In the meantime, “Full of Joy” told me that Lizzie Holden who attended the workshop, had contacted them to pay the rest of the cost. This means that whatever we raise in this second workshop will go towards a second incubator, where owls and hawks and rabbits and other sick creatures can be nursed. I hope some of you can join us.

Instead of the piece I’d planned, on hot days and hedgehogs – and the saving power of poetry, which gives us the means to save small animals, to express ourselves, to understand the world around and inside us, to imagine a different relationship with nature, to bring us together – I wrote this piece on walking through tough weather, and depression, and my regular return to despair. Sometimes the words lead you where you most need to go, and you have to follow them.

I find my meaning in landscape. Every day I walk, and it’s very hard, and rainy, and dark. I am so tired. Some days I simply don’t want to take another step. I want the path to stop. But then there is lichen, that incredible symbiosis of fungus and algae, through which life first crept on its belly onto the land. Then there is scarlet elfcup, and the drowned Ophelia of sphagnum cuspidatum, and the blackbird resuming its song – and yesterday, the first curlew. And there is always my Niamh, my first light, bright star, my green.

Clare Shaw, Rain, rain, snow

Dear god, I renamed one of my current 9 books at editing phase. Continued editing it, then started editing the old version so they diverge. An overlap of poems but changed edits, deletions and additions. I can convert to text files (more versions, goodie) then run through File Merge app to see where changes are.

Is it still a headache if there’s a solution?

Pearl Pirie, I am Forked

I am nervous about writing this post because I also think there is a lot of stigma around ADHD. In fact, when I rang the doctors to have an initial conversation, he actually said to me ‘Well, you’ve done very well for someone with ADHD if you have a doctorate and you are working at a university’. I was so taken aback by this that I said nothing, but of course people who are neurodivergent can ‘do well’ (whatever that means) especially if we are lucky enough to have a job which allows us to hyperfocus on something we love.

I am starting to understand that my ADHD brain has allowed me to achieve so much even whilst it makes things it is not interested in (chores, housework, paying bills, booking doctors appointments, losing things etc) very difficult. My brain, which cannot rest is the reason (I now understand) why so many of the ideas I come up with (16 Days of Activism, January Writing Hours) have this endurance element to them. It’s painful for me to sit still, so I come up with projects that mean I never stop. My brain also means I can hyperfocus all day and forget to eat – a useful trick when you are trying to complete a book manuscript for a deadline.

I wish I could have explained to that doctor that I achieved my doctorate because I found a methodology that was perfect for my particular type of neurodiversity, that I found a structure for the PhD that embraced the quirkiness of the way I think and allowed me to connect everything in a non-linear fashion. I should have told him that people with ADHD are brilliant and creative and resourceful and resilient – but at the time, I didn’t feel like any of those things. I felt like I was drowning and he’d just put his foot on my head!

Despite all this, I think getting the diagnosis has been a largely positive one. I have moved past that numbness and sadness and am starting to process and make sense not just of the past, but also my lived daily experience now.

Kim Moore, What is an overshare anyway?

Early March, below zero, but blue at least, and the long winter loosing in drips and a rouging of the forsythia. Difficult days of promise and betrayal, of hope and despair, large and small. I cannot get out of my own way, nor see around the muddle in my head. My brain is noisy and clanging. But the sun is leaking through the trees, and small birds move in the thicket. I know what I don’t know, but that does not make me brave. I try to stay present but spin out into what-ifs. Time is water in my hands, but the skin on the back of my hands is dry. I think of the word slake. An edgy word, knife-ish, as if the end of thirst is painful. But there seems no end to thirst.

Here is a poem by Lawrence Wray full of sound, and something achey, like thirst but not quite, like promise but with the possibility of its opposite inside.

Marilyn McCabe, I listen for fraught accords between soil and stalks

Today’s Poem is an eighteenth-century curiosity by the now-obscure English poet Stephen Duck (1705–1756). Classified as a “natural” or untutored genius, Duck, son of a poor and obscure Wiltshire family, had left his charity school at thirteen to begin a life of field labor. A self-directed reader and self-taught poet, he came to the notice and patronage first of a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, then of Queen Caroline (1683–1737), wife of George II, who employed Duck as librarian for Merlin’s Cave, her folly at Richmond Park. Both Pope and Swift knew Stephen Duck, liked him personally for his sincere piety, and — when he was rumored to be in the running as the next poet laureate — savaged him in print for his rhymes. […]

Taking holy orders after the death of his royal patron, Duck accepted a series of clerical positions, burying the second of his wives and marrying a third. He continued to write poems. Everywhere he went, as always, he was popular. In 1756 he died by drowning, an apparent suicide, the man whose name had been whispered as a possible poet laureate, only because everybody liked him.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: On Mites (To a Lady)

Like the Romantic poets before me, I believe in the primacy of the Imagination to poetry. You won’t find many everyday or slice of life poems in my debut collection New Famous Phrases. Instead, I deal primarily in myth, in fable, in fairytale, folklore, foretelling, and the fantastic, which for me is where poetry is at its most powerful. This poem, ‘Death by Earth’, is part of the wider aquatic and siren mythology that runs throughout the collection, in poems like ‘The Pact of Water’, an origin myth for humanity’s relationship with nature, ‘The Crying of the Gulls’, a revenge tale of the natural world upon the human, ‘Cryptid (The Myster of Water)’, a poem about mystery, curiosity, and what we do when we find an answer, via the Loch Ness Monster, and ‘Lady of the Rock’, ‘The Sea Chain’, ‘Siren’s Throat’, and ‘Scraps to Daub a Siren’s Lips’, which portray the varying fortunes of their speakers in their goddess quests towards the isle of the sirens, and the reasons for their failures to reach this apotheosis.

I wrote my undergraduate dissertation about an aspect of the goddess quest in Ted Hughes’s work. It is this goddess quest that forms a framework for my poetics, and it is something you’re going to see me return to throughout my poetry, as I navigate how to reach this storied isle. ‘Death by Earth’ draws on the ideas of Robert Graves and Ted Hughes about the transition from a matriarchal goddess to a patriarchal god, hence the epigraph ‘the stages of his age and youth’, plucked from T. S. Eliot’s poem, which I use to evoke the history of mankind (and I use this gendered term deliberately here, given the events of the poem). Or, as I like to more succinctly introduce this poem during readings: puritans vs. mermaids.

Drop-in by Daniel Hinds (Nigel Kent)

“With My Back To The World” was sparked by an ekphrastic prompt that sent Victoria Chang to explore Agnes Martin’s art and write about them. Martin once told an interviewer, “…when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.” Her art, pencil drawings and paintings, are of grids and stripes often in muted colours. That might suggest regulation, rather than freedom, an imposition of straight lines on a naturally curved world. However, in Chang’s poems, those grids become a way of drawing focus, turning a spotlight onto one small part of a bigger whole. […]

An artist or poet may try to guide a viewer/reader, but ultimately have no control about how a piece is perceived. One person may briefly glance and see a grid, another reads suffering into that grid, someone feeling isolated may only see parallel lines that never meet. Chang is inviting readers to participate in her exploration, to see not the paint or the words but the beauty of the structure and what it might represent.

Emma Lee, “With My Back To The World” Victoria Chang (Corsair Poetry) – book review

Clarity and Light by Jesse Baker
I’ve been reading this book of devotional poetry in the mornings – a smooth transition between bible study and poetry writing. “Devotional” poetry sounds flowery, but these poems are earnest and relatable. Jesse is a pastor whose poems arise out of his biblical study and sermon writing process (which you can read about fully in this Rabbit Room article by the author – but an excerpt I cannot resist including:

Poetry has helped my sermon writing; but, it has also helped me to experience the whole of the spiritual life as a patient, attentive, and prayerful experience of God and his Scriptures. With that poetic foundation, when I preach, I hope sermons have the same effect on listeners that a poem has on readers, that it is seen as an open door inviting people into an exploration of both the text and the God revealed in the text. I also hope the whole of our worship becomes, not simply a chance to learn, but an opportunity for the church to embody their spiritual lives prayerfully and poetically, that they in turn become living poems through which the world encounters the Maker of all things. – Jesse Baker

The collection is organized chronologically, so you could keep it alongside your bible readings and tuck in to the aligning poems (though most poems include a scripture excerpt as an epigraph, so you could read it on its own and understand the context just fine). 

Renee Emerson, Listening so hard to an audiobook I almost ran out of gas but Thankfully Did Not

The world has its unacknowledged legislators – now more than ever – but poetry is the wrong place to look. ‘Unacknowledged’ is still on the money, though. When an AI researcher recently quit his high-powered Silicon Valley job, the BBC reported that he’d decided to ‘look to pursue writing and studying poetry, and move back to the UK to “become invisible”.’ The poetry WhatsApps lit up with the predictably self-castigating glee of the nichist: Poetry? in Britain? That should do the job, aye.

We might imagine the quitter chose poetry as the instinctive inverse of AI. Silicon Valley is everything Parnassus Foothill isn’t: modish, cutting-edge, drowning in capital. When people imagine the meeting of the two, they picture some Bay Area tech bro realising there’s a gap in the market to sweep away all the lazy, complacent poets. That is, what people mostly expect the poetry x AI crossover to involve – getting ChatGPT to write poems about how we’re all numb inside now because of capital, woke and melamine – is in fact the least interesting possible avenue of exploration.

But there are lots of ways the analogical interchange between poetry and AI can be rich, fruitful. Here’s one: the unprecedented tidal wave of investment genAI is receiving is strongly incentivising a whole bunch of maths nerds to think about natural language for the first time, and in so doing presenting strange and novel perspectives which, it seems to me, the poets are currently sleeping on. Why not make use of these odd new materials suddenly washing up on our shorelines? Poetry’s slinking, adaptive omnivorousness has long been one of the reasons it’s never needed to be cutting edge, never needed to drown in capital. It possesses a kind of pre-emptive and instinctual access to the new modes of thinking and feeling which any change in linguistic convention necessarily entails.

And linguistic change is coming. For around 200,000 years, if you came across a sentence, then you knew it had been produced by a human. That changed around 2019. Some believe that the discursive tipping point – at which AI began to produce more new commentary than humans do – came in late 2025. Ways of differentiating machine from human text are becoming paramount.

Joey Connolly, Metrics: Machine-Tooling a New Human Poetry

Birds can learn to fly without studying physics, but poets, it seems, cannot write iambic pentameter on instinct alone. This conventional wisdom accounts for the experts offering to teach the rules of meter, in their many books, The Ode Less Traveled, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, and so on, with helpful examples, and exercises whose solutions are not (alas) always in the back of the book. The puzzle is that the rules in those books are wrong—not entirely wrong, nor entirely useless, but wrong in many details, and wrong in the abstract, wrong in the theoretical framework they employ—yet still the poets who study them often end up writing good verse that scans. What’s going on?

The linguists, who have made the study of language, and of poetic meter, into a science, have an answer. While some people learn to scan verse using “rules” they read in a book, others are able to tell—and more reliably—whether a line is metrical without such training. These others are no elite priests; even children learn to sing nursery rhymes. The training for this ability is the experience of metric verse, that is, reading a lot of it, and grokking, inarticulately, what separates it from prose, and (God forbid) non-metric “free” verse. Then one may use the true rules of meter to sort those categories, but here the rules are not available to us in consciousness; we do go by feel. We know the rules the way native but naive and untutored speakers of a language know that language’s rules of grammar.

Are the linguists right about this? Who are they to tell the poets and literary theorists that they misunderstand a core subject of their own discipline? One answer is that they have, or claim to have,

uncovered subtle properties of meter which are so detailed as to be unlikely to be accidental, and also so obscure as to be unlikely to be conscious.

If there are indeed generalizations about iambic pentameter that Shakespeare never violated, but which no one wrote down before 1977, or even had the vocabulary to write down before the 1960s, then yes those generalizations are rules of the meter, and Shakespeare was following them, but he was not doing so consciously. Ask him about them (oh, to ask him a question!), and he won’t recognize them.

Brad Skow, Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing

Here goes a backasswards way of trying to get poetry published, pitching it out on Substack. To my lovely fellow poets thinking ‘What the..?, Submit like everyone else, there’s a queue, you fuck..’ I get it.

But hear me out. One problem I have is that what I’ve written here is a heroic crown of sonnets, or sonnet redoublé, which is too short for all but the most left-field and blue moon random pamphlet subs. Even with a title page and epigraphs it’s 17/18 pages thereabouts. I could wait for the next one in-a-million pamphlet call outs that’ll consider something so short, or I could do what I’m doing here.

Faint heart never won fair maiden. Gah, the dreadfully important nonsense that is poetry, that it should come to this.

The other problem might be the subject matter, stained by stigma, and riddled with ridicule, that is, until fairly recently. You may be forgiven for not noticing that UFOs and ‘aliens’ are having a bit of a moment, sufficient to permit their institutional rebranding as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and NHIs (Non-Human Intelligence). Arch-bozo Donald Trump has even waded into it with promises of revelations, no doubt to divert attention from the Epstein files.

What snagged my interest, and left me wondering why it was met with a cultural shrug, was the dread word uttered by senior intelligence whistle blower David Grusch in the US congress, when asked, “If we have recovered craft, do we have the bodies of the pilots?” To which he responded that yes, non-human biologics had been recovered. There have been three congressional hearings and multiple attempts at transparency legislation since the 2017 NYT article that set this current kerfuffle in motion.

I would urge anyone to avoid the rabbit hole that I threw myself into. At best it’s a bewildering hall of mirrors, with bad actors, a desperate counter intelligence operation losing its grip, a weird coterie of wannabe messiahs, grifters and charlatans. On the other hand, we could be on the brink of the most ontologically significant moment in all of human history. Steven Spielberg certainly seems to think so, his upcoming summer blockbuster, ‘Disclosure Day’ looks set to make our collective skin crawl with gnawing unease. Surely poetry could layer the confusion and ambiguity inherent in what’s referred to as the topic’s ‘high strangeness’ in ways no other form might be able to attempt. That was my brief.

James McConachie, A Straight-up Poetry Pitch.

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

This might be unusual, but the titles often come first. I love titles. I love the act of naming something. It’s like a generative exercise. A perfect example of this is my poem “Antediluvian,” which is the last poem in Citronella. I was curious about the period of time in the Bible between the fall of man and the Great Flood — what I came to know as being called “antediluvian” (or “pre-flood”). I began asking myself, what happens in a moment of banishment? How does one feel looking back at a place called home while simultaneously seeing some strange land on the horizon? It was the first poem I wrote for Citronella, but in doing so, I knew I’d already written its ending. I wrote towards that closing with the other poems; led the speaker all the way to the edge of that cliff.

I don’t think I’ve yet figured out how books “happen.” But I can say this: the more I write, the more I understand how my poems interconnect. It was clear to me when I had enough poems for my chapbooks, and it was clear to me when I had enough for my full-length collection. […]

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

This is a big question, and one that could be answered in no less than a hundred different ways. I see my own role as a writer as being a sort of truthteller. In Shakespeare’s plays, the truthtellers often operate on the margins and in the fens. Think of the Fool in King Lear or the witches in Macbeth. These are queer, weird (wyrd) characters. I feel similarly as a queer writer. I write to reveal uncomfortable truths. I write frankly, and shy from writing fiction, because there is so much happening in the real world. Fiction is an interesting genre. I read a lot of it, and I value the way it can offer escape or confront me with difficult truths. But in my experience, contemporary poetry doesn’t allow for distraction — it cuts straight to the bone.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Loch Baillie

meditation
i remember i left
the lights on

Tom Clausen, footstep

My son is still small enough that, when I put him to bed, I can hear, briefly as I hug him, his heartbeat. It is a beautiful but also a baleful moment. Frank Kermode said, in The Sense of an Ending, that although the clock goes tick, tick, we hear tick, tock; bounded, as we are, in this little life, by a birth and a death, we hear the inevitable everywhere, giving to all things a beginning and an ending. And so the haunting tick, tock echoes in our lives, as it does in my son’s heartbeat.

It echoes through literature, too. It is the ageing Captain Hook, not the ever youthful Peter Pan, who is rendered insensible with fear at the approaching sound of the crocodile’s clock. Barrie’s finest stroke of genius was to have Peter himself make the ticking noise, unconsciously imitating the crocodile, as children do, which sends Hook crawling along the deck, only to plead to be hidden from Fate. ““Hide me!” he cried hoarsely.” And all the while, insouciant, loveable, innocent Peter keeps on ticking.

In a sublime moment, Barrie mentions that Peter “had seen the crocodile pass by without noticing anything peculiar about it, but by and by he remembered that it had not been ticking. At first he thought this eerie, but soon concluded rightly that the clock had run down.” It is terribly funny to read this after Hook has been crawling helplessly along the deck of the Jolly Roger, but it also makes that scene, for the reading parent, far more poignant. It means nothing to Peter that the clock has run down; it is all in the joke; but to the reading parent, faced with their own children and the tick, tick of their little heartbeats, it means all too much.

To the poets, time and death are as commonplace as toast and tea. “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker”, wrote T.S. Eliot, four years after Peter Pan, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In that poem, we hear echoes of Marvell, who wrote one of the most famous lines of English poetry about the swift passage of time—“for always at my back I hear/time’s winged chariot hurrying near”. A few years later Noel Coward had hints of Shakespearean “golden lads and girls” in the lyrics to ‘The Party’s Over Now’: “The candles gutter,/ the starlight leaves the sky;/ It’s time for little girls and boys to hurry home to bed,/ For there’s a new day waiting just ahead.”

Those lyrics are from 1932. Perhaps I am fanciful in hearing an echo of T.S.E. in them.

Henry Oliver, The night cometh

Intense vertigo of the spinning variety, hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ear), nausea, vomiting, and imbalance.

These are the symptoms of a condition caused by an ear infection or a virus attacking a particular part of the ear known as the bony LABYRINTH, a delicate complex located inside the inner ear that includes three specialized structures: the vestibule, the semicircular canal, and the cochlea.

The labyrinth converts mechanical signals transmitted by the middle ear into electrical signals, which are then relayed on to the auditory pathway in the brain.

The labyrinth also detects motion and position in order to maintain balance.

An inflamed labyrinth.

A hidden snail snell with oval handles.

A series of letters in which Samuel Beckett mentions his ear issues, and how motion is displaced by vertigo.

Alina Stefanescu, The thigh of the mind; or a few words that delight me.

In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:

P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].

I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”

What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:

How can any system
observe itself?

And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.

Maria Popova, A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

And if you are
tender to yourself, you’ll hear and
maybe even smell the rain falling on
asphalt, unroll the waxed and wrinkled
map of this life which shows you there
are still wildnesses left unexplored.

Luisa A. Igloria, Little Essay on Disorder

I have a few friends bringing out books soon, and they have told me how they struggle to continue to write, to even dare to post about their new books, or do readings, or any normal things.

I feel this pressure and anxiety as well—how do you write through the most stressful times I’ve ever experienced in my life? How relevant does poetry (or AWP, or a new book) feel in the face of women losing their rights to their bodies, facing a new war, facing threats to our voting rights? Can women in particular be expected to just go about business as usual? How can we deal with personal crises on top of political stress?

I try to spend time noticing nature, spending time reading, trying to deal with each crisis as it comes and just do the best I can. Friends are also a huge support. And can poetry save a country, save women’s rights to vote or use birth control, help us heal our own bodies or those of our loved one? Writers are storytellers, and storytellers have an important role to help people remember moments in lives, in history. If the American mythology seems to be teetering on the edge of insanity right now, how can we set that right? Can writing our own versions of mythology sound a note of hope, of justice, or reason? I hope so. I certainly don’t think it helps the world for artists to silence themselves in the face of so much uncertainty. Reading books about apocalypses helped me process the anxiety of the nuclear war threat of the eighties as a kid—perhaps something you’re writing right now will do the same for some other person? Speaking your truth—whatever that is—seems more important in a world where false information spreads like wildfire and hate tries to suppress everything kind, joyful, empowering. Is what you and I have to say about our daily lives, our work, our love lives, our disappointments and hopes important right now? I would argue, perhaps even more important than we know.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring on the Way, Writing Through Hard Times

— It’s perhaps an evergreen statement these days — I know the news of the world is harrowing today.

— Because the news of the world is harrowing and because the world is full of sorrows, we hold a place here for joy, for when you can get to it, for when it is needed. We lay down some hope and some beauty when we can. Sorrow is not the whole story. […]

— I’ve been reading Fernando Pessoa’s poems, enjoying all his pseudonyms. So many of his poems contain lines that will get in your head and stay. “The astonishing reality of things / Is my discovery every day. / Each thing is what it is, / And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me, / And how much this suffices me.” He says, “All it takes to be complete is to exist.”

— An oft quoted poem by Pessoa:

To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
Into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.

— His book A little Larger than the Entire Universe seems to know things about the universe all the way into the future.

Shawna Lemay, The Entire Universe

Once, when I went to see my mother, we climbed a mountain above the tree line. It was Mount Monadnock, a massive peak in New Hampshire. Partway up, a thunderstorm began, bringing rain and lightning. My mother, already haggard-looking in the eerie lightning, said, “Once you have begun a thing, it is fatal not to finish it.” We climbed to the top and started coming down in the rain to the crack-crack of lightning hitting the rocks. She was slow.

“Leave me up here,” she said.

I, too, believed in finishing a thing. I took my mother off that mountain.

This sense of hiking through the storm is my approach to the press, too, but getting a conversation going about a book is harder than ever, considering the other noise in our culture. Even those authors who have hit the ground running—like Luke Goebel or Rebecca Chace—still have to fight for review space. Poetry is even harder to get into people’s hands. We have a book in Spanish and English coming out from William Archila, an El Salvadoran poet, who walks through the world quietly; I don’t know how many people will have the exquisite experience of his gentle footfalls across their kitchen floor. […]

When I was growing up in the cult, we learned a lot about the building of the Christian churches, and I was interested in the construction of cathedrals. Germany’s grand Cologne Cathedral required the participation of the whole city, and in my classes, they made a big point about everyone participating. We all had to carry wood and take care of the animals in the afternoon, so maybe their lesson was a hint to us that we needed to be ready to participate in work.

But the part we didn’t learn was that the Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to build. That’s many generations of laborers, of dreamers. I like to think that by the time Red Hen is a second-generation press, it will have grown into a stronger, sturdier organization. We are taking firm steps, like building a new website, but I’m also working hard to build a stronger support network. I like to imagine that right around the corner, there are thought partners—those with expertise in marketing, finance, and law—ready to join our board and help us get to the next stage. I feel sure that this spring, we will find these helpers.

Kate Gale, A Cathedral of the Mind: Sustaining the Arts Through Community

When I heard about the attack on Iran
I thought, look how far they’ll go
to keep the depredations of powerful men
off the front page. How can I just
shower, make breakfast tacos, listen
to Bach while the world is on fire?
The world is always on fire.
It’s not a new war. What can I do
but clean out the ashes
and kindle my little light?

Rachel Barenblat, Many things

What will the weather be like on March 7th? I’m planning to attend the book fair day at AWP in Baltimore that day, but always “weather permitting.” Last year in Los Angeles, I liked having the option of just attending one day of the event–sans panels and such, which overload my introvert personality. But Baltimore is a 3-hour drive from here, so weather must permit! The past five years, March 6-8 has been mild and reasonably fair; so says my garden journal, so maybe I will get there. If so, I’ll return bearing poetry collections…

Ann E. Michael, Comparisons

Down at the shore I thought again about the sparrowhawk and adaptation. About how wildlife finds ways of coping, even thriving in nature depleted places. In front of me, amidst all the bustling of oystercatchers, ringed plovers and rock pipits, wrens were flitting back and forth. They slipped in and out of view amongst the boulders. Like the birds of coast and shore, they were finding food in the seaweed piles. I wondered where they shelter on this wild windy coast, where they nest. There are short stretches of tumbled walls but no hedges or bushes or clumps of bramble.

How might we have to adapt and make do as our familiar places change and weather patterns shift? Could I be as adaptable as a sparrowhawk or a wren? As resilient? Unlikely; me, with my stiff bones and slow gait, bad habits and old ways.

News of bombs falling in Iran, retaliatory strikes and mayhem found me at the sea-log-seat as I watched plovers whirl about the sands.  But just as my spirit quailed, the most joyful sound rose up from the dunes and crofts. Skylarks! Heralding spring.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, February flight, flood, light