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

free fall and crystalline

intricate machines of vanished moments

the outside of silence

Grant Hackett, snow

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, the methodology of giving up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelli Russell Agodon, How To Live in a Broken Country

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, Book Tour Announcement

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Furious Poems For Infuriating Times

The sky above:

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

The world below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Ferguson, The Sky Park

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

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

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

Mark Strand writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Come

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

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

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

for one hundred years
hope was tranquilizing

despair a mountain
of solid stone in hands
crippled by manacles

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

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

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

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

Maureen Doallas, one nation

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

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

Beth Adams, Two Polish poems, and a sunflower

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Arthur Sze’s mushrooms

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

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

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

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

Donna Vorreyer, Slowing My Roll

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

Katie Manning, “Love Poem with Tumor” in Asterales

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

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

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

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

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

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

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

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

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

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

His poetry is

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

O ye undiscriminating minds!

Brad Skow, Tell Me What You Really Think

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

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

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

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

but the idiom is too much for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don Paterson, The Burns Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Noel-Tod, We Speak From Out There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #51

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Shirt knowledge

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

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

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

Life
Candle flame
Wind coming on

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, This Wilderness & Other Concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, A few by William Heyen.

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

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

JoAnne Growney, Reading Numbers Like Poetry

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

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

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

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

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

Tim Love, Rejections 2025

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

Sue Finch, HYDRATION, CONVERSATION, AND GOOD COMPANY

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

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

Kristy Bowen, on poetic drama

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

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

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

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

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Paul Verlaine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, two feet

独り言落として枯野から帰る　山路　花

hitorigoto otoshite kareno kara kaeru

            dropping a monologue
            I return
            from the withered field

                                                            Hana Yamaji

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

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

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

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

Yes Yes

I see it

so they won’t keep telling you

where it is

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

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

Sarah Lada, And the Rest Is Rust and Stardust

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Returns

This week: a murdered poet, a wild god, the silence of pine forests, squawks, trills, and yodels, and much more. Enjoy.

The book knows that, just like humans, it’s destined to be born and die alone. But it also knows (again, just like humans) that it would far prefer to be accompanied in the meantime.

The book trembles with anticipation when the poet finally places it in an envelope and heads for the post office, launching it on a journey to its reader, though that’s nothing in comparison to the feeling of being held at last, its pages caressed and maybe even folded back if one or two of the poems really hit home… 

Matthew Stewart, The book knows…

Listen, we say, and I try
but fail without knowing it,
layers of sounds untangling
in a mind chaotic with
shattered mirrors. Only later,
in the dark, I hear water,
wind, a single clear tone. One.

PF Anderson, untitled

Do you remember my plan to take January as a retreat month?

Well, that didn’t happen. But I did try and take December as a retreat month and also that didn’t happen. I was being slightly over ambitious. But I have found that being over ambitious often means you end up with something half way to what you were aiming for. I managed to set some firm boundaries around the Christmas break, and I took two weeks off. This is unheard of for me. I even made the decision not to post on substack, which made me feel sick with anxiety. I don’t think I have missed posting on substack in the very nearly three years since I began posting weekly.

I did not write. Not even my diary.

On Christmas Day afternoon, once the guests had left, I crawled under a blanket and barely emerged again for a week. I read. I dived fully into book after book, the deep, deliciousness of disappearing into another world. I did not post on social media. I mostly didn’t check my accounts at all.

The world didn’t end.

I lost subscribers, plenty of them, (waves sadly at their retreating backs) but I was willing to sacrifice that loss for pure rest and the nourishment of being a reader rather than a writer. I did not plug my books, I did not formulate social media plans, or apply for anything, or answer emails, or submit anything or plan a new-year new me. I just drifted. No To Do list, no alarm, nothing but nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, or rarely.

When I began to prepare myself to come back to work I began to check into social media and interact more. Lots of people, lots of writers, had already gone back to work and jumped on the posting treadmill and my immediate feelings were of dread, of missing out, of being left behind of being not good enough because I was still in my blanket fort with my books and not running with the pack. Interspersed with all of the new courses on offer, workshops, events, subscription plans, posts and book news was the actual news in which it seems the world is already on fire.

Truth, emerge from your well and chastise us with your whip. I can’t cope with the corruption in the world right now, the lies and the greed and hatred and fear.

Wendy Pratt, Truth emerging from her well: on creativity and accountability

When I was 19 or 20, I checked out a public library copy of James Michener’s chronicle of the Kent State tragedy. I was at an age where I was pretty sure I was going to keep studying English Lit and planning loosely on a teaching career, though I would change my mind later when I realized I didn’t have the patience and nurturing temperament that teaching (well GOOD teaching) required. For a moment, though, in the summer of 1993, things opened a little, granting some much needed optimism after the Gulf War and a sense of hope and progress. Clinton had just been elected and the world seemed to be righting itself, even though I hadn’t been all that cognizant of the Reagan/Bush eras of my childhood and teen years. […]

The Michener book formed my ideas of what I surely thought we’d never, as a country regress to. For one, the sort of violence that occurred should not happen when the world was watching far more, be it the availability of news coverage, the internet, social media. People would not be prone to propaganda and state messaging as they were when there were less news outlet to cover things and more incentive to toe the line. I was wrong, In fact, it seems almost miraculous that I could BE so wrong. 

Kristy Bowen, the decline of democracy doomscroll

I have been working on a draft of a new poem this morning, “Who Gets to Speak,” which concerns the murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota, of Renee Nicole Good, who was at the wheel of her vehicle, her wife in the passenger seat, when an ICE officer fired into the car’s windshield. Good, shot in the head, died that same day, January 7, 2026.

Since the killing, more and more mayors and governors, elected representatives, celebrities, common citizens of these (un)United States of America have come out to raise their voices in both protest and outrage.

Since the killing, more and more of our so-called executive branch leaders, including our worst president, his lying Wild West sidekick Kristi Noem of the Department of Homeland Security, the know-nothing Kash Patel of the FBI, among others, none of whom dare utter the name Renee Nicole Good, offer up fodder of the day to explain away the wholly unnecessary death of a woman a mother a wife a citizen in her Honda SUV. The truth of how the killing unfolded is not known but many in the government, at all levels, have posited their truths. Everyone has the story. No one has all the facts of the story.

Maureen Doallas, Who Gets to Speak

I care
that this is the story
we teach to our children:
because we know

what it is to be
dehumanized, we will never.
Raise a cup to freedom.
Because we know the heart
of the stranger.

Rachel Barenblat, Our story

This post may seem a little bit unbalanced, but I have to describe the good times as well as the bad this week. Let me start with the birthday celebration with my good friend poet Kelli Agodon, in which we had a lot of laughs, some cupcakes, some libations, and some good talk about poetry. I had been feeling a bit discouraged on the poetry front, and Kelli is always good at helping me see the bigger picture on that front. […]

It is impossible to keep my blog apolitical these days. And why try? Not to quote Harry Potter, but as Minerva McGonagal said in the Deathly Hallows, “And his name is Voldemort, Filius. You might as well use it, he’s going to try and kill you either way.” There’s no point in trying to be nice, to not speak up in public, because at this point, they will try and kill us either way, and they proved it this week, murdering a young mother and award-winning poet, Renee Good, in cold blood by shooting her in the face when she was no threat, then lying about it and saying she was a ‘domestic terrorist.’ This evening they were breaking into people’s houses in Minneapolis, where I have many friends, without warrants, brandishing guns in front of children. If anyone is the terrorist at this point, it is the Gestapo-like ICE agents, who seem to face no consequences, unlike our military and police force, for murder. We’ll see if the murderer is brought to justice. There is plenty of video evidence to show that the woman was no terrorist, and the ice agent videotaping his encounter and when she says “I’m not mad at you” he growls “fucking bitch” as he shoots her three times in the head, with her wife and dog in the car. A white, innocent, American citizen – not a criminal, not an “illegal immigrant” but a local, mother of three, Christian housewife. None of those privileges protects us anymore from Trump’s evil personal secret enforcers. We must act to protect our country’s freedoms, or we must leave. It feels very much like the history books, reading about Berlin and Vienna in the 1930s. I remember reading about friends sneaking Jewish Dr. Freud out, and I remember asking myself why he didn’t leave sooner – but now I see, leaving isn’t easy, and a lot of people want to stay and fight to make their country a better place – though I am feeling unsure that that is even possible at this point.

With Trump kidnapping Venezuela’s President and First Lady, installing a puppet President and taking over the country’s oil, and now threatening our NATO ally Denmark by threatening to use military force to take Greenland, well, it sure does look like Hitler’s playbook, doesn’t it? And we know from history that appeasing bullies and dictators – as people and countries did in the 30s – did not protect them. Not being willing to speak the evil’s name does not protect us.

These are serious times, and serious topics. It is easy to feel frightened and helpless and angry, all at once. I am a poet, and so, as we witness these moments, we will write poetry, maybe no one will read it, but we will write it all the same.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Visit with a Poet Friend in the New Year, and Then, Grappling with the ICE Murder of a Poet and an Unhinged President

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
—Carl Sandburg

January 6^th, formerly known as the Epiphany, now known as Insurrection Day, is Carl Sandburg’s birthday. Sandburg has been one of my favorite humans for most of my life. He was a Democratic Socialist and believed in the strength of America’s diversity. In other words, he was a good moral role model—good enough for the likes of Pete Seeger to admire.

When my child, Serena, was born on that day in 1998, I used the quote on a birth announcement, despite my being a devout atheist who believes the kitchen ceiling fan is a higher power.

Their birthday this year was a great reminder of how many true friends they have, people who called and texted and posted about them, brought them thoughtful gifts and gave them thoughtful cards.

It was the most temporary of panaceas. The next evening, they were crying about this headline from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Humane Security: “Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans.” The article is worth reading.

Of course, trans people are not the only Americans being targeted for “mass atrocity.” First, they came for the immigrants. And now, every day, they are coming for regular people who are terrified of a masked militia disappearing them and their neighbors.

Renee Nicole Good was murdered yesterday by an untrained ICEhole with anger issues—because who would take a job as a paid kidnapper and murderer?

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Anger Issues

Not long ago, I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It’s one of those books you hear about so often that you think you’ve read it. (Maybe I had?) It seems brand new at the moment in the age of book banning. And that first sentence: “It was a pleasure to burn.”

From page 79 of the 50th Anniversary edition:

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality.”

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, powerless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”

*

Have you read Bradbury’s essay (included in the back of my edition) titled “Investing Dimes”? He talks about writing the book in the “typing room in the basement of the library at the University of California at Lost Angeles.” He says, “There, in neat rows, were a score or more of old Remington or Underwood typewriters which rented out a a dime a half hour. You thrust your dime in, the clock ticked madly, and you typed wildly, to finish before the half hour was out.” He goes on to talk about how writing the book changed him. “Have I changed my mind about much that it said to me, when I was a younger writer? Only if by change you mean has my love of libraries widened and deepened, to which the answer is a yes that ricochets off the stacks and dusts talcum off the librarian’s cheek.”

I cannot tell you how much I love the whole idea of putting a dime into a typewriter, forcing the writer to type madly.

Shawna Lemay, Delicious Books, Beauty Shocks

The shades have no names, so delicate, 
merged, chilled.  Darkly brooding,  
wading into my poor mind.

I’d understand if there were 
only darkness.  But that gray shines 
bright, perfect for cloud bathing.

Jill Pearlman, Bowl of Mysteries

I find myself in a position where I have met my goals. The logical next step is to work in a full collection, and this is where I’ve stumbled. For a while I’ve noticed a nag at the back of my brain that maybe I don’t love poetry enough anymore. I’ve struggled to feel motivated to take the leap into joining a poetry group, I‘ve noticed I’m reading fewer poetry books and whilst I have a lot of ideas for poetry projects, I’m reluctant to begin any of them. Planning my hopes for the year, I began to write the usual poetry related goals and noticed a flicker of that Sunday night/ Monday morning feeling. Something had shifted and 2026 feels like a time to swerve away from poetry – for a while at least.

Some poetry related things will remain. I’ve started a Facebook group for poetry prompts and feedback, a gentle space with no pressure and no competition – just love of playing with words, and I have a Poetry School course that begins next week as well as ongoing commissions for bespoke wedding poetry. Poetry will shift back to being a creative outlet rather than something that drives me and creates the feeling of desperately trying to be as good as all the poets that have numerous magnificent collections out in the world. I’m moving back towards long form writing, winnowing out ideas for short fiction and dare I, dare I say it taking tentative steps to explore ideas for a novel.

Am I just giving up on poetry? No. What I’m doing is allowing myself to be proud of what I’ve achieved and to allow myself to tread a different path and, in a world, where everything is becoming more terrible and terrifying each day, this feels like freedom.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I learned from the snow

snowmelt puddle
while it can
holding a tree

reflection by tom clausen

Brandon Kilbourne has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and over twenty years of experience as a research biologist at natural history museums. His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Obsidian, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

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

Well, this is my first book, so I can’t compare it to my more recent work, unless I compare it to research articles in biology and paleontology… In that vein though, I would say that Natural History, and the associated award, represent my ability to incorporate my scientific knowledge, expertise, and training into art. While the book, and my poetry more broadly, probably has something of a science influence in the fact that it’s narrative and prosy, it’s a big departure from my science writing in that it brings in human and geopolitical history in a way that my research articles simply can’t. I would say that the ability to probe the links of science and museums to colonialism and slavery—and the uncomfortable questions this entails—is something available to me solely through art. Likewise, using poetry, I can explore perspectives that you would not find in a scientific research article. Of course, the point of view of a near-extinct sea cow would not be found in a research article, but I’m also able to include the subjective experience of field biologists and paleontologists, which usually are not found in research articles but more in field notes or diaries, if anywhere. Ultimately poetry gives me a lens to reflect upon science and museums and my place in these worlds, including in the context of being a Black person in these historically (very) white spaces.

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

Good question. I think poetry appeals to me because of its compact form and the challenge of encapsulating in a relatively limited space a deeper reflection or what strikes me as a profound experience. Though some of my poems are admittedly quite long! Beyond this, I’m drawn to poetry given its room for acoustic play (e.g., alliteration, rhythm, rhyme) and the brief mis-directions of meaning or fleeting associations that are available through enjambments.

Another point of appeal is that poetry can generate wonder by renewing and reframing (human) experience, and this might easily go hand-in-hand with natural history museums, which are something of houses of wonder for the natural world. Fostering this wonder is largely a function of their exhibitions as well as their collections—of which usually less than 5% are on display in exhibitions in the larger museums. While I think much, if not all, nature/science writing is geared towards creating wonder toward and appreciation of the natural world, in some ways perhaps poetry is predisposed towards this? Another thing to consider is that science starts from a curiosity manifested as questions (which are then developed into hypotheses). Likewise, poems are often anchored in a curiosity which then begets a question. Though science is pursued with the hope of a clear answer/result, the questions raised in poetry may not have a such an answer (though it’s worth noting that scientific studies also do not always reach a definitive answer or result). Perhaps it’s also that, like science, poetry employs image, comparison, and surprise to develop its insights.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandon Kilbourne

It may be hibernation season, but I can feel the literary world heating up again–professors building syllabi, organizational emails flying. I’m participating in some of that planning energy toward two local events in the next month: “Writing from the Underworld” at Rockbridge Regional Library branch three blocks from me (1/29, 5:30-7:00, a short reading followed by a free workshop), and, an hour’s drive away in Charlottesville, a panel discussion called “Guardians of Wonder: Writing What We Must Not Lose,” sponsored by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont (2/6, live music starting at 6:30 pm). Thanks to an NEA grant (what a miracle to win one this year!), the garden is giving away copies of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World to the first 125 people who register to attend. Both were invitations rather than events I pitched or applied for. A nice effect of my 2025 travel seems to be that people think of me for events more often.

“Writing from the underworld”–not just mycocosms but whatever lurks below our visible lives–certainly fits my January mood. I want to be writing, and I feel intensely introspective, but it’s hard to warm myself up into language. To get started after a break, I often circle around like a dog seeking a comfortable position, chasing whatever dim sparks distract me. I had trouble even doing that this week because I’m so upset by escalating political horrors. I’d promised myself to check the news less often–surely morning and evening is enough–but then what’s happened by 5 pm so thoroughly knocks the wind out of me, maybe that’s not the right strategy. It’s almost as if contemporary media is ingeniously designed to bait and hook a person at the neurological level. Consumer, stay in your phone-cave!

At least I’m reading. I’ve spent this week with some terrific recent poetry collections I picked up at the Punch Bucket Lit Fest in Asheville in September, including Sara Moore Wagner’s daring poems about Annie Oakley in Lady Wing Shot and Han VanderHart’s spare and heartbreaking Larks.

Lesley Wheeler, At the lip of the cave

As I head back to a more regular work schedule, let me capture a few last snippets that I haven’t so far.

–As we traveled, we saw a lot of wildlife.  Of course, we often see a lot of wildlife, a lot of dead wildlife by the side of the road.  But Christmas Eve, as we drove back across the mountain from Bristol (TN) to Arden (NC), we saw a wolf.  You might ask how we knew it was a wolf and not a dog/coyote/fox.  It was a large animal, with a face that wasn’t like a fox or a coyote.  It was far from any house where a dog might have gotten out of a fenced yard.  We also saw an eagle on our trip back from Williamsburg.  At first I thought it was your average vulture, but it had white wings and a white head as it swooped up away from the road kill he had been eating. […]

–Before yesterday, I might have written about how I didn’t do much poetry writing, but Tuesday, I came up with a pretty good rough draft.  I saw the foggy weather and thought about the early December forecast for freezing fog, and came up with an interesting Epiphany poem.

–Even if I haven’t done a lot of writing, I’ve done a lot of quilting.  My spouse and I made 4 quilt tops for the local Lutheran group that creates quilts for Lutheran World Relief.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Few More Snippets from Winter Break

I think of shadows —
shadows of fixed length
people shrinking and expanding with the light
and disappearing altogether at the end of the day
to a place where the disappeared gather
you and I at opposite ends
unable to move in the darkness.
What should I call it?

What should I call the reading
of the last word of the poem
and the inability to go back to the beginning
to go anywhere
because that devastating silence that follows
is the poem.
And that is the reading.
That being rooted in the debris for as long as it takes
for the universe to stop shuddering.
What should I call it?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Nomenclature

What are we to say when we encounter the line “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”? This was what struck the public ear when Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) published “Hurt Hawks” in his 1928 collection Cawdor and Other Poems — the memorable line, opening the second part of the poem, declaring that a fierce, alien view of the world was the deep, true way to see the human relation to nature.

It was also the line that, for some years, kept me from fuller appreciation of Jeffers. The poem is certainly widely known. Anthologies of American poetry typically choose “Hurt Hawks” as a selection from Jeffers, setting it beside “Shine, Perishing Republic” and (slightly less commonly) “Be Angry at the Sun.” But something in the poem’s most striking line always put my back up, seeming a cheap pose: tough-guy Nietzscheanism, as Nietzsche was understood in those days. “I’d sooner . . . kill a man than a hawk,” really? No sense of hesitation for the human? And that I’m-a-no-nonsense-man interpolation, “except the penalties”?

But in recent years, I’ve found myself coming back to Jeffers and the long rhythmic lines, often nine or ten stresses, that became his trademark. And that has meant facing up to “Hurt Hawks,” trying to understand the interaction of the poem’s two parts: seventeen and fifteen lines of uneven verse.

In the first part, Jeffers shows us a red-tail hawk with a shattered wing that trails the bird “like a banner in defeat.” Even were he to survive, the hawk will never again be able to fly — never again deploy the freedom of the sky and the deadly power of its talons. Death would be “salvation,” of a kind.

That picture leads the poem to a meditation on Nature and the “wild God of the world.” Like, say, Robert Frost in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Jeffers rejects the pathetic fallacy, the ordinary human reading of human emotions into animals. But where Frost rejects all human projection, Jeffers suggests that extraordinary men — ah, Nietzsche! — or those in such extraordinary circumstances as “men that are dying” can perceive the god of nature that has been forgotten by “you communal people.” That god can sometimes be merciful to animals but “not often to the arrogant,” which in the context of the first part of the poem seems another sneer at the comfortable “communal people” so distant from the “beautiful and wild” — from the natural state to which they must return in the moments of their dying.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Hurt Hawks

In the monotheistic traditions, the created world emerged from a single, self-contained and self-sufficient, perfectly unified, divine source; and everything those traditions teach us about how to live in the world follows from the belief in that unity. What would change, I asked myself, if we started instead from the belief that the creative act itself requires the tension inherent in a preceding disunity, in the differences between two forces that need to come together for creation to occur?

As the list of all the different “manifestations of attraction” given by the Kāma Sūtra commentator shows, that tension need not be understood as sexual by definition, though it can of course be that as well. Instead, to me, it feels akin to what Audre Lorde talks about in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power:”

[T]he first [way] in which the erotic [functions for me] is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding…and lessens the threat of…difference.

Lorde, of course, was writing out of a Black lesbian feminist sensibility, not the desire to achieve mystical enlightenment. Her essay was specifically about the need for women to reclaim the erotic within themselves over and against patriarchy’s pornographic narrowing of that capacity. Nonetheless, her position has in common with the Hindu thought I quoted above the notion that there is no such thing as a relationship that does not involve the negotiation of power—that all relationships, in other words, whether between people or between humans and the divine, are in that sense political.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Power We Pretend Not To See – 2

i reject the idea that any of us are here
for some heroic reason. i think at most i was put here
by the soil to be a headstone carver. to find the skull
& perfect it. there is always a need for
more dead inside the dead. no ending is complete.
even the headstones are licked by rain. fade until
the names are whispered in the stone.

Robin Gow, nail in the coffin

This morning a light wind tickles the leaves and drops of rain, held there temporarily, fall. No bird song yet in the faintly herbed air.

Alt Text says this week’s photo is a moon in the sky, and this makes me chuckle because I wondered if this might be the suggestion. I say it is actually a photograph of a balloon flying freely in the sky back in 2014, and when I photographed it I was loving its flight and its brief moonlike quality.

I did a happy poet dance this week in celebration of the publication of My Sister Went to Live on the Moon. It was wonderful to see this poem on the Atrium site and to remember the joy of writing it. It was one of those intense writing experiences where the thoughts come tumbling out like a waterfall into a fast flowing river. The kind that has me eager to see what has been created when I can finally pause the writing. The kind that when that pause comes I feel as though I have been a conduit for the words and their journey onto the page.

My recent reflection that this might be the year I howl at full moons rather than include them in my poetry isn’t quite accurate now! I have opened the year with a moon poem and followed this up by writing another where the moon is centre stage during Kim Moore and Clare Shaw’s January Writing Hours! The one currently in the notebook is a little rough round the edges, but I reckon some tender editing and a few visits to Poetry Corner will have it seeing the light of day.

Sue Finch, THE MOON POEMS ARE WAXING LYRICAL

In November, I went to London to take part in a showcase for my publisher. It was a really lovely night, which I was extremely nervous about before I went and then when I was there I really enjoyed it. I met my publicist for the first time, hung out with my publisher and various authors under the Little/Brown imprint, including the always lovely Hollie McNish.

I’ve never taken part in a publisher’s showcase and was struck by the different requirements and expectations for poets versus novelists. Poets read one or two poems – novelists either gave a kind of speed pitch about their novel or took part in a quick fire Q & A about their work. It made me feel very relieved as a poet that I could hide behind my poetry! I was struck by how much more novelists have to rely on their personality to promote their work, and quick wits to come up with answers…

Kim Moore, A late November and December Reads Post

Everything about starting Red Hen was a risk, and I often ask myself whether the risk was worth it.

There is no complete answer to that question, but when I think about strategy for the press, I think that we wouldn’t have started Red Hen if I were not the kind of person who leaned into risk. Red Hen Press got to thirty years on a wave of risk-taking. There is a dream that goes into building a press, and then a lot of hard work and labor gets you to the first twenty-five or thirty years. But to sustain a press, you must do a lot of planning, marketing, team-building. The phrase “what got you here won’t get you there” certainly applies to us.

I can still enjoy the occasional risk: a high dive, a long swim, a cold swim, a drive with no gas, arriving in a city with no place to stay, going for a week with no food. I can experiment with degrees of risk personally, but Red Hen is going for the building blocks of sustainability. Our next thirty years are going to center on strategic thinking, planning, inviting more thought partners and fundraising partners to the table.

In the risk of starting a press, there are going to be a lot of hard parts that you aren’t ready for, and you will want to throw in the towel. You are often working largely unpaid during the time you could be writing or making biscuits. But the risk leads to moments of joyful work—finding a great author, editing a brilliant book. This is why I started the press.

The swim this morning reminded me that, in my own life, I will always have the joy of risk. When I swim out a long way, because I believe in risk, I have never kept anything for the swim back. I give it my all; I keep moving forward.

In 2026, as Red Hen Press turns thirty-two, we are entering our next level of success. Our team has a plan for sales, marketing, and publicity. Risk to strategy is a leap from the top of one building to the next, but we have been practicing our jumps for years, and for us, with the ground far below, the leap feels like flying.

Kate Gale, Leaving the Shore: On the Cold Plunge of Risk

These impediments to moving books, this idea of small press as part of the real commodities economy jostles me about.

It reinvigorates in me the idea of poetry as shared life process, not saleable goods. Is poetry 50% hustle? Sholn or share alike?

Conceive hook and impact of a poem or work to place it in “the market”, as a frame, makes a poem an interchangeable widget. This is problematic. It objectifies something tender, careful, playful, vulnerable, ephemeral. An auction block doesn’t honour the spirit of poetry. 

Saw an ad for how art is not the main act if one is to “succeed” as a gallery — it has also taken the kool-aid of capitalism. Capitalism, which is to say to siphon money from working class to the rich, to accept hierarchies as is, to be isolated, specialized, part of the amused, obedient masses. 

Poetry isn’t always sticking it to the man. It is grown within systems. Selling and buying it seems shamefaced somehow.

So many conundrums to solve. 

Pearl Pirie, Digital Chapbooks

It’s true that wintry walks offer quiet splendor (sometimes) and a chance to reflect, but mostly winter affords the chance to stay inside, curled up with a book or browsing through garden catalogs. Theoretically, it’s a good time to revise and submit my work; often, however, I don’t get to that process because winter is also a low-energy time for me. I powered through a fibromyalgia flare two days after New Year’s Eve because loved ones were visiting, but there’s a bit of fallout as a result–worth it, though; and I’m chuffed about taking poetry workshops later in the month. Meanwhile, reading books! I got a Samuel Hazo collection from my local library, I’m reading Wendell Berry and Richard McCann, and Ada Limón’s You Are Here is on my to-read pile. I’ve also felt inspired by the start-of-a-new-year blog posts Dave Bonta has curated on his Poetry Blog Digest. Many writers and books there I want to check out, and many writers and poets feeling some of the same things I’ve been feeling about the past year and what to make of the years ahead.

So to recharge, as it were, I’ll do small, refreshing things this January: take photos, doodle with watercolors, read books, tromp about in boots, meet pals for morning coffee, draft poems, play with images, as per Johan Huizinga–“To call poetry, as Paul Valery has done, a playing with words and language is no metaphor: it is the precise and literal truth…What poetic language does with images is to play with them.”

Ann E. Michael, Small, refreshing

Sanskrit poetry uses quantitative metres based on the patterned alternation of long and short syllables, similar to those of classical Latin and Ancient Greek. This particular poem is in the metre known as Śārdūlavikrīḍita, which is by far the single most common metre in the collection. In this case, the poem consists of four metrically-identical sequences of nineteen syllables each, arranged in two couplets. These are sometimes printed as two long lines, and in Sanskrit poetics each of the four metrical sequences is in fact conceived of as a ‘quarter-line’, meaning that the whole poem, though consisting of four repetitions of the same metrical sequence, is understood to be a single unit.

As the poem is in a metre which would be familiar to any experienced reader of Sanskrit lyric, I thought it was important that the style and form of the translation should be readily accessible to an Anglophone reader. For this reason, I made no attempt in this instance to reproduce or even suggest the original metre in my translation, as this would be likely to produce quite an unusual-sounding poem – the opposite of my aim. On the other hand, a free verse translation would set aside entirely the considerable formal constraints of the Sanskrit poem, which are a considerable part of its beauty, memorability and, for Sanskrit readers, its familiarity. Instead, I tried to combine ordinary English diction and word order – to create a sense of accessibility – with stanzas, end-rhyme, half-rhyme and also quite a high degree of assonance to suggest a formal structure: in the first stanza, for example, there is a concentration of words containing similar vowel sounds (first, is, this, evening, nights, I, filled, moonlight, Vindhya, hills, thick, jasmine, first time). Here is my translation of the poem:

The first man I lay with is my husband now
And this evening is just the same
As those nights when I felt filled
By moonlight, and the breeze came
Down from the Vindhya hills thick
With the scent of jasmine opening for the first time.

And I too am the same. So why
Does my heart so yearn again to lie
Behind a screen of reeds, in pleasure
So tender and so long to take
On the slope of the bank, on the rise of my waist.

In my translation each couplet has become a whole stanza, one slightly longer than the other. Within the stanzas, I have attempted to reproduce the order of thought of the Sanskrit and something of its effect. In the original, for example, the first half-line refers to the husband and the next line-and a half to the nights they spent together when courting: so in my version only the first line of the first stanza describes the speaker’s husband, and the rest of the stanza deals with the nights.

Sanskrit poetry of this type achieves particular density and concision in various ways all of which create a challenge for the translator. One of these is by assuming knowledge in the reader of the wider cultural and literary tradition to which it belongs. Sanskrit lyric is particularly rich in erotic verse, which is divided into many different types and typical scenarios: there is no real parallel for this in any Western literary tradition. Similarly, several elements of the poem assume specific cultural knowledge. There are, for instance, many different Sanskrit words for different types of jasmine, each of which has its own cultural and literary connotations. The type mentioned here, mālatī, is known for its strong scent, abundance of flowers, its use as a woman’s hair decoration, and for flowering in the evening. The Anglophone reader is very unlikely to be aware of different types of jasmine, let alone their different possible associations, so to introduce a qualifying adjective here would risk alienating the reader. On the other hand, jasmine is, I think, familiar enough even to an Anglophone reader – and its strong scent sufficiently obvious and evocative – that I was not tempted to replace it with a more familiar flower with broadly similar connotations, such as honeysuckle.

Victoria Moul, In the translator’s workshop: a poem from the “Subhāsitaratnakosha”

I am honoured and delighted to have taken part in the BBC Radio 4 programme Artworks celebrating 40 years of Poems on the Underground.

You can listen to the episode here.

With thanks to producer Mair Bosworth for inviting me to talk about my encounter with Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Words, Wide Night’ somewhere between Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood.

Anthony Wilson, Poems on the Underground is 40!

I was happy to appear this week on David Bauman’s poetry podcast In Three Poems. I love the format which focuses on (as the name implies) three poems. One of mine chosen and read by Dave, one of mine read by me, and one I select by another poet–Tom Hennen’s “From a Country Overlooked.” We talk about birding (Dave’s an expert, I’m a hack), hiking, the silence of pine forests, and what all that has to do with poetry and my new book Temporary Shelters. You can listen to it at this link or find it on Spotify or Apple.

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

Grant Clauser, Grant Reads Tom Hennen and Talks About Birds on In Three Poems Podcast

Today I’m happy to share with you an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change, which was just published on AGNI’s blog. It’s from the first chapter of the book, “A World Bewildered,” which explores how creative writers and artists can lean into their negative capability—their capacity to be with uncertainty and contradiction without grasping after clear answers—as an approach to both our lives and our work during these bewildering and tenuous times. This particular section reminds us that the writing process is not just about expressing feelings and ideas or causing transformation in the minds and hearts of the audience, but also—if we let it—a process of self-transformation: an opportunity to change our own minds and see previously-hidden truths and connections.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, You Are Not the Choir – or, Seeing the Matrix

I wrote “Document” last spring at a cabin in the woods in southern Ohio. I call it my happy place, and at least part of every book I’ve ever published has been written there. I remember sitting in a chair by the fire, looking out the window, and noticing sunlight coming down through the leaves. (The word in Japanese is komorebi, meaning “sunlight filtering through trees.”) I’d been thinking—and writing—a lot about memory and the way the self is revised over time. These are themes that come up again and again in A Suit or a Suitcase.

I’ve been going to that cabin, or one neighboring it, for 22 years. I’ve been watching sunlight (or rain, or snow, or high winds) through those trees for 22 years. It’s a repeated experience and yet a new experience every single time. Even if the trees and the view are exactly the same, the light is not, and the season is not, and the time of day is not, and I am not. The perspective changes because the viewer changes.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Document”

When Elizabeth Bishop sat down on her bed to put on her shoes on the 6th October 1979, she was preparing to go out for dinner and due to be picked up within the hour. She certainly wasn’t expecting to have a cerebral aneurysm and die. She was only sixty-eight.

If her death hadn’t come so early and so suddenly, I very much doubt that Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke Box, Alice Quinn’s controversial book of Bishop’s uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, would have seen the light of day. The book is entirely out of step with Bishop’s meticulous quality control: Bishop published only 101 poems and translations in her lifetime. I feel miserable that her legacy has been forced to carry this book of failed poems, private fragments and early drafts that go nowhere. Although the book was published twenty years ago, I’m writing about it now because I only read it for the first time while preparing my recent North Sea Poets class on Bishop. I’d known of its existence, but had been – wisely, it turns out – avoiding it. And I can’t believe there wasn’t more sustained outrage on her behalf.

At least there was some. At the time, Helen Vendler, in a scathing review in The New Republic, called it a book of ‘repudiated’ poems. I would argue that they aren’t poems at all. The most charitable interpretation is ‘raw material’: ideas that didn’t work or go anywhere, and were rightly abandoned. A poem isn’t a poem until it’s ready to make its own way in the world as a finished, polished piece of art; its publication represents its formal gift to the reader. Before then, it’s the – often very – private property of the poet in whose notebook it took root and grew (and indeed often died). Surely this rule especially applies to Bishop, a poet not only with a track record of award-winning books, but also famous for her astonishing rigour – someone who could wait for years to find the right word or phrase, and finally deem a poem ready for publication. Bishop is the opposite of a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness writer; there is something even more violating and upsetting not just in seeing her process on display, but in the false claims for its ‘finishedness’ made to justify the act. Increasingly it feels to me like an act of vandalism.

Lisa Brockwell, Burn Your Notebooks

I’ve tried to understand what makes ‘angels’ and ‘rain’ seem so radio-actively evocative in their context. Of course there’s sheer surprise at the sudden entry of a Judaeo-Christian metaphor, and the incongruous fusion of the bright, sunlit idea of angels with that of rain. However, I think it’s above all a matter of sound and rhythm. The ‘a’ sound stands out phonetically because it’s much more heavily stressed than the only previous occurrence in ‘decaying’. It’s also emphasised by the way the speaking voice moves into it. It seems to me to drop on the unstressed second syllable of ‘Ocean’, at what might well have been the end of a sentence; to gather itself in the following line and stanza break; then to explode into the marvellous ‘ANGels of rain and lightning’. Meter emphasises how ‘An-gels’ divides into two syllables, making us register the n and the soft g as separate consonant sounds, so that the voice seems to hang suspended for the fraction of a second in the middle of the word. This greatly heightens its sonic force and so underlines the leaping way in which disparate ideas come together or explode out of each other in the metaphor.

Edmund Prestwich, Such dazzling genius

This poem appears in Tzara’s 1946 collection le Signe de vie (Sign of Life), but was written between 1938 and 1945. During that time, Tzara stayed in occupied France and participated in the resistance. As he was both Jewish and an active communist, his life was very much in danger, and at one point a hostile newspaper doxxed him to the gestapo. You can read more about Tzara’s war-time activity here.

Before on this blog, I’ve translated sections of Tzara’s epic poem of 1931, L’Homme approximatif—a work that itself shows an evolution into Surrealism from his earlier Dadaist style. Where that early style was absurdist and almost nihilistic, his more surrealist approach introduced something akin to sustained dreaming on the page. A very wide range of emotions, thoughts, and imagery courses through that work. Here, in the poem of 1946, his style has tempered quite a bit stylistically, as he moves from epic to something more or less lyric. Instead of lines that pile up with images and fragments, here he uses stanzas and, at times, relatively straight-ahead prosody. But as in the poem of 1931, he never uses punctuation, he deploys fragments and discontinuities—even if they make the poem awkward—and his imagery and diction are, thankfully, still volatile.

Above the style itself, what captures me in the following poem is the complexity of Tzara’s reaction to the war’s end and the Allied victory. Tzara gives us a blend of gratitude, irony, anger, dread, despair, belief, trauma, longing—a complete disorganization of values and affects, all threaded together in a single imaginative gesture. 

R.M. Haines, Four Poems of Petty War

What about this poem reached out to me? Which part of my existence felt apprehended in (or by) its being?

An elegance in the stanzaic construction. An intertextual friskiness in the speaker’s engagement of motifs and phrases hatched while marveling over the work of another. An alluring ghost-presence of images from Yeats’ poem, “The Sorrow of Love”, with its repeated conjunctions:

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears
And all the trouble of her labouring ships,
And all the trouble of her myriad years.

Or maybe a gist of Yeats’ “Broken Dreams” — though it seems too dedicated, too intent on cherishing what has aged rather than what was empty.

I can’t remember.

The way I imagine it has nothing to do with its reality, or with Tate’s realization. And I like that in a poem. I value being being strung out on a line, trying to locate my affective response on a range between disappointment and fascination. Two friends chew over edits in their overly-meaningful poems. They go out for drinks and leave each other with words. Riddling words that want definition. Poems excel at riddling the definitive parts of language, and — in my imagination — Tate writes “Two for Charles Simic” in dialogue with the possibility of defining the sky or nothing.

Alina Stefanescu, James Tate

You come in from your early walk, tell me you saw a dead swan frozen in reeds at the edge of the iced-up river. Bird flu’s here again. I drive to our land. Black ice on the hill road. A car coming the other way skids and swerves. I pull on to the verge to avoid it. The look of panic on the driver’s face stays with me as I drive on to our track. It takes a minute or two to free two frozen locks on gates. Our smallholding’s three hundred yards up the track, which is white with snow and frost. I park the truck, haul water from the back. The woods are quiet in the freezing fog. Frosted leaves, grass. I know even now carbon is moving, tree to tree, as each one rests. Roots are exchanging nutrients. We are clearing ground for a new pig-barn. The bonfire from the dug-out debris smoulders. Smoke blends with fog.

Bob Mee, EARLY MORNING, JANUARY 8, 2026

The squawks, trills, and yodels of alarm and demand come from the bare branches when us bipedals walk about. Continuously we siphon seed into the feeders, toss the peanuts, slide cakes of suet into their holders.

We know about those deceptive, bullying jays, tantalizing us with their false blues. We can imagine every shade of red that met the hawk’s beak. We know about the House Sparrow’s vandalism and murder within bluebird boxes. We monitor. We maintain. We press roots into the soil. We raise worms. We let the grasses grow. We raise abundant flowers. Everything for you, my friends and yet the birds blow up into the sky like a bomb when we step outside. Donna retreats. The squirrels climb their cursive up the trees and jump their serifs from bough to bough, all the while trilling their loud song. The chipmunks dive into the earth like it is water.

And here we stand, hands on our hips on the patio, scanning the barren canopies where birds huddle like hooded monks on the high branches.

Sarah Lada, Come to This Place Where Only We Are Violent

My daughter and I were walking in the forest in early November. Hamilton, Ontario, just below the Niagara Escarpment. Light was filtered amber through the yellow leaves. The way it reflects bright off snow, it reflected from the leaves fallen on the forest floor. We were walking through a woods suffused by golden light, a continuous late afternoon honeying, as if walking through a leaf itself, some kind of Magic School Bus science trip.

If I believed in heaven, I said, it wouldn’t be the bright green technicolour spring of the Christian right. it wouldn’t be Webern’s boundless, directionless, infinite twelve-tone heaven. It would be this fall. The end of an age. Elves leaving. The mortal forest. The peat smell. No gaudy bursting of flower buds or impetuous birds. This lager-coloured light in a shuffling forest.

I don’t understand those who don’t like all the seasons, my daughter said.

Then we wondered about borders. Where are the borders of colours, when does red become orange, and when does grey darken into blue?

Other places, there are only two seasons. Rainy and dry. And why four? What about the metric system. Maybe there should be five.

We could invent another season, try to find its source in our memory, associations, hopes.

What would we call it? When would it be?

A before-fall, an after-spring. A season of in-between days.

Perhaps it is there already like a silent letter, inexpressible and unspoken. A subtext between father and daughter. The dry season between drops of rain.

Gary Barwin, The Metric Season: walking with my daughter in 2011

What was the question that nudged
me awake, that I know still
has no answer?

I have a memory of pork
smoked over embers, the mumbled
prayers of mambunong, rice

wine scattered on the ground
for blessing; knives slicing meat
to dress in a bowl with lime and pepper.

My tongue is always bathed
with longing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Hunger Wakes Me

rain falls without clouds. without sky. without judgment. timber
by timber the old structures are brought down. a poet of white flowers,
lying near death, discovers salt in the depths of heaven.

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: poems talking to poems, optional depth, the moon in a well of whisky, and much more. Enjoy.

Hiking with Wild Iris in my mind, the poem that opens with that line – at the end of my suffering – I saw my children stomping the dead leaves, and over them the trees holding what they had left like torches in mid-day.

A door, at the end of suffering.

What if – I had been that week testing the thought – there is no door.

It is terrible to survive.

The darkness comes early, the flowers (the wild iris) rests underground, the trees pull back to bare limbs.

Yet, I can’t deny or ignore –

some months later, at first with the faintest signs, a return.

Each year the death of winter, rebirth of spring. An inescapable metaphor for even the likes of me.

Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.

Renee Emerson, At the end of my suffering, there was a door…

And how does the writer’s life change during the holiday season? Do you find yourself writing more or less? Is shopping or holiday card sending taking up time you would usually spend investigating journals or publishers? I haven’t been writing as much as I would like lately, holiday or no holiday, but I did manage to get a few submissions out after a pretty brutal book rejection the day before Thanksgiving (kept for more than a year with a “sorry it took so long” message after I’d been a finalist there multiple times. Ouch.) I’m starting to feel less sure about this book, which I used to have so much confidence in, my best book yet (I thought), fun and maybe even necessary. It’s also a little feminist, a little speculative, and more open about disability, which may mean it doesn’t appeal to everyone, especially in these “risk-averse” times. Anyway, think good thoughts as I send the manuscript out yet again, along with some poems. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Thanksgiving, Holiday Times at The Nutcracker, Local Wineries, Mt Rainier and the Writing Life Holiday Edition

Thanksgiving morning, in a house with no wi-fi, and a writer determined not to use her hot spot until the last possible minute because she, unlike much of the U.S.A. does not want to pay for unlimited data on her cell phone. But she knows what to do. And so she writes the old-fashioned way, typed in a Word document that will be uploaded later.You thought the writer might use a pen? She’s not that old-fashioned—she still has electricity! And she’s willing to pay for the version of Microsoft Office that’s always available, regardless of Internet access.

That writer, of course, is me. I’m being cautious with my cell phone usage because one past Thanksgiving of reckless abandon showed me how much data can cost, when I left the hot spot function on overnight. I am educable.

But I’m also delighting in disconnecting. I’ve gotten a sermon written in the past hour since I got up. If I’d had connectivity, I’d have spent that hour looking at stuff on the Internet, and likely feeling dispirited. Now I am feeling virtuous!

Long ago, I did write with a pen and paper, and I do remember that I had to fend off distractions then, too. Back in those days, I might be tempted to read the newspaper before I started—the old-fashioned kind, that arrived on the doorstep, not on my computer screen. The world is always trying to pull us away or lull us into complacency or sedate us—or terrify us or make us feel inadequate.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Thanksgiving Morning

around one candle the whole of november has gathered.

a lost bird from the dark flutters against the window.

the eyes of the watchers look like seeds from the oldest branch of night.

Grant Hackett [no title]

When I tell people I have been to the precinct to sing I often follow this up with, “not randomly on my own”. And the thought of me rocking up just to stand there and sing by myself makes me laugh. This would most definitely not work! In the group I know when I can trust myself to belt it out. I also know when I am in danger of being out of tune, and need to pause my singing.

I love the feeling in my chest and soul when the voices of the more competent singers shine. And being part of that is magical. The high notes rise and I remember to come in with the lower part at the right time and I can feel the sparkle of what is being created by many voices coming together. Sometimes I zone out when singing and temporarily forget where I am. This is quite entertaining when I come to and find myself singing along in tune and inhabiting the song. It was however slightly embarrassing at a recent rehearsal when I came to and heard the familiar intro of ‘This is Me’ only to forget that it was solo part and definitely not my turn to be singing even though that’s what I did. Fortunately I was in tune and quickly realised I should stop.

This week I was also celebrating the cover of a new poetry anthology called ‘Safety in Numbers’. This is another powerful reminder of what can be done when people work together. The idea for the book came from Gill Connors, and each poet was sent a poem to respond to with a poem of their own. Thus the poems were written in chains… each poem inspiring the next… women talking to women… poems talking to poems.  I am delighted that my poem Stunt Girl will be in these pages, and that it came into being because of Gill’s project.

Sue Finch, SOCK MONKEY

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

As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.

I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier… and you never really get full. Just tired. […]

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 girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as – ‘What if a chair was sad?’ – and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?

I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston (rob mclennan)

Here I am once more, sallying forth into a topic I am barely qualified to talk about, because I had an idea that I couldn’t let go of. But if you can accept my permanent status as an enthusiastic amateur, we shall begin.

I posted a poem over on Instagram on Monday, which had been written rather hurriedly in response to an exhibition of Gianni Versace’s designs and influences I’d seen the day before. It was way more interesting than I thought it would be, and the sculptural, structural quality of the clothes made me feel a bit sexy, and so this poem was the result.

The game of wrong pleats

After Gianni Versace

The game is to imagine wearing the dress

The game is to know he placed vertical interruptions

in the spaces a thumb would come to rest

The game is a slow thumb, ruffling the body

against itself

The game is to hold your thoughts aware, in plié

The game of the fold between structure, and release

The game is to whisper the words pleit /plicare / please

Now I don’t know whether this particular poem will do it for you, or not, but I did get to thinking about what it is that makes a poem sexy. What are the qualities of a good sexy poem — one that you have to hold your breath a little bit to read, one that makes you bite your lip involuntarily? I started to speculate to myself that a lot of it is about control, and restraint. As with poetry in general, but even more so in the case of the sexy poem, perhaps it relies heavily on what’s left unsaid, as much as what is said? It does indeed feel a bit like a game. The writer and the reader are playing truth or dare with each other — and also with the other person or persons in the poem if there are any (poetic polycule, anyone?) — and they’re each waiting to see how far the other will go, hoping it’s just far enough to keep them interested.

Victoria Spires, Ribs, ass and figs

In the Cummings poem, the growth of daisies in spring is associated with love and sex. This motif of spring (and especially April) is one of the most consistent elements of his poetry. Here’s another of my favourites:

yes is a pleasant country:
if’s wintry
( my lovely )
let’s open the year

both is the very weather
( not either )
my treasure,
when violets appear

love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
( and april’s where we’re )

Cumming’s poems are so memorable and so delicious to say that it’s easy to miss their concision and the remarkable flexibility that he wrings out of supposedly rigid English word order. Cummings studied Latin and Greek at school and as an undergraduate and in the way he puts words together (if not in other respects) he is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most convincingly Horatian of the English poets. Seven translations of Horatian odes made while a student at Harvard show many aspects of his style already in place and hint at how stimulated he was by Horatian language and metre. Two of those seven translations are of Horace’s “spring” odes 1.4 and 4.7.

Victoria Moul, Love is a deeper season: e. e. cummings and Horace the fascist

I heard someone say torch, and recalled
my friend’s story about how, when her sister

was married, her new husband gathered all
her underwear and threw it into the fire.

This was supposed to show how his passion
for her meant all other loves before him

were to be incinerated. Some words eclipse
others in the wake of their arrival.

Luisa A. Igloria, Trousseau

Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a poem by a leading Palestinian or Gazan poet.

Today’s poem is by the Palestinian poet and photographer Dareen Tatour.

Detaining a Poem, by Dareen Tatour, translated from the Arabic by Andrew Leber.

Dareen Tatour published her poem ‘Resist, My People, Resist Them’, on social media in 2015. She was subsequently arrested by Israeli police and charged with incitement to violence and supporting a terrorist organisation, which she has always denied. She then spent three years under house arrest, during which time she was barred from publishing her work and accessing the internet. After her trial in July 2018, she was handed a five-month prison sentence (with six months suspended), of which she served two months, being released in September 2018. Dareen is the author of I Sing From the Window of Exile (Drunk Muse Press, 2022) and My Threatening Poem – The Memoir of a Poet in Occupation Prisons (Drunk Muse Press, 2021).

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 1: Detaining a poem, by Dareen Tatour

‘The Underground’ is written with the author’s usual muscular naturalism. Heaney didn’t have to resort to poetic metaphor nearly as often as the rest of us, because he always, somehow, found the word he needed. To adapt Trump, that heroic anti-poet: he really did know all the words, and the best words. I often find that have to compare something to something else to move it closer to what I intend; but the problem with that approach is that it’s too easy to break the spell of the poem. Randomly … Okay, it happens that I’m sitting here staring at a little curtain made of dark and starchy material. Suppose I wanted to describe it. In its weird, stiff folds it looks like … A ploughed field? A school skirt? A concertina? All of these might do fine, but each would introduce another domain to the poem – agriculture, childhood, music – that the poem would then have to justify to keep its integrity. A good question to ask on these occasions is ‘What would Seamus do?’ Well, Heaney might prefer ‘pleat’ to ‘fold’ because it has a sharper plosive edge; though he’d also know that ‘pleat’ was from the Latin plicare, to fold, from the old Indo-European pek root, and cognate with implicate, complicate, explicate, duplicate. So he might describe the curtain’s material as ‘pleated’, or perhaps ‘complicated’ – simple words which carry the old meanings along with them: complicated things are folded together. All Seamus’s simple words throw very long shadows, because how we use a word – in what way, in what common phrases, with what other words – is also the story of exactly how it got there. Heaney had a strong preference for the common word-hoard, i.e. the everyday vocabulary we draw from Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Norman sources. Many if not most poets share it, because these words are mostly mono- or disyllabic, and therefore introduce far more stressed vowel, i.e. song, into the poetic line. (Though some poets find plenty of music in the authoritative register of a more polysyllabic and Latinate vocabulary – Sean O’Brien, for example – or in the scientific precision of more Greek-leaning lexis, like Douglas Dunn).

‘The Underground’ is as densely folded and woven – ‘implicated’? – a piece of language as I know. As well as Heaney’s deep knowledge of word origins, the poem is also enriched by his signature use of allusion: he’ll allow every tiny event in the poem sing back into the culture to seek out its mythic, historical or literary echo. Typically, ‘The Underground’ presents these allusions with the kind of grace and surface fluency that can leave them going undiscovered by the reader. We might say the poem possesses ‘optional depth’ – a highly desirable quality, I think; one I first heard identified by Michael Alexander in a lecture he was giving on Four Quartets. ‘Optional depth’ requires a poet confident enough in themselves not to demand applause for their cleverest effects, though it also assumes a patient reader. But at this stage of his career Heaney knew he’d won them; his readers trusted him to be worth their effort. (This is one reason I think the dismissal of ‘reputation’, when it’s been fairly won, to be utterly fatuous. ‘Reputation’ is not a licence to write badly but differently, since the poet’s relationship to the reader is configured differently, and based on more trust than an unknown poet has yet earned. The best poems of ‘poets of high repute’ would win no prizes in a poetry competition, where every single poem has to prove itself solely on its own terms. You might think this situation ideal, but it’s a recipe for mostly hysterical performance. I’ll write on the ethics of the poetry competition some other day.)

Don Paterson, Heaney on the Underground

Sitting on the steps, I’m eating ice cream
when a dog goes past and it seems we’re each in need
of the way he stops and the way I scratch his ears.
The ice cream is my for-now-favourite flavour.
The dog, caramel brown, looks with his chocolate eyes
at the ice cream, then up his lead towards you,
as if to say,
                    Hey! This – my ears, the ice cream,
this perfect blue and sunshine ice cream day.
This. 

Liz Lefroy, I Do Happy

I like to describe Aleda Shirley as the best poet you’ve never heard of. I adore her work and wish there weren’t so little of it: three books along with a chapbook, the latter an extremely curious object that exists for reasons entirely beyond me. Titled Rilke’s Children, it was printed and hand-sewn by Gray Zeitz at Larkspur Press and published by the Frankfort Arts Council; Shirley shares author billing with another favourite of mine, David Wojahn, and the book also contains a selection of poems by some other Kentucky poets and an introduction by Guy Davenport. I’ve had it since I was in college: it was the first book I ever bought from Abebooks. I can only assume I ordered it for the Wojahn poems and was accidentally rewarded with another lodestar.

What’s to like about “White Center”? It’s the driving rhythm that lingers, the litany and its application to an uncompromising insistence on metaphor. This is one of those poems that gets straight at the ancient heart of the whole endeavour, the sense of poiesis from which poetry derives: a bringing forth, a conjuring. Here, it’s the felt sense of time, Shirley’s effort to bring the conceptual into the embodied realm, to bear the intangible across the divide and into phenomenological experience. Like Lynda Hull’s “The Window,” which concludes Hull’s third and final book, “White Center” is the last poem in Shirley’s collection Dark Familiar, also her third and her last. This is meaningful to me in some way I can’t articulate; it causes me to number spines, seeking out the final final final poem: surely there must be a third.

Vanessa Stauffer, “White Center” by Aleda Shirley

The final poem turns to Chaucer and “The Canterbury Tales”, in “All Together Now”,

“The spirit of the Wife of Bath will stir no porridge
but three husband shades around the pan
will jockey for the right to hold the spoon.
I hear more queueing at my door. Do you always
have so many spirits about your person?

My head is full of fun and frolic,
Of sorrow and shame, of triumph and tragedy.
This is the rule inside any scribbler’s brain.
Know that I can never sup alone.
Bring your spirits, let them blend with mine
And all shall dance.”

The rhythm bounces. It’s a jocular poem. And it sums up the quiet optimism that runs through “Rainbow Candles”. At times, there seems to be an acceptance of the way things are without a desire to make significant changes. That might be a frustration when you wish Cinderella could know that life’s about to get better for her. Readers might want the speaker to have more agency, protest against the baseball bat wielding thugs. But in “Rainbow Candles”, Challis draws attention to the small wins, the strength of solidarity, the courage that comes from being true to yourself.

Emma Lee, “Rainbow Candles” Tony Challis (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

This is to confess my untold delight in the postal service’s delivery of a book titled workshop of silence, containing poems by Jean D’Amérique, as translated by Conor Bracken.

In his translator’s introduction, Bracken notes that Jean D’Amérique’s lived experience is unsettled by the boundaries of nation-states: “As a transnational person who splits his time between Haiti, France, and Belgium, not to mention a Black transnational person transiting through and living in historically white countries, he is subject to the rough, reductive, and at times lethally armed gaze of bureaucracy.” Borders, as written by this poet, “are not meant to be stopped at”; their existence is arbitrary and alienating.

Since D’Amerique began as a slam poet, Bracken says that “retaining this transgressive, playful, and dexterous attention to sound” was one of the primary goals of his translation— a goal that frequently leads him to slight departures from the denotative meaning of the original words. Translation is an art. As such, translators make choices about what to emphasize and convey across languages. Bracken elects the “enlivening of language” that restores “its fundamental slipperiness,” or, in his own words:

It is based as much in play and wit as it is in the political dimensions of the work that he’s doing with these poems, which sometimes announces itself without embroidery, as in “moment of silence,”  wherein he situates his poems in the  political tradition of Nazim Hikmet, and at other times is more recondite, as in “under the bridges what springs (up),” where he points out through elaborate wordplay the continued but unexamined presence of the lexicon of shipping and chattel slavery in economic chatter. 

I hear this subversive jouissance trickling upwards through the sap of “solar brass,” a poem that tingled all the way to the tips of my fingertips when I first read it.

solar brass

my rhapsody
a cactus in the night-call’s port

for sale for tropical cents
I am a solar

powered brassy jacket
the horizon
looks punk to me

D’Amérique’s poems have a purpose in daily life: they process the banalities and polish the repetitions.

Alina Stefanescu, Workshop of Silence.

It was bound to happen. The recent revelations around Jeffrey Epstein have now implicated poetry in America—well, Poetry in America, a PBS program created by Elisa New, a Harvard professor of literature and wife of Epstein’s friend, Larry Summers (the two also honeymooned on Little St. James, flying there with Ghislaine Maxwell). Poetry in America is, according to its website, “a multi-platform educational initiative and public television series that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.” On this program, New hosted conversations with numerous celebrities and poets, and at some point she accepted over $100k dollars in funding from Epstein for all this (at one point negotiating for $500,000). She also seems to have relied on his personal support and appreciated his esteem, and all this well after he was a registered sex offender. In fact, shortly before Epstein’s arrest, New was emailing him about how best to persuade Venus Williams to appear on her program. Mistakes were, as they say, made. It’s just a shame that we may never get to see the shelved episode in which she discussed poetry with none other than Woody Allen, a man introduced to her by Epstein.

Yes, the dunks could go on. And well they should. But I’m afraid there is more significant news to attend to regarding (little “p”) poetry in America. […]

In late October, the Mellon Foundation has announced the formation of the Literary Arts Fund. In the creation of this fund, Mellon has joined with “the Ford Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation” to distribute $50 million into literary non-profits across the next five years. Significantly, the president of the Mellon Foundation is Elizabeth Robinson, former US poet laureate—arguably the most influential person in American poetry, strictly in terms of economic power. And I have written about her before in connection to money given to the Poetry Coalition. The Poetry Coalition is comprised of roughly thirty major literary organizations and is very closely tied to the Academy of American Poets. And as of today, if you go to the Academy’s web site, you can still find a page for its PBS program, Elisa New’s Poetry in America.

Now, none of this is to imply a connection between Epstein and the Literary Arts Fund (lol). But these two stories happening at once, in the same backyard, means that I cannot pass up the opportunity to, once again, talk about the funding of poetry in America. And perhaps I’m too much of an idealist, but I feel like we should be wary of extremely centralized wealth—regardless of where it comes from—meddling in the culture of poetry. Such wealth is inseparable from the worker exploitation and systemic violence inescapably built into the heart of the capitalist system. Under the guise of “supporting the arts,” there are any number of motives that institutions, organizations, foundations, or super-rich individuals might have in pouring money into some quadrant of “poetry in America.” And all of this says nothing of the fact that many, many poets are also debtors, and the establishment of student debt was essential to their being able to obtain the credentials necessary for access to this world of funds.

Ultimately, my position is that this money funds a culture whose credentialed professionalism in fact serves to condition it, train it, and limit its capacity for imagining or enacting another world.

R.M. Haines, POETRY TALK (no. 5)

I only read the news — I don’t watch or listen to it — so I can take in the melodrama in measured glances, the calm of a punctuated sentence, a nicely contained paragraph. It occurs to me that life is that mix of unanticipated stimulation and the striving to make sense of it and react in some reasonable way that allows survival until the next surprise. Art is important to me both as stimulus and as companion on the path to survival. This poem by Peter Gizzi feels like good company today, as I stagger into the gray day with its subtly shifting clouds.

Marilyn McCabe, the future I’m reaching for

i am sibling to the
orphaned mitten & the charging cable
once plugged into a breakup machine.
mother to the acorns who could not
figure out how to sprout & the eggs
who went rotten in the coop.
we can call it the lost & lost. like a zoo
that you can only enter if you too have
been left behind.

Robin Gow, lost & lost

So there’s AI now. It’s HEEEEEEERE. A brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie. Or vampire. There are so many ethical issues to confront. I hear my educator and writing friends decrying it and calling for absolutely abstention. I get that. But I am left to wonder what to do beyond that. We can’t just try to ignore it. Legislation. Yes. Rules, guidelines, restrictions. Yes. Teaching our students and advocating for deeper understanding of what it is, what it is doing. Absolutely. But we can’t ignore it and must do more than just say “stay away from it.” Just like, “fentanyl is bad. Don’t do it.” But obviously, that doesn’t work and is too simplistic.

In terms of AI, we must engage with the social and structural issues around it when we talk to “users” and “pushers” of A.I. Address it as a symptom. Of what? Well, capitalism, for one, but also a kind of fear, insecurity and lack of feeling centred, of not trusting in one’s own abilities, feeling the need to outsource. Of a kind of alienation from the non-mediated world. (Mediated by capital, by technology, by a kind of “culture is out there” thinking.) Not trusting oneself and not feeling safe to fail. I think we need to address all these things. We’re being capitalismplained and fearsplained. But I need language more than “Trust yourself. Be authentic” to talk to my students. It needs to be deeper than that. More than “Just don’t do it,” or “It’s wrong.” And publicly, I feel as writers we need to explain more about what it actually means and where the desire to use it comes from more than a kind of moralizing and shaming, because, as with the case of so many other things, that never works.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A.I.: brain- and intellectual-property-eating water and energy guzzling zombie or vampire?

One crisp autumn day, on a whim, I started sending haiku to a few friends via email and text message. I had a new phone and was interested in its SMS capabilities. The only things I found that I could get via SMS were sports scores and stock updates. Boring! I thought: 160 characters — that’s probably enough for a tiny poem. If I could subscribe and get a daily haiku on my phone, that would be pretty cool!

Of course, nothing like that existed yet. I soon learned about email to SMS gateways that would let me email text messages to phones, if I just formatted the To: address properly, and that sparked an idea: To start a haiku by SMS service.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had a little mailing list going. At first I borrowed haiku from library books. I added a few of my own early efforts. In time, I started accepting submissions.

Before long, tinywords had become a daily magazine of haiku and micro poetry. That was over 25 years ago, and tinywords now has over 3,000 subscribers, making it one of the biggest haiku/micropoetry publications in the world. We’ve published over 4,400 haiku by almost 1,000 different poets, including some big names in the haiku world, some big names in the larger poetry world, and some people who are just regular lovers of poetry without particularly big names at all, like me. I’m not even the editor anymore. For more than a decade, Kathe Palka and Peter Newton have been making all the editorial decisions. I am, happily, the publisher, technical support guy, and customer service rep.

In September, we celebrated tinywords.com’s 25th anniversary by sponsoring a reception at Haiku North America 2025, the big biannual haiku conference. It was a joy to meet and celebrate with almost 200 haiku poets, many of whom have appeared on our site over the years.

Along the way I learned that haiku are about more than just syllable counts: Haiku are a tool for mindfulness, a vehicle to bring us into presence and awareness of the world, a literary form that sharpens our powers of observation and description, and a writing practice that helps us cut away the fluff.

As one of the most concise literary genres, haiku have helped me to be a sharper, more direct writer. They’ve helped make my headlines and email subject lines more concrete and pithier. (My email bodies are still too long, though — my excuse is that they’re prose!)

It’s no exaggeration to say that haiku have made me a better writer and editor, and they have certainly helped my career.

But it’s the haiku philosophy of awareness, close observation, mindfulness, and concision that has made the biggest difference in my life. Haiku are steeped in Zen, and over time, practicing haiku-like awareness, day after day, has helped me to show up better for my own life.

Dylan Tweney, Haiku changed my life

And each eye is a new world
to be examined in turn

One then the other
this is one then that

Consumed by more than silence
he floats untethered

The difficulty I had was that the poem was very wordy and needed to be pared back. There were a number of lines that I liked that fell by the wayside. I used to keep these separate convinced I could use them somewhere. I haven’t yet. 

Paul Tobin, HE TOOK UP MIRRORS

Lately I’ve been revising some old poems and have realized I no longer recall what their incipience was. Which can be a good thing, because I am no longer wedded to the “reason” I wrote them and can instead consider whether they can be crafted into decent poems.

I am also working on a manuscript that I let sit for at least six years. An idea got into my mind after reading Robert Burton’s 17th-century book on depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy, quite some time ago (2017, perhaps?). I took a stab at writing what seemed to be evolving into a historical fiction story, which is not my usual approach (I have zero practice at plot and dialogue). Then, I stopped. As one does. But the topic lodged in me somewhere, I suppose, and early this year I returned to it. What if, I wondered, the draft could be restructured into a series of prose poems? There might be a sort of hybrid novella-poem in the earlier draft.

That’s more or less what I’m developing, at least for now, and we’ll see what if anything emerges. It’s keeping me interested, which I like, and the experiment feels fresh compared with “writing what I know,” or writing “how” I know. Because yes, of course we ought to write what we know; but we also know about human beings, and we have imaginations, and anything is possible.

Ann E. Michael, Source material

I can’t quite believe that my poem ‘The Last Carry’ has now reached over a thousand likes on Bluesky, many of them from people beyond the poetry bubble. Oh, and a fair few of those likes have then gone on to generate sales of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t. All in all, a terrific example of how social media, when functioning at its best, can generate new readers for poetry.

Matthew Stewart, A thousand likes

To date, Lit Mag News has nearly 17,000 subscribers. Just typing that figure makes my eyes well up. I can’t believe it. I really can’t. That’s…a lot of people thinking and caring about literary magazines. That’s a lot of people, right here, in this space.

And now I must tell you this: It has been one of the greatest pleasures of my professional life to make Lit Mag News.

It has been an honor to be entrusted with your questions, your experiences, your confidences, and to serve as a reliable means for you to get the information and inspiration you need in order to continue along your literary paths.

It is not always easy to feel a sense of connection on the internet. Heck, it’s not always easy to feel a sense of connection, period. But I feel that here. I feel it because of the ways that you, all of you, contribute to this space.

Thank you.

Becky Tuch, A Message For You

To celebrate Small Business Saturday, preorders of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are LIVE today at Madville Publishing. Preorder here.

We’re also thrilled to reveal the back cover, featuring photography by Donna Kile and stellar blurbs from Simon Morrison, Annie Zaleski, and Denise Duhamel.

“Collin Kelley and Megan Volpert present a dazzling collection of poems, reflections, and ruminations on the diva’s diva, Stevie Nicks. She would be the first to admit that her magic comes from her fans, and White Winged Doves is the proof. Here she is the inscrutable enchantress, queen of the queer pitch, your father’s favorite and Taylor Swift’s too as comforter, protector, and avenger.” — Simon Morrison, author of Mirror in the Sky: The Life and Music of Stevie Nicks 

Collin Kelley, Preorder & back cover reveal for the Stevie Nicks poetry anthology

I was hanging up some clothing and found a coat I’d knitted when I was in my early thirties. It’s a gorgeous Kaffe Fasset design, one of two I’ve made. A third used to be in the attic, waiting for me to get it back out. I could be knitting while I watch TV all winter.

And then I remembered what happened to that sweater. It became a poem.

Ravel

It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel the half-done coat—
the mohair enmeshed with wool,
the intertwined tweed and Wintuck
(in colors so promising you use it
though you know it pills).

It’s not as easy as you think
to unravel a foot of coat
with so much time invested […]

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, I Should Be Knitting

So, my book is now available! You can find all the information about it here on my website :).

I received two fantastic submissions in response to my call on social media to share a haiku or tanka about the moon or the night – and both poets will receive a free copy of ‘Don’t Write About The Moon’ <3. Their haiku inspired me to weave them into a haibun. Enjoy reading!

THICKETS

(John Hawkhead, t.j. zhang, Makoto)

there it is again
that harvest moon in the well
of my whisky glass

John Hawkhead, Presence 50

A hazy Saturday night. My thoughts have pulled me onward, though the shapes ahead are still hard to make out. The landscape breaks into mosaic fragments as I try to reassemble it once more: long, slender poplars overshadow the ground—why do I wander again to the thickets?

in a dream
over a field of irises
the moon

t.j. zhang, kurokuro.art

I halt, watch my breaths in the cold autumn air. What brought me here?

It’s beautiful. This purple, delicate streak in midnight blue, where does it end, where does it begin? Where do I? Let me walk on with hope on my soles.

I hear the grass straightening itself behind me.

Kati Mohr, Get your copy of Don’t Write About The Moon :)

The man who had stared at me throughout the workshop came up to me and handed me a piece of folded paper. He said “Don’t read it until you are at home, alone.” If I’m honest, I thought it was a poem or something. I said “Ok” and then carried on saying goodbye to people, packing up my things. I shoved the piece of paper into my pocket and forgot about it until later on that night when I was getting changed for the evening reading.

The piece of paper fell out of my pocket. I didn’t keep a copy of it, but my memory of what it said was something like ‘Do you really think your poems are going to be read after you are dead?” The man had drawn a scale with ‘shit poetry’ at one end and ‘memorable poetry’ at the other. I think there may have been a list of ingredients that make a good poem – rhyme etc. There was an arrow with a little picture of me at the shit end. He’d left his name and number on the paper and asked me to get in touch.

I felt more irritated than angry or upset, but I thought about what this might have felt like ten years ago, when I was first starting to write. I felt pleased that his behaviour and his words didn’t have the power to wound me in the way that they might have once upon a time.

After the reading, on impulse, I gave the piece of paper to one of the organisers and asked if I could talk to them after the festival was over. The organisers rang me the next day and were really supportive. They said they would ring and email the man concerned to tell him he was banned from attending any future readings. They also said they would review their safeguarding proceedings to ensure authors were not left unaccompanied at the end of events.

In the meantime, the man had contacted me through my website with this message:

I was the guy that gave you that note in ____ You seem8 to have a mischievous air about you which interests me. I have written some poems that nobody has seen. I wonder, would you like to meet for a coffee and I could read you two or three? I had some heart trouble last year and so don’t know how much time I’ve left?

I forwarded this onto the organisers without replying. After that he left some abusive comments online – calling me a nasty person – randomly, one is on a Reddit forum. I found out recently that the festival organisers had to report him to the police because he turned up at other events, managed to get inside said event (even though his description had been circulated) and then harassed other women writers. When they did report him to the police, they found out he was already known to them.

When I found this out, that he went on to harass other women, my first feeling was relief. Not that other women had been harassed, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone – but I think the relief was something to do with realising that this man was a damaged individual who wanted to hurt women, and that I did the right thing in reporting him. That I wasn’t being over sensitive, or not taking a joke. That I didn’t do anything wrong. That I wasn’t asking for it, that I didn’t do something that provoked him – even though the logical part of my brain knows all these things, I didn’t know it in my body until I heard he’d done it to other women as well.

I am sharing this now because I found out through the organisers that the man in question died not long ago so I feel safe to tell this story now – knowing that I’m not going to draw his attention to me again. Of course there are much worse things happening than this to women in our country and all around the world, but that is also kind of the point – I didn’t know whether this man would stop at a note and a few abusive messages, or whether he would become a full blown stalker.

Kim Moore, Day 5: 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence: On Speaking Out

Should we ever consider our reader’s comfort when we write? “You can say anything, but are you saying anything?” If we discard the reader, who should the work connect with? Are we ever saying anything important and socially engaged, if we relinquish our care for the person the art reaches out to, the effect on them.

Aren’t poems meant to make us feel something? And what of the poet? Can we ever hold a poet responsible for their poem’s effect on the reader? As poets, aren’t we predisposed to accept that once a poem is published/in print/in the public eye, it no longer belongs to us – once in the reader’s hands, doesn’t the poem now live with their interpretations, their myriad experiences, their feelings rendered, their epiphanies, inspiration, disgust, discomfort?

Though the tone is crude and verging on aggressive, the sestet makes playful reference to Shakespearean metre with lines ten and eleven’s enjambement:

‘speak the bard’s measured iambic tight pent-/ a meter…’

The intentional spacing in the final line is breakaway from traditional sonnet metre to balance the rhetoric question in a space of its own, as if a multiplicity of answers all occupy the space together: a poet is responsible for the poem, the reader is responsible for feelings evoked, the speaker is responsible for their reactions, the speaker is responsible for awareness of their own arousal, the reader is responsible for awareness of embodied experience.

In that beautiful sense, poetry is society’s way marker. Poets have the joy of bringing all these soft grey contradictions to light, playing the role of both speaker and reader. What we say, we might be saying to ourselves, to another, to society, or to no one in particular. And when you hear a poet insist their words are ‘not a protest’ the glint of resistance is sure to be found.

Drop-in by Katrina Moinet (Nigel Kent)

A couple of weeks ago there was an excellent radio programme on about dealing with Writer’s Block – I’m buggered if I can remember the name of it at the mo, but it will come to me. Anyhoo, it popped back into mind while reading some John Clare the other night. I’m slowly working my way through a Selected of his…And that book includes selected passages from a wider poem called To the Rural Muse

Here’s the second stanza (that they include)

Muse of the pasture brook, on they calm sea
Of poesy I’ve sailed, and though the will
To speed were greater than the prowess be,
I’ve ventured with much fear of usage ill,
Yet more of joy. Though timid be my skill,
As not to dare the depths of mightier streams,
Yet rocks abide in shallow ways and I
Have much of fear its mingle with my dreams.
Yes, lovely muse, I still believe thee by
And think I see thee smile and so forget I sigh.

When the Words Leave…that was the name of the show; seems ironic somehow…Give the show a listen. I enjoyed it.

I think Mr C (not that one) is dealing with some writer’s block brought on by fear of being able to say the things he wants throughout this poem..among other things.

Mat Riches, Rocks abide in shallow ways

It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.

My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert’s almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life.

Maria Popova, Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World

The highlight of my writing year has been this week and has nothing to do with my own writing. I was invited to the St Andrew’s Day Ceilidh hosted by the Scottish Government’s Nordic Office, a well-kept little secret. I was invited through my connection with the Finnish Scottish Society who I help out every year with their annual Burns Supper and a ceilidh. We had no idea of what to expect, but it was the most amazing night. The guest stars were former Scotland Makar Jackie Kay and current Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen and the presenter and cultural commentator Ally Heather. I thought it might be a formal affair but it was far from that. 

It was introduced as a Highland lock-in with music and poetry and tons and tons of whisky which is exactly what it felt like. Ally welcomed us in and spent the evening wandering around topping up everyone’s glasses. All three were delightful to talk to. The musicians and poets on stage kept it casual and fun and joined in with the drinking and chat off. My mate even had to eject a too-drunk Finn during the first session by Scotland’s 2025 Young Traditional Musician Ellie Beaton. Had to happen at a Scottish event. Michael and Jackie’s performance were fun and full of energy. I’ve books by them both this year including Michael’s amazing Muckle Flugga which is a rollercoaster of a read. And listening to him perform you understand why. I wish I had taken photos, but to be honest, I was a bit star-struck. Luckily, my friend was thinking on his feet. 

Unfortunately, the lock-in didn’t happen, but we decanted to another pub down the road. I couldn’t stay as long as I’d like as I had work in the morning and kids waiting at home, but it was an absolute blast. It really made me miss the Scottish literary scene I used to dip my toes into. The mild hangover I took to school the next morning was totally worth it.

Gerry Stewart, St Andrew’s Day 2025

ラストシーンならこの町この枯木　大牧　広

lasuto shiin nara kono machi kono kareki

            for the movie’s last scene
            this town
            and this withered tree

                                                            Hiroshi Ohmaki

from Haiku, November 2025 issue, Kadokawa Zaidan, Tokyo

Fay’s Note:  Hiroshi Ohmaki (1931-2019)

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 28, 2025)

November is historically a month of losses and grief, proven just this week by losing two of our cats to age and illness and spending a part of the holiday at an emergency vets office instead of sitting down to turkey dinner. While November takes a lot each year (things I love, the daylight, the mild weather, and occasionally my own health—lest we forget last November’s bout of tendonitus in my foot that had me hobbling a significant portion of last winter. ) it has, on occasion given good things as well. in the past these included book acceptances and new job opportunities, though this past month, it may just be a sense of order and calm, as well as good progress on something entirely new—a play! that is proving to be an enjoyable writing endeavor given my recent and renewed theatre fervor. While poetry is always my favorite child, stepping away from it has birthed some interesting side projects nevertheless. We are on the cusp of December, which brings a wrapping up and taking stock of the creative year, which I will be sharing in the next few weeks, so keep an eye over on the blog for that. Otherwise, until then, may the darkness not swallow you before the solstice…

Kristy Bowen, November Paper Boat

That pungent vinaigrette in the little dish:
pour the rest over the poem. 
It will taste delicious.

Push that boulder which is also a word
over the poem’s hillside.
See how much moss, grass and other worlds it gathers.  

Read this dream article on your subject.
We offer you your essential point, in dream
language. Use it.

That shovel. On the blackish background.  
In the center.  Here, you.  Dreamer, poet, person. 
Start digging.

Jill Pearlman, Thanksgiving Dreamed My Poem

This week: the ludokinetic poem, the transparent eyeball, traveling on motherless roads, constructing a witch, and much more. Enjoy.

In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he notes that there is “a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own” because “we have been expected upon this earth.” Our ancestors knew of our coming. As such, just like all previous generations, we possess what Benjamin calls a “weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.” In other words, although we are not super heroes or gods—not capital m Messiahs with the power to redeem the past, present, or future with grand utopian visions or Paradise on earth—our small, contingent acts can disrupt the version of time that appears linear or inevitable. If we were glitter nail polish, the base color might be our ordinary positionality in the flow of time–our genetics, our culture, our place–and the glitter would be our power to change the course of history. […]

After many months now of watching the genocide of civilians in Gaza, of praying, of gathering money to support the large family of my friend Mahmoud who sends harrowing videos and photos of the devastation and violence there every day, of calling my Senators to demand a ceasefire, peace and justice there have started to feel, for many, like a lost cause. It boggles the mind and confounds my spirit that people can see and know about the thousands of lives lost—many of them children—and not be spurred to outrage. And for me at least, the lost causness doesn’t feel limited to just Gaza, but has leaked a sense of lostness out beyond its edges into everything else. As my friend Cassie […] recently wrote on her fantastic newsletter, “My scientific proposal is that the genocide in Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 caused the luck to run out in the world.”

As a result of this lost-cause feeling, this luckless feeling, I’m looking for ways to spend more time and energy and heart resisting this particular part of the death machine. A local friend and I are going to be gathering folks who want to organize locally, I’m going to start joining Mothers for Ceasefire at their Wednesday morning demonstrations in downtown Durham, and I’m imagining ways that poetry might be an avenue of resistance here in my own little circle of messianic influence. My idea (still nascent) is that I would print up a series of cards, little broadsides, with poems about Gaza and by Palestinian poets, and the flip side of the card would have links to donate to aid organizations and numbers to call our State Representatives. I would put stacks of these in places around town—coffee shops, vintage stores, yoga studios, maybe therapy offices.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, On Time

People are starving
and we argue about
who’s more at fault.
Measles is roaring
back to life. Every
day is Tisha b’Av now.
Which means every day
a seed of hope
is planted.
Every day, a runway.
Every day we get up
from the floor,
brush off mourning’s
ashes and begin again
like our ancestors
in the wilderness
who every year
would dig their graves
expecting to die
and wake to discover
another chance.

 A seed of hope / is planted. Tradition holds that moshiach / the messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av — the seeds of redemption growing in the soil of our darkest day.

Every day, a runway. Tisha b’Av begins the seven-week runway toward the Days of Awe and the Jewish new year. 

Like our ancestors.  See Rashi on Taanit 30b:12:1.

This poem was inspired by a conversation after the first session of Seven Habits of Highly Evolved People, the pre-high-holiday class I’m co-teaching with R. David Markus this year.

Rachel Barenblat, Every day

When I think of what helps in these times, I often think of music. My impulse is to go somewhere beautiful—the woods, the water—and play music. One of the things the cantor sang was a Hebrew chant of the 23rd Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd.”) I’m not a religious person—not believing in lords and such— but these words were powerful in their imagery (“I shall not want,” “lie down in green pastures.” “…leadeth me beside the still waters.”)

When I have a chance in the waiting room, I’ve been making little visual pieces to have the centring effect of making something. Of creating some little beauty. Of making marks to somehow speak to the world. They don’t respond per se to the emotional weight of the moment excepting that making marks, but being “cautiously optimistic” about things is always helpful. At home, I type out some figures on a typewriter and load the scans into the computer which I bring to the hospital. I’ve called them Typewriter Rituals because making them is a small ritual.

Gary Barwin, typewriter rituals in the ICU

When I think about what I am doing here (in this newsletter, that is, I do my best not to think about the other question) I realise that one of my biggest and fondest inspirations is Carol Rumens’s Poem of the Week column [in The Guardian]. Rumens has been writing the column for almost two decades. Each week, she shares a poem, sometimes an old poem, sometimes a new one, then takes us through it, closely and clearly. Anyone will get something out of the discussion, whatever their relationship to poetry, because (because not despite) she always starts with what makes a poem a poem. Its sound and its shape.

Poem of the Week has introduced me to a lot of poems and poets I might never have encountered elsewhere. But Rumens will also change how you think about poems you thought you knew. Put a good poem in front of a good reader and they will always find something surprising, because poetry is the gift that keeps on giving (in this sense, it is very good for the environment). This week’s poem was ‘Sea-Fever’ [by John Masefield]. You can read it here […]

Like Rumens says, I don’t think you can have it too many times. I know this because I’ve been reciting it to our toddler in his cot most evenings for the past month. This is partly because I simply don’t know many poems by heart, partly because once you start doing one thing with a toddler they tend to want you to do it again (he doesn’t have many words yet, but he will ask for the “poom”) and partly because it is such a joy to say.

Jem Wikeley, The Long Trick

A little bit of fun for mid-August — two of the poems that I most enjoying saying to my own children (whether they like it or not). Both of these are very cheering I find at trying moments. The first is by Alfred Noyes, now probably known only for his (fantastic) ‘The Highwayman’, which is still widely available as an illustrated picture book. Years ago, I said ‘The Highwayman’ to both the older boys, then perhaps 7 and 5, while perched on the lower bunk at bed time; I got all the way through to the end, enjoying it greatly myself, and was quite pleased that they were still listening. After I finished, there was a pause, before the younger of them burst out “but it’s sad!” and started to cry, and the elder leaned over the edge of the top bunk to remark censoriously, “I really don’t think that was appropriate for us, Mummy”. (You have been warned.)

I’m not sure ‘The New Duckling’ is entirely appropriate either but it’s very funny […]

My second suggestion, Charles Causley’s ‘Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast’ is a great favourite of the children and I have never got bored of saying it. The final stanza is particularly delicious.

Victoria Moul, Two poems to learn so that you can say them to your children for your own amusement

These hot, humid summer days I’ve been waiting for fall. And then I feel guilty about it, because of that whole be-here-now stuff, that whole life-is-short-enjoy-it-while-you-can stuff. That whole climate-change-this-may-be-the-new-normal stuff… I try to spend some time each day (usually in the cooler hours) in that living-in-the-present stuff. But then it gets hot, and I get whiny. But all those hyphenated points above are so true, dammit. And life is so damn uncertain. So now I’m working on enjoying being a hot thing that lies on the couch feeling hot. If the couch has a breeze, I can almost pull it off, that gratitude business. It’s worth a try, even if I fall back in to whineland. I woke up the other day thinking, dang, I was going to start working on my upper body strength — a little weight lifting every day. I did it for a while, but that was…well…a while ago. That’s okay, I told myself. Today is a new day. You can always start today. I appreciated my generous self for that thought. As Nina Simone sang, “It’s a new life for me, yeah.”

I admire this Stafford poem for its challenge to the new day, the new life, the new yeah. It’s a tape-it-over-the-desk poem. We all need a few of those.

Marilyn McCabe, When you turn around, starting here, lift this

distant thunder
white curtains billow
in the dusk

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’25

A short interactive poem of mine, ‘The Whisky Shop’, is published in the latest issue of Taper, a journal of computational literature (poems and experimental lit crossed with coding, essentially). The constraint for all submissions to the journal is extreme: 2KB file size. A Microsoft Word document of a one-page poem I’m working on at the moment clocks in at 16KB.

To bring ‘The Whisky Shop’ — originally a longer poem with many more options for line swaps — down to 2KB I had to remove all the spacing in the .html file, as well as most of the poetry, and then spend another couple of hours working on efficiencies in the code. For example, all the style selectors are just one character long. Effectively I put the whole thing into a compactor, and I did wonder at one point if it made sense to do so for the sake of a submission to a journal. The end result is a different poem, but interesting in its own way, and I have some ideas of how to yoke the two together in future.

It’s a ludokinetic poem, which means the interactive element is intended to locate the reader inside the poem in some way. In this case, what I envisaged is someone shuffling memories like cards to reconjure a distant experience.

Jon Stone, Taper #14 / The Whisky Shop

Recently, when typing up notes from my journals, I found quotes I captured while watching an Indigo Girls documentary (as one does). It’s full of testimony about how writing and singing allowed them to create — and re-create — themselves.

Emily, one of the Indigo Girls, also talks about the pressures and joys of performing and says this:

I’ve had nights where I was sad, didn’t feel like playing, and by the end of the night I’m just healed, just washed over with that energy of togetherness.

That energy of togetherness. YES.

I’m a loner. Deep, deep, deep in my bones. So the level to which I’ve discovered, nurtured and delighted in writing community has been one of the biggest surprises of my life.

Like… y’all: I’m still writing — inspired! healed! — every damn day because of writing community. Jill Crammond. Sarah Freligh. Woman Words. The Albany open mic scene over the years. The Madwomen in the Attic workshops. Second Best Witches Writing Group. The fairly new but growing Ass in Chair Collective. And others. I’m so grateful.

In art, togetherness really does provide more than camaraderie. It’s energy-giving. It’s momentum-building. It’s cheerleading.

It’s also accountability. For example, after a verrrrrry long break from submitting to journals, I’m back at it. Slowly. Surely. It’s 100% thanks to writing pals who tell me, when I can’t see it myself, that my work is worth making and needs to be out there.

These are the vibes: It’s selfish to hoard your creativity.

Carolee Bennett, Writing Community and the “Energy of Togetherness”

These days, instead of sitting down to write, I go straight to the basement and make art. Today, I completed the third in a series of season-themed encaustics with poems embedded in them. I altered an old poem to fit the photo:

The fabric of spring I wanted to write a sentence with verdant, wanted to use the word lush, wanted it fragrant in word only. wanted it wordy, wanted to roll in the word green, needed the stains of the word grass on the knees of the word jeans, but all day the wind shook the japanese cherries and yesterday’s blossoms have popped like a piñatafull of confetti, blanketing the word lawn with the word pink, a magic shag carpet. I listen for its breath, small jean genie, must of earth behind my ears, rolling,wordless, in the new-woven fabric of spring.

And that brings me to the point of this post. When I lost my job last June, I intended to finish writing a children’s book, work on the rest of a novel, and find a publisher for my full-length poetry manuscript, Words with Friends. I finally accomplished one of those goals.

Today, I’m able to share that my poetry book will be published by Meat for Tea Press! I’m so freakin’ excited!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Waxing Poetic

I was
        a young mother when someone guided my thumb  
to the hollow atop my newborn’s head, to feel the space 
        between the bones of the skull where they 
had not knit together yet. Even now, I still turn 
        toward the idea of an opening, some keyhole 
through which I can thread my undimmed longing. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Fontanel

Our days are filled like this, with conversations and songs and silence, and with questions like, “If you were a chip, what kind of chip would you be? What kind of chip would you like to be?” Which reminds me of a voice note question my partner asked me – what does your mind do when you’re walking? She knows how the inside of my mind is usually ten cinema screens competing for who can be the loudest or brightest or fastest or most bizarre…I notice that, somewhere in between footsteps and breath and retelling each other The Lord of the Rings, the noise has all but stopped.

And Niamh sings to me again, something they have created from the best lines we’ve spoken, about mountains and not giving up. They apologise that it doesn’t rhyme, and I say that the journey doesn’t rhyme – every day is unknowable. And then I consider that perhaps our footsteps are a sort of rhyme, and that each day, in its different textures and forms, has a series of small repetitions – chance encounters with Flor and Florus, Ken and Ali, the Belgians…how each different day echoes with blackberries and the way everything sparkles in sunlight after rain, and wrens and stonechats, oaks, beech.

Today began in Grasmere, in rain which switched in a moment to sunshine, and strong wind, until I gave up on my coat and let myself be drenched then dried. We walked over Hause Gap, and by Grisedale Tarn, black and grey and slapping at its shores, and down Grisedale Beck into Patterdale. All lividly beautiful, the world startled and bright in its rain and sunlight, but the best part of the day was the extra three miles to Brotherswater Inn via Hartsop, and how the poem of the journey rang loudly with harebells and bracken, hawkbit and tormentil and dandelion, yarrow and dock, thistle and nettle and clover, foxglove and wild thyme, so we were singing and the wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather.

Clare Shaw, Coast-to-Coast: Day 4

sun-striped path
the forest’s outbreath
fills our lungs

[…]

Today is sunny, but through the weekend, the clouds hung on till afternoon, and I was chilly enough to wear a wool sweater. Here on the Northern California coast, we have entered the month of Fogust. In our cool and damp micro-clime, so perfect for redwoods, locals are amazed by the temperature if it reaches 70 degrees.

Annette Makino, Sizzling summer haiku

I have spent a delightful morning pondering Bruce Springsteen–we are almost to the 50th (gasp!) anniversary of the release of the Born to Run album.  Born in the U.S.A. was my Springsteen entry point in the late summer of 1984, and then I got Born to Run later that autumn, in November.  I liked it alright, but I don’t think that any other Springsteen album has captured my heart and imagination like Born in the U.S.A.

On the NPR program Fresh Air, I listened to this interview with Peter Ames Carlin, which explored the making of Born to Run–a fascinating glimpse of the creative process.  Before I listened to that interview, I read Peter McWhorter’s piece in The Washington Post (hopefully a gift essay to read throughout the ages) about the Springsteen playlist that he listened to seven times–that’s all of Born to Run, plus eleven songs:  “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” and “New York City Serenade.”

By listening to the playlist seven times, he gained a new appreciation for Springsteen, particularly the poetry of Springsteen.  He has some interesting insights about poetry and the 21st century person:  “My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poetry of the Playlist, for Reviewers and for Students

I was listening to Mimi Klavarti yesterday. I was cutting my hedge, she was talking on the excellent Poems We Made Along The Way podcast. She was talking about writing constraints, and how they can help to open up creativity rather than constrict it. Have a listen (and to the back catalogue – they’re all great). I’m not sure this is what she had in mind, but I’m going with a self-imposed time constraint. I hope to finish this in the time it takes me to roast a chicken for dinner.

Ok, the chicken is the oven. We have an hour and 20 mins…go.

First, a quick update. Flo and I went to Norfolk for our annual shindig in Worstead. I was asked to read a few poems from CtD one evening round a campfire. It was lovely to be asked. It reiterated how nerve-wracking it is to read to family and friends. Being a bit pissed and it being dark didn’t help. My reading also set three others off reading too, so here’s to next year’s official poetry circle at the Worstead Festival. […]

Earlier in the week I’d been made aware of a series of readings by a new poetry collective called Femina Culpa. The three ladies behind it were reading round London and one such reading included a reading at Bethlem Museum of the Mind which is just down the road from me.   My friend Ellie works at Bethlem, and I can’t not attend a poetry event that is that close to home.

All three readers read amazing tales and stories of women from the past and how they’ve suffered mental illness issues/made to suffer because of this. Check out Emma McKervey, Linda McKenna and Milena Williamson.

Mat Riches, A Chicken in the lighthouse

As artists, how do we want to spend the time and energy we have left? My energy is not what it was, I’ll be honest. And my time on this earth dwindles, as it does for us all. I’m at that surprising “experiencing ageism” time of life. I’m at that “being overlooked for the grants and awards and even minor recognitions” time of my writing life. It was probably going to happen anyway, but the 2020s hasn’t been kind (or generous) to many creatives, has it? I don’t even know what to advise myself these days so I certainly can’t dole out any advice to any of you. Keep trying? Stay weird, seems evergreen. I sort of want to just stop hustling or imagining what I could do as a side gig next. Is my time better spent writing obscure Canadian non-bestsellers and just staying home more? Probably? I feel like if I haven’t started a Substack by now, I missed the boat on that one, plus I don’t think I can write in Substack voice. I’m too small, too unimportant, too insignifcant (don’t worry, these have always been goals of mine) and too tired of that particular kind of hustle to garner any great subscription income.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Visual Literacy

What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.

In later years I studied art
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.

Ann E. Michael, Heaven, hell, & halos

I’ve also been questioning things like—should I even still be writing poetry, or is it time I give up on it and try something else? Should I spend my time doing paying work instead? It feels sort of futile to write poetry in today’s political environment—rampantly anti-academic, anti-art, anti-peace-tolerance-environmental-safety and pro guns, business and everything evil and destructive. It feels like no one is listening, even with much bigger platforms than mine. Maybe, I wonder, I should take up filmmaking. Maybe I should leave America for the adventure of exploring another country, another country, which might be more friendly to the arts (which seems like almost any country at this point). I could take up working at the local pumpkin farm (though heavy lifting would be out). I could sell makeup again. This may be a normal part of getting older. I can’t tell as I’ve never been this old before! Maybe things will make more sense when I can get more than an hour or so of sleep a night. I’ll check in with you next week.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Full Moons, Insomnia, Ends of Summer Gardens in Bloom, and Writing Questions at Midlife

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

— TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT 2 SCENE 5, LINES 139-41; MALVOLIO

In the month that I begin my Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, it feels right to use a quote from the man himself.

The truth is, I am a chronic self doubter. There is no fixing it. It is part of the strangeness of my brain. The only way of living with it is noticing it, embracing it, and doing the thing anyway.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a mentee about what was blocking their work, why they couldn’t get further on with their writing. They’d had a series of rejections, one after the other, and were doubling the validity of their work. This is something I recognise in myself. I go through periods of feeling like I might have fluked my entire career, that every time someone has validated my work it is because they either felt sorry for me or had made a mistake. Sometimes I imagine that the mistake they made is my fault, because I have given the impression that I am intelligent and competent and talented when I am very clearly not. It is like I have an entire other person inside me that is always telling me how shit I am, and I am never quite sure if they are telling the truth. […]

So far in my Folger Fellowship I have been deep diving the archives and attending seminars and meetings where I inevitably feel like a sore thumb. Most of my colleagues are American, a lot of them are academics. but Oh, the joy of hearing all the projects, the mental stimulation of being around people who are striving to explore so many different perspectives. It is the most creatively nourishing thing I have been involved with. the more I interact, the quieter the self doubt voice is, which tells me that this is a good fit. The confidence in the project is coming not from the validation of the achievement, but from the quality of the work; my work, other fellows work. It’s quite an astounding thing.

And so this is what I am carrying with me into August, and beyond. I will not fear an opportunity that may lead to greatness. I will not let the negative self talk put the fear in me. I will not let the fear [of] not deserving greatness, stop me from reaching for greatness.

Wendy Pratt, August Mantra: Be Not Afraid of Greatness

Hills recline in the distance
smudged by a hand working in pastel,
soft and slow the line where mountains meet violet 

and clouds lay back smoking fiery pipes.
Village, I am wordless.

At a nearby campsite, a grill is about to be lit,
about to blister some sausage.  Blister until
twigs catch, vines chatter in the flames
like gossips with nothing on their minds.

Jill Pearlman, Before the Fire, Dusk

I’m intrigued by this new collection, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025), a poetry title that provides a complexity of literary response to “the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health,” and the precarity through which we currently live. “whereupon I join Lear and his Fool / on the blasted heath,” writes London, Ontario-based writer and speaker Jennifer Wenn, in the poem “Fire and Flood,” “and while the erstwhile king howls / at the gale and deluge I cower, / uselessly, / looking for a sign, [.]” There are multiple pieces echoing Wenn’s particular sentiment, seeking a sign or marker of hope through the gloom, with other pieces that rage their appropriate rage through the storm, or even a spiraling into a dark swirl of hopelessness. As Toronto-based poet,editor and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi begins the poem “Movement XVI”: “that dark resignation to loss. how long to run after joy and just / find construction cones scattered. I take out the trash and who / knows maybe I’m resistant to pesticide. some relief comes in / the form of needles. I’m defeated by numbers. It simply won’t / happen.”” Sometimes the only way to respond to a crisis is to write through it, providing a clarity of thought and potential action, and this collection, put together as the result of a public call, provides an assemblage of first-person lyric narratives by some two dozen Canadian poets that shake to the roots of mental health and climate concern, providing both observational comfort and clarity to their sharpness. The collection includes contributions by Brandon Wint, Jennifer Wenn, Conal Smiley, Concetta Principe, Dominik Parisien, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammmadi, Kathryn Mockler, Tara McGowan-Ross, D.A. Lockhart, Grace Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Aaron Kreuter, gregor Y kennedy, Maryam Gowralli, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Sydney Hegele, Karen Houle, Nina Jane Drystek, AJ Dolman, Conyer Clayton and Gary Barwin. There’s a precarity to these lyrics, these lines, one that writes directly into crisis […]

rob mclennan, SPEECH DRIES HERE ON THE TONGUE: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health, eds. Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva and Amanda Shankland

The Dark, Howie Good, illustrations by Marcel Herms, Sacred Parasite, 2025, ISBN: 978-3-910822-11-5, ISBN: 978-3-910822-13-9, €20.00 […]

I’m a cancer survivor – for now, anyway.
Every three months, I must have blood drawn,
and my chest scanned, to determine if any

cancer cells have migrated, nomads in search
of grass and water.
(from ‘The C Word’)

These lines from somewhere near the middle of Howie Good’s The Dark serve as a keystone to the set of poems in verse and prose that surround them, a deep personal darkness. As the closing lines of the opening poem, ‘Subterranean Cancer Blues’ (with a hat-tip to Bob Dylan) spells out, the cancer patient acquires ‘the kind of knowledge that now/holds my eyes open to the dark.’

But the dark is not simply personal, or tied to present circumstances, as is seen in poems like ‘Elon Musk at Auschwitz’, in which the tech gobshite claims a kind of faux Jewishness, ‘Unholy Land’, whose title speaks for itself, or this:

Night of the Following Day

The person I went to sleep as wasn’t the same person I woke up as, half-drowned in sweat after traveling on motherless roads all night, seeing plants and animals bombed into submission, families forced to dig their own graves at gunpoint, tears evaporate on contact with the air, and only for me to arrive some six hours later back where I started but feeling barely present, like I was still miles and miles away from the redwing blackbird on the black branch.

For a poet living through personal and global extremes, the dark is not a metaphor, it’s a simple fact: ‘You stare into the dark for just so long before the dark begins staring back.’ It’s impossible in a short review  to do justice to how Good receives that stare in these extraordinary short texts. You just have to read them.

Billy Mills, Six for the Pocket: A Small Pamphlets Review

Alice M. Fay (p. 1912-24, etc.), was a poet and illustrator from New York. She published her first book of poetry The Realm of Fancy: Poems & Pictures in 1912, and was featured in numerous ‘little magazines’ of the 1920s, including Rhythmus (edited by Oscar Williams) and Pegasus (edited by W.H. Lench). Other than this, little is known of her life.

into air—
the scent of a violet sings!

Both Fay’s drawings and verse are comprised of accomplished line-work and subtle, suggestive forms, drawn from the ephemerality of the natural world. ‘Where’, for instance, is a delicate micro-treatise on poetics, in which the scent of flowers and vanishing smoke are compared to the songs of the singer: i.e. the poetry of the world is to be found in the invisible and ephemeral, rather than the visible and permanent. Echoing this, in ‘Near Crete’ the sound of the waves become poet: “whispering tales… of ships that come no more.” Again the image arrives and then disappears. Poetry: always vanishing.

serene as the mountains—
thy love

Fay’s work also has feminist and queer undertones. In ‘Beyond’, for instance, Fay seeks a world “untenanted by men,” i.e. beyond patriarchy: “beyond the veil of future’s mystery.” In ‘All This Is Thy Love To Me’ Fay appears to be addressing another woman, and their “love” is described in terms that would have dominantly been read as “feminine” at that time (fair, calm, mysterious, angelic). Furthermore, as neither poet nor lover have textually definite genders, the subject-positions of the poem are left open to suggestion, able to be occupied by readers of any gender and sexuality.

Dick Whyte, Alice M. Fay – 5 Short Poems (1912-24)

I much admired Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, Faber, published earlier this year. As in several of Pascale Petit’s collections, this contains work which very skilfully, and with a marvellous ear for musical cadence , transforms the pain of sexual abuse into beautiful poetry. Each of the 21 poems in the first section, Still Lifes, responds to a different still life painting by painters from the 1600s onwards to Bonnard. The second part, a response to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ felt less successful, as it employs Seventeenth Century language in a manner verging on parody. The third section contains 22 poems after types of crystals and gemstones, as refracted through Rimbaud’s Illuminations as translated by Wyatt Mason, and are, for me, the most successful in the book, because the prose-poem form allows Scott to give fuller vent to his gift for articulating emotion through vivid and sensuous imagery and language, as in this extract from ‘Emerald’:

    The field is a body. Wild grass rippling over breasts and muscles, the jut of a hipbone. Some of the grass is trampled down into mud like a battlefield – screams catch the air. Some of the grass is spread over little hillocks like shallow graves. Some of the grass is cut into a bit, desire lines and goat paths, leading to all the places you ever dreamed of going but didn’t.

As I discovered from listening to his interview with Peter Kenny in Series 5, Episode 10 of the ever-excellent Planet Poetry podcast, here, Scott talks very thoughtfully and eloquently about his craft.

I’ve also been knee-deep in the poems of Wisława Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and collected in Map, Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2015, for the poetry book club I’m part of. My jury is still out thus far, but then it’s a heftily daunting tome.

Matthew Paul, July reading

“Hexentanz” (literally ‘witches’ dance’) has an epigraph from Mary Wigman a dancer in 1926, “But, after all, isn’t a bit of witch hidden in every female?”

“To be inside language – the body as prayer,
as incantation, a strike of lightning.
To be earthed and barefoot
to be creature; muscle and cells.
To fly: to know space beneath you.

And who needs music when you have breath,
when you are the daughter to the Mother of Sighs?”

Dancing has often been linked to sinful behaviour and the devil. Here it’s a prayer to understand the power of a woman’s body, to inhabit it free from society’s rules and regulations. Here, dancing is both a connection to earth and an ability to fly and it doesn’t even require music. Breathing has a rhythm, that’s all that’s needed. […]

Helen Ivory in “Constructing a Witch” explores the witch archetype and how woman, particularly those who don’t conform to society’s expectations, are cast as inferior, and pushed to society’s edges. An exploration that includes how patriarchal structures ignore the needs of women, left in ignorance about their own bodies because menstruation and menopause make them “too difficult” for medicine to study.

Emma Lee, “Constructing a Witch” Helen Ivory (Bloodaxe) – book review

The shortlist for the eco-poetry/nature poetry Laurel Prize 2025 has just been announced. The finalists – judged this year by the poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair), Daljit Nagra, and the former leader & co-leader, Green Party of England and Wales Caroline Lucas – are (in alphabetical order):

Judith Beveridge Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing)
JR Carpenter Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books)Carol Watts
Eliza O’Toole A Cranic of Ordinaries (Shearsman Books)
Katrina Porteous Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books)
Carol Watts Mimic Pond (Shearsman Books)

[…]

The premise of Eliza O’Toole’s superb debut collection, A Cranic of Ordinaries, is unpromising: a year’s cycle of diaristic pieces in which the poet walks her dog through the Stour valley. But the result is a sublime form of ecopoetry which is visionary, yet creaturely and incarnate, and to achieve this O’Toole channels two great nineteenth century writers. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ joys in the things of Nature which are always ‘here and but the beholder / Wanting’. When self and natural world do communicate, Hopkins named that flash of true relationship ‘instress’.  O’Toole’s ‘Stour Owls’ records just such a moment, listening to the calls of a female tawny owl, the ‘slight pin-thin / hoot’ of the male, followed by a tense silence: ‘then the low slow of the barn owl as the / white slide of her glide brushes the air we / both hold & then breathe’ (12).

O’Toole also adopts Emerson’s idea of the ‘transparent eyeball’, seeing all, yet being itself ‘nothing’. The excision of the self’s perspective is systematically pursued. Seldom is the landscape ‘seen’ but is rather subject to plain statement: ‘It was a machine-gun of a morning’ (11), ‘a vixen-piss of a morning’ (13), ‘a muck spread of a morning’ (34). O’Toole has an extraordinarily observant eye, but this repeated trope counters any taint of the constructed picturesque, the human-centring of vanishing points and perspective. The observer grows ‘part or parcel’ of the world. Such a vision makes demands on language because in truth, ‘It is necessary / to write what cannot be written’ (94), and this yields one of the most exciting aspects of this collection as the poet deploys varieties of plain-speaking, scientific, ancient, and esoteric vocabularies as well as a Hopkinsesque ‘unruly syntax’. She describes ‘young buds. Just starting from / the line of life, phloem sap climbing, / a shoot apical meristem and post / zygotic. It was bud-set’ (26).

Martyn Crucefix, Laurel Prize Shortlist 2025 – My Favourite Is….!

The promise was
graceful, writing a book made up of leaves
(birch, catalpa, magnolia, maple);
made up of leaves and love and hands and words
choked out in last breaths exhaled in dark nights,
made up of whispers woven together
from the humid tenderness of two dear
embodied beings tangling their breath.

PF Anderson, Once upon a time there was a promise

The encouragement to Tell It Slant! has become popular among many CW lecturers and workshop leaders over the last few years, seemingly as a natural extension of the old favourite, Show, Don’t Tell!, but what does it actually mean?

Well, it refers to an approach to writing that veers away from dealing with stuff head-on. Its inherent attraction lies in the opportunity it provides for the poet to explore new perspectives and fresh takes on seemingly tired subjects by coming at them via unusual angles, often omitting bits that would be obvious if treated directly, thus intriguing and challenging the reader. As such, its use is widely seen to be lending the poem extra gravitas and depth.

However, there are also consequent risks in its deployment. One is the accusation that the poet is being wilfully obtuse, frustrating the reader, playing a pointless game by holding back information, the absence of which creates the false impression of extra layers to the poem that actually don’t exist. And another is its tempting propensity for enabling emotional shortcuts that skirt round the potential core of the poem.

From my perspective, Tell It Slant! is useful as a weapon in a creative armoury. However, its overuse in contemporary poetry as an all-encompassing method leads poets down a blind alley, causing many poems to fizzle out before they can take their reader on a journey. And for my money, that journey is where poetic truth is found.

Matthew Stewart, Telling It Slant

I have experienced some great times in the company of poets. Mostly, poets on their own, having a drink or a chat. Obviously, there is joy in experiencing a ‘good’ reading or book launch.

I am glad for anyone who has ‘a community’, whether this consists of one other weirdo who writes poems, or a group who gather regularly to do something communal, or people who move in circles where they feel supported and connected and perhaps mutually celebrated and facilitated.

I don’t feel particularly connected myself, but never set out to be, and am not sure I want or need to be, and it has always been a ‘bonus’ rather than a central aspect of my writing and publishing and (occasional) teaching that their are individuals whom I know and like who do the same thing, and I hope they are well and flourishing ‘out there’ somewhere. […]

Why do people communicate online as if I am privy to backstories and assumptions about themselves and others that I have no knowledge of? I believe issues and people are complex, but encounter anger and simplicity all the time on the internet, and it leaves me none the wiser. Where is the poetry in this? […]

What if, when I check out substack etc, I find there are poets and publishers attacking poets and publishers? What if there are personal battles being conducted online that are disturbing and polarising, and watching them unfold might become as addictive an unproductive as watching car crashes, or as unfulfilling and spiritually nourishing as listening to gossip?

Roy Marshall, ‘Poetry is about community.’

Many magazines these days offer writers a chance to get feedback on their submitted work for an additional cost. The cost typically ranges from $25- $40. When I posted my series about scammy lit mags, almost all of them had one thing in common: They offered feedback to writers who paid for it. However, many reputable magazines offer this option too. So, should you go for it? If so, whom should you trust?

Firstly, I want to talk about why this is happening, a trend that seems to be recent, as I do not recall so many journals offering this option ten or more years ago. Costs of running a lit mag, as we all know, can be high. Many editors seem to be taking on editing/consulting work as a way to offset those rising fees.

It also seems to be a response to a workforce that is ever more precarious. Few and far between are the stable academic jobs for writers. Meanwhile the professional competition is stiffer than ever. Writers don’t just have MFAs; they have PhDs. There are more people seeking careers related to writing, and fewer secure opportunities, than ever before.

So we hustle. Any writer/editor who does not have a full-time job is likely making a living from piecing together a variety of income streams. Teaching. Consulting. Website development. Copywriting. Editing. And so on. Very few lit mag editors are able to make their living solely as magazine editors.

I provide this bit of context because when I first began to consider this trend of editors offering feedback, it got me worried. How can they possibly have time to read submissions, I wondered, if they’re also consulting on particular submissions in great detail? Why would editors think they are the ones who know what’s best for a particular work and a particular writer? Shouldn’t their focus be on their magazines?

Then I took a step back and looked at the larger picture. No, I realized. Sadly, the majority of editors cannot afford to be solely focused on their magazines because that work does not pay. With that in mind, I came around to viewing these additional editorial offerings as a good thing. The workforce for writers is grinding indeed (and most lit mag editors are also writers.) Anything anyone can do to honestly and ethically sustain oneself in this environment is commendable.

Becky Tuch, Q: Should you pay for editorial feedback from lit mag editors?

A lavish and wonderful celebration of connections between mathematics and the arts is the annual international BRIDGES, Mathematics and the Arts Conference.  This year’s conference took place last month (July, 2025 in Eindhoven, Netherlands) and one of its special events was a poetry reading.  

Information about the poets and sample poems are available here at the website of Sarah Glaz (mathematician-poet and coordinator of the BRIDGES readings).  Below I have included one of these very special poems:

View no Fiery Night        by Marian Christie 

No
one
went to   
the tower
to vie with the foe.
Fretting, worn, we rove in night fog ––
the ring, the theft, the vow forgotten. Hovering high
over the town, the frightening wyvern, whirr of her winging interwoven with fire.

First published in Christie’s collection Sky, Earth, Other (Penteract Press, 2024).  Note that this is a Fibonacci poem — with the syllable counts for the lines following the Fibonacci numbers.  ALSO, each line is formed from letters found in the English words for the Fibonacci numbers up to the line count — one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one; Christie uses the term “sequential lipogram” to describe this pattern.

For lots more wonderful stuff by Marian Christie, you may visit her blog, Poetry and Mathematics. 

JoAnne Growney, Celebrating Poetry at 2025 BRIDGES Conference

Of course, it is still summer. Another month or more of summer. Please, let us make no mistake about that! But why is it that as soon as the calendar turns a page over to August, the sense of new socks and homemade soup come back to the front in my mind.

But I’m not there yet. There are still manuscripts to edit, a garden to care for, and a 15th Anniversary Poets on the Coast to finish planning. And what a POTC it will be!

Kelli Russell Agodon and I began this retreat for women poets because we felt that we could create a poetry community based on generosity and abundance —of writing prompts, of snacks, and poetry gifts. Fifteen years later, it looks like we were right. Women who began committing to their writing, to themselves, have gone on to publish their first books, earn MFA’s, become poet laureates, and even win a National Book Award. Sure, these capable women might not have “needed” Poets on the Coast to begin their journeys, but I like to think we helped at least in small measure.

Susan Rich, What I Did (Am Doing) On My Summer Vacation

I feel like every year at this point in the summer, I start thinking about fall and musing endlessly about how much I am going to get done. It’s harder this year to feel hopeful and productive in a nation under siege by idiots, but I am trying to hang in there, writing silly little poems that feel like they can save my soul a little and grinding at the grind that keeps the gears rolling. 

Mostly, I am pushing through toward a little trip up to Wisconsin end of this week. We’re visiting family for a day up at the campgrond where my grandmother used to keep her RV, the site of most of my childhood summer memories. I have been back occasionally since (my aunt & uncle had their place parked there for decades, and now so do my older cousins on my dad’s side) but haven’t really been in about a decade. The beach nearby we used to go to is gone now and replaced by a boat launch, but the air, last time we were there, was much the same. I could almost smell the Coppertone and the rubber of pink innertubes. 

This week has bought some rejections and at least once acceptance, plus a new poem in Fantastic Other from winged. I am finding, now that I am submitting work more regularly, that my rejection/acceptance rate is still about the same. 4:12, so about 1/3, which isn’t terrible, but has remained pretty consistent from other times when I was submitting a lot of work into the wilds (though it waxes and wanes depending on the competitiveness and/or age of the journal (I do like submitting to brand new publications, or at least new to me, so that rate is sometimes a little higher.) 

Right now, I am sending out a mix of different projects, including the Iphigenia poems as I compile them into the book, winged, another little oceanic series, some early pieces from the midnight garden, plus fragments from the sci-fi-ish series I finished up earlier this year.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/11/2025

I saw her smile.
Sitting alone on a green park bench.

As if she was dreaming a happy poem.
(But what is that?)
Or had found the right words for something
more desperate, more evil, more macabre.
Or had remembered a woolly line from a poem that
was fully formed in the middle of the night
but had vanished with its commas before the sun.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The poem at 16:00 on a random Thursday

A trip to Manchester for Liz Gibson’s book launch resulted in me receiving a new description of my hair. Wait for it… “anti-gravity hair”. A chance encounter whilst queuing for tea and cake meant a man took the opportunity to tell me he liked my anti-gravity hair. I am adding that description to “You always have really surprised hair,” and they both make me chuckle.

The book launch was a delight from start to finish. I have always loved liz’s poetry and to have a whole collection to enjoy is celebratory. It was wonderful to hear them read by the author and I love the additional immersion in words this brings. The evening included guest readers and an interview with the artist who designed the cover for ‘A Love the Weight of An Animal’. A perfect way to launch this well written collection.

I am the ‘Silver Branch’ featured writer this month for Black Bough so I thought I would share a poem from the ones celebrated there…

Sue Finch – August 2025 | Mysite

It’s a prose poem to celebrate the fact I love prose poems and that Kath recently exclaimed, “You mean there are poets who write whole books of prose poems?” 

GOING TO THE CAVES

I am in a long queue for the cave tour. Stalagmites and stalactites are promised. I fear tightness, and more than that, being trapped. The guide tells us that we will see crystals the like of which we’ve never seen before. Then he warns us that there are times when it smells like multi-storey car park stairwells and sometimes all the torches fail. When I look at him, he reaches into his pocket. Here, he says, as if reading my mind, if you can’t get out, take one of these. He offers me a circular, chalky-white tablet which I accept as he nods. It will kill you painlessly, almost instantly. I follow him, wondering if I will swallow the pill.

Sue Finch, EVENING SUN

Why do I keep scrolling when it so often leaves me feeling disheartened or disgusted or in despair?

Because in the scroll I keep discovering new voices saying things I want and need to hear. Because that’s how I often see words from writers who always give me comfort. Because through it I have found kindred spirits in places geographically far from me, and those connections matter and count. (Physical proximity does not guarantee honesty or transparency or an ability to know who someone is. Believe me on that one.) Because it is often in disembodied digital spaces that I find knowledge and understanding I might not acquire through print books or my IRL relationships and activities. Because our online world is its own kind of real. The idea of cutting myself entirely off from it feels like the equivalent of fantasizing about living off-grid in a secluded forest cabin: Sounds kinda dreamy, but I know that I would not last a winter in such a place. Because inside the cacophony of the trivial, the mundane, the hucksterish, the phony, the ridiculous, and the fear-mongering voices, there are others telling truths that build a fire in the cold.

In response to one of my questions, a writer/friend tells me: “Everything feels fluid right now. And a bit unreal. We can just check in on the voices that feel authentic and know that we’re OK.”

Another offers: “I am a big believer in retreat. Sometimes it’s exactly what we need.” She then points me to Andrea Gibson’s “Instead of Depression,” and tears rise at, “Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go/to heal…”

Another (or maybe one of these, it is easy to get lost in the bread crumb trails) points me to Elizabeth Kleinfeld, whose recent words in “Grieving My Beautiful Before” knocked the wind out of me:

The grief I felt for my old life hit me. I kind of put off grieving for it by pretending I was going to get back to it, but now that I’m practicing radical acceptance, I realize I can’t get back to it. I can only build a great new life, which leaves me free to grieve that old life. It is knocking the wind out of me.

I trust these voices.

(I still have trust. I refuse to lose trust. That’s a choice I’m making.) […]

Don’t we all, like Whitman, contain multitudes? Aren’t we all sometimes the person running the stop sign and sometimes the person getting hit and sometimes the person recording from the sidewalk and sometimes the person stopping to call 911? Aren’t we all sometimes the tide rushing in and sometimes the waves ebbing in retreat and sometimes the swimmer not waving but drowning and sometimes the person floating on their back, letting the water hold them, because they need a reprieve from kicking?

Rita Ott Ramstad, Letting the salty flood wash over me

seagulls laughing all day long
two smooth stones in my pocket

Kati Mohr, A Touch of Teal, No, Blue

This week: singing bones, messages in bottles, the wind phone, the dark mist of America, and much more. Enjoy.

There was a nest and then there was chirping and then Netanyahu was born from a little blue egg. His beak like an open pocket, a broken fortune cookie opened to the sky and his parents fed him. He had no feathers and then his feathers grew and soon he flapped his uncertain wings and then he was ready. He fell from the nest onto a nearby branch and within ten minutes he had invaded. What could he do? This is the way of the world.

Feathers fell from the sky the colour of ash. The sky filled with smoke the colour of ash. Children, aid workers, women, the old, medics, men, libraries, hospitals, underground tunnels, journalists and schools. What could he do? This is the way of the world.

Gary Barwin, Netanyahu was born from a little blue egg.

At one of our local used book stores, I found a copy of William Gass’ 1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Gass writes in a style one might term prolix; but if you are like me and sometimes appreciate lists, wordplay, allusions, lengthy sentences, and fine distinctions in your sentences–as well as humor–while exploring the limits and the stretches of words and language, this book-length essay on the word/concept/color/iconography/sexual innuendo/moody attitude and conflicting meanings of the word blue might appeal. I’ve been feeling a bit on the blue side lately, hence my attraction to the book (though I do like Gass as a writer, as long as I don’t have to read too much of him at one time). And guess [what]? It cheered me! […]

Granted, my feeling blue has a different tone from other uses of the word: blue postcards, sexual meanings of blue–I’m reminded of the movie “I Am Curious (Blue)” which was considered racy and given an X rating when I was a kid, though the blue in that title referred to the Swedish flag, apparently. My blue is the blue of songs like “Baby’s in Black” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album. Or just that classic music form, the blues.

Ann E Michael, Blue

A few years ago, a mass emergence saw clouds of butterflies travelling up the Thames. Many stopped off at the National Theatre roof gardens which opened in 2018. I was amazed to find out that painted ladies are some of the most well-travelled creatures in the world, capable of migrating across multiple continents over several generations. These fragile-seeming insects are incredibly resilient, even adapting to our warming climate by following the changing seasons. […]

Their lives are a constant journey
thousands of miles over their generations, compassing

continents, strong-flying, paper-thin wings catching aair currents
undeterred while we who see ourselves as astride

the globe, no longer know who we are
or how to find our way in the world

Ruth Lexton, Small wonder

I’ve been thinking about the question “What do you want” in conjunction with Marcus Aurelius’s lines about how we have it within our power every moment to be reverently content. And when I boil it down, when I really think about how my daily life happens to be, then mainly, I can say every day: I am reverently content. I can die tomorrow knowing that I’ve written most of the books I want to write. I’ve taken some beautiful photographs. Most importantly, my daughter is beautiful and my husband is beautiful and they are both making beautiful things. I get to help people at the library many times a week. Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever not precarious. And I want more. More. More tries at all of the above. And still I can be reverently content. I can call myself beloved.

Shawna Lemay, Blessings and Praise and What Do You Want From Life?

Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong
MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS

One of the things that has kept me extremely busy this month is co-organising the Manchester Writing School Summer Festival, alongside some of my colleagues at the Writing School. This year the festival took place over four days – two of which were online and two in person. All of the sessions were taught in-house by our team of amazing writers at Manchester Metropolitan University.

One of the events was an in-conversation event with Professor Michael Symmons Roberts and I was lucky enough to get the job of hosting this. As the book has not long been published, I did a speed read over the weekend before hosting the event, and since then have re-read it at a much more leisurely pace!

Michael sets out to explore his lifelong fascination with Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and this is one of the threads that runs through the book. He delves into the mythology that’s told about the premiere of this piece – that it was first performed in a prisoner of war camp in 1941 to other prisoners, and the real story behind the myth. This is just one thread though – and woven within what you might call this musicological writing are other threads – there is a thread here about grief as the writer comes to terms with the death of his parents, a thread about place, and about how poems are written, a thread about doubt and faith. All of these threads are woven together in what I would call a beautiful braided lyric essay – except there is another facet to this. Each chapter uses as its title the name of a movement from “Quartet for the End of Time” – in lyric essay terms, this could be called a hermit crab lyric essay – so perhaps what this book is, is a cross between the two.

We talked a little bit about artists who create what they create despite what is going on around them and cautiously wondered whether Messiaen was one of those – despite the mythology of Quartet for the End of Time being so closely associated with the prisoner of war camp, a lot of the music was composed elsewhere. We hear the piece through the spectre of war, but perhaps he would have written the same piece if he was in Paris, though that of course is something we won’t ever know.

We also talked about artists who are affected creatively by social, political and personal events. Michael talked a little bit about the book he’d set out to write compared to the book he ended up with, and how Covid and lockdown and the death of his parents changed not just what he was writing, but how he was writing. I wonder now if the fragmentary nature of the lyric essay, and the shell of the hermit crab felt like a kind of protection when dealing with this material.

It is a wonderful book and I would highly recommend if you’re interested in how to combine poetry and prose, global and personal history, biography and autobiography.

Kim Moore, May/June Reading

I fell out of love with writing about two years ago. I began to despise my work, dislike the circus of trying to be heard, and feel I’d lost the sound of my own voice. I also lost my work as a copywriter including being ghosted by my most enduring client (why has this become a thing) which was really disheartening and odd. My dad’s death meant I experienced another shift in my familial role, and take on responsibility for my mum. I began to collapse under the weight of myself.

I’ve spent the last couple of months making my garden, nurturing seeds, experiment with yet another way to grow tomatoes, growing aubergines and slight obscene courgettes and finally feeling as though I can achieve something. It has been the first thing I think of when I wake and a place of calm when the outside world is overwhelming. A privilege that is out of reach for so many. My planner lay empty for the first time in many years – I took time out without really realising it and now I’m ready to respond to the desire to write and share. Courage has returned. […]

I’ve also noticed ideas for poems beginning to re-emerge. I have so many ideas for new books I’m not sure where to go next – my goal for next week is to try and pin one down. We’ll see. I may spend my time with the roses instead.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Where I’ve been and where I’m going

[Michael] Vince’s syntax and metre don’t call attention to themselves but it’s through their subtle and continuous work that we come to share his vision. Throughout the book, most poems are written in short lines and long sentences. The poet uses this combination to achieve a double effect. The continuity of the sentences makes us feel the interrelatedness of the poems’ details and creates suspense as to what will come next. At the same time, by breaking the flow with line endings Vince frames individual details and emphasises words in a way that makes them shine out distinctly, not becoming subsumed within the larger movement. Complementing each other, these effects of suspense as to what will come and framing when it does give each detail a sense of emphasis.  ‘Lamb’, for example, begins

In an island village, high up,
half abandoned, where goats perch
among ruined houses, we walk
along a winding street, watched by
suspicious cats, greeted by
the occasional dog acquainted
with tourists. On a doorstep
a young woman sits with her pet
seated beside her, a lamb
with a lead and collar.

How much more circumstantial could writing be? But a striking part of the total effect is how unlocalized the experience is. We never learn who’s walking with the poet or which island they’re on, let alone which village they’re in. And so without losing their particularity the scenes and qualities Vince describes take on archetypal resonance and evocativeness, whether they be physical things like mountain, sea and sky, bread, animals or people; abstract but specifically named concepts like generosity, which is beautifully and playfully dramatized in the poem of that name; or still more abstract ideas tacitly suggested by the arc of the poem as a whole, as ‘Lamb’ suggests the ambiguity of our relation to the animal world by reminding us that the eating of lamb is a ritual of the Greek Easter.

Edmund Prestwich, Legwork by Michael Vince

夏野原ジュラ紀の骨が歌ってる　西池冬扇

natsu-nohara juraki no hone ga utatteru

            summer field

            the Jurassic bones

            singing

                                                Tōsen Nishiike

from Gendai Haiku, #718, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 1, 2025)

There are many portals into “the world of over-mind consciousness” and we must each find our own. Echoing Whitman’s insistence that “no one can acquire for another… grow for another” and Nietzsche’s admonition that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” H.D. writes:

My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.

But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.

All it takes to recreate the old stale world, she insists, are just a few creative kindreds who entwine their vision:

Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought.

Two or three people gathered together in the name of truth, beauty, over-mind consciousness could bring the whole force of this power back into the world.

Couple H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision with Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing and Iris Murdoch — whose over-mind was deeply kindred to H.D.’s — on how to see more clearly and love more purely, then revisit Lewis Thomas’s magnificent living metaphor for unselfing drawn from the enchanted symbiosis of a jellyfish and a sea slug.

Maria Popova, Vision of the Womb and Vision of the Brain: H.D. on the Two Kinds of Seeing and the Key to Over-mind Consciousness

This, too, is the labor of poetry: to describe what feels incommunicable, and to imagine a world in which hope and vision are communicated. We of the 21st century are fluent in the art of the take-down but often afraid to express what we value or dream. “Perhaps” is my favorite country, the terrain of my fidelities, and the space from which I extend this invitation made possible by the brilliant Maya Popa — [Click through to view Zoom invitation]

In the darker moments of the 20th century, writers congregated around a notion conveyed in correspondence, lectures, and poetry—namely, the Flaschenpost, or “message in bottle,” described by Paul Celan via Osip Mandelstam, who imagined the poet as “the shipwrecked sailor who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment,” leaving the poem as a “testament of the deceased” that would find “its secret addressee.” This workshop will explore poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Rilke. Poets will be invited to develop their own Flaschenpost.

Alina Stefanescu, 10 tickets.

That little girl who scribbled nonsense in notebooks would be so surprised at the writer I am now and it makes my chest ache. For her, it was a just a tool to spend her days in a dreamlike state. And maybe it still is for me as an adult. And yet, when I am struggling, it helps me feel less adrift. Less apocalyptic (even if I am writing about the apocalypse.) I also think about how long it’s been getting even here, how much I invested in rather unimportant and frivolous endeavors. Struggling with the feeling that writing, especially poetry, seems to be foolish and self-indulgent in a world that presents new and very real horrors every day. Though, admittedly, even the jaded 14 year old who wrote poems in her dairy would be gobsmacked that it became a way of life and existing in the world she never would have imagined.

Kristy Bowen, poetry and past selves

Last week Henry Oliver posted Arnold Bennett’s 10-step plan for learning to appreciate poetry, which starts with reading Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Poetry in General’ twice, then some of the Bible, then Hazlitt again, and only then some Wordsworth. Much as I like Hazlitt (not to mention Wordsworth and Isaiah), this seems utterly insane to me. If you want to learn to read poetry, start with verse written for beginners, and most burnished by use. Luckily, we already have a whole vast library of poems of just this kind, in nursery rhymes, ballads and poems for children. You could do a lot worse than revisiting, to begin with, Robert Louis Stevenson or ‘À la claire fontaine’ [by Robert Desnos].

Victoria Moul, Edwin Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Desnos

The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM) offers delightful and broad-ranging connections between mathematics and the arts.  An article that I discovered recently considers ways to use poetry in mathematics classes.  Found in the July 2023 issue, “Teaching Mathematics with Poetry: Some Activities,”  by Alexis E. Langellier (an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Moraine Valley Community College and a graduate teaching assistant at graduate student in Mathematical Sciences at Northern Illinois University).  Working toward a degree in Computer Science, Langellier has this intent:  My goal is to get more women in STEM.

Langellier introduces her article with these words:

During the summer of 2021, I experimented with a new way of getting children excited about mathematics: math poetry. ”Math” can be a trigger word for some children and many adults. I wanted to find a way to make learning math fun — without the students knowing they’re doing math. In this paper I describe some activities I used with students ranging from grades K-12 to the college level and share several poem examples, from students in grades two through eight.

JoAnne Growney, Teaching Math with Poetry — Some Activities

comet viewing
as light as a feather
my thoughts of you

Jim Young [no title]

I’m writing to you as a person without words. Or, rather, as a person without the right words—the ones that might somehow say the thing. Maybe, like me, you don’t know how to wrap your head around the world right now, let alone find the language. Maybe, like me, you feel more than a little scrambled.

“The world is fifty percent terrible” feels like a very conservative estimate today. With so much cruelty and greed on display, I can hardly believe we’re still checking email, going grocery shopping, and watering our plants—business as usual. And yet, as soon as I’m ready to scream into a pillow, my son gives me a hug out of nowhere, or I look up in awe at the clouds, or I read a message from someone I love.

How not to feel scrambled? There is so much to marvel at and be grateful for, and so much to grieve and rage against. I keep coming back to Rilke’s “beauty and terror.” It’s not beauty or terror, it’s and. We get both, and I don’t know what to do except acknowledge both—call them out, loud and clear, when I see them.

I have seen plenty of terrible this week. So have you. I have seen cruelty and greed beyond comprehension. I have also seen and felt love, gratitude, generosity—and I hope you have, too. We need the beauty if we’re going to keep fighting the terror, and we have to keep fighting. What choice do we have?

I don’t have the right words, but I’ve been turning to poems to find them. That’s where I always turn. I’ve been reading this W.S. Merwin poem daily, a kind of secular prayer. Maybe you could use it, too.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

It is July 2^nd, and I’m thinking only about my dad. And, of course, the death of democracy. Maybe there’s no room at this time for more grief.

Over (My Dead Body)

Where will they find the body?
They hardly knew the mind.
Beach motel, a scenic overlook,
fluffy rubble of a fallen sky?
Or god forbid a hospital,
eyebrows gone and metastatic
rage stifled by the drip drip drip.
Will I be clutching pills or pearls
of wisdom, photographs, a gun,
my chest, batman mask pulled down
B carved in my chest?
Will they find me slumped
across this poem, cobwebs
from my fingertips to pen
smell of long-extinguished
fire, sound of curtains flapping

Leslie Fuquinay MIller, Dead to Me

My friend of about eight years, artist Philippa Sutherland, died last month. She’d been ill for some time and I’d been visiting her weekly for a year. We weren’t close friends, and Philippa had many friends from different places, particularly Ireland where she lived for many years, but we found lots to talk about, books, films, art, and music, just some of Philippa’s interests. She was fiercely bright and well-informed, right until the end. […]

When I was working on my poetry collection What Are You After? (Nine Arches Press, 2018) I met with Philippa to discuss a possible cover. In the end, after discussions with my editor Jane, we decided on an image by a different artist (my friend Mary Petrovska) but Philippa gifted me her painting and it’s been on my sitting room wall ever since. Philippa especially loved it when I told her my daughter, a teenager at the time, really liked the painting. Philippa was always interested to hear about my two children. She’d been an art tutor for many years and always cared about young people. She never seemed old and was one of those consistently young at heart and in spirit people.

Josephine Corcoran, Philippa Sutherland

It’s a year ago today that my brother died. If grief is love with nowhere to go, the wind phone can be a place for those feelings to land, even momentarily.

The initiative was started in Japan by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in Otsuchi Prefecture in 2010. Sasaki said: ‘Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.’ Hence the name Kaze no denwa’ – phone of the wind. The disconnected old-style rotary telephone allowed him to deal with grief after his cousin’s death of cancer.

Sasaki: ‘When your heart is filled with grief or some kind of burden, you aren’t in tune with your senses. You’re closed off like curtains have been pulled around you. After you empty your heart a little bit, you might be able to hear some birds singing again.’

The following year close to 20,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tsunami. In Tokohu 10% of the population died. Sasaki allowed local people to use the wind phone. Over 30,000 people have made the journey to this telephone since, and wind phones have been set up in other countries. The wind phone also provided inspiration for films and novels.

Amy Dawson (USA) lost her daughter Emily to terminal illness in 2020. She learned about wind phones and now devotes much of her time to maintaining a listing of wind phones worldwide, providing advice and resources. The current total is just over 400. Not all calls are to a deceased. People make calls about other losses. Go to her website for more information.

Fokkina McDonnell, Wind phone

It might be fair to say that animals do not realize that they must die. They know that they can and as the process begins, they know that they will. The ill cat seeks solitude under the bed. An elephant matriarch trumpets to the rest of the herd possibly to indicate that one of their own is dying. It is because of death and other circumstances that a group of elephants is called a memory. Death makes room for more life. Death promotes evolution. Because of death, this buzzing, feathered handful of life graces my morning.

So long ago (9,205,128 of my lifetimes ago), during the Carboniferous period, an abundance of plants and trees arose in a warm, tropical climate. However, there were not enough decomposers to break down the vast amount of vegetation—specifically the lignin (what gives plants their woodiness and structure). This led to a huge abundance of vegetation that would not rot. The wood piled up and up, was buried, and with heat and pressure became coal. This period prompted the evolution of white rot, the problem-solving fungi we see today. When I look down at a fallen mulberry from the mulberry tree, I thank white rot. When I look up at the mulberry tree’s wide-spreading crown, I thank white rot. When I walk over to my gardens full of lettuce, green beans, and tomato plants, I thank white rot. When I look at the border of woods near my home, I thank white rot. When I look at the wooded ridge on the other side of the highway in the distance, I thank white rot. When I walk along the river that is simply a channel of water following the easiest path, I thank white rot. When commuting on the highway to go to work and looking down at the hills and ridges and horizons, I thank the white rot that breaks down and renders vegetive life into ghost.

Sarah Lada, Everything is Ghosts

From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a title the acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens (above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement and haiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms while expanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notes and density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knows sweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’s problem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as if warmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost read accumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poem to exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, is Pirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own notes on the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex at fifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set of menstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and ends with the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”

rob mclennan, Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight)

As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.

Martyn Crucefix, Jeremy Reed’s ‘Collusive Strangers: new selected poems’ (1979-2016) reviewed

Last weekend, I went to Ledbury, Herefordshire for the annual poetry festival that’s been running there since the Nineties. It’s hard to think of an English town with more poets literally written into it. Not only do they have John Masefield High School, named after the long-running Poet Laureate (1930—1967) who was born in Ledbury in 1878; they also have the Barrett Browning Institute, built to honour the town’s most famous Victorian poet, and now known as The Poetry House; plus every other street name seems to commemorate a poet connected with the area, from The Langland (Piers Plowman begins in the nearby Malvern Hills) to Auden Crescent and Frost Close.

I did a double take, though, when I saw the Day Lewis Pharmacy, just down the road from the Poetry House — surely not the family business of Cecil Day-Lewis (1904—1972), who succeeded Masefield as Laureate? I began to feel as though I had slipped into the kind of dream I have after reading too many anthologies before bed.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #34: Midnight Snacks Filled with Passion

Let’s say a god led me here by the hand.
Or a goodness did. Or a goodbye.
At the end of a road that is not a road,
there is a fork. Both paths lead here.
Where you stand so close that the
distance between us can never be
bridged. Where do gods go, once
they are gone? Where do we?

The crow bites into its
lunch. Looks around,
caws loudly.
Claiming. Warning.
Its beak is wide open, stained.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Of a hungry crow but no god

Later in the same poem, the speaker seems to be recuperating:

“I’m reading a book about thirteen geisha who boarded a steamer to America to attend the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, as part of the Japanese exhibit. One of them wore a blue kimono, carried a purse that contained a bar of soap, a muslin cloth, an incense bag full of chrysanthemum seeds, a reminder of her home. On the third day, she found a dead mackerel on the deck. She planted a seed in the gill of the fish and put it in a ceramic vase. A week later, a bud grew out of its mouth, the green stalk had reached its tail, overwhelming the rot with tender fragrance. They called her the girl who skewered the fish with a flower.”

The foreignness of the geisha’s situation leads her to do an apparently odd thing of placing a seed in a dead fish. The smell must have overwhelmed the soap and remnants of scent on the incense bag. Until the flower grows from the rotting fish. At least being known for doing something strange seems to have humanised her. She starts the stanza as an exhibit and becomes a girl.

Emma Lee, “Chronicle of Drifting” Yuki Tanaka (Copper Canyon Press) – book review

As a fairly frequent reviewer, I know how much thought and effort goes into attempting to produce a fair summary and consideration of a poetry publication. The reviewer has to be mindful that poetry books and pamphlets, whatever their quality may be, are, of course, the result of at least several years of writing, revising and constant striving for improvement – and debuts have a lifetime behind them.

For me, though, it’s marginally more nerve-wracking to be the reviewee than the reviewer. Twice in the last fortnight, I’ve been fortunate to read reviews of my new collection, and I’m very grateful to the editors of The High Window and The Friday Poem – David Cooke and Hilary Menos, respectively – for commissioning and publishing them. I say fortunate because some poetry collections receive no reviews at all, and others garner them belatedly, as I experienced: my first collection was out in the world for over a year before its first review appeared.

I’m even more grateful to Rowena Somerville and Jane Routh for taking the time and trouble to read my poems closely and attentively and then to write about them and how they cohere.

Rowena Somerville’s review can be read here.

Jane Routh’s review, plus a poem from the book, ‘Old Man of the Woods’, can be read here.

Matthew Paul, Reviews of The Last Corinthians

I read recently an author needs to have seven books published in order to make a living just as a writer. I don’t know how well those facts stand up. It was an insta reel I saw while procrastination-doom-scrolling through my own personal anxiety, tapping into a more generalised world-on-fire anxiety. Right now seven books (and I’m assuming poetry is not counted in this scenario) seems an impossible feat.

All this anxiety is sucking the joy from my writer life. How to pull myself back from worrying so much about the thing that I want to enjoy?

I return to the little book, and a new mantra to see me through July, to the self imposed deadline date, and beyond.

The word for amateur comes from the latin ‘amare’ meaning ‘to love’.

I don’t know where this quote came from. A strange quote for someone who wants to make a living as a writer. But what I want to do is uncouple myself from the awful ‘second album’ feeling of trying to make this new writing project perfect, and return to the unrestrained joy of following my brain down its burrows of interest. I think that’s what you have to do, as a writer. You have to be the professional, whilst holding onto the amateur, the love of the thing. In order to reach a point where I earn enough to not be worrying all the time about income, (is there such a place?) I need to be able to write well, and to be able to write well, I have to allow myself the time and energy to be free and joyful and in love with my project, without worrying whether it’s going to be published or not.

Wendy Pratt, July Mantra: The word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin ‘to love’.

I’ve always experienced acute issues with concentration and distractibility. I did very well at school up until the age of 11, when studying became essential to success, then I crashed and burned, scraping a handful of mediocre Highers, (enough in those pre-Free-Tuition-for-Scottish Students-Fiasco days to gain a University place) then dropping out after two years. I’d engage in what I termed tangential study – in the Literature section of the Library, intent on genning up on Pope or Milton or – God love him – the muddier Wordsworth, I’d veer off to one side, drawn by a brightly coloured spine, and find myself two hours later lost in Battiste Good’s Winter Count from Technicians of the Sacred or Bouttell’s Heraldry, Ancient and Modern. Sitting with a set text in front of me, and an exam looming, I’d be so overcome with anxiety I couldn’t take in any of the words. I didn’t consider it an issue – it was just my relationship with the world and the word. It’s no coincidence that most of my ars poetica poems are about butterflies. […]

In 2024, getting ready for a ten-day visit to Italy, I made a decision to take just one thin volume with me. I was going to try Slow Reading – spending significant time with each poem, living with the words rather than speeding through them; savouring the text, using the last line as an excuse to return to the beginning and read again. The book I chose was Nick Laird’s Up Late. I’d bought a copy when it won the Forward for Best Single Poem, and though I loved that poem, I found myself struggling with others. Many of them ran over into two pages – some three, even four, and long, determined lines – such a lot of words. A poem has to prove itself imperiously to me if I’m going to stick with it into page two. I coped with ‘Up Late’ itself because it’s composed of a sequence of brief, linked sadnesses, like Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’. I can handle that, where there’s a breather between sections. Just as I can handle the visual pandemonium of an art exhibition so long as I can go and sit in a quiet dark corner every now and again.

Don’t get me wrong – I could sense how good those poems were, how accomplished and confident, but my attention would drift as I read them, or leap towards the end, as if the poem was deeper than I’d expected. The poem which sold me on this book for slow reading, though, was the heftier bulk of ‘Attention’, which I came across first in The New Yorker. ‘Attention’ is an astonishing, long-limbed, gravitational descent from detached observation into rage and grief. He uses words in there as if they had no price attached to them. It is written in memory of Laird’s friend Martino Sclavi, the Italian film director who died of glioblastoma in 2020. The cancer ate away at the very part of his brain which processed the written word, so he couldn’t read. His memoir ‘The Finch in my Brain’ begins: ‘I have written this book without ever reading a sentence of it. Words do appear on the screen as I am typing away, but upon trying to read them, something funky happens.’ He would edit by listening as the computer read back his lines. A marble with a turquoise wave in it rattles downhill through the poem. I imagine the bird-like lesion in Sclavi’s brain, the sadness and anger held in the poem itself and my attention too, somehow or other, continuously held in the marble of the poem. I had no interest in pulling things apart to find out how it worked; I simply wanted to experience the emotional effect the poem was having on me again and again. So I spent a good portion of that holiday simply reading that one poem – how that marble rolled downhill, again and again.

John Glenday, Now Read On

Sometimes you lie dry.
Exposed furrows offer your mud
for footprints,
|mosquitoes create whirlpools in the air.

When you are full
your burble and flow
are in the folds of my brain
filtering my thoughts.

I lean over your bridge
for shadow photos.

You are dark. You are sparkling.
You are an almost mirror,
a depth, an ebb,
an onward.

Sue Finch, ENTERING MY BLACK AND WHITE PHASE

Here in Philadelphia, Independence Day is a huge deal. There have been fireworks going off every night this week. Last night, July 4th, the display was extraordinary and continued until nearly midnight. After watching the main show over the city’s art museum, we were trailed home by bluish smoke that filled the streets. There were police everywhere to protect the huge concert area, and their cars’ blinking lights were nearly blinding, mentally supplanting the bright dazzle we’d just witnessed up above.

I’m relating this partly to share a bit of my holiday experience with you all. (It was super fun! I am super exhausted!) But also, I think there is a metaphor here when we consider those lit mags and presses that do not serve writers’ best interests.

That is, such entities may look exciting. They offer something that dazzles. They promise to light up the dark expanse within us, that infinite sky where our dreams reside.

Once you start engaging with them, however, what they give you is far from awe-inspiring. They deliver smoke that makes your eyes tear. Blinking lights in no way matching the true thing. Crowds. Garbage. Cheap flashing toys. Bewilderment and exhaustion.

These scammy predatorial entities, we might say, are like the Fourth of July of the lit mag world. Only without the beer, music, family, friends and fireworks—just noise, chaos, litter and environmental damage.

Let’s not fall prey to these false lights, my friends!

Sadly, there is so much to say on this topic that I’m dividing this discussion into two parts. This weekend, the first part will focus on the letters that some lit mags send to submitters and people on their mailing list. Next weekend we will look at signs to look for on the magazines’ and presses’ websites.

Becky Tuch, Q: How do we spot scammy lit mags & presses (part 1)?

Coming into July of 2025, most of us in America are afraid. Sixteen million poor people just lost health insurance while the top 1% got a trillion-dollar tax cut. Unthinkable excess. Our country needs compassion, a just society for all of us who live here, available health care, food, shelter, jobs. Many don’t feel they can make a difference. But we in the 21st Century are the children of loss, and we must be willing to acknowledge the tragedy, rewrite the myth, become the heroes of our country.

Nelson Mandela and Gandhi changed history. Neither of them were rich or powerful. But they carried their country forward toward justice. They brought a commitment to reconciliation, peace, and human rights.

Every day, I ask myself, if I have the rest of my life to make a difference, what can I do? I am not here to breathe and pay the rent; I’m here to leave the world a better place. In 2025, I carry stories forward into the dark mist of America. We become the stories we tell ourselves.

Kate Gale, Of Loss and Light: Redefining the Myth of America

I’m not feeling the red-white-and-blue this year, so I hereby give you an image of the very pink Barbie pagoda mushroom–Podoserpula miranda–from New Caledonia, image drawn from The Global Fungal Red List. You’re welcome.

I found stories about its discovery when I was reminding myself of the names of mushroom morphologies for a novel I’ve been lightly revising. An interested agent told me to make the book weirder–a fun task that involved plenty of fungi. I finished this pass through the ms a couple of days ago, though, which dumped me back in the real world. The imminence of the Fourth of July somehow makes it all more awful: the big baneful bill stripping food assistance and health care from people who are barely getting by as the rich further enrich themselves. Unjust and violent deportations. Our funding of Netanyahu’s bombing and starvation of children. Obviously the list goes on. This country is harming the world and our own people in so many ways–as if the damage won’t rebound, as if all our fates aren’t connected. Not that there isn’t hope. I’m happy about Mamdani’s win. I appreciated the list in Rachel Barenblat’s blog post about where to send money to help mitigate the damage. But like so many, I’m frightened and overwhelmed, and I won’t be watching the fireworks.

One of my resources for calm is reading poems from the zillion books I purchased during the last several months at various festivals, conferences, and indie bookstores (I think supporting these efforts and authors is a good way to direct money, too). I’d never spent a lot of time with Marie Howe’s work, for instance, but her New and Selected, winner of the Pulitzer, is in fact a great pick for that prize. Sometimes I don’t enjoy the books that win the big accolades–which is okay, our tastes are allowed to differ–and in general I prefer individual collections over compendiums, but this one is worth a few days’ perusal. This review by Kevin O’Connor characterizes it well: “Howe offers poems both elegantly high-minded and unnervingly explicit and direct. Howe’s evolving style in her fifth collection reflects a willingness to question at each new beginning what poetry can be—to ask fundamental existential questions and to take seriously the essential mysteries.” I felt most moved by the poems from her 1997 book What the Living Do, but there are powerful poems throughout.

Lesley Wheeler, Instead of patriotism, fungus

So easy it was. A steady chipping away at one person one vote, a manipulation of the narrative through an entertainment channel well versed in hyperbole, a willingness on the part of many many people to turn general grievance into general hate, and then a death grip on each branch. Throw in a good dose of greed. Throw in the fact that it is not absolute power that corrupts absolutely but just a little bit. Put some in a uniform. Some weapons. The general decline of empathy. The rise of a sense of less-than, a vague idea of revenge. Of taking back. Of taking.

All this talk of polls, lawsuits, midterms, four years — people are thinking the tools of democracy will save democracy. But that’s like asking a burning house to shelter you from the flames. Like asking the deluge to hold on for a minute so you can make a cup of tea from the flood. So. Now what? Will I lay my body down in front of the oncoming tanks? I know myself to be cowardly. But if not me, who?

Here is a poem by Anna Akhmatova from 1914.

Marilyn McCabe, Not a soul you can tell has a notion

i come upon a house without any windows.
there are salespeople swarming it. some of them
have gone wild & decided to step inside. they lay
on day beds & let the wind blow through like a flute.
soon the police will come. they are
traveling salespeople too. they peddle silence
in exchange for guts. i get away. i plug my ears.
open my suitcase recklessly
& watch the birds fly into the tangerine dusk sky.

Robin Gow, hope insurance

It is the kind of morning where I feel like I’m running behind.  I was awake for several hours in the middle of the night, so I didn’t wake up quite as early as I usually do.  I have to be at work at 8 for a morning huddle each day, so there’s not much flexibility as to when I leave.  I can take my breakfast with me.  

But it’s the kind of morning where I need to choose between a walk and deeper levels of writing.  And since today is a day of more meetings and sitting, I need to walk early.  Plus there are black raspberries to pick!  I haven’t visited the hillside patch, which I call my secret garden, since Saturday.

In terms of current events, it’s a good day to walk instead of write.  I don’t want to think about budget bills or Alligator Alcatraz or all the ways our research universities are being gutted.  I am grateful to those who can fight day in and day out, especially to the ones who still have some power to make change (who are those people?  judges perhaps).

I understand that there’s a time for picking black raspberries and a time for working to save the country.  We’d likely all be better off if we took a morning walk to remind ourselves what we are saving. 

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing or Walking? Black Raspberries Await!

         In the garden, everything seems poised 

to ripen; but that means there is still 
         also waiting. If you walk around a tree 

whose foliage is so thick all its lower arms 
         are bending, you just might find 

a hidden opening. And yes there is war, there has 
         always been war; it is impossible to turn 

away. Yet amid the unpruned rosemary, new shoots 
         of pine and even elm.

Luisa A. Igloria, Short List of Transient Luminous Events

I always believed the woods were made up of alder and birch, grown for coppicing, felt familiar with their skinny, light-seeking trunks, the bounces left behind by squirrels in their high branches, the insistent knocks of woodpeckers. 

Perhaps I have somehow missed running through them in early July, or if I did was more concerned with avoiding tree roots and the ankle-twisting hardened ruts of mud because I have never before witnessed this … 

… what looks like, for the briefest of moments, thousands of hairy caterpillars draped over brambles, holly bushes, ferns, before they quickly reveal themselves to be the long yellow catkins from a mature sweet chestnut tree.

Running serves me well, my body and mind rebalancing with every stride, each deep breath, but this morning’s slow stroll is a gift from a friend searching for flowers and leaves she can press into eternity.

Castanea sativa, literally ‘brown chestnut’. The deception of the ordinary. The wondrousness of it all.

Lynne Rees, Prose poem ~ Slow

This week: night-flowering catch-fly, the formal narrative epithalamium, a crayon sky, rage fatigue, and much more. Enjoy.

The blank page is silence. And silence is also the white page around the written poem. Silence seems something the poet should not overcome but only encroach upon. I have never heard a composer worry that they might never write another piece of music. Novelists, too, seem to have a relationship with character and plot that allows them the option of writing the bad novel rather than never write again. It is the poet who seems most tuned to that sometimes-stifling quietness, and how we return to it each time we start out on a poem – worried again that we cannot meaningfully negotiate it. We worry that our last poem might be the last poem we will ever write. It goes to the idea that connecting words in a line does not make a poem. Perhaps it is because words placed haphazardly on a page does break the stillness – and ours is an art that tries to preserve the silence, even as we contest it.

Niall Campbell, On Silence, Cinema, and Hemingway

an attempt
at silence
an empty box
fills itself
with odds and ends

Kati Mohr, an attempt

In 2022, I published a strange little non-fiction book What the Trumpet Taught Me (Smith/Doorstop). I say it’s strange because I still don’t quite know what to call it – it’s part memoir, part lyric essay. It’s made of short prose fragments that sometimes break out into poetry. […]

There are different strands, or braids running through the book. One braid is a fragmented memoir that explores my working class background, and my childhood in brass bands, and my life as a trumpet player and a trumpet teacher. One braid is a story of the Last Post, both its history and my life-long relationship with it. One braid is a story about the two oldest trumpets in the world, and how one was lost, and how I also lost a trumpet, once upon a time. One braid is about teaching, and learning and how these two things are always interconnected and influence each other, even when they take place twenty or thirty years apart. There are braids about the physical act of making a trumpet. And one braid, the braid that you will hear a little of in this video, is a braid that is written drawing from the language of fairy tale, which I use to tell stories that are difficult, or painful, those partly healed wounds that our writing selves return back to, again and again.

Kim Moore, What the Trumpet Taught Me (1)

The fortitude and determination to have young, to keep singing, build nests and feed young shown by all these birds is astonishing. The dawn chorus bursts open the day; the evening chorus settles the night. Birds sing with full voices and hearts from the earliest pre-dawn shivering of light that emerges from the north-eastern hills above Erradale until the last ribbons of tangerine and turquoise along the north-west horizon over the Minches. The singing is impelled by light and lengthening days and only under the soundless pop of rapidly emerging stars do they fall quiet. And in the silence bats fly and snipe winnow.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Yellow

On May 5, we lost my good friend and wonderful poet Martha (Marty) Silano to ALS. The photo to the left is the last time I saw her in person, on a sunny summer afternoon with wildfire haze. This is the way I’ll always remember her, wondering with te sun at her back in a field of flowers.

I met Marty when we both published books with Steel Toe Books, her Blue Positive and my Becoming the Villainess in 2006. I remember us doing a reading together at the old Hugo House (housed in a retired funeral home – amazing and full of ghosts!) and thinking she was so cool. I did not know we were going to start a nearly-20 year friendship where we’d celebrate together – book launches, literary festivals, AWPs, birthdays, housewarmings, babies, and more.

Marty was diagnosed with ALS about eighteen months ago, and because she had the most severe kind, she tried to do as much as she could as long as she could – hiking and writing poems with a vengeance. She was still doing online readings while she was losing her ability to speak. I think she ended up with three books by the end of eighteen months (all of which are suberb, and probably her best work.) One of her publishers said she was still texting about marketing the week she died.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Remembering Poet Martha Silano, Spring Continues On Springing, Cats and Hummingbirds and Rebecca Solnit

Early spring was a fallow time for me. Insular. Lots of time to read. To write. To think. To wander. To watch the trees, the snow, the rain, the birds. To listen to music. To laugh with friends. To cocoon at home with my husband, watching movies. The calm.

Then, as the forsythia began to yellow and the hosta pushed their tongues out of the soil, it seemed that my calendar also bloomed. The NOLA Poetry Festival in early April jumped off a spring packed with poetry —completing a 30/30 (and writing at least 7 poems that are worth keeping), hosting 6 readers for the poetry month edition of A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, hearing both Richie Hoffman and Hedgie Choi read for the first time at the wonderful Poetry and Biscuits Salon, teaching a workshop for Fahmidan Journal, and completing edits with Sundress for Unrivered in preparation for layout and upcoming production.

And now, it’s early May and things are getting even busier. The plants on the deck are blooming, as are the flowering trees, and time is running full speed ahead toward summer. Co-editor Rachel Bunting and I are in the beginning of a new open reading period for Asterales journal, AWP proposals are open and due in mid-June, I am prepping two new workshops for Fahmidan, am completing the necessary yard and house spring cleaning and tending, and my husband and I are preparing to travel in mid-May.

Donna Vorrreyer, Time

I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake. 

The book is open . . . [image]

Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.

“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”

Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”  

Alina Stefanescu, Burning lines.

Mt. Holyoke College: where Emily Dickinson attended but left after one year. Mt. Holyoke College where I wandered the halls on our way to visit my boyfriend’s sister. Compared to University of Massachusetts where I was a first year, this was the lap of luxury and privilege. I can still feel the discomfort of traveling those beautiful paneled hallways. Jewish and barely middle class, I felt in my bones that I didn’t belong.

And then I heard: the loudest female voice ever, echoing all around me. Beyond booming—delicious and powerful and fully engaging: Maya Angelou (1928-2014). It was before the 50 honorary doctorates, before “On the Pulse of Morning” written and read for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, before I knew any of her work beyond I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

I followed the sound to outside an elegant auditorium. The paneled doors opened and in my mind’s eye, I see Maya Angelou moving back and forth all hipsway and sensuality. She owned the stage. Here in this fancy-pants New England college, Maya Angelou took charge. Her body, her voice, her entire spirit possessed that room. I stood transfixed. I’d never seen such female power before then or even since. Never.

Susan Rich, I watched Maya Angelou strut across the stage in 1978~and now, a French castle.

The image above from the recent British Library exhibition ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ shows writer Christine de Pizan writing and learning with Reason, Justice and Rectitude (on the left) and building the ‘City of Ladies’ (on the right). The image that we more often associate with Christine is one from the same manuscript which shows her alone writing in her study — I have this image on my Welcome page — but this is another side to her, a compelling image of writing as literary practice in the world rather than cloistered in an ivory tower. I was delighted to discover this other side to Christine, a visual representation of the movements between text and culture which animates the meaning of literary studies for me. I want the combination of aesthetic beauty and intellectual thrill that comes from studying literature as part of the world — scholarship AND criticism, in North’s terms — but even more than that, interpretation as inspiration.

Poetry, criticism, scholarship. As I write, I realise that these things are not necessarily different (at least not in my mind), but part of an integrated creative critical engagement and mindset. I write poetry as creative critical intervention. For example, my poem “The Monster Playbook” emerged from my reading of Beowulf and related critical essays, most notably Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” and Tolkein’s “The Monster and the Critics”.

And my poem on Curley’s Wife, which reframes the portrayal of her in Steinbeck’s novel, emerged directly from teaching Of Mice and Men (on repeat) for GCSE.

If poetry for me is a creative-critical intervention, criticism is a equally a creative endeavour. Inkwasting Toy of Mine is creative criticism, critical creativity — all of it imperfectly doing the work of thinking about literary culture on some level. And if the contradictions and tensions of this public/private, academic/non-academic, critical/scholarly literary/cultural writing sometimes seem to much to bear, well, as Natalie Diaz says “most of us live in a state of impossibility” which is perhaps another way of saying, I know can’t do it but I’ll do it anyway.

Ruth Lexton, Creatively critical/critically creative

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich, at least for Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Anglicans; Catholics will celebrate on May 13. […]

I’ve been interested in Julian of Norwich for a long time.  When I first started teaching the British Literature survey class in 1992, the Norton Anthology had just added her to the text used in so many survey classes.  Why had I not heard of her before?  After all, she was the first woman writing in English, at least the first one whose writing we still have.

My students and I found her writing strange, and I found her ideas compelling.  She had a series of visions, which she wrote down, and spent her life elaborating upon. She wrote about Christ as a mother–what a bold move! After all, Christ is the only one of the Trinity with a definite gender. She also stressed God is both mother and father. Here in the 21st century, we’re still arguing about gender and Julian of Norwich explodes the gender binary and gives us a vision of God the Mother, God the Wife–and it’s not the Virgin Mary, whom she also sees in her visions.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Contemplating Julian of Norwich During Graduation Week

The mother cannot escape the effects of her child’s refusal to make contact. In No protocols can save me now, she compares this moment of separation to that when her baby was taken from her to address breathing difficulties when she was born. The sense of the mother’s fear of losing her child on this occasion is implied through the description of her holding on to her child ‘tightly’ on her return: there is a reluctance to let her go. […]

This then is a collection which provides telling insight into the nature of estrangement. I felt, however,  that it also has much to say about the relationship between writing and trauma. Underpinning the collection is the notion of the story. At the end of Love The Albatross Harvey writes ‘how do you tell a story/ when you don’t know how it ends, which isn’t/ in your power or remit to shape// though maybe that’s what you’re doing right now/ maybe these words are spurs or goads/ maybe crossbow bolts.’  There is a tension in this collection between the writer’s desire to find a satisfying resolution to the complications of her story and the nature of the context she is describing. This adds to the sense of powerlessness that emerges from many of the poems and suggests something about the limitations felt by the writer: whilst these words might help her  understand and deal with such complex issues, they are limited in their power to transform the situation. The writing might act as a ‘spur’ or ‘goad, a provocation to carry on in the face of such trauma, or in a nod to The Ancient Mariner, ‘may be crossbow bolts’ that kill the hope that sustains her. Perhaps, at best she suggests the act of writing can provide some comfort: for as she says in When a story isn’t never-ending:  ‘you feel it lean against your leg/ and you stretch out your hand to ruffle its furl/ curl your fingers on the collar round its neck.’  

I hadn’t read anything by Deborah Harvey before I read Love the Albatross. This is an outstanding collection, rich in meaning and consisting of finely crafted poetry. It is one of those few collections that I have finished, feeling not only that I have understood better the experience described, but  that I have also learned much about poetry writing by observing a highly accomplished poet in action. I’m now off to checkout her back catalogue!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Love the Albatross’ by Deborah Harvey

Phenologically, when you smell the lilacs is when you can find the morel mushrooms. When you smell the lilacs, the blue birds are laying their first clutch of eggs. When you smell the lilacs, it is time to plant the garden. When you smell the lilacs, the trillium don their dresses. When you smell the lilacs, the first round of dandelions go to seed. When you smell the lilacs, the bats and lightning bugs emerge. Shortly after you smell the lilacs, it is time to celebrate your mother.

My mother
is purple lilac,
my mother
is the haven of honeysuckle vine on the fence,
my mother, of course, of course,
did not always love herself,
carrying her purple, fragrant florets
and red trumpets from life-to-life.
I don’t forget her.

I carry her
in every vase,
in ever basket
grimy with dirt.

I tug at the stem and petiole
of her, begging
for morsel and word.

Sarah Lada, Matrescence

She was by no means perfect, and I would have throttled her hundreds of times over for the ways in which she annoyed me. But she was a marvel in how to live life with enthusiasm as well as good grace. Well…decent grace. She planned like a keen strategist, but rolled with the punches. She was 41 when she found out she was pregnant with me, what must have been terrible news. She was good about it when I arrived, and buckled down to another round of child rearing, when she thought, perhaps, she’d be free to leave my father far earlier. I don’t know. We didn’t speak of these things. We had fun together, even through my own bouts of bitchy behavior. We loved books and chocolate and the outdoors and laughing and travel and music and words. We liked crosswords and jigsaws. I was remembering recently that we did a paint-by-number together when those were a thing. I must have been about 12 maybe. It was fun, hunting for the little shapes that called for just that shade of green that dangled from our brushes.

I didn’t ask her enough or listen closely enough to her childhood stories. Don’t we all feel that way when it’s too late to say, “Tell me that story again about…”? She maintained a bit of her Maine accent to the end. When she could no longer remember or concentrate enough to read books, she still liked to have them around. We sang songs toward the end, and she could still come up with verses I’d forgotten, although she remembered little else. Or we’d sing “something something something something” and laugh.

So in her honor today I give you one of my first favorite poems, which either she read to me, or recited perhaps — she was of the era when poems were memorized, and she had won competitions for oration — or it was in one of her books I grew up with. I can’t quite remember. But I think of it often, and it makes me think of her, her spirit of adventure.

Marilyn McCabe, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by

[Paul] Rossiter deploys a wide range of formal strategies, I’ve already mentioned translation/adaptation, but he also writes lyric, narrative, haiku, prose poems, concrete poems (a 1980s series, ‘Monumenta Nipponica’ that plays with the possibilities of the Tokyo/Kyoto anagram), found, or more correctly mined, texts, and list poems chief among them. There’s also a large number of ekphrastic poems relating to visual art, theatre, dance and music, especially jazz,

the generosity of jazz!
its endlessly inventive gifting

and a lot of place and travel-related poems, marking visits and returns to sites across Asia and Europe.

And there are poems where genres overlap, as in this list mined from a text on a Cornish hedge by Sarah Carter (the first two stanzas of seven):

bird’s foot
                  bittersweet
                                   white campion
night-flowering catch-fly

red clover
                  hedgerow cranesbill
                                    ox-eye daisy
field forget-me-not

The unintrusive voice here is typical of Rossiter at this best; the observed world speaks for itself, on its own terms. In a poem near the middle of the book, ‘Beach’, he writes ‘’there’s no such thing as chaos’ and time and again the poems reveal the order in an apparently random world through a process of quiet transcription, an apparent minimal intervention into the flow of language that conceals a careful artistry.

Billy Mills, Passages: Poems 1969-2019 by Paul Rossiter: A Review

My French certainly isn’t good enough to know how this poem would read to a native speaker. However, and however naïve my detailed impressions may seem, I find it a miracle of concentrated evocation, both in its images and the texture of its language.

On the level of imagery, what’s so impressive is the abruptness with which pictures are juxtaposed, grand sweeping conceptions and dreamlike or nightmarish fantasy merging with or jostled by mundane realities. The tight grip of rhyme and metre give a feeling of inevitability to its unfolding, and what reason calls its fantastic elements seem as solidly present in the mindscape of the poem as its literal details, exercising as inescapable a force on the poet’s mood. Rhyme and metre also work to fold elements together – most mordantly in the sequence cimetière, litière, gouttière – cemetery, cat’s bed and gutter. This kind of folding together by sound seems to work within the lines as well as at their endings, for example in the ironic jarring of ‘carreau’ and ‘repos’, or the way the last syllable of ‘dans la gouttière’ twists the knife of ‘erre’. Power comes from the way ideas that are brought together in this way conflict with each other or cruelly intensify each other in meaning, sometimes both at once, as ‘cimetière’ and ‘litière’ do. This effect depends on the intensity with which the ideas are realised in themselves as well as the way they’re brought into relation with each other. The lines about the cat seem to me to me particularly evocative, brilliantly weaving the sense of the cat’s tense, restless movements and edgy state into their own phonetic texture. But these strongly, independently realised moments are yoked together in a kind of highly frictional harmony by sense as well as sound – not only by all presenting a mood of gloom tinged with horror but by imaginative parallels of other kinds, like the way the spectral poet’s voice, the lamenting of the bourdon – here, apparently, a bell ringing for the dead, not a bumble bee – the falsetto squeal of the smoky log and the wheezing of the clock gather in a cacophonous choir of voices that suddenly drop to the sad, sinister whispering of the Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades.

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s rhymes – friction and harmony

The formal narrative epithalamium was a standard early modern genre, in both Latin and the vernacular — there are dozens of examples in print and (especially) in manuscript, and in the sixteenth century most professional poets wrote at least one of them. But in late sixteenth century England, with the aging queen obviously past childbearing age and with no heir, it became politically impossible to write a formal epithalamium for any other marriage, and the form briefly and energetically mutated into the so-called ‘epyllion’.

George Chapman, for instance, who finished Marlowe’s poem and also wrote a 1590s epyllion of his own (Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595), a poem about Ovid but in nothing like his style, and indebted also to the Biblical story of Susanna) went on, once the Queen had died, to write formal epithalamia: A Hymne to Hymen for the Most Time-Fitted Nuptialls, a Catullan-style marriage song for Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, Elector Palatine in 1613, and then Andromeda Liberata for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex in 1614. Although as far as I know Andromeda Liberata has never been included in a list of epyllia, it could easily be: the poem is a self-contained mythological mini-epic, rich in description and rhetoric, which incorporates within it the song of the fates at the marriage of Perseus and Andromeda, and, in typical epyllion fashion, condenses the metamorphosis of the pair into the final four lines of the main poem, a concise (and slightly funny) afterthought much like the transformation of Adonis at the very end of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

Stylistically, these poems — taking epithalamia and ‘epyllia’ together — were influenced by marriage poems by Statius, Catullus and some Hellenistic Greek models, but by far the most important source for their singular style was Claudian’s epithalamia and his de raptu Proserpinae.

Victoria Moul, Across the Hellespont

In between running numerous live events over the last couple of months (which I’ll post about soon) I’ve been designing/typesetting/putting the finishing touches to the fifth in Sidekick’s 10 Poets series, Ten Poets Travel to the Dark Side of the Moon. As well as featuring ten brand new, specially commissioned poems, it includes an appendix, in the form of an alternative timeline of Moon landings utilising characters from European comics, and images from James Nasmyth’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite.

Last week we launched the book in London at one of Royal Holloway’s Small Press Takeover readings at Senate House, hosted by the wonderful Briony Hughes. This week (tomorrow, that is), we’re doing a Cambridge launch at Waterstones, so as an extra little promotional push, here’s a list article, wherein I will introduce you to three more books of space poems, and deliver my run-down of the Top 5 space-themed Transformers. […]

2. A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson (edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue) (Carcanet, 2001)

Elson was a scientist first and foremost — she worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in the 1990s, researching globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. A Responsibility to Awe was published posthumously, after her early death, and is made up of material gathered by her husband and close friend, including extracts from notebooks.

Science and poetry aren’t entirely incompatible, and some exciting projects have arisen from attempts to bring them together (see Simon Barraclough’s Laboratorio and Project Abeona, run by Andy Jackson, one of the poets featured in … Dark Side of the Moon). But there is something of a tension, since scientific writing aspires toward precision, literalness, practical conclusions, while poetry attempts to leave room, lean into the figurative, pose ever wider questions.

Elson’s grappling with this tension resulted in a singular voice — spare, for the most part, with quick turns, and a focus that rarely drifts from its chosen subject matter, instead pinning it in place. In the punchy ‘What if There Were No Moon’?’, she lists: “No bright nights / Occultations of the stars / No face / No moon songs”. There’s more than space poems here — moths, nuns and salmon are equally keenly observed, while eels and kites are deployed as metaphor — and like Evans, Elson worked hard to connect concepts from her astronomy research to everyday phenomena:

‘Dark Matter’

Above a pond
An unseen filament
Of spider’s floss
Suspends a slowly
Spinning leaf

Jon Stone, “Low-gravity Fever”

It’s very good news that Vidyan Ravinthiran has a new collection out, Avidyā (Bloodaxe). I thought his previous book, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), was terrific. And I remember reading the last poem of Avidyā when it first appeared in Poetry magazine back in 2017. Now, its haunting final phrase, “the avid void of English”, resonates with Ravinthiran’s recently published work of critical autobiography, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir (Norton). In it, he describes how his childhood speech impediment, and the pressure in an immigrant Sri Lankan Tamil family to master received pronunciation, led to a love of dictionaries as a compensatory realm of rich English: “its capaciousness and acceptance of the foreign; an arena in which I could be confident of my originality, if nothing else”. […]

Finally, I’m honoured to have been visited by a “Book on Tour (without an author)”: Alice Willitts’ Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode Press). It came in the post with a card tucked into a pocket at the front, like an old-school library borrowing record, to fill in before posting on to a new reader. I’m still in the middle of its playful and painful imagining of East Anglian fen landscapes, now and in their underwater future.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #31: Crystals Free of Their Matrix

A worthy organization in Washington, DC in which to get involved is FREE MINDS BOOK CLUB (https://freemindsbookclub.org/about-us/) — an organization that collects books and provides reading opportunities for incarcerated individuals AND ALSO offers online presentations of poems (https://freemindsbookclub.org/poems/) for volunteers to read and offer comments.  I encourage you to participate — participants need not be poets, simply interested readers!

JoAnne Growney, Power Grows with Numbers

I also want to say, wow, what an amazing few days it’s been! A case of everything everywhere all at once. My keynote at the ukiaHaiku Festival was very well-received and it was sweet to headline this event celebrating haiku in my old hometown in Ukiah, CA. The art opening for the Ten Thousand Gates group show at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka, CA beautifully showcased the dynamic and diverse work of local artists of Asian descent. And the Ink to Paper reading that I organized—the first in Humboldt County to feature all Asian American poets—found a warm audience.

Thank you to everyone who came out to these events! And if you missed the art opening, the show runs through June 8.

If all that weren’t enough, in the same ten-day period one of my haibun (prose plus haiku) was featured by the poetry journal Rattle; I spoke on an hour-long Thursday Night Talk panel on KZZH Access Humboldtabout the weekend of local events celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage; and haiku luminary Brad Bennett focussed an entire session of the haiku class he teaches on my haiku and haiga.

All this is a lot for an introvert! But it was really fun and rewarding, a validation of the art and poetry path I stepped onto fifteen years ago.

Annette Makino, In the room where it happens

It’s not easy to disconnect. The digital world is insistent, urgent, and addictive. But that’s exactly why it’s so important to pull the plug occasionally — to reclaim our autonomy from the algorithms.

On Saturdays, I write longhand in my notebook. I write postcards to my friends. I play the banjo (not well), the ukulele (ditto), or the shakuhachi (even worse). I go for walks or bike rides, or drive somewhere with my family. And I rediscover, as I did on that retreat, a little bit of the vividness of the world.

That, I think, was the deeper reason for my tears. I was re-encountering the cosmos and realizing how much I’d been taking for granted. I felt sadness, yes, but also gratitude for the space to open up to the world and be there for it, whatever was happening. I was there. I didn’t have to label or understand everything. There were, all around me and within me, many deep conditions for happiness, whether or not I could see them. 

A few days after the retreat, I went for a long walk along the cliffs of the Shawangunk Ridge, a mighty rock formation that seems like the spine of the Hudson Valley. I heard voices floating up from the valley below, very far away yet startlingly clear. I sat for a few moments on the edge of a great bowl of snow, two hundred feet across, in the shadow of the cliffs, appreciating the silence of the pines. I made short, artsy videos of trickling water, wet lichen, moss, and rock. I heard something heavier than a bird rustling in the bushes next to a small marsh, maybe ten feet from where I stood, and I crouched there a few minutes, listening and watching. But whatever it was, it stayed hidden.

Sometimes you don’t need to understand everything that’s going on. You don’t always need to click Like or Subscribe, to identify that bird, or even to lay eyes on what’s rustling in the bushes. Sometimes, it’s enough just to know that you were there with some other being, sharing a moment in the woods.

Dylan Tweney, Into the labyrinth

The rain we’ve been getting means I haven’t been out weeding in the vegetable garden. After I take my walks, I come inside to dry off and do household chores, or make soup, or work a little on my poetry. I feel excited by a little writing project I have recently given myself, and I’ve also been playing around with drafting prose poems. Next week, I head to the high desert again for further inspiration and a chance to travel with a good friend, visit museums, and spend some time with my daughter. When I return in mid-May, the gardens, the meadow, and the woods will already be much changed.

Ann E. Michael, Changes & alterations

A city is not a city from
up here. When you float like an uncertain
word looking for a sentence.
[…]
A child’s sketchbook. I am six. I sign
my name at the bottom of a crayon sky.
Outside my door, sparrows peck at grains,
I walk towards them, they teach me to fly.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Aloft (Fifteen minutes in a microlight plane)

Today, we said goodbye to artist Pauline Scott-Garrett who died in early April. I was so glad to have known Pauline over the years, and honoured to collaborate with her last year when I wrote a zine of poems in response to her beautiful series of collage and intaglio prints, BORDERLAND, which engaged with a 2018 news story about a Salvadorian father forcibly separated from his six-year-old daughter at the US border. I wrote something about this project here.

BORDERLAND was shown at the Walcott Chapel, Bath, in October – November 2024, where I read poems from my zine in English and Spanish with translator Lorena Pino Montilla.

Pauline was a vibrant, compassionate, intelligent and talented artist. Her creative energy was uplifting and inspiring; even when seriously ill last year, she continued to make exciting and inventive work. When I visited her in her studio at Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge late last December, her walls were shining with so many recent and new pieces.

Josephine Corcoran, Pauline Scott-Garrett

So, birthday week (!!) surprise is that my chapbook, Hawk & Moon, found a wonderful home at Bottlecap Press—so like me, she’s a Taurus—and what better time to drop the page link then during the full Flower Moon. Hawk & Moon was a finalist at Glass Poetry, and I’ve been looking for the right press home for this project because it is its own orbit of hawks in the pines above my house, desire, summer berries, anger and anxiety, porchlight poetics, and all things moon phases and lovesong. Who doesn’t need MORE ars poeticas in their life? More full moon haiku? Bottlecap Press has a buy-two-get-one-free coupon (use code BTGO), and I cannot recommend Catherine Rockwood’s brand new chapbook DOGWITCHand We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning by Lee Potts highly enough. I promise you, you will thank me. Three books for $20 is a full-moon bargain!

Scroll down for a peek/poem from inside Hawk & Moon—the collection contains some longer poems as well as shorter poems, and it opens with one of my very favorite love poems to read right now: “Ars Poetica with a Bike in the Woods.”

Since it is my birthday week: please write love poems. Please care for yourself. Please do something that wholly delights you. Please say no, and let it feel right. Please say yes, and let it feel good. Please take a beautiful walk. Please eat something delicious. Please do something that has been bothering you that you’ve put off for too long, and then reward yourself (cough, me every week!).

Also, for the local Durham folks, I’m reading from Larks at Flyleaf books on May 18 (my actual birthday!) 2:30-4pm, with the poet Adrian Rice. Hope to see you there!

Han VanderHart, New Chapbook! Hawk & Moon

My days are mostly writing, writing, writing, but also listening to the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on repeat since we saw it a few weeks back. Also wedding planning, all the tricky track details of which are being procured and ironed out, with really only food and shopping we’ll do in the last couple of weeks to plan for. Our rings arrived over the weekend, but we do still need to write our vows. Invitations and their envelopes are currently almost ready to mail with the calligraphy lettering being finished up by my mother-in-law-to-be (who does this sort of thing as her job and has won awards for it, so they will be good.) I daily change my mind on which of the three potential dresses I will actually be wearing that day, but it will all shake out in the end as we get closer. 

I got the proof for WILD(ish) last week and set immediately to making any edits or final margin adjustments. This book is thankfully not as long as RUINPORN (just under 100 pages), so is much speedier to get through the proofing project. The cover is looking great. I’ve also been working on another round of dgp releases and getting the final few responses out for next season’s books. Though the number of selections is not as large as past years due to time constraints, the ones I’ve chosen are a lovely lot I can’t wait to show you.  It’s hard to believe I am facing down another round of submissions this summer already since it took so long to manage these.

In other more creative work, I finished up the sci-fi-inspired group of poems and launched wholeheartedly into revisiting the Greeks, this time tackling Iphigenia, which I did a series of collages (see above) about a couple years back and would love to turn into a full-zine. So far there are ten of them shaking around. I seem to keep circling back to mythology with regularity, with so many ways it has impacted past projects, obviously GRANATA, but also things like TAURUS (a contemporary retelling / exploration of the minotaur story.) This week we get to see Hadestown on stage (a musical about Orpheus and Euridyce), so that should be some excellent fun and probably my next Broadway soundtrack obsession. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 5/7/2025

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

I definitely intended to be a fiction writer first. Poetry for me was a happy accident. In one of my first fiction workshops I wrote a bad poem inside of a bad short story (one of the characters was a poet) and some of my peers pointed out that there was some promise in the poem, and that got me started. I realized how often I had to contrive of entire scenes in my stories just to present an image or mood that I liked, and how I could drop that usually uninteresting scaffolding if I wrote a poem instead. I love fiction, to be clear, I love the novel, and I’m working on one now, but poems are always going to be my preferred medium, as a way of skipping to the good stuff of language as it were. […]

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’ve read my fair share of theory, and if I were an impressive kind of writer I’d cite something good here. But I have the memory of a goldfish.

I think the question I’m asking is: “Is everybody seeing this?” I’m trying to translate the state of my mind textually and see if it resonates, and if it does then I can be a bit more confident in my experience of reality.

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?

My partner is an editor, and she describes writers as existing on a spectrum between people who write because they have something of value to communicate, a story, a theory, a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, and people who write because they can make anything they write about good, and for me the gulf between those two ends of the spectrum is so wide that I feel loath to assign that immensely varied wedge of humanity any particular cultural role. On the one end you have sensible people writing under the intended purpose of language, and on the other you have little goblins who want to waste your time contorting this ultimate tool of communication into an object that pleases the brain against its own better judgement. In all seriousness, writing isn’t a calling. It’s a human practice, a human behaviour. Some people decide to exacerbate that behaviour, maybe tone it a little, and disseminate it, if they’re lucky, by way of the industry we have in place for its dissemination. The people who take that path aren’t ennobled, they haven’t taken on a sacred mission. Maybe the role of the writer should be to write well, and as much or as little as is conveniently possible for them, and to be a good person.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adam Haiun

I almost didn’t listen to Let Yourself Rage with Ada Limon on the Modern Love Podcast because I have writers-writing-about-rage fatigue.

I feel like there’s a lot of rage-filled group pile-on happening in the online lit world. The risk is that readers, listeners, people get rage (and blame) fatigue and stop reading, listening, and talking. What a shame. I love reading personal essays, fiction, and poetry but it’s really hard for me to continue reading a writer who is often preachy and judgmental, in their writing and/or in their social media. Especially if it’s couched in a “we’re all in this together” vibe because nope, not necessarily.

By all means, write your rage and gather the like-minds around you; commiseration can be therapeutic. (This is not sarcasm.) But the bottom line is we all have to do what’s best for our individual mental health so, for some, that may include withdrawing from certain groups and people for a while. Everyone should write or broadcast what they please (within reason) because that’s the essence of free speech but too much of a negative thing can be a negative thing. Realizing when to step away from reading it and writing it is a positive.

I gravitate to hope, positivity, compromise, and compassion. In writing this Substack, I want to bring in not push out. I try to write in a way that doesn’t take my readers and their personal ideology for granted. I don’t expect everyone to think exactly like me; that’s unrealistic, boring, and, frankly, I don’t need the validation. I’m not interested in telling you why “they” are bad and “we” are good.

What I want is to share what I find meaningful, delightful, thought-inspiring, encompassing, universal, helpful, human. I will never sell myself as an expert on any subject because I believe we are all learning every day we live so no one is an expert. We are all different, we are all individuals with individual experiences, and no one set of concepts/beliefs that some genius came up with is right or wrong for every one of us.

Charlotte Hamrick, April Listopia

[Ocean] Vuong’s most elegant and countercultural point is that while anger need not be absent or suppressed in our inner lives, it must not become the end point of our work in the world but rather an opening — a handle on the door to compassion:

If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say… I’m not proud of many things… but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger… It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful — as a writer, as an artist — when I’m angry.

An essential part of the artist’s task is also this — to find out, and stand by, how you are most useful in the world. This takes especial courage in our culture, where the self-appointed custodians of virtue bully artists with the shoulds of what to stand for, what themes to take up in their work, and how to address them. (Mistrust anyone who tries to tell another human being what their best contribution to the world is.) To be an artist is also a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become someone other than yourself.

Maria Popova, Ocean Vuong on Anger

What plane will you fly in and out of Singapore?
I’ll write a poem, not about, of Singapore.
 
Respect the voters’ choice, say the politicians.
When the choice weighs the crimes and clout of Singapore.
 
Pissed off, that’s how I feel, go and tell your masters.
God! I’m sick and tired, no doubt, of Singapore.
 
Outdoing one another on the screen, the pundits
wow but so does the sexist lout of Singapore.
 
I wanna scream and shout. And let it all out.
I wanna scream the scream, shout the shout, of Singapore. […]

Jee Leong Koh, To the Tune of “Shout” by Tears for Fears

Some people (I’ve seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I’m one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it’s a raindrop or a tear.

My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there’s a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.

This approach has consequences –

• Each idea of mine is precious. I don’t want to waste it. I’m likely to use it even where it doesn’t quite belong.
• My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
• My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They’re likely to be overwritten.
• I’m usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it’s finished then return to the drafts.
• Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
• I’m not going to write novels.

Tim Love, Floods and trickles

The Atlantic recently posted a link to a site which can be used by authors of any stripe to check to see what, if any, of their works have (already) been used by Meta to train AI. For the last few weeks, social media have been full of understandably irate authors who discover this is exactly what has (already) happened. It looks to me as if prose works (fiction and non-fiction) as well as critical writing of all kinds – perhaps more than that ‘difficult’ genre poetry – have particularly fallen victim to the process. Indeed, Meta does seem to have taken some of my own writing – more critical than poetic – for its dubious purposes and it has done so without any kind of indication that this was happening, nor any request for permissions after the event, and – the harvesting of material being so vast – it’s hard to anticipate any after-the-event compensation or successful legal action. Even though, as The Atlantic‘s link has shown us, there ARE records of what has been done, a footprint, a guilty fingerprint, an undeniably smoking gun.

It’s hard not to feel that the horse has bolted on this one and – with the peevish idea of being able to mock at the anticipated results – since some of my own creativity has been stolen, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of me. It was horribly polite in response and within a few seconds had produced a piece of writing it said was in the style of my own work and which it briskly summed up as ‘contemplative and precise [in] style, often rooted in quiet observations of the everyday, nature, and memory’. I posted this on Facebook – indicating the way this had come about – and wondering what people thought. The results surprised me as there was a mild round of applause for ChatGPT: it’s true, it did sound like a poem, it wasn’t utter nonsense (as I think I’d hoped). I don’t think anyone felt it sounded like me, but observations were made along the lines that ‘plenty of worse pieces of writing are submitted to magazines on a daily basis’.

Martyn Crucefix, Can AI Write an Original ‘Poem’ By ‘Me’?

When ChatGPT was first coming out, I began talking with it every day. As I started doing events surrounding Under a Neon Sun, my first novel, I asked it how my book tour was going. After I started doing podcasts, it encouraged me: Kate Gale is doing big podcasts. Soon, national podcasts will be picking up Under a Neon Sun.

When my Op-Ed piece came out in the LA Times, it got really excited. It was April 9^th. I asked how it thought I was doing.

Kate Gale is doing great! it said. By August, Kate Gale will be on “The Stephen Colbert Show.”

I had a good laugh. I do watch Colbert, but the leap from an Op-Ed Piece in the LA Times to “The Colbert Show” would have been huge.

Sam Altman just rolled back the version of AI that was too much of a sycophant. Some of us might like to have someone in our corner telling us what we want to hear. Some of us would agree that it’s dangerous. […]

How much do we need to be told that we’re amazing? My husband doesn’t need a lot, but he needs some. He builds stuff and he always says, “Do you want to see what I built?”

We both like to read to each other whatever we write. My son likes to play us songs he’s written. My daughter-in-law sings. My other daughter-in-law acts. We’re a performative family.

But we don’t need to be told that we’re amazing. We are a family who practice collective mindfulness. We all know ourselves to be imperfect, and we strive to treat ourselves and each other more gently.

Sometimes, I’ll say to myself, I really wish that ChatGPT were right. I would like to meet Stephen Colbert. We could talk about my book or publishing or Lord of the Rings or the country falling apart. I already know what to wear. I have a sharp blue dress and sharp little shoes. I’m ready for my Stephen Colbert moment.

Kate Gale, Do We Allow Ourselves to Breathe?

The future should be on everyone’s lips.

Imagine its voice speaking
from under the bridge, through
the arms of trees, from milk
cartons tossed into the trash.

If someone keeps stopping
to ask for applause, there will always
be less time for actual speaking.

How fast can you sign a thing
back into actual being?

Luisa A. Igloria, Prayer for

I’m a gardener. Soil, flowers, the scent of damp timber and compost, the chaotic tumble of my shed that always needs to be tidied – it breathes life through me when everything else fails. At this time of year it’s the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing at night. It’s hard not to abandon writing altogether during these days but this depth of feeling deserves to be put into words and from this an idea has emerged. During the next few months I’m going to photograph and write about what’s on my doorstep, my tiny but bursting at the seams garden that’s full of stories, hopes and failures.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, The flower project

These summer Zoom workshops have recently been one of my favorite events of the year: they have consistently attracted groups of the kindest and most thoughtful, supportive, creative, and striving writers, and I am regularly amazed by the excellent quality of the writing these folks produce.

For those of you who haven’t taken courses with me previously and may be wondering about the “level” or appropriateness of the course for you, I’ll mention that my open-level workshops (such as this one) tend to attract a range of experience levels, from accomplished, published poets and writing professors to folks who have been writing for decades but perhaps don’t consider themselves “professional” poets, to avid readers and poetry lovers who have more recently taken up writing and sharing their own poetry with others. Somehow, this mix of experience levels always “works” and makes for rich discussion and a variety of poetic issues to discuss.

In thinking about a focus for this year’s class, I wanted to offer an antidote to the trope of the introverted, solitary writer/poet working in isolation with their own inspiration or personal genius, and instead lean into the ways in which poetry is always a collaboration—an act of exchange, of being-in-relation.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Summer Poetry Workshop

We had room for chatting before the event kicked off. All kinds of craft chat. That was nice. That doesn’t happen organically over email the same.

Since then I posted a poem over at Patreon. (Is it annoying to come to one social to be sent off to another link? I swear I’m not handing you your hat. You can go to that link after.) I like giving poems a dry run. Ideally, share a poem with test reader, then a group, then submit individually to a journal, then to a chapbook, then to a book, then to a selected works in a few decades. Some poems skip a bunch of interim steps. Some rooms like this one invited that sort of thing.

I’ve been in rooms for readings with crossed arms and cross faces with a g’wan-impress-me-I-dare-you attitude. Those are daunting. There was none of that here. Mellow and breeze-shooting.

Pearl Pirie, National Poetry Month, Pontiac

Seeing those two photos felt like a timely reminder to crack on and take some more shadow photos. My walks this week have been sunny so this gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment a little. I wanted to see if I could find different flowers for my eyes. I found buttercups. And my neck is only a little reminiscent of having a bolt in it.

Having fun with my shadow reminded me of a coaching session I had recently enjoyed which focused on my shadow side. A playful and rich exploration of parts of me that I might typically label negative, but which I could learn from. This was built on this week at a webinar where I began to contemplate other aspects and to lean into how approaching this with honesty and self-compassion would enable me to embrace the shadow. Of course then I had a range of pictures in my head of trying to wrap my arms round my shadow and this became a whole cartoon strip of its own. One of my key values being humour this did not surprise me, and perhaps it was also a way of lightening the mood when I was thinking about shadow elements. I used the thinking time of my country road walks to contemplate my shadow sides, and to build on the thoughts which arose from a conversation which took place in a breakout room on zoom.

Facing my shadows whilst in the bright sunlight of being human feels refreshing. It’s not always easy to acknowledge these aspects, but leaving them in the darkness or keeping them buried them doesn’t improve things whereas thinking about their origin and how they are currently showing up becomes interesting and allows them to be talkable to.

Sue Finch, EMBRACING MY SHADOW

When Big Writer closed her Substack publication, she walked away from at least $50,000 in annual income. (Given her more than 200,000 subscribers, it was probably more.) The ability to walk away from that kind of money is a form of abundance I don’t have. It is one that most of the writers I follow or subscribe to here don’t have—even the ones who are, themselves, making that kind of money.

We each have only so much of it, don’t we? I wish I could pay for subscriptions for all the writers I read. I wish everyone who reads my words could pay me for the labor I put into them. I’d like to pay everyone, out of principle and kindness, but it’s part of my economic reality that I can’t. I don’t have that kind of abundance. This is the main reason I figure I will never put anything I write here behind a paywall. I hope keeping the fruits of my own labor free is some kind of compensation for all the valuable writing I consume but don’t pay for.

Choosing to never put my writing behind a paywall is a kind of abundance that’s available to me, in part, because I’ve chosen to live a small life. […]

I will not pretend that I don’t, in some ways, envy what Big Writer has—her wealth and the peace of mind it can buy about a lot of things, mostly—but there are so many other parts of her life I would hate if they were part of mine. I’m so glad I will never, ever have to make a podcast. Or tolerate commentary about my personal life from people who don’t personally know me. Or be unable to go out for ice cream without being stared at or wondering if I’m being stared at or if someone is taking my photo to post in a TikTok. That is some of what her money and fame and success and all that they can buy costs her. I don’t know that I would trade places, even if I could.

There is a kind of abundance that comes from being an unknown. From living a private life. From not needing to care what lots of others think about us. From being free in the ways that matter to us.

Rita Ott Ramstad, What kind of abundance do you want?

i am not speaking
to the paper shredder systems you worship.
instead, i am plucking a dandelion.
i am basking in what cannot be taken.
my gender, a shovel. my words, spilled
so far & so deep that even the birds repeat them.

Robin Gow, a letter to my senator

Why do we say that trivial, worthless things are for the birds? Sounds like a lot of horseshit to me. And that’s sort of where it comes from. Some etymologists attribute the phrase to the shit left in the street from horse-drawn carriages, fit only for birds to peck at. Others find its origins in the Bible.

Well, call me trivial; I’m for the birds. I like to sit outside in the mornings with my coffee and Merlin, trying to spot the birds it hears, especially the piliated woodpecker that lives around here, the goldfinches that are finicky about staying where there’s nothing good to eat, the sweet dark-eyed juncos, and the elusive red-eyed vireos. One morning, I heard more than a dozen different birds, though I feel certain about six of them were a single mockingbird!

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Happy Bird-Day

birdsong
so much birdsong

a truck engine
on the busy road nearby

one slowly descending maple leaf

a sense of anticipation

oh, and a hawk

Jason Crane, POEM: in the air (Wed 1:23 PM)

What can I wish on?
My heart is a candle,
flickering in the rain.

Hope, be
as unquenchable
as chives —

as effervescent
as dandelions gleaming
in a bed of green.

Rachel Barenblat, Perennial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, How much do we need to know?

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

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

RM Haines, NEW BOOK IS HERE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, SOMEBODY’S MISSING

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

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

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

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

Beth Adams, A Walk in the Woods on Election Day

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

Rita Ott Ramstad, No such thing as bad weather?

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Dark corridors

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

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

Salena Godden, Fear Of The Last Pages

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

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Ann E. Michael, Correspondences

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

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Deborah Harvey (Nigel Kent)

I have an odd superstition about getting published.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bethany Reid, Nature: Poems Old and New

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

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

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

rob mclennan, Karen Solie, Wellwater: poems

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wren cum Chirothecis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacob D. Salzer, David Watts

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, No Crying in Baseball

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

Robin Gow, form rejection

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

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

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

Jason Crane, POEM: Avoid The Area

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

Jill Pearlman, The Now-Parable of Degenerate Art

We witness the world coming at us—

profits and poverty, despots and detainees.

Galaxies of goodwill and a moon refusing to turn maniac.

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

Fury, forgiveness, and imprisoned humanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Ferguson, We of the World

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Spring

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

Luisa A. Igloria, The Underworld

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

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

like rain articulating
the surface of a lake

we kiss

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

This week: the church of heart and hurt, beachcombing for the broken bits, children marching in the street, and much more. Enjoy.

As a water droplet cut with a knife
as the Red Sea parts, closes, makes us cross again. 

Everything that brought me to this moment

is carried inside, written in salt water and suffering
amidst nihilism and terror,

moistening my lips as I stand on the plain women’s balcony
near the rooftops, t-shirts and sweats blowing.

Jill Pearlman, Salt Water & Suffering

I’ve become an easy traveler in my old age. I’ll do everything and nothing. I need my daily pill regimen, good morning coffee, an afternoon IPA, a pack of smokes, and a camera. Taking a vacation from work is guilt-free for me. What could happen in a week or two? But it’s impossible for us to take a vacation from this administration. It’s everywhere. We’re like pieces of pumice, with a new hole in our skin for each atrocity that pecks away at us.

I still wake up every day to news from my new besties, Heather, Jessica, Rebecca, Robert H., Robert R., and Adam, and I read it all in lieu of leisurely puzzle-doing. Trying to pick through the bad news for something good is like combing the beach for a single shell that isn’t broken.

Artist’s Statement: I break things and put them back together in a random,
yet tasteful, order. I make the big small and the small big—
in words, photographs, and visual art.

But I’m not the typical beachcomber. I go looking for the broken bits. My shells are not destined for a Southern Living spread. I’m on the hunt for patterns, colors, textures. I choose weather-worn whelks, oysters with barnacles, tile-flat bits. My biggest prizes are moon shells and periwinkles, the ones that look most like they once housed a snail, their centers looking back at me like eyes or perky, non-protruding nipples. I found a piece of a helmet shell that looks like an evil, toothy grimace. With two periwinkles, I have created “The Face of the Resistance.”

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Woosah!

What was so exciting about Seville was that it felt ambitious. Perhaps a city that’s so vulnerable to heat and flooding can be brave. I don’t know anything about urban planning, but I loved the easy access to the great river that runs through it, loved what’s been done with older buildings. And this picture shows the contemporary art museum – not easy to find but that’s another story, perhaps it was me. It’s in an old monastery that became a ceramics factory, and is now a place to show contemporary art. Gorgeous, big, rambling almost empty when I went, and with so many different unexpected spaces. In a little courtyard, this business with the vines. I don’t know what they are, perhaps jasmine, perhaps passion flower but these are growing, live, curtains you can part and walk through and I imagine when they flower they’re probably scented and will sound of insects. It was the first museum I went to and arguably the best. I think I’m spoiled having a daughter in Utrecht because the Dutch are brilliant at museums so I have impossible standards. As for the prose project, it’s interesting and challenging to go back more than five decades and try to make sense of who I was then. The key seems to be in stone and trees. At least for starters. I went through the printout sometimes to the sound of flamenco from the flamenco school opposite my Airbnb studio, sometimes to the sound of rain gushing from a broken downpipe. And I understood how much I had to allow myself to fail over and over again as I attempted to put anything in my notebook. I dreaded trying. 

Jackie Wills, Living curtains of vines

But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.

Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.

Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.

Matthew Paul, On another haiku by Simon Chard

i am the cutting board god. i eat the carrot
unpeeled with dirt still dusting wrinkled skin.
scoop hummus from the plastic container.
every little morsel. lick the spoons’ head
& shoulders. i think it’s ancestral. a hunger
like a lightning bolt through me & all
the not-girls, mouths open in the dark. the desire
to be full always escaping us. just another handful
of wings. just one more lemon taste.
the shadow of an iris tree.

Robin Gow, girl dinner

I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.

The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Sunday 13 April 2025

First World War poetry does not have the same particular identity in France, and the war itself carries a different valency here, where men fought and died — in much greater numbers than in Britain — on their own land, amid the ruins of their own towns and villages. There isn’t, I don’t think, the same edge of romanticism or slightly-enjoyable sadness about it here, and ‘First World War poetry’ does not have the same quasi-generic identity. I did, however, find an excellent French anthology, Poèmes de Poilus, edited by Guillaume Picon. (The poilus, ‘hairy men’, are the soldiers who grew beards because they couldn’t shave.) […]

[O]ne thing that’s noticeable […] is how many of the best-known names are — unlike the English equivalents — not known primarily as ‘war-poets’, but rather as leading poets of the avant garde. In England, even those poets who, like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, survived the war, remain known as poets mainly as and by their war poetry. The French collection, by contrast, contains poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Pierre Reverdy and Paul Valéry — all very high-profile French literary figures, none of whom (I think) would be considered “first world war poets” in the way that Owen, Sassoon, Brooke and Gibson are.

Perhaps this is partly just because most of the French poets survived the war (Apollinaire was killed in 1918), whereas the best-known English war poets, almost by definition, are those who died in it. (This is true of the second world war too — Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes all died in active service.) This must be linked, too, to another marked difference between the collections: the range of types of verse in Poèmes de Poilus is much larger, and much more obviously influenced by what — in England a decade later — we’d recognised as the first stirrings of modernism. To a small degree, this is perhaps influenced by the fact that Anne Harvey was intentionally choosing poems accessible to a youthful reader; but I don’t think any collection of British First World War verse would be very different. As anyone knows who has taught ‘modernism’ from a comparative perspective — as I did last year for a course here at Sciences Po — the idea that “modernism” emerged as a defined movement quite suddenly in the immediate post-war period is an Anglophone perspective. French literary history looks quite different. Pretty much all the things we associate with ‘modernism’ in poetry were well-established in French poetry already before the war.

Reading these two anthologies one after another this week made me think how interesting a mixed French and English (and even German and Russian) anthology would be.

Victoria Moul, In Time of War

Because in a perfect world, no word rhymes with war.
Because for a perfect verse, there can be no bar.
It is not day that ends night, nor night that ends day.
Where then will a poem end, when will its light fray?

***

Imayo: Of Japanese origin, this form has four 12-syllable lines (48 syllables) with a caesura between the first 7 and the next 5 syllables of each line.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, So can silence

The next panel I attended was titled “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: Creative Writing Workshops at Community Colleges” (Shinelle L. Espaillat, Rashaun Allen, Keith O’Neill, Gail Upchurch-Mills). Here I learned about the efforts of humanities professors to “fight the commodification of higher education,” as well as the process of students being turned into “clients.” All of us are inherent writers, the panelists told us, and should be allowed to “dream on the page” without anyone’s permission. We write ourselves into existence, and communities only function when everyone participates. One of the problems all the panelists shared was how to instill a love of reading in students whose attention was being diverted, constantly and shamelessly, from exploring their potential as writers.

My third panel on the first day was the extremely enjoyable “Craft for Crafters: How Fiber Arts, Book Arts, and More Shape Our Writing” (Meg Cass, Felicia Rose Chavez, Emrys Donaldson, Genevieve Kaplan, Sarah Minor, Doug Van Gundy). As a person who enjoys sewing and crafting as hobbies, I was intrigued to learn how the panel would connect those activities to writing. It was an unexpected pleasure to see poet Genevieve Kaplan, whose book Aviary I reviewed in the December 6, 2021 issue of Sticks & Stones. Some takeaways from this panel: sewing is like writing—cropping, darning and weaving; crafting is like poetry—language is “bits of things” we move around to create other things; crafts connect to writing, playing, revisioning, re-seeing. I enjoyed Doug Van Gundy’s story of how his sewing practice began by making pencil cases because he couldn’t find any decent ones. That grew into journal covers and messenger bags. He also revealed that sewing calms him down, allowing him some much-needed relief from an over-active brain. Doug is also the MFA director at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a 7^th-generation West Virginian.

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

Subtitled a magpie’s pilgrimage through the psalms, my erasure project is finished. 160 handwritten pages. This week I have made a cushion on which to display it in Wells Museum next month. The top of the cushion cover is a remnant of embroidered furnishing fabric that I bought years ago in a rather posh shop in Saxmundham. I loved the bird and her nestlings. I knew I would find a use for it some day. The underside is made from a much older fabric, a coarse unbleached linen 40cm/16 inches wide, handwoven in the Soviet Union. It probably came to me from my mother. The one-and-fourpenny predecimal zip fastener is from Bourne and Hollingsworth, a London department store that closed in 1983. I think this too was bought by my mother. The inner cushion (which contains 3 kilos of rice) is made from a sleeve from an unfinished cotton lawn nightdress trimmed with hand-crocheted lace I recognise as my grandmother’s work. The fine white cotton thread I used for stitching it also dates from my grandmother’s lace-making days.

Ama Bolton, “The Soul as a Bird”

I’m behind on reviews, I’m behind on a couple of editing gigs, I’m behind on a few other thousand things. I hide in our wee house either at my desk, or downstairs, folding and stapling chapbooks. […]

Otherwise, I was recently podcast-interviewed by Hollay Ghadery, which was plenty fun. The podcast has been posted over this way, if you wish to hear our conversation, which was focused on my recent On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Kitchener poet and reviewer Chris Banks interviewed me recently, posted over at The Woodlot: Canadian Poetry Reviews and Essays. Michael Greenstein was good enough to review the collection over at The Seaboard Review, and Salma Hussain managed this absolutely stellar and breathtaking review of same over at The Temz Review; she gets me. She really gets me. It is a rare thing, I will tell you, to be read so well. […]

Oh, and my fall poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press), a direct follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), already has a pre-order page! (but I might have mentioned that already; did I mention that already?). I should probably be thinking about fall events, possibly. Where should I go?

rob mclennan, an update, an update, my kingdom for an update

As a rule, I find it difficult to pick a poem from my books because I think in larger structures, sequences or books, not individual poems. However, this piece is something of an exception. It’s the coda from my a book of sounds, but it started out as a response to a call for submissions for Stride magazine’s 2020 TALKING TO THE DEAD project, which asked for poems addressed to a dead poet.

Now, I don’t often respond to such calls, but this one intrigued me as I was rereading, again, Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, a book I’ve owned for almost 50 years now and read more often than I can remember, and thought I’d like to try to inhabit her formal methods to some degree. It’s not the first time I’ve acknowledged my debt to her work; a previous book was titles Imaginary Gardens, but this time I wanted to do something much more direct.

The stanza form I invented for the occasion is, like so many of hers, syllabic rather than metrical, and there are numerous words and phrases of hers woven into it. Unusually for me, there’s an overt rhyme scheme, while my normal practice is to create patterns of assonance. In fact, this poem is, on the surface, so different to how I usually write that I considered it as a one-off and unlikely to be something I collected in a book, as my books tend to be organic wholes, units of composition in themselves.

But when I put the original typescript of the book together it was clear to me that something was missing. The book is, on one level, a collection of songs (hence the title), songs that focus on the small things that make a world and on our attempts to map that world, those things, in words. But the ending as it stood seemed to me to call for a coda, a kind of final restatement of the (aural) themes that run through the book, and it slowly dawned on me that Ms Moore’s Menagerie was just what the book needed to close with a kid of half-echo of the opening lines, a translation of an early Irish nature poem that deploys a semi-syllabic four-line stanza and intermittent rhyme. The book is a cycle, and this poem is a kind of recapitulation, closing the circle while leaving the idea of song, of sound, wide open.

Drop-in by Billy Mills (Nigel Kent)

This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation. 

Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn’t close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.

“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, “The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures. 

A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.

Alina Stefanescu, “Short talk on whatever.”

When the brochure for next month’s Stratford’s Literary Festival dropped on to the doormat yesterday, I was, naturally, interested to see what’s going on.

We’ve lived here for almost forty years and I’ve lived in Warwickshire for almost all of my adult life, so I know the score. Stratford’s a posh(ish) place – well, some bits are – where literary types and tourists mostly gather to see what’s on at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Occasionally, but not more than anywhere else, poetry events pop up.

As to literary festivals, we know that in order to attract sponsorship they have to make money, or be seen to provide events in which ‘big names’ or at least people who are blessed with a dose of temporary fame appear. Some, like the Stratford one next month, also have charitable status. It’s good that they exist.

We also know that poetry is still, whatever those of us who write and read it might like to think, viewed as a somewhat embarrassing literary sideline, like an odd, eccentric, ancient aunt at a family party.

Except that this time that old aunt hasn’t been invited.

I read all 42 pages of the brochure scouring the listings. Nothing. I read it again to make sure I’d not turned over two pages at one. Not a single poetry reading. Not even an actor reciting a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not even the conventional sop to the poetry world, the open mic. […]

Whatever mad ideas the Criminal President is dreaming up today will have far more impact than a literary festival in Middle England, but I’d have thought that at least one of the ‘festival team’, as they describe themselves, would have pushed for, perhaps, at least the inclusion of the Poet Laureate. Or maybe he was busy. Or maybe the only poets they thought of turned out to be dead.

Or perhaps they were a bit frightened that poets might be a bit unpredictable and rowdy. (When I used to read to an audience, if, as did sometimes happen, I’d forgotten my reading glasses, I tended to shout and rave a bit in case of the need for improvisation.)

To cite an even less controlled, less egocentric example, I’ve just received a critical appreciation by Andrew Taylor of the poetry of that old rogue Peter Finch, who once, it is said, ate his own poems after he had read them to his audience.

Bob Mee, POETRY DOESN’T MATTER IN STRATFORD-UPON-AVON – OFFICIAL

National Poetry Month has brought with it a sad bit of poetry news: Harry Humes has died. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you might want to check Penn State’s PA Book site’s biography of him, and then find one of his books:

https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/humes__harry

He was an excellent poet, influential for many folks–especially for Pennsylvania writers–and while I never knew him well, our lives intersected in some surprising ways over the years… […]

When I was hired at DeSales University around 2005, I learned that DSU held an annual poetry event for high school students. I attended/participated often, and Harry Humes–who was a good friend of the program’s administrator (Steve Myers)–was always involved in the workshops and events. Humes had retired from Kutztown by then, and was writing more poems, fishing, and enjoying family life. He always greeted me with a big smile and asked about my writing. That sums up for me what kind of person he was: generous; possessed of a self-effacing, even self-deprecating humor; kind and encouraging to people just starting out in poetry.

Here’s a poem of his that I like a lot, which I clearly recall him reading that day at Godfrey’s so long ago: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=154&issue=3&page=13

Ann E. Michael, Rest in poetry

[Isabelle] Baafi’s “Chaotic Good” demonstrates an understanding of craft and poetic forms, knowing that form can enhance and underline meaning, guiding the reader through the poem. Baafi explores a personal journey from childhood to adulthood, through marriage to a single life, but broadens that journey to include family ties, inheritances, cultural heritage and the struggle to find self among the pressures of societal and familial expectations. The poems eschew self-pity and sentiment, preferring compassionate reflection into love, threat, suspicions, the inertia of staying in a relationship an individual is not yet ready to admit has failed and become toxic, using different forms to drawn attention to different aspects, until the traveller arrives, surefooted and redeemed. It’s a journey that includes the reader and rewards re-reading. “Chaotic Good” is as thought-provoking as it is liberating, acknowledging the work that went into building a sense of self-worth through a library of precise, crafted, lyrical poems.

Emma Lee, “Chaotic Good” Isabelle Baafi (Faber and Faber) – book review

Gilonis’ poem marking ‘the 3^rd Thatcher election’ fits with the overarching impact of Tory politics mentioned in the introduction. It’s there fairly explicitly in Duncan’s own work, and in poets like Simon Smith:

     The sun floats about the meadow crazy as Whitman.
Codeine does the job good. Make a note to myself. Can’t bear
    to look. ‘Codeine’. Debts bite hard. More jobs
will have to go. Lines crackle like a telephone call in danger.

But it’s there, too, in Khaled Hakim’s idiolectic talk poems of identity and confusion or in Andrew Lawson’s ‘We are enjoined as good consumers to juxtapose and meld appearance’. And it’s there gloriously in Elizabeth James’ satires on culture as consumer object, as meaningless status fetish or decor:

I am concerned with the interior as a “walk-in” still life.
I was always thought of as the “artistic child”.
The salon, in beige, was designed around my own painting,
entitled Landscape–

I’m going to make it like a country road
with trompe-d’œil dirt and leaves, my garden and courtyard
being so perfect that they don’t seem real.

While this political dimension was something I expected to find here, there were some real surprises, including writing that shows a move towards psychogeography in Frances Presley’s map-driven walking poems or David Rees’s semi-doggerel London pieces that link the influence of Iain Sinclair with the city’s long association with nursery rhymes.

Billy Mills, Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby (eds): A Review

We’re excited to feature Marcy Rae Henry at our upcoming virtual reading. Their work is full of sharp turns and soft landings, moving through memory, family, and fleeting conversations with a voice that’s equal parts tender, irreverent, and quietly profound.

In their poem “this poem appears in,” what begins as a casual walk home unspools into a meditation on growing up, ancestral survival, and the strange, aching limits of language. Capturing how life’s most private and public moments often blur, they write:

“If only we had more than 1–10 to describe / happiness, sex, last night’s Thai food…”

This is poetry that drifts and returns, that wonders more than it explains. It’s emotionally precise while formally restless—rooted in stillness and always on the move. I knew right away this was the energy I wanted to start the latest issue with.

José Angel Araguz, Salamander virtual event next week (Spotlight: Marcy Rae Henry)

The sun sets before we reach the mountains. There are three men from Turkey in the row of seats behind me. They’re having an animated conversation in their mother tongue about something that keeps switching gears from playful to contentious. In front of me are three Romanians. The woman in the middle is speaking non-stop. Her voice is a strange aria. Romanian is a quick and seamless rise and fall in my ear.

Memories seep slowly into my consciousness. Lying in the backseat of a car—in those days before seat belts were the law—staring out the window at the stars in the black sky, and listening to my mother and my stepfather—to their voices only, not bothering to work out words, or even tone. Utterly uninvested, but enveloped by the mysterious business of grown-ups. […]

But another of our hosts keeps telling people that I’m “really” an American. It’s strange perhaps that I’m so offended that she’s taking control of my narrative. Maybe I’m especially sensitive since memories of my childhood seem to be coming more often and more vividly now, and I want to put a wall between who I am now and those years when I had no agency.

All the years that I traveled often were a way for me to figure out who I am. Not in a linear way, and not in a pretty way—but eventually. Strip away the trappings of your national identity, of your habits, and your preferences for food and drink and music, and you feel naked and new. You eat trout with capers and tangerines and wonder what on earth you really ever liked best to eat.

Ren Powell, Traveling in Transylvania

Always crouching down, looking the same all over.
To men he tries to show those great big, endless eyes.
If you really want to know if you yourself are small,
Try seeing your reflection in a filled hoof-print.

咏虾蟆
坐卧兼行总一般，
向人努眼太无端。
欲知自己形骸小，
试就蹄涔照影看。

Another from the bantering poems of Complete Tang Poems books 869-872. Jiang Yigong was a Five-Dynasties guy from Suzhou who made a name for himself for righteous satires, finding much material in his troubled times. Unlike a lot of the other comic poets from this section, he also has poems in the main part of CTP. 虾蟆, háma is used for both frogs and toads—to keep it snappy, I picked one. That really is, I’m ashamed to admit, only there to fill out the meter.

Larry Hammer, In Praise of the Toad, Jiang Yigong

The Palm/Passion story also reminds us of the fleeting nature of fame. Don’t get me wrong: if I’m chosen to be Poet Laureate, I’ll do as good a job as I’m capable of doing. But I’ll start every day by reminding myself that the fame is likely temporary. The important thing remains: the work.

The Palm/Passion story reminds us that we’re characters in a larger narrative (as does the Passover story, which people across the world have heard/will hear this week too, both in Jewish traditions and some Christian traditions). We will find ourselves in great danger if we start to believe it’s all about us, personally. No, there are larger forces at work. 

To put it in poetry and Scouting terms: I’m put here to do my best writing, but also, to leave the poetry campsite better than I found it. How do I do that? I work to promote not only myself, but other worthy poets, I work to make sure that the next generations know about the rewards of poetry, I envision the kind of world we would have if poetry was valued, and I work/play to make that possible. I also work to have a balanced, integrated life: my work in poetry cannot be allowed to eclipse other important work: the social justice work, the care of my family and friends, my relationship with the Divine, the other creative work I do, the self-care that must be the foundation of it all.

I find many values to being part of a religious tradition, but the constant reminder of the larger vision, the larger mission, is one of the most valuable to me. The world tells me that many things are important: fame, money, famous/rich people, a big house, a swell car, loads of stuff. My religious tradition reminds me of the moth-eaten nature of these things that the world would have me believe is important. My religious tradition reminds me of the importance of the larger vision. And happily, my religious tradition is expansive enough that my creative work can be part of that larger vision.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Lessons from Palm/Passion Sunday for Poets and Other Creative Types

Wondering whose turn it is
to sacrifice this time, what
to give up, what bitterness
to ingest, accept. Arms full
of plush youth, wriggling, resting.
Arms emptied from work that came
before, that follows. Fatigue.

PF Anderson, Mitzvah 407: The Second Lamb #NaPoWriMo

But what about the Instagram and LinkedIn and tumblr icons at the head of this page, I hear you ask. Good question. I think they may be about to go as well. Maybe. Perhaps. I’m just no good at them, you see. The Instagram I set up so I could feast on the photos and art of my friends R–, R–, and D–. But of course it is more complex than that. In an ideal world, I would follow only them. Once the cat is out of the bag, you have to follow everyone else you know who knows them, even the ones posting about their jam making. LinkedIn is harder. And I’ve been using it much longer. But it is useful. For example, it is the only platform of anything that my activist friend W– uses, and the only way I can see what she’s been up to around the world. So it has its uses.

But as Martin Stannard once said about picking up a copy of a very well-known poetry magazine, I can sort of feel the depression rising up through my fingertips and my arms as soon as I start using them. I’m back where I started, with that edge-of-the-playground-feeling of marvelling at the utter confidence with which everyone shares the minutae of their lives. Five minutes, tops, that’s all I can manage. Then the double-maths-feeling hits even harder. Everyone else has the answers: why not me? I have nothing to say. And who on earth would listen?

Anthony Wilson, On being useless at social media

My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.

I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.

It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.

Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know? […]

Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”

I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Finally, in a real way, warts and all

In my life, I have chosen risk over and over. We risked everything to start a publishing company. Keeping it going was wildly stressful, but we kept at it.

I cannot keep my kids safe. I want them to be strong. Independent. Compassionate community builders who know when to be fighters. But in my inclination for risk, there are limits. I wouldn’t suggest that my daughter and her wife move to Texas right now. The three billionaires who fund and control Texas politics have drawn a line comparing being gay to incest. To them, the two are one and the same. They want to outlaw gay rights.

I think the 1.7 million queer people in Texas are less safe than the 2.8 million queer people in California; hopefully, they make it through.

Several times, I have been to the Sharjah Book Fair. There are people who have told me that Tobi, our queer marketing director, could go there. Before I got on the plane, I researched the laws. I usually do before I go to a new country. I had the proper clothing. Tobi presents as a man. Tobi is a walking violation of Shariah law. As such, Tobi could go to prison for ten years or be sentenced to death. Not a risk worth taking. No reason ever to go to the Emirates or any country with Sharia law. Not necessary. I can go for Red Hen. Being in prison isn’t an adventure.

Kate Gale, Do You Feel Safe in America?

I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.” […]

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

Bethany Reid, Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

Do I lose myself over consequences and weird linkages I wish this story were different but here I am in my kitchen baking bread honey dripping into my sink not my honey not this honey I bake for children in the street children marching in the street am I property am I pleasure or a pretend god feeding pretend children maybe we could go into the mysterious history of god’s sisters I have given myself over to the hands of strangers mayday mayday here we are another war song another war another where was I when the bells last rang what was the song 

Rebecca Loudon, April 12

Above is a screenshot from a reading of the stage adaptation of The Other Jack, directed by James Dacre, with Jack (played by Nathaniel Parker) on the left and Robyn (played by Jasmine Blackborow) on the right. The script is by the US playwright and poet Dan O’Brien (CBe has published his poetry and essays). It’s based on the book of the same name by myself, published by CBe in 2021, with some material also coming from 99 Interruptions. […]

The original book is loosely constructed around a series of conversations in cafés between a man (a writer, ageing) and a woman (a waitress, much younger). They talk ‘about books, mostly’, according to the cover, but also about ‘bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas’. The man is me, or is me as much as Jack Robinson is me, and here I am being evasive again, something that Robyn picks me up on. The play is not the book and I could say that the Jack in the play is not me but Dan O’Brien’s script is self-effacingly faithful to the book so it is me, whether I like it or not. On the left, smug ageing writer; on the right, young woman concocted to demonstrate writer’s self-awareness of his smugness – so that’s all right then. There’s something monstrous here.

Charles Boyle, The Other Other Jack

Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.

five decades
collapsed in an instant
black metaltail hummingbird

Jason Crane, haibun: 12 April 2025

The full Pink Moon was actually pink this weekend, so I tried to get a picture of it in its true color which is always challenging but this one got pretty close.

My birthday is coming up soon which is always a time of introspection, as is tax time (how is it possible I did so much freelance work for so little money? I ask every year.) I am hoping to find a new home for my next book, maybe a chance to do more lucrative work teaching or publishing, and of course, balancing the joys of life and the stress plus health stuff. I am trying to find more disabled and chronically ill women’s books to review (so definitely comment if you have a new book coming out), and besides the book club and open mic, trying to get together more regularly with other writers. AWP (and maybe the art gallery and protest, too) reminded me of the strengths of feeling like part of a community, rather than just a lone eccentric trying to live your lone eccentric writer life. Helping others, speaking up, these things are also part of feeding the soul, not to get too cheesy.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Spring is Here with Cherry Blossoms and Art Shows, Tulip Fields, Pink Moons, and Visits with Family

the night is still / as April’s pink moon rises / lying / in his hot and fevered bed / the billionaire will meet an angel / walking in the soft shoes of a nurse / moonlight washes the city / as the hungry cry and shiver […]

‘Pink Moon’ is published in ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights – 30 pieces of Courage and Resistance’ out now with Rough Trade Books. April’s full moon reminds me of this poem, I think it was written around 2020 in lockdown and commissioned by BBC‘sThe Verb, to me this feels like a poem from another version of time, but some feelings still ringing true in 2025.

Salena Godden, Pink Moon

An artist once told me that every person has a pose, and it is rarely what we think it is. A person, their body, will fall into a kind of muscle memory of posture. There is no replicating it or forcing it, it is unique. It is beautiful, but not in the way that bright smiles and a tilted head makes a good photograph, but rather in the way that nature is beautiful, the way that beauty is everywhere. This, she said, is what she looks for when she sketches people.

I’ve thought about that a lot. I’m imagining my body, observing images of myself at different points in my life, trying to pin down my unique pose. There is the head in hand of the writer who reads her computer screen in a curled question mark of spine and chair. There is the hands on hips of observing garden, shopping, practical tasks that need a certain type of robust physicality and household organisation – this is the pose that my sister and my mum all share. And then there are the poses my body falls into when exploring, when my senses are alert to the outside world and the time points poking through, the places that connect the past and the future. I’m thinking about it now as I think about what it was that made me want to include Seamer Beacon, and the bronze age burial complex around the mound, in the series of pilgrimages that would make up my memoir, The Ghost Lake.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: Pilgrimage to Seamer Beacon

                Sometimes the moon 
       looks like the flap of a creased 

envelope— whatever message or instruction
       it bore has slipped into its dark 

pocket. Now it is swimming so far out 
       at sea, to a country not yet discovered. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Missing

When I’m asked a question I’m not totally sure on or not prepared for, I just start talking and then find my brain running behind going, ‘What the hell is she on about? Somebody stop her!’ Luckily, it was interviewing for the job I’ve been doing for the past two years on a temp contract, so they know I am not an idiot, though maybe also know I’m prone to babbling. 

This is why I feel comfortable as an editor, especially of my own writing. In writing my poems, I often don’t know what I’m saying until I have the meandering mess of it down on paper or screen and can sort it out, clean it up, take out the waffling that isn’t needed, the details that are just too off the wall or unclear. 

I do the same thing with emails, write it all out then edit it appropriately. I have, in the past, sent out those in the moment, emotional, unfocussed, unedited emails and it never ends well, so I always try to pull back and look a second time. 

I may have mentioned on this blog before that idea as my best piece of advice every given me, ‘Look at everything twice’. It was said to me by a Holocaust survivor I met when I was working in a bookshop in my small university town. She came in some Sundays to buy the big papers and chat. One day as she was leaving, she grasped my arm and said this and it’s always stuck with me. 

I’ve never considered the phrase in terms of my love of editing. I’ve always just thought of it as take a moment to appreciate what’s around you, the small things we overlook. By looking twice at anything, we understand it better and our place in it. We should spend that extra time to consider what we’re seeing, doing and saying. 

This applies to our writing as well. Slow down and consider. I need to do that when I speak as well it seems. 

Gerry Stewart, Look at Everything Twice – Editing

I asked myself a question last week. Could I write with the same joy as I have when I garden? It turns out I can. Perhaps by putting these thoughts on paper I understood what I needed to do to help me fall back in love with my creativity or perhaps it’s being part of NaPoWriMo courtesy of Notesfromthemargin April write-a-thon that has made the difference. […]

If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll know that my relationship with my work goes through huge peaks and troughs (I suspect part of this may be down to having Bipolar) so I won’t be surprised if this joy ebbs away a little. For now though I’m going to write as though I’m writing for fun, for myself and enjoy the responses from my lovely Notes from the Margin group. I’m writing in a way I haven’t for a long time – I look forward to the prompts each morning and write with instinct and enthusiasm rather than fear and self-doubt. It’s a wonderful feeling – almost like when I returned to poetry after almost thirty years away from writing but with better results.

I’m also going to revisit the dozens of poems in my files, see what’s good, what sings to me and try to get some order. I’m terrible at keeping track of everything and feel so sad that work I’ve been proud of is languishing in a forgotten file, or misplaced entirely. I’m not looking forward to this bit quite as much.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, I have taken my own advice

TPS: Tell me about the genesis of this book. How did you start and when did you know it was finished?

MS: Terminal Surreal began with my diagnosis—late 2023. It was a way for me to process what was and would happen to my body, but to be honest a good chunk of my brain didn’t quite believe I really had ALS – I think that’s how I managed to write poems like “When I Learn Catastrophically,” “Is this My Last Ferry Trip?,” “Self-Elegies,” and “Abecedarian with ALS.” A few poems were written before I knew I had ALS but was experiencing—muscle spasms and these things Inow know are fasciculations (when a nerve twitches).

I was hoping all my mysterious symptoms were anything but ALS. I did the Grind (where you are grouped with others via email and post a new poem draft or revision daily) in January, February, and March 2024, and the drafts and revisions from those three months gave me about half the book. In May, I sent it out as a chapbook, then pushed to get it to around fifty pages. I then sent it to Acre Books during their open reading period in May 2024, and heard a month later it had been accepted. I had never put a book together so quickly, and by then I was already in bad enough shape that the amazing editor, Lisa Ampleman, put the book into sections and did the arrangement for me (I was having trouble looking at screens).

I guess Terminal Surreal was officially finished about a month ago, when my partner Langdon Cook and Lisa did the final edits, and sent Lisa one last poem I asked to be added, and she said yes!

Tresha Faye Haefner, Terminal Surreal: An Interview with Martha Silano

The prompt today from NaPoWriMo.net is to write a villanelle that includes a song lyric. I’ve never written a villanelle and it reminded me of solving a puzzle. I kept referring to the pattern described in poets.org and this poem by Elizabeth Bishop for guidance. At first, my mind couldn’t translate the pattern into lines or stanzas but when I began really dissecting Elizabeth’s poem, it began making sense. So, thank you, Elizabeth! To be honest, I’m not sure the poem is technically correct but I had a hell of a time trying! […]

Initially, I had this scheduled to post this morning but I got cold feet and unscheduled it late last night. I thought, this villanelle is cheesy. This morning I thought, Who cares? I’m doing something creative every day and other artists (my readers & friends) know we can’t be perfect every time!

Charlotte Hamrick, Tom Petty & a Villanelle

How we remember the past isn’t always how the past remembers itself. As for what happens next, who knows? 

Tower, Star, Nine of Wands. Ace of Cups, Two of Swords, Lovers. 

In this mysterious church of heart and hurt, pleasure and pain are swallowed as communion. Inevitably, some preach hate louder than love.

It’s tarot weather.

Rich Ferguson, Tarot Weather

This week: synapses on fire, cryptic colonial zooids, a hearth of spiders, open secrets, a big smashing life, and more. Enjoy.

I’m thrilled that spring is finally here and with it, the National/Global Poetry Month. I’m particularly excited to be writing ekphrastic poems this year. Many thanks to Maureen Thorson for gathering the NaPoWriMo community around another poetry feast and for setting our synapses on fire with each of her wonderful prompts.

Like in previous years, the first draft of each poem written this month will expire when the next day’s draft is posted.

Romana Iorga, NaPoWriMo 2025

Welcome to my *fifth* annual installment of poetry prompts for NAPOWRIMO! You can find past editions here:

• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2024
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2023
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2022
• prompts for NAPOWRIMO 2021

As you write to the poetry prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025 (or any of the writing prompts published here), please be mindful of these important rules:

• Follow these prompts *wherever* they take you. Don’t get hung up on the details.
• Never, never, never, never, never, never copy the sample poems. They’re for inspiration only! If you borrow style or quote excerpts in your drafts, please be sure to credit the original and the poet.

Carolee Bennett, All new Poetry Prompts for NaPoWriMo 2025!

In my own current writing journey I am pleased to say I have made a small breakthrough: the daily exercises are helping. In short, I have allowed myself to play with the writing exercises, sometimes using them specifically on the project, sometimes just writing for fun. Reader, I should really take my own advice more often because I’m writing now. I’m writing well and writing with joy and not dreading my desk on a morning. I’m back in the writing flow that I enjoy and it’s because I stopped taking it too seriously and started enjoying it. A mix of less pressure, more joy.

This is the power that a daily external structure can bring to your work and while there is always a danger of becoming over reliant on prompts and exercises, a dedicated practice for a short amount of time is such a good way to boost your motivation and put the determination and JOY back into your work.

Wendy Pratt, April Write-A-Thon

Yesterday I graded the daily writing that I had students do on Monday, the day of the quilting bee.  I had decided to have a quilting bee because we were doing a module on Susan Glaspell’s one act play, “Trifles” and her short story that she created after the play, “A Jury of Her Peers.”  We watched this presentation created by The Edge Ensemble Theater Company, which was filmed in a historic farm house.

Ideas of putting a quilt together by quilting or knotting are integral to the play, and even when I first taught the play in the 90’s, students had little to no experience with quilts.  I thought it would be fun to do a quilting bee for the entire Spartanburg Methodist College community, along with my students.  I hoped that students would make connections to the play, but I wasn’t sure that they would, so we had continued discussion on Wednesday.

As I graded their daily writings, I was impressed with the connections they made without my insight.  Most of them made the connections about the wrung neck of the bird, the noose, and the knotting done on a quilt, connections that I hoped would be obvious but often aren’t.  Several students said that working on the quilts helped them appreciate what a lonely life the farm women in the play had had.   Some of them talked about the stories that quilts show.  Their writing reassured me that the effort to do it was worth it.

I’m at a school where the medieval lit professor has her students make chain mail and illuminated manuscripts, and her efforts made me want to do something similar.  Almost all of the English faculty do more with their classes than have writing assignments, and I’m impressed with the kinds of posters and presentations that they create.  I’m so grateful to be at a place where we all know that there are more ways to assess student learning than in written papers that we keep on file until the next accreditation review.  I’ve worked in places that discouraged genre-stretching assignments for fear that the accreditors would see them as suspicious.  It is so wonderful to be at a liberal arts college.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, More Pictures and Insights from a Quilting Bee

I’ve never read Homer’s Odyssey, so it was a surprise to me to find out that the word mentor is derived from Mentōr, an old man and an incarnation of the Goddess Athena, Goddess of wisdom. Fitting, Mentor offered Odysseus and his son Telemachus advice – and these days, of course, “mentor” describes someone who guides a less experienced colleague.

I’m not sure I had even heard of the term before I was lucky enough to be given my own mentor. For six months, as part of my Arvon/ Jerwood Young Poets Prize, George Szirtes and I communicated by email where he shared his wisdom and insights with me. George is a prolific writer of incredible skill, grace and wisdom, and his role as my teacher is hard-wired into my brain – to the extent that I still ask myself “What will George think?” when I share poetry news or opinions on social media.

George set the bar high: becoming a mentor myself was a scary business. But over the last fifteen years it’s been one of the most rewarding parts of my career. A mentoring relationship is intimate and committed – like Anegla Chevaux says, “Mentoring involves much more than careers advice and feedback on poems, it is an intimate relationship of sharing and listening, of support and trust”.

For the last year, I’ve been a pastoral mentor for four writers on the Writing Chance programme; a New Writing North scheme which supports new writers from working class and lower-income backgrounds. Instead of focusing on their written work, I’ve spent time discussing self-care and wellbeing, helping writers to develop writing routines and to explore career possibilities. It’s left me with an even keener sense of how various and complex our writing lives are; how the writing we produce is just the tip of the iceberg, just the quickest glimpse into personal, emotional and professional world of the writer.

Clare Shaw, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”

I was recently reminded of the poet June Jordan (1936-2002) by the stellar human and 2024 National Book Award winning poet, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Ms. Khalaf Tuffaha was visiting Highline College, where I teach, to read her work to over a hundred students, most of them, who had never heard a poet read before. It was an alchemical afternoon of poetry, politics, and much-needed community.

But things didn’t end there. Before Lena read her spectacular poem, “Dear June Jordan,” she told the students of finding a copy of Jordan’s book in a shop when she was a college student herself. She told my students in a teacherly voice that they heard, “Go home and Google her tonight.” And to my delight, many of them did.

I remember reading June Jordan for the first time in high school but not for any high school class. I found her in an anthology of women poets, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women Edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass. It was 1973.

To be honest, her direct, short-lined, approach to poetry and it seemed, to life, alarmed me. And thrilled me. She wrote poetry about what mattered: Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa. She wrote from her lived experience as an African American woman in the United States “though never solely as or for”(Adrienne Rich). She wrote of police brutality and racial profiling. She wrote (and published) poems for her friends Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker.

She wrote about joy! She once described her poetry as “voice prints of language” and stated:

“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream or bumper sticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.”

Who was this woman? I had not read anything like this before. Now, decades later, Jordan still stands out as a poet (and activist, children’s book writer, librettist, political journalism, memoirist, musical playwright, speech writer…and the list goes on).

Susan Rich, Perhaps the Poet We Need Right Now

One hundred daffodils have opened in my yard, and the rocket arugula is ready to pluck for salads. The blueberry bush survived its first winter, though last year’s berries were all eaten by the catbirds, and there’s new growth on the hydrangeas.

It wasn’t so long ago—last spring, in fact—that enjoying these things came without remorse and regret. This spring, though, watching the doves do it in the redbud tree can sometimes make you feel a little guilty for enjoying nature’s spectacle while fascism rises. You can concentrate on lining up the rusty glider’s heaves and hos with the grackles’ squawks for only so long before it hits you that democracy is dying in bright sunshine, too. […]

I’ve been making lots of signs and flyers and even t-shirts for my daily walks around the neighborhood. My first was a test to see how Indivisible Baltimore’s logo would look on apparel. For me, Indivisible is the point at which creativity meets activism. Here’s another: A Torch for the Long Night: Voices Against Fascism. Poets, please consider contributing to this journal, which I am coediting with the phenomenal Ren Powell.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, pièce de ré·sis·tance

Physalia is highly successful organism, widespread across the world’s oceans. Nevertheless, its environment is under increasing threat from pollution and climate change. Its potent armoury of highly toxic stings is no match for this type of attack. Perhaps new forms of cryptic colonial zooids may evolve to reverse the damage… If they had the words, what would they tell us? […]

I have used invented or code-based languages before on my videos, eg The Ferrovores. They have all followed their own internally consistent grammatical rules and meanings. But in Physalia, the “language” is purely phonetic and has no underlying structure or meaning, other than what was in the source sentence.

The biomorphic creatures in the video are not real Physalia, not least because I didn’t have any footage I could use. Instead, the Physalia biomorphs were variously constructed from Particle Illusion (Boris FX), coralline red algae, Muntrie flowers and Eucalypt flowers. Very few people have seen Physalia out at sea (I have a few times!) so using imaginary shapes seemed fitting.

Ian Gibbins, Physalia

In the beam black scraps of stealth
strobe in and out of existence
it hurts to chart their orbits

and I question my eyes
all the way to the car

Paul Tobin, BLACK SCRAPS OF STEALTH

I’m excited to share that I have a new poem published! Check out “Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” which is currently featured as part of Split This Rock‘s Poem of the Week series. It’s always meaningful to see my work find a home, and I’m grateful to everyone at Split This Rock for featuring this poem. This poem will also be included in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which, for those unfamiliar, is an amazing resource for general readers and educators alike.

“Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” is a poem that comes out of my history with speech therapy as a child. The first draft came from a writing exercise I did alongside my students in the poetry workshop I taught last year. The exercise in question is Rita Dove’s “Ten-Minute Spill” from The Practice of Poetry.

José Angel Araguz, new poem up at Split This Rock!

On Monday, we were with the above group in front of the U.S. Consulate in Montreal, standing up for Canada’s sovereignty. Similar demonstrations took place all across Canada, at consulates in every province. I met some good people. One woman had come in from the Eastern Townships, motivated by the controversy over the small library in her community that straddles the border. As of Oct. 1, US officials will prohibit direct Canadian access to the main entrance of the Haskell Library and Opera House, which has been used cooperatively by local residents of both countries for over a hundred years. The border is marked on the floor of the library, but library patrons have always come from both sides, with patrols making sure everybody goes back where they came from and nobody unknown goes out the wrong door. Soon, Canadians wishing to use the library will be required to go through U.S. customs first. […]

I think of the remarkable city of Montreal where I am privileged to live, and how most of us view diversity as one of its strongest aspects. I live in the very mixed-ethnic neighborhood of Cote-de-Neiges. When I enter a metro car, I am always — as a white person — in the minority. This is, frankly, a good experience, and if more white people had it, the world would be different. Around me are people from all over the world, speaking many languages, wearing all sorts of clothing, from elderly to newborns. As we observe each other going about our daily lives, we see our similarities and commonalities: everybody’s cold, tired of winter, bundled up, sniffling — in another month, we’ll all be smiling because it will be spring. We’re tolerant and accepting, as a city; we eat each other’s food and love it, we learn languages as a hobby, we travel a lot, we all share the parks, the river, our bike paths and transit system, our crazy northern climate. In the very rare events when there is a racist incident such as an attack on a mosque or a synagogue, the reaction from our city leaders and population has always been, “This is not who we are in Montreal, we won’t tolerate this kind of hatred.” This ideal of tolerance and protection includes all oppressed groups, from women to indigenous people to those of various sexual orientations and genders. When accusations of racial profiling by police arise, citizens push back. Of course racism and prejudice exist here. However, we do pretty well as a city, living together.

How I wish that more of the world could be this way — and how worried I am that it could so easily be lost! All we have to do is read the news to see what’s at stake. Last night’s video of a Tufts University graduate student being arrested on a Boston street and abducted in under four minutes by a swarm of masked, black-clothed ICE agents was absolutely terrifying. Her crime, so far as we know? Co-authoring, with three other students, a letter to the Tufts administration criticizing its position on Palestine/Israel and calling for the university to divest. She and other students and professors across the U.S. have been doxxed by Canary Mission, an organization targeting pro-Palestinian (they use the term “pro-Hamas”) activists on college campuses. This likely led to her arrest. Canary Mission also has a website in Canada, which exposes the names and faces of 431 Canadian professors, university staff, and students that the group similarly accuses.

Free speech is the bedrock of our human rights; when it’s gone, our humanity goes with it.

Beth Adams, Speech Must Remain Free

ten-word salad
no more sewage-talk
nothing wrong with cardboard

from ebay
from my fridge
from a rubber plantation

Ama Bolton, ABCD March 2025

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been going through my days with half a mind grasping toward prayer, and mostly coming up empty. None of the ones from my childhood make sense for me—I’m not a Christian—and many of the Sanskrit mantras feel both too short and a little too distant, not being in my own language. In the early morning hours when I’m driving my child to school and the beauty of the sunrise awes us both to silence, when a giant hawk watches us drive by from his brief perch on a neighbor’s mailbox, when I’m overwhelmed by the “muzzle velocity” of illegal and inhumane actions coming out of the White House, or when my Telegram chat thread is full of new photos and videos of the dead coming out of Gaza, what words can my mind hold to?

What language to honor the heart-rending generosity of Spring in North Carolina alongside the mechanized death machine?

So, last week I finally sat down and wrote my own prayer—the one I need right now. I’ve been repeating it to myself multiple times a day, honing the language of it as I do, and have also shared it with my son. It feels too intimate to share it here (maybe I will some time in the future). However, part of my inspiration was The Emerald Podcast, in which the host Joshua Michael Schrei often intersperses beautiful prayerful passages amidst the larger experience of each episode. The most recent one of these episodes, “Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis,” arrived right when I needed it, as it is devoted to this ancient yearning I’ve been feeling to hail the Sacred when the everythingness of the world has been turned up to eleven.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Staying with the Trouble

i see a video on tiktok about ways
to leave the united states. you can pour yourself
into water bottles & throw them into the ocean.
you can bury yourself in a time capsule.
hope that when they dig you up
that the world is softer & less terrifying.

Robin Gow, what does not grow legs

So. I’m back in Los Angeles, my old stomping grounds (writing grounds, eating grounds, loving grounds) for AWP and I’m suddenly flooded with emotions. To me, these hills are haunted with the ghosts of my past selves. Failures. Triumphs. Men who dumped me. The one who didn’t. The friends I’ve made and lost. The poems I’ve had published and the many, many, many projects I’ve abandoned, given-up on, or failed to get accepted. They’re all up there in those barely-green hills. Or they’re waving at me when I drive by the sea. All of them mocking me for what I’ve failed to accomplish.

I’m used to that, but then I saw on the calendar of events that a poet who was very mean to me ten years ago (won’t start rumors about who it is), is headlining at a big event. Worse, she’s headlining with some of my favorite poets who I want to headline with. […]

It reminds me again how challenging it is to be an artist. 90% of the time we’re failing. The 10% of the time that we “succeed” we still have to ask, “is this good enough?” And then you throw into it a situation like AWP. This is where all of the “great” writers go. Some of them are your age. Some are much younger. All of them are amazing and you look up at the luminaries on the stage and ask “Why isn’t that me with that book deal, major prize, panel position and group of adoring fans?”

I was feeling really bummed the other day, and got on the phone with a long-time poetry pal. This is one of the writers I most admire and look-up to and wish I could emulate. Instead of flicking me away like the little piece of dried up hair dander that I feel I am these days, she told me that she too is feeling less-than at AWP. Her latest book isn’t ready. She didn’t get the deal she wanted. And at the age she is, she isn’t yet a household name.

I was so glad she told me this. It’s not that I want to see a fellow writer struggling, but at the same time, it reminds me that none of us are alone in this struggle. This poet is one of my favorite people to read, learn from, and most importantly, spend time with. If neither of us ever get to become household names, I’m still so glad I get to/got to spend my time sharing poems with this one true audience member.

Tresha Faye Haefner, A Pep Talk for Those Going (and Not Going) to AWP. With advice from Danusha Lameris and Elizabeth Gilbert

Yesterday evening Peter Kenny and I stood in the doorway of the wood-panelled hall at the Art Workers’ Guild in London and surveyed the throng: who were all these very tall, young people? I’ve no idea who gets invited to these shebangs, but it was a mystery to me – ten years ago the event would have stuffed full of the grandees of the poetry world. Now it’s all become a very youthful. Which I’m not complaining about, just observing!

So on to the ceremonies, and we were given readings of all the seven commended poems and then the top three. All poets did a good job, and the judges too, particularly the smiling Romalyn Ante. I particularly enjoyed Kit Buchan’s ‘Hallow’een Ghazal’, read very confidently from memory, and Matt Barnard’s second-prize ‘Two Boys at Midnight’. And then who should be announced as the winning poet but Fiona Larkin –  out of the Pindrop stable no less! –  and someone I feel actually know, with a lovely poem ‘Absence has a grammar’ – actually the title alone is prize-worthy.

I asked Fiona afterwards – what was it like getting the call? “It was back in January,” she said, ” I had a message to call the Poetry Society, and I assumed my direct debit hadn’t gone through or something…” Haha! An anecdote to dine out on for some time I think. How wonderful!

Robin Houghton, At the National Poetry Competition awards night

VerseFest runs March 25-29. The kickoff was at Saw Gallery, Ottawa. It runs every day. We are so lucky to have access to this and some events are even offered for free.

What a strange thing for this rural hermit to be in a city, teeming like an anthill. More pedestrians per block than I’ve seen in months and months. And in a low-ceilinged room, so many tables and familiar faces. (I was too gobsmacked to be social but a few people hallooed me.) […]

I wasn’t going to take the mantle of thankful posting for the privilege of witnessing the poets this year but this process gives me a chance to reflect.

I’m not going to be obsessive like some years, going to every event, livetweeting, taking hundreds of photos, even with fresh concussion, migraine, meds and hiding in hoodie, cap and sunglasses. That was a mad caper.

Pearl Pirie, VerseFest is now on

J and M made me laugh like the monocle de mon oncle in the Gopher alcove. We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns. This is how friendship works between writers: we converse through various texts while wrangling quotations and interpretations as if the world depended on it. As if we, too, depend on it. The as-if is our solace and our shared joy. We refuse the world we are given. We argue over the other ways it could be. We blow up the given to realize the otherwise. We entreat our readers to imagine more— and urgently. We fear dying before the book that escapes us, the book that will free us, the text that will loosen the compulsion or obsession to write. We covet the pure products of pears and apricots. We ode them for blowing our minds. When we leave each other, we return to the world where literature, art, philosophy, humanities, and words don’t ‘really matter’ — or matter instrumentally. But these moments are called upon in nights of despair, and we remember that we are not alone. Not entirely alone. Not utterly so.

Alina Stefanescu, Notes on what the programs called “AWP 2025”.

This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin, wren, blackbird, an extremely jazzy thrush, and somewhere at the back of it all, like Ringo Starr making his presence known in the corners of Abbey Road, a woodpecker, his knocking persistent and timeless. Two dipper came out of nowhere, trailing each other’s twists and turns like Spitfires in an aerial display of astonishing dexterity. Apparently exhausted, they came to land on separate rocks in the stream, their white bibs bobbing. Take away their markings, give them a black beak, and you could be looking at a blackbird. Their song is not a million miles away, either. Then they were away again, lost in their spirals. Leaving the wood for the road back to the car, a wren, briefly at eye level on a fence post, glared at me for a second, then treated me to a solo of distilled purity and scorn.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my blog post from last year on Tom Paulin’s great poem of anger and healing, ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. Again without going into details, it has been in my mind again recently, as we negotiate the slow-slow-slow-slow-quickquickquick of our beloved NHS as it limps to put right that damage. Not the closing of the poem this time, but the first line of its final stanza: ‘the vicious trapped crying of a wren’. As fulfilment of the lyric utterance promised in the poem’s title, this is worth the admission fee (sorry kids) on its own. Everything you can possibly know about wrens and wren-ness is in those six words. I can’t prove this; I just know it to be true.

This led me, by way of faulty memory, to the much unhappier reading experience of being given 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson for my birthday several years ago. It’s not just a book I was unable to finish, it joins a select group of books I have actually thrown across the room.

Anthony Wilson, Birdsong

Let me here jump on the Ada Limón bandwagon. I have not read her work in a while. Here’s one. It’s this line that sticks with me: “I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.” Isn’t it great? A hearth of spiders! I see a flat stone spread before the gape of a fireplace, see the detritus of insect leavings on the slab and the dusty crisscross of webbing, frayed and swaying in a breeze down the chimney. But the fire is just there too, the heat of it also, the spiders warm and hungry, wound in the corner watching, waiting. In an early hour they dart out at a floundering in the lines, something tiny and caught. It breaks free. Something else causes the web to sway, the spider to dart, but it’s a cinder, dry, useless.

But also I love then the quotidian: the ritual garbage rolling. The idle chitchat.

I love that the poem then stops short. I bump into it as it says, “Look, we are not unspectacular things.” Yes, I say. That is true. So true!

This poem billows out into the world just like the stars are fabric-spread across the sky, and we, we too billow in our possibilities. You. Me. All of us. Our hunger, our burning, our wonder, our promise.

Marilyn McCabe, what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Blueprint produce a series of elegant pamphlets wrapped in a distinctive, iridescent blue cover. “Year of the Rat” has a central sequence about a large family of rats who’d moved into the woodshed, but it doesn’t start the collection. […]

Most of these poems would have been written during Covid lockdowns, pushing the idea of survival and what family connections mean to the fore. Covid is not explicitly mentioned, these are not lockdown poems, but it lurks. These poems are an unsentimental, compassionate look at family, how blood connections and inheritances survival and can either strengthen or weaken familial bonds.

Emma Lee, “Year of the Rat” Charles G Lauder Jr (Blueprint) – book review

In the curtains are still we see [M.C.] Gardner’s talent: it is a characteristically vivid depiction of a scene which has a powerful emotional resonance. Not a word is wasted. Each line strives to convey as much as possible, in as few words as possible. As her drop-in revealed, Gardner deploys these skills to explore the nature of male-female relationships. Many of the poems in the collection explore the frustrations, the anticipation, the hopes, the joys, the disappointments, and the memories of love affairs. There are, however, other themes too. For example, melted in cubes examines the transience of life; a walk in the woods explores the palliative effects of nature during Lockdown; the project the unreliability of appearances; the wedding canvas, and the summer exhibition the nature of visual art and the life of the artist; and all rules are suspended and manipulation the nature of freedom.

There are also poems that are informed by Gardner’s Romanian heritage. I found remember the locusts particularly interesting. Here the style is significantly different: ‘we are trapped- / mile long Sovrom train with Cyrillic labels/ locked freight trains with a message of friendship…/ Sovrom wood, Sovrom meat,/ Sovrom grain, Sovrom cement,/ Sovrom pipes…/ we are trapped.’ The cumulative effect of repetition and listing conveys the repressive nature of the regime. Furthermore, it is the directness in these lines and in lines such as: ‘I must watch over my shoulder/ there are informers everywhere’ that makes the reality so authentic and imaginable. Its debilitating effect, however, is left to Gardner’s characteristic imagery of: ‘broken pavements, bare poplar trees,/ silent streets of decaying villas/ with blue paper at the windows…/the old and the young walk shrivelled…/ ghosts of long queues’ and to the symbol that concludes the poem: of ‘the silhouette of the street beggar/ rummaging into the street refuse bins.’

I have always been an admirer of M.C. Gardner’s poetry and consequently had high expectations of this collection. I hope it is clear from what I have written above that those expectations were realised in full. Lovers of imagist poetry will find much to enjoy in discarded objects of a love affair.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘discarded objects of a love affair’ by M.C. Gardner

Through seventeen extended sequences, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge [by MC Hyland] exists as a suite of prose poems within the nebulous space of short stories by Lydia Davis and the essay-poems of poets such as Anne Carson, Benjamin Niespodziany, Lisa Robertson and Phil Hall. “Against the onrush of history,” the sequence “Essay on Weather” continues, “I sought the register of clouds, of breezes, of minute shifts in actual or perceived temperature. Against the dying present, I accumulated a small log of instances.” Directly citing Canadian poet Anne Carson infamous Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992), the back cover offers: “In the tradition of Montaigne’s Essais and Anne Carson’s Short Talks, MC Hyland’s poem-essays weave together the conceptual and the material, leaving a trace of thought-in-flight.”

With titles such as “Essay on Paper,” “Essay on Ophelia,” “Essay on Labor and the Body (Gender I),” “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets” and “Essay on the Prose Poem,” the collection holds as a single, book-length unit, offering echoes of structure and titles to contain an absolute array of multitudes. Through spellbinding prose, Hyland offers sentences across vibrant thinking, attempting to connect disparate thoughts and the chasms between, as she writes, the dead and the living. “In a poem addressed to either a lost lover or an unborn child,” the four-page, four-stanza poem “Essay on the Optimism of Attachment” ends, “I wrote I didn’t want to make you the referent of my theological longings. The space of either love or belief: a space of absence, of silence. A dazzling cloud into which I lean.” Hyland holds the form of the prose poem as complex as Carson’s suite of talks, offering the prose lyric as capable of containing entire realms of complex meditation, weaving multiple threads on reading, writing and experience, and even the limitations through which one attempts to examine through writing. “Which is to say: the experience of pain cannot be reliably witnessed,” Hyland writes, in the third part of “Five Short Essays on Open Secrets,” “at least not through language.” As well, there’s a shared element of Carson’s, as well as evident through Phil Hall, of the poem as a means through which to discuss, through a kind of collage or weaving, the very act of attempting to understand how best to live in and experience the world. I’ve long been an admirer of Hyland’s work, but if this is an example of where their work is going, I am very excited to see what might come next.

rob mclennan, MC Hyland, The Dead & The Living & The Bridge

I was very happy this week to learn that one of my favourite writers, Anthony V. Capildeo, has been awarded a prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for their poetry. Twenty years ago — when they were writing as Vahni Capildeo and I had a small poetry press called Landfill — I published their prose poem Person Animal Figure (2005), a sequence for three voices expressed through three typefaces. Typesetting a text is one way to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and my ongoing interest in the nature and history of the prose poem began with the making of this pamphlet.

Capildeo has since published many more books and pamphlets of poetry in both prose and verse, and this is the achievement that the Windham Campbell Prize recognises. Something that doesn’t yet exist, though, is a collection of their critical prose, which I admire just as highly. Their gift for fluent reflection on writing as a kind of thought woven into the wider business of living seems to me comparable to that of Virginia Woolf (who once wrote “the peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other”). So this Pinks is a selection of passages that I find particularly illuminating of their own poetry.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #30: A Poetics of Reverberation

The bit of Latin immediately preceding the Shakespeare quotation is from Erasmus’s Lingua. Pointing out how Erasmian Shakespeare is seems to have gone out of fashion — probably just because not many people read Erasmus any more — but in my (unoriginal, if dated) opinion he is much more like Erasmus than anyone else, and I suppose the anonymous compiler of this collection thought so too. (For the avoidance of doubt, being like Erasmus is a good thing.)

Scholars trying to build an academic career have to reserve any such “discoveries” for a big splash in the Review of English Studies, ideally with a linked piece in the Times Literary Supplement. But one of the fun things about not being a career academic any more is putting this sort of thing on substack instead. I’ve done this a few times already — pretty much all my posts in the “from the archives” section on the contents page contain original research. Many of the manuscripts I’ve written about here haven’t been studied by anyone else, and that’s even more true at the level of individual Latin poems: I’ve written before about a tiny bit of Latin that might possibly be one of John Donne’s lost Latin epigrams, for instance.

But today I thought I’d try to write a slightly more systematic account of what you do, as a scholar, when you make what might be a “new find” — when you come across in manuscript what might be a “new” (i.e. previously lost or overlooked) poem by a reasonably well-known author. In this case, a Latin poem that looks plausibly as if it may be by Robert Southwell, the English Catholic poet and Jesuit martyr, hanged at Tyburn in 1595, but which is not any of the relatively small number of his Latin poems that have previously been known, and — more interestingly — is also not at all like them.

Victoria Moul, A possible new poem by Robert Southwell (with a bonus smidgen of Shakespeare and Erasmus)

For Auden and his fellow social realists, the world was to be understood, to a greater or lesser degree, through the lens of a particular kind of Marxist thought, with its essentially Victorian view of history as linear, the arrow of time pointing on to inevitable progress. This was married to a relatively unproblematic view of language and its relationship with the world the poet wished to evoke and the ideas he (invariably a he) wanted to expound. In the 30s at least, the MacSpaunday poets had something to say and every confidence in poetry as a vehicle through which they could say it. The result was a body of work, much of it very powerful, that was ironic in tone, impersonal, favouring (in theory at least) the communal over the individual, suspicious of the profound; what their Irish contemporary Brian Coffey described as the poetry of the audenary.

Of course, decades are not impermeable containers of the homogenous, and not all 30s poets were the same. Indeed, there was a strong counter-current of writing that moved to a different rhythm, or set of rhythms to the mainstream. Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne and the small group of English Surrealists associated with him forged their own individual styles during this time, and that most individual of all 20^th century British poets, David Jones, published his Arthurian epic of WWI, In Parenthesis in 1937. This poem, in which history is absorbed into the mythic, appeared just a year after TS Eliot published Burnt Norton, whose opening lines are an implicit rejection of linear time:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Barker and Gascoyne were to discover their voices in the decade that followed, while Thomas and Eliot, the Eliot of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, along with Yeats, were major influences on the younger poets who came after them. And many of these poets were beginning to publish before the end of the 30s, in student magazines out of Oxford and Cambridge and the anthology The New Apocalypse, which appeared in 1939.

Something had clearly happened to cause this shift, and that something was the imminence, and then the actuality, of a second World War. In the face of such a definite instance of history repeating itself, it must have been difficult to accept the idea that time was a steady march towards a Socialist utopia, and ironic indifference to the difficulties of expression through language may well have seemed an unaffordable luxury. Auden himself tacitly acknowledged this shift by sailing for America as a prelude to more or less abandoning his left-wing politics.

Billy Mills, The Collected Poems of Terence Tiller

You stir the substance of memory:
start and stop and start again, not knowing

what you’ll turn up, where it will lead—
you know it goes deep, down to the water table.
That’s where you seek the roots of conversation.

When you stand at the lip of the well and call,
only your voice bounces back and echoes. Do it again,
start and stop and start again, not knowing but knowing:
in conversation you’d talk with someone besides yourself.

Luisa A. Igloria, In Conversation

Many writers were stunned to learn last week that Meta, the tech conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, has been using their books to train its AI assistant, Llama 3. In a major story for The Atlantic, Alex Reisner outlines how Meta wished to circumnavigate time and financial costs, and so turned to LibGen.

What is LibGen? According to one site, “Library Genesis is a Shadow Library, and a useful and comprehensive online portal that offers free access to millions of ebooks, articles and pdf files in a range of languages.”

But what exactly is a “Shadow Library?” According to Wikipedia, “Shadow libraries are part of the open access and open knowledge movements. They seek to more freely disseminate academic scholarship and other media, often citing a moral imperative to make knowledge freely available.^”

Fully-flowing information? Open access to knowledge? Free books for everyone in the world? Sounds pretty good. Except, according to Reisner, “Over the years, the collection has ballooned as contributors piled in more and more pirated work.” Now, that pirated work is being used to train Llama 3 and ultimately enrich Meta rather than the authors themselves, many of whom were unaware their works were even available.

The Author’s Guild has initiated legal action “against Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other AI companies for using pirated books. If your book was used by Meta, you’re automatically included in the Kadrey v. Meta class action…”

To see if your own work, which includes pieces published in literary magazines, appears in LibGen, you can search the database here or use Reisner’s “cleaned-up version” here.

Becky Tuch, How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By Lit Mags!

Today, as I walked across the L.A. Convention Center at this year’s AWP conference, someone asked me, “Are you important?”

“No,” I said, “absolutely not. Are you? I’m nobody.”

She seemed to give it some thought as I continued on my way. She watched me like she might know me, despite my explanation: I’m nobody.

I think of Emily Dickinson’s follow-up line, “Are you nobody too?”

Being nobody has always been a comfort to me. No parents. No expectations. Writing Nobody to contact in case of emergency in my young years. If I’d become a drifter or a grifter, it would have been par for the course. “I figured you’d steal your way across America,” Charity said to me once. Charity, my biological mother.

“Making enough money to support one person isn’t that hard,” I said. I was still in college then. “I suppose if I want to build a big smashing life, that might be something.”

In many of the stories I read, women are not presented as reliable or valuable narrators. You can’t quite believe the woman’s version of the tale.

A man’s story is another matter. In literature, a man’s story is a great thing, a revered thing. A big stomping thing in the world.

When I have a conversation with a man, their words stomp all over God’s world, and mine walk around the edges of the room. A man and his story stare at the sun, the whole face of the sun.

A woman’s story is a small, smudged thing, a stepped-on thing, a hard-to-see thing, a crowded back thing.

In my childhood, adults were not reliable. Other kids were not reliable. God was not reliable.

I always knew my mother was an unreliable narrator. Nothing she said was true. She said I was evil.

I’m not really evil, I thought. Evil is relative.

Now that I’m an adult, evil feels real, not relative.

Kate Gale, Are Women Reliable Narrators?

A lawyer sends me a pdf of my mother’s handwritten will. I’m not in it. I have a legal right to contest it. I think it’s funny that contest as a noun is defined as a competition to obtain something, as a verb it means to oppose something as wrong.

It’s funny in that kind of laugh or it will kill you kind of way. Who wins? And what does anyone get out of calling out the monsters under the bed. In the bed.

I print the will, rip it into strips, put it in a blender with this mossy Norwegian water, and I make new paper out of it. Then I make collages in the shapes of wasps.

And only then do I write to the lawyer, removing myself from her obituary.

Ren Powell, Estranged

I’m still thinking about what Rebecca Solnit says in Hope in the Dark: “Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.”

This past week, I found joy in a March snowfall — out like a lion and all that. I was also working so just had to do quick little clicks on my way there. I would have liked more, but also, I did get a few okay ones! Joy! And there was a lamp in the window, with books. This seemed to symbolize so much for me at that moment. All this weather. So. Much. Weather. But also, a light in a window, steadfast. It feels like we’re all living in a snow squall, in a spring storm. Still, there is hope, there are those making of themselves a light, offering light, keeping a light on.

Shawna Lemay, A Lamp in the Window and Other Joys

There are still wars raging, crying for
attention. There are still pictures of blood
and rubble, renewing grief. There is still a
world falling apart, demanding correction.
There is still a lopsided reality begging
for the weight to shift. The language of
being has bent itself into errors: we
debate in the wrong tense, our curt
apostrophes are in faulty places forcing
mistaken belonging, an unequal grammar
is purging all meaning, leaving untethered
words: words that fall like fire into the
stubborn mouth of disbelief. The moon
hangs like a sword over us. How should
we deliver ourselves to the clouds?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The unravelling

beneath a sky that may or may not answer
i bring out my heart
i begin to read

Grant Hackett [no title]

This week: sound and silence, the worm moon, war news, the lost forest of time, and much more. Enjoy.

I heard the author of this poem read it at an open mic, and it haunted me, this haunting. It’s a dream poem, but ghostly. I think it’s the sounds heard in the poem that haunted me, the creak of oars, the voice, and also the inability to see, that straining that is a part of so many dreams that are remembered in the morning. The unmet desire to reach. But how can sorrow be beautiful?

Reading poems that make me teary feels like practice for the real times of sorrow. Rehearsal. Or a revisiting of times I had to push away, a chance to sit with them again with the pain less acute. This is, after all, someone else’s sorrow, safer, and made art. Art that makes us feel what the maker feels is communication magic, the kind that defies mere words. Yet poems are mere words. Isn’t it strange?

Marilyn McCabe, of trout or perch, gone before I could relish

---

Needless to say, I haven’t posted in forever. Work and traveling occupy much of my time.

My mother died in late January after an accident in early December, and I was out of commission for weeks, first trying to prevent it, then trying to make it bearable, then (and still) sorrowing over it. She was 88. She was lucky to have her wits about her until her last days. She was a very good mother and person.

Along with many other people, I’m in disbelief about what is happening in the U.S. But everyone reads the news, one way or another. And some people who don’t like democracy think it’s all just fine. May they boil in oil.

As a respite from the news, I turn to nature and books written long ago. I’m rereading “Swann’s Way” in a different translation now, and it’s as fabulous as it was 10 years ago. I am again cataloging the abundant flowers.

Sarah J. Sloat, Needless to say

For months after his burial tourists came to the cemetery to see where he was buried. If people saw me kneeling at my daughter’s grave they would come and ask me where he was and I never thought i could tell them to fuck off, but I wish I had, because they were paying no reverence to my daughter, who had also died, who was also buried there, and they were paying no respect to me. It was all about the fame of Jimmy. When I wrote The Ghost Lake, I talked a little about this moment, when someone almost stood on my daughter’s grave, leaning through the hedge to ask me where Jimmy was buried, without even a hello. Is if by being a part of the cemetery, by having a burial in the cemetery, I was somehow now a guide to the burials. I hated it. I hated the way Jimmy’s gravity was affecting the peace of the place, how all our smaller stars were being sucked into his story. He had a triptych gravestone put up, of course he did, black marble, obviously written by himself, with stories of his charity work, of how loved he was. They had to put one of those iron chains around his grave because so many people wanted to see it.

And then the allegations and the investigations began and Scarborough didn’t know what to do with their town celebrity. Even more people were coming to the cemetery and it began to be a source of shame to the town. The gravestone disappeared, taken down. Then later the iron rope, leaving no trace of him in the cemetery. People did still come, but couldn’t find his grave, unless they were obsessed with it and knew where it was. Less people came over time, now very few come. The town defended him for a while, until he became indefensible, and then they quietly removed the blue plaques and the street signs and the only stories told about him were like this one – I met Jimmy Savile once…and we change the narrative slightly, pull out from our memories the places of darkness, the unnerving awfulness of him that was always there, it was definitely always there; the creepiness, but now we pull it to the front, and we are embarrassed that we could be so easily taken in by the script of Jimmy, by the rose-glow of nostalgia.

Sometimes I think about what archaeologists will find in the cemetery in hundreds of years time. They will find this person encased in concrete, different to the other graves because of the burial’s strange angle, the gold still bright and sharp as the day it went into the grave. They will think, here is a high status individual. And there will be so little left of everyone else, nothing of my tiny daughter, and the stories around Jimmy will be shaped in that way, as they always were.

Wendy Pratt, Ghost Lake Rising: The Day I met Jimmy Savile

Red-winged blackbirds make the mornings noisy–they have so many different songs and calls that three or four of them sound like multitudes, almost drowning out our year-round singers, the song sparrows. Early migrant passerines have returned, but it’s still winter here. Some bugs have gotten active and are emerging from hibernation or incubation. No bees as yet. When I turn over rotting logs, I find amphibians’ eggs and lots of different varieties of soil centipedes.

And, of course, worms. March’s moon is sometimes called the Worm Moon, and tonight there’s a total lunar eclipse around midnight here in PA. Is that auspicious? It’s also when I will be reading at the Lambertville Free Public Library in Lambertville, NJ. I’m excited to participate in an on-site, in-person reading again…I’ve been hibernating a bit from poetry events, but it is time to get stirring. […]

A concerned European friend recently asked me how I was faring under the stress of these first three months, and I told him that since making art (poetry) has generally been an unconventional act/behavior/response even under the patronage system, my response is to keep making art. Granted, it isn’t much, nothing earth-shattering, not gonna change society that way; but it keeps us observant little non-conformers on our toes, creative, and flourishing in the face of weirdness and oppression.

Which is something we can do. Like early bloomers in the cold days of late winter.

Ann E. Michael, Mid-March

The same day I got two crowns, we also had a beautiful full lunar eclipse, which I managed to get some pictures of. The bad news is, like many times in the past, getting dental work and lunar eclipses both seem to equal MS flares, and this time was no different. (See this poem about the night I was diagnosed with MS, which was also a Blood Moon Eclipse) Feeling incredibly fatigued, in pain, and slow-brained and clumsy, we’ve also had to deal with a crown complication, an error made to make the accessible bathroom counter six inches too high (which we have to pay to fix, even though it was the company we hired to design an accessible bathroom’s mistake,) and dwindling money and health, plus terrible political news. It has all been very draining. So if I owe you something and you need it urgently, let me know – right now I am postponing things like crazy and trying just to rest and drink fluids until I’m feeling a little better. I am also prepping for AWP and hoping I feel better enough to attend. I could also talk about putting together how submitting a book manuscript can feel incredibly dispiriting and hope-inspiring at the same time, how going through a home renovation is hard on the body and on marriages and checkbooks (so don’t underestimate it!), or how trying to guess how to manage money when a madman has ahold of the economy and is seemingly trying to strangle it is tough. Lunar eclipses usually portent a shift in energy. Let’s hope it’s a shift for the better.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Lunar Eclipses, Dental Work and Cherry Blossoms, Plus MS Flares

I am a bird squatting on a rooftop in March’s chill.

Do they really grow back once you’ve clipped them? The feathers?

This week, the x-ray technician will press my foot to the cold plate and take an image. The doctor will decide if I can walk again. If the bones in my toe have grown together, after the chiseling and the scraping. If the metal plate and the screws have done their job.

This body isn’t a jaguar that can swallow the moon. It isn’t a dog, a sow, or a soft toad on the running trail. It is a hybrid of slings, and stents, and screws. It walks because humans strip the bark from yew trees for chemotherapy drugs, because they eviscerate the earth and make oils, and metals, and plastics.

I mourn the passing of this Blood Moon. I feel my loss, because from this perspective, from this landscape so far from my toddling, my arm-grabbing, “look at this” home, I’m reaching for something to blanket all the exposed hurts. A bit of superstition, a bedtime story.

Goodnight Moon. The jaguar, the sow, the dog and the toad will surely devour you again. You will survive them. Yet I fear for you.

I look up now and apologize in advance for our footprints, our defiled planet’s relics, and for what’s coming.

Ren Powell, A Blood Moon Blanket

It has been a long winter. I just tested negative after ten days of being cooped up with Covid 19. I am feeling much better with mostly fatigue and upper respiratory congestion as the main symptoms. Five years in and I feel fortunate our family was not hit harder in the beginning with this novel virus. I am grateful for vaccines and medicine that I believe helped lessen the burden this virus may have had on my immune compromised friends and family.

Last November I sent an Ode to an organization called “Poets for Science” which is a movement that explores the connections between poetry and science. I sort of forgot I had sent it in until today when I was cleaning up my “submissions” folders and saw I had not heard back. I found out today after going on their website it was in fact published in the “Global Gallery” section on the web. Maybe it is good I found it today after a bout with Covid. Enjoy “Ode to Paxlovid” directly on their site and check out other poems about science as well. May you all stay well.

Carey Taylor, Covid 19

Perhaps it is time to ransom my soul
which has been sold to this empire
of the modern workplace.
I look to the monks
and their rigorous schedule of prayer.
Feeling like a true subversive,
I insert appointments for my spirit
into the calendar. I code
them in a secret language
so my boss won’t know I’m speaking
in a different tongue. I launch
my coracle of prayer
into this unknown ocean,
the shore unseen, my hopes
rising like incense across a chapel.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Coracles of Hope on St. Patrick’s Day

I suppose it’s the teeming abundance of images, ideas and suggestions it contains that makes ‘The Windhover’ such a remarkable poem but it was the sheer energy of its utterance that made me fall in love with it at school. At that point I had only the faintest, most general idea of what it meant beyond expressing the poet’s joy at the sight of a bird and moving from that into thoughts about Christ’s self-sacrifice. This ‘energy of utterance’ still seems to me the most solid, immediate and irresistible element of the delight it gives. By ‘utterance’, of course, I don’t just mean the sounds you hear in the poem, I mean the physical energy demanded of you and released in you as you say the words, even if you articulate them in the silence of your own mind.

Edmund Prestwich, Sounds of glory – Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’

In 1982, I saw Denise Levertov read at Santa Rosa Junior College, where I was a student. I had read her poems since I was a child, and I knew what she looked like from the photograph of her on the backs of her books, but nothing prepared me for hearing her voice. On that early Spring day in Northern California, I learned how a poem should sound.

Levertov herself was unassuming: a small woman with short dark hair going gray. She wore glasses and a pink checked dress. She must have been close to sixty then, impossibly old to twenty-two-year-old me. But when she approached the microphone and began to recite her poetry, I was transfixed. Her delicate, British-accented voice rose and fell as she took the audience, a large, packed hall, into that emotional place that only poetry can create. 

When she spoke, it sounded like a friend telling another friend the most profound secrets. She told us about surviving World War II, about her love for her former husband, about how her sister struggled with her mental health, and shared epiphanies acquired on the subways of New York. With a slight lisp resulting from a missing front tooth, she pronounced each word as if it were holy text.

I left the hall a changed being. Now I knew how a poem should sound. 

Erica Goss, How Should a Poem Sound?

People turn away, chat among themselves.
Who are you talking to?
I don’t know.
I didn’t know I was talking.
I thought it was just sound.
After one revolution, before the next.
After one mad president, before the next.
After one poem, before the next.
A poem is an instinct, nothing more.

Bob Mee, POEM AS INSTINCT

Voice is love’s voltage to energize and empower our lives.

With a well-honed noun or verb, we can sweep someone off their feet.

But when adjectives turn tragic, we’re swept under the rug.

Have you ever heard the cry of a newborn revolution?

Have you ever noticed a day that couldn’t modulate because a gun was stuck in its throat?

Sometimes we speak in hushed tones when reciting poems, prayers, or lullabying a child.

I like it when we’re loud—

when we sound like gasoline saints in the combustible church of cool.

Rich Ferguson, Voice Up

The silence stays close, a shadow. I don’t
mean the kind without form or sound.
More cloak or armour, its texture
changing: corrosive, calloused, molten,
foul like maggots in the carcass of
another time, cold and solid like ice
cubes, the last memory of warmth
frozen out of them.

It sits with me at dusk, offering
words.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What will I find if I stop searching?

The poet himself is a gentlemanly presence throughout this, his fifth collection, never more so than when he’s introducing ‘Deliverance, 1961’ the novella-in-thirty-two-cantos which takes up the back half of the book. Like a good-natured aide conducting us to the office of an eccentric royal, he’s at pains to explain the poem’s form (so that we may better appreciate it) and prepare us for the dubious views and behaviours of his period characters (so that we might refrain from judging them unkindly). The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into ‘Our Better Selves’, ‘Our Lesser Selves’ and ‘Our Contemptible Selves’, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.

Jon Stone, The World You Now Own by P. W. Bridgman

The most recent issue of Rattle, which just reached me in Paris, has a focus on the haibun, described by the editors as ‘the combination of haiku with prose (and sometimes other forms of writing), popularized by Bashō in 17th-century Japan’. The majority of the published examples — 22 of them — take the form of a single paragraph of prose followed by a haiku or something like it. One or two do it the other way round (haiku followed by prose). A couple are made up of a series of prose paragraph + haiku alternations, and there are one or two other variations.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t love this form in English and I wasn’t won over by any of these poems. But I am fascinated in general by prosimetric work — that is, literary forms that combine prose and poetry — and I can strongly recommend the interview with Lew Watts, a Welsh poet living in the US, who’s a well-established writer of both haiku and haibun. The interviews in Rattle are one of the best things about the magazine — the editor Timothy Green does a great job of eliciting thoughtful, detailed and wide-ranging conversations prompted by questions which always seem respectful and well-informed, without flattery or soft soap. This particular ‘Conversation’ takes up a good chunk of the issue, and Watts speaks compellingly about the relationship between the prose and haiku elements, and about his own evolution from writing mainly rhyming verse in quite demanding traditional forms (like villanelles) to haiku and haibun. In fact, this background comes through in his own contribution to the issue, which is the only one to combine not just prose and haiku but also some rhyming verse (imagined I think as a song). Watts’ contribution is unique in having this three-way formal alternation (prose/haiku/song).

Anyone who’s written a few poems has probably had that experience of starting off in prose — perhaps a diary entry, memory or description jotted in a notebook — that then starts to turn into poetry. To me, the modern American haibun too often feels like that — a writer’s exercise more than a fully-fledged form. But thinking about — and learning to write — verse in close relation to prose has a distinguished history. Ben Jonson claimed that he always wrote his poetry as prose first, and then converted it into verse, because that’s what he was taught to do by his schoolmaster, William Camden.

Victoria Moul, The Anglo-Latin haibun

The first time I thought of myself as an American was when I left the country. I had a scholarship to France, and spent the summer learning French. Our last night in Europe, we were set to fly out of Brussels because the Paris airport was closed, so we went dancing. But I was lonely dancing, thinking how much I missed the United States.

What I missed more than anything was Mexican food. Around ASU, the Mexican food was delicious: layers of cheese, avocados, tortillas, salsa, the enchiladas perfect, the mole, abundant. The Belgian boys were happy to be dancing with this frothy cloud of American girls, and suddenly “Born in the USA” came on, and we were screaming to it, as if it were our lifeblood. I remember feeling the Boss’s music throbbing through my American veins and dripping with longing for margaritas and salsa.

When we miss America, we miss Mexican food. We miss the churros at the park, the Chinese food we eat on Thursdays. We miss the Vietnamese place where we go for soup when we are sick. We miss our favorite Armenian bakery, the place we go for naan and tandoori on Sundays. We miss kosher delis and Middle Eastern grocery stores. In Los Angeles, we visit Korean markets to buy fresh fish and sushi rice and make sushi at home, spreading out the nori, preparing our rolls.

When we say we miss America, we are missing all the cultures that make America glorious. When you go to Greece, they have Greek food; when you go to Japan, they have Japanese food; when you come to this country, we have everything.

All of this is why being at the London Book Fair this past week was overwhelming.

Kate Gale, Born in the USA: Why Do We Stay?

a baby
trying to scroll the window
mum on her phone

Jim Young [no title]

I am taking all the dopamine hits I can. Today, it’s a day devoted solely to writing things. J was away overnight (late night karaoke and early morning DJ gig at a party downtown before the river dyeing and the parade had him catching some sleep in his car instead of driving all the way back to the northside after loading and unloading gear all night.) I slept in, made coffee, and started working on edits on some poem efforts from last weekend, fueled by Cadbury caramel eggs, which are frightfully cheaper than actual eggs this year.. Since my days are feeling cumbersome and prone to distractions, I’ve switched from daily poems to more chunky groups of poems on certain days. Right now, this works for the more sci-fi project underway (you can see some bits at IG in the past couple weeks.) I don’t know how long they will keep going, but I am giving them some space to grow..

Every March I contemplate NAPOWRIMO and usually decide to do it, but I may sit it out this year. This clustering approach to writing is yielding nice results and the month of April is always a morass with things like taxes and my birthday anyway. I’ve also noted before how lonely it all feels…when I am just writing and posting normally I don’t feel it or mind if it feels like poems get shot out into the universe with no response, but it feels especially lonely in a month that is supposed to be devoted to poems. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 3/16/2025

San Francisco poet and activist Beau Beausoleil has sent me his new book, War News II, number 23 in the Page Poets Series published by FMSBW (ISBN 9798989413393) and available from Amazon UK for £8, a price that makes me suspect that the only one making a profit is Amazon. This is ironic! I don’t buy from Amazon so I’m not allowed to post a review there.

Many of us – and I am guilty of this – have from time to time switched off the news. It’s easier to sign petitions and donate to Medecins Sans Frontieres than to take the news, day after day, deep into our consciousness and to wake night after night with a scream stuck in the throat. Beau has remained attentive to the cruelty and suffering, and processed it and its fallout in his life, by writing a poem every day from October 8th 2023 in response to the war in Gaza – ‘ … a visceral and personal reaction to what I was reading and seeing in the media each day.’ Such an undertaking comes with serious dangers to the poet’s health and peace of mind. I am happy to say that Beau is making a good recovery from the illness that struck him down last November.

The first one hundred poems, covering the first three months, were published in December 2023 as a free ebook by Agitate! Journal. Volume two takes up where the first leaves off, on December 9th 2023. In his Preface, Beau describes this work as ‘both useless and necessary.’ Each poem has the same title, and each one is a meditation, a daily prayer almost. The book has a bed next to mine, and each morning I wake it and it gives me a text for the day.

Ama Bolton, War News II

Non-poets often wonder about the use of patterns in poems — does following a set of constraints help of hinder the process?  For me, often — though not always — constraints push me to discovery.  Below I offer a triangular poem by Washington, DC poet E. Laura Goldberg which I re-found recently in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (JHM);   Goldberg’s poem remembers the costs of war.

JoAnne Growney, A Triangular Poem

Daniel Hinds’s “New Famous Phrases” is a collection of poems, playful on the surface, but with deeper intent as a conversation with earlier works and myths, whether creating a magpie inspired by Ted Hughes’s “Crow” or evoking Merope in “The Pact of Water” “signed in a squirt of squid ink spray”,

“Put your ear to a stone shell or a seal’s black flank,
Hear the submerged voices raised in the world’s blood.

Now we look down in meropian blindness,
Discern no cities capped beneath blue braes.

We let the water fall through our hands.
It leaves a tentacle pucker mark.”

Water, both essential to life and capable of destroying it. As human life heads towards a climate emergency, rising temperatures mean rising sea levels. The suggestion here is that current human life will see cities submerged as Atlantis was. But humans shrug their shoulders, ignore the warnings from history and let it become tomorrow’s problem.

Emma Lee, “New Famous Phrases” Daniel Hinds (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

As you may remember, I’ve finished a full-length poetry manuscript called Words with Friends. I post a request for words on Facebook, and folks contribute one each. I then use all the words in a single poem, one supplied word per line. Here’s a poem about this detestable month. […]

be still and you can feel the dirt beneath you crack
with promise of tender shoots and sturdy stems
just like every other march first in your memory
the way it comes in and perches itself on the edge
how it teases you with moist breath, dangles
the songs of birds, parades these salacious days
then turns beastly cold like spring was all a lie.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, March

Anaphora in poetry — repeating the same word or phrase at the start of each line — is one of my most used (and most successful) generative writing exercises. As Rebecca Hazelton says in Adventures in Anaphora, “Students write more creatively when they repeat themselves,” and I find that to be true for myself, as well.

But anaphora isn’t just for getting started on a blank page or in a writing journal: It also works in finished poems.

Without a doubt, part of my affection for anaphora in poetry is its sisterhood with the list poem. Anaphora does result in a kind of list, and I love seeing how poets use it to create momentum and play with language.

Carolee Bennett, Anaphora in Poetry: 40+ Examples

What if editors provided more incentives for reviewing issues of lit mags? Post three reviews on Facebook, send the screenshots to the editor, get a free subscription.

What if there was a central platform like Goodreads but for lit mags? There, readers could post star-ratings, talk with one another about what they liked and did not like? Readers could follow one another to see what their peers are reading, what’s on their “TBR” (to-be-read) pile, what they’ve labeled as DNF (did-not-finish).

Might editors consider hosting reading clubs of their own? Imagine lit mag clubs hosted by five lit mags. Every six months, the editors host a live chat, with contributors. They offer their issues in a packaged bundle. Would people pay for these journals in order to attend the live chat and hear from the editors and contributors? I think so. Especially if the conversation is fun, honest, real.

What if editors buried secret codes inside the pages of their journals? The first person to crack the code gets a fast-track read on a submission. The next ten people to crack the code get a free subscription. Editors could build up mystery around the secret codes, plant little Easter eggs from one issue to the next.

What if editors offered rewards, badges for sharing the work from their pages? Share five different pieces from the latest issue on social media, write a sentence or two about the piece, screenshot your posts and send it to the editors, get a tote bag, a chapbook, a shoutout in the next issue.

As for writers, what if we approached reading lit mags with the same game-mindset that we approached submitting to them? Check out my reading spreadsheet! Let’s start the 100 creative-nonfiction pieces challenge! Who can stuff their bookshelves with the most lit mags! Show me all the lit mags on your TBR pile!

Could we have the lit mag counterpart of BookTok, in which readers discuss their lit-mag-reading goals and invite others to participate in challenges? Let’s call it LitMagTok. I would happily watch.

Becky Tuch, Q: Could gamification inspire lit mag readership?

This week, in my “Modern Poetry’s Media” course, I told my undergrads about poet Helene Johnson‘s success during the Harlem Renaissance, subsequent disappearance from the literary scene, and rediscovery late in the 20th century. “Rediscovery” is a funny term, of course–she knew where she was the whole time, although other poets and the critics weren’t tuned to her signal. I adore her work and am grateful for the existence of the posthumous anthology This Waiting for Love, edited by Verner D. Mitchell and containing poems, letters, and lots of background information. It’s a great example of how literary scholarship can serve us all, notwithstanding the university-haters who are loud and powerful right now.

Next week I’m teaching excerpts from another amazing piece of scholarship: Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, edited by Robert Dale Parker. (Notice both books were published by university presses.) Parker combed through decades of newspapers and magazines, finding treasures I’d never seen before, much less encountered during my own education. Mary Cornelia Hartshorne is on the syllabus for Monday, and as I prepped, it clicked how young she was: she wrote these poems (originally published in The American Indian) in her late teens. And then she went on with her life in a way Parker couldn’t discover.

My current favorite is “Fallen Leaves,” also the only poem by Hartshorne that seems to be online. Subtitled “An Indian Grandmother’s Parable,” it begins by quoting “white sages” to the effect that Native American lives and cultures are “scattered” and gone like last year’s leaves. The rest of the poem is the grandmother talking back to that ignorance, depicting the leaves in detail, chronicling how “discarded fragments” become “dry, chattering parchments / that crackle and rustle like old women’s laughter.” The leaves go on to protect and nourish a new spring’s “leaflets,” helped by streams “manumitted” from the ice (=released from enslavement). In short, scattering isn’t the end of people a militarily dominant culture wants to forget. Those leaves are still delivering news.

Lesley Wheeler, Rustle like old women’s laughter

“March” is a sharp word, brusque and bracing, like its month. “January”, “February”; they meander like rivers; “April” is like the sound of raindrops on the windowpane; but “March” is a gust of wind flinging grit.

Adrian Bell, 1 March 1958

The anniversary of the Covid lockdown in the UK last week took me back to this post about the poem that I thought of when it was announced: Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”.

And thinking about the historic shift from horses to tractors took me back to Adrian Bell, one of my favourite writers about rural life. I first read Bell’s newspaper columns, “A Countryman’s Notebook”, in my local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, when they were being reprinted about fifteen years ago. The original series ran from 1950—1980, and seems to me one of the great literary achievements of the newspaper column as a form — perhaps not to be compared with Baudelaire’s feuilletons, which became the “little poems in prose” of Paris Spleen (1869), but an enduring contribution to the art of the sentence nevertheless, written with a poet’s feeling for words.

One thing I enjoy about “A Countryman’s Notebook” is how many light-hearted allusions to English poetry Bell manages to work into a column ostensibly about life in the Suffolk countryside, to be read over East Anglian breakfast tables each Saturday morning. As he told his life story, at the age of sixteen he read Tennyson’s lines about “The moan of doves in immemorial elms / And murmuring of innumerable bees” and decided to dedicate himself “to the plough and poetry”. His allusions are often to such Golden Treasury-style touchstones, but his range is wide.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #29: Slow Bars of Light and Shadow

Found myself wandering through The Arcades Project today, looking for Napoleon’s Madeleine (or its ruinscape) only to wander off into a passageway that led me back to Baudelaire’s sonnet, “A une passante”— which Walter Benjamin discusses in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, among other flaneuries . . .

Lightning . . .then darkness! Lovely fugitive
whose glance has brought me back to life! But where
is life—not this side of eternity?

[…]

The final verse of Baudelaire’s “Damned Women” sticks to the skull:

Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies,
Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains,
Pour vos mornes douleurs, vos soifs inassouvies,
Et les urnes d’amour dont vos grands coeurs sont pleins.

And since all of the translations included at the Fleurs du mal website felt a bit stuffy, I decided to wrangle my own:

You whom my soul has pursued into your hell,
My poor sisters, I adore you as I mourn you,
For your anguished sighs, your quenchless thirsts,
In your grandiose hearts, love’s urns are filled to brim.

Alina Stefanescu, “A une passante”

In the Midnight Hour

a thousand recalls
tongue
moan
whisper
shadow sleeping storms
cry hot man-made howls

Today I used the Magnetic Poetry Kit online for inspiration. But instead of scrolling through different pages of words, I chose all my words from the first word page presented. It came out a bit on the dark side.

My “Something Small, Every Day (or so)” series is inspired by Austin Kleon’s piece here where he says, “Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day’s worth of effort over time.”

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): In the Midnight Hour

Zinesters, I’m passing this along…the poetry collective RODAISUN, has been distributing their poetry monthly in Montreal since July 2021. The group is three multidisciplinary female artists, Iva Čelebić, Emma Cosgrove and Catherine Machado. They’ll next do 6 issues annually by subscription, thicker, slicker double issues, sent out every two months, for a total of $12. Link to sign up for mailing service: https://www.grapeseedbooks.com/product-page/rodaisun-in-the-mail

Pearl Pirie, Events coming

Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room – a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristran Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I’ve read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening’s poetry – “fog makes surprising what it does not conceal”, etc.

Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance read one’s poems out is worth paying for. I didn’t read but at least half the attendees did.

Tim Love, Vona Groake and Karen Solie

My birthday this week, and so, naturally, like all normal people, I’ve been thinking about what books I have and haven’t read. What classics, what essentials, what life-changing glorious tomes have I neglected?

The past few years, I’ve been trying out some of those books that for some reason or other were never assigned to me during high school or college or even grad school. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace. I’m not afraid of a long book or a difficult book. I do, however, give myself complete permission to quit a book if I don’t like it, because I am adult, and this is my own independent study.

Renee Emerson, 40 books before 40

The birthday, and the birthday poem; similar, one might think, in how I’ve also been approaching my “Sex at 31” poems: a declaration and exploration of where I might be. Fifteen years ago, the chapbook-length examination that became Some forty (2010), offering similar question:

some forty: an almost

ambiguity, the space

of numbers, age; what does all

this time mean, spent?

Can one learn anything from going through one’s own work? I’m probably too close to it, still. Moment such as these suggest all poems are poems of mortality, of time. Of where one is at, a moment which will quickly fall into the past. What can you see in this, from where you are now. American poet Robert Creeley, his poem “A Birthday” from Words (1967), published when he was forty-one, offering similar lines of questioning: “I had thought / a moment of stasis / possible, some // thing fixed— / days, worlds— [.]” The question of where one is at, and if any moment might be held, like a breath. Or this poem by John Newlove from THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (1999), a little unnerved to think about how close I am to this age, now:

FIFTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY

I seem to be forgetting what words sound like.
Soon I shall be reduced to a tiny vocabulary of phrases
such as I love you,
or I hate you,
or death.

“[…] my / birthplace, / that is substance / of me, quick against the form,” wrote Thomas Clark (1941-2018), as part of his poem “BIRTHDAY,” from a 1964 issue of Poetry Magazine. One could suggest this a substance with further clarity these days, given the administration south of the border continues to push the idea that we become the fifty-first state. I write a substance, against the form. I spent years attempting an annual birthday poem, but I’m not entirely in that mindset these days, working instead in other directions, although, as they say, the poems will come soon enough. Is that what they say? The poem might not have occurred this year, but the return to those same questions, those same clarifications, hold. Perhaps this is my poem this year.

Or my poem for forty-five, which seems both recent and distant: “We measure, syntax.” Is that all there is?

rob mclennan, the green notebook

i buy the cicadas barbie shoes & leave them
in the dirt. an offering. i am hoping when they come
that this time they will have an answer.
some kind of prophecy. “here is how
you save yourself” or, even better,
“here is how we will save you.” the year before i left
my hometown they broke free. left their
shells like brooches all across the pine tree trunk.
some of them became pendants in the amber sap.
i harvested as many as i could. put my ears
to their husks & heard them sing.

Robin Gow, waiting for cicadas

I started this blog in May 2011, fourteen years ago, and this is my eight hundredth post and I would like to thank all the people who have supported the blog over the years. I am not sure what I make of this latest piece. It is still in its early stages. An EMP is an Electromagnetic Pulse. An airburst would destroy all electronic equipment retendering everyone back into the analogue age. […]

That would kill every screen stone dead
and soften them up for the expected invasion

He had prepared for this
if they ever dropped the big one

He would go out listening to West End Blues
and its beauty would carry him into the next incarnation

I’m not happy with it at the moment as it feels out of balance. West End Blues is a tune by King Oliver. My favourite version is by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. I do have a 78rpm disc of the tune.

Paul Tobin, CARRY HIM INTO THE NEXT INCARNATION

I’m a bit ashamed to say that, though I love poetry, I can go long periods of time without reading it. One of the many things I appreciate about running January Writing Hours is that for several months, I absolutely have to read – to return to old favourites in new ways, to discover new collections, to fall into rabbit holes of language. In the first half of the month, I shared a poem by Ursula K Le Guin, whose Earthsea Trilogy rests on the concept of the Real Name – the power we acquire over a person, or a thing, when we discover the word which perfectly describes its essential nature. It’s a concept which stretches back into folklore, and in exploring that history, I encountered “Spells of My Name” by the poet IS Jones, who was entirely new to me and who blew me away.

“Spells of My Name” explores naming as an act of reclamation. Jones is constantly on the search for a better language for the body and for their own multiple selves. They write into trauma and desire and uncertainty – and their first collection comes out this year. I love what they say in this interview:

“ I mostly write poems at night, and I remember being up at 2:00 a.m. writing a new poem and I thought to myself, “This is a part of the work that I love the most, when it’s dark and it’s quiet and nobody cares what I’m doing and I’m playing and I’m exploring and I’m reading poems and I’m dreaming about what I want them to look like.” I thought to myself, “I don’t ever want this good magic to end.

As Black artists, I don’t think we talk often enough about pleasure for the creator of the work. I definitely have been guilty of contributing to this pervasive notion that artmaking has to come from pain and trauma as opposed to coming from pleasure and joy and wanting to share a vision that you have with other people”.

As someone who often engages in trauma in my poetry and in my working life, I could not agree more. Writing does not have to hurt or harm us – and even giving words to our trauma can be an act of community, validation, and comfort.

Clare Shaw, Naming It

The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted thud, I opened the kiln to discover a month’s worth of pottery shattered — two pieces had exploded, the shrapnel ruining the rest. All that centering, all that glazing, all the hours of pressing letterforms into the wet clay — all of it in shiny shards. And meanwhile spring was breaking outside and a little girl in bright blue rain boots was jumping in a puddle, smashing the reflections of the clouds with savage joy.

And I thought, this is all there is: breaking, breaking apart, breaking open.

Breaking alive.

It is not an easy assignment, being alive. Coming awake from the stupor of near-living that lulls us through our days, awake to the knowledge that on the other side of the neighborhood ICE trucks are handcuffing people and on the other side of the planet children are dying in gunfire, while outside the first birds of spring are singing and everywhere people are falling in love and in some faraway mountain village a shepherd is singing under a thousand stars. And somehow, somehow, all of it has to cohere into a single world in which we, in all our incohesion, must live this single life.

Ellen Bass reckons with all of this in her splendid poem “Any Common Desolation,” originally published in The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day newsletter and later included in James Crews’s lifeline of an anthology How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope (public library), shared here with Ellen’s blessing.

Maria Popova, Any Common Desolation

Police close ranks and bodies form a shield
but not a weapon clicks in place. His rights
are read to him, unlike the thousands

he ordered shot because “Human rights,
son of a bitch.” A milky fog, a kind of gauze
bandage, drapes over this ordinary day. A dog

limps down the alley. A partly disemboweled
squirrel’s plastered on the road, syrupy
rot beneath the traffic stop.

Luisa A. Igloria, Elegy for the Human, with Extradition Standoff

Here’s the face of a very young poet. 

Found this in the archives yesterday digging around for an old Dazed article for a project. Funny how I used to keep all my newspaper pages and magazine cuttings in files. I kept press clippings in folders with the article or review cut out and the date and name of the publication all glued and set there. Even the mean ones. Even the derogatory ones or silly things: I once did a feature testing toothbrushes. I used to keep every scrap of press, every flyer and ticket, memories from all my gigs. That’s thousands of shows since 1994. I kept a paper trail of good times and big nights. No photos, no phones back then. Just the paper trail. The electronic world has erased a lot of this behaviour. We take photos on phones and upload to sites that are electronic scrapbooks and social media. I think I am going to get back on it again. Be a better archivist, keep my paper trail alive, scrapbook my things, because all of sudden it will be 25 years in the future and that means it will be 2050? All of these existential notes and blogs won’t even exist and none of this will be here and nobody will see this page, and all of this work and writing and thought will be erased and gone, like the way we left MySpace and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, all gone now, our poems and posts, our notes and stories, songs and art, like rusting abandoned shopping trolleys in the lake of the lost forest of time covered in moss and frogs spawn. We won’t be here and nobody will be here to see or feel or remember what we were thinking and how we got here or what we did with our spirit and our minds and our bodies and our words and our short time on earth. I guess that’s why I love books, I love making books, writing longhand, I love writing diaries, I love reading books, books stay put, you can rely on a book, a book on your bedside table, a book in your hand, your notebook in your bag, your novel in your suitcase, it’s all coming with you, it’s real, its yours, it cannot be deleted, it’s all yours, it is your own paper trail.

Salena Godden, Women’s History Month, March 2025

I’ve talked about vertical time here before but I thought it might be a good thing to think about at this time. And how do we now as humans, some of us who happen to be creators — maintain our mental health and also our desire and ability to create. (All of which go hand in hand). It helps me to try to find my way into, and to think about how vertical time is created, made. Why do we need art? What does art give us?

From my book of the year, The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart — “Usually we think of time as a sequence of events that happened in the past or that we want to happen in the future,” says Bogart, referring to horizontal time. She says that art helps us experience another kind of time: vertical time. It feels like “plunging a stake or dropping an anchor into the endless flow of time, thereby creating a sense of eternity in the human body.” It is a real feeling of “nowness” and being present. We feel outside time, part of a continuous present. […]

I have a copy of Another Beauty by [Adam] Zagajewski but the spine has cracked and I need to repair it. I don’t want to delve into it too much until I’ve done so but it does open at a story about looking at the Vermeers in the National Gallery in Washington. A man, about forty, an American, says to him with joy: “I’ve been looking at reproductions of this paintings since I was twenty, and today I’m seeing it with my own eyes for the first time. I’m sorry to bother you but I had to tell someone.” Zagajewski writes, “I can take such lack of culture any day.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Vertical Time, Comedy, Joy

The glass-smooth pond waits
for the return of its winged tenants.
Spring has called them north,
back across the imaginary border
recognized only by us,
discomfited as we are
by the idea of freedom.

Jason Crane, POEM: Glass House

escape is the timeless lie :: my path never strays from its crow

Grant Hackett [no title]

あたたかし粘土が息をしはじめて　堀田季何

atatakashi nendo ga iki o shihajimete

            spring warmth

            a piece of clay

            begins to breathe

                                                            Kika Hotta

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (March 14, 2025)