This week: a migraine’s glittering distortions, a woman who is part moth, warty yellow amanitas, a world of random objects, and much more. Enjoy.

Where to begin?

In the again of this daunting question, there is an effort to match fragments and pieces of memory, to make a map of the mind. One might, for example, leave a page from a notebook on the kitchen table, promising to return to it and find a strand. One might walk the dog and return to the table. One might stare at the paper and prevaricate, maybe spin a wheel to see where the urge to narrate lands. One might procrastinate and pace the summer-warmed floor and settle on the place in the Cote d’Azur where the mouth of the wolf meets the beach.

Alina Stefanescu, “…in the branches of ourselves…”

at the beach no one has
heads anymore. there is a new corporation
who will remove your head & replace it
with a pot & fake flowers for
no small fortune. everyone reports it
makes them feel “less stressed.” i think truly
we should probably be more stressed.
an empire is always dissociating.

Robin Gow, vacation mirror

A young fox is sitting on the path in my back garden as a fierce tomcat from over the road tucks into meat my neighbour’s thrown out. The fox is cautious, checks the wall, stands on it to see if the cat’s still there. This tomcat’s legendary. He spent a night and much of the next day at the top of an elm tree before he was rescued. The fox is back now but the food is gone. He’s elegant, his brush full and healthy, no sign of mange. He walks confidently but is wary, sniffs the ground, jumps back on the wall, back down to the garden to sniff again. Nothing left. 

I’ve moved back into this room, once my office until the children became too old to share and it became my daughter’s. She’s grown up hardy – it’s the coldest in the house. 

(The fox has run through my garden with a piece of chicken, off to a shed roof or the graveyard. A dog’s now in the garden sniffing.)

My desk, once a Victorian washstand is back in front of the window, but now only the wooden top survives, held up by four extendable legs. On it, my laptop and sewing machine. […]

The view through this window with its old, distorted glass, often becomes a tunnel. I live in the city and last night coming home late from a friend’s I met a badger on my path. Sometimes the past gathers like a migraine’s glittering distortions and stars around my eyes.

Jackie Wills, Fox summons the past

Crabgrass is lounging across the lawn and embedded in the garden beds, acting as if it had been there all along, which perhaps it was, abiding and biding its August time to stretch and lie languid, ducking its head under my mower, its roots defying my pull. Some tuberous rooted thing has lunged up in several places in the garden. What on earth is it? On earth indeed, in earth, and I can’t be bothered to unearth it, curious to see what it’s flowering into, sure I’ll regret it next year, as it takes over some corner of the yard. Witness the uninvited goldenrod, the drunken little asters propping each other up behind the deck, whatever that would-be bush that inserts itself everywhere. Some plants arrive dropped by bird poop, and I think about the seeds’ adventures: extruded from a root, nipped by a beak, floated through a digestive system, briefly flying through the air as part of a splat, and splat, dirt, rooted again. And again and again. A reminder of what can come of chance meetings, what glory can rise from a small hard thing.

Marilyn McCabe, Untitled

— It’s the delightful deliquescent dregs of August. The golden hour is doing the old razzle-dazzle like its life depended on it. […]

— Well, the idea that it is in writing that we can create ourselves. One of the ways. This is the thing about making, creating. It’s not even the thing that you end up making, but it’s how the making makes you. I’ve always loved that. And so of course we makers despair at the present time when it feels like that is being taken from us, from the futures of those would-be artists and writers, our youth. I spend a lot of time reacting in my mind to the sloppola. But on the ground level, I’m still doing my writing, I’m taking photographs. I’m making this and that.

— What we have is silence, the silence between words and passages of words, as Jenny Erpenbeck says here.

— We also have courage.

“hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful”
— Adam Zagajewski, from his book Eternal Enemies

— When you have a day where you’re not certain if life is beautiful, I encourage you to take a mirror outside, into the garden, or the forest. Walk around with it and look. Prop it up here or there.

— When Rob is working on a painting he will often check it in a mirror so that he can see it afresh. I sometimes feel like I should be holding a mirror up to pretty much everything these days for a reality check, at least metaphorically. Which is also an old art forgery detection trick, as the reflected image often gives a sense if something is ‘off.’

Shawna Lemay, Courage, Silence, the Deliquescent Dregs

We saw smoke, and the terrible, twisted aftermath of flame. Most of all, we saw – and felt and heard – the dry bogs, the empty streams, the yellowed hills, the heavy air, the crunch of dessicated sphagnum for mile after mile after mile. The tiny velvety bodies of shrews on the hardened, waterless ground.

When I got home, the little bog I keep on my windowsill – a Kilner jar of moss and sundew – was all but dry. I’ve filled it repeatedly today: each time, the moss drinks with a deep thirst and needs more, more, more. I wish i could do the same for our bogs and fens and moors.

A few hours ago, Anna and I met to finalise tomorrow morning’s Writing Bogwise workshop, which will explore how creative writing can support positive ecological practice – and how nature connectedness can restore our health and humanity. When we read from some of the articles and poems we’ll be using – Jane Clarke, Gregory Norminton, Amanda Chester – I felt like some burnt and thirsty part of myself was drinking deeply too. 

Clare Shaw, Restoration: finding hope in a crisis

When the weather is good, I walk. Walking around my neighborhood is the only real exercise I get, so in Minnesota’s climate I’m lucky to be able to do it about half the year. I used to range more widely and see more of it; I also used to be a subscriber to the app NextDoor, a sometimes troubling mix of gripes, grudges, and rants about local issues. The juxtaposition led to the poem I want to share today. This year, my neighbors have proved that they’re better than that, going to great lengths to support the embattled immigrants among us. But in some places one still feels the discomfort, the sense of walling people out, that led to today’s poem, “An Enclosed Garden.”

Maryann Corbett, Walking the Neighborhood

It may be nothing more than the power of the mind and its ability to manifest (or the brain’s love affair with seeking out patterns), and if magic makes you uncomfortable, feel free to set it inside those safer contexts. But as I age and as the material world continues to disappoint, I’m tired of playing it cool. I’m more interested in leaning into spirit and feral female energy. There’s more for me in mushrooms and shells and mist on the lake than in patriarchy, capitalism and the horrors du jour they ask us to accept as par for the course.

I’ve always seen my energy as a force, but I’d characterized it previously by its intensity, chaos, hard edges, ambition, combustibility. This current energy has a different quality. It’s gooey. It breathes from its belly. It smells like salt and rosemary and bread in the oven. It smiles and floats and stirs and digs. It nests. […]

An earlier version of Carolee would’ve been (at least slightly) irritated with so many whirlwind trips to Maine. She would’ve seen them as distractions from the current plot line: finishing her manuscript. Instead, at every turn, including (and especially) the difficult trips, those visits back home opened paths for me to go deeper into the manuscript. Similarly, the naming of magic (and its practice) did not take away from work on the Gertie manuscript. It helped me see writing this book as casting a spell.

Carolee Bennett, Creative Life Lately: Maine, Magic, Manuscript

[…] we are
idle spit dried to salt
on steamy blacktop
withered illusions
screwed up tattoos

we are struggling steel in a hot metal world

This poem was accepted and published in Eunoia Review in 2018 after five other litmags rejected it. When I write something new I always note the date I began, this was begun on 5/17/18.

I was not a fan of Janis [Joplin]. She was a rock star of the 60s and I became a fan of rock music right about the time she died in 1970. Fast forward to 2018 when I discovered the poetry of Dorianne Laux and stumbled on her reading of her poem “Pearl” on PennSound Daily. Here is the direct link to Dorianne talking about and reading the poem. You can also read/hear it on The Slowdown here. Do listen! The power of that poem hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I had never been a fan of Janis, the poem was so visceral and communicated Dorianne’s view of her so purposefully that it made me really see Janis and think of her in a way I never had before. That’s the power of poetry and of writing in general. A really good writer can make you see something in a whole new way, can actually shift your perspective. I love that. Since then, I’ve read articles about Janis and watched a couple of documentaries and now realize what a creative powerhouse she was and how she paved the way for women in rock music, a genre dominated by men.

Anyway, I don’t know what was going on with me on 5/17/18 when I wrote my poem but apparently I was feeling a kinship with “Pearl” in some way at the time.

Charlotte Hamrick, About & Including

I made it through torrential highway storms this week to introduce Arthur Sze at our CWC session on Transient Worlds, his fantastic new anthology exploring poetry in translation. It was a mesmerizing session, and deeply inspiring to hear how the project connects to his work as U.S. Poet Laureate—Sze has made the imaginative and connecting powers of translation his central focus.

In other news, my book’s title poem was published in The Rumpus this week (a huge thank you to Roxane Gay!). If you would like to purchase a signed copy of If You Love That Lady for yourself or someone else, please send me a message—I’ll cover the shipping.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

These poems were written a little while ago, and I never quite knew what to do with them. Well, it turns out that putting them together as a short, themed sequence (which anyway is how they were written) was just the right thing.

They all loosely speak to my enduring fascination with what I’ll inelegantly call (because I think it is called this) the theory of perception. I’ve talked before about how I think poems function as mini Rube Goldberg machines – well, take another step back and … does the same apply to us humans? We take in sensory input and, through a series of complex and ultimately quite bizarre processes, we come to understand the world around us. At the same time, we are converting inner thoughts and feelings into words and actions we express outwardly, in a way that leaves a mark on the world.

At this stage in proceedings, if you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, you might want to look here, or here, or even here.

So, we’re all Rube Goldberg machines, unwittingly but irreversibly wonkifying anything we come into contact with – converting an egg rolling off a shelf into a squeeze of toothpaste on a brush, or the action of a cuckoo clock into a buttered slice of toast. So, would you like to read eight poems ‘about’ that?

You would? Oh, great. The pamphlet is available to buy directly from Shadow & Sax’s online shop, along with other publications, including Urchin by Sand Letellier, which I’m looking forward to getting my hands on.

Victoria Spires, I suppose I do have something to sell

Every Sunday on his fantastic neonpajamas, Benjamin Niespodziany posts poems by others and then creates a prompt for the readers based on some element of that poem. The selection of poems is always great—tending toward the disjunctive and/or surreal and considering what language and all its strangeness can do. Readers are invited to post their responses to the prompts on the site or else elsewhere and then tag him. It’s a brilliant way to spend some time on a Sunday and I try to whenever I can. Last week, Ben posted a poem by Evan Nicholls whose work is always surprising and fresh. I wrote a response to the poem and the prompt (follow that link for both) though I only sort of followed Ben’s prompt because I was most interested in how Evan ended the poem. A really great twist at the end—funny but somehow revealing about one’s assumptions in the poem and in reading in general. There’s often a desire for a poem (or any text really) to speak to universal truths, it’s a satisfying, filling move. But Evan does an amazing turn in the last lines of his poem.

Gary Barwin, Neon Pajamas, Justice and the Pig

Be warned: if your usual method of reading, like mine, is to carry a book with you in your backpack everywhere you go, digging it out on train journeys and in sandwich queues, you will need to take extra care with #Moth (published by Ethel Zine and Micro Press). It’s a hand-stitched booklet, and as well as gold stitching it sports a delicate cover of silver paper, with thread used to add a textured filigree to the moth’s wing pattern and antennae. This is in keeping with the content of the book, which — at least initially — seems focused on the fragility of the human mind, in that it moves from a bus stop setting to a psyche ward in the first two pages, the transition implicitly triggered by the folding door of the bus, or some other simple act this motion approximates.

Holmes describes #Moth as a ‘hybrid text’, and it is — part poetry, part short fiction (it definitely advances toward an ending), utilising a mixture of clinical and lyrical language. There’s no contents page and it’s not always clear where poems begin and end, as there are a few different styles of heading and subheading. It also features a hybrid character at its centre — a woman who is part-moth, or perceived as part-moth by others:

brazen midriff, miniskirt:
body hair fine copper fuzz.

wings jostle inside his chest

Once it settles in there is a steady alternation between pieces which record fragments of doctor/patient conversation (verso) and miniature monologues by different moth species (recto), these preceded by images of the species in question on semi-transparent pages. It’s something of a power struggle; each monologue acts as a different guise worn by the main character — a response to the attempts of the doctor to categorise and contain her. 

Jon Stone, REVIEW: #Moth by Eleanor Holmes

Helen [Mort] is a poet I’ve been in conversation with poetically ever since I first started writing, although she didn’t know it at the time! I remember reading one of her Tall Lighthouse pamphlets a pint for the ghost, published in 2009 and being absolutely blown away – this was three years before my first pamphlet came out. In fact, I’ve just pulled the pamphlet out from my bookshelf and opened it up to find a poem on page 15 called ‘a dram for all the men I’ve never drank with’ – I can’t help but think that this subliminally must have influenced my second collection All the Men I Never Married, which I eventually published over ten years later.

Back to Helen’s fourth full-length collection Stepmother. I managed to get a copy of this from Helen when we read together at Haworth. For fans of Helen’s work, there is still her trademark playfulness and close attention to the musicality of language, but in many ways this feels like a bold departure from her previous work. It is a poetic investigation into the archetype of the stepmother – drawing on fairy tale, pornography and popular culture to examine how stepmothers play out in the modern family.

There are striking prose sections that sometimes read like lyric essays, sometimes like prose poems. There is something meditative about these pieces – there is ‘On silence’ and ‘On Origins’ and ‘On souls’. Silence is a theme that looms large throughout the book. This complicated relationship with speaking – when to speak up, when to be silent runs throughout the book. In “On Silence” a family photographer mistakenly calls the speaker of the poem ‘mum’ and the piece ends with ‘To speak would have seemed like a disavowal, a distancing. To stay silent meant taking something which was not yours.

‘So of course you said nothing. You took it’

The house as a domestic space is often a dangerous place, sometimes configured as a living being, a body that can swallow people whole – in the poem ‘In every house there is a cupboard’ finishes ‘When you lean into the cupboard, you could pitch yourself right down the house’s throat’.

It feels like a risky, risk-taking book. It made me think a little bit about A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk in its approach to examining the straitjackets that women are written into, or spoken into or moulded into by the forces that govern our lives and the forces that we let run loose inside us.

Kim Moore, July Reading Diary

When I was in Malaysia last year, I read with Beijing-based poet Anthony Tao. We discovered, amongst other things, a shared love of writing about bars: theatres of the absurd, meeting points, places of temporary epiphany.

I’ve been fascinated by pubs as spaces of storytelling since my pamphlet ‘a pint for the ghost’ back in the mid 2000s. When I got back to the UK after my fleeting trip to Penang, Anthony and I started writing a few poems-in-dialogue about bars.

I’m massively excited that Anthony is coming over to the UK at the end of this month and we’re going to be reading together along with Matt Byrne at Sheffield’s very own Over The Yardarm on 31st August.

Ahead of that gig, I thought I’d share a couple of drafts of things I wrote in response to poems by Anthony. Mine are set in Manchester, but the first piece took inspiration from a line in Anthony’s poem ‘Hanoi, Day and Night’.

If you want to see us in dialogue IRL, come to Sheffield on bank holiday Monday, August 31st!

Hope you like these two mini bar poems!

Irwell

‘..not stink, just fragrance gone too far.’ – Anthony Tao

The way Canal Street’s overcome
some nights by sudden river
so as you sit under the rainbow flags
at dusk, in unfit northern weather
you might smell something tar-like,
dankness, shipping’s aftermath,
the smoke-on-clothing reek
of defunct industry, lung-deep
and if you let yourself inhale
you’ll notice how the Irwell
holds the scent of everyone
it ever touched […]

Helen Mort, A poem walks into a bar

Poet, Iris Anne Lewis, has clearly chosen the title of her collection, Amber (Graffiti Books, 2024), with care. Amber, the highly valued, fossilised tree resin, is notable for its capacity to preserve traces of the ancient world, including insects and plants. Lewis’s collection performs a comparable act of preservation. It revisits the human past without sentimentality, often through artefacts and images that have survived across time and uses history as a lens through which contemporary life can be viewed with humanity, precision and perception.

Handprints, one of the strongest poems in the collection, is typical of the poems in the opening section, which focuses on history and prehistory. The first part of the poem, subtitled 30,000 BCE, describes the silhouetted handprints found in the caves of Gargas. Lewis vividly recreates the act of making them: ‘the artist splays hand to rock,/ sucks black pigment into hollow/ bone of swan, blows living breath/ into paint.’ The final phrase recalls the classical motif of gods breathing life into human beings. Here, however, it becomes both a metaphor for artistic mastery and an expression of the connection experienced by the modern viewer. These are not merely handprints; they stand for living people — ‘men/ women, children’ — who, although they lived many thousands of years ago, would have known ‘Disease…mourning…grief.’ In the second section of the poem, subtitled 2000 CE, that connection is extended into the present. Lewis moves us into neonatal units, where nurses help ‘bereaved mothers of still-birthed babies,/ take hand and footprints.’ The grief of early cave dwellers is echoed in a contemporary context: the experience of death, mourning and remembrance remains part of the human condition. Yet Lewis does not linger solely on loss. She then turns to the nursery school, where children make prints of their own hands and ‘Proud parents/ display’ this ‘infant art’ ‘on kitchen walls and fridges.’ This broadens the poem’s emotional range, presenting another enduring aspect of human experience: the impulse to create, to make marks and to assert presence. Lewis makes this universality explicit in the closing question: ‘which of us/ has not pressed hand/ to paper, drawn round our palm/ and fingers? Made this statement?// I am here. I matter.’ The poem therefore connects ancient handprints with the fundamental human need to express identity and affirm existence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Amber’ by Iris Anne Lewis

Julia Webb’s fourth collection focuses on grief after bereavement. Grief can be a tricky topic as the poet can either include the reader, by focusing on exploration and communication or shut out the reader by focusing on the personal and individual response that the reader feels excluded from understanding the relationship or the person(s) behind the grief. Webb invites the reader in by focusing on the nature of unresolved relationships, the parts of connections and conversations of avoidance. There are dashes of colour (other than grey) and one poem turns a mother into an owl. Grief here is for a mother and a brother, without details given, not that the poet is obliged to give details, so readers can probe their own familial relationships through the lens offered. Grief is likened to “I have spent years falling out of each window” and its first line “the tall building of grief gave me”. 

Emma Lee, “Grey Time” Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press) – book review

Path, Chris Torrance, Aquifer, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-0684861-3-5

When I reviewed the Test Centre edition of Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door back in January 2018, I concluded by writing:

In his Afterword, Torrance refers to ‘at least 3 more books, taking The Magic Door into the 21st century’. I can only urge you to buy the current volume so that [Test Centre] might publish these outstanding volumes with the same diligence.

It has taken longer than I hoped, but thanks to Aquifer and editor Phil Maillard, we finally have not three, but nine new sections of Torrance’s major poem published together under the title Path, which is also the title of the first new section. The full list is:

Path
A Garden Book
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writing Tutor
RORI: A Book of the Boundaries
Frinite
Wobbly Chair
Dreamin’ Viv
Aurochs
A Book of Number/Gos Diaries

They vary in length from 9 to 40 pages, but each section, however short, is a self-contained book, albeit with recurring themes, including ones from the earlier volumes, running through. There’s so much going on in this book that I’ve decided to focus this review on just some of the many paths a reader could take to traverse it. There are, of course, other paths I could have taken, music, for instance, but to do full justice to this book, I’d need to write another one.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

So, we have a looking-glass book in a Looking-Glass book, which ought to mean something — perhaps that the obvious parody of the quest tale in “Jabberwocky” can remind us that one way to read Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is as a strange and dreamy quest. That’s suggested, too, by “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” the acrostic poem with which the narrative ends.

And suggested as well by the conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”

“Brillig means four o’clock in the afternoon,” Humpty Dumpty tells her, “the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.” And with his learnedly silly explications — “Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?” he asks Alice — we’re warned off the side-quest. And back to the poem’s absurdity, parodic flavor, and bounce.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Jabberwocky

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

My mom bought me a copy of Langston Hughes’ The Dream Keeper–the edition illustrated by Brian Pinkney–shortly before my first day of school in 3rd grade. At one point I had most of those poems memorized. No longer. I was fascinated with the Beats in high school, mainly Burroughs, Welch, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Those last fellas are few tough heroes to have, I guess, but who doesn’t have those? College was the big sort of aha moment: Lorca, Mayer, Whitman, Dickinson, Baraka, Notley, O’Hara, etc. etc. I did my undergrad at Brooklyn College, so I was reading New Yorkers alongside New Yorkers. It became my world for a long time. I wrote poems with friends in them for friends and with those same friends–we had a big, rollicking, cinematic writing collective. In a lot of ways, I wrote poems so that I could have friends, too.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

This latest book took me about three and a half months to write. It’s the shortest bit of complete writing that I’ve ever (and probably will ever) accomplish. I was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers after my dad had fallen very ill. I’d basically alternate between rehab room / waiting room / car / Stewart’s (for those who don’t know, a regional convenience store franchise that sells ice cream, usually with bright orange booths for the newspaper-and-coffee set). The writing quite literally fell out of me. I just had to make sure I was able to catch all of it as it fell out. That type of writing feels blessed. It doesn’t happen too often. 

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I write every day, usually in the morning. In college I was introduced to the poetry of kari edwards, who I read fervently and obsessively, and who I think is one of our most massively underread late poets. I can’t remember the exact sequence and durations, but Rob Halpern notes, in his introduction to edwards’ succubus in my pocket, that she would wake, meditate for x hours, read philosophy for an hour, fiction for an hour, and poetry for an hour, constantly writing across these various texts, then finally eat breakfast, go back to reading, etc. I am not nearly as regimented or as robust in my mornings, but I drew a lot of inspiration from hir dedication to encounter and thought. Always reading. Always writing. 

For the most part, I am writing into a question or a feeling, or around a question or a feeling. I do a lot of circling and sizing up. Collage work, mosaic work, lots of tinkering in the first half of my process. I do a lot of work up front. Once the book is together, it’s mostly there. I will send it to a few friends to get a sense of sequencing and big picture work. 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ryan Skrabalak

At the 2022 National Book Awards Finalist Reading, Sharon Olds prefaced her poem “Quarantine” like this: “I just thought that before I read my poem I would show that I rewrote it a little since it was in my book because I read it at a reading and there was something wrong with it. Something in the beginning especially and I fixed—I think I fixed it.” She explains that she removed four adjectives and one adverb from the first version and changed a noun. “So I’m very ha—I’m not afraid.”

A poem can be part of a critically acclaimed collection and also be not quite right, Olds is telling us, though the poem had seemed right to her at one time. And she can’t even be certain she’s completely addressed the problem. She starts to claim to have fixed it, then backtracks. She thinks she’s fixed it, she amends, which implies future changes may be required. And while she begins to say she’s happy with the newer version, she says instead that she’s not afraid. The audience claps and whistles.

I love what Olds offers us here. Isn’t that the task of every writer? To be not afraid? Not afraid to make work and not afraid to let strangers read it and judge it and not afraid to acknowledge the work’s failings and to try to fix those failings, even if the piece was previously declared finished. Even if it’s already been printed in a collection and that collection is up for the National Book Award, for instance.

Which brings me back to the idea that I was issuing corrections while putting together my book. In an interview with Brian Brodeur, Keetje Kuipers was asked how she knows a poem is ready to be published. “I don’t mind the idea that drafts of my poems (good drafts, ones that have had careful attention and revision, but drafts all the same) are appearing in journals and magazines,” she says. “In some ways, it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that I’m sharing that process with a wider audience, and that people may have the opportunity to encounter a single poem in widely varying incarnations by the time it appears in a book.”

I love this as well—this practice of sharing drafts with readers. In rewriting an already-public poem, you admit which parts of your work you found wanting or that you maybe just outgrew. It’s vulnerable and brave to hold your poems with such open hands, allowing observers into your process and accepting that your current creative choices might feel wrong in the future. How comforting to know that even Sharon Olds needs to make corrections. How freeing to think of them as Keetje Kuipers does—not as corrections but as incarnations. Each version of a poem granted its own place in the world. The first version with the plums in it and the second one with pears because plums are trite, aren’t they, and the third iteration with the red plums back in because they are delicious and nearly my favorite fruit, even if William Carlos Williams liked them too, and so it should be plums, I’ve decided. For now.

The Generous Act of Publishing Drafts: Poems as Iterations – guest post by Abbie Kiefer (Trish Hopkinson)

As we close in on the last couple weeks of the open reading period, I am enjoying wading into the submissions pool and have even started accepting some titles for the first couple months of the 2026-27 season (and amazingly am somewhat on schedule getting these last handful of books out for this past season, which is wrapping up as we speak.) I am once again thinking about what makes a manuscript a definite “yes” and what makes me take a pass on the “no”s. Some manuscripts stand out for their strangeness, their innovation. This can be subject matter-wise, language-wise, stylistic, or narrative. It can mean using page space in interesting ways. Using art and graphics mixed in. Using found texts and appropriated forms like glossaries and diagrams. I like books that go for bold in some ways. That aren’t afraid to take risks. I’ve often heard from authors that the book I accepted had been out in submission for a minute and no one was biting. I sometimes am just that weirdo that loves it or sees the potential in it. 

We have recent books that are erasures and black outs. Books that masquerades as other kinds of text–prose, charts, indices. We have books that include original art by the author (which now that we are using a professional  printer, look even more amazing than when I was doing them in house.) This is also true of books that use the page space in interesting ways, which we can now do in differing sizes than the standard paperback dimensions. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part 2

Independent publishing has always operated on the slimmest of margins. It’s not the oil business. In that business, there’s a vertical marketplace. Shell digs the oil, refines it, carries it on the big boat, and sells it to you at the pump. That’s a lucrative business to start with.

The writer gets a piece of the action.

The distributor gets nearly a third.

The printer gets 10-15%.

The bookstore gets about half.

In the end, the publisher doesn’t have enough to buy tuna.

It’s a business that is run on prayer. If you have wealthy friends, and grants, and a few authors who sell well, and you don’t waste any money, and nothing bad ever happens to you, and you don’t make any mistakes, you might survive. That’s a lot to ask in one life, especially for a nonprofit leader.

I like the phrase “Money should flow toward the writer.” Why stop at money? Why not tequila?

The problem is that in the oil business, there is already money. In the publishing business, unless you are in New York, there isn’t any money flowing.

I talked with an agent the other day who said, “Why did you get into this business?”

I told her the truth: “I was in love with stories that wanted homes. I loved Duras and Colette and Marquez and Calvino and Morrison, and I wanted to climb across the fields, run through the forest, and find what was hanging out there longing for the right editor. What about you?”

She said, “I like money.”

I wanted to write back and suggest she move over to JPMorgan, where she could think about money all the time. Investment banking and tech are the fields where you get to like money. Not publishing.

Kate Gale, Keepers of the Flame: Stepping Up in the Dark

I’ll be interviewing Emily Wilson for Literary Hub next month, so more on this soon. In the meantime, some notes from my reading of her fabulous new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. The book, which will be out September 1st, ranges widely, building toward a dazzling final essay in which she lays out her particular philosophy of translation.

Called “Translating the Odyssey,” the essay had its start in a series of tweets in which she compared and contrasted translations for the first line of the poem, specifically the first adjective Homer attaches to his hero.

Polytropos

Robert Fagles gave us “the man of twists and turns.” And Daniel Mendelsohn translated it as the man “who had so many roundabout ways / To wander.” While Emily Wilson made headlines when she wonderfully used, “A complicated man.”

One critic joked that it sounded more like his relationship status on Facebook but I love the translation!

One word, and already the translators diverge—each hearing something different in the Greek, each also responding to the versions that came before.

My own favorite is the one by Stanley Lombardo. A classics professor and Zen teacher, he rendered the first lines like this:

Speak, Memory—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again

As Wilson points out in her essay, Lombardo’s “Speak, Memory” is a Nabokovian wink. His version also takes polytropos apart, distributing its possibilities across “cunning,” “wanderer” and “blown off course.”

Reading them together, Wilson shows us not only how much each translator relies upon the Greek, but how much they also relied on the English versions that came before them. Translation, she reminds us, is not a solitary encounter between a translator and an original.

It is also a conversation, and sometimes an argument, across generations.

Leanne Ogasawara, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea & the Politeness of the Genji Translators

For those of you who don’t know what the GCSE poetry exam looks like, it varies a little between exam boards but essentially, we teach them fifteen poems from the anthology we’ve been using since 2015. One of the poems will be printed on the exam paper and then students have to write an essay comparing it to one of the other fourteen, none of which are printed on the exam paper. They’re comparing something they can see with something they are trying to remember. They are expected to include analysis of language features, poetic structure and the historical context of both poems. Then they do almost the same thing all over again, but with two poems they’ve never seen before, though both of these are printed on the paper this time. These are Sections B and C of a three-section exam (one of two exams) which lasts 2 hours and 15 minutes for most students. If they have a condition which qualifies them for extra time, they’re doing this for the length of The Odyssey movie. Many cope admirably with these demands. Many do not. And whether they cope has almost nothing to do with how many annotations they made, and it definitely doesn’t have much to do with how much they like poetry. Lots of young people love poetry, and say wonderful things about it, and write wonderful poetry themselves. The exam doesn’t necessarily encourage that out of them, that’s all, so what is it testing? If I’m honest, I wish we could assess poetry entirely on unseen responses; take away the stress of the anthology and see what they can really do with a poem.

Even though they can’t take notes into the exam any more (phew), a lot of my students in recent years have become a bit obsessed with them. Annotations are trending, it appears. There are pastel highlighters and insta-style calligraphied headings and colour coded post-its. […]

I think the thing about annotations at this level is that they’re a poor proxy for learning – students feel much happier when they have them and they enjoy making them look beautiful, but ultimately that isn’t the same thing as understanding or genuine insight. This isn’t the kids’ fault. They want to pass, and many have been disempowered by social media, and their self-esteem is often so low that they don’t trust their own ideas. I’ve had intuitive, creative, diligent students, loads of them, sit and wait with poised pens for me to tell them what to write down. It makes me uneasy, that. It’s not the kind of teaching I’m up for. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 23: Hopkins again, and Darren.

At first I thought I would put one object per table, and then I thought it would be more interesting to have several objects.  Some tables had connected objects:  for example, on one table I put Christmas ornaments, a Christmas card, a packet of replacement bulbs for a strand of holiday lights.  On another, I kept the objects from the natural world:  3 feathers, a pine cone, and some shells.  Other tables were more random collections.

I was also pleased with how many tactile experiences they could have.  I had two felted pieces, along with chunks of wood and chunks of asphalt.  The cross made out of palm stalks and the waxy, half-burnt candle gave different sensations.  I put out broken strings of beads and broken pottery.

I told students that they would need paper and something to write with, or they could take laptops to write on.  They all chose paper, and I told them to make sure they had enough paper.

Students sat at a table and had 30 seconds to look at the objects.  Then they wrote for 3 minutes.  They could write about the object or write in the voice of the characters we created in past class sessions or explore their own memories.  I wasn’t looking at their writing, so they had plenty of latitude, as long as they kept writing.

After three minutes, they moved to the next table, a process which went smoothly.  At the end, I had them read all the writing they had done, marking any that had potential.  I reminded them that they could go deeper, but I wasn’t requiring it.  For me, it’s too much policing, having students write for 20-30 minutes.

My students seemed to really like the process.  They talked about how many ideas it generated and how much fun it was to write about random objects.  They also talked about their wonder at what all was waiting to be written about–and I reminded them that we live in a world of random objects, so whenever they feel blocked, they should remember this technique.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Random Objects in the Creative Writing Classroom

I received a lovely message the other day from someone wanting to run a poetry event with their members and looking for some input from a poet, including delivering a talk and a short reading for inspiration alongside some optional involvement further down the line.

I was thrilled, still am really, I don’t often get messages like this.

So I wrote back saying yes I’m interested and asking for some more information, a timeline, and what kind of compensation they’re offering. I received in response:

“I had not anticipated paying for this as I was hoping poets and authors would like to volunteer their time to the next generation of writers.”

Yep. Goodwill and inspiration and yes I probably should have expected that despite them being a national organisation. And that’s ok, I’m not angry so I hope this post doesn’t come across that way, but it raised a familiar (and tired) story.

Why is it so acceptable to ask creatives to work with no offer of payment? In business, ‘time is money’, ‘people’s time is money’, but that doesn’t seem to apply so readily to us. As if we magically don’t need to earn an income from our work.

And yes it’s lovely to inspire the next generation, but you’re contacting me from a multi-institutional organisation that clearly has money (and probably funding), while I’m a singular human living off less than 20k a year. It’s super easy for you to suggest moral reward is enough … would you mind suggesting that to my landlord too?

I feel like there’s this weird dual stereotyping of writers that goes on:

No 1. is that you’re a ‘starving artist’ living hand to mouth and writing furiously till the wee hours every night but somehow at peace with this because you’re ‘creatively fulfilled’ and have ‘chosen’ this life.

No 2. is that because you’re ‘a writer/an author’ with a public profile saying as much you’ve clearly reached the heights of career and financial stability and can volunteer your time any which way.

Realistically the first is bloody hard and frustrating for all of us, and the second, well, maybe if you’ve gone into writing crime fiction or romance and are churning out a book every year…

Either way neither of them seem to amount to many offers of payment for work undertaken. And both of them mean that a huge amount of our time is taken up by either trying to write as much as possible and send as much out on submission as possible alongside actual employment, or trying to write as much as possible and apply for as many grants/residencies/projects as possible to keep the money coming in. Neither of which is great ground for volunteering a bunch of time. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t volunteer, I do think it’s important to volunteer for things when we can.

But when you reduce it down what’s happening is an organisation is asking for a service, one which you can provide and they can’t because you’ve trained and worked hard over a number of years to develop the skills to be able to do it. And then you’re asked to do it for free, regularly. It’s a systemic devaluing of those skills.

Rachael Hill, I was hoping you’d volunteer your time…

Let me preface this with a confession: I’m not great about managing my time. Period. I can get distracted doing laundry—maybe I get a call and walk upstairs to talk—and then I might start emptying the dishwasher, leave that half done because I suddenly remember an email I need to respond to, then get sidetracked responding to emails (or scrolling), then remember I have to pay some bills while I’m online, then wander back into the kitchen for some coffee, only find the dishwater open and half unloaded. Maybe, just maybe, I remember that I was in the middle of doing laundry earlier, and I head back to the basement to finish that.

Whew. If that sounds familiar, I’m sorry, and hello, you’re my people.

That said, someone asked during a Q&A in San Miguel about balancing different parts of the work—writing, of course, but also and other kinds of work, and caregiving, and admin, and social media (if you choose to use it), etc. Despite being a little scatterbrained in my daily life, I had an answer: You get your own best time.

Let me explain. I know that my brain is freshest and most primed to write—to be imaginative, to generate fresh ideas, to find new solutions to old problems—first thing in the morning, before the day has a chance to get at me. Before my phone starts ringing and the emails start piling up, and I get pulled in multiple directions. That’s just me. Maybe your best, freshest time is late at night, when everyone is in bed and the house is finally quiet. Or midday, when you’ve cleared a few things from your plate and can focus on creative work.

But whenever you are sharpest, give yourself and your creative work that time. Don’t devote the best thinking part of your day to emails and errands.

If you’re best in the morning, like me, try to set aside some morning time to write. Maybe that means getting up before your family (I put a quiet Keurig in my bedroom for a reason). I try to devote mornings to anything generative, and save my afternoons, when I feel a little duller, for errands and admin work like emails. I don’t need peak creativity to go to the UPS store or the pharmacy. I don’t need to bring my best sentence-building potential to my inbox.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

Here are a few helpful questions I ask myself when I begin a critique:

1. What work is the title doing? Is it a placeholder? Is it forgettable?
2. Are there any moments in the poem where I am confused?
3. What images / lines stay with me when I am done reading the poem?
4. Does the opening line intrigue me and make me want to read more?
5. Is there anywhere in the poem where I begin to lose interest?
6. Could this poem be lineated differently? Are the line breaks doing any work to add meaning or are they distracting?
7. Is this poem in the correct order? Could an idea or stanza be moved elsewhere in the poem to achieve a different effect?
8. What do you notice with the sound – repetition, assonance, consonance, rhyme or slant rhyme?
9. What is this poem leaving out? Could the poet explore an idea further?
10. What is not essential in the poem?

Though they do take time and can be daunting to begin, if you have the opportunity to be involved with critique, you should do it.

It is one of the best ways to grow as a writer, sharpening your “editing eye” – evaluating why a piece is working or why it isn’t, seeing what is missing, what is unnecessary, thinking through how a piece of writing effects the reader.

Renee Emerson, How to Critique a Poem

How much of writing and submitting are just…waiting? Far too much. I write a lot, way more than I publish, and I submit I would say a fair amount (like between a couple and a dozen submissions per month, I’d say). I’m right now trying to find a place that will publish my next book as well as individual poems. But how powerless are writers like me? Unless you’re one of the chosen (ie, you’re friends with the editor of Paris Review, or got an NEA grant when they still existed, or a supergenius grant, etc,) you’re playing a waiting game. Sending out your work, then waiting sometimes over a year for a rejection.

Sometimes the name of the game is empowering yourself by staying proactive in sending out your work or distracting yourself with other hobbies or work. Distraction isn’t a bad idea if you’re worrying about your work and writing something else—an essay or short fiction if you’re a poet or sketching a local scene or taking photos—something else creative—is a good way to help. And sometimes talking to other writers and encouraging them (or listening to their worries) is helpful too.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Practically Perfect Summer Day with Goldfinches and Dahlias, Sleepwrecked, and Writing as a Waiting Game

Is it worth all the effort? All the research and rejections that come along with it? A while ago I wrote about the dangers and blessings of the publishing “dance” in an essay that Trish Hopkinson published on her blog. You can read it here: Why You Should Submit Even if You’re Not 100% Sure You’re Done

I still stand by what I said in the article. In hindsight, I do have new and additional thoughts. When I was younger, I thought the point of getting published was to make a name for myself as a poet and build a career. That wasn’t wrong exactly, but over the years I’ve found other reasons that are more meaningful. What has proven to be a lot more real and fun about getting published, is finding my tribe. […]

What do I mean by that? Every time I get something published, I read the work of the poets who were published alongside me. I make note of the poems I particularly enjoy. I earmark those as poems to use in my workshops. Then I social-media stalk them – add them as friends, tell them how much I like their work, invite them to be on The Poetry Saloncast, ask if they’re doing readings in my area.

Over the years these shared poems have led to some seriously meaningful friendships, collaborations, and ongoing artistic support systems. One of the friends I met through mutual publication hosted me at a poetry reading in Colorado when I came out on book tour. Another invited me to the beach in North Carolina to do a reading for her venue. Some have been on retreat with me in Costa Rica. Many have invited me to speak to their classes, submit to their journals, or just stay in touch.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Find Your Poetry Tribe This Saturday at The Poetry Salon

7. The Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe

Since Swan, the character in my poem, had his own website, his own social media accounts and was beginning to develop his own identity it felt only right that he’d be on a dating site.

I set up a profile under My Name Is Swan and waited. I got one enquiry, a message that read, “Who are you? What are you?” “I’m a poem,” Swan replied. “Interesting,” came the response, “where can I read you?” “Come to the Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe and you can hear me instead,” wrote Swan providing a day and a time.

Swan arrived early and found his ‘date’ already at a table. He sat down opposite and delivered his poem in its entirety. His date listened intently and then when it was done she stood up. “Thank you Mr Swan,” she said. And then she left. And Swan never heard from her again.

Strange rating: 6/10
Danger rating: 1/10
Beauty rating: 7/10

*

6. The Swan and ******

I’m not gonna reveal the full name of this pub, not because I fear any repercussions but because I may give the impression that it’s a bit of a rough house. It’s not. The landlord was great, the staff were lovely and the punters, well, they were a bit lively. Lads in hard hats straight off the building site, hitting the Stella Artois. This was undoubtedly a proper boozer I’d walked into. No frills, no messing, a working man’s taproom and, if I’m honest, quite an intimidating place to read poetry.

The boys were a few pints in and the pool game was getting pretty animated. I picked my moment and, unannounced, launched into My Name Is Swan. You can see how anxious I was – this moment is recorded in the closing seconds of our film of the same name. I just went for it. The lads gathered round, came in close, clutching their pool cues. I kept reading, half expecting to get a pool cue wrapped around me canister at any second. It didn’t happen. When I was done I got one of the most enthusiastic rounds of applause I’ve ever received. It taught me something about peoples’ ability to appreciate poetry, this innate capacity we have for art and also how judgemental we can be about who it’s supposed to be for.

I understand they serve Thai food in this pub now. I may, sadly, be responsible for its gentrification. I do hope not. And so does Swan.

Strange rating: 4/10
Danger rating: 6/10
Beauty rating: 6/10

Jan Noble, Nº78 The top ten strangest, most dangerous and most beautiful places that I’ve read poetry

Highlights of the Telluride Mushroom Festival? What I’ll remember longest, I suspect, is a guided foray at Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan Mountains. The “guided” part came and went. The leader walked too quickly for me, both because I wanted to look around and because, at 10,000 feet, I’m easily winded. I wasn’t the only one in our large group taking it slow, though. There was so much to look at! Coral mushrooms, violet cortinarius, warty yellow amanitas, a billion LBMs (little brown mushrooms, often stymieing even the experts), tall plants I’d never seen before (bear grass, I was told), slightly worrisome elk and bear scat (enormous amounts!). My fellow ramblers were interesting people, sometimes knowledgeable foragers in their own right. Plus we all reconnected at the end, where the guide confirmed that Chris had found king boletes–porcini, essentially. Back at our rental I fried them in olive oil with salt and pepper until the pieces were golden and slightly crisped. They were GLORIOUS.

Also terrific: how much poetry was part of the gathering! The poetry events were organized by poet Art Goodtimes, a festival co-founder, who has a lot more energy than seems possible in a eighty-year-old. An “open myc” at the library had a lovely, inclusive, community vibe, alternating poetry and music. The big evening poetry show at the Sheridan Opera House was a wilder yet tightly choreographed mix that also featured hilariously shroomy raps, parodies, and more–Art presiding, this time, in a red sequined tailcoat. What a trip (although I was sober) to see SO many enthusiastic people desperate to snag seats in the audience! On the last day, Art and I signed a collaborative chapbook, Hyphae, designed for the occasion, which I’ll say more about below.

Lesley Wheeler, Hyphae–and gifts

After the rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underground
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Approaching the Third Anniversary of Your Death

Today, waking to the excitement of no plans, I packed my rucksack, cycled to my allotment via coffee and cake at C’s, unlocked my shed, assembled my hammock stand and slung my hammock.

A few weeks ago, when my sweetcorn crop was at its peak, inbetween hammock-reading and dozing, I used my camping stove to flash-boil cobs, then anointed them with butter, before eating them like an unholy rodent.

Today, in tune with the ripening season, I dug some desirée potatoes then, satisfied with my haul for now, lay in my hammock to read ‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, and drink elderflower cordial. Of course, I dozed. I read more. 

Deakin’s accounts of swimming fit well with the sway and lull of hammocking, with the being held in the same view as when backstroking. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sling My Hammock

I often experience my body as “other.” Culture sets us up for this view, Descartes and all that, but it also makes intuitive sense that we would feel quite separate from our bodies. In meditation, it is the idea of ultimately being an “observer” of my life that is most confusing. How can one experience feelings, and observe them at the same time? As a longtime dissociator, I beg to differ. So here is a poem along these lines; bear with me through the extended metaphor.

Life at Sea

1–

I am born inside a ship.

2–

I am inside my body.
My body is a ship on the sea.

3–

My body is a ship on the sea
sailing unawares
its muscles, rafters, joints
creaking, bending
straight into the storm. […]

Rebecca Cook, Life at Sea

My tomatoes have been going wild this year, with plants 7 feet tall, 8 feet in circumference, all of them loaded with fruit. I should not mind sharing with a few very hungry caterpillars when, after all, I’m loading my friends with tomatoes and making more sauce than Best Beloved and I can possibly consume in a year. And yet, it is rather annoying. So I was scouting the internet when I found this blog from Brie Arthur re hornworms. It’s a nice overview and shows “both sides” of hornworm invaders (though as she is in North Carolina, she has tobacco hornworms on her tomatoes).

Hornworms bring to my mind two very astonishing Stanley Kunitz poems written from the worm’s viewpoint. A tricky task, taking the persona of a non-human and still avoiding the more common issues of anthropomorphism. Kunitz, a master, pulls it off. Here is an excerpt from “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I’ll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won’t be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

I encourage you to read the entire short poem. So layered. And it gave me new respect for the animals that eat the same things we want to eat, who can blame them?

Ann E. Michael, Hornworms

A day
like today
the air
feels invisible.
Crickets sing
steady songs
while catbirds
riff solos.
Who wants
to think
of darkness?
But look:
the plant
that means
the year
will turn
is blooming.

Rachel Barenblat, Cusp

i mean, death looks more alive than the scholar, right? he is animated, urgent, dynamically beseeching. as if he knows what the doctor has failed to grasp: that mortal life is short, that the ephemeral and embodied joy of music is as real and valuable as the abstract, theoretical weight of learning. so even as the skeleton-maestro leads the doctor on to death, he summons him (and us) to life.

or, read the image another way, and it becomes about resolve: standing fast and holding faith in the face of death’s destructive antics and strange glamour. i’ve needed to keep both these thoughts in mind at different times in my life and what i’ll laughingly call my “career”, which is why i’m sharing this with you now, and why…

i have selected this as the cover image for the department of queer complaint, a collection of poems (finally) forthcoming from the mighty poetry bus press. the collection has been knocking around since my tenure at cambridge ended, but for all sorts of reasons, it now feels like time to shove it up poetry’s peep hole and have done with it. watch this space. or not. it’s going to be wild.

Fran Lock, IT’S TIME

霧吸うてだんだん秋の人  高山れおな

kiri sūte dandan aki no hito  

            inhaling fog
           slowly I become
            an autumnal human

                                                Leona Takayama

from Hyakudai Keiko (100 Waka Theme Practice), a haiku collection of Leona Takayama, Gendai Tanka Sha, Kyoto, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, SITTING IN THE MUD

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Beach Sunrises

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

R.M. Haines, BLUETOOTH SPEAKER YALDABAOTH

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

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

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

Tim Love, Continuous narrative

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

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

Rebecca Cook, The Sound of The Ocean

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

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

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

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

Marilyn McCabe, into empty sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is looping loss upon loss.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, To play with catastrophe.

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

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

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Luisa A. Igloria, Souls on Board

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

Fran Lock, ON MEMORY #2

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

Lori Witzel, Smoke

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

Fokkina McDonnell, Life expectancy begins to fall – poems

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

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

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

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

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

Eileen Tabios, PRE-RELEASE NOTES: COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, Self Publishing Myths Dispelled

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

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

I know what you mean. It is too unstable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I loved […]

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

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

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

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

and published it.

Jill Pearlman, Wedding Miracles

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the next section addresses its value:

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

The penultimate section revolves around the title line:

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

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

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

Billy Mills, A Basket of Barnetts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, Two poems by Bob Hicok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tycoch

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

Caroline Gill, 14 May is #dylanday

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Complaints, critiques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

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

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

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

Maryann Corbett, Failing Astronomy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I Sprint to the Finish

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

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

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

Tom Clausen, matrix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, BOGS AGAINST FASCISM

after the rain
sunshine dripping
from the fig tree

Jim Young [no title]

This week: picnicking on ice, clock-time vs. earth-time, the enormity of the world’s grief, the sound of a fountain, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m sitting here, still in bed because it is my birthday and on your birthday you get to work from your bed. It’s a misty morning in North Yorkshire but the sun is breaking through.

Spring is arriving.

Wendy Pratt, Dawn and Dusk Chorus Write Along Sessions

This lake surface is flat-with-rising-places. These are mini alpine mountains, where expanding ice has pushed itself into Mont Blanc-resonant peaks to alleviate the pressure that comes with expansion. There are fissures too and in some places, there are small portholes to the next layers down, and these are mysterious with interlacing crystals and thin pastry layer accumulations. 

We sat, P, L, and I, and talked of rootedness and our lives (which, I’ve just thought, add up to a small-large 188 years). We ate and drank, looking outwards. It was peaceful, and there was a white silence as backdrop to these connections. 

And all the while the sun warmed us without the interruption of a single cloud.

Liz Lefroy, I Picnic On Ice

“April is the cruellest month” is the first line of TS Eliot’s Wasteland, which has always puzzled me. April is bluebells and swallows and hares, the dawn chorus, waking in a downpour of song. April is life returning, showy and cheerful and loud after the white silence of winter, the muted February gloom: “Lilacs/ out of the dead land”.

Which is, I think, the speaker’s problem – he prefers the silence, the soft, quiet protection of snow. Especially when the snow hides wreckage and ruin – Eliot wrote the poem in 1921, recovering from a breakdown whilst Europe reeled in the aftermath of the first World War. And yes, the March insistence of crocus and daffodil can seem at odds with world events, but oh my God, how welcome is that March sun, warm, soft, golden; the first buds on the willow, like tiny paws? So much so that my third collection, “Flood”, contains a response to Eliot’s famous line – you’ll find it at the end of this article.

Clare Shaw, The Cruellest Month is over!

There is no one left to sing to so I
sing to the water: From where do you spring and
how will you slake me?
How long must I return
with jar and tattered rope, bearing
the dry sockets of my bones?

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 4

“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive while waiting to start living, wandering the labyrinth of life with wayward presence, wishing that time ran differently as the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience.

And all the while, our time is nested within our times — the epoch we are living through together, born into it with no more choice in the matter than the body and brain and family we have been born into. In his magnificent essay on Shakespeare, James Baldwin countered the commonplace lament of every epoch: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” A century before him — a century of unrest and transformation — Emerson issued the ultimate antilamentation: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” […]

If time is the fundamental problem of human life and poetry is our most precise technology for parsing the aching astonishment of being alive, then time is the prime subject of poetry. Neruda knew this — time is the subterranean current coursing beneath his vast and varied body of work, the substrate upon which all of his stunning love poems and his meditations on the inner life grow. He reverenced the stones for how they have “touched time,” reverenced the minute for how it is “bound to join the river of time that bears us,” reverenced “the inexhaustible springs of time,” longed for “a time complete as an ocean,” then made that ocean with his poetry.

Maria Popova, Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

I have a bit of time here and there to do the activities that nourish me:  reading and a variety of creative work.  I have time to see friends.  My family members are in good shape.

We are bombarded, day after day, with stories of women who have not been so lucky, reminding us that we still have work to do.

I’m thinking of the multitude of poems that I’ve written about gender and history and all of those intersections.  Here’s a poem that I wrote years ago that says a lot about the life of a certain class of women in modern, capitalistic countries.  It’s part of my chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

The Hollow Women

We are the hollow women,
the ones with carved muscles,
the ones run ragged by calendars
and other apps that promised
us mastery of that cruel slavedriver, time. […]

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Poem for International Women’s Day

Time accumulates and erodes as we spread ourselves thin over work, people who don’t deserve our energy, constant complaints, addictions, and pettiness. Those who step out of Kronos (clock-time) and into Kairos (earth-time) may find that time slows and stills like a warm, shallow sea. Here, when you pay the currency of your limited attention, you will feel how the sun shines down on your face. With your valuable attention, you will notice that the waters are warm and the creatures, they just do their business of making the first pathways on this earth. Please do them no harm. And look at those clouds. Look at how they come undone in their becoming. Soon enough, as always, and forevermore, something big will happen, with or without you. It is all a continuous happening. A continuous genesis of building a becoming and initiating an ending. All of us. Every one. And all the ones after.

Sarah Lada, Orogeny

broken, broken world
or is it me
seeing cracks on still water
seeing wounds instead of flowers
seeing blood where sunset
should drip behind the ears of trees

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Broken

I keep seeing discussion online about how artists and writers function in a world that is, if not completely falling apart in front of us, in danger of toppling.  On one hand, you have those who find the terrors of everyday living have a dampening effect on productivity (even for fun things), a lack of concentration, and a lack of purpose. On the other hand, and this I see too in myself, the drive to keep on going. To keep making and loving and creating something beautiful or interesting in a world that not only doesn’t seem to want it, but fights its very existence. Either through distraction or making things like art less likely in the struggle to survive (metaphorically or actually.)

And yet, art can be sustaining. It can often be the only thing which seems bearable. It may feel like playing the cello while the ship sinks or straightening the beds while the world is on fire, But it is also, in some ways, an act of persistence and resistance. 

I’ve been channeling my energies into the press. Into poems and plays. Into art experiments that have lesser to more degrees of success. These things are surely harder than they would be not under duress, and yet I do them in spite of a world that seems unbearably cruel and deeply stupid.  I suppose that is all we can do…

Kristy Bowen, creative life amid the doomscroll

Maggie talks about poems as a stone we carry in our pockets. I’ve had this one in my pocket a lot lately. It’s a poem by Derek Mahon. He writes:

There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.

I love that line because it doesn’t shy away from the suffering. It names it directly. Loss is real. It’s always been real. But Mahon doesn’t let that truth swallow the whole poem. He refuses to.

I tend to do the opposite. I take the hardest thing I know and carry it into every room. I rehearse it. I turn it over until it fills the whole day. You might do something similar. Most people I talk to do.

But we are not able to solve the entire human condition before lunch. (Probably not even by dinner.)

Eric Zimmer, Guest Pep Talk (Maggie Smith)

The one hundred sixty girls
won’t be watching the long-armed

yellow-bodied machines scooping
the dirt from between white lines

that lessons in geometry would show
make rectangles from imperfect ground,

or how the diggers know just how big
to make the depth and width of every hole,

or even why the digging must go on
once time for talks has ended and azan

— the call to prayer — has come too late.

Maureen Doallas, Who Counts

Updating Descartes: I travel so I can talk to strangers.  Updating Descartes again: I travel so I can reality-check the words of writers’ against the wisdom of Uber drivers.  Using that as a measure, AWP was stupendous!

No wonder we pay drivers to sit in their cars for twenty, thirty minutes, through traffic snarls and horrifically inflated rates.  One driver, slung back in his seat of his Toyota Corolla, reeled off a lovely phrase about not recognizing what privilege is when we have it.  That line could stand in any poem, I said, as I’d been sitting through a lot of poetry readings.  He told me his line was borrowed; I added that we pick up a lot of folk wisdom through pop songs, rap, movies.  He upped me: through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius.  

Getting into another Uber, I asked the driver how he was.  “Any day I’m still alive is a good day.”  What an opening line, even if we’ve heard it before. I got to hear about Mamma in rural South Carolina, his 94-year-old mother-in-law, the whole array of sisters down there, the food and beverage that comes with visitors, the testifying, the cigarettes and coffee that fortify the old lady.  He was beaming the whole time.

When I told the first driver about an award-winning book of poetry written about conversations written by a taxi driver, he was incredulous.  “Are you telling me that book won awards?” Indeed.  “Bor-ing,” he said.  “I’d shut that in a second.”

Jill Pearlman, Uber Drivers at AWP

I’d like to so say a huge thank you to Stephen Claughton and Mark Randles for having Matthew [Stewart] and me in St Albans to read at Ver Poets. if you look now, we are at the top of the news page. It was an early kick off (I think to avoid crowd trouble, and not to avoid me having a few liveness/straighteners beforehand – Thank you for that suggestion, Matthew Paul)…I think it was probably the earliest I’ve read, but very civilised. Lovely to read in a library, and to a warm crowd. We both had two slots, one at 20 mins and one of ten, which was a nice way to do things.

Matthew leant into his two collections, including some of the wine poems form Knives. I leant into CtD, including some that rarely get read like Tea Hut. I also tried out some newer poems…including a longer one (for me) that I think acts as a complement to Clearing Dad’s Shed (in a way). Not sure if it’s not too long for a reading, but we live and learn.

We also had an open mic, including a poem from Tim Love who’d made the journey up (Thanks Tim). I did take notes about the readers, but they seem to have got very wet in my bag on the way home, so alas they are illegible…Nay, more illegible given my handwriting. Sorry folks, but I enjoyed you all.

Mat Riches, And roast of all, thank you to you for coming

It might be an obvious thing to say but as far as poetry is concerned… well, my poetry… truth is an awkward subject. Every poem I write has what I believe to be a truth at its core. If I sense that anything I’ve written is dishonest, or in some way fails to tell the truth I intend it to tell, I chuck it out.

That said, the truth in poetry is often hidden behind masks, stray voices, even downright lies. A reader might have to search for it (if you can be bothered). The key, I suppose, is to write something that people feel they want to explore and discover what the particular truth might be.

That’s part of the attraction of poetry for me. OK, I can lie and deceive. Take the Ezra Pound’s Trombone poem I wrote a while back about visiting a museum in Genoa and seeing the legendary man’s trombone in a glass case. It was a piece of fun if you took it at face value but the truth, not too hard to see, was in our need for a quest, in the way we need to find things that feel of value to us, to honour people we might (even begrudgingly) admire. At no point when I was writing did it occur to me that somebody might be so excited by it that they would want to travel to Genoa on an actual quest to find the trombone. When the person contacted me to ask for the name and address of the museum I sheepishly had to admit I’d made it up, I’d never been to Genoa and as far as I knew there was no trombone…

Diane Wakoski had a similar experience when a radio interviewer gently asked her for the background to her poem Some Brilliant Sky from 1972 which begins ‘David was my brother/ and killed himself/ by the sea’. The interviewer was probing for the effect the death of her brother had on her – and on her poetry. She had to admit she’d made the poem up and she had no brother. The so-called ‘facts’ of the poem aren’t the point. They’re the tool which the poet is using to tell their truth.

Bob Mee, TRUTH IN POETRY? WELL, YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT…AND EVEN THEN…

Eavan Boland, one of the most important voices in Irish literature, was as strong a presence in poetry as one can read. Her gift of craft is evident in every poem. Her use of language, blending the historical, mythical, and the personal, is beautiful and startling – adept at drawing in the reader.

The speaker’s voice in “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” is muscular and convincing in creating a moving, lingering ambiance for the piece. The work is the closing poem in Boland’s brilliant collection, In a Time of Violence (W.W. Norton, 1994), and serves as a perfect glance across the acute observation of the human condition that precedes it. A consideration of a poetry that is a manifesto:

“This is not death. It is the terrible
suspension of life.
I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”

Boland forces the reader to consider the world and culture – like the “hammered gold and gold enameling” in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” – that left these fine lines of art among the “curios and silver / in the pureness of wintry light”. The narrator’s voice in Boland’s poem is declaring the “terrible” act of any attempt to confine or limit women to any state short of real.

This is the holy grail of all poetic endeavors – a poetry that defies time, place, and history. A poetry that lets us live in the grandeur and in the tedium, and – yes – lets us die.

Sam Rasnake, Thoughts on… Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

Some of the most enduring poetry in the English tradition draws on classical myth, literature, and folklore. Daniel Hinds’ New and Famous Phrases (Broken Sleep Books, 2025) participates in this lineage with remarkable originality. Although deeply informed by literary history, Hinds never imitates; instead, he revitalises inherited forms and narratives through a voice that feels strikingly fresh, imaginative, and contemporary. His encyclopaedic knowledge of language and literature serves not as ornamentation but as the foundation for ambitious poems that operate simultaneously as homage, dialogue, and innovation.

The Siren Star offers a clear example of Hinds’ distinctive approach. By echoing the seven‑day structure of the Book of Genesis, the poem presents a cosmological reversal: a creation story rewritten as an account of extinction. Each day charts a further step toward the end of human life, beginning with the death of an astronaut and the suicide of another, who “Downed tools / Unlatched the white umbilical cord,” a moment that suggests both the inevitability of mortality and the futility of technological mastery in the face of cosmic forces. As the poem progresses, the erosion of human presence becomes stark—by the fifth day “there were no seeing men left,” and by the sixth, “no women.” These apocalyptic developments unfold within an unmistakably contemporary world, one populated by children with telescopes purchased by affluent parents and dominated by “concrete Cities.”

It is in the seventh day, however, that Hinds turns decisively to myth. The final human encounters “three copper women,” figures who recall the ominous sisters of Greek mythology but are reimagined as “citizens of the sun,” their bodies marked by “three black holes at their necks.” This fusion of classical symbolism with astrophysical imagery evokes the terrifying grandeur of a dying star pulling Earth into its expanded orbit. The title’s reference to the sun as a “siren” encapsulates this duality of allure and annihilation. The poem culminates in the haunting image of extinction described as a kiss: “She lifts his heavy glass mask / And makes first contact with her lips.” The moment is at once intimate, inevitable, and profoundly unsettling.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘New Famous Phrases’ by Daniel Hinds

Maybe this is about darkening pink things, and the power of raspberry jam to evoke involuntary memories. Maybe it’s all in the imprint. One could say the unexpected photograph is a segue into thinking about how poetry moves, or how the distance between the poem’s opening line and the poem’s closing can narrow into a specific yet unexpected place. Maybe I need the ellipses of William Heyen’s “The Berries” to wound their way through me.

Alina Stefanescu, Imprints in absence… and a motif in raspberry.

Darkness pervades each couplet—the atmosphere of fable, of fairy tale—each compact narrative moving inevitably toward the word home, each repetition of this single-word refrain adding resonance to the narrator’s ambivalence about the very meaning of home.

The third couplet features ravens. Given the company this ghazal is keeping—Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson—this reader feels the presence of Poe, subtly established in the previous couplet: “A leaden shadow is tethered to the heart.”

David Meischen, No Porch Light On

“Something In Nothing” uses fairytales, often dismissed as children’s stories, to explore their original purpose: as warnings of the darker side of humanity, as the title poem suggests,

“All the world revolves in it
and it is no more than a grain of sand.
For that is all I have –
a story that is something in nothing.”

That’s what the best stories are: a handful of characters, a few words that conjure an entire imaginary world. How many daydreaming children have been told they are ‘wasting time’ when they were creating a rich inner world and trying to make sense of something that was strange to them or finding safety in a world that felt dangerous.

Emma Lee, “Something In Nothing” Zoe Brooks (Indigo Dreams Publishing) – book review

Henry Gould’s work has always been suffused with Christian hope and love, but here it’s becoming ever more urgently the surface of the poetry. There are moments when the writing takes on the quality of prayer, as in these lines from the end of ’17 Fahrenheit’:

It’s taken me forever, to reckon the price
of ancient JUBILEE. Beyond my ken.
God is divine kindness : we must be kind,
cease making war against our kind… and then
restore our sunlit planet – for they praise!
So chants your silver turtledove, O smiling Moon.

Gould’s physical location in Minneapolis has long been central to his work, and this has become even more the case since the ICE invasion. Mayflower Table, a single poem in 22 numbered sections, is at heart a response to this situation, with part 12 dedicated ‘i.m. Renee Nicole Good’ and 17 ‘to the people of Minneapolis’. 12 ends with lines that restate Gould’s ongoing belief in the potential of America:

Sulfurous tyrants grieve us – but we shall not fear:
for we the people are created equal – in the mind of God.

Billy Mills, Two Pamphlets by Henry Gould: A Review

The Rose is the fifth collection from the wonderful American poet Ariana Reines. In the UK, Penguin are publishing it and I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. This is what I like to call a desert island book – a book that you could take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island for twenty years because there are enough layers and ideas to keep you going for a long time. It’s a book that interrogates and reinvents our ideas and preconceptions around female desire, power and submission and argues for the possibility that sometimes there is no easy or single answer.

The figure of Medea (who in the most famous version of the myth murdered her own children after being abandoned by her husband Jason for a new wife) haunts this book in a sequence of poems with the title Medea – none of which tell her story, or at least not in a linear way. The Medea in The Rose is utterly contemporary and mythic. In the first poem called ‘Medea’ of the many that run through the collection, she says “I’ll find another woman / Somewhere inside me /I’ll humble myself / I’ll try”. There is a beautiful recording of one of the later ‘Medea’ poems on poems.org where Ariana explains ‘I kept asking myself what it would mean to be the worst woman in the world.’ I loved this poem for the way it lists all the good things that must be forgotten in order to both endure violence and to carry it out.

One of my favourite poems is ‘Hellmouth’ with its repeated insistence that we must build a secret room inside ourselves. The first iteration of this has such a surefooted line break ‘If you fail to build in yourself a secret /Room’. We must build secrets in ourselves and secret rooms. Later in the poem she writes ‘The little / Room in the middle / Of me. Where I see / What I can’t say’.

Many years ago, I had ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my arm – inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay of course – I longed for a physical room of my own that would be my writing room, but I also wanted to have a room inside myself, a place that nobody else could touch, that could not be controlled or known or owned.

Kim Moore, February Reading Diary

Last week we were away for five days, and just before leaving I picked up a few books to take with me, almost at random, including Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Years (very enjoyable) and C. H. Sisson’s English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (first published 1971). Sisson is always a bracing and engaging read and I was struck by this paragraph from his first chapter, on the 1890s:

Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, John Davidson and Yeats himself were workmen of importance by any standards which would be reasonable in a history of fifty years, and their technical practice was important, in varying degrees, for the writers who followed them. The vague and notorious aura of the period matters less.

None of Johnson’s poems are included in any of the anthologies of English verse I had to hand, and if anyone mentions him now, they generally do so for just those ‘vague and notorious’ reasons to which alludes, and which he then dismisses. Johnson was a sensitive Englishman who wished he was Irish, was taught by Walter Pater at Oxford, became early on an insomniac and an alcoholic, converted to Catholicism, ‘notoriously’ introduced his friend, Oscar Wilde, to Lord Alfred Douglas, and then died suddenly of a stroke brought on by excessive drinking, aged only 35, in 1902. A more wholeheartedly 1890s biography is hard to imagine. Nina Antonia’s 2018 edition of Johnson’s selected writings (which I haven’t read, though the free sample of the introductory biography looks quite fun) is accordingly titled to hit as many of the ‘vague and notorious’ targets of high decadence as possible: Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel. The Amazon summary makes Johnson sound, frankly, unbearable.

A vague sense of all this had in the past rather put me off Johnson. But I was interested by Sisson’s focus, not on any of the seedy drama of decadence, but on his ‘technical practice’. What makes Johnson’s poetry of interest in a technical sense for the literary historian?

So this week I sat down and read Johnson’s complete verse, and found rather a different poetic personality from what I had expected.

Victoria Moul, The saddest of all kings: reading Lionel Johnson

A recent read I have thoroughly relished is this memoir by my friend Sally Evans.

I first met Sally when she invited me to read at her 70th birthday party in Dunblane. Many poets were invited, and the idea was that there would be short reading slots for invited poets, so plenty of variety. It was one of the best parties! The food was fantastic, as was the company. Sally offered me a day of bookbinding lessons with Ian King, and that was my first visit to their incredible bookshop on the Main Street in Callander. So I knew very little of Sally’s earlier life, how she came to be a bookseller, how she met Ian, apart from the fact they had Grindles in Edinburgh, a very well known second hand bookshop, and had ‘retired’ to Callander. So it was fascinating to hear about her earlier life, her work as a librarian, how she came to meet Ian, and how they started their business.

Sally is a very generous person, and this comes across in her writing, as well as her annual Poetry Weekend hosted in Callander, to which many of us flocked year on year, finding the most attentive poetry audience and best book-buyers, as we all supported each other. For me, it was an extension of the 70th birthday party, and many of the same people attended. They were all good poets. When I first went to StAnza in 2014, invited to bring The Lightfoot Letters up by then director Eleanor Livingstone, I had felt rather shy. However, I soon found the streets and the venues were full of people I knew from knowing Sally. (in that way it resembles Whitby Folk Week). People like Judith Taylor, the late Sheila Templeton, late Brian Johnstone, Elizabeth Rimmer, as well as friends from home. Sally is generous about the people who come into the shop, dealing with irritating customers firmly but politely.

Angela Topping, Driving in the Book Lane, a memoir by Sally Evans

You authored a unique collection of haiku and illustrations, titled Faunistics. Would you be willing to tell us more about this book and the inspiration behind it?

Faunistics was my way back into haiku, essentially. I’d had a brief foray in my early twenties but hadn’t quite mastered it and then I got sidetracked with other things. Fast forward to my mid-thirties, and I’d been through a very long period of not being able to write and/or writing trash. I’d always had this goal of publishing a collection of haiku, and had an old manuscript, which I forced myself to dig out, redraft, and publish. As a result, I ended up completely immersed in the haiku community and soon learned to write it properly. The more I wrote, the more embarrassing my old haiku became and most of the original haiku were discarded. The ones that were any good were related to animals, so I made that my focus. I began grouping them by animal type to get a roughly equal amount of each, then grouping them as per their native continents, if not where their population is the highest. Within these continental groups, I divided them up into countries, so that the book is ordered like a page-by-page worldwide safari. I’ve always loved writing about nature. So, this was a good excuse for a deep dive. I think maybe one haiku from my original manuscript survived, but even that was redrafted.

You also co-authored an interesting book with Hifsa Ashraf titled Infinity Strings, which explores much of humanity’s attachment to modern culture, space, and technology. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project? What inspired you and Hifsa Ashraf to write this book together? What did you learn from the experience of writing collaboratively?

A big part of haikai is collaboration. I’d written with a few haiku poets at that time who I’d connected with online. With Hifsa, we started writing on spontaneous subjects. Then, I introduced her to the tan-renga and I recall her getting really excited about the form. We tried our hand at something more experimental in terms of subject and liked the result, and so it snowballed into a potential sequence, then a potential pamphlet, at which point we felt we might as well take it to collection-length. We became obsessed with how far we could go down the rabbit hole and push the collection to its limits. Infinity Strings is the polar opposite to Faunistics. I think it’s fair to say it’s an outlier amongst both our repertoires. It has its own personality entirely, and every now and then we meet someone brave enough to follow its disconcerting path.

Jacob D. Salzer, R.C. Thomas (Richard)

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

Uche: My first book, Dark through the Delta, was inspired by oil exploitation in the Niger Delta and the environmental devastation that followed. Writing that book convinced me of literature’s power to spotlight various forms of plunder of both human and nonhuman worlds. My most recent book, We Survived Until We Could Live, is different, in tone and theme. It’s less ecological and much more intimate and explores postwar memory, historical and family traumas, domestic violence, grief, healing, and love. In some way, both books are still very much about devastation. While Dark through the Delta examines the devastation caused by an oil behemoth and its effects on both human and nonhuman life, We Survived Until We Could Live reveals the devastation of war and its toll on human lives and relationships. I think this book is my most ambitious and certainly my most vulnerable. I couldn’t have written it without the generous support of the entire team at the University of Calgary Press.

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

Uche: I came to poetry by accident, in my late uncle’s house – a biochemist, but an avid reader of literature. He had a storage full of books, including British and Roman poets and playwrights. One day, I went to the storage to get something and stumbled upon a small book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I opened it almost at random, and the rhyme scheme, its imagery, and its lyric intensity captivated me. It’s funny, because before that, I’d never been particularly interested in literature at high school. That Shakespearean moment, or rather, encounter, is what really started me writing poetry.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

i come wrapped in
plastic. tear here. tear here. the tongue
is stuck in the gutter. i fish it out.
i don’t bother scolding it anymore.
instead we go into the kitchen
in search of salt.

Robin Gow, cheese pull

I had an interesting experience recently trying to write a braided essay, that is, an essay that intersperses subject matter such that each thread sheds some light on the others. I had it as an open file on my desktop for two weeks or so, and when thoughts occurred to me on any of the threads, I jotted them down. After a while I braided the whole thing, snipped out some stuff, was kind of happy with it, but thought it might be confusing or confused. Trusted Reader took a look and didn’t like the illogic of it all, so reordered it into more of a sandwich than a braid, and I realized two things. One was that the braid itself lent, to me, interesting energy to the piece, and two, that, all in all, the energy was undeserved, as I really hadn’t logically said much at all. So, I’m walking away from it, wiser, but still like the approach I took, and maybe could use a few bits and pieces again. This is writing work: Look around, think stuff, try stuff, let it sit, revise, wait, snip, relook, get a different perspective, turn it upside down, ask yourself what you think you’re up to, repeat.

I hate the precious idea of a “muse.” Ideas may float like waves of pollen or surge up like the snags of skunk cabbage, they’re not sprinkled on you like fairy dust by some fucking lady in a diaphonous gown. You have to be alert, maybe on the hunt like a mushroom tracker, or a garbage picker looking for discarded treasures. You have to squint your eyes, rest your mind, look to one side of the dim stars. You have to listen through the din for a faint peep. And then…and THEN…you have to figure out how to make something of it. And then make it.

The muses were the daughters of the head god dude and memory. (Which is actually kind of interesting, memory as a mother of muse.) But mythology is just a bunch of made up stories. And those ancient Greeks were just more misogynists who made up female gods but kept real flesh and blood women well under control. So I say to hell with the idea of “the muse.” And yes to the inspiration of being a body-in-the-world, flailing about. And a restless, doubt-filled, querulous, messy, glorious mind.

Marilyn McCabe, Still, I listen. I search

Against the backdrop of Emersonian philosophy, albeit from the vantage point of thirty years’ hindsight, Today’s Poem, written around 1867, becomes, like nature itself, an extended metaphor. It offers a description of the various behaviors of water, but its true burden, like the true burden of nature itself, is to analogize the human mind in all its constructive and destructive potential.

Its twelve trimeter lines begin to resolve, by line 3, into rhymed couplets, only to dissolve again — or to mimic the widening ripples in the surface of the water — by way of an envelope quatrain at the end. In the course of these twelve lines, water, that fundamental element, accumulates sapient qualities, for good or for ill. It begins in understanding. Ask the water what it knows about “civilization,” and presumably it will tell you, if you have ears to hear. Its physical qualities are dispatched in the first rhyming couplet; yes, yes, it can make you wet and cold, but “prettily” and “wittily.” It doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, it’s downright cheerful. At least, it’s neither “disconcerted” nor “broken-hearted,” as the second rhymed couplet, in pleasing feminine rhymes, has it.

Its natural state, in other words, is to be good and ordered toward “joy,” as the third rhymed couplet emphasizes via its repetition of that word. But water’s capacity to “deck” and “double” joy is bound up — as the next rhyme suggests — with its destructive potential if “ill-used.” Its power can tilt both ways. Its beauty should not reassure; “elegantly,” with “a look of golden pleasure,” it may sweep everything you love away. And in the face of the water, as the poem tacitly implies, being of a piece with the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the human beholder may find a mirror for the state of his own soul.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Water

Keats was born on the fringes of the city, at Moorgate, spending early years in present day Hoxton, but his school in leafy Enfield and his grandmother’s home in Edmonton close the River Lea provided a rural idyl flush with bubbling springs and swimming pools. Think also of the Fontana della Barcaccia in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna, the sound of its waters soothing the poet on his deathbed and offering the source for his epitaph. From his room, restored in Keats-Shelley House, I do not hear the sound of the fountain. By day it is drowned by the bustle and mutter of tourists flooding the piazza. By night, where I am staying, in the room above where he died, it comes, gently and I sense all is well.

I take a shower, wash the journey from me. In the square glasses are being filled and raised, toasts to health are given, drink is taken. We are familiar with the first part of the motto, “In vino veritas,” but less aquatinted with the second, “in aqua sanitas.” While in wine truth may be revealed, in water we find salubrity and I, I have come to seek clarity, to pursue restoration through poetry, to wash the drudgery from me.

I rise early, before the crowds come, before the police whistles sound out in the piazza. I walk a little, ascend the Spanish Steps, alight on one of the landings, lifted but not yet arrived, rising from the civic, between the public and the sacred.

Jan Noble, Nº54 A postcard from Rome…

the breadth 
of a water breath
a sky breath
a mountain breath of
a shore line’s breadth
it was all there
held in a held breath

Jim Young, on looking at a mountain lake

A so-called FB friend (who will remain anonymous, so no fishing!) told me to my face the other day that my promotion of my books was far better than the poetry inside them, implying that I was less of a poet for getting my stuff out there. I can fully understand why a poet might feel uncomfortable about promoting their work, but I can’t comprehend how this might then lead to their denigrating other poets who do so.

I was stunned by his words, though I recovered sufficiently to reply that his attitude was representative of the worst of U.K poetry. Which reminds me. Anyone up for a signed copy?! If so, just drop me an email. The address is in my blogger profile…

Matthew Stewart, Less of a poet…?

I was very pleased to see my poem Canada is as far away as bibles are on After. Many thanks to Editor Mark Antony Owen. You can read the poem here.

After publishes ekphrastic poems and my poem was inspired by The Avid Reader, 1949. Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) was a visual artist, painter, and musician. He made the lightbox in 2011.

‘We see the middle-aged man / carrying a hat, smoking a pipe, / because Graham inhabits him.’

The Avid Reader, 1949 was one of the works on display at Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, the Netherlands in the major exhibition of Graham’s work titled That’s Not Me. An ironic title as Graham appears in all the works – as a builder having a smoke, a lighthouse keeper, historical figure.

Voorlinden is a fabulous museum – more about it some other time.

I was struck by the attention to detail and the scale of the works. The woman is ‘his wife, swing coat, high heels, walks past on the right.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Canada is as far away as bibles are

I collect phrases I like, ones that I hear or read in books. The trouble is I usually do nothing with them. The other day though, I decided to use one that has been knocking about for some time as a writing exercise. I do not remember where the phrase the unpopular provincial museum came from but it sparked this. […]

This one it is claimed won a Bronze,
another a cap for his country,
here it is secure, pinned to the wall,
for the few who visit to see.
It all adds up to a feeling
that nothing has ever happened here,
which given the times we live in,
adds to its attractiveness
and makes it a desirable and safe place to live.

Paul Tobin, THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

After that, we visited the Museum of Things Left in Cars Overnight—

books, random receipts with poems written on the back.

Smells of vinyl and dust preserved under glass.

The Museum of Instructions Without Context was far too confusing,

and we got totally turned around in the Museum Without Exit Signs.

A stranger on the street recommended we visit the Museum of Objects That Remember You—

a chair that recalls your weight, a mirror that reflects an earlier version of your face,

a key that insists it belongs to you.

Rich Ferguson, I’ll Always Remember The Day

My trip to Baltimore for the AWP Conference Book Fair didn’t happen; my immune system decided otherwise, with a resurgence of a nasty respiratory virus and a flare of fibromyalgia. I guess I can look on the positive side and say I saved a lot of money, right? Plus I can purchase most of those poetry collections online, I suppose. Still, there really is nothing like browsing through thousands of luscious books for something that grabs me, that takes the top of my head off, to paraphrase Ms. Dickinson. Through social media platforms, I can see colleagues-in-literature making connections and meeting one another face-to-face, which is what conferences are for. Another year, maybe.

And after days of necessary spring rain, drizzle, and fog, the long-awaited thaw eradicated most of our snow. Crocuses bloomed, and bees came out to visit the snowdrops.

I felt much better today and was able to take a walk in the mild sun, listening to robins, mourning doves, song sparrows, woodpeckers, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, house finches, Carolina chickadees, American crows, Canada geese, mockingbirds, cardinals, bluejays, masses of starlings…I watched the high-flown antics of redtail hawks and turkey vultures.

In other regions of the world today, people listen and watch for fighter jets, torpedoes, drones. There but for fortune may go you or I (Phil Ochs). Meanwhile I remain grateful for feeling slightly better as the days lengthen into spring. It’s March–we could still get snow! But the spring peepers sense the warmer temperature and trilled a bit last evening while the great horned owl was hooting. Here’s a poem I wrote in 2012 about DST. […]

I am glad for the extra hour
among long shadows as my dog
chases a woodchuck, as the wood-
pecker pounds in metrical progressions:
trochee, trochee, spondee. […]

Ann E. Michael, Snowdrops

Despite the misleading cherry blossoms at the top of the post, we’re supposed to have cold rain AND snow this week, so spring seems like a false hope at this point, a thing which will never arrive. Winter Blues are a real thing for me in November, February, and yes, March. I wish for some dry warm days to shake up my physical miseries (colds never seem to be made better by cold wet weather, I notice). I missed AWP and saw all the happy pics on Facebook and sighed to myself. I don’t go every year—I don’t have the means, as a non-academic, to do it, even if I wanted to. But the news has also been so miserable, the weather, the fact that we’re planning a trip home to visit a very sick family member…it’s hard to just snap back to my usual cheerful self. I wrote a few poems about how I felt about America. Will these poems change anything? Probably not, but sometimes you need to write them anyway.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Time Changes and Winter Blues with Cherry Blossoms, Academic Women in Pop Culture: Vladmir

We didn’t really plan this, you know. We began, and indeed still persist as, ‘Thrums Chums’ (blame Glenday) – an informal workshop organised around little more than that we are all old pals, and all more-or-less in driving distance of a kitchen table in Kirriemuir, Angus. For your geocultural orientation: immediately behind us is the cemetery where JM Barrie lies buried with Peter Pan; just behind that, the frozen storm-surge of the mighty Cairngorms. From kailyard to eternity.

The advantage of our being friends first is that we don’t feel the need to agree on everything, or indeed anything. We’ve no common political stance or aesthetic. None of us give a toss for ideological compliance, and we would rather run on trust. Differences are good. Besides, what we have in common is far more important: poetry, for some reason, has placed itself at the centre of our lives.

As North Sea Poets (with the indispensable help of Miriam Huxley, our wonderful administrator), we’ve sought to extend that circle of friendship and share what collective expertise we’re accumulated in our many years of avoiding the right margin – whether as poets, tutors, workshop leaders, essayists on Substack, or just as fellow readers. Despite what London or Edinburgh or NYC might tell you, poetry has no centre. Not even Kirriemuir. It’s wherever you’re reading this. The best gift of the digital age is that being remote needn’t mean feeling remote. Now we can all gather in the same place, and yet still be anywhere. While I bang on and on about metonymy.

Don Paterson, A Year of North Sea Poets

Although I try to stay connected with my readers, I haven’t written you in close to three months. The truth is, with all the upheaval in the world these days, it has been hard to know what to say.

On the one hand, I know I’m not obligated to say anything about the news—no one really expects artists and poets to analyze the political events of the day. Somehow the New York Times still hasn’t phoned for my take on the war in Iran! On the other hand, it seems oblivious at best to chatter about my creative projects and my happy little life while the regime is locking up children and murdering US citizens in broad daylight.

How to navigate these dystopian times? I know many of us attend protests.* We’ve got our reps on speed dial. We donate to help people in Gaza, Ukraine, Minnesota. We stay informed as best we can without drowning in the horrors of the day. Yet faced with the shocking cruelty and corruption of this administration, it never feels like enough.

Still, I take heart from these words by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, interpreting a part of the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief . . . You are not expected to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Under an administration that stokes fear and hatred of “the other,” I believe that connection, creative expression, and celebration are all forms of this work. Whether it’s taking in a beach sunset, writing a poem or petting a stranger’s dog, joy is an act of resistance.

copper-tinged waves
trying to fit the ocean
into my camera

Annette Makino, How to move through a broken world?

                            Without 

having known what it’s like to fumble 
through darkness, would the pearl-

light of morning feel less of an 
astonishment? Bodies that bore 

a hundred hurts, that carved of 
themselves an offering. A warbler 

balances on the tip of a branch, 
its weight barely enough to break it.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Blessing

This week: yellow plastic whistles, white matter, inhabiting unfamiliar thoughts, eating ice, and much more. Enjoy.

February this year started with a full moon, and it felt good to turn the calendars over to welcome in a new month before taking time to take a stroll under the Snow Moon. Cloud meant I could not see it, but I knew it was up there somewhere and I sent it a gentle howl!

On the last day of January I took a walk before going to the last session of January Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. It felt good to clear my head in anticipation of the final session and to give a gentle nod to all the hours I had spent in their zoom room with my writing. It was important to me to mark the ending of this particular daily practice and to think what I am taking forward with me. As well as writing poems in my own style (it’s always right in there!) I have enjoyed experimenting with different forms and approaches in response to the poems and prompts provided. I have some lovely drafts to work on over the coming month and that feels wonderfully celebratory as does the recognition that carving out this daily space has given me the chance to write poems that were definitely waiting inside me.

Sue Finch, SNOW MOON AND GRATITUDE

And when I reach
the grounds of the gym the heat of the sun
slanting through the branches of the giant oaks
is raising wisps of steam from the icy ground,

like wishes, like dreams. Small moments
of pause, when we allow ourselves to notice
the ordinary beauty in our lives, are always
welcome, aren’t they? Especially after a few
days of despair at the inhumanity we have all
now seen, the terrible darkness of a man shot 

in a city street, killed for witnessing and caring.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ What we remember (for Alex Pretti)

It’s 5:00 pm, and there’s still pink light making the rising clouds of steam blush in the distance beyond our windows, and turning the glass and steel surfaces into mirrors. We’ve noticed, just this week, that the days really do seem to be getting longer — and what a welcome thing that is. Winter will last two more months up here, but there will be more bright days like this one from now on.

I will gratefully take all the brightness I can find. We are all struggling for words, for focus, for stability. I hope that you can see that our biggest reason for hope is each other. I am so heartened by the steadfastness and courage of the ordinary people of Minnesota, and all those who are speaking out with their words, their feet, their presence. And I hope you can also see that the nefarious forces are afraid of this power. I do think that those closest to the struggle can feel the support of the millions of us who cannot be there in person. So please do hold them in the light of your consciousness, or whatever way you describe this act of intention that we humans do. I wish we had more of a solidarity movement here in Canada, with a symbol like putting a candle in our window after dark, but maybe doing it anyway is a gesture that can help us.

And please do your own creative work, as much as you can. If we are aware of the plight of others, and do what we can to help, it’s an act of resistance to also continue to make things, to allow the creative life force to flow through us. I’ve had a busy week full of dental and eye appointments, a dead car battery, and days that seemed to dissolve without much to show for them. But I’ve drawn a little bit, and reworked the recent oil painting so that I’m more satisfied with it.

Beth Adams, Longer Days

Somehow, the new year seems to be both dragging and chugging along. Both brisk and slow, as January is wont to be sometimes. We’ve had quite a bit of snow and cold in Chicago so far, which feels unduly personal when the digital world feels so jagged and depressing. I am trying to stay focused even when the constant barrage of terrible news is unceasing and overwhelming—working more on poems in the SWINE DAUGHTER series (which you can catch in some #workinprogress snippets on IG) as well as some more edits on the second act of the play, on which I vacillate between its genius and its ordinariness (sometimes all in the same hour.) Of course, perhaps at a time when I most need art to function, it fails me sometimes. It occasionally feels like yet another thing we have to continue to do as the ship goes down (playing the violins and making the beds on a Titanic full of water already. ) I don’t have answers on how to navigate it—the decline and disillusionment we all feel. The drag of it on our limbs. I look for moments of lightness: a few sunny and clear but cold days. A slice of lemon pie. Good coffee. Covers to design and collages to make.

Kristy Bowen, January Paper Boat

Recently, someone commented on a poem of mine, “I wish we could force the president, and these ICE agents, to read poetry every day.” As if maybe, just maybe, if they read poems, they couldn’t keep doing what they’re doing. As if the poems would change them. I thought of the wise words of Richard Blanco, who was the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet for President Barack Obama.

Poems may not change the world directly,
but a poem can change a person
who can change the world.
—Richard Blanco

YES. Poetry changes us. Poetry has certainly changed me. But I approach poems with openness, expecting to be changed. I approach it with gratitude for what I know it has to offer. I approach it as someone who is interested in humanity. It’s hard for me to imagine not being interested in humanity. If I found myself in that dark, narrow space, could poetry reach me there? Can poetry reach the people among us whose hearts have been hardened? I don’t know, but we can try. I’m not ready to give up on us yet.

I’ve also been thinking about something I read in the New Yorker, from the writer Philip Pullman.

Poetry is not a fancy way
of giving you information;
it’s an incantation.
It is actually a magic spell.
It changes things; it changes you.
—Philip Pullman

We’re transformed by our experiences—the people we meet, the things we try, the places we go, and the art we engage with. Poetry can be part of that transformation, if we let it. It’s my hope with every episode of The Slowdown: that a poem might reach someone where they are and work its magic.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

“I’m not smart enough to come up with solutions for how to fight this,” I said to my husband Brian over Bluetooth as I drove home from work. While talking with him, I took stock of my surroundings, how they look now, before the storm would arrive later in the night. The river, mostly covered in ice from the below-zero temperatures, was black mottled with white. “And the people smarter than me,” I said to my husband, “don’t seem to be doing anything besides posting online about how horrible things are.” I feel my voice crack. “And everyone is full of so much hate.”

969 miles away from Minneapolis, I imagined myself as a dot on a map of a huge country. Zooming in on the map in my mind, I became a dot in the lowlands of a precipice, contour lines surrounding me. Zooming in further, I was suddenly a moving dot, meandering along River Road in some small Pennsylvanian town, angry and helpless. Zooming in further, I was a human distraught in the driver’s seat with thoughts volleying between this country is fucking itself and I wonder how the animals are preparing themselves for the storm.

And then,

“Brian, thanks for being who you are.”

And then,

“I might go take a walk in the wetlands this evening, even though it will be getting dark when I get there.”

Sarah Lada, Go Feed the Birds about It

This last couple of weeks have also reminded me of the power of community. In Minnesota, community protests have meant a little boy released from ICE detention, a change of leadership of ICE in town, and even friendly National Guardsmen handing out hot chocolate to cold members of the community. I hope this means that ICE will back down (Trump noticing his poll numbers shrinking, too, no doubt helps), and we’ll have no more horrendous human rights offenses or trying to take away Constitutional rights (freedom of speech and assembly, the right to due process for all on American ground, the right to bear arms, which the GOP is usually quite quick to defend, and birthright citizenship). People are making a lot of noise—and though sometimes it feels like nothing is being accomplished, if enough Americans make enough noise, occasionally we can change things for the better.

In my own life, a gathering of poets reminded me of the small, good things we can do for each other. I noticed that in encouraging each other, there is power—more success that seems to follow meeting together. That has been the case in my own writing life—and at least, things are more fun to celebrate (and commiserate) in a group. And the scary things of life don’t seem quite as scary.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy February! Snow Moons, Unusual Birds, Cancer Scares and Big Birthdays, the Power of Community and More

It’s a chilly full moon Saturday here, so I’ve made a little world of my own for a few: Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda is playing my headphones – it’s long been one of my Saturday albums. And I’m just reviewing recent photos that I’ve made some exploring the ‘Democratic Forest’ style, and others where I’ve really been looking at composition that holds shadow and light. So I thought I’d share another batch of Democratic Forest shots with you. These are a mixture of X100VI and iPhone shots – you use the camera you have to hand, though I do find myself wishing I’d also packed my small Leica, which is so easy to throw in a bag I’d use it over the iPhone, so I’ve used the Leica app on the phone to make the phone shots, so that I get some of that feel.

One thing I’ve sworn to myself with my photography here is to deliberately circumvent my own internal impulse that is endlessly informed by the western gaze. We’ve seen so many photos of India in the last century from that angle, that I realised that it is just too easy to make the ‘Indian’ photograph. My question always is what actually interests the artist I am, and how to let the writing or the photography serve my deeper eye.

John Siddique, Full Moon in The Democratic Forest

That night, as I was feeling alone, I thought of that line, Tell me your despair and I’ll you mine. But my despair is not so great. I live in a house. I publish books. Sometimes it feels like a wild prayer keeps us afloat. I have a life. I can make magic. Life outside the house is a good story. The press is a good story. Finding sleep in February is a good story. It’s imaginary, more a fantasy, but fantasy is a well-loved category these days. 

Kate Gale, Toward the Winged Horse: On the Stories That Lift Us

Whatever normal or paranormal trigger gave me the dream, the commission and its deadline gave me the daydream, what Gaston Bachelard calls reverie: “Instead of looking for the dream in reverie, people should look for reverie in the dream.” In The Poetics of Reverie he describes it as a space one can inhabit, like a secret hideout, “a phenomenon of solitude” that helps us also to “escape time.” It is a state, he writes; it exists. In reverie I was able to return to an experience that was – ironically, given the mandate of the discount store – rich, multidimensional with fear and comfort, awe and novelty. In my memory it’s always busy, it’s always winter, puddles on the floor from snow tracked in, people visiting, smells of cold air and cigarettes on their coats. As I remember it, we arrive in the morning and leave in the late afternoon as new snow falls and streetlights blink on. Which isn’t, of course, true. Writing on house images in The Poetics of Space, Bachelard notes that “The phenomenology of the daydream can untangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomes necessarily sensitive to the differentiations of the symbol.” I’m generally wary of nostalgia; but the poem is definitely nostalgic.

Karen Solie, Reverie and Deadlines

I dreamt of my anger:

An animal wrapped up in a bright red shawl.

It looked me straight in the eye as I anticipated its rapid advance.

It was raining. We were in my garden. […]

I celebrate my birthday in winter now. Valentine’s. I was born on a Saturday at noon. It was Carnival.

It snows in January. A boy’s prayer has been finally answered, slowly over time.

And suddenly, it thaws. In between snowing and thawing, our footsteps printed on the path towards and back from the field where we laid down on the cold and soft snow, laughing. Our arms spread out, flapping. We left angels in our trail.

Further along, index finger to the snow, he traces one of his favourite characters from a Nintendo video game.

A few moments earlier, he had spotted Blackbird pecking on a snow-less patch, under the protection of very tall pine trees.

Everywhere else and around was covered in winter white. It was as if Blackbird had its own force field.

Luciana Francis, Chiaroscuro

The Age of Aquarius has long ended,
the music we heard then replaced

today with yellow, plastic whistles
purchased cheaper by the box,

dangled from the neck on string,
worked like ancient talismans

to ward off our daily troubles.
Whistles shrill, like an out-of-tune chorus

from some Shakespeare play
we didn’t get at the time, portending

Fate’s own black hands on our backs.

Maureen Doallas, No One Is Going Ice-Fishing

You would think that with two snow days this week, three actually counting cancelled church on Sunday, I wouldn’t feel desperate for some early morning writing time.  And yet, at 1:30 when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I decided to get up for a bit.  I’ve enjoyed this early morning writing time so much that I didn’t go back to sleep. […]

I turned my attention to a poem I’ve been revising.  I first started writing it on January 15.  I was inspired by Jan Richardson’s poem about wise women also coming to the baby Jesus. […]

This morning, I decided that it was time to actually finish the draft.  I was partly inspired by the end of the month approaching and my intention to end the year with 52 finished drafts.  I was successful, and then I thought about revising another poem–that would mean I am on track for the year, not slightly behind.  

I’ve decided that my intention to finish drafts can extend to rough drafts written before 2026, so I went back to my folder of rough drafts.  I pulled out a rough draft from December, about Noah’s wife looking at Realtor.com and seeing her old house.  I should be able to finish that revision by tomorrow.  I’m waiting to see if some final lines come to me today as my brain works on the ending.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Yearly Intentions Report: The Poem Revision Edition

As a creative, it helps to have clear objectives for your creative work that are not about validating your work through publication of course, but that’s a lot easier to say than do. Writing is a conversation, it needs an audience. This is our evolutionary creative drive – to share experience, to share stories about what it is to be human. It’s hard then to say to oneself, just don’t think about it, let the creativity itself be the reward.

Self belief, and the desire to achieve, will get you so far, but I don’t believe that confidence in the work is the key here. I believe that tenacity is the key: a kind of blind refusal to give up. It’s that, rather than confidence, that will keep you going when the odds are against you. However, the truth is that there might not be a successful outcome at the end. Not everybody’s work fits into a traditional model, and it’s worth considering if the traditional route to publishing is the correct vehicle for your work. There is more than one way to reach an audience and often we only see the one that involves agent-publisher-bookdeal. But let me also remind you that you have reached a place in this particular journey that is hard to get to. Turn around and look behind you, the road to a completed MS and an active submissions plan is littered with writers that have fallen at the wayside, writers that gave up when they got stuck at 30,000 words, writers who let rejection frame how they value their own work. You have already beaten those odds to get to where you are.

I also think that there is something else to consider here. You cannot control how your work is received. You cannot control whether a publisher or an agent says yes or no, or whether they say anything at all. But you can control your own reaction to it. If you can, and it seems like you are already doing it, make the part of the process at which you seek representation less of an end goal, make it just another part of the process. Scale it down, don’t make that one response the thing on which you hang your potential. Get on to the next project while you wait to hear about that one. It defuses the feeling of all eggs being in one basket.

This is what we do. We push on, push forward, we keep writing and refining and reaching out into the dark. We keep throwing our work into the abyss, and we keep the blind faith of our tenacity. One word at a time, one submission at a time.

Wendy Pratt, The awful abyss into which you throw your years of work

I consider myself lucky to have had an immensely talented partner who had a deep passion for poetry.

I have abundant books and poems, videos and photos of readings to always dive into. And my grief tending / legacy building happens incrementally each night, as I am working on compiling an almost 500 page post-humous uncollected works to be published in mid-late 2026 and tag-team editing his Canadian book due out in 2027.

It is a meditation, this experience. Like a sacred ritual, it has carefully shuttled me through the cycle of this first year without him. (I don’t call it a process. The way the word minimizes grief and loss, that it is step-related, chronologically based, that it will “end” is a patently false, limited way to think of it. Much like the word “widow”, it’s a word I really make a concerted effort to avoid.)

So every night, for months, at first, I would sit by the small altar I created and read his work aloud to him by candlelight. Then it became clear, once all the poems were read—all nearly 3,000 of them, hardcopy—it was time to begin grouping them, detecting themes/tropes/patterns and arrange them in some sort of book form.

The love poems were first. Countless bittersweet moments I relived: our first poem exchanges after we met, our first kiss, our intense physical attraction, the unwavering devotion to one another. My heart broke in a million pieces reading each intricate etching to me.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, The nightmare of normal.

I’ve been reading John Rowlands-Pritchard’s glorious Hymns of the Worcester Monastic Antiphoner (circa 1230), with painted inscriptions, and Beowulf in the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, which usefully has the Old English text facing.

Together, these influences have shaped my writing in response to the terrifying world of 2026.

Te Deum laudamus

Only a dictator would demand
only an egomaniac could enjoy
the tedium of tireless praise.

Lord lend us mercy
rescue us from the ravening
world-wounder over the water.

Sanctus sanctus sanctus
the hymn of the heavenly host
hallows a world of wonders.

Ama Bolton, Reading and writing in January

I’m rereading Etel Adnan, her SURGE (2018), as part of an acknowledgment of her centenary. The Poetry Project in New York is running a symposium on her work that begins tomorrow night, “Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World.” As the website for the event offers: “Etel Adnan’s oeuvre did not follow a masterplan; it expanded and shape-shifted ceaselessly. Each book invented its own genre. And yet her tone is unmistakable, combining sharp observation with the associative logic of dreams.” I would have been curious to attend, if such had been possible. “Organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Etel Adnan’s birth,” the text adds, “this symposium gathers together old friends, confirmed specialists, and younger disciples of Adnan’s. They will offer talks, poetry readings, and musical performances in response to multiple aspects of her literary and visual work.”

I admire the ways in which Adnan’s long sequences extend across books through small moments, as her work explored violence, culture, power and memory. She composed her books across small abstract moments that accumulate in a way that echoes for anyone even faintly familiar with contemporary French writing, but in a way that also reminds me of the work of the late Eastern Townships, Quebec poet and translator D.G. Jones (1929-2016), another poet who stretched out the sequence from accumulated small abstracts, as well as one influenced by French writing. You can see it, whether through his poems, or through his translations of the work of the late Quebec poet Anne Hébert (1916-2000), a writer born a decade earlier than Adnan.

“Etel,” what my phone attempts to autocorrect to “Ethel.” Cellphone, I’m onto you.

A circling of sentences. A simultaneous circling and straightforward line. The silence of a Wednesday evening, reading Etel Adnan in my usual St. Laurent and Innes Road sportsbar corner, an hour-plus awaiting Rose in the first session of her nearby gymnastics class.

The logic of dreams, and of temporality. I first caught Adnan’s work through TIME (2019), as translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, a collection constructed out of six extended lyric sequences, each of which are clearly situated, whether in time or place or both, tethered to the ground so the abstract of her lyric thinking won’t float away completely. Since then, I’ve read at least a half dozen titles, maybe more, still so clearly behind. Not enough to begin to wrap my head around the largesse of her accumulated short lyrics, short sentences. From SURGE:

A radical pain traversed my life from end to end—a large band of light crossed the moon’s hidden face. That kind of motion alters the world.

There is something comparable, to my mind, between the prose poems of Etel Adnan and Rosmarie Waldrop: their use of the prose sentence via the poem, and the potential shared factor of utilizing sentence structures and syntax from their individual mother tongues across English language lyrics.

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

At the start of 2025, I had a slightly-used date book from the Field Notes Index quarterly edition (now sold out). I prefer a much larger notebook for keeping track of my schedule, so while I’d made a few halfhearted attempts at using it, I couldn’t get traction. Then I got inspired to use that notebook to help me observe and track the seasons as I experienced them.

The goal was to write down three simple observations about the day, and at the end of the month, type them into a single file. Over time, that computer file would be filled with enough daily entries that I could track my perception of the seasons–especially in relation to climate change–over the long term. I typically recorded the high and low temperatures as a baseline, and whether there was sun, rain, or snow. I also noted whether I observed wildlife or indicated the time of sunrise and sunset. Over time, I tried to pay more attention to the night sky, and occasionally added cultural events and holidays, as those human aspects are a way of tracking the seasons as well. 

While I missed my goal of recording every single day, I still made observations more days than most. In addition, I’ve continued the practice into 2026, and I’m happy to report that I have not yet missed a day in January. The old Index book ran out, so now I’m using one of the notebooks from the Is a River Alive? quarterly edition. I’ve set up a single page for every day, which has usually resulted in me recording more than three observations. More page room means that my mind naturally stays open to finding more to record.

My biggest takeaway from the first year of this project is that a daily walk is vital not just to my phenology practice, but to my writing practice as well. Between last winter’s prolonged cold and last summer’s persistent, record-breaking heat, I walked less in 2025 than I had since . . .  probably 2014. (It doesn’t help that walking is not Maybelle’s favorite activity.) But the days I didn’t walk were the days I was most likely to skip recording anything, and these were days I was most likely to skip writing. I wasn’t expecting that this would be the lesson of the year, but as a result, I’ve tried to get back in the habit of daily walks. (Though this week’s snow storm has really put a damper on that.)

I imagine that in the second year of this project, as I begin to gather build up my observations, I’ll start to have some insights about the seasons in St. Louis. Or maybe I’ll have a different insight altogether. Only time will tell, and I look forward to reporting and reflecting in January 2027.

Allyson Whipple, Personal Phenology

枯草の線沈黙の骨空の耳　対馬康子

karekusa no sen chinmoku no hone sora no mimi

            a line of withered grass
            a bone of silence
            an ear of the sky

                                                Yasuko Tsushima

from Gendai Haiku, #728, January 2026 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 2, 2026)

I have met new friends in Sweden and Shropshire in the past year: friends who know about water, and who know about trees. The words on my autumn bowl encapsulate what I’ve learned about my Willow nature, which seeks water, and my need to be around the dependability of Oak. And I have learned to respect in myself the natural rhythms of needing to go underground, to seek rest and stillness, in order to grow again. 

“I fall into earth-life.
Acorn. Willow-seed.
We are the making of ourselves.”

Liz Lefroy, I Paint My Year

This one came back to me as a single phrase: “Troy after Troy after Troy.” If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you know I love repetition, whether it be the anticipated patterns of a received form, or a rhetorical device unique to an individual poem’s argument or emotional arc—anaphora or epistrophe or something looser and organic—or simply a sequence of matching sounds, regular or not, that chime between the lines.

It was this repetition that sent a shiver down my spine the first time I read “Things Seem Strong,” so it was no wonder that that’s what called me back to it this week. What was terrifically surprising was discovering that what was in my memory a pivotal moment actually occurs early on—it’s an exposition, the aria’s opening gesture, and not the thunderclap I carried in my memory, which had become a kind of stand-in or synecdoche for the poem as a whole. Some words and phrases cling to a consciousness like burdock to a cuff. I’m tempted to say it’s just some fascination of the pattern-loving mind, that the scraps that stick are, if not arbitrary, perhaps without much significance, though if you asked a magpie, I imagine you’d find that every shiny treasure in her nest was somehow meaningful to her.

What’s to love about “Things Seem Strong”? Hirshfield is a Zen Buddhist, a translator of Classical Japanese poetry, and these practices carry into her own poems in ways that I find captivating. She is a poet of presence, observation, direct experience, connectedness. What I love in this poem is the way that the poet’s philosophical concerns are born out by its making: how the form enacts habits of mind—until, of course, it doesn’t—and, likewise, the music of its construction regulates tone, until it is subsumed by it.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Things Seem Strong” by Jane Hirshfield

Earlier this week my middle son was surprised and even a bit indignant to discover that the words in English for le compas (which you use to draw a circle in maths) and la boussole (which you use to find which way is north) are the same. But aren’t they at least pronounced differently? he asked, crossly. I don’t use either kind of compass very often these days, though I do have to remember to buy the mathematical type depressingly often as for some reason it is the most frequently lost or broken element of the older boys’ fourniture scolaire — the baroquely complex list of school supplies that French schools send you in mid-summer and which you have to assemble (and label) in time for the new school year. This is a ritual element of French family life, part of the preparation for the grand rentrée at the start of September, and poorer families get a special grant to help with it.

We moved to France in the summer of 2021, when the older children were 6 and 8, so one of my first challenges was taking them to the vast “back-to-school” section of the nearest Monoprix, clutching two very long lists, in both of which I recognised, at best, about 50% of the vocabulary. The boys were already bilingual but only in the sense of chatting to their Dad and reading Tintin: they’d never been to school in France before and they didn’t have any more idea than I did of the difference between pochettes and classeurs, or paper that’s in feuilles simples rather than feuilles doubles, with grands or petits carreaux — though they were naturally very anxious not to turn up at a new school in a new country with all the wrong kit. As a result the whole thing was a bit stressful. Much as I love a good vocabulary challenge, I remember feeling literally dizzy in the aisles — though that might also have been because I was in fact already pregnant with the next one.

Le compas, though, was one word I did recognise, and because I read Jonson pretty much continuously for five years or so in my 20s, I can never think of a compass without remembering that for him it was the perfect emblem of a life well lived:

Stand forth my Object, then, you that have been
Ever at home; yet have all Countries seen:
And like a Compass, keeping one Foot still
Upon your Center, do your Circle fill
Of general Knowledge; watch’d Men, Manners too,
Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do:

These lines are from his epistle to John Selden in Underwoods, and they draw upon a common Renaissance emblem of the compass as an image of labor et constantia — an ethically ideal combination of wide-ranging effort and psychological constancy. Jonson’s verse letters, by the way, are both a triumph and a lasting consolation — I wrote about why I love this aspect of Jonson so much in this piece last year.

Victoria Moul, Love and compasses

A funky used bookstore. A local coffee shop. The living room of a brownstone with people on the floor and homemade biscuits in the next room. A little bar that has jazz musicians ready to start after the poets are done. An art studio. Another small bar with cozy tables and a little stage (that from the outside looks like it’s not even open.) Another bar with neon pinball decorations. A small local theater. A brewery. These are just a few of the places I have read or have attended a reading in the past year.

Like most writers since the pandemic, I have consumed and participated in most of my poetry readings online, but there’s something about a live reading that cannot be replicated online. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the availability and scope that online events provide, the exposure and access to so many writers that would be geographically impossible to achieve otherwise. It’s why I love to curate A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and why I’m a regular listener to many other series.

But a real live reading, even to just a handful of people, creates a different kind of magic. You can see and hear people respond in the audience. You can connect eye to eye with someone while reading and/or listening. You can appreciate the unplanned laughter or appreciation from a reader’s remarks and demeanor. But one of my favorite parts of being a part of live readings is meeting poets/curators I have never met IRL and being exposed to their work.

For example, as an audience member, I recently attended my first Neon Nights reading in Chicago, curated by Benjamin Niespodziany, a celebration of Johannes Goransson’s translation of Aase Berg’s Aase’s Death from Black Ocean featuring Johannes and Black Ocean editor Carrie Olivia Adams (and curator of Poetry & Biscuits), Nathan Hoks, Paul Cunningham, and Hedgie Choi. I had heard Hedgie’s work before and love her book award-winning book Salvage, and I have long admired the work of Johannes and Carrie and have attended and read for Carrie’s series in her lovely home But I hadn’t heard Johannes or Carrie read from their work before, nor was I familiar with the other readers. The evening was full of surprises – Ben’s intros which include fictional erasure bios, Nathan fashioning antlers from sticks onto his glasses in honor of reading from Aase’ Berg’s With Deer, Hedgie turning in a circle each time she ended a poem. Everyone was at ease.

Donna Vorreyer, IRL

Also, I’m suddenly obsessed with –

The Half-Finished Heaven by Tomas Transomer, translated by Robert Bly
Everytime I love a poet in translation, I inevitably hear from someone that I am reading the VERY WORST translation – so if I am, let me know. Actually, I like to read poets in multiple translations and see which one I like best.
Read “The Bookcase” on page 4 (I am sorry I could not lift this from the internet somewhere- but this is a good link!). I have been thinking about this poem for weeks. First off, a prose poem – those I read less often than the lineated variety – but also the breath on the glass… ah it is so good! So please stop reading this and go read that, it is much better than anything I have to say here.

Renee Emerson, Snow Books, Fullmetal Alchemist, Theo of Golden, Time of the Child, & more

“A translation,” I thought as I’d paused on the ski trail to catch my breath and look around, listen around. (No sound. No birdsong, no human sound: no gear shift or metal grind or churn of airplane overhead.) I looked up. A complex skeleton of tree overhead, each limb outlined in thick white. A translation of a tree, those thick white lines underscored by thin lines of black beneath. A white tree version of the damp-black tree beneath, a bit cumbersome, a bit heavy, but beautiful, the two kinds of lines living together. I love side-by-side translations, love to eyeball the disparate marks between the two, to see how the translator handled the line break, the punctuation. Love to examine the original for repeating words or ideographs or glyphs. When they live side by side on a page or set of pages, the original and the translation can reside like limb and snowshade.

I may be flirting with the limits of free use here, but I’ve just had such an enjoyable time poking through Wickerwork, poems by Christian Lehnert, translated by Richard Sieburth, published by Archipelago Books, 2022, and messed around with by me, with help from a certain unmentionable online translation program, and some German-English dictionaries. Again, I realize, given Lehnert’s interest and careful attention to form, rhythm, and rhyme, I am guilty of the treason of translation. Sieburth’s translations are perfectly fine. I mean no disrespect to this lovely volume. It’s just that I poked around and found some little gems in the language that delighted me. So. Here are two more poems from this intriguing collection, and the results of my meddling.

Marilyn McCabe, der Nebelgang

At a recent translation slam, three translators read their remarkably different translations of the same passage of prose in Ukrainian, each explaining their process and choices. All three were faithful to the original. None made anything up. And yet each translation had a distinct sound, rhythm, and feel. Prompted by a question from the audience, one translator likened the practice of translation to a dance. The voice of the text, she explained, is what activates the emotion, energy, and movement of words and sentences in translation, what guides her in delivering the author’s intention and text’s meaning.

The audience of translators, writers, and readers nodded in unison and for me, as a bit of all three plus a social salsa dancer, her analogy had special resonance. It echoed the playful negotiation between rules and artistry, the formal steps and the ways dancing bodies interpret them. Though the translator was speaking about what it feels like to translate, the metaphor applied just as well to the experience of reading translated literature. Reading a story in translation is like being pulled into a dance by a poised, mysterious stranger—the translator—inviting us to follow their lead into an unknown.

When I first moved from the drills of salsa class onto a real dance floor—loud music, no talking, no step-count chants—I could only surrender to the rhythm and attune to my partner’s cues. To enjoy the dance I had to both pay attention and give into abandon. Neither myself nor my partner knew ahead of time how the dance would go, but we were willing to be in it together, trusting that wherever it took us—whether seamless compatibility or, more likely, awkward steps salvaged from a mortifying fall by clumsy grasps at each other’s bodies—it would be an adventure.

Translated literature guides me into inhabiting not only inner worlds of people, places, and cultures I know little or nothing about, but different ways of organizing thoughts and ideas. It makes me experience the words of a language I know—its order, sounds, and textures—in unfamiliar ways I might otherwise overlook when reading the smooth, intuitive syntax of a native speaker.

Bergita Bugarija, The Beautiful Dance of Literary Translation

Today’s Poem by Babette Deutsch (1895–1982), taken from her 1925 second collection, Honey Out of the Rock, feels in some ways like a poem we’ve seen before. Or if not exactly that, it feels of a piece with a kind of poem we’ve come to identify with women poets of the 1920s: brief, imagistic, lyric, and characterized by what Elinor Wylie identified as a “small clean technique.” If we were going to identify a school of women poets of this era, we might well call it the Small Clean School and include in it not only Wylie, but also Sara Teasdale, whose “There Will Be Stars” we’ve recently examined as an exemplar of this minimalist technique.

While these poets don’t absolutely eschew events relayed chronologically, as narrative, (see Teasdale’s “Summer Night, Riverside” and “A Winter Bluejay,” for example), their defining concern is with the isolation of a particular moment, suspended outside time — though even that suspension may be transient or illusory. The context of Wylie’s “A Crowded Trolley Car” is, as the title suggests, a trolley, moving from stop to stop in a linear progression. Yet once the clanging bell and the swaying of the car are dispensed with, that movement never again intrudes on the view of hands clutching the rail and the omniscient speaker’s meditation on what those hands reveal. Time stills; its movements are of no concern. What matters is the image of each hand and the associations that unfold from it.

Deutsch’s own technique shares both Wylie’s predilection for imagistic miniatures and Teasdale’s intimations of rapture. But where Teasdale’s joys verge on pain, Deutsch’s literary persona — as we’ve previously seen in her 1919 poem, “Silence” — seems, to a great extent, genuinely and generatively open to happiness. It’s easy to think of happiness as inimical to art, or even to interest: “Happy families are all alike,” and so forth. It’s easy to think of the definitive bitterness of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, as well as the veiled despair of Sara Teasdale, and to forget that some women of the same generation were relatively happy in love, did not live their lives continually on a precipice, and declined to nurse a continual state of regret as energy source and fodder for art. And those women — Janet Loxley Lewis and Genevieve Taggard, for example, as well as Babette Deutsch — made good art.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Ballet School

Greetings Dr. Vaishnavi Pusapati. Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up in India? What was the landscape like? What kind of wildlife did you see there? What was one of your favorite experiences in Nature as a child?

Thank you so much for having me. I have been reading the Haiku Poet interviews for a long while now and it has introduced me to many poets I admire in the haiku community.

I grew up in many states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, among others, sometimes changing cities within the same state. I currently reside in Bangalore in Karnataka state. The landscapes I grew up in were like sand dunes, always changing, and I witnessed the uniform loss of nature in the face of fast urbanization.

The first two places I grew up in were beach towns, and there is a certain awareness of nature in that. Hokusai’s paintings of the wave must have come from a reverence of a natural place when residence changes to resonance and belonging. I believe the rhythm of the wave was internalized for me, then.

The wildlife was flame of the forest, coconut groves and Ashoka trees, bougainvillea, poison ivy, bee hives, barnacles on oars, woodpeckers, ant hills, mushrooms, shallow ponds, old wells with tadpoles and lily pads, scurrying squirrels, wasp nests, occasional monkeys, weaver birds, parrots, butterflies, abandoned pets, migratory birds, a lot of pigeons, and a few sparrows.

Then, when we moved to the northern arid areas, it was sad to see the occasional tree, the dry wells, and thinning rivers. I saw the concrete and glass buildings begin to take over the silhouette of old sleeping cities, the slow stripping away of individualism of a place, and the sprouting of matchbox apartments.  

My favorite adventure into nature was to the mountains in Ooty where I touched a cloud for the first time and watched it dissipate and saw my first waterfall. […]

When and how did you discover haiku and Japanese poetry forms?

When I started writing poetry seriously, I was searching for a form that resonates with my minimalism and the themes I find myself most comfortable with. Then, I chanced upon online haiku journals. My initial haiku were no good, without that haiku moment or the technique, but it was a fun way to write, much like having a conversation with nature. The draw was perhaps the scale of the ambition, intentional refrain, and the insistence on not having a title or rhyme but rather aiming for musicality. It was radical and non-anthropocentric, an antithesis to everything I believed poetry to be. Reading contemporary haiku really helped me advance. I did not expect to write more than a few, alongside my longer forms, but I have found a routine of attempting to write haiku frequently. The haiku sequence form, or linked haiku, is an enticing hook, too. The other Japanese forms came much later and although I read them, haiku remains ideal in my poetic approach.

Jacob D. Salzer, Vaishnavi Pusapati

Addiction is not romanticised, the addict knows she’s abusing herself and it’s not a solution even if it brings temporary relief. However, it is also buying her time to fix and work on herself. The first step there is to accept that the speaker now has to become the parent she wanted as a girl and parent herself into an adulthood where she gives herself the permission to feel and emote which she should have had as a child.

[Bonnie] Tobias uses plain, pared back, stripped down language to reflect the place she had to start from. A minimal place free of distractions where no euphemistic phrases were allowed to gloss over the problems that were being avoided. A place where emotions can be expressed and acknowledged instead of buried. A place of safety but not dishonesty. At its heart that’s what “about this” focuses on. How emotionally neglected children have to adjust to adulthood without the confident and support from parents. Its plain speaking may lack poeticisms, but it underlines authenticity and emotional honesty.

Emma Lee, “about this” Bonnie Tobias (Warren Publishing) – book review

I like the mandala of everything in a poem, the leaching in, the leaking on, the letting out, the marginalia, the parts that don’t fit, the honouring of non-story, of no-conclusion, of clustering bits, of oblique, of pointing at wonder and neutrality and grief in everything.

If no pattern, why gather, why present it? 

But there’s white matter connecting under. It is not as obvious as a true or false sonnet or multiple choice haiku, or an isolate mood or depiction of diorama of traipsing a crying figure along a seashore.

It is open to inference instead of deduction. invitation to look together instead of echo each other. 

It’s another kind of reportage, reflection, assembly of things that hang together and matter in a similar inclusive ample way.

What draws suspense through a poem’s frame?

Pearl Pirie, Further

The poem must do more than complete or fulfill: it must defy the given order that makes us feel comfortable. Or secure.

More than anything, we want to feel safe, and secure in that feeling.

Our sense of security warms its feet by a fire that thinks it knows what needs to be known. Warmed by prediction and the coziness of predictability, we reify contingent things as if they are known and graspable. But what exists is always in dialogue with what may be otherwise. Poetry knows this better than prose, I think.

To quote Dean [Young] again:

To be only comprehensible is to be fully known is to be already seen, predictable. The next poem must shake us, must wake us, must entice us toward the denied, the disallowed. It is what wasn’t. Someone had erased a YES out of the charcoal Nos. The new is always scrawled over the old. Anything fully known offers us no site of entry, no site of escape, no site of desire. In the morning we mistook the roofers on the hill for flames. Desecration is the mix of opposites, that field of contact, the tear that draws us. […] Some of them chased each other, some of them fell to the ground. Coyote vanished into the smoke. The clash of the seen with the unseen, the broken seam, the unmasked with the masking that amazes us, sticky-out red thing, outrages and liberates us, embodies possibility.

This possibility inheres in each word. Increasingly, the word “content” appears as noun that designates slop or world-salad spliced by the energy of bots. I miss the gist of light happiness of in it, miss the absence of contentedness as a cultural frame of reference, miss the slower pace of time prior to the hustle-economy.

And I was made even more of this missing in Washington DC last week, with only a few hours to spend exploring the National Gallery of Art, trying to find a place to squat and scribble notes in my notebook.

 “I think one could spend one’s life having this desire to be in and outside at the same time,” said Willem de Kooning, “content as a glimpse.”

Content as a glimpse— yes. This is the content I dearly miss.

The idea must be unfixed from its iconostasis. One must unhinge it a bit.

Alina Stefanescu, “To comprehend is to complicate.

木蓮の
落ちくだけあり
寂光土
（川端茅舍）

Petals falling all at once
—Magnolia flowers
Reborn in the Pure Land

—Kawabata Bōsha (川端茅舍, 1897–1941)

木蓮の Magnolia flowers
落ちくだけあり petals falling apart completely
寂光土 the land of Quiescent Light
Mokuren no / ochi-kudake ari / jakkō-do

It’s hard to capture in English what this poem conveys about magnolia petals falling. Unlike sakura blossoms, for example, that scatter on the wind like snowflakes—sometimes floating away in great clouds—magnolia petals fall heavily and directly, “falling” not “scattering,” more like peonies. Their descent feels deliberate and weighty. You could almost hear them land. Thud.

What is so brilliant about this poem is how it evokes the seeming willfulness of their descent. As if the flower had undergone spiritual training like a Buddhist anchorite walling himself up to await death with perfect resolution. Climbing up a tree or tower to pray. Or sitting in meditation like Daruma until his legs and arms and eyelids fell off—an admirable commitment to self-cultivation.

My writing mentor says, “the writer is the last person standing.” Perseverance and resolution are everything.

Magnolias, ancient like conifers and waterlilies, must be tenacious indeed, since they’ve been around since Tyrannosaurus was traipsing around in forests filled with ferns.

In Tendai Buddhism, jakkōdo (寂光土) refers to the “Pure Land of Still and Radiant Light,” the highest paradise where Buddhas reside. I love how this poem entangles human emotions with flowers—As the Nirvana Sutra teaches, all beings have a Buddha nature. In just seventeen syllables, you feel the flowers striking out on their path toward becoming a Buddha.

Leanne Ogasawara, Magnolia flowers

It follows us like a shadow, dragging its roots along—this garden.

It’s there behind us in the coffee line, at our workstation,

beside us when we’re looking in the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing our appearance.

In bed at 3 AM, it hogs the covers.

Rich Ferguson, The Garden That Follows

when others were in bed,
i would go to chew ice in the kitchen.
groaning mechanism. bowls & bowls.
all kinds of feast. no one ever caught me.
i learned to take only what will
not be missed. the ice maker, refilling
before anyone else was awake. water coming
& going. the rain on the roof. barefoot july
eating a hole through the wall. now, i still
keep a mouthful of the cold. bite down
harder. years of practice. they think
i am scared of creatures that eat our flesh
but i eat bone. i devour the cold.

Robin Gow, ice maker

The other day, we noticed a coyote limping down the meadow. We hear them now and then, at night, but we seldom see them; and this one was out at noontime. A bit unusual. I felt concerned about it as it moved off into the undergrowth at the field’s edge.

Out of curiosity, I guess, the next day I traced its tracks from the treeline between our property and the next one, down through our meadow, into the woods beyond our lot. […]

The average cat weighs 10-12 pounds, the average red fox 30-ish pounds, and eastern coyotes in our region can be 45-55 pounds. This one was, I think, a male because it left quite heavy tracks, though possibly it was putting more weight on three legs because the front right paw was injured badly enough it never set that paw down. I recall once when our family dog got caught in a neighbor’s “soft-paw” fox trap. As soon as I got her loose, she ran for the house, and I noticed her prints in the snow–three heavy prints and a lighter one since she was favoring one foot. This coyote wasn’t using its leg at all. In a few places I could see a swash on the snow surface where the snow was deep enough that the coyote’s foot had skimmed it. The circuit led into the woods and I pressed no further.

That’s about the extent of my animal-tracking knowledge. It was, however, an interesting departure from my usual winter walk, and a nice day for walking. Everyone else in the county was out buying gasoline and groceries because a big storm was in the forecast for the weekend. Which did arrive (the storm, I mean. Well, also the weekend.).

I’ve been working on new poem drafts lately, after weeks of barely any new writing, focusing on revision instead. What do you bet that coyote, or its tracks, or at very least, the snow, will show up in at least one new draft?

Ann E. Michael, Tracks

Heaps of snow on the chaise longues 
are body shaped. Aha! There lie the outsiders
who live outside. Others, unwanteds, the ones 
they now see, are said to be among us. 
If only we knew who the “we” is.  

If only shadows didn’t seem doomed. 
The drip-drip of the faucet, shoe-sized. 

They can’t even let the full moon off the hook.

Jill Pearlman, UltraViolet Night

We try to gather our

courage into kindling:
speaking and naming,
watching and witnessing.
We know we can hold

silence and words in
the same hand, that knees
can sing on the hard
streets packed

with snow. The child
sleeps with his mouth open.
Look at that kind of trust
his body still has.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Child Sleeps

This week: poems in which the word ‘snow’ matters, the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric, a guy running in the park, a word that feels like a sort of dignified sadness, and much more. Enjoy. And happy holidays! I hope to be back for one last edition of the digest before the New Year.

The darkness comes earlier every day, and we depend on electric light to illuminate our faces, everyone home around the table after a hours away.
My dad died the day after Christmas.
One of my children never born was due a few days before Christmas.
The last hours of daylight slip over our neighbors yard in a slanted line, a tightrope line between fear and despair.
Their nativity–even Joseph–golden, lit within.
And Santa is a neon outline on the siding, red and white, his blue eyes laughing.
Inside our home, I hang up lights that twinkle, strands to cast a glow in the empty living room in the evening.
I keep a fire burning only for its light.

Renee Emerson, The Language of Loss

Listen! Nothingness.
Look through it.
Swollen river.
Swans in mist.

Moonlit puddles, iced.
Look through, past.
Sit for a bit. Doze.

Bob Mee, POETRY AS AN UNCERTAIN COLLECTION OF NOISES

The snows have come. This means many things. Even the birds on their fly-highways can’t help but be found out. Everyone must land somewhere. In winter, the black-capped chickadee’s flight is an arcing applause that ends in the cedar tree. Their plaudits celebrate seed and suet. And with every landing avian talon a crystalline flower plummets into the white tapestry below. And below that tapestry, worm and pupae dot the deeper soil in their chambers. Everyone, including the hunkering deer, pretend to be stone.

Sarah Lada, The Valley Dwellers

Three more poems featuring snow which must be in conversation with each other and perhaps with Rossetti too: Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snow Man’, Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘The Winter Palace’. Three wintry poems by three wintry poets. Three poems in which the mind is like winter, because winter is nothingness, and so is the mind. Three poems in which each poem feels a little differently about the mind being a kind of nothingness.

Three poems, too, in which the word ‘snow’ matters, though Frost is the one who makes it work the hardest:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Fast, snow, fast. It doesn’t snow much here in London, and when it does snow the snow rarely settles. It doesn’t snow anywhere in England as much as it once did, which is one of those facts which, when I remember it, gives me the chills.

Jeremy Wikeley, Snow on snow, snow on snow (on snow)

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is  a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread. There is a crow whom the other crows caw around and he is likely the lead crow likely his name is Frank. There are parents who will not let their children play in the meadow because it is full of weeds and buttercups and fire ant mounds. The parents want someone to own the meadow and develop it. There are many ways to say develop without meaning to but there are no ways to say develop that do not involve the destruction of something else. There is a child developing their interpersonal skills which means she learns to stop imagining the crows conversing in the meadow. The child will develop beyond freeze-tag, and when she has developed appropriately this child-part will be dead. There is a distinct tinge of ache she will feel when passing the meadow but the pain will be located in a phantom limb. There is no way to discuss the pain we feel in parts of us that don’t exist anymore. There is a meadow and crows and fire ants. There is a place waiting to die. There will be cupcakes and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. There are people who will call the cupcakes an improvement.

Alina Stefanescu, Rant.

only the empire thinks,
“there are not enough data centers.”
a warehouse full of little machines.
our bodies like lakes wrapping
around them as if we can brush
our teeth with horror. as if the salmon
will still be able to speak to us.
a dry wishing fountain full of pennies.

Robin Gow, uses for water

I know I have to rise from the small low chair
whose seat bears my grief print

Seven days of sitting with all that quickened love
sickness

Still so opened; still the quivering shell
of darkness

Jill Pearlman, City Shiva

I arrived in Paris on 10th September, 2024. When I first came here, I wasn’t sure if I were going to stay beyond the summer of this year but it has been one year and a few months that I have been here. In this time, I haven’t really left Paris except for a few days. It has not been long enough to call this hallucinatory city home but it has been long enough to not find it entirely foreign: it is a liminal city, like a person who you have known for a long time and then suddenly 

not 
at 
all. 

Saudamini Deo, Leaving Paris

Solstice: a clear day here in the Netherlands with the sun breaking through as I type this.

My holiday reading is sorted. The seven books include translations from French, Spanish and Norwegian. The latter an interesting set of haiku and haiku-like poems about the Japanese ski-jumper Noriaki Kasai.

Broken Sleep Books use the world’s largest on-demand publishers. The parcel came from France: no import duties, no VAT, no waiting while parcels linger in the customs depot. A bonus!

Fokkina McDonnell, Solstice and poetry

At the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a period in which epigrams were at their most intensely fashionable, we find many examples of Christmas epigrams. This one, on the symbolism of celebrating mass three times at Christmas, is much more succinct than our anonymous late 16th century student, but it’s structured around the same point: that Bethlehem marks the convergence of Noah’s Ark, David and Christ. The final four lines run as follows:

Nocte prior, sub luce sequens, in luce suprema
   Sub Noe, sub templo, sub cruce sacra notant
Sub Noe, sub Dauid, sub Christo sacra fuere
   Nox, aurora, dies, vmbra, figura, deus.

The first at night, the next at dawn, the last in the daylight
   They mark rites under Noah, under the temple, under the cross:
Under Noah, under David, under Christ were made sacred
   Night, dawn, day, shade, shape, god.

The very popular Epigrammata (1616) of the Dutch Jesuit poet Bernhard Bauhusius (van Bauhuysen, 1576-1619), one of the first Jesuit Latin poets to have a significant influence in England, treats the topic entirely differently. He writes in a highly emotive and imaginative mode, as if the poet were present at the manger, singing to the baby, and reminding Mary to shut the stable door.

Lectule, lectule mi, dulcissime lectule, salue;
   Lectule liliolis, lectule strate rosis.
Ah nec strate rosis, nec liliolis formosis;
   Verum & liliolis, & benè digne rosis.
[…]
Claude MARIA fores, en algida, nuda tremensque
   Prae foribus stat hyems; claude MARIA fores.

Crib, my crib, my sweetest crib, greetings;
   Crib spread with tiny lilies, spread with roses.
Ah not spread with roses, nor with beautiful tiny lilies;
   But truly worthy of tiny lilies, and well worthy of roses.
[…]
Mary, shut the doors, look how icy, naked and trembling
   Stands winter at the doors; Mary, shut the doors.

This placing of oneself at the Biblical scene derives from Jesuit meditative practice, but was quickly influential upon poets who were not themselves Jesuits or even Roman Catholics — including George Herbert, who, along with the Franco-Scot George Buchanan in the sixteenth century and the Polish Jesuit Casimir Sarbiewski, was among the most influential religious poets of the period in England.

Victoria Moul, How to write a Christmas poem in early modern England

Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence.

Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.

That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.

Maria Popova, If Birds Ran the World

Through text, photographs, visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation, [Eric] Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is true; the rest is poetry.”

In many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional, each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.” Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.” There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode, something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed across an expansive bandwidth.

rob mclennan, Eric Schmaltz, I Confess

Very excited to get my contributor’s copy of Laurel Review, which has my poem “Biodiversity (In the World of Fairy Tales)”—and also work by a ton of friends, Steve Fellner, Amanda Auchter, Michael Czyzniejewski, and local Allen Braden. I love when I get to read my friend’s work with mine! […]

Since tonight is the Solstice, I’ll try to remember to light a candle (even an LED one counts) and think about what I want to leave behind and what I want to happen in the new year. A friend of mine recommended a “reverse bucket list,” which involves listing accomplishments you’ve already done and crossing things off your life list that you don’t need or want (skydiving? No thank you! I’ve already parasailed, zip lined, rock climbed, rappelled down a mountain, and ropes courses galore…don’t have anything to prove about that stuff anymore). The point is that we often discount things we’ve already accomplished and feel anxious about things we want that we haven’t accomplished yet (more money! more fame! more accolades! etc.), so this is a way to feel more gratitude and less stress.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, New Poem in Laurel Review, and Holiday Coping Mechanisms

Earlier in the year, my North Sea Poets workshop looked at the masks a poets might wear and why they might wear them. There are creative reasons, like being able to make an imaginative leap or garner a new perspective by a change of position, into someone or something else. But there is also the potential for renewal – when one’s own writing has hit too comfortable a groove, when one’s gestures and turns come too easily, too mechanically, for there ever to be any tears or surprise.

Heaney still serves us as a great guide today, not only for his poems but his essays – and especially his long interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones. It is a comfort to any poet to read that, seventeen years after Death of a Naturalist, Heaney himself was sensing the limits of where his writing had taken him. Facing this staleness, he put on the mask of Sweeney, writing poems in the guise of the cursed madman of Irish myth. Doing this, something new opened up for Heaney’s poetry. Heaney himself states ‘I felt relieved of myself when I was writing them’. ‘I felt up and away, as one of the poems has it. At full tilt. Reckless and accurate and entirely Sweenified, as capable of muck-racking as of self-mockery. The poetry was in the persona’.

Helen Vendler, in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry is sure of the positive effect on Heaney’s poetry of Heaney becoming not-Heaney for a while:

‘The outlaw role of Sweeney permits Heaney to assume the mask of an alienated warrior, of a wilful temperament (that of Miłosz, that of Cézanne) in many ways unlike his own. The assumption of a persona cannot, of course, be a permanent solution to the problematic aspects of one’s own personality and culture but in resorting to the masks of Miłosz and Cézanne, Heaney can glimpse further authentic extensions of his own imagination.’

There’s an appealing paradox in all this – for Heaney to carry on as himself, he had to spend some time being someone else. There is writer’s block, yes. But I think I feel my own symptoms as closer to this second type of stasis – where I have perhaps hit the limits of whatever first voice I had, and where the desire is to discover the ‘authentic extensions’ of my own writing. The desire to feel again that I might sit at a page and anything could happen. The memoir pieces I’ve contributed to our Substack have been the unexpected trialling of such a shift. Maybe in 2026 such experiments can bring my writing to newer, fresher ground.

Niall Campbell, What If It’s Not Writer’s Block?

I must try and remember how darkness is not to be feared or resisted, like this morning in the yoga studio when the instructor dimmed the lights and we submitted to the shadows around us as well as those within us.

child’s pose*
letting go of ourselves
to become ourselves

*Child’s Pose (Balasana) is a grounding, inward-folding pose that encourages introspection and confronting inner truths.

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Winter Solstice 2025

Thra-Koom! was an e-pamphlet published 15 years ago by Silkworms Ink.

It’s a short sequence of superhero poems — comic-book-based, since the Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t really made its appearance yet. For this little advent calendar, I should arguably have revived ‘Iceman’ — but I’m not sure that poem has a lot of heart or depth to it, and I’m not quite as invested in Iceman as I am in the Silver Surfer.

The Surfer, of course, appeared in this summer’s Fantastic Four: First Steps, portrayed by Juliet Garner, in a mildly controversial (though ultimately inconsequential) bit of casting. A male version, played by Doug Jones (of Pan’s Labyrinth and other monster movies) appeared in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — Jones did a better job of brooding philosophically, aided by Laurence Fishburne’s baritone voiceover, but neither portrayal really connected with the version of the character I’ve found most affecting, which is rooted in Stan Lee and John Buscema’s run of Silver Surfer comics from 1968 to 1970. Here, the Surfer is almost wretchedly noble and introspective, frequently shown in poses of contorted anguish as he faces godly adversaries, existential crises and the self-destructive stupidity of vicious men.

“In every voice … in every human heart … a smouldering hostility!” he laments, squatting on a rooftop while Spiderman tries to pick a fight with him. The messaging is fairly crude — these are comics for children, after all — but it remains refreshing, even today, to read about a superhero who is made vulnerable, even driven to despair, by his sensitivity to man-made horror.

Why is this version of the poem called ‘Or, from the Mountain’? I suppose because I wanted to revise it into something with more of a folk flavour. What if, rather than being coated in silver, the character had an association with orichalcum, the mythical metal referred to in Ancient Greek texts (from ὄρο / óros / mountain and χαλκό / khalkós / copper)? The mountain as a source of power, rather than the space god Galactus, is also a little more grounded.

Jon Stone, 10-Day Ice Advent Calendar #9: Or, from the Mountain

O naraniag
a bulan, Un-unnoyko indengam the lover sings

in serenade to the moon. It floats, seemingly
remote, a silver coin in the atmosphere

above all the petty currency of our lives.
It’s been an age since I heard these lyrics—

Toy nasipnget a lubongko/ Inka kad silawan
Tapno diak mayyaw-awan— a prayer for some

brilliance to spill into this dark,
something to point the way onward or out.

Luisa A. Igloria, O Bright Moon

My thoughts are with Michael and team at London Grip for their recent technical disasters that mean the majority of the London Grip archive has gone. LG is a source of wonderful poems and reviews, and I feel for the folks there as the disaster was not of their making. Poets, if you’re published online make sure you take a PDF download after…

In lovely and unexpected news this week, I saw there was a new episode of Planet Poetry. That , in and of itself, is cause for celebration. And it was great to hear the interview with Niall Campbell that was the main focus off it. I mean, I say main focus, but arguably he was more of a support act to Robin reading one of my poems in the second half. I wasn’t expecting it at all, but what an honour.

Robin did an excellent job reading Riches (about 48 mins in) from Collecting the Data. It was very strange to hear someone else reading my work. It’s a new experience for me, and has made me look at the poem again in a new (and good) way. I hear the beats of the poem differently now, even if they haven’t changed. It’s know the advice is to read your poem aloud when writing, but you’re still yourself when you do it, so to hear someone else do it is really quite educational. And very moving. Thank you Robin and Peter. Listen to the ep for the poems and interview , the poem from Kay Syrad and the bloopers.

Mat Riches, Peace to all on this Cluttered Earth

During my ridiculously lucky 3-night residency in Miami last week–praise to SWWIM and the Betsy Writer’s Room!–I worked on a multipart poem I started in October. The sequence begins by conjuring a tiny land snail. A brainstorm occurred to me on the sand, because in South Beach you’re basically obligated to do some of your thinking next to the Atlantic: hey, I should end the sequence with the Great Pink Sea Snail! As a seventies kid catching the 1967 movie Dr. Dolittle on TV once in a while, I adored the giant snail, which you may remember carries some of the characters back to England from Sea Star Island. Its watertight shell, pearly-pink inside, is the size of a small house, equipped with gauzy curtains and baskets of fruity refreshments. What a ride.

And wow, what a racist, sexist, bloated, boring film. I rewatched much of it, often on fast-forward because it’s painful in every way possible. I also went down the internet rabbit-hole to learn that Rex Harrison, whom my mother loved, was loathed by many who worked with him (the rudest, most selfish person they’d ever met, they say, and worse–it’s always worse). I’m guessing the Great Pink Sea Snail swam so fast mainly to get away from him.

I have some ideas about why the snail captured my imagination. My long-ago dissertation on U.S. women poets was called The Poetics of Enclosure, after all. I’m attracted to inward-turning spaces–like the lyric poem–that also, paradoxically, make room for big ideas, aspirations, and feelings. That gorgeous shell offers protection and secrecy while also enabling movement.

Lesley Wheeler, The Great Pink Sea Snail rides on

Part of the test for the poet-mother is that the child is a distraction from writing. In Dead fly, she is faced with the dilemma of using the time when he is asleep to write or to catch up on sleep herself: ‘Do I creep/ the aching floorboards and return to bed, or enter the other dimensions where verse spills/ from head to notebook in the study?’ It is not that she has nothing to say, the ideas will spill from her head but she is exhausted and to choose sleep will leave her feeling guilty and unfulfilled. The poem ends with: ‘I pick up the baby monitor/ make my way/ along the corridor/ which groans/ and will never stop.’ This final image is rich in meaning: it embodies her sense of desperation that she will never find time to write again; it conveys the obligations of motherhood being endless; and it evokes a sense of the speaker’s exhaustion.

 In the concluding poems of the collection the speaker resolves this tension between being both mother and writer. In Second wind, Mahon writes: ‘Despite the lopsided balance of those early years/ weighted in exploring maternal conventions,/ the daily rotes pulsed along a blurry sweep/ and became my art.’ She finds a way of integrating writing with motherhood. Practically, she uses the time when her son is at school to write: ‘My hands cradle/ coffee mug as he walks to school./ Freedom loops his step/ The blank page stares.’ However, more than that, it appears that this new life as a mother becomes the poetry. ‘In isolation,// this mother’s creativity found its nook/ in a tedium punctured by guilt, self-doubt./ I’d spy the notebook and pen,/ hold words in my head/ till my hands were free.’ Motherhood becomes the inspiration, it provides the words which she would hang on to till she had the opportunity to write them down.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Cry’ by Katy Mahon

In “Fragments” Tara Singh has created a powerful sequence of poems exploring the power/status imbalances that trap victims with abusers. Singh demonstrates awareness of how form, whether free verse, duplex or using symbols to represent words indicating where victims can’t speak or where words aren’t enough, can work with a poem to convey and enhance meaning. Singh has a compassionate, interrogative eye.

Emma Lee, “Fragments” Tara Singh (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

If you’ve ever been pursued by someone who purports to love you, if you’ve been hassled, threatened by a person-thinks-they’re-god, who won’t just leave you alone, who doesn’t respect your simplest boundaries, then this poem, which is at one level praising the persistence of divine love, will send a chill to your heart, as it does now to mine. 

If you’ve ever had this said to you, “I love you so much I’ll harm myself if you don’t XYZ…,” then the whole Hound-poem thing looks more terrifying and manipulative than pinnacle of Victorian ode-writing. No wonder Francis was “sore adread”. No wonder he, in the absence of twenty-first century trauma-informed therapy, capitulated to the Hound in the end. No wonder even the care of others who rated his poetry couldn’t help him give up his opium addiction. 

I’m sorry, but English Literature O level notwithstanding, I think The Hound of Heaven a ghastly poem. I know it was written in a different era. I know it rhymes, and is an extended metaphor, and is thought to be great, particularly by those who share Thompson’s faith, but that’s not enough to redeem it for me.

I’m grateful, nevertheless, that the poem exists for this reason: Thompson and his Dangerous Dog highlight the importance of choosing the right hound to live alongside. One that’s cool, self-sufficient, has a band of kind and reliable archetypal friends. A dog who sleeps on his back atop his kennel, listens to Woodstock speaking in Bird, writes novels, and recognises, and has compassion for, human foibles. Most of all, a hound who is at peace with his own doggy, dogged nature, and doesn’t feel the need to capture and dominate others. 

So, Snoopy! I choose Snoopy as my hound for Christmas, and for life.

Liz Lefroy, I Choose A Hound For Life, Not Just For Christmas

The Sunday School pageant director embraced
the medieval ideals. Mary would have dark
hair and a pure soul. Joseph, a mousy
man who knew how to fade into the background.
Every angel must be haloed with golden
hair, and I, the greatest girl, the head
angel, standing shoulders above the others.

It could have been worse. Ugly and unruly
children had to slide into the heads and tails
of other creatures, subdued by the weight
of their costumes, while I got to lead
the processional. But I, unworldly foolish,
longed to be Mary. I cursed
my blond hair, my Slavic looks which damned
me to the realm of the angels.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Christmas Pageants, Modern and Medieval

He loved it all (the music, the tree, the tinsel, the Rankin and Bass, the hot chocolate, the gifts, etc.) So every year, I played along, my heart warming a little bit each time. I knew how much it meant to him. So I found one thing I could get excited about with him: Lights. Candles. Always with a quick flashback to that hidden menorah. The one my grandmother couldn’t openly take out to burn each candle properly. Maybe that’s why I hoard and feel so brazen about burning candles now? It’s a generational comeback, a return to roots, a “pour-one-out-for-močiute”* kind of thing?

*Lithuanian for granny, grandma

This also seems to track with my alignment with pagan solstice, the time of year I genuinely feel a shift within me. It’s not so much Christmas for me, it’s the light in spite of the darkness, the long nights, the blankets of snow that seem to insulate all earthly sound. You can hear the trees going into long slumbers. They creak. The moon, the sky, the wind are all bare, raw, crisp, and stark. I like this reality. It makes me feel small, properly insignificant—human.

And so, I am still devoted to light as a way to connect with him, even, devastatingly, in his absence this year, my first holiday without him. I light candles in my home almost every night, but most specifically, a candle upon his altar. I have been fiercely ardent in the ritual of lighting the candle. It is a way to call to him, to fixate myself in the moment of stillness, to be present when the veil between us drops. I can often sense that he appreciates the fire light as a gate through which to communicate. Earlier this summer, I played one of his poems aloud near the flame and it seemed to dance in synch with the poem. For a brief moment, the reflection in the glass of the candle holder seemed to morph into the shape of his face.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Looking for matches.

There’s something strange about opening a fat parcel of books that bear your own name. It doesn’t seem real, and when you read your own words on a tangible white page rather than a screen, it feels quite odd, and also rather wonderful.

I have been lucky enough – or I should say WE have been lucky enough – to be published by the fine Welsh publisher Briony Collins at Atomic Bohemian. It’s a collaboration between me, and the chemist and poet Stephen Paul Wren, on the subject of microplastics, those tiny fibres shed from the everyday plastic items that we take for granted.

Stephen’s viewpoint as a scientist is somewhat different from mine. I collected historical plastics like bakelite for many years, admiring the sculptural or art deco designs, and the astounding technical innovations of the early and mid 20th century.

I have sold most of the collection, including 55 bakelite or catalin wirelesses. What started out as a wonder substance has become a threat to the environment, and to human and animal health. The thing I loved has become a dirty word.

When I discovered that Stephen shared my worries about microplastics, we decided to write a book together. Some of the poems come in two parts, one written by him, the other by me. Many of them have footnotes directing the reader to the scientific papers or articles which sow the evidence behind the poem. Of course we have extrapolated from the current facts or hypotheses, and the result is often surreal and disturbing.

Lesley Curwen, Opening the author’s copies

The top 10 and the top 2 dozen of the year. Some of these were really tight calls. And a have a dozen still underway that I may finish this year. Could happen.

2025 Poetry:

Toward an Origin Story by Laurie D Graham (Model Press, 2025)
Seed Beetle by Mahaila Smith (Stelliform Press, 2025)
Hawk & Moon by Han VanderHart (Bottlecap Press, 2025)

[…]

2 dozen “Backlist” Favs

Poetry:

Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin (Brick, 2024)
To Assemble an Absence by John Levy (above/ground, 2024)
Sweet Vinegars: poems of wildflowers by Claudia Radmore (Shoreline, 2024)
Heliotropia: poems by Manahil Bandukwala (Brick, 2024)
Slowly Turning by Marco Fraticelli (Yarrow Press, 2024)
Small Arguments: poems by Souvankham Thammovongsa (M&S, 2003, 2023)
A “Working Life” by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2023)
Notes on Drowning by rob mclennan (Broken Jaw Press, 1998)
still the dead trees: haiku by Robert Piotrowski (Red Moon Press, 2017)
The Weight of Oranges: poems by Anne Michaels (M&S, 1997)

Pearl Pirie, Fav Reads 2025

I wonder if I make too much of this but the ghost of mortality clings to me this December a danse macabre in which each step, each pirouette, leads further towards an unstoppable incapacity. How many things become impossible, every day? How many are disappearing, right now?

[…]

My first post on Substack was on Christmas day, last year. It has been a spectacular adventure on this platform. A huge thank you to those who subscribed and followed and read and liked and commented and even bought my book. Am greatly encouraged to continue to write and share and learn and grow in this wonderful community. Wish you all the very best of the season. May the new year come with kindness and grace.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Countdown conversation

Once the holiday hubbub dies down and the lonelier, cold January days arrive, I have poetry workshops to look forward to. They’ll be online, which suits my schedule in winter. Last year, I enrolled in two such workshops and found they spurred me to get a good deal of writing done, so I figured I might try repeating the process. Anita Skeen is doing another series for The Friends of Roethke Foundation with readings, prompts, and discussion on “writing toward wisdom.” In Dickens’ era, I’d be considered old enough to be wise (though most of us, Dickens certainly included, know better about age inevitably bringing wisdom). But the operating word for Skeen in this case is “toward.” It will be interesting to see where she takes her workshop participants in the new year.

Ann E. Michael, Last messages

Equinox is from the Latin aequus—equal—and nox: night; solstice is from sol + sistere: sun standing still. While our linguistic relationship to equinox is one of measurement, the solstice is phenomenological. You can’t quite apprehend a day and night of equal length, though I guess you can stay awake with a couple of stopwatches if you really want. But light that comes later and later (or earlier and earlier), night that falls faster and faster (or slower and slower) is a persistent reminder that we are whirling around the sun at thirty kilometres a second, no matter how much slower (faster) it feels.

Tranströmer’s lyric lives in this moment of renewed awareness, opening with a moment of revelation that carries into observation:

One winter morning, you sense how this earth
rolls forward. Against the walls of the house
a blast of air rattles
out from hiding.

Every moment of every day, you know the earth rolls forward, but that’s not the same as sensing it, as perceiving it, which requires the body’s assistance: the ears that hear the rattle of air, the skin that feels the ice embedded in blast. So awakened, the speaker lingers in his awareness, figured as a sort of shelter:

Surrounded by motion: tranquility’s tent.

This is the first solsticey bit for me, the standing still, which here enables a new kind of sight, one that also now perceives the “secret rudder in the migrating bird flock” and hears “Out of the winter darkness / a tremolo.” It’s a lovely, subtle transition that sets us up for what’s coming, tremolo being by (my) accounts a summer word. From the Latin tremulus, meaning “trembling,” it is a word movement and of song, the willow’s thousand thousand leaves shimmering above the wind-stirred pond, the delicate flute of the wood thrush. The stanza is enjambed, a moment that recalls the enjambed opening line; like that instant in which we await the first revelation that shifts us from stillness to movement, the source of the tremolo is withheld across the break, and once again motion meets stasis.

Vanessa Stauffer, “In the Surging Prow There Is Calm” by Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Patty Crane)

the way
the light bulb rests
in the rest of the trash

smokestack sunset by tom clausen

We’re a week away from Christmas. The weekend snow is melting, though still hanging around. My kids will be coming home soon and I hope to share some winter hikes with them.

Anyway, the lovely poetry website One Art published two Xmas-themed poems of mine. One takes place in a dismal shopping mall where a pall of the season’s (year’s) malaise looms over everything except the lone mall caroler.

The other is mostly a metaphor for the hard passage of time, the burdens we carry, especially this time of year–typical holiday stuff.

You can read them both here at One Art.

Grant Clauser, Almost Christmas Poetry

I think people treat things like Chat GPT as an oracle, when really it’s more like mirror. If what it is reflecting is faulty or misinformed, it too will be faulty and misinformed. If you tell it to write poetry, it will write what it thinks poetry looks like. One of the hilarious things I kept encountering when using the image generators I tried out was that it took things far too literally. I was mostly making faux artifacts in vintage camera styles–cabinet card photos of Mothman and dollhouse dioramas of creepy Victorian houses. But the more specific I got, the more erratic the generator became. While most AI art could hardly be called art (and many artists violently balk at even that conversation)  I have seen people do some really cool things in the horror genre with it.  I still like its possibilities for creating collage elements in Canva I can’t find among stock photos or things I can actually use.  I just wish it compensated artists it scrapes from and didn’t use so much water. 

In [the television series] PLURIBUS, the collective operates not unlike an LLM. If everyone shares the same brain, no new creativity can come from it—at least not any that doesn’t already exits or Frankenstein existing things together. 

Kristy Bowen, the mirror and the oracle

וְנִשְׁכַּח כּל־הַשָּׂבָע בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם וְכִלָּה הָרָעָב אֶת־הָאָרֶץ׃
All the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. (Gen. 41:30)

Isn’t that what trauma does?
We forget we ever felt otherwise.
This grief is reality, has always
been lurking under the surface.
This is life, this emptiness.
This is all life is, or ever was.
Sink to the earth and give in.

But Yosef says no. Stick photographs
on the fridge. Preserve sungolds
for a snow-day pizza topping, apples
into applesauce for latkes.
Talk to Shekhinah in the front seat
of your car. Even in the dungeon
you are not alone.

Rachel Barenblat, Seven lean years

The other day I found myself a bit overwhelmed with my dead. It must have been the coming-on of Christmas, hanging ornaments on the tree that made me think of me and my little mom doing that together. A guy running in the park put me in mind of my brother. Some guy’s facial expression on TV made me think of Dave. I’m shopping for new skis, which made me think of Art, who would have had what I wanted and would have given me a discount. I heard myself say in my head “Oh…mygod,” just the way Emma used to say it. And I’m glad not to be once again wrangling with Kathy about not wanting her to give me a gift but her wanting to give me a gift so me trying to come up with something I wanted and then having to come up with a gift for her. Geesh, woman, give it a rest. And she did.

And I felt bereft, a word that to me feels like a sort of dignified sadness, with its measured e’s balanced on either side of the fulcrum of r, and that efficient ft cutting off any great show of grief. So I walked bereft in the gray wind. But then solstice, and the coming-on of light, bit by bit. And someone told me the stars are aligned in some way that only happens during times of great change.

And so I resolve to stay present, both with my dead and with my living. Both so surprisingly full of light. And here is a poem by Kathleen Lynch that cracks me up. And isn’t that what we want art to do, crack us up a little bit.

Marilyn McCabe, I eat the many possibilities

The fourth and final poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Samar Al Guhssain.

Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen.

Samar Al Guhssain is an 18-year-old poet from Gaza. This is her first publication. 

Anthony Wilson, Gaza Advent 4: Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain

I’ve always been fascinated by those traditions that treat books almost like people. In the Jewish tradition, sacred books that are damaged or not used are not destroyed, but buried in a cemetery. I find this beautiful and haunting. I’ve been burying books in my garden and then exhuming them. Here is a video of one. I left it outside for a long time and then I buried it. Then dug it up.

The image makes sense to me. A book interacting with the world. With earth, with the elements. Rain. Sun. Wind. A book resisting decay. Or fulfulling its natural role of engaging with life and death. Transformation. Beginning in the earth as seed then growth to tree, toppled, made paper then a return to earth. As with ink. And whatever cycle ideas undergo. The book as a part of the infinite number of processes of change, Emergence, decay, resurgence.

I know in one way a book is a cultural object and this framing is fanciful, ecoromantic. But in another way, everything is part of the process. It may be a precious poeticization to say so, but broadly, it is true. And a book, its bookness, is always implicitly a metaphor. It’s a kind of visual poetry: not just examining the letter but a larger form. Its medium.

This book is a body. A landscape. And you can see how it has begun to merge with its environment. Leaves, maple key, dirt. Its words have disappeared into its burial. Have changed state. Changed statement.

Gary Barwin, Haunted (Buried) Books: Remains that remain.

地球儀が鞄に入り日短　常幸龍BCAD

chikyūgi ga kaban ni hairi hi mijika

            a globe
           fits in a bag
            short winter day

                                                BCAD Jōkōryu

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (December 20, 2025)

Many cultures do not regard January 1st as a significant date at all. The Lunar New Year is at the end of January. The Jewish New Year is in the fall. The Persian New Year is in March. The Islamic New Year is in June.

You may have your own individual new year. Personally, I consider my birthday to be a more significant date than the Gregorian New Year. (Though as I get older, both dates have come to feel equally depressing.)

Another problematic aspect of New Year’s resolutions is one I wrote about last year. I suspect this might be the true reason so many resolutions fail. That is, they are so often tied to self-recrimination. The very nature of making resolutions for change implies that we believe something in our lives needs fixing. We insist on change because we are convinced something is broken, often that we ourselves don’t measure up. Resolutions tend to begin from feelings of unworthiness.

I will start that novel…because I’ve been such a slacker.

I will commit to writing more…because my output sucked last year.

I’ll send my work out more frequently…because my CV is pathetic.

I will make more time to write …because everyone else is moving ahead while I twiddle my stubby little thumbs.

It’s only natural that our plans for self-improvement would fail in a headspace like this. (Your thumbs are beautiful and perfect, by the way.)

Truly, what is the motivation to push harder, work more, create bigger, when your mind will invariably become a bossy scold who never appreciates what you do? Nothing is ever good enough for you, your inner self is bound to rebel. And by month two, motivation tanks.

For this reason, rather than pledge oneself to some new agenda, some grand life change, I think it’s better—more gratifying, more compassionate, more motivating—to commit to something you’ve already begun. This means looking at your writing life and finding habits, practices and actions that are working right now.

It’s so easy to castigate ourselves for all the ways we haven’t met our goals or lived up to our own expectations. What about acknowledging what you’ve already achieved? Celebrating what you’ve found exciting in your process? Commending yourself for your already-habitual efforts and hard-won discipline?

And then, committing to simply keeping it going?

Becky Tuch, Q: What are your New Year’s acknowledgements and resolutions?

When you first discover kissing, it is a wonder. I thought kissing was all I would ever do. I remember kissing in cars. For hours. I remember the fog on the windows as the music played. It was the late Eighties. “Heaven is a Place on Earth?” played while I kissed a boy in my four-hundred-dollar car that I had to roll start each morning. The kissing went on and on; there was Madonna, Queen, Michael Jackson. […]

In the Year of the Horse, I may still be figuring out the next act, but it is going to include kissing, because, as my friend Ron Koertge says in his fairytale poems, kissing transforms us. The next kiss might be from my dog, Maja, or from my husband, but I will continue to lean into love. In a year like this, love, joy, and gratitude—these are what have sustained me in the belief that a kinder future is ahead.

Kate Gale, Kissing in the Year of the Horse

a small horse leans into her juniper tree. a lost whisper

recovers its body. love and silence will cut life’s thread.

i feel the splinter in my palm burrow on.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

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

Sarah Lada, Donna

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

Dale Favier, Fetch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, football tv

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Systems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

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

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

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

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

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

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

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

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

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

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

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

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

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

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

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

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

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

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

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

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

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

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

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

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

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

*

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

This week: 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: poetry sandwiches, the long churn of time, naming the beast, the heaviness of the future, and much more. Enjoy.

Most of the week was dark, windy, and rainy, but for fifteen minutes we got to see the Northern Lights! I only got a couple of quick cell phone pictures because the clouds came in so quickly. My brother on the other side of town couldn’t see them at all.

Here is a poem I wrote the last time the Northern Lights appeared, which was published in The Normal School,  “Aurora, or When Firefoxes Spark the Sky.”

We also discussed my late friend Martha Silano’s incredible book of poetry, Terminal Surreal [at the book club]. And the discussion was really amazing. An engineer in the group mapped the sections of the book to the five stages of grief, and someone talked about the idea of knowing something of the author’s life and how that can enhance the reading of the book. When I was in graduate school, biographical readings were very out of style, but I always talk about the culture, the time of the writing, some details of the author’s life—for instance, when we read Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo, we talked about Japan in the 30s and the incredible stardom of Dazai in Japan. I only teared up once talking about Martha, and Glenn said he also teared up once. We still miss her! I had never thought about whether or not to discuss the context of the book and author at the book club, but I’ve always found that knowing more about the author enhanced, rather than hurt, my own readings. We’ve read poetry books several times now, but this was the first time we read poems out loud at the club, including poems that were referenced in the book (Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert” and Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”). I think we’ll try that again—hearing a poem out loud is a great way to really get a different dimension of the book.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Northern Lights, Book Club Revelations, Winter Blues and Winter Holiday

The fact of it is that I think about this poem daily and have for how many years I do not know. Filling the French press in the morning, I will think: Mixed ready to begin the morning right. I sit down at the desk and open a notebook, muttering I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, the iambs bouncing along like some sort of motivational poetry-coach speech: you can start simply, you can say a thing outright, you can bob up and down in a sea of simple syllables until something sparks. On a long run I will, for no reason whatsoever, start timing my steps with Dead wings carried like a paper kite. (I Am Fun.)

I loved to tell a class to turn to this poem in their textbooks and then recite it while writing the rhyme scheme on the board (Super Fun!); they would gradually look up and realize what was happening and be amazed someone could know a poem by heart despite having untold numbers of songs and movie monologues committed to their own memories. Sometimes I would perform this trick after referring to Robert Frost as “My uncle Robert,” a joke I ceased to make when I saw what appeared to be an innocent gen-ed student writing it down.

What I am saying is that I love this poem and it is so deeply embedded in my person that I do not go anywhere without it. Which is why I was so amazed to realize, earlier this week, that at some point between the Ah-ha! of my first reading and, like, Tuesday, I have changed my mind about the tone and therefore my entire sense of what is at stake in these 142 syllables. 

Vanessa Stauffer, “Design” by Robert Frost

Ten members of Bath Writers and Artists met at The Hive Community Centre in Peasedown St John yesterday. I was teaching the other nine some Turkish map folds, but first we showed the books we’d made since our last meeting.

June Wentland‘s biscuit-books are poetry sandwiches. Her miniature-book-brooches are delightful. I’ve been waiting (and nagging) a long time for her pamphlet of Emily Dickinson-inspired poems and collages that I first saw at a meeting of the Tipi group. This group of six writers meets six times a year in a tipi in a walled garden on the edge of Bath. I feel hugely fortunate to be a member. We take it in turns to introduce a topic and set the homework. […]

And here is a book by Claire Coleman: photos and drawings from her garden, and poems about some of the birds that visit, or don’t. The tabs on the left are strips with the names of endangered species of garden birds: tear-off strips, so easy to tear off. It’s an emotional read. […]

It gladdened my heart to see how inventive everyone was! The last five photos were taken by Verona. They illustrate the industry, chaos and excitement of the session. At 3pm we cleared the table, swept the floor, and spent the time till 4 o’clock reading poems and reflecting on the day.

Ama Bolton, Another day of Art and Poetry at The Hive

This group is unlike any other I’ve ever worked with. I love the process we’ve evolved — brainstorm, create, workshop what we’ve created, revise, polish, curate, share with the world — and I love how what we co-create is always more than the sum of its parts. I know that I would never have written, on my own, the particular work I’ve generated as part of this collab. It has been a joy and a privilege to collaborate with this group on this body of work, and I can’t wait to see what we decide to do together next. Anyway, I hope what we’ve created here will speak to you.

Rachel Barenblat, New poem at Bayit

Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.

Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.

In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.

Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.

Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”

What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).

Maria Popova, How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes

When You found me I asked what You wanted:
I want you to eat at the fruits of my table.
And I came to learn
of famine’s savage offense, what
had truly been taken from me. The crops
burned, the fields salted, nothing
left but straw and maggots. I was
bewildered and ravenous. Never
had I witnessed such abundance.
I took first the bread,
then the wine, the living blood.

Then the dates and wild honey. The garlic
and mustard. Locusts, fish and cucumbers.

Kristen McHenry, A New Poem

Since meeting the Four Quartets in English Literature A level, I’ve been fascinated by TS Eliot’s phrase ‘the still point of the turning world’. He captures in this metaphor the idea that, if you can get to the very middle of something (as with a wheel), you’ll find that the central point isn’t moving, though all around is turning. The point itself in physics terms (i.e. in terms that stretch the limits of my mind and imagination) is one atom big.

Saturday’s programming was audacious, in particular the second half bracketing of two new works (Kulning by Lefroy Watt and Murmurations by Johnson) around the Adagio from Bach’s Violin Sonata no.1 in G minor. This was exquisitely played by Zea Hunt, but (and especially, you may well think), how can two young composers in 2025 sit themselves either side of Bach? Then again, how can they not? 

What this Jonty Lefroy Watt : JS Bach : Oran Johnson juxtaposition did was open up the Bach to newness. As I listened to the three pieces, surrounded by a warm, attentive audience, I felt myself gradually lulled out of time. It was as if the Bach was fresh as the pieces either side. I imagined what it would’ve been like to hear any of Bach’s compositions as a world premiere, and then realised I had: feeling on this occasion his composition as completely, viscerally original. This is the joy of live performance – it’s all new to us.

By the time we reached the sweeping shapes of Johnson’s Murmurations, I felt myself eternal (not immortal, nothing so grand). I think I mean eternal in the sense of experiencing my life as a singular life stretching backward and forwards within a collective of lives. It was like reaching right into the legacies and promises of creativity as fundamental as Bach’s and as vibrant as that of the young musicians in the church. I’m not sure if the still point atom was the quality of  concentration given by the audience, or a singular note – let’s say G – of music. It doesn’t matter – as Eliot says elsewhere, ‘words strain, sometimes crack’ if we lay too much on them. 

Liz Lefroy, I Travel In Time (this one’s not about swimming)

Now consider the text below, “Ethics of the Clown.” It is absurd and surreal (the narrator fits themselves inside a condom, for instance) and it is apparently about clowns, or clowns as a stand-in for human experience. It is absurd, certainly and perhaps funny. The pacing of the images and the rhythms of the piece are carefully and aesthetically controlled. However, for most readers, I’ve found, it’s too outré or odd to garner the kind of literary appreciation that other texts might evoke. I wonder why? Is it because many people would rather not mix absurdity and “low” content with art, because perhaps it tends to belie “deep” thought and feelings — i.e. for them it only evokes triviality or simple humour? Is it because most of us have been trained to appreciate the traditionally “poetic” (wherein we respond with “mmm” when we hear it)? I don’t really know. For me, my most profound experiences often mix “high” and “low,” the ridiculous and trivial with the luminous and numinous. And most of my life is a salmagundi of both at the same time. I might be only able to access trivilities when walking in the woods or attending a symphony yet might feel illumination or deep joy when on the toilet or cashing in a coupon at the drug store. I think our art should sometimes reflect this and we should be open to all of it. Trees, woods, discarded condoms, clowns and carbuncles all.

Gary Barwin, Not Stand-Up but Stand-in Comedy: the Venn diagram of profound and ridiculous

1. a lava lamp and Nag Champa.

2. a blossoming Joshua tree.

3. a Ventura Boulevard bus stop bench.

4. a Pilates machine, a yogurt machine.

5. a stranger’s IQ test results.

6. a leading man’s jawline.

7. a dinner party hosted by a coyote.

Rich Ferguson, Various ways I’ve accessorized my boredom

A bridge too far for many people, and until recently I would have included myself in this, would be the alleged incidents of abduction by extra-terrestrials. This is obviously the most fertile territory for the lonely attention seeker, or a good hook for a book that might make it on to the NYT best seller list. Exploring the UFO/UAP rabbit hole and its torrent of content, not to mention the considerable demand for such content, I watched endless hours of people talking about their ‘abduction experiences’. Many of them are easy to disbelieve; we’ve all met a few Walter Mitty characters in our lives, or just pathological liars, and it’s not difficult to sense an ulterior motive behind any given fantastical story. […]

It isn’t necessarily my intention to convince you of anything here, I suspect we will all shortly come to accept the nature of this, even if we don’t understand it. My conviction that poetry’s job is to address the human condition led me into this mad sonnet project and I thought Shakespeare would do this justice, so elected Shakespearean sonnets as the form, with the boundaries and the significant space within. Poetry allows for the layering of implication and ambiguity, one can pull at multiple threads and see what unravels, in what better way could a writer hope to probe the borders of existential unease?

james mcconachie, Holding Them in the Light

Sprouting gills and lizards’ tails, rebel angels
change in their fall from the shining walls of heaven—
becoming horned and feathered beasts, hybrids
of irregular size. Poisons of the puffer fish, the scaled,
the seven-headed; and though they’re meant to stand for
what is dark and evil, their beauty still is terrible
to behold. Pistil or tulip bulb, zebra swallowtail
butterfly with a body of burnished hair; the gleam
of shields and swords raised for lethal strike.

Luisa A. Igloria, The Grief of Angels

I’ve read Poetry London on and off for a long time, but I really like what the new editor, Niall Campbell, has done with it, so I’m delighted to have two poems in the most recent issue — one is a translation from the contemporary French poet Gérard Bocholier, an untitled poem from his 2016 collection Nuits. The other is a funny little poem, or perhaps actually two linked poems, called ‘Counterfactual’, imagining Moses gone unfound. Here is the first part of that poem:

Moses aging in his basket,
unfound, unloved amid the rushes,
withering in reedy splendour:
king of the frogs, prince pond-skater.

I mentioned briefly how I came to write the Moses poems in an interview with Greg Allum which was published on Monday, and which you can read here.

Victoria Moul, Two poems in Poetry London

When I was a child I read a magazine article about a man who could hold photographic plates to his head and think images on to the paper. The resulting  fuzzy dream like black and white images fascinated me. Years later I wrote a poem about it. […]

I think that a common theme of my work is the act of searching for another who is not there. The poem is too fresh for me to assess. Watch this space, it might well return.

Paul Tobin, THOUGHTOGRAPHY

I’m the sole survivor of a cohort of ten prostituted women/sex workers who are now all dead murdered, suicides or disappeared. Until now I’ve avoided talking about this text, as a way of keeping a safe distance from the subject matter, but the subject matter refuses to play ball.

Recently I was delighted to hear that poet and writer Richard Skinner had included a review of In an Ideal World I’d Not Be Murdered in his publication Undercurrents, released by Broken Sleep (2025). Richard stated that he thought Coup de Maître was ‘… the most powerful poem in the book…’. I really value this contribution and hope that all comments, reviews and conversations around this poem, and its subject matter, will go some way towards extending and critiquing the narrative around prostitution and the power dynamics inherent in the sex industry. As Richard so astutely pointed out:

… the act of devouring a shellfish is made explicitly like the act of emotional evisceration during paid sex. The power is only one way, and it is brutal, total destruction.   

I am also grateful to Nigel for giving me this opportunity to write about this poem.

Even though it has been called a ‘difficult poem to read, but a necessary one …’ the irony is that it was a relatively easy poem to write – written on auto pilot (I think) and almost fully formed (possibly). I’m acutely aware that trauma memories are often fragmented and therefore slippery and there is nothing linear or straightforward about how poems develop.

However, what I do remember is that I did not set out to write about a crustacean with jointed legs, a hard shell and no backbone.  I did not set out to write about the qualities of fine dining. But I did set out to attempt to articulate and investigate issues around power dynamics that play out between escort and punter.  I could only do that by using my own experience. 

While researching the poem I found that the paraphernalia around the cooking and consumption of crab is complex and highly disturbing, involving extraordinary violence. For example, the tools used are crab mallets, seafood crackers, picks, kitchen shears, and knives. Alongside, these instruments, I came across details and videos where consumers expressed pleasure over breaking joints, ripping bodies apart, and savouring the experience.

I remember being struck by the terminology used and the violence which resonated and appeared familiar. Indeed, it seemed an accurate metaphor to describe prostitution. The act of consuming and destroying this aquatic crustacean calls attention to the impact and consequences of prostitution on the body, while also highlighting the complex power dynamics within the sex industry.

Drop-in by Chaucer Cameron (Nigel Kent)

裸木や何でも聞こえそうな空　なつはづき

hadakagi ya nandemo kikoesōna sora

            bare trees

            the sky likely hears

            everything

                                                Hazuki Natsu

from Gendai Haiku (Modern Haiku). #722, October 2025 issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 13, 2025)

This week my internet became unstable. No great drama you might think, but this is me and I was at an event where I was reading! It has taken me some time to develop my reading confidence, and to have the right kind of self-talk when things seem to be going wrong.

And now I take a bow because I did not panic! Not only that, I also did not panic in the moments before this when my wife inadvertently switched the internet off at the start of the meeting and I was no longer even in the zoom room. It definitely felt weird to be staring at a screen and realising that despite not physically going anywhere I was no longer present. Like a kind of out of body experience in a dreamlike waiting room that didn’t even exist. […]

It was a good week for poetry… I loved being invited to read at Stephen Paul Wren’s Blood Women book launch, I enjoyed a whole day of editing and drafting some work, and when I landed in my chair after the journey back from the yarn show I found a lovely acceptance in my inbox.

Here’s to zoom rooms, to words and to the people who invite us to share time and space.

Sue Finch, ON HAVING AN UNSTABLE CONNECTION

One advantage of later-life publishing is that older writers seldom need resume fodder. In my own case, and I suspect in many cases, this means I can write more honestly, or at least, I think I’m writing more honestly. I feel freer to write what and how (and when) I want to write. Also, I’m less concerned (never unconcerned, however) with competition or with fitting my work into literary trends or traditions. Part of this is hereditary stubbornness and rebellion; if confessional “I” poems are all the rage, I’ll put together an entire manuscript of 3^rd-person, observational limericks, thank you very much.

Another plus as an older poet is that I’m no longer operating under my grad-school-days misconception that I would someday be a “famous” writer. I was never good at math, but I should have figured out those percentages much sooner than I did. I’ve since made peace with my lack of recognition—no pressure, no ladder-climbing, no hobnobbing unless I feel like it, no jetting off for another one-night reading (she says, pretending she wouldn’t just ADORE that)—and I can simply enjoy and appreciate the act of writing itself.

One of the most important things about older poets is that they add perspective to the depth and breadth of poetry. I’m glad for the passion, idealism, energy, and unabashed in-your-faceness of many younger poets’ work. We need it. But we need ALL the voices. We need the less-panicked historical perspective, the longer, sometimes more comprehensive, panoramic view. We need the more outward-facing, less me-centric voice that older writers sometimes bring to the poetic landscape.

In Defense of Later-Life Publishing – guest post by Marcella Remund (Trish Hopkinson)

Lana Hechtman Ayers is a one-woman poetry dynamo. She is the managing editor of three Pacific Northwest poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.”  

In The Autobiography of Rain, her eleventh and most recent collection of poems, rain patters in and out of the poems, welcome, relieving. “The rain is my best friend,” she writes in “Nineteen Things No One Knows about Me (And One They Do)”: “She knows how to keep a secret / and wash away the evidence.” Humor, sometimes, but rain also shows up hand-in-hand with grief. In “Landscape in Dreams”:

Where is it you go
when I lose sight of you in fog?
I’m certain I’ve seen you in dreams
that smell of burnt toast
On rainy days your laughter chimes
raindrops against roof gutter (27)

Oliver de la Paz uses these words to praise the book: “The fickle and atmospheric weather of losses, revelations, and heartbreak shifts and shimmers.” In poems such as “Reasons to Live,” and “On the Nature of Grief,” I was reminded that indeed this is poetry that “shifts and shimmers,”  that encompasses, becomes a voice talking back to you on a suicide hotline, sits beside you, faithful as a loved dog.

Bethany Reid, The Autobiography of Rain

It’s not easy for a poet to find a new angle on daffodils after Wordsworth, but [Julie] Burke gives it a shot in “The promise of daffodils (Spring 2020)”. The date being the beginning of covid,

“Outside, the daffodils find their own bed
wherever they have sprouted, heaving
aside any pebbly impediment, shred
of carrier bag, tin can, or leavings
of take-away. They peek from under hedges,
squirt out of pots, bluster along carriageways.
They are ground level pledges
of sunshine when our heads are too heavy to raise.”

Even flowers can grow from discards and stony ground. Burke’s poems are daffodil-like too: they broach tricky subjects but a note of renewal and optimism reverberates through each poem. A reminder that life is not monotone, but full of harmony if we allow ourselves to hear it.

Emma Lee, “Kindling” Julie Burke (Five Leaves Publications) – book review

Vanishing Points, by Lucija Stupica, is a translation from the Slovene (by Andrej Peric, published by Arc Publications in 2024) of the poet’s fourth collection, published in 2019, and is her first book to appear in English. Like Krisztina Tóth, whose book My Secret Life (translated by George Szirtes) I reviewed here, Stupica began publishing in the early 1990s, after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and Slovenian independence. Also like Tóth, this book suggests a searching restlessness, perhaps a carrying of deep scars that continue to affect a life. The book’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem, ‘Questions of Travel’ (1965): ‘Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?’ The Vanishing Points Stupica seems to have in mind are those to do with distance, diminishment, travel and perspective. This has been stimulated by (or has itself provoked) her leaving Slovenia to live on the tiny island of Oaxen, near Stockholm, in 2012. This experiment in ‘island living’ proved unhappy and short-lived, as she and her family moved to Stockholm itself three years later and many of these poems explore this experience. […]

Bishop (like early Lowell) manages the trick of making personal experiences resonate far beyond the merely autobiographical. I don’t think Stupica has the same magic for the most part. In ‘North’, there is something more narrowly personal in the differing wishes of the man and woman. He wishes for a lake, darkness, spruce trees, while she wishes for the sea and light. The re-location to Oaxen seems to provoke a divergence of views. The woman experiences boredom, a sense of death (the demise of a beetle in one poem, a toad in another) and a brief prose poem evokes a stultifying routine: ‘You’ve become heavy as a rock. Move it. Eat up your meal. Do the cleaning. Talk to the neighbour. Smile. Brush your teeth’. A more extended meditation on the fascination with islands, ‘Islomania’, presents some of the more attractive aspects of the wintry landscape, the wild orchids, seal spotting, but the midnight sun and the summer’s tourist invasion, convince the narrator that those who bear the ‘affliction’ of islomania have contacted a rare disease, an intoxication, even a ‘sort of scar until the end of time’.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of ‘Vanishing Points’ by Lucija Stupica, tr. Andrej Peric

Set with opening poem, “Before We Begin …,” and six sections—“Psychotic Notebooks,” “Purgatorial Imagery,” “There Needs to Be More to This Than Nostalgia,” “A Harmonious Armageddon,” “An Autobiography” and “Consonants* A Book of Visions*: A Book of Illuminations*: A Chorus of* L*ght: Against L*ght: Against L*ght”—The Book of Interruptions extends Mohammadi’s accumulations of space and spacings, writing a sequence of interruptions and disturbances, hiccups and self-sabotage, writing the possibility and impossibly of words, language and meaning. “my mouth bubbling under water // the narrator mentions me by name,” the opening of the sequence “Psychotic Notebooks” begins, “I am the cliffhanger // for one of a thousand nights before slaughter // having asked more questions than I have answered // in the city within the city I swerve // among the cacophony of the tunnel // an ocean within an ocean [.]”

Gestural and expansive, there is an element of worldbuilding to [Khashayar “Kess”] Mohammadi’s lyric, one that returns the structure to the crossed-out (or interrupted) vowel through their use of the * symbol from prior work (specifically), writing a narrative structure concurrently fragmented, populated and isolated, swirling amid staccato struggles with faith and cities, queer experience and a litany of restless, thoughtful observations around feeling unsettled in a secular Toronto, while holding on to a cultural history of the poem that connects to that stretches back thousands of years. With each collection, Mohammadi furthers a complexity of their engagement with the long poem, the book-length accumulated lyric, a trajectory that is as striking as it is propulsive. And yet, each work begins fresh, composed with an open curiosity, and an array of questions, some new, and others, that need to be asked more than once, for the sake of a broader, even ongoing, response. 

rob mclennan, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, The Book of Interruptions

At one of the many events I attended this fall, a magazine editor, reflecting on downsides of a generally rewarding job, sighed and said something like “so many bad poems.” What’s hardest for me about selecting poems for Shenandoah is how many good poems I receive, way more than I can accept, given a limited budget and small production staff. “Good” can encompass a lot of values, but I think what I mean here is not only skill–the sense that someone has read a lot of poetry and is crafting their diction, linebreaks, etc. with care and knowledge of the options–but something like sincerity. I sometimes roll my eyes at the word “sincerity” when applied to literature, because art isn’t life. Yet it matters when a reader can sense a person behind the poem, when the piece conveys vulnerability or a sharp mind in motion or searching honesty, especially in this AI-blighted moment. I often feel moved and intrigued by submissions that don’t quite make the difficult final cut. It’s both beautiful and heart-piercing to know how many dedicated writers are trying to deliver their work to readerships.

With all of these feelings, I’ve been whittling down a pool of entries for the Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize during the past few weeks–I try to give at least the small mercy of a timely decision–and finished late Friday. Some of the poems I rejected are staying with me, as well as the terrific pieces on the finalist list.

Editing has both steeled and tenderized me. Sometimes knowing what it’s like on the other side of Submittable dulls my will to try–how does anybody ever rise to the top? Should I even bother drafting a poem if I don’t have a shiny, high-stakes idea? (The answer to that is yes: the process has to matter more than the product.) But I understand now that when I’m rejected, I may still have reached one or a few appreciative readers who lingered over the work, thought about it for a while. That’s not nothing. Reading submissions reminds me, too, that persistence matters. As an editor who has rejected good writers multiple times, I root for those stalwart subbers to break through with a poem I cannot pass up. I also respect poets who are just done with the discouraging struggle to be published in traditional ways–or perhaps done with my rejections specifically! There are many ways to write a “good” poem and many ways to share it. As often as I think “this poem has strengths but isn’t in its best possible version yet,” the writer might counter, validly, that I’m just not the right reader.

Lesley Wheeler, The knife

I know very little about opera, but I think “Recitativo secco” is what opera singers sometimes do between songs – minimal orchestration: more talking than singing. In musicals they would talk.

I can’t find much online about the pros/cons of recitative. It can involve a few instruments. “secco” (dry) is the most minimal style. Here are a few quotes –

• “It increases the interest of Scenes which, deprived of the resources of the Orchestra, might become tedious: but it seriously diminishes the amount of contrast attainable in effects of colouring and chiaroscuro” (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Secco_Recitative)
• secco recitative gave way to full recitative by 1820 in serious operas, and became standard in comic operas during the following decade (New Grove Dictionary)
• “Typically, the earlier the opera is, the easier it is to distinguish between recitative and other operatic sections, such as arias or ensemble pieces” (https://www.operasense.com/tag/recitativo-secco/

In books like Tim Steele’s “Towards a winter solstice” the rhyme/meter keeps ticking over even when the poetry’s having a rest. In free verse books like “Bycatch” (Caroline Smith) (a good book) there are stanzas (indeed, whole poems) where the line-breaks carry on even though the text is prose. It’s like those joggers who run on the spot waiting for the lights to turn green.

So what’s wrong with talking instead of (gratuitous?) singing? What’s wrong with passages of prose? Maybe

1. the work feels more of a unified whole if the music/form is sustained
2. there is a hierarchy of arts – music is higher than words; poetry is higher than prose – and people prefer the higher arts
3. there’s a thin-end-of-the-wedge fear – if you start leaving out line-breaks where will it end? Flash?

Tim Love, Recitativo secco and poetry

Since to be engaged with poetry is to be engaged, endlessly, in this business of working out how things are like other things (thank you, James Mcconachie, for that one), it stands to reason that a poet might wonder about the things-as-things of poems, themselves. What is a poem? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot again recently, after reading Jon Stone’s excellent essay ‘The Amalgamist’s Workshop’, published here. In this essay, Stone sets out what he calls “a new-ish statement of intent” as to the how and why of his writing. The whole essay makes me fizz with excitement and possibility and new ways of thinking (and isn’t that the point?), but especially this part:

“To characterise poems as ‘toys’, meanwhile, is to suggest (in what I hope is a friendly way) that the reader is also part of the amalgamatic process – that a poem is something to get involved with, not just observe or absorb. “Here is a toy. Do something with it. We learn through play.””

Poems are toys. Well, of course they are. I’ve been groping about in the dark for a while now with the idea of the act of poetry as play (perhaps serious play, but play nonetheless), but reading this statement was like a torch beam illuminating something at my feet that I was just about to stumble over. Poems are toys. They are things the reader brings their own imagination, openness and capacity for surprise to bear on. Like a toy, a poem can be played with in an endless variety of ways, not even remotely limited to the functional and physical constraints of the thing itself. Like a toy, successive readers will play with different facets of the poem and derive different results with it. One reader really enjoys pressing that button that makes a loud ding; another enjoys making the twinkling lights flash; one likes shaking it to see what words fall out; another just wants to wrap it up in a makeshift blanket and cuddle it like a teddy bear.

You might say – well, what is special about toys, anyway? Any random object can be a toy. Yes, it can. But when it’s being played with as a toy, its function changes, from the function of the object to that of a toy. Toys have a special status that is different to other kinds of objects and it’s in the act of playing with them that this status is conferred. Is the same true of poems, and reading?

Victoria Spires, Egg rolls off a table

our town was big enough to consume me.
now that i am older i seek out larger monsters
to devour me bone by bone but then
it was just the overpass & the red truck.
the old factory by the train station
without any windows.

Robin Gow, 11/15

I was just working on a blog post for Patreon on titling your work, and while I reined it in to be more informational and practical, it had me thinking of all the ways I’ve titled works, both individually and as collections. While I have very little problem coming up with book titles (well, barring one recent project I will get to in a minute) individual poems have always been rough for me. It may in fact be why I rarely title the smaller bits and pieces of larger projects, instead leaving them without titles or adding numbers/letters and other typographical elements to denote separate pieces. 

It wasn’t always this way, and my first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC is an excellent example of my early poet days, when I titled individual pieces much more frequently.  I was pretty good at it, and usually the title was something I sussed out of the poem as I drafted it, or it was a word or phrase I had scribbled down in a notebook. The real challenge was the overall collection, which had many titles and versions in those couple of years I was pulling together that first full-length and submitting it. In the fall of 2003, it was titled “Almanac”, and was arranged by seasons, Later, it merged with a second manuscript of poems written between 2004-2005 I was calling “The Fever Poems.”  During that summer of revision, right before the combined version that was eventually accepted, I mended the two titles together and it stuck.

My second book, IN THE BIRD MUSEUM, was not always called that. When I queried and sent the book to Dusie Press, it was still called “Instabilities, ” after another one of the poems. It was a title that reflected the ideas of knowledge and transgression well. My editor suggested I change it to “In the Bird Museum” which was the title of another one of the poems and I was amenable to the change.

GIRL SHOW, however, was always GIRL SHOW, even before I had written a single poem. I pulled it from a non-fiction historical book I had on my desk in the library with the same title that was all about women sideshow performers. When I wrote the first poem, this was its title and the guiding force behind the book as it took shape over the next couple of years, even enduring my MFA, where I completed the manuscript as my thesis project. The title of my next book, THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS, if I remember correctly, came from something scribbled in my notebook. At the time an editor requested to see the manuscript in the fall of 2012, I vaguely remember slapping the title on it and seeing if they thought it worked. When the book came out less than a year later, that was the title. 

Kristy Bowen, naming the beast

Some days I feel I’m getting quieter and quieter. Have less that demands to be barked [at] anywhere outside my head, or less worth saying, less worth the effort toward affecting the world order, or the small world, anyway, in which I roam. I’m a wizard, often, at conversing. The idle chitchat I can do when required. I don’t mind small talk. (I don’t trust people who do. It is a small courtesy in an often discourteous world, this world of humans we cannot escape.) But I’m more apt these days to remain quiet. Sometimes it feels like a defeat. Other times it feels like new wisdom. Both could be true, of course, depending on the context of my silence. Some silence is a being-with, some is a withdrawal-from. Some verbiage is a combat. Some a defense. Some a nervous habit. More and more I am trying to learn all the differences among the types of talk and the sorts of silences. More and more I am trying to empathize with each. 

Marilyn McCabe, be visited by a dream of the world as kind

The poem is sitting opposite you, watching while you read it through. Once you raise your eyes from the page, it catches your glance. Takes a sip of its glass of Tempranillo. Lets you think. Then sends you back to the beginning to reread it again in light of the ending.

You draw up some more chairs: one for your memory, one for your dreams, another for your imagination. The poem pours them all a glass of that Tempranillo. They swirl it and sniff. Clink glasses in a silent toast. Start talking among themselves. You even dare to join their conversation.

And that’s when the poem stands up, drains its glass, and quietly leaves. Its job is done.

Matthew Stewart, The poem and you

Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California.  Where have I been?  In the land of the skeptic, in France.  But what luck to have had California before me.  Full-on sensory discovery.

Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me for walking naively into known mythologies.)

Rocky cliffs and water that rolls with a steady rhythm that gathers, then completely releases with an assured swagger, somehow embarrassing the Atlantic. 

Painting after painting in a grand sfumato that no matter how many times you clean your glasses, is real and before you.

Sad lady of the lake and her plangent guitar at a hillside café.

Looking, looking, I became entranced by planes and screens.

Jill Pearlman, Be Here Now, California (gaps included)

Here were tall lines of stone men and women, arranged in rows and circles, as if preparing to dance. Around the small hill on which they stood, cloud had fallen into the hollows of wide-open peat country, a land where lochs and lochans, hills and hillocks morph into creatures of fantasy, illusions created by the pouring and shifting mists and rains, by light and shade.

I was speechless in the company of these stones. My ears rang. R and I walked around, together then apart, each trying to make sense of them, of the wider landscape in which they stood. From standing stones to distant hills the space was filled with hollows and hummocks. Each loch was a bowl filled with milk. Each hill trailed fogs made of silk. The effect was unsettling and unnerving. I lost my balance a few times when my feet should have been sure. […]

Our modern world is febrile with anxiety, paranoia and conflict, addled with gut-wrenching concern for the future. But shadows on pale sand, white shells and crisped seaweed and fragments of ancient rock grounded me. I thought of remote lives, the long churn of time and the relentless natural processes governing Planet Earth, of how people knew their natural landscape, understood the local geology, found comfort in using stone to observe change across seasons and years, and calculate the motions of the stars. Perhaps they knew the deep time memories held within rock. Perhaps a sense of permanence and meaning came from the process of construction. Perhaps the standing stones gave reassurance to the builders and their families about their own place in the universe, and enabled them to imagine distant futures.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, The comfort of rock

They chant the same Psalms, the same tones
used for centuries. Modern minds scoff,
but the monks, yoked together
into a process both mystical and practical,
do as they’ve been commanded.

Their graves, as unadorned as their robes,
stretch out in rows of white crosses, reminiscent
of a distant French field. We might ponder
the futility of belief in a new covenant,
when all around us old enemies clash,
or we might show up for prayer, light
a candle, and simply submit.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Armistice Day with Monastic Poem

In life, in a marriage, in a community, in a company, in a story, there is a moment when you can see the light ahead. You clearly see what’s going to happen. You know: danger. Democracy-ending danger. You see the lanterns flickering. There was a time when this mobilized people, made them understand that it was time to rise to action.

I feel the heaviness of the future pushing against my own door. This year, our press has withstood an extreme funding crisis, springtime fires, and now, emergency flooding that has left half our space unusable. In 2015, we were nearly ready to close the press, and now, after the government has consistently reinforced that the arts are useless, we are looking into the same abyss. But we continue ahead with the knowledge that now, more than ever, narratives rooted in truth and experience must be uplifted. Despite widespread hopelessness, I know we can achieve a different story. I feel the breath of the gods. Overcoming this, and doing so in community, will be the joy of a lifetime.

Kate Gale, One if by Land, Two if by Sea: Misinformation in a Burning Country

This morning the beech leaves I carried home have curled into themselves. Rather like us in front of the log-burner at night or when we climb under the plump duvet. We sigh before we fall asleep, the brilliance of autumn folding up behind our eyes, packing itself away for another year.

We are ready now, for whenever it comes: the first frost, or even, perhaps, one morning that strange flat silence marking the arrival of snow.   

tree-pose
going deeper
into myself

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Towards December

This week: chaos gardening, the father of concrete poetry, rewriting Utopia, hoarding ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.

Someone in the apartment to my left applies his drill to the wall in between us, forcing the hard buzz into the drift of my reading, altering the smooth of images, and I am reminded of how perception in poetry depends on pacing, on the rate of movement and the appearance of speed bumps, sirens, pauses.

It is morning. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind drags its “drunk rooftops” into the light. “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing” — tracking, collecting, studying — “hot legs and rosebud breasts”…

The teens are among the sunbathers today, their voices retreating as they move towards the beach; a clump of busy vowels to which no consonant can cling by the time the teens’ shout ascends to where I stand, watching, from the balcony. Ferlinghetti builds from association and accumulation: the images link to each other mnemonically, like the simple dogs and cats on those flashcards once used to teach phonics.

Alina Stefanescu, “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing”

Maggie Smith and I are hitting the road this September to bring The People’s Project to y’all live and in color! We’re so excited! All the tour information is included below AND here’s a sneak preview of the introduction we wrote for the book! […]

This anthology is a community as a book. As we put it together, we turned to people who we always turn to for guidance, encouragement and truth. These are the people we text and call to talk our way through the path of daggers. These are the mentors, siblings on the page, and friends we trust with both heavy-hearted conversations and laughter loud enough to color a crowded restaurant. We’ve broken bread, poured drinks, danced, and created art with these folks. And now, as both an offering and a prayer, we’re bringing the best of us to you. In a 1982 interview with Kay Bonetti, Toni Cade Bambara said “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed class, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” The People’s Project is as much about what we need and hope for as it is about who we are.

The fact is, reader, no one is coming to save us but us. Our survival and future—not just through this political era, but onward into the blur of eras that await—wholly depend on our ability to connect with and protect each other far and wide, to share what we’ve learned from our varied and shared histories in order to enrich each other’s wisdom, confidence and imagination. The People’s Project is our attempt to honor the fact that, terrified as we are, we are nonetheless proud to understand the stakes of our work. No way forward but through, together. As it should be.

Saeed Jones, “The People’s Project” is going on tour!

Those tragic headlines crash into well-being, shatter personal alphabets, then leave us to pick up the pieces of broken lives and languages.

I remember when we used to read poetry to one another on the front porch of my aorta,

how every line would beat a distinct pulse of love.

It’s a comforting feeling, like how I know my daughter‘s old baby cradle won’t wake up one day

believing it’s a nest of grenades.

Rich Ferguson, The Inner Workings Revisited

The fire began close to the military base at Fylingdales. 18 bombs have exploded; soft moss and sundew, bilberry, cowberry, lapwing and adder. Where a fire burns, the soil is sterilised and seeds grow slowly. The ground is dry and hard, rain gushes fast from the high ground, hard into the valleys, taking the dry soil with it; hawthorn and rowan, the ancient oak. 12 fire crews are fighting the blaze over 25 km of fire, many of them voluntary. The fire chief thanks the public for their donations of drinks and cake – “We are at saturation point”, he says, and asks us to stop.

The fire broke out on the 11th. On 14th, we watched the smoke in the distance from Blakey Ridge, in the low pink evening. We walked from Grosmont to Robin Hood’s Bay and it felt like my heart was breaking. It’s been a very tough two weeks, for reasons more complex than I can describe in this blog. But I will find the words. That’s what poetry is for, and music, and my own good time.

On Thursday 4th September I’ll be reading at “A Love Song to Peat” at Ponden Mill, on the edge of the threatened Walshaw Moor; there will be music and films and words, there will be miles of moors, the craft of walls, ruins holding their stories. “The wild mountain thyme / Grows around the bloomin’ heather/ Will ye go, lassie, go?”

We write love songs because the landscape inside us is so huge and we are so small. We write love songs because love is all of the oceans and we cannot hold them. Sometimes we are a curlew and we sing for our mate and our chicks, we sing for our land. Sometimes we are quietly on fire and a thousand years burn inside us. Sometimes the flames reach high and we sing so that the fire crews will come, and the people will bring them cake. Look at my flames, we sing, look at my ashes.

Clare Shaw, Love Songs

Nothing of night is left
in this day; the angle
of the sun promises
more heat; the earth itself
seems slant, matching the sun
I tilt sideways to find
balance. There is a gasp
in the light as if breath
will be lacking. The gasp
comes true. The light itself
cracked and misplaced.

PF Anderson, Sunslant

The ziplock of summer fruit is emptied.

I did 3 readings and an author’s day. I sent 2 submissions, and 3 of 4 reviews that I have on tap. I repaired a few book bindings, read a whack of things, located 2/3 mislaid books. I’m averaging a title read every 5 days, some 16 pages, some 400+. I found a new contest judge for next year for the haiku contest I coordinate for Haiku Canada. I’m talking with two poets who might let me publish a chapbook of their poems this fall and spring. Taking a page from Tanis I’m taking names and seeing if we can start a local silent book club. Humming along. […]

I write in fragments whose centre has not been found. Or isn’t needed.

Pearl Pirie, Summer Zipped

Apparently there’s a newish fad in the horticulture world called “chaos gardening.” This is described in UK’s House and Garden as “inspired by the unruly growth of nature and a whiff of rebellion against the control and neatness of traditional horticulture.”

Oh honey, many of us have been chaos gardening for a very long time. […]

I’m mostly at peace with the chaos here, although my better self would like to tend more closely to our gardens. But my husband and I just don’t have the gumption right now to do more. We are exhausted by a country in chaos. Democracy is being undermined by well-funded extremists, authoritarianism is marching in, inequality is compounded, genocide not only ignored but fostered, and all the while the climate every life form relies on to survive is being sacrificed for profit.

Chaos, I’m reminded by evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme, is one of the powers of the universe. We’re here thanks to the cataclysmic death of stars. Their explosions provided the iron circulating in our blood, the calcium making up our bones, the oxygen we inhale. Cataclysms on our planet have caused five major extinctions. (We humans are causing the sixth.) We have endured many other catastrophes including wars, famine, plagues. And yet, from the cataclysmic death of stars, we get to live on a planet graced by orioles, humpback whales, monarch butterflies, sunsets, tides, elephants, newborn humans. We are all part of one another, composed of star stuff.   

May long and gentle rains like this one fall on every parched landscape. May beauty pair with chaos and peace rise from cataclysm.

Laura Grace Weldon, Chaos Gardening

I do not have brilliant form with Louise Glück. I seem to remember the Poetry Book Society choosing or recommending The Wild Iris in the mid-nineties, buying it, and it completely going over my head. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I find this description, taken from the Carcanet and PBS websites, very appealing, but that is where my admiration, not to mention understanding, has come to a halt: ‘What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siècle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.’ Sometimes we encounter books just when we need them. But sometimes this happens much too early. I think this was the case with The Wild Iris.

I gave Louise Glück another go in the autumn of 2020. I’d published a book in 2019, just in time not to be able to promote it during the pandemic and, like everyone else, was generally exhausted. Plus my mother had just died, from dementia and Alzheimer’s. A friend advised me to ignore everything and concentrate on reading four poets and watch what emerged. It was kind advice, meant well. Never having come to terms with my Glück-failure, I bought her massive Poems 1962-2020. But still we did not get on. A few weeks later, the book now discarded, she won the Nobel Prize.

And that was where I was prepared to leave things. Another failure, but hey. It happens. And then Louise Glück died. And I read this extraordinary piece about her by Colm Tóibín in the Guardian and I felt something in me begin to shift:

When I interviewed her at the New York Public Library in 2017, she spoke about the two years of silence, maybe two and half, that came before The Wild Iris, for which she won the Pulitzer prize in 1993. She was not writing badly, she said – she was simply not writing at all. Not a verb. Not a noun. She was living in Vermont and hardly reading anything either. Just gardening books.

During this period, she had just two lines in her head, which had come to her out of the blue. But she had no idea where they might go, or even what they might mean.

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

It struck me because as poets we hardly ever speak about silence, or if we do, only in hushed tones, and certainly not publicly. The silence I’m talking about here is the one we might experience at the end of a poem, or a burst of them, when we feel blessed to have been visited by something from outside of ourselves, giddily and not quite fully believing that the poems were real, or any good, or even written by us. It gave me great comfort to hear about a famous poet experiencing this silence, venturing into it with a mere two lines and a handful of gardening books, and trusting that these would be enough to see her through to the other side and one day writing again.

Anthony Wilson, There was a door

Louise Glück was a pivotal voice in American poetry for the last few decades. She received every esteem a poet can earn: The Nobel Prize in Literature, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Poet Laureate of the United States, among others. But what is most notable about her is that she brought a new poetic voice to the forefront: not confessional, but mythic; sparse but also poignant.

In 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of Louise Glück’s poetry students at Boston University’s MFA program. […]

Toward the end of my time at BU, I met with her for one-on-one conference at her home, over my final manuscript. She told me that she really thought that I had talent. I could’ve about fallen out on the floor to hear her say that, and that encouragement bolstered me up through many a year in my mediocre poetry-career.

Because one thing about Louise: she meant what she said. She could be just as biting and austere as her poetry, but what was so attractive about her and her writing was that it always told the truth, the plain bald-faced truth.

Renee Emerson, Louise Glück: a poet of precision

I’ve returned home from August, and from the resolve that emerged as I went into this gift of a month that I’d swim outdoors each day. It wasn’t a rule so much as a blessing I’ve given myself, and that was given to me by spending most of the time on P’s farm in Sweden, a few hundred metres from a beautiful lake.

Something about taking this love of mine – for water – sacredly has been part of a cleansing that I’ve felt on my skin and within my body. […]

This morning, I swam out of August’s final day in the River Severn just along from where I live. It was J. who helped me to see I could find my way home like this. All these years in Shrewsbury, and I’ve never swum in the river which characterises the town’s year with its floods and lows, its duck families, weir, and leaping salmon. Without the peaty clarity of Norrsjön it has its own beauty of trees, swans, and tiny fishes.

And on my allotment, I’ve started a new project: Biscuit Tin Lake. I won’t be able to swim in it until I work out how to shrink down to Lilliputian height. But I’ve sunk the tin into soil, filled it with water, and surrounded it with stones, shells, and prunings, and floated a few flowers on its surface in memory of friends. And maybe, in September, there’ll be birds that come to drink, and to bathe. 

Liz Lefroy, I See Myself Home

the shrivelled plums
showing the summer sunshine
their deep blue hearts

Jim Young [no title]

I dropped Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (Mr Lear) two-thirds of the way through, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I felt I’d got to know Lear already and didn’t need to know how it ends. Which is often the way with biographies.

Lear must be best known now for his nonsense poetry, but he was also an incredibly talented, astonishingly hardworking and very well-travelled painter (Auden: He became a land). He also hero-worshipped Tennyson and spent a lot of time with the poet’s family on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson, being Tennyson, kept him at arm’s length: Lear’s friendship was with Emily. Lear was very good at making friends, yet always seemed to be at arm’s length, everywhere. Uglow brings out just how important the cartoons are to his limericks: and how often his character’s expressions complicate his words…

Jem Wikeley, Some reviews I didn’t write

i have been a pig in another life.
i wrote poetry & shared it with the others.
we plotted ways to take over the government
but then we died. they sensor death
on the internet these days. people say,
“unalive” as if death were an erasing instead
of a return. i was sitting & eating lucky charms
last night & thinking about how one day
all the buzzing in my head will be nothing.
i don’t know how to make sense of death other than
to watch the street sweeper go by & panic,
wondering if i remembered to move my car.

Robin Gow, street sweeper

I spend as much time as I can around death. I know that sounds morbid and absurd. But I literally have a dead katydid on the table next to me as I type this. I found it on my porch, likely a “gift” from one of my cat friends. On my walk on River Road yesterday, I came across a dead raccoon lying on their back, their gaping mouth full of pulsating maggots. Their little arms and legs were reaching upward, hands open. I knelt down next to them and held their little hand for a little bit. This reminds me, I think I have a skull or wing or something in one of my fanny packs. I have to go find it. I don’t know if I want to find it? I can’t even remember exactly what it is? You’d get a kick out of how horrible my memory is.

Sarah Lada, Are You There, Mandy? It’s Me, Sarah

Rilke wrote about
living the questions

not searching for answers
and so I will sit here and listen 

to the rain on the glass roof
my heart like a fulcrum

between joy and sadness:
the sweet spot of not-knowing.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Not Knowing

I was attracted to this blue morpho butterfly in Sheffield’s Millenium Gallery today. The exhibition was all about colour, how we perceive it, what it signifies etc. Writers have often used it as a unifying theme or motif (the blues that immediately spring to mind are Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and, more recently, Debbie Strange’s haiku collection, Random Blue Sparks (Snapshot Press 2024). Rereading Haiku 2024 (Modern Haiku Press, Ed. Scott Metz & Lee Gurga) I came across this monoku by David McKee which uses blue in a way that seems to allow for lots of different possibilities, something I always admire, and invariably feel a little envious of too!

blue note scale model of her heart

David McKee
whiptail 7

So, note to self- try to be a bit more experimental. And use some colour!

Julie Mellor, Blue

Blue sweater with a hole
for the head. Blue sky
through a hole in the
head. Blue head. Blue
sky. Blue river. Blue
bridge, empty, quiet,
spanning blue night and blue night.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Blue

The latest small edition from Barley Books is a themed sequence of poems from Beau Beausoleil, with textile images from me. The book on top of the packet is an unbound proof. The packet contains the first ten – of an edition of 100 – which I’d hoped to post to the author in San Francisco today. When I got to the Post Office counter I was told that a new memo stated that no parcels should be accepted for sending to USA. If accepted, they would be either returned or destroyed.

The 10% tariff comes into effect in two days’ time. It will have a massive impact, both financial and administrative, on any business exporting to the States. Private individuals like me are currently unable to send parcels to friends and family, until further notice. A report from The Independent here.

This book will be available in UK from me for £10, as soon as I have made some more. It is printed on ‘Elliepoo’ recycled paper with ‘Denim’ flyleaf, and the cover is ‘Flat White’ card made from recycled take-away coffee mugs. All three of these are now unavailable. When I run out, I’ll have to find something else.

Ama Bolton, How love sustains us

Eugen Gomringer died on 25th August 2025 at the age of 100. It seems appropriate that the life of the man known as “the father of concrete poetry” should have achieved the round number of a whole century, with all the simplicity and symbolism of its single line and two circles. Born in Bolivia and educated in Switzerland, Gomringer’s work embodied a modernising spirit of gleaming idealism and comic-strip humour about the world of international signs and logos in which we live. “Our languages,” he wrote, “are on the road to formal simplification” — a fact that the poet must work with. His poem “roads 68”, for example, composed in English, captures the monotonous phenomenon of the petrol station by repeating the names that loom up along the motorway in different combinations, then giving them a final, rhyming twist:

TEXACO and
ESSO

ESSO and
BP

BP and
SHELL

the common
smell

[…]

One of the best descriptions I have read of how Gomringer’s poems work (or play) comes from Greg Thomas’s Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2019):

Gomringer’s earliest concrete poems […] tend to rely on an impression of objectivity involving implied referential accuracy. Many of these poems employ a tiny lexicon of words, each imbued with a sense of precise aptitude generally enhanced by repetition. That impression of accuracy, coextensive with an impression of universal intelligibility, is often achieved by using words coherent across several different languages, as in Gomringer’s 1952 poem “Ping Pong”. Indeed, in this poem, the onomatopoeic title-words seem not so much multi-linguistic as meta-linguistic, foregoing semantic language entirely in order to relay the universal, differential structures of linguistic cognition from which specific statements take shape.

This nicely describes how concrete poetry verges on an abstract verbal art, concerned with the dynamics of relationship. But I think there is still an important element of semantic or referential content in “Ping Pong”: the visual 2-3-3-2 rhythm of its shape, made of overlapping lines on a diagonal axis, wittily suggests a rally across a table tennis table. Gomringer said of his word-shapes that “the constellation is an invitation”, and here the reading eye is invited to bounce around like a player at the table, or even the “o”-shaped ball itself. In this way, he hoped, the poet could “help” the reader to find the poetry in modern life through a new “kind of play-activity”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #35: Eugen Gomringer (1925-2025)

Many, even most of the poems in Imtiaz Dharker’s Shadow Reader present some form of suffering, cruelty, oppression or abuse. However, they don’t cloud our impressions of these things by pushing the poet’s own emotions at us; presenting scenes and situations in a gently understanding way, with a polished musicality of sound, they let the beauty or cruelty of what they show speak for itself, in all its subtlety of nuance and overtone. In other ways, they’re highly varied in style and imaginative mode. Some offer what appear to be direct accounts of literal events, letting broader metaphorical or representative suggestions shine through by implication; some, at an opposite extreme, are like pieces of fairytale or myth; many include elements of both. The lovely ‘For the Girl on the Elizabeth Line’ is an example of the first mode. Its language seems simple and transparent, achieving power by a sudden deepening of tone in lines three to five:

Standing by the door
the way young people do,
as if a seat is a waste
of life, you are lost

in each other.

Only in the third stanza does it emerge that what we’re seeing isn’t the scene of joyful young love it seems at first glance. The whole poem reverberates with complex suggestions of power, oppression and helplessness, both in the couple and in the passengers who silently watch them. The way our understanding of the couple’s relationship changes is a wonderfully delicate evocation of how liable we are to misinterpret our fleeting glimpses of other lives. At an opposite extreme, formally speaking, we have the sonnet ‘For the Woman Who Changed Back to a Snake’. Addressed to the woman / snake by someone who may be her mother, this poem seems to create an original, profoundly ambiguous myth related to the myth of Persephone and folk tales of the selkie or seal woman. Its vivid, highly wrought language makes a series of intensely sensuous imagistic impressions so that on one level it’s very concrete. It might be called abstract on another because we can read such very different stories into the chain of metaphors. These stories converge to suggest ideas and feelings about female beauty and the habitual mistreatment and proper respectful treatment of women in a way that’s the more powerful and the more wide-reaching for being indirect.

Edmund Prestwich, Imtiaz Dharker, Shadow Reader – review

In his preface to Studies in the Unnatural World, Keith Tuma writes:

I started writing Studies in the Unnatural World before Allison’s initial diagnosis. I have long been interested in the prose poem. I’m equally drawn to works that complicate the definitions of (and boundaries between) genres and disciplines, particularly when such works examine the relationship between nature and culture. I began this project with the idea of writing short works of prose or prose poetry comprising anecdote, discourse, metaphor, and speculation. These were to be organized and generated by the name of a particular discipline (I speak to friends of my “ologies”). That was the plan.

Allison is, or was, his daughter and the diagnosis was of an ultimately terminal cancer, and so the ‘project’ became entwined with that most unnatural thing, the loss of a child.

The pre-diagnosis pieces are characterised by sharp observation and a dry humour:

Promenadology

We called him Chucky, I can’t remember why—after the movie maybe. He raked leaves, cut grass in town. Had a bulldog face and aggressive gait leaning forward, working his arms with a sense of purpose. Glowered. We put his IQ at 85; we were cruel like that. Then one day we saw him pushing a baby stroller. How can he have a baby? we said. We snuck a look. He was pushing his cat around. Hmmm, we said.

The distancing created by the undefined ‘we’, the implication that the story does not belong to the narrator alone, sets up that punchline which gently ridicules both Chucky’s behaviour and the responses of the ‘we’. It’s even funnier in Tuma’s delivery when reading. Much later on, in a piece called ‘Gerontology’ (all the pieces have an -ology title), we get a glimpse into the impact of Allison’s diagnosis that (in)directly reminds the reader of these earlier poems:

But six years of living with Allison’s illness did plenty to change the ways I look at things too. My sense of humor is not what it was. My tastes in music and literature have shifted, though not in every case. Roger Grenier’s The Difficulty of Being a Dog remains important to me: “And what if literature were a dog tagging along beside you … that hurts you by dying before you do, short as a book’s life is these days?” Though Diane’s problems with her short-term memory were getting worse, I said to our neighbour ‘We’re going up to Maine for the end” and packed up the car. The dogs, at least, were ready.

In between, we read of life in a rented house in Lewiston, trying to get ready, gruelling drives between there and Oxford, Ohio (‘home’ not home), and get more insight into Diane Tuma’s developing health issues, as well as Keith’s own heart problems. There are ekphrastic pieces and observations of what passes for the ‘natural world’. But the dominant thread is the cruel inevitability of death:

We have only the one plant beside the garage, and only one daughter, also dying. Who would want to read a miserable poem about that? Maybe the gods would if I ask nicely, or if I cry out. The gods love best those who die young, but what do they know? Some say Peony is from Paeon, who died when his teacher Asclepius thought he had become too beautiful. Zeus turned him into a flower to save him from the consequences of that observation. Good job, Zeus.

(from ‘Phenology’)

That punchline exemplifies the journey from the dry humour of the earlier poems to the increasingly and understandably bitter flavour of the post-diagnosis work. But that bitterness is handled with a quiet dignity that impresses the reader. In the final piece, Tuma and Diane are taking the final drive home when they find themselves behind a truck bearing a sign that reads ‘Allison’, which Diane photographs (the photo graces the book’s cover). Tuma takes it as literally the sign he asked his daughter to send him from beyond the grave. It’s scant consolation, but consolation nonetheless. Life goes on, like it or not. A deeply moving book, one that will live long in the reader’s mind, despite Grenier’s observation.

Billy Mills, August 2025: A SoundEye Review Special

Inger Christensen’s long poem alphabet was published in 1981. Its backdrop, and the backdrop to much of her work, is the never-ending Cold War and the real existential threat of nuclear conflict. Denmark, “a strategic giant” according to Nato and “a weak link in the chain” according to the Soviet Union, lay in a highly vulnerable position between East and West. “I did not set out to write an apocalypse poem,” said Christensen; but as the sequence progresses, ideas of alienation and ecological collapse force their way in. Its world is shaped by a sense that we are living with a profound environmental grief (daily life in Denmark at the time was punctuated with preparations for nuclear attack). Yet there is also a human process by which we knit together our ordinary world in all its profusion of living things and objects that hold meaning for us, and from which we create some kind of hope.

Lesley Harrison, Writing the Last Word

You studied poetry under David Ferry at Wellesley and co-founded MIT’s literary magazine Rune (1976). What are the main things you learned under David Ferry? What kind of poetry did you study? Who were some of your favorite poets?

David Ferry was probably the best teacher I ever had. I learned an awful lot about both the art of poetry and the art of teaching from him. Wellesley was full of young students who had led pampered lives, which showed up in their attitudes about poetry and about themselves. Prof. Ferry was a master at commenting on the poems produced. He was always – always – able to find something positive to say about any student’s poem. His charity and generosity were beautiful to behold.

I think the secret of his pedagogical style was that he viewed each poem as a starting point, an initial expression of the student’s insight, and helped the student think about how to push the expression further. It’s what I call the dynamic perspective on one’s life or work, as opposed to the static perspective. Not “where have you arrived at?” but “where are you going?”. I recently wrote an essay on this question: https://writersinkyoto.com/2025/07/31/nonfiction/doko-iku-where-are-you-going/

[…]

In general, what are the key aims that you have when translating Japanese poetry into English?

When translating Japanese poetry into English, my overriding priority is to capture the spirit of the poem. Often the spirit of the poem takes the form of a specific image, but there is typically a meaning associated with the image. Sometimes, it is a fragment of action or dialog. Sometimes (especially with classical tanka poetry), it is more of a feeling or an emotion.

I think too many translations get bogged down in the pursuit of literal accuracy and academic respectability. Sometimes, of course, this requires a freer style of translation, but I think that makes the poems more accessible and inspiring to ordinary people. I may try out as many as four or five different versions of a poem before selecting one.

You co-translated They Never Asked: Senryū Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center (Oregon State University Press, 2023) with Shelley Baker-Gard and Satsuki Takikawa. What did you enjoy the most about this project? What were some of the challenges of this particular project?

The aspect of this project that struck me most deeply was developing a sense of empathy with the wide range of emotions articulated by the senryu poets. There was raw anger, to be sure. But there was also biting sarcasm, sharp humor, ironic detachment, and a kind of Buddhist resignation in different poems. Appreciating the resilience of the human spirit in the face of such treatment was nothing short of inspiring.

Jacob D. Salzer, Michael Freiling

I’m intrigued by this title by New York-based poet and translator Grace Nissan, The Utopians (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a book that but hints at the structure of the constraint used, through blurbs offered by Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel and Ted Rees. As Black offers: “Using mostly the para-colonial language of Thomas More’s Utopia, Grace Nissan has made an almost shockingly compelling book out of a formal constraint as sharp and absurd as the limitations of living in these trivial, awful, genocidal, yearning times.” Gabriel, also: “Rewriting Utopia using, mostly, Thomas More’s own language, Grace Nissan poses in a different way a classic organizer’s question: how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want?” It is only through the publisher’s website that one might find this (arguably offering little more than what the blurbs provide, and not assisting to spell out Nissan’s specific constraints through this project): “Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called ‘THE WORLD’ about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.” Or, one can seek through the text itself to hear Nissan’s own thoughts, set close to the end: “that the dead mix freely / in a spirit of reverence // this translation is based on / death / terribly well, I must admit // they cremate the / discussion / to accept it [.]”

Nissan is also the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii), and their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale.

rob mclennan, Grace Nissan, The Utopians

Twenty years ago, New Orleans was being slammed by hurricane Katrina. I’ve heard and seen a report or two, and it’s fitting that New Orleans gets the focus. We lived in South Florida at the time, and South Floridians have their own Hurricane Katrina memories, which can be dramatic, on an individual level. […]

If you want a book-length treatment of hurricane Katrina in poems, I recommend  two wonderful books. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler does amazing things, an astonishing collection of poems that deal with Hurricane Katrina. I love the way that Katrina comes to life. I love that a dog makes its way through these poems. I love the multitude of voices, so many inanimate things brought to life (a poem in the voice of the Superdome–what a cool idea!). I love the mix of formalist poetry with more free form verse and the influence of jazz and blues music. An amazing book.

In Colosseum, Katie Ford also does amazing things. She, too, writes poems of Hurricane Katrina. But she also looks back to the ancient world, with poems that ponder great civilizations buried under the sands of time. What is the nature of catastrophe? What can be saved? What will be lost? […]

You did not expect
that months, even years afterwards
you would find yourself inexplicably
weeping in your car, parked
in a garage that overlooks
an industrial wasteland.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hurricane Katrina Memories, Twenty Years On

Katrina was not a natural disaster. It was a man-made failure of engineering and resources made even worse by a racist disregard for the lives of black people.

Speaking personally, it was also the moment in my own radicalization when the final piece of the veil was ripped away and I realized that no part of the official apparatus of our society was here for any reason other than service to capital.

Jason Crane, 20 years since Katrina

August has turned out to be a quiet month for the Gulf South (knock on wood, still 3 days to go) on the hurricane front. I’m sharing my monthly Listopia today because it is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and I want to raise my small voice in gratitude that, while I will never forget the pain and trauma of that experience for myself and so many others, art and beauty survives and thrives in our imperfect, challenging world. Art and beauty sustained me personally in the long, hard months (& years for many) after the storm when we lived in a truly apocalyptic city.

In reviewing what I accumulated over the month in this post, I realized almost every entry centers on pain. The stories, movies, books, and music I chose this month feels like an unconscous choice to roll in pain then purge it. I’ve shed a few tears for many reasons that lead back to the big one. But, although pain is the theme, it’s written to share and share we will.

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2025

August has been a month of firsts. First memoir event with my children in the audience (at Chautauqua in New York). First driving lesson with my daughter. First time cheering on my son at a cross country meet. First time riding on the back of a motorcycle. I love that midlife is still full of firsts.

Another one: my first anthology, co-curated with my dear friend Saeed Jones, is here! Early finished hardcovers of The People’s Project arrived at my house, and they are beautiful. The book is officially out on Tuesday, September 9, so you still have time to preorder copies for yourself and the people in your life who could use some community in book form right now. (That’s all of us. Get copies for all of us.)

Book tour for The People’s Project starts a week from Monday, and Saeed and I would so love to see you out on the road. All of the info and registration links are here. We aren’t in this alone, and let’s not forget it.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

As August haze gives way to the sharpening clarity of September and school, it feels like a good time for this poem which was published in ionosphere along with The Work of Poetry in the Age of Large Language Models. You can find the issue in print here. “The Reckoning of Salt” shares some of the thematic concerns of technology and memory that I was playing around with in “The Work of Poetry”. Looking forward to the use of salt in our energy storage future as well as backward in the way salt mines are used to hold our history, the poem explores the incredible power and potential of this quotidian substance, with a nostalgic turn at the very end. I hope that you enjoy it.

Ruth Lexton, The Reckoning of Salt

When it comes to submitting poems to magazines, we all have our favourites.
UK institutions like The North and The Rialto are two of the places I am grateful to for having published some of my poems over the 15 or so years since I began sending them out. Where to send is a matter for the individual poet – why send work to magazines whose contents don’t generally appeal?

Despite the limited number of poetry publishing outlets, there are magazines, both in print and online, I haven’t and probably wouldn’t submit to. Some, because I have never seen a copy, others because I don’t fancy their name, style or editorial content. There are one or two magazines and newspapers that I would not want to have work in due to longstanding political alignments that I disagree with.

Sometimes, partly due to intermittent impatience with the (often understandably) glacial pace of poetry magazine publishing, I will send some poems to a small online magazine or perhaps a blog where I know I will receive a swift response. Once or twice I have been asked for a poem by an editor, which is very nice.

Roy Marshall, Light Work

I think a fair amount about ambition — often inspired in that thinking by the frequent rejections sliding into my email account — lit mags, publishers, film festivals, whatever else I’ve put my work out for. I wish I could move beyond this need for external validation for my creative work, but I haven’t quite developed past it yet. Not quite that evolved.

But I think too about a different kind of ambition, the ambition for any of my pieces of creative output — poem, painting, other thingies. That feels like a less needy form of ambition. The desire that what I’m making become the best it can be, the best I can make it through my work. The operative word being “through,” as this kind of ambition seems to me to be a bit otherworldly. Which generally is not a thing I believe in. Something about being a vessel. About being confident in my abilities enough to step aside, to set my conscious mind aside, to let, to allow. Even if it means ruining the very thing I’m making. Taking that risk. And I fail regularly, both through that self-consciousness leaking through, or through allowing…but things go awry anyway. It happens.

It’s something about trying without trying, making an effort without it being effort-ful. That kind of ambition is worth working toward.

Marilyn McCabe, I am working on drying up the rain that puddles in my subconscious. I am working on sleeping

This morning the air brings the faint smell of wood smoke and whispers Autumn. […]

I have taken a glance backwards this week to see where I have come from to get to this point. So many years of September marking the start of a new year makes this the kind of habit that is ingrained for me, and I do like the freshness of any kind of new beginning. I can see I have been determined to improve my fitness, and I love the way I have heard continued echoes of self-encouragement as well as wonderfully wise words from friends and family. I have definitely improved my ability to work within a stretch zone instead of a comfort zone, and I can see how I can make even more of this going forward.

There is something spangly about this being episode 99 of this particular blogging where each Monday sees me recording what the air smells like, and I love the fact I can clearly remember some of the scents without even rereading the entries. A webinar with Ruby Wax this week (and I am still kicking myself that I didn’t speak to her when I saw her walking the same road as me in in Chester) made some interesting points about mindfulness. For me the anchoring of my sense of smell and the rhythmic nature of walking are my favourite ways of being in the moment. They suit me and do me good.

My new relationship with Monday mornings began two years ago when I made the promise to myself to get up early each Monday and see what the world smelt like wherever I was. It came about because I knew I wouldn’t be driving to work each morning and therefore my morning tweets would disappear. It was also enhanced by my noticing that the air smelt of raw meringue one day when I was out walking in the rain.

Next week to mark episode 100 I would love you to join me in recording what the air smells like where you are and if you think you might forget and want to take a deep in breath through your nose today instead then feel free to send me your observations.

Sue Finch, COBWEBS BLOWN

On the cusp of September, I have many things planned for the new month, including digging into a new poem project. 

I’ve been working on an article on junk journaling for Classpop!, which I haven’t done in a while, tending toward more digital artwork of late outside some random watercolors every once in a while. I have been hoarding ephemera like a mouse with a tiny nest of dried flowers, postcards, etc I hopefully will get to use as fall creeps in. Tomorrow, hopefully I can polish that off and work on some layouts that have been lingering unfinished in the chaos. 

I am working on some new little bits for Patreon as well in the form of collage postcards that will accompany the September mailing. I sent off the last of the August packages the other day and am excited to get to share not only books and poems, but also art this way in the form of some prints, postcards, bookmarks, and stickers (you can subscribe to the paper bundle tier that includes all this for only $13 a month.) There will be some kind of print edition included in each mailing including a luxe hardcover edition of EXOTICA I put the finishing touches on yesterday. October, if I can make it happen logistically, is another little surprise Patreon-exclusive. Having closed the lid on the CLOVEN project, there is that to return to in September to start the road to publication. I was aiming for the new year, but if I move swifter through the process, some early copies may be available as quickly as November.  I will be showing off the cover design for that soon. 

This past week has bought some rejections from that big batch of submissions earlier in the summer, but some poems did appear in the Tide Driven issue of The Solitude Diaries. These are some of the sea-inspired poems of DEEPWATER of which there are more out in the submission wilds that will hopefully find harbors. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 8/27/2025

Although it’s still warm (with wildfire smoke), fall is approaching, and I’m already ready for dishes featuring delicata squash and our late-harvest corn. Getting the house ready for more visitors, I’m also trying to make space for my books (which my unread stack is now big enough for its own Ikea bookshelf) and changing up decor. My latest stack of books includes collections of ghost stories from other cultures, which should be fun. Our winery book club is reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier for September, a book referenced by so many of our recent club picks, it’s amazing. Were we all super spellbound by that book as teens, and now it’s creeping into our selections?

I’m also judging yet another poetry contest, this time for the SFPA. I judge contests once or twice a year, and I always wonder if people are sending their best work. I don’t send to many individual poetry contests, but I’ll tell you this—you probably have more of a shot than you think. You never know what an individual judge will like. And don’t take not winning personally. Who knows what any judge will like or dislike?

I’m also getting ready to get into poetry submission mode, as I haven’t been sending out poems much in the last few months. Too busy? Too discouraged? Feeling like poetry is maybe a waste of my time after twenty years and feeling like maybe I should switch genres? Maybe a little of each. September is a month of renewal, after all, with its shades of new pencils and new sweaters and of course, more new books. Housecleaning, closet cleanouts, and yes, taking stock of our writing and deciding where to spend our time and energy, with bouquets of dahlias and sunflowers around the house and pumpkin apple muffins in the kitchen.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy September! Last Days of Lavender Gardens and Hot Air Balloons, Judging Poetry Contests, and Preparing for Fall

We are here
with our long-held hungers, our dying
for a taste. We go home with oily newspaper
parcels, the ink of what has happened in the world
pooling into each morsel. Dizzy with pleasure,
we cannot tell when our mouths become raw,
and wake with the sensation of stampeding
beasts, released from the cage of our bodies.

Luisa A. Igloria, Ceremonial

“I wish we humans could be so cooperative,” said one of my neighbours as we watched the chimney swifts circling about the tall brick chimney, their home for the night. This is a sign that fall is coming. As the birds sank down into their chimney, so the pink and orange light fell out of the clouds, and the twilight became dark. Soon they will migrate to Peru.

To begin with, there were half a dozen birds or so. They flit and dart, making no noise. Over the next ten minutes, they are joined by dozens and dozens more, perhaps two hundred. Their flight becomes more patterned. They make loops and figures of eight. Sometimes they crowd above the tall chimney; sometimes they bulge away from it.

Occasionally, one or two birds dive into the chimney; mostly they circulate. At one point, they went so far away, we thought they might spend the night in a nearby chimney. The flock moves in a way that seems intentional, but it’s like watching Brownian motion. You cannot guess how they will be formed in the next few seconds.

Then comes the circle. All the birds, with more and more twittering, started rotating in a great “O”, wider at the top, as if imitating the shape of the Guggenheim Museum. Round and round the chimney they turn, tweeting more quickly. We chat about how this must be it, they must be about to go down.

Then they flex out, make more figures of eight, more wide flights away. Twice more this happens. And then the circle moves faster, tighter. They cohere. The descent begins just as the colour goes out of the evening light.

As they fall into the chimney, a little trickle at the bottom of the large funnel, it looks like a film being run backwards, of smoke escaping in reverse. The coordination required for a dozen birds to descend so closely to each other into the chimney without getting hurt is extraordinary. It almost feels like a visual trick.

Henry Oliver, Chimney swifts on Labour Day

次の世のしづけさにある黄菊かな　浅井一志

tsugi no yo no shizukesa ni aru kigiku kana

            in the tranquility

            of the next world

            yellow chrysanthemums…

                                                            Hitoshi Asai 

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

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

This week: polar bears in the pews, the pace of chance, bioluminescent joy, the secretary spider, and much more. Enjoy!

Today I am in church again. I have come for silent reflection in one of my favourite seats, but it feels a little closer to the edge than usual. Shuffling footsteps in the aisle have me predicting who might be about to go past. Slowly and steadily polar bears are settling into the pews around me. Their black claws lightly clasp copies of The Book of Common Prayer. One across the aisle is flicking the pages randomly as if speed reading, another puffs out fishy breath in celebration of finding the right page.

Sue Finch, CLAPPING WITH MY HEART

the blue hills open a window.
i greet the poem with calloused hands.
silence ticking in the walls.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I think a lot about how the words author and authority are related. What does it do to the authority of the poet—and the speaker—when errors are allowed to remain and play an important role in a poem? I’d argue that it’s worth the risk, and that there is value in that transparency. I’d argue that it doesn’t undermine the authority of the poet or speaker as much as it prioritizes authenticity.

By allowing imperfection into our poems—by letting some of the breaks and repairs show—we’re allowing for a different kind of intimacy between the reader and writer. I read poems to witness someone else’s mind at work, and these moments of error or brokenness, those switchbacks and wait-on-second-thoughts, help me see that work.

I don’t go to poetry for comfort, as a writer or as a reader. I go to poetry to be changed, to revise my own thinking. I’m much more likely to be changed by the original thinking of another human being, a voice I trust because it’s honest with me, and because I can see myself mirrored in the utterance: the occasional faltering, or disorientation, or struggle to find a new foothold.

We’re imperfect. We slip up. We change our minds. We lose our train of thought. We misspeak or mishear or misunderstand. We do this, all of us, in our lives, but can we also sometimes do that in our work? I want to leave you with a prompt: Let some of the seams show in your next poem or essay. Accept the gifts that arrive packaged as missteps. Try not to buff out every scratch, or sand down every splinter. Give yourself permission to be more human.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

I recorded some el cheapo broken student violin. I played a wonky zither (both plucking and bowing it.) Then I slowed down some of the violin sounds. And finally added alto recorder. Of course, I added some digital processing — some reverb and echo effects to make the audio sound good.

And then I found a text file on my computer which had a bunch of poetry material collaged together. I then further randomized the lines and edited them, moving some around, changing some, removing some others. And so I arrived at the poetic text.

I tried videoing me drawing with a thick pencil around some stones but it didn’t look very interesting, so instead I filmed the rocks in close-up, slowly. I slowed the video down even more and then combined the three elements: the music, the text and the video.

I found it the mix of sound, scrolling text (using a fake old typewriter font) and the visuals to be satisfying. Usually inscrutable and ambiguous.

I did think about what the experience of someone watching the text might be. The slow visuals and the non-developmental music, the ambiguous text. And I thought about what the experience might be if encountered online, which I know is different than say, experiencing the work in a gallery or cinema aka biosphere, as my South African granny would say.)

I think in this work, I’m interested in a slow yet rich experience for the viewer, one that asks questions while keeping the viewer engaged in its play of signs. What is happening? What is being said? How does it feel? What does this say about making art and art itself? How is this like or not like the world or my experience of the world? What do I notice? What thought, feelings, experience, tactility, does this work bring up for me?

Gary Barwin, When I invent rain: how much do you want to know about an artwork?

How might we fashion
the pace of chance?

– Sam Kerbel, “Broken Record”

“Broken Record” is from Sam Kerbel’s chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price, a series of poems that riddle, poems that inhabit the riddling, poems engrossed in the unconscious communication between instances and objects. Words are played into their sonic shadows, or their near-homophones, as with “Romance,” which finishes:

Yes royalty is our golden ample
But we’re never quite finished with things
Are we?

The plural pronoun of the last line asks both if “we” are and what “we” is under conditions too thin and skimpy to imagine the events of tomorrow. The conditions, as they stand, are not enough. And yet there is a confirmation  — “Yes” –  followed by that play on sound and idiom which gives us the “golden ample” rather than the golden apple. The ample is not an apple. 

Alina Stefanescu, “Lyric research and adamant digression.”

Another coolish, sunny afternoon in Northern California. Yesterday biking, today gym, everyday, in the morning, writing, translating. I’ve been slogging away at some prose texts (poems) by a contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli. I discovered Magrelli by reading a selection of his poems by a British poet Jamie McKendrick (Faber), really fine translations that made me want to read more of Magrelli (and McKendrick). I began with a recent collection of poems called Exfanzia, then switched to the prose called In the Flesh Condominium, as backup. I’m gradually getting it, but it’s not easy. I’ve fallen back on Baudelaire as relief, a poem called ‘The Giantess’ (La Géante’) ‘recited’ by Matisse in a book I was reading, a favourite of Matisse, apparently. It’s lovely, I hope I can get it word and tone-perfect.

I’m also trying to do that with a couple of my own poem drafts, over and over, in each case a stanza that won’t come right (of course I come back to them after not having worked on them for a while, and nothing will seem right).

So I’m going to the gym and maybe a yoga class to think of something else.

Beverley Bie Brahic, Palo Alto, Tuesday 12 August 2025

Discouragement, a regular visitor to this writer (and many other writers), has settled into the house with me. Summer is often, for me, a time of writing less and doing outdoor and social things more; this year, though spring was lovely despite torrents of rain, summer commenced with the deaths of two long-time friends, and I haven’t been able to shake my low mood. Now the rejection slips are arriving thick and fast, and I’m questioning the value of my work in particular and of creative writing in general. Like, why bother? What am I doing this for? For whom? What’s my purpose? And under what circumstances? Why? […]

Somewhere on a social media platform, I encountered these words by Virginia Woolf (from “A Room of One’s Own”): “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Good perspective, that, to stop being concerned for how long your writing matters, or to whom, as long as what you write is what you wish to write. And then if you don’t submit your work for publication? Maybe that is something you can live with. Rather, something I can live with; at this point in my life, I have had hundreds of poems and essays published, six chapbooks, and three poetry collections…maybe from now on, I should write (as I always have) for myself. Even if my work is not in fashion, or considered irrelevant, or judged as potentially lasting, it is still what I wish to write, what I find necessary to express.

Ann E. Michael, As you wish

O, gentle reader. We’ve all been there. And what other medium is open to bottom-feeding poets like myself, but the open mic. And the whole thing is satirised in outstanding fashion here. The persona of the book, Zuleika, wants to be a poet. So she organises an event (hang on… I see where this is going…). The chapter/poem is called ‘Verbosa Orgia’. The first poet to read I has the adopted name of ‘Hrrathaghervood’ and comes on to shout at everyone and receive a ‘standing ovation’ for his ‘Pictish patois’. I won’t spoil all the lines, but everyone in the audience feels as Zuleika does that ‘Mesmerised… by his stage presence, I had hardly/ listened to his utterances’. You’ve met this guy. I have. In the fiction, his name is actually ‘Robbie’ not ‘Hrrathaghervood’. Like I say, you’ll find him familiar. Familiar, too, is the next poet to read at the reading who is called ‘Pomponius Tarquin who has won the “Governor’s Award for poetry”. He says to the audience “This first poem/ is called ‘Matter. Moment.’ This first poem/ is called ‘The Day My Cat Died’./ There are one hundred poems in the collection,/ but I’ll only read seventy-five of them now.” You’ll finish the chapter thinking you were at this reading (but for the ending…). Next up is ‘Calpurnicus Trio who is ‘popular with sheep’. It’s good poetry satire.

Andy Hopkins, ‘The Emperor’s Babe’, by Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin, 2002): Five Reasons to Read.

Last night, I looked at the Saturn through a low-resolution telescope. It took me some time to understand: the large planet of Saturn appeared like a tiny orange dot with rings around it. At first, I felt a bit disappointed but just a few moments later I couldn’t believe that it happened, that I saw the planet of Saturn with my own eyes through an eyepiece lens. After some time, I went to see it the second time. All day today, the orange dot keeps returning to me in flashes and I keep thinking: I saw the planet of Saturn. 

I would not want to live 2000 years later where it might be commonplace to travel to distant planets. I would like to die in a forest somewhere looking through a telescope. And someone, thousands of years later, will find bones of an ancient woman not knowing that she died looking at rings of Saturn. 

Saudamini Deo, The Rings of Saturn

I feel like I’m crawling out of the primordial swamp, I said to my friend Jody yesterday as I crawled out of cave water to where I was eventually able to stand on my feet. At that point, I was the farthest I had ever gone in that cave. My bare knees stung from crawling on my hands and knees over rocks. We started off as a group of six that dwindled down to four due to personal comfort preferences. The four of us, bipedal again, stared up at the cave ceiling as if we were standing inside an expanded, textured lung. What looked like draperies of flesh was limestone and calcification. Some parts of the ceiling had organic debris lodged in the crevices, an indicator of having been flooded to the ceiling. I then had a flashback to the briefest paralysis of panic I felt when army crawling through the earth just minutes ago. I had imagined the small space I occupied filling with an unexpected torrent of water. Being a pro at panic attacks, the paralysis had subsided with my well-practiced mind tricks.

All of us adorning head lamps, we illuminated the limestone cathedral and marveled at its decadence. The ceiling, lung-like and gill-like, had me mindful of my own breathing apparatuses. The expanding and retracting sacks adjacent to my heart. The swell of my diaphragm. The way air catches in the throat. The way I hold balls of air in my mouth and move them around my gums and lips. How those balls of air chortle as they break down into smaller balls of air. And there I was, a little human inside a ball of air within the cave’s body.

Sarah Lada, What in Earth?

In the just-about dark twilight of late summer, the stars coming out after their long Scandinavian rest, we stripped off – no costume or shyness required. L&P insisted I go in first promising me a surprise, and not the jellyfish which L scanned for using a torch. 

I took my silhouette down the ladder into the sea. I swam, and as I stroked the water saw sparks fly from my fingertips. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed. “Oh, oh … wow!” I could think of nothing more poetic. As I moved in the water, it seemed stars were born. 

I looked up at the sky – stars. I looked into the water – stars. Starlight everywhere. Starlight within reach and starlight beyond imagination. 

L&P came in to join the celebration, the firework party, the bioluminescent joy of seawater – plankton when ruffled – in dark-skied warmer waters of this late season.

The current drifted us away from the jetty – we took the light show with us, between our fingers and toes. We laughed, sang, played with the magic of the night – British, Australian, and Belgian, in Swedish waters, nothing between our skins and the heavens’ gift of freedom, of joy. 

Liz Lefroy, I Bathe With / Under / Among Stars

When Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, he joined a tiny but existent coterie of Nobel laureates who were poets: Walcott, Miłosz. Brodsky. Wisława Szymborska joined a year later, the same year both Odysseas Elytis and Joseph Brodsky died. Tomas Tranströmer joined in 2013. You could have intelligent discussion about who else should or could join that list. Les Murray? Adam Zagajewski? Adrienne Rich? Hughes? Darwish? Voznesenski?

Then they were gone. The poets, I mean. I am deliberately excluding Bob Dylan. Louise Glück spent a lonely couple of years as the only Nobel Prize-winning poet on the planet. She died in 2023, leaving none.

To my mind, this feels like an extinction. The removal of a charismatic megafauna. And yes we all know that megafauna need a busy ecology of small and lesser creatures, and unlike extinction, the situation might be temporary; but I feel the lack. Where now that rumpled clique, however few, however male-dominated, of older poets of global stature? You didn’t necessarily have to like them or their work, it was enough that they existed: far from slick, far from performance-y, invested with authority, with shambling gravitas and various accents, persons of conscience whose presence at a festival or a lecture-hall induced a frisson and attracted a crowd.

Why are there none? Why does the very idea of a Great Poet seem almost old-fashioned? Surely it’s not the lack of talent or availability of poets; there have never been so many published poets. It must be to do with the times and our current sense of what poets are for, or can be, in public life.

Kathleen Jamie, Where Have All the Great Poets Gone?

Here’s the first paragraph of a message sent to the Associated Press’s book reviewers a few days ago:

“Dear AP book reviewers,

I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.”

No one reads book reviews?? Or, to quote the above paragraph, “the audience for book reviews is relatively low”—in comparison with which audience? Or audiences?

This message does not include any substantial data to back it up. A “thorough review” should show statistics like website visitor engagement, how many views a piece of content receives, and how long users stay on a piece of content. The people who’ve been writing book reviews for the AP deserve at least that.

And what about the idea of supporting a literary form that might have a small, but passionate audience (such as poetry)? An organization like the AP helps drive culture forward, but without book reviews, it’s a poorer offering. I was saddened when American Poets, the journal of the Academy of American Poets, ended the “Books Noted” section, which contained micro-reviews of recently published poetry books, in 2021. I did not renew my subscription in 2022.

The letter goes on to thank someone named Mark, no last name, “who has edited the reviews and incorporated best practices for trying to get reviews to appear in search results and get as many readers as possible.” So I guess we can blame this poor guy for not getting more readers for those reviews you worked so hard on.

Erica Goss, Associated Press Ends Weekly Book Reviews

While a couple of weeks too late to celebrate Bloom’s Day (June 16) properly, I made my pilgrimages to the Martello tower and Eccles Street. I bought a bar of lemon soap at Sweny’s pharmacy, and I ate the traditional gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Brynes. I’d been living out these moments in my imagination for more than 25 years, and I savored every minute of making it real—to take something as miraculous as a novel and to let that magic spill over into the lived world.

But what surprised me most, and what I cannot stop considering, is how much of Dublin—and Ireland, more generally—is dedicated to a celebration of its literary tradition. It reminded me of being in Slovenia in the early 2000s, when even the pre-Euro currency had poets on the bills. It’s not Joyce, of course, who gets the attention. In Dublin, there’s even a Samuel Beckett bridge. Living in Clout City, I cannot imagine something like a bridge or a tunnel not being named for a politician. But in Ireland, two of the most challenging and experimental modernist writers and their works are honored—perhaps, even more so, because of their difficulty.

This is the land of Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, Iris Murdoch, and Elizabeth Bowen, among so many more. And, it feels like that literary culture is still an incredible point of pride, something you see called out in big or small part wherever you are. And yet, I came back from Ireland to the news that even my home institution—the University of Chicago—was cutting its commitment to the humanities, due to funding pressures caused in great part by our own country’s retreat from supporting higher education and the arts.

I am worried less these days about what my own artistic legacy might be—I know I won’t fill auditoriums like Maya [Angelou] did—and more about what legacy there will be of the literature of today. What happens to a society that gives up on the things that exist outside market value? Who will we be and what will be remembered?

Carrie Olivia Adams, A Country That Celebrates Its Writers?

I became interested in thinking about the poetry of interiors thanks to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. (Originally published in the late 50s, my edition came out in English translation in 1994). All the writers at a certain point had read it. How can any of us think of space the same way after reading it? Mark Z. Danielewski says, “it has everything to do with how our comprehension of space, however confined or expansive, still affords an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just as they are about to give way.”

And John Stilgoe says of the book: “it demonstrates to its readers that space can be poetry” and he notes that the book “opens it readers to the titanic importance of setting.” I can only be jealous of anyone encountering this book for the first time. […]

If you’ve read this far, thanks for coming along with me into this little rabbit hole, thinking about our happiness in spaces. Thinking about how spaces can hold poetry. Thinking about how sight-lines, smells, colours, doors, windows, light, sounds, all operate together on our nervous systems to make us feel certain ways below the surface of our awareness. But how when we become aware of those spatial comprehension we might be able to manipulate where we are to accommodate a poetics.

My morning writing space is a bit of a sacred thing: quiet to begin, then some wordless music. A candle burning, perhaps. Good paper and a fountain pen to think things through. Books and more books. Paintings to look at. (Yes, I’m spoiled in that category). Plants are also nice. Interesting lights when there is darkness, and natural light when possible.

Our spaces don’t have to be perfect, just offer us a place to breathe. Because we can’t be creative when we’re not breathing well. We can’t work well. And who want to squander their gifts?

Shawna Lemay, Neuroaesthetics and Interiors

In the early 2000s, I worked at a tech job on Bainbridge Island, Washington—our office was on the third floor surrounded by trees. One day, I overheard two coworkers having a discussion—one said, “I think a pet store burned down. Or maybe someone’s canaries escaped?” Wait, whaaaat?!

I looked out the window and saw what they were seeing—dozens of yellow birds flickering through the evergreens. I turned back to them and said, “Gentlemen, those are goldfinches.”

Sometimes when beauty shows up, and we panic and think the worst—or we mislabel it. But it’s still there. Beauty just being beauty.

Since the start of 2025, I’ve been trying to write a poem each day (another kind of beauty). There’s something funny that happens when you try this practice—you write a lot of bad poems (okay, that’s not really funny, but it is.) This daily writing practice is kind of like batting practice, except instead of baseballs, you’re swinging at metaphors and images, and occasionally, one cracks the sky open—in a good way.

Daily poems remind me that beauty can still be created, even when it feels absent everywhere else—wordbeauty—when you pair two words together and they surprise you. […]

I turned in the FINAL version of my manuscript, Accidental Devotions, which will be published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2026! I have worked so hard on this collection! And one thing I’ve learned through it all is how revision is its own kind of devotion. My advice when revising a manuscript: 1) Let go of what isn’t strong enough. 2) Bring in a few newer poems to create energy. 3) Continue to allow the manuscript to evolve—even when you’re certain it’s finished.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Beauty Just Being Beauty ~`♡´~

I volunteer at a county food bank, staffed by a handful of paid workers and a stalwart volunteer phalanx of middle-aged (and I use the term loosely) women, and some men. They show up early, stay late, do what needs to be done. They are funny, quirky, busy, kind, crabby, generous. This may be the future, this aged rabble. They may make the way. I don’t know.

I think often of this poem [by] Antonio Machado, perhaps so common as to be a chestnut now, but I find power in it. That first word has been variously translated: traveler, walker, pilgrim, wayfarer; and the second noun as path, road, way. Each has its pleasures and power. I favor “wayfarer” and “way” as a satisfying echo to the original: caminante, camino. I like “pilgrim” too, with its sense of someone going with a purpose and humility, a sense of something larger than themselves at work.

“Proverbios y cantares XXIX” in Campos de Castilla.

Antonio Machado

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

[…]

my translation:

Wayfarer, your steps
are the way and nothing more;
wayfarer, there is no way,
the way is made by walking,
by walking you make the way
and when you look back
you see the way that will never
be walked again.
Wayfarer, there is no way,
only the wakes on the sea.

Marilyn McCabe, and when you look back

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure my first book did change my life, though it perhaps coincided with a volatile period in which I did go through some very big changes. I can’t say for sure from this distance, but I likely held some hope that my first book was going to somehow open doors (to where, I don’t really know). All in all, the response was quiet, and this was one of several elements of my life that contributed to a deepening depression and addiction. My drinking, which was already problematic, got worse and worse, and I dove straight to the bottom and stayed there for some time.

When I finally began to get sober eight years ago, it took a great deal of time to get healthy enough to begin writing. Making If Nothing changed me. By going back to the source of pain and betrayal again and again with a hunger for honesty, I had to grow my capacity to be with the parts of myself I couldn’t bear. By doing this, I became more coherent, more resilient, and much more available to my family and friends. Until writing the poems that make up this new collection, there had always been a faint veil between my daily life and my poems. This book erased that separation for me and I haven’t fully metabolized what this means in the larger scope of my life.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matthew Nienow

On Aug. 1, Megan and I submitted the completed draft of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology to Madville Publishing. We also got some lovely photos of Stevie via photographer Donna Kile, so the cover is in the works, too. Contributors should see a proof this autumn and the book is still on track for a May 2026 release. 

Last month, I received a surprise acceptance letter for the Visiting Joni: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Joni Mitchell, a forthcoming anthology edited by Debra Marquart, Alan Davis, and Thom Tammaro. I submitted my poem “Night Ride Home” to this anthology back in 2022 and, frankly, had forgotten all about it. Glad the anthology is finally seeing the light of day in the near future. 

Collin Kelley, The Sealey Challenge and a Stevie update

My first full collection, Daughter of Fire, reimagines the life and legacy of Queen Margaret of Anjou, the late medieval Queen of England and fierce protagonist in the Wars of the Roses. Margaret is best known today as Shakespeare’s villainous “she-wolf of France” or perhaps as the alleged model for Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones.

Like many women of history who dared to tread their own path, the living, breathing woman behind the reputation has been lost to time. Margaret has not been treated kindly by chroniclers and historians, playwrights and novelists. She’s even been a Manga villainess, which I explore in another poem in the collection.

Daughter of Fire reconsiders this much-maligned warrior queen, seeking out connections with women’s experiences through six centuries, right up to today. My aim was to call out the maligning of women, the gendered insults, name-calling and inuendo that are so often used to control women’s behaviour. That said, this is not a history book or hagiography – this Margaret of Anjou is not a saint or a “girl boss” but a woman with many faces: daughter, wife, consort, mother, political schemer, leader of armies, survivor.

Drop-in by Lucy Heuschen (Nigel Kent)

It’s been a long time — seven years — since I published a poetry collection. I was interrupted by the pandemic, a busy work schedule, and other projects. Receiving a poem is a delicate thing. It requires an intense, Zen-like freedom from thought and for me, quiet mornings. A space opens, a mood descends, and then a thought or image. As it touches the soil, words arrive like wings folding to yield to gravity. A poem is much like a hawk landing, wondering what to devour.

This summer opened a gate to the creative fields, and I found myself circling around a concept that feels like home. It became clear, and I worked myself up to naming a theme: The Artist’s House. I drew into the document poems from my vault and new imaginings. I indulged in paying homage to inspirations and my early immersion in the arts. My parents were dedicated to music and visual art. They enriched my childhood by encouraging me to read and taking me to see painting and sculpture in museums and galleries, as well as to experience live music and dance. They gave me all the lessons I wanted, for which I chose a focus on ballet.

This collection forms a sustained contemplation of what art means in my life, and of the creative process. I tip my hat to favorite artists—Monet, Caravaggio, Andy Goldsworthy, and Oz book illustrator John R. Neill. Favorite poets Emily Dickinson and Rilke get whole sections. Walt Whitman makes an appearance, as does another favorite, Alice Oswald.

Rachel Dacus, New Poetry Book in October

As someone who designs books for other people (or at least designs chapbooks, with occasional commissioned covers for other publishers) and an avid zinester, I have to admit I may approach the task of putting together a book a little differently than a writer who doesn’t have their hands as much in the design. Typically by the time I finish a manuscript, there has already been some thought about potential cover designs, interior layout, materials like video poems and reels, graphics for the book promo stuff. For other writers, the manuscript alone may be the focus, the words on the page, but this will be the second longer project I’ve done with artwork included, so there are already a lot of visuals and design elements at play by default.

Kristy Bowen, self publishing diaries | finishing the book

So far, I can’t recommend Bluesky enough for poetry. Over the past few months, it’s enabled me to connect with a lot of poetry people who were new to me, while also finding a whole host of additional readers from beyond the poetry bubble. One excellent example has been the reception for my poem ‘The Last Carry’, first published in The Spectator and then included in my second collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press, 2023). As of today, it’s garnered well over 600 likes and more than 100 shares, all along with numerous generous comments from readers. This is the nearest I’ve ever come to going viral! In fact, not a week goes by without a trip or two to the post office for me with books that I’ve sold via Bluesky. From my experience, it’s really worthwhile in terms of finding a new audience for my poems, though perhaps the most significant bit has been the lovely people I’ve encountered on there…!

Matthew Stewart, Poetry on Bluesky

I’ve attended the Glen Workshop many times, so it was a special honor to return as faculty this summer. I was the writing retreat guide, and I spent a few hours each morning working on writing projects in the company of wonderful creative people.

There were too many highlights in the week to name them all, but one that stands out to me is the LOGOS poetry reading on Sunday night. It was co-sponsored by EcoTheo and hosted by Shann Ray, who created such a welcoming space. I loved reading alongside Phil Metres and Gabby Bates, and the audience conversation and Q&A times were more lovely than I can describe; the whole event had a beautiful earnestness about it.

Katie Manning, Glen Workshop Reflection

But of course, what really made me feel better was getting the writing tasks done.  I now have a sermon I like, and I made significant progress on my CPE paper.  Now let me think about the upcoming semester.  I want to establish some habits that can get me back to writing more of what I want to write:

–I want to write my sermon by Thursday, which means that I start thinking and planning by Tuesday.  I had this goal in the spring, but the seminary course work I needed to do often took priority.

–I want to return to my goal that I formulated in the first days of this year, writing one finished draft of a poem a week.

–Actually, that’s not really my goal.  Here is that goal, as I wrote it in my January 1 blog post:  “I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

–Right now, I have 14 finished poems in the file.  So I am seriously behind.  But I still have 19.5 weeks in the year.  I could get to 52 poems in the file if I focus.

–I have a lot of rough drafts.  Many of them won’t require much revision. So, I’ll take a look through those drafts, as I am also writing new work.  I also want to get back to writing new poems.

–Let me finish with the words of Octavia Butler, from one of her early journals, before she won the MacArthur, which changed her writing life trajectory:  “So be it, See to it.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Goals for the Last Third of the Year

It works I think, a simple straight-forward narrative, something I could have remembered. I don’t, though, think it is true. It is a very vague memory. But then again, things don’t have to be real to be true, or so it seems with all the made up nonsense circulating about the internet.

Paul Tobin, BOUNCING LIGHT

I was recently tagged in a social media post by someone doing the Sealey Challenge – one poetry book a day for the month of August! I do admire people’s stamina. I was tagged because the book of the day for this person – and a mercifully short one at that – turned out to be my own chapbook, published by Hercules Editions back in 2019 under the title Cargo of Limbs. Originating in events almost 10 years ago now, it is utterly depressing that the longish poem that constitutes most of the book remains relevant. Now – as then – the news is full of people in small boats. Then, refugees and migrants were embarking in the Mediterranean. Now, most of the talk here is of people embarking from the coast of France to risk the real dangers of the English Channel. The book remains in print and can be bought from Hercules here or by contacting me directly. […]

It’s early in 2016 and I am on a train crossing southern England. On my headphones, Ian McKellen is reading Seamus Heaney’s just-published translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. This is the book in which Aeneas journeys into the Underworld. As he descends, he encounters terror, war and violence before the house of the dead. He finds a tree filled with “[f]alse dreams”, then grotesque beasts, centaurs, gorgons, harpies. At the river Acheron, he sees crowds of people thronging towards a boat. These people are desperate to cross, yet the ferryman, Charon, only allows some to embark, rejecting others. At this point, in Heaney’s translation, Aeneas cries out to his Sibyl guide: “What does it mean [. . . ] / This push to the riverbank? What do these souls desire? / What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy waters?”

The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries. The timing is crucial. It’s just six months since the terrible images of Alan Kurdi’s body – drowned on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey – had filled the media. In the summer of 2015, this three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes of their planned flight across the Aegean, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.

Beyond my train window, the fields of England swept past; Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family. It struck me that some form of versioning of these ancient lines might be a way of addressing – as a poet – such difficult, contemporary events. I hoped they might offer a means of support as Tony Harrison has spoken of using rhyme and metre to negotiate, to pass through the “fire” of painful material. I also saw a further aspect to these dove-tailing elements that interested me: the power of the image. The death of Alan Kurdi made the headlines because photographs of his drowned body, washed up on the beach, had been taken. When Nilüfer Demir, a Turkish photographer for the Dogan News Agency, arrived on the beach that day, she said it was like a “children’s graveyard”. She took pictures of Alan’s lifeless body; a child’s body washed up along the shore, half in the sand and half in the water, his trainers still on his feet. Demir’s photographs, shared by Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch on social media, became world news.

Demir’s images were indeed shocking, breaking established, unspoken conventions about showing the bodies of dead children. I remember passionate online debates about the rights and wrongs of disseminating such images. Yet the power of the images, without doubt, contributed to a shift in opinion, marked to some degree by a shift in language as those people moving towards Europe came to be termed “refugees” more often than the othering word, “migrants”.

Martyn Crucefix, Continuing Relevance of ‘Cargo of Limbs’

I suppose we can blame Trump for the mini-shake-up in the literature world. His selective reduction of NEA grants has helped provoke an anti-woke reaction.

There’s nothing very pure about the Arts. They’re used as a vehicle by dictators and revolutionaries. They’re used as therapy, as vanity showcases. When public funds are used for the Arts, closer scrutiny is attracted. The NEA’s home page currently says that “Approximately 34 Percent … of Arts Endowment-funded activities [are] in high-poverty communities”, which may make US tax payers think that the NEA is left-wing. But stats can be misleading.

Sometimes when I read a magazine I do some stats based on the bios. Some info is easier to collect than others. I like seeing how many of the contributors are Creative Writing lecturers, or have Creative Writing degrees. The old gender ratios have been replaced by more fluid categories. Age and race details are harder to determine. Even if stats can be determined, interpreting them is difficult. Why should the demographics of authors correspond to that of the general UK (or world) population? Isn’t it reasonable to believe that a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people than the general population will turn to writing?

Tim Love, Reactionary writing?

But the poet can dream. The poet
has the freedom to wish this much
at least will happen: That her
plan works. That the poem can
manifest wings. That the reader
can open a cage. That the thought
can escape, become airborne. 

Rajani Radhakrishnan, It won’t bite

Perhaps we are born with a tendency towards certain landscapes, but I think we learn what to love. As the youngest of six in a single parent family, I had little supervision, and sometimes this came at a price. But in South Cumbria, it felt entirely safe, and I learned to love the tall hedges, the small walled fields and their gates, the copses and crags. I am so grateful to her for this.

I think we were at our closest in nature. As we walk in the heather, I tell Niamh how, long ago, I dreamt Mum told me she wanted to me to be there when she died, and how, against all the odds, it came to pass. I told Niamh how being present when someone enters the world, and when someone leaves it, is the most privileged and holy space, how all ordinary things fall away, how all that it left is the unspeakable magic of it. As Niamh pointed to the peat, I felt something of my mother on the moors.

Peat is unrotted vegetation; that’s why it holds so much carbon, why it’s such a vital defence against climate change. It’s largely formed from sphagnum, which grows from its tips, leaving its death behind it in its roots, which can be millennia deep. Peat, moss, bogs, are death and life all at the same time, deep and dark and soft. My mother is gone, and my mother is in my humour, and love of nature, and I talk about her every day.

When the walk ends, my holiday with Niamh is over, and they will head off with their other mum. The prospect is painful. Remembering what we’ve done these last fourteen days is painful. Even as we live them, every moment is sliding away into memory; there is no way to stop it from moving and leaving. How brave it is to love something, anyone, anything, knowing that it will pass.

Clare Shaw, Coast to Coast: Day 14

At all these fields of flowers, the finches have been twittering around us in the air. The hummingbirds are dwindling in number but still busy at the flowers as well. I’ll miss their bright colors and songs when the winter comes back. Some small parts of late summer are my favorite parts. (Wasps, not so much, but the birds, absolutely, and the blueberries in my garden this year – especially sweet.)

This is a busy month – my older brother is coming out to visit the week after my folks leave – I am trying to look at my schedule for the fall, with readings and classes. After the health and dental dramas of the past weeks, I am ready to relax a bit, hopefully. I’m also hoping my next book gets picked up soon so I can start focusing on my next writing project, which might be quite a different creature than my previous works.

In the meantime, my friends, this seems like a rough and tumble world, but there are tiny moments of joy, beauty, kindness to be found. Sending you all hopes for tiny good August joys.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Parental Visits, End of Summer Flower Farm Visits, August Birds

On the bottom step of the patio,
unmoving: the perfect wire
symmetry of a dragonfly.

In a clump of grass a few
meters away, the armor
shed by a lone cicada.

When the stars emerge
tonight, will they let down
a ladder for them to ascend?

In the shadow of the fig
tree, the secretary spider
keeps writing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Chronicle of Small Moments in Time