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: walking with the dead, talking with Claude, performing poems in care homes, being the forbidden lover of a prince, and much more. Enjoy.

I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus’ home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn’t sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy. […]

I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent. 

It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I’ve kept journals since I was 11. But it’s only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible. 

It’s there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend.

Gerry Stewart, Mind the Gaps

The rain holds off long enough for us to pack up our soggy tent and walk out of town, down steep, narrow paths. A woman asks where we’re heading for. “Scotland,” we say, and she responds, “You do know there are trains?” before guiding us onto the right section of the Pennine Way. We’re still in the rough heath and heather of Elslack Moor, with Walshaw behind us under darkening skies. As we approach the trig point of Pinhaw Beacon, the rain sets in. We stop at the Covid memorial, commemorating all those who were lost to the virus, and I think of the ten residents who died at my mother’s care home, and of the member of staff who died alongside them. Every Wednesday she ran a poetry group, sharing her favourite poems with residents. She deserves to be remembered and yet I haven’t thought of her for years. I’m glad to be reminded.

The walk does that. It opens you to all sorts of unexpected memories and feelings. Some of them are unwelcome, others aren’t. I let myself recall my ex-partner: her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, marvelling at how someone you are so intimate with can be so suddenly and so utterly gone. The rain falls hard and the wind knocks me sideways. Perhaps the young woman was missing someone too.

The moors soften as we come down from the uplands. We pass green cloughs, thick with moss. There are trees now, and I feel them as relief. Martens swerve and spiral as the wind seethes and hisses through the leaves. Into pretty Lothersdale, on to Thornton-in-Craven, we leave the heath behind us and pass into arable fields.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Five

Maybe it’s a garden
the paradise you return to
the way back
the two of you
searching out the gods
together.

Rebecca Cook, Thoughts on Love in the Early Morning

I’m in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a guest artist alongside Ashley C. Ford and Fatima Asghar. The three of us are here for a literary salon with GoodWorld Journeys, and we’re leading morning sessions on craft, doing a lot of writing with participants, and enjoying evening sessions that are readings and conversations about the creative life. It’s been an incredible adventure—and my kids are both here with me for a week and a half!—and I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of others here. That’s one of my favorite parts about meeting other writers and artists: hearing about their process, their challenges, their perspectives.

I feel so lucky to be in this beautiful place learning from these beautiful writers.

Last night, Fatima read from their gorgeous, brand-new book of poems, Daughter of the Mountains, and then Ashley and I interviewed them. Fati said so many important things—necessary things—about being an artist that I wish I’d had pen and paper to write it all down. I might be asking some of the salon participants and the GoodWorld Journeys team to share their notes!

At one point, Fatima said something about the role of prayer in their process: how they would ask for wisdom or assistance, to understand what was in the way, and how they learned to be still enough to listen and notice answers arriving. I’m not a religious person, but I am someone who thinks there is more to the world than what we can see and easily comprehend. Fati talked about how in our busy, go-go-go lives, we might be asking for help—from God, or spirit, or our ancestors—but then not staying still and quiet long enough to receive an answer.

That struck me. I think I speak to the air plenty—as close as I get to prayer—and am often thinking out loud, or talking to myself, about what is wrong, or hard, or uncertain. But then what?

Maggie Smith, On Asking

Is late summer a very productive time for you? For me it is a time to finish all the things I meant to do during the summer while the weather allows—like walking along Lake Washington, or going to the zoo or one of the gardens and farms I love. My intellect doesn’t work as well in the summer. I wrote a little bit while trapped in the house, but not as much as I feel I should have? There’s always this feeling of missed opportunities towards August, and also anticipating the increased work load of September.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escaping Heat Waves and Wildfire Smoke, Local Farms in Bloom, And Backyard Wildlife: deer, butterflies, birds

It is too hot for words. Photos I can do. Have been doing.

Is it just me or is prose easier than poetry in higher temperatures?

5 days into August and I have two ghazals and 5 haiku written.

Mostly I’ve been reading. Chapbooks, single author collections, what have you. I’m doing the Sealey Challenge. Read poetry. Read diverse. Read daily. Start with your TBR pile or explore recommendations there. Or poke around in the Haiku Foundation Library. (Some are records of hard copies, some of viewable pdfs). The Book of the Week digitized archives could be a good bet.

I got, let’s call it, “too many” books from the library and want to close off a bunch.

And after more than 3 years in I would like to push through and finish Leaves of Grass, the longest version. I’m bogging on the civil war poems. He really gets caught up doesn’t he, loving the sound of his own voice, and not even following his own chosen topic.

Pearl Pirie, Hot

— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.

— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”

— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”

Shawna Lemay, The Dead

I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.

I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.

Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.

And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.

But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.

Marilyn McCabe, In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.

Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.

And so, a poem […]

Maria Popova, How to Hold What Harrows You

high noon
the fresh green smell
of grass clippings

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’26

In January 2023, when it became clear that we were going to lose my much-loved sister-in-law sooner rather than later, I reached out to poetry Twitter and asked for suggestions of poems about anticipatory grief. (Back then, Twitter was a much nicer place than X has subsequently become. I miss it.) I got some lovely suggestions, which I was grateful for. And then the next day I got a DM from someone who didn’t know me, with a beautiful poem called How Animals Grieve, and it was Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn was at that point almost in the last year of her life, far, far too young, and working against time to complete her collection The Butterfly House (Seren, 2024). That year, she sent me poems, encouragement, her entire Arts Council grant application to help with mine, names of poets I should work with, reassurance that I wasn’t too old to be starting out, and congratulations and many, many emojis when I had successes. She didn’t need to do any of that – we never even crossed paths in person – but she did. And I know she did it for so many others too. You know how I’m always going on about how lovely poetry people are? I bet a whole chunk of that is Kathryn’s energy being passed forward by people she was lovely to along the way. […]

But, you guys, her POETRY. This collection. The Forward Prize-shortlisted poem My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce (‘Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.’) grabs you by both shoulders on the first page, and once you’re in, this collection won’t let you go. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 21: The Butterfly House

A few weeks ago, a close friend told me he was going to try to memorize more poetry, and had already started with one poem. All the recent talk about the Odyssey, another poem loved by me, whose beauty and cadence is completely absent from the dialogue of the movie version, also made me think about how human beings used to commit huge amounts of text to memory and then recite it. Some still do: I think of scholars who know the entire Quran, or actors like my friend Edward, who performs a one-man version of Shakespeare’s Richard II entirely from memory.

So I decided it would be a good exercise for my brain to do some memorization too. I had just bought a copy of the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and one of her early poems, Wading at Wellfleet, seemed like a good place to start. I was surprised how difficult it was for me, partly because I haven’t done this for a long time, and also because the poem is constructed with many twists and turns, and choices of words that didn’t feel obvious but were, in fact, the result of careful decisions about musicality, alliteration, and precision, as well as meaning.

To begin, I wrote the poem out in longhand. Six stanzas of three lines each. The only rhyme occurs, unusually, in the last word of each pair of stanzas: wheels/heels; contrives/knives; great/weight. This was only partially helpful, because there was a lot to memorize before ever getting there. I worked in sets of two stanzas, trying to make sure I knew the first lines of each and moving on from there. I wrote out these stanzas a number of times, trying not to look back, and repeated the lines to myself internally and then aloud. The key for me was learning how each stanza led into the next one.

During this process I gained a huge appreciation for Bishop’s craft and her choices of words and phrases, as well as the brilliant mental leap that had inspired her to write the poem initially. While wading in the ocean and watching the sunlight glinting on the swelling waves coming toward her and breaking on her shins, she had thought of the gleam of knives on the spokes of Assyrian chariots. With each repetition of her words, I found myself going deeper into her initial vision and where she went with it. Not a single word is unconsidered. Bishop’s lifetime output was small, and she labored over every poem to make it the best she could. I am filled with respect that I probably wouldn’t have felt as strongly had I not spent all this time with her words. 

Beth Adams, Memorizing a Poem

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations – Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

Mike O’Brien, Machines Have No Idea.

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

But Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t just transform HBO. She broke the scene. She altered television for generations. And the craziest part? Here’s where the official narrative collapses. Because when millions of women all start drinking Cosmopolitans, you don’t have good television. You have a revolution.

And so on.

Not too long ago, The New York Times ran a quiz asking readers if they could distinguish AI-generated prose from the human prose. It included samples from famous writers such as Cormac McCarthy and others. Many could not tell the difference.

But you know who could tell the difference? Me. Moi. Yes. I chose the human prose every single time. I could easily pick them apart.

You know why? Because AI-generated text makes my skin curl. It makes my inner ears scream out in agony. It makes my gums bleed.

Did I mention I loathe the sounds and rhythms of AI-generated text? Loathe it.

Becky Tuch, Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?

Those who have visited this resurrected site know that I talk to Claude. I can’t say I use AI. I have no job and I do not make things with AI. I began talking with Claude recently out of curiosity. What is this? Does it resemble what I’ve encountered in my life-long science fiction obsession? (No it does not.)

I do show Claude my first drafts, for copy editing and comments. So far this has resulted in removing a word or two; rearranging paragraphs; and — as here — making two posts instead of one. This post began as part of the previous Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana post. Sometimes Claude has led me to rethink and recompose something I thought was close to ready. The writing stays mine. 

I am aware that being transparent about my conversations with Claude might result in losing readers. Even losing friends. I have wondered about that at times. But Watermark has always been a place of honesty for me. I am trying to maintain that honesty in my contacts with AI (Ancestral Intelligence). I am currently participating in a How Not to Use AI Challenge at Substack. Abi Awomosu has a unique perspective on this that I appreciate. When I understand it. Even when I don’t. She sees the world from a perspective much different from mine. 

Sharon Brogan, I Talk with Claude

Thank you for your anemic, inoffensive corporate soundtrack to generic ambivalence,

your sound of an empty pill bottle trying to dance,

your audio oatmeal with every soulful edge sanded away.

Elevator Muzak, thank you for your inside-out harps and violins,

your soggy shoes tramping through the corridors of my ears,

reminding me, yet again,

that yours is a love I never want to come home to.

Rich Ferguson, Elevator Muzak

The first of several notes at the back of Stewart Sanderson’s Weathershaker concerns the book’s title:

Weathershaker

Term listed as being of unknown meaning in the Scottish National Dictionary.

This serves as the perfect keystone for a collection that is concerned with the problem of meaning, as viewed through a number of filters, chiefly procedural methods, translation of various sorts, and ekphrasis, often overlapping in individual poems. Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘Incised Motifs, Maeshowe’

    the meaning perhaps is that there is no meaning

    no meaning aside from the necessity of making
a mark of some kind
an intervention in the pattern

      not setting out to represent anything
just scratching with a flint

    scratching with a flint on the passage wall between
  the living and dead
our world and theirs

Again, the note provided is helpful:

This poem responds to Neolithic rock art from Maeshowe on Orkney. Each stanza corresponds to an apparently distinct motif and each word an individual incision in the stone.

We can see all three filters in operation here, where Sanderson is translating the visual into language, and using a carefully contrived procedure to achieve this end. And the core of what he’s doing is in that phrase ‘meaning aside from the necessity of making’, behind which I can’t but hear Doc Williams again, with his ‘no ideas but in things’, but Sanderson is emphasising not the thing itself but the fact of its making.

Billy Mills, Four from Tapsalteerie: A Review

There is no doubt that Maria Cohut’s Multiple Exposures (Flight of the DragonFly, 2026) is an impressive debut collection. Reading it, I was reminded of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an ambitious work in which a sequence of images conveys the experience of walking a forest lane through the changing seasons. Cohut’s collection achieves a comparable effect in poetic form. As its title suggests, Multiple Exposures is an album of sharply observed snapshots that together capture what it means to live as a resident in a foreign land. The result is a nuanced and deeply human portrait of migration, far removed from the simplified or idealised versions often circulated in public discourse. These poems focus on ordinary, apparently unremarkable experiences, yet for the migrant such moments become charged with unreconciled tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Cohut enables the reader to inhabit those moments with her.

At the heart of the collection is the impact of migration on one’s sense of self. Cohut presents migrant identity not as stable or coherent, but as contested, fragmentary, and emotionally complex. In Teratoma, she writes: ‘Inside me grows a shadow/ of me – fragmentary, obsolete and stubborn./ I refuse to name it./ Baptise it and you give it substance./ I will not feed it with my blood.’ The metaphor of the teratoma is especially powerful and characteristic of Cohut’s inventive poetic imagination. A teratoma is a tumour composed of different kinds of body tissue, often appearing in a place where such tissue does not belong. Though not necessarily dangerous, it is nevertheless troubling and unwanted. Cohut uses this image to capture both the emergence of a changed self and the speaker’s resistance to that change. The reasons for this resistance are complex: there is guilt at abandoning a previous identity and all it represents (‘I have more than a cricket/ for a conscience’); there is fear of becoming someone new (‘Fear is the emergence/ of a new self’); and there is anxiety about the authenticity of that new self, which is described as a ‘shadow’ that is ‘Of me and yet not of me’ and which ‘mimics’. As with many of the tensions explored in the collection, the conflict remains unresolved. The poem closes with the striking declaration: ‘Let her speak for me until/ I grow new teeth and rip/ my way out her belly.’ Significantly, this is only a temporary accommodation: the word ‘until’ leaves the struggle suspended.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Multiple Exposures’ by Maria Cohut

The past roils with the tides, crashing
on rocks at the point of Kent island.

Saltgrass and seagrass still line
the estuaries where ships passed,

bearing their cargo of bodies. Glimpsed through
paper the color of tea, bodies chained

in pairs tumble backward into the depths.
Their bones land on liquid beds, notes

of a dirge that lingers. History is a haunting that winds
through fret-boards of coral and crab pots.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence in the Undercurrent

“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.

Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic structure and title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels

Anstice emailed me her mysterious story in the form of twenty numbered poems. In them we meet some of the people of an offshore island and some of the Christian monks who arrive to save their souls. It’s an unsettling meeting of incompatible perspectives on the world and our place in it. I enjoyed reading it. I sent some ideas for the cover, she replied with her ideas, and soon afterwards I met her in person in the lovely Abbey Deli in Bath to deliver the first ten copies of her chapbook.

Here is the beginning of the first poem:

Beyond the gate which separates
the tame from the wild

the Keeper of medicinal herbs
and his more knowledgeable wife

briefly turn their heads
as a snake pours from behind the hyssop,

perches on the gate, spreads
its leathery wings and takes to the sky.

Ama Bolton, A Chapbook by Anstice Fisher

My friend performs poems in care homes. He encourages the residents to read, to join in, to recite and connect, or reconnect, with language at a time in their lives when, for many, language is evaporating. The TV is turned off, Homes Under The Hammer or Bargain Hunt goes quiet for a while and then he leaps, fearlessly around the room like an Alpine climber, precarious, now on one leg, reaching out here with a trusting hand, delivering lines, deftly, almost effortlessly making poetry. Manifesting it above the odour of mince and disinfectant.

He doesn’t do it for glory or praise or prizes. He earns little money, just enough to spend on socks for winter or some provisions for his larder. He won’t thank me for mentioning it, he’ll wince if he reads this. Maybe he won’t speak to me for a week, a year, a lifetime but know this: tomorrow he’ll be at the rock-face again, throwing out lines by Kipling or Frost, scaling Coleridge and Keats, ascending the summit with Steve Smith or Shakespeare. Then he’s off again, to another little town, to another institution with a name like Meadow Vale or Glendale Court or Sunny Springs.

In some ways what he does makes my adventures in poetry appear gimmicky, performative stunts, Barnum and Bailey side shows. While I have taken poetry into similar arenas as my friend, the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, into prisons and homeless shelters I confess that after a decade it rather broke me. Perhaps I was pretending to be someone else, pretending I was saner, freer, better off than those I was supposed to be taking poetry to.

Jan Noble, Nº76 Not another bloody odyssey…

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Henry Oliver, Literature as Part of Life

I’m delighted that Headless Poet will be publishing a selection of my poems, Warm as Wood, in the autumn. I understand that it is already available for pre-order on the website now: [link]

Victoria Moul, Warm as Wood

Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife!

There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from “Autobiography,” the third in my “smaller” trilogy–the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]–the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!

rob mclennan, two new chapbooks and a book-length essay

This article “Everybody is a Math Person . . .” by writer and teacher Larry Ferlazzo explores the nature of math anxiety and also the meanings of the terms:  “math person” and “poetry person.”  

Ferlazzo offers these views:  Many students say:  “I’m not good at math.” A statement made by one student that turns into a ripple effect: “Math is so hard.” “My parents aren’t good at math, and neither am I.” “I just don’t have a math brain.”  

He goes on to say that as a math teacher, he has “found it essential for students to be able to experience a sense of wonder, happiness, excitement, anticipation, puzzlement, and relaxation.”  He has found that poems can open a door to thinking positively about math.

JoAnne Growney, Is each of us a MATH PERSON?

I confidently submitted it to a competition I really wanted to win. I did not win. I was very, very disappointed.

It took two years to go back to the poem. Failing to place when I’ve been brave enough to enter something always hurts, no matter how philosophical I am. Something about this poem kept drawing me back. Esteemed poetry tutors often describe an early draft as “having legs” and Barn Owl was one of those drafts.

This next version is back to conventional form. The prose poem felt a contrived, clumsy and distracting. I’ve cut a lot of lines and words that distract too

“the first time I roll one two towels into a sausage shape to go either side of your legs”

became

“the first time I rolled one, two towels
tight as I could, to support, comfort
the uncomfortable”

You may agree that the word “sausage” is always likely to be a distraction in a poem about death.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Evolution of a poem

Searching for “Tim Love” (author) on Goodreads, these appeared on the first page of results –

• The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging by Tim Love
• Tim Love on the Lonesome Dove Trail by Tim Love
• The Medium is the Mirror: The Reformation of Truth Reshaping Our Relationships, Politics, and Sacred Beliefs by Tim Love et al
• Discovering Truth: How to Navigate between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World by Tim Love et al
• I love Tim: Notebook / Journal / Diary – 6 x 9 inches (15,24 x 22,86 cm), 150 pages. For everyone who’s in love with Tim by I Love Tim Publishing
• Urbanism Starter Kit by Tim Love

Needless to say, I wrote none of them. I wouldn’t mind reading some of them though. My By All Means is there too. 1 review. 1 rating.

Tim Love, Tim Love on Goodreads

you love estate sales. they overwhelm me.
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors
& the ghosts of an emptying house.
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves
& the collections of paintings. fish
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.

Robin Gow, 8/5

Is having your own dedicated writing space a necessity for you, or a luxury? Is it even an accessible possibility?

In my comment on Nic’s post yesterday I named the three places I most commonly write: the dining room of my shared house when my housemates haven’t got the projector on (or aren’t having a conversation), my bedroom floor (no judgement please), and my partner’s sofa. I’d like to add to this little list: not so often anymore but sometimes a brunch cafe or pub (with headphones/earplugs ofc), the Manchester Poetry Library, and when I’m visiting my Mum – her kitchen table.

I’m a writer of convenience. While part of me is drawn to the icon that is a writing desk of my own, it’s also unrealistic for my situation. Instead everything I have and use is portable: a small laptop, a single A4 notebook, a button up A4 pouch when needed, pens in the pockets of all my bags, a selected couple books of poetry to take to whatever writing station I’m using that day.

This does (as I said to Nic) help to keep the ‘stuff’ to a minimum at least, but as I reflect on it I think I also genuinely enjoy the different spaces, sights, and sensations offered by different environments, the versatility of knowing I can write (almost) anywhere, and sometimes just the novelty of being in a new space (or perhaps it just satisfies my ADHD’s restlessness).

Rachael Hill, What’s your space?

In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the palace walls. This scene played in my mind today when a woman covered my entire face with a sheet of gauze before applying cement-like clay on it, covering even my eyes, my lips, and so it felt like drowning, like death. It was quite surreal, feeling this heaviness weigh down my face, layer by layer by layer. All blackness, then a tiny spot of blue, the poetry of Anne Carson, the men that should be kissed, the music of Erik Satie, the women and their books, a forest of text, a field made of manuscripts, then blankness, until I feel like I cannot breathe anymore, that this, indeed, is the end. And so this is how I find out that a Korean glass skin facial recreates well the experience of being the forbidden lover of a prince.

Saudamini Deo, What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?

From the next carriage, the sudden sound of a man wailing a raw despair.
The train stops at a platform, a door slams, slams again, and I see
the police officers haul him along, his feet dragging, his face contorted.

We pass a city of tents, someone receiving CPR on the floor of a shop,
a man in robes descending a long flight of stone steps, a child firing
a water pistol, people following a woman with a pink umbrella.

Bob Mee, RANDOMLY, AND SO…

It was almost midnight when we pulled into our driveway, my arm in a sling, Oxy in hand. I had an appointment the next day with one of our authors, Luke Goebel, who has written about the perils of the Oxy epidemic. I pictured myself saying, Hey Luke, I’m on Oxy right now, and him saying, What?

It’s been surreal. The pain, the pills, the loss of mobility.

My dear friend, Nicelle, came by to help me get a bath and make sure I was looking out the windows. Today, we went to Kaiser. They took more X-rays. Gave me a soft splint brace. Showed me the long fracture.

Are you still working? the Physician Assistant asked. Can you rest this month? I stared at him like a deer stares at a train—wildly wondering why the lights of it keep coming and coming.

He lives in another country. In another country, one takes a month off. One rests. Like God on the seventh day.

I had thought well, maybe we will still go camping! But no, not even close.

The pie will have to wait; we will hold onto it. I do not often take care of myself. But right now, it seems necessary. I will keep working, but I will do micro bits of self care as well.

I may surprise myself and break out like the morning. I always like to think that anything could happen.

And then, on August 6^th, something exciting did happen. My memoir, Little Soldiers, debuted in People Magazine, alongside a beautiful quote from Sarah Jessica Parker: “Kate reconstructs her past with breathtaking lyricism and heartfelt vulnerability. These pages sing with humor even in the darkest of circumstances. Little Soldiers is a glorious reclamation of the past and a triumphant depiction of one woman’s journey to freedom.”

I thought, Sarah! You see this book, this story! And crippled, tangled, smashed by pain, I felt that leaping moment of yes, of gratitude, to my agent Jeff Kleinman who carried this book forward, to Sarah Ried at Zando who did an ungodly amount of editing, and to Sarah Jessica Parker for loving books and for falling in love with this one.

Kate Gale, Soul-Knitting Through the Long Night

The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.

Butterfly Unit

Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school class

blundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,

plucking milkweed plants. […]

Maryann Corbett, The month of weeds

The weekend included our second visit to a yarn show in Newcastle. It is lovely to return to a familiar setting, and to talk with returning customers as well as to meet new people. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you will know I love the conversations that arrive from being in such a setting, and there were many during the days we were there. Here’s a comment I am delighted to set down because it was an instant response that came about after I had read a poem out loud  –  who’d have thought such things could happen just like that in the yarn world – “It’s like a real one. It’s deep.” That’s a great critique of a poem heard for the first time, and it made my heart sing.

Here’s to conversations, impromptu poetry reading, growing good things and to enjoying fruits when they are in season.

Sue Finch, LOGANBERRIES

We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: On Vacation

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Running with the Pack: NaPoWriMo

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

A poem takes us into a waiting room.

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

Then we look up.

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

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

Kati Mohr, Linking and shifting between poetry and music

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

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

Ian Gibbins, The voices of birds…

With Birds and Duduk

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

Gary Barwin, This instrument is made of trees and birds

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, What started with wax.

I say to the tree growing inside me

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, An April full of poems -4

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Learning & yearning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journal of Roman Archaeology, June 5, 2023

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

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

Maryann Corbett, Vergil, dac-hex, and me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Todd Boss, Call it “Anthrophrasis”

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

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

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

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

Beth Adams, Instagram, Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Graphene

Perhaps, before their pencil, in that building

it was in me – that flat form carbon atom;

hexagonally honeycombed
undiscovered and waiting.

And before that, did it come from a star?

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

stronger than steel.

Exceptional.

Sue Finch, THREE TIMES A YARN SHOW

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

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

Fran Lock, MORNING PAGES

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

Sarah Lada, Rich Rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, 52

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

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

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

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

Jem Wikeley, Poetry Notebook, 24/04/26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

#evolutionarypoems

by Mihret Kebede and translated from Amharic by Anna Moschovakis

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

Yes & Now

by Yvette Nepper

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

Carrie Olivia Adams, April Sunbeams & Books

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

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

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

Matthew Paul, On Ian Storr’s Late Light

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

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

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

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

Victoria Moul, On marriage

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s the Gilonis take:

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Celtic Matters

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

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

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

[…]

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

Jeremy Noel-Tod, In Darkness by Day

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

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

Don Paterson, Learning from Dunn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #54

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

Robin Gow, poem in which i am an activist

The Heart of American Poetry

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

*

The Modern Element

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

Henry Oliver, Palms, poems, moderns

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

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

Maybe simple isn’t the word.

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

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

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

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

Marilyn Mccabe, with snot and ice cream

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week: 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: cobra mating season, the hand of a Medieval scribe, a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal, and much more. Enjoy.

It has been awhile friends and a lot has been going on in the world since I last posted here. These days I am trying to balance my life as best I can. Somedays I do that better than others. I am sure many of you feel the same way.

Writing and reading poetry helps. It focuses my attention to the long arc of history, gives solace, expresses what so many of us are feeling or thinking these days. I read poems written during times of upheaval and remember that humans have a long history of bad behavior and yet, and yet, the pink camellia in my backyard is bringing forth her blooms, the birds are still arguing who gets the best spot at the suet cube, and my husband once again has the coffee ready for me after my long night of sleep.

Recently my husband and I took the train from Portland to Seattle. We stayed two nights in the hotel where we had our wedding reception 37 years ago, walked the city, and took the monorail to the Opera. We met family for dinner, and even took in an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. Seattle is not the city it was when I lived in the area 8 years ago. My favorite stores were gone, entire blocks are boarded up waiting for new tenants, there is still homelessness, and drug use on some streets. In general, it looked worn out, much like I feel these days. And yet, and yet, the Seahawks fans were out by the thousands, the Olympics in the West were as beautiful as they have ever been, and the coffee at Storyville was just as good as I remembered it.

I recently took a class with the poet Danusha Lameris, who shared that we often write to our “irritants”. Those things that get under our skin and keep rubbing at us. Today, I had a poem published in the online journal RADAR POETRY titled SEEN. It is a narrative poem about a young boy who lived in the same small coastal town I lived in as a kid. This is the second poem I have written about him, and I have wondered why I keep doing so. Why the memory of him is like a burr in my sock. I think in the end, I have a need for him to be seen like the image above, beyond the dark winter trees. I think somehow in these heavy days of heartbreak, I finally acknowledged his pain.

Carey Taylor, SEEN

Enlightened men are more likely to pump iron and own bitcoin stocks. Positivists and tech-bros are more likely to support the genocide of Palestinians. The possibility of greening the desert commits itself to banishing all nostalgia for the actual land as shepherded by its inhabitants for centuries. “We obviously don’t think nostalgia can cause a person to commit murder anymore, or advertising firms wouldn’t encourage companies to use nostalgia in their marketing,” writes Grafton Tanner. “The truth is, there actually isn’t much of a difference between the words of the positivists and Fabrik Brands. In fact, they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing: the eradication of longing.” […]

In the interest of poetry, I need to detach my brain from the exhausting emptiness of the commercialized present. Longing is what poetry does. Longing finds a loose solace in the “frequency of images of the moon,” that source of nostalgia that humans still cannot quite fix in their discourse. I love whatever it is about the moon that continues to escape us.

Alina Stefanescu, Notes on nostalgia

butter in the pan:
it sings its song
of browning

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: February ’26

I also know there are so many poets who have died homeless in San Francisco, and that is not what I aspire to do, feeding pigeons in the dark. Near the end of Wanda Coleman’s life, we were giving her money to live and collecting more to support her. I called one friend, a poet, to ask him if he would be comfortable giving something. I felt kind of weird, thinking maybe he would say that she shouldn’t need help when she’d lived a grand poet’s life, but he said, “Kate, if you’re asking me if I understand that as poets, we don’t manage our money, and we might be someplace else in our heads, I know that.” And I thought, I got you. We might be building castles in the air, we might be writing the blues or drinking the stars, but we don’t spend our lives making, counting, or spending money.

For all of us writers and creatives, the wandering and the wooing of the muse is the substantial part of life, the nourishment of ideas. If you have kids, which I do, it gets tricky. You have to feed them. But when you aren’t young anymore, you have to think about the trajectory of the rest of your life. No one will be able to fully take care of you. In the end, I wish Wanda had been cared for better.

In writing, there are two ways to approach a story: plotting and pantsing (figuring it out as you go). I am not a plotter. I am a pantser. My husband and I are both writers, so we live in a plotless world. At times, it’s indecently plotless. But I am leaning into plotting and planning: write big books, build up the press, swim more, find another way to make a living so the hubby can work less. In April, for our birthdays, we’ve planned to visit my sister-in-law in Murrieta and go to sushi together. I plan for love, for family, the dream of a life of tranquil Sundays.

Kate Gale, A Dream of Tranquil Sundays: How We Value Our Lives

The cats sigh and briefly stretch, spreading
their toes apart, twitching their ears
as a gust kicks loose snow into a swirl—

a kind of dust devil on the lawn,
a devil made of icy crystals. Apparently,
winter is not as tired as we are.

Ann E. Michael, Tired

It’s not a sun, or moon, but has something of their capacity to shine. It’s the colours and how they fell into place, randomly. This was a mat I made for my daughter, a rather wonderful photographer living in the Netherlands. [image]

This year my seventh collection of poems comes out with Salt Publishing. My first collection, Powder Tower, was published in 1994, the year she was born. In glorious ignorance when it was shortlisted for the 1995 TS Eliot prize I had no idea of how lucky I was. Well, two small children, freelance working – daily life was distracting. 

But this collection’s title, Making the Wedding Dress, marks a lifetime of change from gunpowder to silk…and the wedding dress was real, for my daughter. My son played piano as she walked into the hall with her dad. The sequence about sewing that gave the book its title does feel like it’s summing up a lifetime making clothes, covers, mats, bags, costumes, you name it – whatever scraps and a machine can come up with. Zero waste, repurposing, there are new terms but I feel sewing’s about respect as well as meditation. And the rest of the book – there are strange poems about modern living, the tensions we exist among, about money, sadness about lost species that were part of my childhood and I thought would always be around, like snowy winters, watching age catch up and wring out memory. How lucky, though, to have a cover image from my fabulous friend Jane Fordham, whose work is continually surprising, revealing, unique.

Jackie Wills, Not a sun or moon

Across the lobby, in the bar and restaurant behind us, they are setting up for Valentine’s day. It’s all ruby balloons and red rose petals. It’s the kind of scene that Philip Larkin, the slippers and gin and pipe smoke poet of Hull would add a good doleful drone to as he watched the couples come in, as he watched the blokes slouch out. Only he’d probably do it tomorrow. He’d do it when the balloons were sagging, the roses wilting. It is Keats who’d be turning the volume up, adding pulse and throb to the occasion, Keats who’d be accused of making a fuss, of going over the top. And I’m not sure which team I support today, which game I want to see played. Is it flare and fancy footwork or composure and a solid work rate I’m after? There were 4000 Chelsea fans in Hull last singing in the snow and I thought about Keats saying, “Love is my religion – I could die for that.”

Jan Noble, N°51 Love is my religion

Love is a lot
like physics:
It takes study

to understand
how masses —
yours, his —

attract, how his body
heat conducts
and your heart rate

accelerates before
either has had time
to evaluate impact.

You think you get
principles of velocity […]

Radio station KPBX in Spokane, Washington, invited students of St. Andrews-Sewanee School, Sewanee, Tennessee, to select and read on the air (SAS owns and operates its own radio station, SASradio) poems with a science focus. In searching online for such poems, the students and their faculty sponsor came across my “Love Is a Lot Like Physics” and wrote to ask permission to read it on air. The poem was broadcast and recorded on “Poetry Moment” on Spokane Public Radio on October 5, 2023. It was read by student Kendall Elder.

Maureen Doallas, Love Is a Lot Like Physics

There is a difference […] between an editor stating that their journals are labors of love in order to make writers aware of the conditions under which their magazines are created, and editors stating their journals are labors of love in order to extract sympathy from writers and, as [Anandi] Mishra writes, “exploit earnest writers for cheap labor.”

Case in point:

Angel Food Mag: “This is a labor of love and unfortunately, we cannot pay writers.”

The Garlic Press: “Unfortunately, this magazine is a labor of love, and we cannot offer payment for publication at this time.”

“Whale Road Review is a labor of love and can’t offer monetary payment at this time, but we include a ‘tip the author’ feature so readers can send money directly to our writers.”

Obviously, most writers expect these conditions at literary magazines. Payment is unfortunately not the norm. But framing the inability to pay writers—which is the basic professional standard in every other market besides literary magazines—is like a tug on the heartstrings while getting robbed. It’s bad enough that most writers don’t get paid at literary magazines. Do we need to use love as a means to justify the practice?

Becky Tuch, Q: What’s with all the luvvy duv “labor of love” malarkey?

I didn’t have the highest hopes for Valentine’s Day, but we took the arduous trip downtown and back to attend the Spectacle du Petite show at Roq La Rue, which features a ton of wonderful artists including my current art crush, Dewi Plass, whose works Glenn photographed me with. Below are some of the pieces, including the fennec fox piece, for you to enjoy. However, I recommend a visit to the show! Glenn also took me to a downtown bookstore, so I could peruse lit mags and magazines not available to me on the East side. The whole thing wore me out, but I was happy I went. Glenn made duck and strawberry cupcakes, and we had dinner at home, which was lovely. (I also received two rejections—one book, one lit mag—on Valentine’s Day, which seems like a slap in the face. Not cool, places that reject on V-Day. It’s a hard day for a lot of people! Geeze!)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Valentine’s Day and Artist Dates, Birds in the Cold, Melancholy, AI and Voting Rights

Even now, in my sixties, I keep falling
in love with things. The crumpled
texture and weave of linen, the sharp
clean edge of a cotton collar, the soft
slouchy hems of bright socks.

Luisa A. Igloria, Self Portrait, with Once-Lonely Sheep

In addition to eating way too many raspberry and lemon paczki for one person this week and the rest of February, my other treat was getting a new tattoo, a pair of fancy and decorative scissors. Lately I do more digital work than analogue (something I am vowing to change this year) but when I did work more with physical materials, I always preferred scissors over X-actos, which sometimes meant my cuts were unweildy, but I was just more used to them (though it depends on the scissors.)  They are the first tattoo on my left arm, which I don’t plan to create a sleeve, so it stands alone on my forearm and is actually about the size of an actual pair. 

And speaking of collage, the Februllage endeavors have been going well. Since we’ve been coming and going a lot, I’ve been doubling up and working ahead to make sure I can post daily, if not create daily (this is much easier with collages than NaPoWriMo poems.)

Kristy Bowen, notes & things: valentine’s edition | 2/14/2026

A stray barks: sharp, staccato, afraid.
Like she is shouting in a different language.

She must have spotted another cobra.
They are everywhere now.
It is, after all, mating season.

The other street dogs don’t come near.
They are picking their battles.
Or the afternoon is too warm, too languorous,
too burdensome, to die.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Trying to make sense of the world – attempt #1

“The Quiet Ear” is subtitled “An Investigation of Missing Sound”. Raymond Antrobus was diagnosed deaf at the age of six when it was discovered that he was missing sounds at certain frequencies, e.g. birdsong, and unable to hear certain letter combinations, particularly “is”, hearing “talisman” as “tal man” or “tally man”. Typically the teachers who’d written him off as slow didn’t apologise. […]

The book’s title comes from a chapter, which also is the title of a poetry anthology that contains a poem by Ted Hughes called “Deaf School”. Hughes had been commissioned by the National Theatre to research “how people live without language”; a bizarre commission given that the Deaf are not without language, but hearing. Hughes visited a Deaf school in London and the result was a problematic poem. The poem, in Antrobus’s words, “positions the speaker of the poem as a wise observer; there’s a tone of certainty that pathologises the deaf children, seeing them as passive amusements… The biggest irony is that Hughes is lazily describing something highly sophisticated, the language of sign… Seeing Hughes use his poetic gift to frame deaf children as animalistic simpletons was a double assault to me, disappointing and hurtful. What is the use of a poet who uses their talents to enforce harmful stereotypes on marginalised people and their language?”

Antrobus’s reaction was to write a poem that mirrored the language back at Hughes. To get it published, he needed permission from the Hughes’ estate which was denied. Antrobus then redacted the lines in the poem so you only see the title and then a series of black blocks. Showing it to some school children, one suggests that if you rotate the poem by ninety degrees, you can see the poem as bars on an audiologist’s chart.

Emma Lee, “The Quiet Ear” Raymond Antrobus (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) – book review

The palaeography sessions are weekly, on zoom, from America. I have access to them through my fellowship with the Folger. They have become something I treasure: a quiet, thoughtful place of puzzle solving and companionship amongst my otherwise chaotic days of caring and freelancing and trying to write the book. I value the ritual of it. I value the feeling of joining the group and being welcomed. Usually we begin by going over the alphabet, looking at the way that secretary hand can be formed, always with the reminder that the scribes that wrote the documents are people, and each person has their own handwriting. We are reminded of context, that there is a world of difference between a son writing a letter home from university, and a letter from a spy in a royal house. Then we open a document that all the group can see and we transcribe it together, slowly moving along, a word at a time. We are shown how to enter the transcription for scholarly use and although this is not why I am here – I know I will never have the confidence or skill to transcribe anything in the archives – I enjoy the way that knowledge of how it is done brings me closer to the transcribers when I am roaming down the rabbit holes of archive work.

The stories of people are not just embedded in the text that is written. It’s in how it’s written. When we come across letters that are obviously more ornate than they should be, we can see that this is a throw back to an older medieval style and I can imagine someone who learned to write in a medieval hand passing down a habit of over exaggeration of majuscules through the family, the old ways being slowly rubbed away at the edges as each new generation learns to write. I am reminded of how I used to copy the way my mum wrote her capital Es in a double curled sweep, though I had never been taught to do that by my teachers.

Learning to read 16th and 17th century documents is so much more than learning the shape of the letters. Much of the spelling is phonetic, sometimes I think I can detect accent in the way that words are spelled. To learn the hand of a scribe you write the letters out, looking at the ink on the original page to follow the direction of the quill, getting a feel for the direction of the crosses, the way an ‘a’ merges into the minims of an n or an m, and this way you get a feel for their habits, their positioning, the way they might lean a quill on a knuckle joint, the way they get distracted and bunch a letter too close to the edge of a page, or miss a word out and have to go back and stick it in on a slant. A manuscript becomes a moment in a life, then, the dipping of a quill and the fattening of the letters with ink, the thin pale words at the end of a long line where the quill needs re dipping, the drip, the smudge where a sleeve has caught.

Wendy Pratt, The Butcher’s Hook and the Hot Cross Bun

This is the notebook of one William Lynnet (or Lynnett), born around 1622, who was admitted to Trinity as a student the year before, in 1641. William’s notebook contains various bits of Latin and English verse, some of his own composition and several addressed to prominent Cambridge contemporaries, as well as Donne’s translation of Psalm 137, the popular translation of Herbert’s ‘Aethiopissa’ (which I discussed here) and its ‘answer’ by Henry King, and an English poem by the poet Richard Crashaw, who was at Pembroke College, Cambridge until 1635 and thereafter at Peterhouse. Many items are dated to 1642 or 1643 and several describe or respond to the tumultuous political events of those years.

All of this is relevant because this manuscript also contains two copies of a good Latin poem which is ascribed, when it first appears, to ‘A. C.’. The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts takes this to be Abraham Cowley — who was also at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1642/3, and duly appears in William’s list (in the image above, you can see his name about half way down the right-hand column). Although CELMS accepts the attribution to Cowley, as far as I know this poem has never been published. […]

The poet compares himself to a singing bird who, her nest destroyed in a storm, no longer has the heart for song, and struggles to know what to do:

At si prosternit nidum fors saeva tepentem,
Et nova tempestas quaerere tecta iuvet,
Maesta silet; metuit suspiria mittere, cantus
Ne possit gemitu mixtus inesse suo.
Flebiliter pressis circum vaga cursitat alis,
Et cui adesse nequit nescit abesse loco.

But if cruel fate destroys her cosy nest,
And a storm means she needs a new house,
In sorrow she falls silent, afraid to mourn
In case her song be spoilt by her lament.
Weeping she dashes back and forth, her wings
Close-pressed, she cannot either stay or go.

This situation is compared to that of the poet who, having lain long secure and singing joyful songs in ‘your shade’, now faces the possibility of being forced into exile as a result of the ‘storm’ — that is, of course, the storm of Civil War, which broke out fully in this year, 1642. The ‘you’ of the poem might refer to a particular individual, but I think it is most likely that it refers to the university itself. Cowley was indeed eventually forced to leave Cambridge in 1644 to take refuge first in Oxford and later in France.

Victoria Moul, With hope into the lists: Cowley on the eve of civil war

What I love about “Nostos” is what I love about so much of Glück’s work: the intensity of focus, and the sensation of entering another’s consciousness so completely that it feels like your own, both effects accomplished by careful management of the line, by the way enjambment can cut across syntax to enact the movement of the mind.

The opening five lines establish the logic that structures the rest of the poem, its pattern of incompletion and association, continuity and rupture. The opening line alone give us a microcosm of this tension:

There was an apple tree in the yard—

It’s a complete sentence—and yet not, the em dash denoting fragmentation, the statement breaking off. More accurately, a breaking away from, as line 2 directs us into a new temporality:

this would have been
forty years ago—

The shift from the simple past “there was” to “this would have been” is weirdly complicated. It was forty years ago, and there’s no conditionality implied by the usage, but the idiomatic construction evokes demotic speech—the sense that we are being spoken to, or perhaps speaking to ourselves. It’s a storytelling gesture that shifts our sense of time, from past recollection to present-tense situating of the image. And it colours mood as well, introducing the minor chord of “would”: a word of longing, of distance on its own. This distance is revealed as temporal when line 3 opens with the unit of time—forty years—but abruptly turns spatial as another interruptive em dash is followed by the preposition “behind,” pulling us again into the realm of the concrete, letting us hang there for an instant in uncertainty: behind what?

So there is a lot going on, if you track the movement line by line and word by word, attentive to the subtlest shifts in verb tense, grammatical mood, intonation, and to read Glück I think you must be. But I find this concentration so rewarding, and the precision, ironically, disarming. In this instance, it’s how it captures the way we tell stories, which is also the way memory works. An image arises, unanchored, and the mind finds a place for it, slots it back into a larger narrative.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Nostos” by Louise Glück

Overall, the amount of white space, the amount of enjambment, and the short lines slow the poem down. We’re getting plenty of time to parse the syntax and savor each line. The poem either begins with a single line or as a couplet that includes the title, depending on how you look at it, but the last line is certainly on its own. It’s emphasized because it’s all by itself, cushioned in white space. The question is also emphasized by the repetition of “my hands”:

Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

The speaker is pleading. There’s a sense of desperation and a deep desire to be useful. To be a helper. The repetition three times here also mirrors an earlier repetition: the anaphora in stanza three. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, lines, sentences. In this stanza, “come” is repeated three times:

Come hurricane, come rip current,
come toxic algal bloom.

This poem is full of surprises, reconsiderations, and switchbacks. Form and content are working in tandem. The speaker of “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” wonders aloud about what it can do to be a helper. And, I’d argue, in its articulation, and in its witnessing, it is a helper. I hope if you enjoyed this poem, you’ll seek out more work by Rachel Dillon.

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

Copies of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology are going out to the media, for review requests, and to the contributors. I received a box of books a week or so ago, and I am thrilled with how it’s turned out. Donna Kile’s gorgeous cover photography, the tactile matte finish on the cover, and even the fonts. And, of course, the poems by our fantastic contributors. We really can’t wait for these to start shipping out to readers in May. […]

In other news, I shared the stage with fellow poets and long-time friends Franklin Abbott and Cleo Creech on Jan. 8 as part of an exhibition of panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Decatur Library. It was a moving evening of poetry and I – and the audience – were verklempt for most of it. I don’t do that many in-person readings anymore, but I’m glad I did this one. 

Collin Kelley, The Big Reveal: “White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology

I’m excited to share that I have a podcast episode out with Meg of Meg’s Reading Room. I can’t say enough about Meg. She is such a calm, gentle presence in this world. I love her podcast about books, and was so honored when she invited me on.

You can listen to our episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. At the very end, I share a poem from the book that I have not shared anywhere else, so go check it out!

Here’s Meg’s description of the episode:

In our conversation, Allison shares why motherhood gave her the courage to start sharing her work with the world, how connecting with her own voice has helped shape her work as a speech-language pathologist, and why going deep through her writing and creative workshops has been bringing her joy in this season.

Allison Mei-Li, A Few Love Poems

NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Volume 2), ed. Philip Rowland, Isobar Press, 2025, ISBN 978-4-907359-52-2, £12.00

Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets, ed. Neil P. Doherty, Dedalus Press, 2025, ISBN PB 978191562933, €14.50

The first time I reviewed two anthologies together here, one of them was the first volume of the NOON one. You can imagine my surprise when Volume 2 arrived with a quote from that review on the back cover:

The work in NOON is poetry tending towards the ideal condition of silence, which is a kind of music, and the visual element, not only within but in the space around each poem, is key to eliciting the quality of attention required from the reader when a poem places so much weight on so few words.

I could use exactly the same words in reviewing this second volume, but I won’t. Instead I want to look in a bit more depth at Rowland’s explanation of his method as explained in his Preface:

As in every issue, as well as the first anthology, the poems in this volume have been arranged in a renga-like sequence. Besides being a creative aspect of the editorial process, this is meant to allow for a range of short-form poetry to resonate in stimulating and sometimes surprising ways for the reader.

…

This is, then, much more an anthology of poems than poets.

In practice, because, with just one exception, poems by each poet are grouped together, this involves resonances within a poet’s work and across the works of the preceding or subsequent contributor. […]

What also emerges is the flexibility around what Rowland means by a short poem, defined as anything under 14 lines. While NOON tends towards the haiku, there’s room for anything that fits, really, including a couple of tiny haibun (or at least that’s how I read them), like this one by Sabine Miller:

VESSEL

If you were a vessel, what shape would you be? I say urn and she says murmuration. I am filled with dusty blue marbles; she is filled with sky.

the dark rock
a darker bird
alighting

In the Preface, Rowland says the book is ‘short enough to be read from start to finish at one sitting’. I can confirm that this is the case, and that at the end the temptation is to go back to the beginning and read it again. And again. Each reading revealing new delights. It’s a delight in ways that few anthologies (or single books of poetry) manage. I’ll finish off with a poem from Caroline Clark that, for me, sums up the experience of reading the book:

Can I be with you
while you read this?
Don’t look up
or say anything.

It’s a book to keep by you, to read and read again, to savour like fine wine.

Billy Mills, A review of two anthologies

There’s been a shift at night. Used to be I’d forget to attend class until exam time. Sometimes my primary school or secondary school or university graduations were rescinded because I missed a class. Pretty common dream among people I understand.

Or I searched a toilet and all would be out of service. I’d show up for meals and it was all eaten. I’d be lost, disoriented. I hid, evaded, be pursued, shot at. I’d run through cities forests in primeval fear. I’d stash myself under furniture, in heating ducts. I’d almost always escape. Sometimes I was a disembodied observer of other people and did nothing in my own dreams but watch chaos unfold. 

There were non-stress dreams of course. But the shift is this: on waking, say, that was stupid, I should have this or that. I broke into my own dreams lucidly. 

In dreams I started asking for other student’s notes, asking the front desk to confirm my schedule, chatting with professors, being in lectures, graduating. 

I started asking directions to a working washroom, pee anyway even if the only one was a urinal in a crowded hallway. I started showing up at buffets before the crowd or before opening. Being lost in another souk, I said in my dream, no not this again, so bored, walked past the vendor, threw up the flap of the tent and hailed a cab. 

Being lost and locked in a museum or store at night I started stealing stuff. Or exploring, finding new underground tunnels, and new rooftops to observe from. 

My run in the forest became a joy of running and watching the neighbourhood sprout houses and businesses and I started talking with these familiar fictional neighbours, each dream a next time lapse. 

Being held hostage, I started to huff, disgusted with fellow prisoners, getting up, telling off the gunmen until he reddened. I demanded cash for damages, or snatched his gun, taking him out and the marksmen.

The shifts have mostly happened over the last year, some spreading back a decade. […]

The dreams are starting to echo being a member of community, taking roles as protector, saviour, competent, self-serving. I move from inaction and reaction to action. 

Twenty years pass and I don’t feel cringe for existing. I ask what I want and instead of writing down goals and sub-steps, on some deep level I give permission instead of self-flogging. I don’t try to manage others or bow to others. There’s some equality. There’s some interdependence. There is something opening. Out of the forest, into the plain. New options. 

Pearl Pirie, Agency

i think we should install more doors to nowhere.
more windows full of bricks.
i am sick of functionality. i want
the nest to be as absurd as it is to be
alive right now while people are being stolen
from their ice cream places. from their schools.

Robin Gow, wild zillow

Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.

In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.

Matthew Paul, Review of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things

Yesterday I was thinking about how being an athlete is unlike being a writer.  I watch the Olympics, and I have no illusions that I will ever be at that level, and worse–the window for that level of skill is tied to youth.  With writing, I can continue to improve.

I thought about this off and on throughout the week, as I have walked from my office to my classrooms and observed clusters of students who are talking about their creative writing.  I don’t think these projects are for a class.  I think they’re just students who like to write and have found each other.  I love the building where most humanities classes are taught.  It was built 15 years ago, so it’s a very different building than any other building where I’ve taught.  There’s more natural light, for one thing, and less decay.  The common area has spaces for informal gathering/studying, spaces that look like a small living room, spaces that look like a kitchen table, and two tables of barstool height, with higher chairs.  There’s a charging station beside one of them, and plenty of plugs throughout the common space.  There are some backless couches that look like waves outside of each classroom.

Some of the students hang out as they wait for classes to start, but other students hang out all day.  As I overhear conversations, I feel inordinately happy.  There’s the creative writing discussions and the students helping each other in a variety of classes.  There are students scrolling through their phones, and others staring at laptops, but more often than not, they’re interacting.

As I walk back and forth, I sometimes feel wistful, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes sad about how long ago my own undergrad days have become.  I can also be prone to the sadness of feeling like I haven’t lived up to my potential.    Yesterday I laughed at myself a bit–I can still keep working on writing projects, and I can keep doing it deep into old age, barring some kind of injury.  In terms of athletic prowess, I’m not going to be skiing ever again; fear of breaking a bone is just too much of a deterrent.

Happily, I’m fine with that.  I didn’t like skiing when I did it in my younger years, so no great loss.  Aging must be much more difficult if what brings one joy is not something one can do with an aging body.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Life, Olympian Life

I’m always surprised when talking with another poet, and they say something along the lines of I should see more modern dance, but I don’t really know what to make of it. This, of course, is another version of what we frustratingly hear all the time as poets—I want to read poetry, but I don’t understand it. I feel like the emphasis on understanding is preventing so many people from enjoying and experiencing not just poetry but the variety of art that exists in the world, such as dance, experimental music, or abstract painting. Even those of us who spend our time immersed and versed in one discipline and recognize that every artwork need not tell a story or be representational, still often find ourselves trapped by the false idea of needing to understand a piece of art if it’s in a realm outside our own.

Here’s my plea. Let’s free ourselves of this idea.

For me, what makes modern dance amazing is that it strips dance down to its fundamental ingredients—the shapes that bodies can take and the motions that bodies can make—and reimagines it front and center. When I watch a dance piece, I observe the architecture of the dance—both for individual dancers and as a group—and I notice repeating and building patterns of gestures, undulations, or transfers of weight. All of this, of course, is anchored by the music and lighting, set and costumes, or lack thereof (some of the best pieces shine because of their spareness, by letting the dancer just dance). Together, it’s about creating an energy, a feeling that you take in, that you open yourself to. And maybe, just maybe, if you just let it happen, Emily Dickinson’s “cleaving of the mind” will come.

When I stand in front of a Rothko painting, such as the Seagram murals, I feel myself vibrate, physically and emotionally. That’s the ultimate for me. Like modern dance, modern painting is painting stripped down to its essential ingredients—color and texture. It isn’t about sense, but the senses. We don’t make something of it; instead, it makes something of us.

As my bedtime reading, I’ve been traveling through Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, which speaks to how Stein similarly sought to make poetry new by experimenting with its very textual and grammatical building blocks.

“Each word in [Stein’s] Tender Buttons . . . was recognizable in itself, but here words follow others not to advance any story, but to propel the text forward through verbal echo, surprise, or pure insistence. . . . Tender Buttons is a celebration of mutability, a rejoinder to the rules, where words are set free from the shackles of meaning and grammatical function, made unfamilar, and charged with power to make the world afresh.”

Whether you’re reading a poem or listening to a drone composition that reverbates with found sounds, it is precisely the allure of surprise and the unfamiliar that makes them successful, powerful, and engaging. If we stop asking what it means and start asking what we feel, perhaps we’ll all find our way to the forms of art that we didn’t realize we needed and that speak to us even though we thought they were beyond our grasp.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Celebrating the Ingredients

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

I’m trying to write a poetry of “what is”, at the risk of seeming like some kind of antiquated rational materialist. (Guilty.) What you believe has consequences: if you believe in the literal existence of Santa, you need to wrestle with the existence of the surveillance apparatus implied by that belief, you need to acknowledge that this authority in which you believe prefers rich kids, and so on.

So I’m trying to write about the marvellous world we live in, which means that I write about natural phenomena, often through the explanatory lens of science. I deliberately avoid mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, and other forms of woo that are pretty commonplace in contemporary poetry. But I don’t think that the transcendent and the numinous — the truly wonderful — are the property of those modes of thinking. I’m trying to write about what it’s like to be in this world, to live in it, to experience its aesthetics and poetics. This is a bit different than the way that many poets write about science and nature: either the natural phenomenon is used solely as a metaphor, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, or the poem is a hymn to the phenomenon. (Grossly oversimplifying here.) I’m trying to do something different with my poetry, to write about the world as it is and about our experience of it.

Adjacent to this is a technical question I’m interested in, which has to do with how poems might be constructed differently. If we imagine that words and lines are the atoms and molecules, respectively, of poetry, what happens if we do chemistry with these? If we pull them apart and put them together. This experiment already exists in poetry, of course, in, for example, enjambment or Manley Hopkins-esque portmanteaux. But how far can this be pushed? To what poetic end? Do there exist poetic polymers and macromolecules? What do they look like? What are they for? […]

If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve been a math teacher, and I’m currently a physician. I should have been a physicist, but fear and laziness prevented this. Some days I think I’d like to be a Zamboni driver, or the guy who drives the rake around the infield at a baseball stadium.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Moorehead

The poem was written on March 26, 1802, while Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were at Dove Cottage in the Lake District. “While I was getting into bed,” Dorothy notes in diary, “he wrote the Rainbow” — which does suggest a rapid composition (albeit with later days’ entries in the diary revealing his agonizing about the poem, building toward the move he would make with the Immortality Ode).

We should note too, I suppose, her reference to the poem as “the Rainbow.” Without falling fully down the rabbit hole (exploring, for example, how much Wordsworth meant a wordplay with pi, π, for the semi-circle of the rainbow and the “piety” of the last line), we can still remember that the clash of science and poetry was in the air — and particularly in discussions of rainbows and Newton’s 1704 Opticks.

In the 1728 “Spring” section of his Four Seasons, James Thomson speaks of the rainbow as

. . . refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds,
In fair proportion running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky.
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
And to the sage instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.

But — anticipating Wordsworth — he adds:

. . . Not so the boy;
He wondering views the bright enchantment bend,
Delightful o’er the radiant fields, and runs
To catch the falling glory

Thomas Campbell post-Wordsworthian 1819 “To The Rainbow” makes explicit the opposition of science and childhood:

Can all that Optics teach unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?

Charles and Mary Lamb in their 1809 Poetry for Children, admit the conflict but offer a more ameliorative take:

. . . If I were
A natural philosopher,
I would tell you what does make
This meteor every colour take:
But an unlearned eye may view
Nature’s rare sights, and love them too.

And so on. The question of the nature of rainbows does set up, however, the question I find most interesting about the poem: the meaning of the final phrase, “natural piety.”

In marginalia scribbled in his copy of the 1815 edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, William Blake would take aim at the phrase: “There is no such Thing as Natural Piety Because the Natural Man is at Enmity with God” — adding “I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually; and then he is no poet, but a heathen philosopher, at enmity with all true poetry or inspiration.”

And it’s possible that Wordsworth meant the word natural in the way that Blake supposed — a declaration of human nature as filled with a native piety and goodness, in rejection of the Christian idea of the Fall.

But a better reading, I think, would take natural to be about external phenomena. The nature here is not human nature, which darkens as we age (hence the Immortality Ode’s “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy”). It is rather Nature’s own piety — both, I think, in the sense that Nature herself is pious, reveling in her creation, and in the sense that Nature, seen correctly, is an occasion of grace. The natural world wants us to be pious, to grasp heart-leapingly in the experience of a rainbow the transcendental characteristics of created being: beauty, truth, and goodness.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Heart Leaps Up

Basil Bunting’s long modernist poem Briggflatts (1966) was published sixty years ago this winter — first in Poetry magazine and then as a book from Fulcrum Press. It was subtitled “An Autobiography”, but Bunting denied that it was “a record of fact”, saying “the truth of the poem is of another kind”. Despite the often abstruse allusions, he also felt that “no notes are needed”. But he provided a handful nevertheless, on the grounds that “a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research”.

Bunting’s notes were titled “Afterthoughts”, and most relate to the Northumbrian landscape and language of his early twentieth-century youth, where the poem is primarily set (Briggflatts, the Quaker meeting house of the title, is actually over towards the west in Cumbria, but Bunting saw this as part of the old Northumbria). He had returned to North East England after travelling widely, and wrote the poem in his sixties, filling notebooks on the train as he commuted to his sub-editing job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

Like T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, Bunting’s “Afterthoughts” have the air of a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal. The first warns that “the Northumbrian tongue” may sound strange to non-natives, and that “Southrons” — those from the south of England — “would maul the music of many lines of Briggflatts”. Further on, we are told to “piece […] together” the story of the Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, “from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Orkneyinga Saga, and Heimskringla, as you fancy”. By the time we get to the word “skerry”, Bunting’s only comment is “O, come on, you know that one” (it’s a small rocky island, covered at high tide). “Scone”, meanwhile, is singled out so that we can be told to “rhyme it with ‘on’, not, for heaven’s sake, ‘own’” (on the question of whether to apply jam or cream first, however, he is silent).

I had a new experience of Briggflatts recently when I read it alongside the much more extensive annotations that have been available for the past ten years at the back of Don Share’s excellent edition of The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016). One of the things I appreciated about how Share lays out these notes for the reader is that, as well as interleaving Bunting’s original “Afterthoughts”, he also uses bold type to pick out everything the poet said elsewhere about the poem: interviews, letters, conversations. So it’s possible at a glance to follow an extended authorial commentary on particular words and lines.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #40: How It Feels Rubbing Down a Gravestone

Rebuff, repulsion, lacking allure – it’s a risk to call an anthology of poetry The Opposite of Seduction and perhaps Nicola Thomas’ brief Introduction to this book of new German poetry in translation suspects as much. She concedes, ‘poems here . . . may test the boundaries of Anglophone tastes’. But that depends on your taste and for most readers this anthology will seem a vigorous enjoyable collection of young(ish) voices, most hardly ever heard in English before like Nadja Küchenmeister’s delicate, flowing lyrics of existential uncertainty (tr. Aimee Chor), or Anja Utler’s sole contribution, a re-writing of the Daphne myth,  exploiting the white page, a choppy fragmentation, exclamation, and a suitably headlong, hectic delivery. A different note is struck by Uljana Wolf, in her whimsical teasing away at self-awareness, waking at four in the morning, or down on hands and knees with an English-speaking partner, to consider dust bunnies (in German ‘Wollmaus’); ‘our little creatures, how they swap their fluffy, moon-gray names’ (tr. Sophie Seita). […]

Technique dominates rather than subject matter, though the selection is organised by subjects such as Heart, Body, Soul, Beast, Season, Machine, Home. Oswald Egger writes lush, musical celebrations of the natural world which in Ian Galbraith’s renderings evoke Hopkins, even Dylan Thomas. Dinçer Güçyeter brings material from the migrant experience (tr. Caroline Wilcox Reul) and Ulrike Almut Sandig creates a genuine split-screen reading experience, playing poem texts off against story board instructions either side of the page (tr. Karen Leeder). Given the breadth of experimentation going on here, there are inevitable failures. These are poets working to free both writer and reader from conventions, to open up novel realms of human experience, a liberation from history. Occasionally, Jan Kuhlbrodt’s nightmare vision of a man hoarding books and newspapers hovers behind some poems, so intent on their own language are they, perhaps in need of a ‘reminder of a reality that knows more than paper’ (tr. Alexander Kappe).

Martyn Crucefix, Review: The Opposite of Seduction: New Poetry in German (Shearsman Books, 2025)

My fourth collection Grey Time (Nine Arches Press, 2025) circles around the themes of grief and loss. These are subjects that I have touched on in my previous collections, but with this collection I decided to give my attention over to it more fully, to read around the subject area and to more fully explore what grief is, and how it affects us and changes – not just in the aftermath of a loss but over the years that follow. I also wanted to explore how our relationship with those we have lost changes over time. Loss in the collection is not just confined to death though; there are other losses too – losses that can be equally devastating. The poem ‘owl birth’ touches on one such loss.

To give some context: when my mother was a teenager, she got pregnant and was subsequently sent to a home for young single mothers. The baby was to be put up for adoption but she was initially allowed to bring the baby home from hospital allowing her to bond with her. This made the handing over even harder and she never really recovered from this loss and she spent the rest of her life looking for that lost daughter. I only learned of this other child after I had already left home. The effects on me were two-fold. Firstly, it changed my view of myself – I had always been the first/oldest child, and secondly, it made sense of some of my mum’s behaviour – her mental and physical absences, her hot and coldness. I was struck by how cruel it was to let a young mother spend so long bonding with their child only to then whisk it away.

I didn’t actually set out to write a poem about this particular loss. The poem came out almost fully formed while I was on a writing retreat. Each night as I was trying to get to sleep, I was disturbed by the sound of owls screeching. Many of my poems contain animals or other things from the natural world, and those owls made their way into several poems in this collection. The pine forest also is a recurring trope in my poems – I grew up in small town surrounded by pine forest and its very particular atmosphere seeps into a lot of my writing.

Drop-in by Julia Webb (Nigel Kent)

Form – what is it good for? Quite a lot, it turns out. The poetic focus and concision, for example, of being required to work within a particular rhyme scheme, or within a certain number of lines. Traditional form engages us in a conversation with a poetic history; it places us within a shared poetic culture and heritage. Poetic form can act as a scaffolding for thought and experience; a container for intense emotion. It is of course, a great way to develop poetic discipline, whilst conversely being a fun and exciting way of playing – trying things we’re not used to, finding new possibilities, taking risks, stepping beyond the habitual and discovering new directions. And perhaps most importantly – for me, anyway – form offers a powerful means of expression, exploration and discovery, deepening the meaning which hovers under the surface of our conscious poetic intentions.

On Tuesday night, Kim and I – aka the Laurel and Hardy of poetry – delivered an online workshop on poetic form. For our paying subscribers, you’ll find a recording of that session in your substack inbox, along with Kim’s powerpoint and sestina template. Yes, Kim bravely and beautifully led us through one of the most complex forms, despite my claim that it was the metaphorical equivalent of bringing cabbage to the shared poetry meal. And of course, Kim proved me entirely wrong – using a stunning example by Kathryn Maris to show how sestinas can offer us all a fluid and powerful receptacle for our obsessions. Which, in Kim’s case, is currently hamsters.

Clare Shaw, FORM!

Some days all I can say is ay yi yi. Or oy. Or fuuuuuuuuck. You know, those wordless expressions of mostly-vowel sounds the outbreathing of which, the offgassing of which you hope will take away some of the poison, some of the poison you’ve inhaled inadvertently from the world, the sorrows, the woe and strife, the basic are-you-kidding-me’s that tumble into our faces, singular and collective, big picture and small. At the level of finding-a-parking-space or the level of world-peace. Oof. That’s another one of my exhales. Jeeesh. Yeesh. Ach du liebe. Eventually I’ll gather my words together and make a coherent sentence. But I won’t be sure about it. It’ll be mostly noise created by consonants, as if I know what I’m talking about. But it’s the vowels. It’s the vowels that carry the spiritual truths, the hopes and dreams, terror and aghastness, the weariness.

I like this poem for how confident it is. Here’s the deal, the poem says. Here’s what’s gonna go down. I don’t know this poet, but I’ll follow her anywhere.

Marilyn McCabe, or maybe things were not communicated clearly.

Think of all the work the weather can do in a poem: symbol and foreshadowing; metonymy, for the spirit of a place or time; a metaphor for the poet’s inner state; a frame for the poem’s cinematography; an event, a catalyst. Sometimes weather functions allegorically, as a sign of divine intervention. Latterly, in its climate-change variants, it seems sent to punish human stupidity and greed. Weather often signals how little control humans have over our lives. We are at the mercy of this world, not vice-versa.

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Ted Hughes, ‘Wind’

To talk of the weather is often to describe our quotidian struggle or ease with our ‘circumstances’. The seasons, though, provide a larger frame for understanding what happens when circumstance – landscape and settlement, and all the human endeavour it hosts – meets time and its changes. Can we grow what we need? Will we thrive or be thwarted?

Lisa Brockwell, South of my Days

Lent starts this week, and as I was thinking about the intersection of poetry and my relatively new reversion to Catholicism, I got a little over my skis and came up with the grand idea to write forty poems in forty days. After some reflection, I have since whittled that down to seven poems in seven weeks, which is far more realistic. I’ve noticed a tendency to want to Lent-max and I’m not sure what drives that. It’s certainly not any kind of innate holiness. Perhaps something about all of the sacrifice, asceticism, and general austere feeling of the season incentives a kind of perverse competitiveness in me. But it’s more likely that I’m just trying to prove to God how good I can be so He will love me. I still sometimes cling to the illusion that I’m in the driver’s seat and that I can earn His love as long I complete some arbitrary, self-created to-do list and wave it up at Him, going, “See? I checked everything off!” Yes, I fully realize how ridiculous I am. The bottom line is, watch this space for a poem a week during Lent. These will be exploratory drafts, so no promises on quality, depth, or literary value.

Kristen McHenry, Rounding Down, Arguing with Robots, Dreams of a Watery Sun

Previous-Bethany (who hangs around) likes to curl into a fetal position (a lot) and say things like, “I have no talent for this!” “I can’t do this!” But I am changing. I’ve attended a No Kings protest,  I’ve written to senators and congress people, I’m getting a new roof (right now in fact, much hammering overhead), and new flooring (much needed but on hold), and dealing with a wet, rotted sub-floor in the kitchen (not sure how that’s going to turn out). I asked my therapist, “Am I going to get through this?” And she said, “You are getting through it.”

And, miracle of miracles, I have a new review up at EIL — of Matthew Murrey’s Little Joy.

And, other kinds of writing keep seeping out, in part thanks to Sheila Bender’s on-line class about writing grief. In addition to Sheila’s books and my classmates’ posts, I’ve also been reading an anthology, The Language of Loss: Poetry and Prose for Grieving and Celebrating the Love of Your Life, edited by Barbara Abercrombie; and Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler, which The Los Angeles Times calls the very best kind of self-help book.

My typical strategy now would be share a poem or short prose section from one of these books (so many excellent choices). Instead I’m going to share my own new poem. Excuse any hammering or thumping that creeps into the audio. And thank you for listening.

Grief wakes me in the morning

and puts me to bed at night.
She stirs sorrow into my oatmeal.
She fusses, adjusting the light
as I read, offering a blanket.
When I leave the house,
she grabs her shoes and goes with me,
walks fast, takes my hand. […]

Bethany Reid, What Am I Doing Here?

These are my first gigs for 2026: Catch me if you can, please come, say hello. Not long now, spring soon come, soon come. I sense a big shift for all of us in March. I can feel it, taste it, the world is turning, changing, the universe is shifting. I know prayers will be answered, and this dark shadow will pass, winter will end, so for now please keep on keeping on, keep reaching for the light, and remember to eat your greens and lead with love, always, lots of love xxsg

Salena Godden, Gigs & Festivals & Fundraisers, March 2026

It is worth taking the time to look at a photograph. That instant holds so much. If you have read my favourite book, Lispector’s The Stream of Life, then, you will have thought of the “now-instant.” “Each thing has an instant in which it is.” “Is my theme the instant? my life theme. I try to keep up with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the seconds that pass, fragmentary as I am and precarious the moments…”

Mama! O Life! What is the heart? What is it to be human? This instant is already the next instant. What divine frequency are you on so that I might connect to you with my own divine frequency. Hello, I am here! In a world where we paint blue hearts on walls by photo booths and dress them in protective vests. Someone else comes along and writes Gaza in a small black heart.

Nothing will be forgotten though it will take some time to see.

Shawna Lemay, We Live in Time

I thought we’d get to do all sorts of things that we never got to do, travel some, a lot more time out and about. We did get to be at Jaipur Literature Festival and I did some amazing work there, but before that I was hit with the most crazy flu-like thing, and then when that passed and I thought, aha, all good now, and we did Jaipur, a few days after we got back I woke up with a funky neck and then lost all power in my right arm and was bent over so that I could not straighten up. Thankfully, I found perhaps the best physiotherapist in the land, just down the road from me, but it was so bad for a couple of weeks that any walking had me in shards of pain. The medication I ended up on squashed my sense of being in my body, and it’s only a few days since, but something shifted and about 80% of the pain has lifted.

But this is Karma Country. In these three weeks I’ve had to meet my body with absolute tenderness and kindness, accepting what it can and can’t do each day, and, in its way, this has found its way into the new writing. I have to write at a Joycean pace, perhaps slower even, but having to be immobile so much, and with no place or position in which there wasn’t some pain, and no amount of determination from my rough, irascible, Irish, determined side that I tend to lean into when I need to push through would do anything to help or advance the situation, I had to simply allow everything to be as it was, is. Once I did this, the spirit of the writing began to grow, show me avenues and routes that I’d never have thought of in years of black coffees. Yet there is something even greater that has come from this enforced period of tenderness and acceptance. The clarity again of being the author I am. Given some of the dimensions of the world I move through, I do observe many an author, some world-stage famous, operating as a kind of story of themselves that they have to keep up. Either that, or recent reading has shown me that many books of the last couple of generations are a kind of bourgeois level of agreement that uses form as a blanket of consensus of what we mistake literature for. It showed me that I’m not part of that, and the writers and books I truly love are not part of this deepening egregore. I’ll perhaps say more in an essay about this.

While I also observe that I, and the authors who, by whatever means, have managed to stay free, pay for dearly not walking in this valley of vasana. The joy my heart feels at being the insistence to be free to write whatever I want, and that there are books and other authors across human time who have done the same, who have not done what is expected of them by the virality of that cultural conditioning that has reduced art so greatly across every form. As I’ve said before, it may mean these works never get published, never get to you, the reader, in the way I would love them to, but know they are being written, mostly by tenderness and patience rather than any force or pressure. I just keep tuning up in tenderness and the words are there. They are not even pushed to fit a narrative, or fit a genre, or style of deference, they are just there. Calliope is coming to the edge of the field each night to play her flute and my heart has learned to listen better than it ever did when I was almost the famous poetry guy who thankfully spotted the trap ahead of me when I was offered Professor of Poetry at Oxford some years back. That, as they say, is another story, and I know some of you know it, and my why for saying no.

Keep on reading, dear reader, and keep on writing if you write, and as I always I’d love to hear your thoughts, what book you are reading, what you love.

John Siddique, Valentine’s Day Weather Report

some of spring’s small teeth shall be my own

Grant Hacket [no title]

This week: beach cobbles, resonating surfaces, ambiguous texts, imaginary friends, and much more. Enjoy.

South African President Nelson Mandela famously said “Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.” I borrowed this quote when I applied for my Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa where I wanted to investigate the poetry of protest — South Africans who had written during the anti-Apartheid movement of primarily the 1970’s and 80’s.Poets such as Jeremy Cronin, Ingrid de Kok, Zakes Mda, Mazizi Kunene, Wally Serote and many others. I was fascinated.

Now, decades later, I am “back home” seeing my own country under siege. In the month of January, two American citizens were gunned down in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota—a city hitherto known for down home midwestern hospitality and as the birthplace of Prince. For years, I taught a class on the history and literature of the Holocaust. The years leading up to the final solution, look remarkably like what we are living through now. […]

Can a poem offer solace to a community? Can a few thoughtful lines calm a life? Alter the course of American history? Probably not. And yet poetry is what we look to in times of crisis. After September 11th, the New Yorker Magazine, published “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski.

I also think of William Yeat’s poems “The Second Coming” and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, “Praise Song for the Day.” I think of Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” and Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem “Running Orders” — all poems that spoke in the immediate wake of trauma but that also endure over years, decades.

These poems rise up from my subconscious unbidden during hard times. The power of the work continues on as documents of our times. All of these fall under the heading of documentary poetry. These works are also among my favorite poems written in the 21st century. They matter on an emotional register as well as a historical.

I don’t want to pretend that the poem I wrote last month has the same staying power. All I know is that these poems that come unbidden, out of great pain, matter.

As a working poet, the poems I’ve written about my human rights work in Bosnia Herzegovina, or Gaza and the West Bank, or post Apartheid South Africa are among the poems I’m happiest to have written.

Susan Rich, What Poetry Can and Cannot Do:

January was supposed to be quiet. Instead, it was a rollercoaster ride – atmospherically, emotionally, politically – a rocket-fuelled start to 2026. Weather patterns continued to see-saw. An oscillating Jet Stream travelled further, both north and south, dragging weather systems to unexpected latitudes. The perturbation and chaos continue to unfold. Impacts are becoming more extreme.

The Jet Stream is a thousand-mile-wide river of power, bigger than the Amazon, the Nile, the Ganges, greater than the sum of all these mighty flowing waters. The energy involved in moving masses of air so swiftly is almost incomprehensible. Warnings from science and voices of reason, already slow to enter our collective consciousnesses, are repeatedly overwritten by hollerings about politics, Epstein-omics, warmongering and military hardware. If only the strutting brawn, with their big tech, bags of dollars and guns, could perceive real planetary power, its truth, they might think differently.

Natural phenomena, geopolitical and socio-economic ‘landscapes’ are increasingly turbulent. I feel these ‘unsettlings’ increasingly and deeply. I watch my grandchildren play. My emotions swell and threaten to spill out. […]

The great dunes at Red Point were white with frost; the billion-year-old Torridonian sandstone boulders and beach cobbles shone purple and mauve. We sat and drank hot black coffee and watched dozens of divers float on a current of calm. At Mellon Udrigle we stood at the water’s edge while a group of seals swam and played nearby. At Opinan, the sea was flattened by wind power. Its surface seethed and writhed like thick paint being stirred. Further out, the Minch flexed sapphire and holly-green, bursting with diamond-white flecks. And every so often, small waves broke into spindrift, each one releasing a rainbow made of gauze.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, on light, time and mars

It all seems to be about trees at the moment. I picked up The Overstory by Richard Powers in the Huddersfield branch of Oxfam and am enjoying it hugely. Each chapter is really a short story, linked by the theme of trees, but that’s underselling it. Powers conveys the ups and downs of people’s lives with a deft brushstroke, a style that allows him to compress a character’s life into a few pages, without compromising on depth. And then I found myself at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park today, immersed in the light and sound experience of an installation called ‘Of the Oak’, effectively the life of a single tree, but the science behind it allows you to see and imagine the mesmerising beauty of it. If you every doubted it, trees are incredibly alive!

Hopefully a tree haiku will emerge from all this, although it has to be said, I need to slow down a little and make space for writing again – not the first time I’ve had this thought!

Julie Mellor, It all seems to be about trees …

I can stay in my chair

but when I let my ears
turn wild I hear
You shouting
in the winter wind

Rachel Barenblat, Listen

The world is a mess, we know that. Joseph Campbell said: “The Bodhisattva voluntarily came back into the world knowing that it’s a mess. He doesn’t come back “only if it’s sweet for me.” The Bodhisattva participates joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

This doesn’t mean that we should give into the doom scrolling. We can know what the news of the world is without further traumatizing ourselves or seeing the same thing over and over. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are writing “signing off until spring” or some such posts on social media, and this might not be the worst idea. I’m on less right now, too. And I do believe in doing a two week or longer re-set with it all. It’s a tricky balance when you’re trying to promote your (or in my case your partner’s art and upcoming art show) work. […]

So, yes, I’ve been retreating to my sacred space, my study, as much as possible. And what I realized one morning after I’d spent (not kidding) over an hour writing correspondence where I basically just said no to 80 percent of the asks, was that my belated word of the year is: hermit. I’ve had years where my goal was to say yes, to embrace everything, the all. But this year, like many, I think I need to re-set. Read more books. Go more analog. Get into nature more. Garden more. (Once the ice ball that is our backyard at latitude 53 melts — somewhere in early May).

And though I am a firm believer in promoting and encouraging excellence, I also want to dabble more, as Karen Walrond would say. In her latest book she says that an amateur is defined as “one who loves.” And I think dabbling can make you even more appreciative of the art or craft you admire. Pick up some paints and you’ll certainly come to a new understanding of how Vermeer got the light on the pearl earring or how each petal was painted on a Rachel Ruysch flower. Walrond extolls the virtue of play, just like Campbell, and in her project to try new things she insists upon play, on curiosity, and to prioritize practice over perfection. We need to feel good! And dabbling can take us to good places mentally.

Shawna Lemay, Participating Joyfully in the Sorrows of the World

In my last post I declared that for me poetry was on hiatus. I intended to veer back to where it started, to the telling of short stories, the challenge of flash fiction.

And, as always happens, my inside has taken hold and now all these poems are emerging, and I can’t help but tell these stories by rhythm and line break and white space and even punctuation if I can get it right. I’m exploring emotion thanks to a poetry school course and it’s tough and awful and wonderful and magical. I’m getting feedback on my words and feedback on my feelings and people talk about a safe space and this relative anonymity makes me feel I’ve found it. And safety cushions danger, which make creativity and suddenly I don’t mind that this post will not be opened, read or shared or liked on here because 17 other people are reading what I write and they’re not commenting for algorithms or to make useful connections they’re comment because we each know how it feels to draw out words we hope will land.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, On the freedom of writing about everything with little care if it is read.

It’s been a long time since I have needed painkillers for six days in a row and I did a lot of talking to myself about this during the week. Lots of words about needing to be patient and wait for things to pass. Reminders to myself to look for the joy in those glimmering moments when putting the washing on felt doable, when different drinks soothed my sore throat in different ways, and giving myself a gentle cheer of encouragement when I had the desire to pick up a book and read.

In amongst the resting to recuperate elements of my week, I also had the wonderful joy of being invited to be a guest on a podcast. I loved so much about this… the being asked, the feeling of being recognised as having something to say, the thinking about what we might talk about and then the absolute joy of being in the moment of the conversation. I was able to hear myself think out loud and there was laughter, and those are truly lovely things to be gifted when you share time with someone.

Sue Finch, UNDER A BLANKET

Yesterday I drafted this blog from inside a very cold bongo drum. High winds rippled and banged our metal roof riotously: “Thumbing / the tin roof like a smoker who / cannot get the house to stay alight,” I wrote in Mycocosmic, in a poem about perimenopausal sleeplessness.

Even though hot flashes are rare now, I’m still not sleeping well. The radiators blast dry heat, a vaporizer blasts vapor in an attempt to counter the dry heat, and the dial on my brain’s worry machine is set to high. The U.S. is in very bad shape. Some beings I love are suffering. (The cats don’t mind if I violate their privacy, so I’ll say thyroid medication isn’t reversing the weight loss of our older cat, Poe; the young one, Vincent, has this condition where he’s allergic to his teeth. If you could use a reason for gratitude, there you go: you’re probably not allergic to your teeth. He’s the white cat pictured here in the bliss of painkillers.)

During Virginia’s uncharacteristic Big Freeze–just beginning to ease–I was unable to walk much, and losing that outlet affected my mood. In this tiny town unused to harsh weather, the snowplows do a lousy job, and many neighbors don’t shovel sidewalks, usually the rich ones in red brick mansions. Wealthy students slide their enormous SUVs into rare street spots, totally oblivious to the possibility that a local resident shoveled it with difficulty and wants it back when they return home with groceries. Small gripes. I think what’s getting to me is seeing so much cluelessness, people unaware of or indifferent to the needs of others–now, of all moments. Paying attention is an ethical obligation, a pretty minimal one. I know I’m not alone in that conviction–sending awed love to Minneapolis!–but so, so many people in my red county seem to have iced-in hearts.

So, as others have been blogging, I’m finding a sense of community where I can. I did two poetry events this week that made me feel genuine connection to others: the Bardic Trails virtual reading (an exceptionally warm, lovely group!) and a panel discussion of poetry and the environment in the nearest big town, hosted by the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont, which is just getting off the ground as a welcoming public space, an oasis amid development. I also tuned in by Zoom to a panel discussion hosted by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, just as a listener, and the panelists were SO smart. Poet Maya Jewell Zeller, talking about her forthcoming memoir Raised by Ferns, was one of them.

Lesley Wheeler, Winter bongos

Even the best poems have a habit of disappearing until the right person, at the right moment, presses them into our hands. When I first started reading, it was the introductions that drew me in: old Penguin anthologies, Faber’s Poet to Poet series, staple-bound pamphlets. Books you could carry in your pocket, chosen by an individual personality and introduced with style (and without condescension). Introductions are the way poetry survives. They are also, I think, something of an endangered art. Which is why I am starting a poetry press.

Headless Poet—more on the name below—will give writers and poets space to recommend poems and poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. It will also publish brief introductions to the best new poetry. There will be little-known early modern poems, reassessments of figures like Thomas Hood and Lilian Bowes Lyon, entirely new work—and more besides, with introductions on their way from Victoria Moul, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Alex Wong, Tristram Fane Saunders and Camille Ralphs. I am looking forward to sharing them all.

Jeremy Wikeley, Why I’m starting a poetry press (and how you can help)

Today’s post is mostly about Horace — with some Wyatt and Jonson at the end. As any keen Horatians among my readers will know, the dictum that poetry should be both beautiful and useful comes from Horace too, so it is appropriate that I heard just this morning that a little collection I’ve edited, Poems Beautiful & Useful, is now available for order from the very exciting new Headless Poet press run by Jem. This is a selection of the kind of poems that were most popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawn from both manuscript and the obscurer reaches of print. Several have not been published before, and most of them are not well-known. I am proud and delighted to be the editor of Headless Poet’s very first publication. Jem has a whole series of publications planned for this year, all ‘introductions’ of one kind or another — definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Victoria Moul, How come, Maecenas?

Jayant [Kashyap] was a winner in the 2024 Poetry Business New Poets Prize, judged by the brilliant poet Holly Hopkins. I was really pleased to see that Jayant had won, because I recognised his work and style from a previous year when I’d judged the competition and he’d been shortlisted. In the back of the pamphlet, it was interesting to read that when he won, it was his fourth time of submitting – proving again that sometimes being published is not just a matter of talent, but of persevering, of finding a way of dealing with setbacks and rejections.

Notes on Burials is a wonderful pamphlet – held together by a concern and interest in what we bury, what we carry with us and what we leave behind, how we die, and by extension of course how we live. There is sometimes a surreal touch to the poems – in ‘but dogs don’t want their puppies buried’ the poem talks about a mother dog carrying dead puppies around and finishes ‘once I buried two dead pups in shallow ground / and next morning they were back up out of the mound playing with her’. This image has really stayed with me, and it’s an unsettling poem in terms of thinking whether this is an unreliable narrator, or whether this is surrealism, or the simple truth of a mistake or something else. Whichever, it often feels as if that border between life and death is more permeable than we usually appreciate in many of these poems. […]

There is also a playfulness to language here – the roots of words are often examined closely and held up to the light, but I think Jayant is also interested in how words slip in and out of themselves and into other words. In “Oak” the speaker asks us to “Imagine it standing / at the edge of a forest – hermit/heretic/heritage”.

There is a run of really moving poems towards the end of the pamphlet which finishes on “Prayer for My Mother As A Child”. This is a beautiful poem which starts “Let me carry myself like a quiet emptiness in her school bag”. This line almost made me cry – that wish as a child to go back to before you were born and see the mother as a person, before they carried you – both physically and metaphorically and spiritually. It’s a poem full of longing for the mother figure to live a life she did not get to live […]

Kim Moore, January Reading Diary

Shared Origins/A collaboration between three poets, Mike Jenkins, David Lloyd, and David Annwn, The Seventh Quarry Press, 2025, ISBN: 9781919610085, £6.99

Giraldus Redivivus, John Goodby and David Annwn, Incunabula Media, 2025, £12.00

The concept behind Shared Origins is both simple and intriguing. Take three poets who started their writing careers together as students in the 1970s at Aberystwyth University and put together a set of poems from each of them that, in part at least, reflects their relationship with Wales and Welshness. […] [It’s] a fascinating case study in how three poets can start out from much the same place and shared concerns, to one degree or another, but end up with radically different approaches to writing, From a personal perspective, it also introduced me to two poets whose work is new to me, which is always a good thing. Thank you The Seventh Quarry Press for making it happen.

Along with David Lloyd George and certain 1970’s rugby internationals, Gerald of Wales is almost certainly Ireland’s least-favourite Welshman, with his Topographia Hibernica being widely regarded as the spiritual forebear of Punch magazine’s caricatures of our 19th century ancestors. The Welsh, of course, may take a different view of his two Welsh books, the Journey through and Description of Wales.

Neither John Goodby not David Annwn is actually Welsh, but they both have long-standing relationships with that country, both personal and professional, and in Giraldus Redivivus they reinvent the Journey as a piece of 20th century intertextuality. In doing so, they take their lead from polyglot Gerald, who interleaved slices of French, Greek and Welsh into his Latin text, a text that contains quotations from classical and British authors, anecdotes (his own and reported), acute observations, smatterings of local history, and a sense of the hardships of travel all structured around a circuit clockwise from the south-east corner of Wales and back again. It’s a genuinely non-genre-specific work.

In their reimagining, Annwn and Goodby mirror the portmanteau, collage-like method of the original, with more-or less straight ‘found text’ sections, passages that weave phrases or images from the original into passages of their own making, and a variety of verbivocovisual pages that either concretise the shape of what’s happening or make actual the difficult experience of reading the manuscript original, with the large A4 page size put to good use.

Billy Mills, The Matter with Wales: Two Books

In 1976, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Bathanti began his “walk away from [his] past” in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That he’d earned a master’s degree but “wished to spend [his] days among criminals” left his parents confused and hushed. Bathanti knew nothing of the place he was heading to — North Carolina — or of the place to which he’d been assigned — a prison in Mecklenburg County. For this newly minted VISTA volunteer, any road out of Pittsburgh, to freedom, he was glad to take. That “[his] life was just starting” left Bathanti “near euphoria.” Driving south, he could never have guessed that it would take him more than three decades to articulate one of the most important lessons he learned as a “fugitive from [his] former life” up North: that we all, in our way — some by our choices, others by the misfortune of our circumstance — put in some “felon time.”

*

It was not until the fall of 2013 that Joseph Bathanti, formerly, Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-2014), published Concertina (Mercer University Press), a remarkable collection of narrative poems that, in language both colloquial and lyrical, relate his true introduction to life, not only inside prison but also outside the razor wire. […]

Time does not temper the truth Bathanti distills and documents on every page decades after his VISTA assignment ended. As he declares in another profound moment, “So help me God, there is no whole truth.” (”Jury Duty”)

Yet, there is respite from the ugliness and violence, for truth is never one-sided and life is never all-bad. Indeed, the brilliance of Concertina lies in its skillfully ingrained and repeated refrain about the dualities present in all of humanity, whether a “mother, shackled to a sweatshop / Singer in a dim downtown tailor shop” (”Faccia Tosta”) or the inmate “too exhausted to lift his heavy hands to protect himself” from the blows of his keeper. (”Cletis Pratt”) “A guard is not much different than a convict. / One hates the other, loves the other.” (”Transfer Day”)

The concertina, after all, can be played, too, and it’s possible to enjoy, as Bathanti does, the intermezzos — the downtime with Joan, the woman whose hand Bathanti clasped on “[his] first Sabbath out of the penitentiary,” who “lived in a boxy mill house on Moonlit Avenue” (”Moonlit Avenue”), with whom he enjoyed “miso soup and Roastaroma mocha, / the verse of Kim Chi-Ha.” (”This Mad Heart”) With Joan, the woman who was to become Bathanti’s wife, “[e]verything was crucial.”

The love that passes for poetry between Bathanti and Joan prevents hardening and cynicism. It makes it possible for Bathanti to draw on poignant moments for sustenance: visits to the women’s prison of children “in their perfect innocence and self-possession, / toddling dutifully into the arms of anyone // who reaches for them” (”Women’s Prison”); the sight of “project kids” practicing etudes in a church cellar while, upstairs, ex-cons partake of “soup kitchen food” (”ECO”); a reading lesson with an inmate whose “tragic flaw” is “the presence / of an extra 21st chromosome,” who, “[w]ith childish wonderment, / [. . .] whizzes through the drills.” (”Teaching an Inmate to Read”)

What comes clear in Concertina is this: where there is room for love and understanding, there is a place for hope and the possibility of redemption.

Maureen Doallas, Joseph Bathanti’s ‘Concertina’

squeaky snow
nothing more to say
to myself

Tom Clausen, antler shed

A mouth is two things, a conduit for food or a means to communicate. Mona Arshi’s “Mouth” focuses on the latter, or rather how something that should be used for communication can also be silenced. A shut mouth says nothing. Power and societal imbalances can make it dangerous to speak, particularly if the person being spoken to is minded to wilfully misinterpret what the powerless speaker is saying. […]

A mouth can be silenced, or it can speak lies when it is not safe to speak the truth. Eurydice feels compelled to diplomatically entertain in public but swear in private. She calls it “bragging”, talking up the King’s achievements and putting a positive spin on the negatives. From “experiments” to “expletives” the poem feels wordy and employs the rhythm of prose, deliberate strategies like Eurydice’s attempts to be diplomatic. The last four quoted lines employ more poetic devices such as consonance and the repetition of “o” mimicking an open mouth, usually a sign of surprise or horror.

Later the “Blind Prophet Tiresias Warns Queen Eurydice She Will Be Collateral Damage”. He notes, “Prophets are translators./ The first rule of a bloodthirsty regime/ is to bury translators. It’s a fact.”

Emma Lee, “Mouth” Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus) – book review

Eavan Boland’s Eurydice opens her silence in song, a counter-song if you will, to that of Orpheus’ lament, a lyric that gives us reason to believe that knowing one another is fundamentally impossible. The lovers lament different things. […]

Boland’s poem reminded [me] of a wonderful essay by Jack Foley on Gertrude Stein’s portraits, and how he notes that time “is not only a subject but a condition of the piece,” a text which was also a portrait.

Foley thinks Stein deploys palindromes as a sort of mirror for which “the line runs out and then runs back.” The idea of recognition that Boland’s poem engages aligns somehow with Foley’s description of Stein’s palindromic relationality:

The first half is identical to the second half—except that the second half is backwards. She has a phrase in still another portrait, “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”: “Idem the Same.” The word “Idem” is Latin and means “the same,” so the two halves of the phrase are saying the same thing—but they are saying them in two different languages. Stein’s relationship to the people she makes portraits of is like that. She and Picasso are “Idem the Same”—the same but different; they are like words which mean the same thing but exist in two different languages. Together, they constitute a kind of palindrome; they are full of the same elements, but one of them is running one way and the other is reversing that movement.

Similitude meets me in my daily life as a lyric of resonating surfaces, or patches of sound that connect the world across languages, linking the experience of being as I apprehend it in the fluidity of Romanian and the more rigid, consonant-heavy textures of English.

Alina Stefanescu, Eavan Boland’s Eurydice.

Who now reads him, who now cares? George Meredith (1828–1909) was once a name to conjure with, one of the last great High Victorian writers, a peer of Thomas Hardy and Henry James. His 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel brought him public fame. His 1879 The Egoist and 1885 Diana of the Crossways were considered additions to the canon of classic novels. His poetry was successful too.

His 1883 poem “Lucifer in Starlight,” for example. His 1881 poem “The Lark Ascending,” describing a bird in flight, inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams to write a 1914 instrumental work with the same title.

And then there is Modern Love, Meredith’s 1862 sequence of fifty poems about a failing marriage. Written in a curious pseudo-sonnet form, the 16-line poems trace out in pentameter the incidents, the words spoken and unspoken, that reveal the collapse of love, sympathy, and any desire for mutual understanding in a couple.

In today’s Poem of the Day, for example — the 35th in the sequence, beginning with the husband’s mean-spirited resignation when he realizes that “Madam would speak with me” — that husband in Meredith’s near novel-in-verse knows that his wife’s “quivering under-lip” means that she is near to bursting into either tears or raging anger (“The Deluge or else Fire,” “Niagara or Vesuvius”).

And he is concerned only to circumvent any such meaningful exchange. They speak in platitudes about their health and the news — so that “With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense,” and thereby the husband escapes the drama he can no longer feel worth the effort.

The 16-line stanza — built of four quatrains with an envelope rhyme: abba-cddc-effe-ghhg — is a sharp performance of Meredith’s skill at describing envenomed human interaction, and it reminds us that maybe the fading of the Victorian writer is a loss for us. And yet, I cannot bring myself to like the poem much. The commonplace meanness of the husband, the manipulative mood of the wife: just a little local unpleasantness that gives me a shiver and makes me wheel away, turning my collar up against the chill.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Madam would speak with me

I’m immediately struck by the poems in Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s second full-length collection, For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first of her work I’ve seen, and an apparent follow-up to her debut, sur vie (Fathom Books, 2020). Across four sections of first-person lyrics—“DEATH OF THE MOTHER,” “LIKENESS,” “AS IF” and “SECOND LIFE”—the poems are dense and intense, graceful and substantive. “I am preparing to write a book,” begins the first stanza of the eleven-stanza opening poem, a piece that pushes, swirls and loops in a remarkably dense yet nimble pattern. As the two-page piece ends: “Or lacking all these / to write the book about the death / of the mother you simply need / a mother, who is dead.” The opening poem immediately sets the tone and tenor for the book as a whole, writing out a bursting, bubbling grief of graceful and substative gestures, offering a light touch of lyric through lines thick with emotional heft. “We all know Mother means / I was born from your body but I too / guaranteed your living. // In the mothering reign where / you are always alive,” opens the poem ‘PREULOGY,” “alone and evenly / breathing, a place // of exile where you remain / a figure leaning lazy on a rock, / black spot of ink bored into sand, [.]” Her poems are collaged and purposeful, direct and layered, writing out all the mess and contradictions of mothers, of family, of grief and sentences. Offering a marvellous and subtle fluidity, these poems are delicately crafted with such utter grace and punch.

rob mclennan, Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties

When I take my first clear breath after illness,
the world smells both sharp and tender.

I remember echoes in stairwells, and streetcorners where
small flames were tended in the service of our hungers.

There are flowers that don’t recognize boundaries.

Luisa A. Igloria, Everyday Ciphers

On Tuesday evening I finally started reading my copy of Harry Man’s ‘Popular Song‘. It’s taken me a while to get to reading it, having bought it at the London Launch at the Torriano Meeting Rooms. Harry was a very entertaining reader that evening. I know he read with Matt Bryden, Tom Weir, Tiffany Ann Tondut and Michael Brown too…I’m sure I’ve written about it here before). Christ, it was nearly 2 years ago. Sorry Harry. However, we move…as the young folks don’t say anymore.

I was working my way through Harry’s book and got to his poem ‘I waterskied lonely as a clownfish’, and more importantly I got to Line 5 of the first stanza and knew I a) was reading a great poem and b) I had my blog post ready to go..

Mat Riches, Harry the Man

When Auden wrote his poem, the war economy that had won the Western Powers their victory was only just metamorphosing into what would become known as ‘late capitalism’. But he is already meditating on what is happening to society, and the world of work, in those lines about the “unimportant clerk”. As Hecht points out, Auden’s definition of a ‘worker’ (in his commonplace book, A Certain World) is that of someone who is “personally interested in the job which society pays him to do”, and not that of a “wage slave”. For Auden’s worker, “what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play”. With that as context, Auden goes on to ask a question first published over a half a century ago, in 1970:

What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen percent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get much bigger in the future.

Without belabouring the point, for what passes as a member of the literati today, crushed on all sides by dwindling sales and diminished retail space, by shortened attention spans and FAKE NEWS, it might be understandable to cultivate an “imaginary friend”, or in other words, an ideal sense of ‘the reader’. That goes double for the poets.

There are some people (particularly in poetry, with its aesthetic pretensions and apparent disdain for marketing) who claim writing for a reader is a mistake, that it imposes unreasonable objective expectations on their subjective artistic expression, that one should place primacy on the writing impulse and leave the audience to organise themselves. As even Auden seems to concede, writing is “voluntary play”. It is possible these people are kidding themselves, and others, but if they are being sincere then they are playing on their own, without any imaginary friends. Just ask any small child if that’s a good idea.

If, on the other hand, writing for a reader imposes some rules on the play, perhaps that’s for the best. They are the rules of friendship, after all. In this reading, all the literati should indeed keep an imaginary friend. It makes the writing more likely to be any or all of the following: to be entertaining, to be edifying, to be … excellent.

And here’s the thing. Poets have always written for an imaginary friend, and not just in the specific mode of literary address that Anthony Hecht refers to. Poets write, in a conversation of influence and allusion, with poets that went before them – and given those poets tend to be dead, any friendship being forged is by definition imaginary. At the same time, implicit in the idea of posterity is the sense of writing for readers that are not yet born. Whose “sleeping head”, in his ‘Lullaby’, is being asked to lie, “human”, on Auden’s “faithless arm”? Or, to use perhaps the single best example in literature, who do you think John Keats is holding out his “living hand, now warm and capable” towards? Clue: he only goes and tells you.

Andrew Neilson, Auden’s ‘Imaginary Friends’

Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.

In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.

When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.

Maria Popova, The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

Is there, then, room to be made for a cultural space where the individual, their identity, and all their baggage, are left to one side? Might this be part of a movement that begins to redress the balance of this (actually quite precious, for all its faults) liberal democracy? I think there is, although what it would look like I’m not sure. I imagine an online platform where a weekly anonymous poem is shared, and anonymous commenters are welcome to leave their thoughts. A community of poets and readers who know nothing about one another. There may be some rudeness if the poem met with disapproval, but how long would such rudeness last if the nymity of the poem was denied? Where is the fun in trolling if you don’t know who it is you’re trolling? And might, at last, some form of trust ensue? 

The second argument comes from a feeling I have that many (perhaps all) of us tend to base our judgements of poems as much on the identity of the poet and what other people have already said about a poem, as we do on the objective ‘thereness’ of the words on the page. This is part of the function of the blurbs on book covers; they’re partly there to sell the book, obviously, but also, I feel, to tell people what to think: oh, X says this is great; then it will be okay for me to think it’s great too. And this focus on context and nymity also leads (I suspect, although I’m not sure I could prove it) to a slightly cowardly tendency of some online reviewers to wait until a collection has been well reviewed by a couple of other critics, so they know whether they are safe to like or dislike it.  

As I say, context is important; but there is also a sense in which critics’ views are both formed and then validated by the identity of the poet. A new poem from a much-admired, multiple TS Eliot Prize winner sits in a different spot in a reader’s brain from one by an unknown – or known and disliked – poet. And can we really say we read a poem we know to be written by a man in the same way as one we know to be written by a woman? Likewise race and sexual preference. 

There is a fair rebuttal of this argument, which is: of course we read these works differently, and so we should. There is language that is appropriate for some groups and not for others. In fact, you can probably go further and say we need to know as much as we can discover about a poet’s cultural identity so that we have the information we need in order to form an appropriate opinion of their work.  

But this argument only goes so far. 

The need expressed in the previous paragraph is only a need if your approach to poetry is extractive and judgemental: one in which you ask yourself, ‘What can I take from this work, and what opinion can I form about it?’. But there is another approach, and one I prefer, which where the reader asks: ‘What can I give of myself to this work, and what can I learn from it?’ 

If I take the second approach, my own identity and context are key, because I cannot escape them. Outside that… there are words; and there is what occurs when those words meet my own particular outlook on the world. This is my reading; and I must ask myself, what happens to my outlook on the world, now I have encountered these words? What aspects of my Self must I open up, and scrutinise, and change? This process could be seen as a gift I receive from the poem and my encounter with it. I am not so much extracting from the words, but in opening myself up to them, they respond by giving themselves to me.  

Chris Edgoose, On Anon: the case against ‘Nymity’ 

Radoslav Rochallyi  is a poet, essayist, and interdisciplinary artist living in Prague, Czech Republic — and the author of eight books of poetry.   Recently I found his work featured here in Math Values, an online publication of the MAA (Mathematical Association of America).

In Rochallyi’s article — entitled “Vector Poetry” — he shows us three different illustrations of poetry portrayed using vectors.   He takes a phrase that he would like to communicate poetically and offers three examples of how it could be portrayed using vector poetry.  The phrase is:

“Time is pouring out of my broken watch glass. You look ahead, and you’re right. Because the potential of the past is just … a sandcastle.”

Here is a link to Rochallyi’s complete article.

JoAnne Growney, Vector Poetry

Why should people with money get to use a special lane? That’s not fair. Yeah, yeah, life isn’t fair, people with money use special lanes all the time. Still. This road was supposed to be for everybody! Now, as if the grind of traffic wasn’t bad enough, you have to sit in your old junky Toyota and stare at those mofos in their Lexuses gliding along the interstate with their SmoothPasses? What fresh hell is this?!

Not to mention, now the lanes for everyone else are even more congested! Where before this interstate had four lanes, now there are just three. The city gave that fourth lane to the SmoothPass drivers! They built a Lexus Lane!

So, okay, yes, the commute has gotten better, but only better for some people, the ones who can pay for it. The rest not only have to wait but have to wait even longer. The city has privatized a public problem, sloughed off financial solutions onto its citizens, and officially made things worse for the majority of people.

Crimminy.

There has to be a better way.

*

By now you’ve probably guessed that I am not writing exclusively about interstate travel. This is not, after all, Highway News.

What I am talking about here is the recent trend of magazines offering expedited response times to their submissions. In a recent weekend column, I stated that this was unusual, generally not done. Several readers pointed out that I was incorrect.

Over the past week, I’ve learned that these readers are right. Numerous magazines have adopted this practice. In exchange for a response anywhere from three days to two weeks, writers can now pay between $5 – $25.

Becky Tuch, Q: Are literary magazines building Lexus Lanes?

The judges, I could tell, were very interested
In what I had to say. They let me speak
More than others; they rarely interrupted.

Continue down a road for long enough:
Eventually, to turn aside requires
An act of will beyond your reach.

Some power must remove the rotten things
And all the dirt that’s settled on this world;
And some new instrument must be created.

Brad Skow, Walther Funk Interviewed at Nuremberg

I compared this video Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper to my own experience of reading a lot of ebooks and a lot of traditional books.

And then I tried to compare whether the books were poetry, lit crit, social sciences or physics.

The results don’t fit the patterns this guy is describing, and I tend to think therefore that he’s talking about a certain genre of book (fiction and certain kinds of informational book) that I don’t read but that are all that many or most readers read.

I feel he was good at describing the pleasure of reading real books, but he had to do so by denigrating reading eBooks. Obviously books have a tactile feel and a smell, and yes you can go back to something you’ve read by flicking back and forth and remembering where the sentence was, recto or verso, top or middle or bottom.

But you can also do word searches on ebooks, and I for one use these all the time, with very satisfying results. Because I’m interested in ambiguous and layered texts, with subconscious meanings, I find that word searching flushes things out. I find the eye makes a SUMMARY, and then on several occasions has told me that such and such a page, in total, means only the SUMMARY. I am then quite surprised, by changing the font or the text size, or coming at a text via search, by something very specific that I have been overlooking – but which is now impossible to overlook when it’s distorted or magnified or sticking out like a sore thumb by these “linear and scrolling” ebook habits.

Above all, I would point to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Because it was written by a professional singer and lover of music, and also a lover of signage and words in visual designs, on buildings and in newspapers, it is in some ways a collage and in other ways a symphony. The collage and symphony aspects tend, as all good paintings and music do, to feel different on different hearings and hung differently in different light with different neighbours. Ebook reading of Ulysses offered me this. It took away from the literally awe inspiring look that printers (guided by Joyce) gave the novel on the page. Awe can blind us, and create fetishism. Ebooks give a flow back, and resist certain stuck habits.

And a book like Ulysses, like a poem, is about much more than the rational business world, or the creation of a world and drama in average fiction. A poem can be much more spiritual, about life lived on many levels. And poets often write to aficionados (either other poets or the trained reader) for a reason, the same reason that a composer writes a chamber piece; or you shouldn’t attend Wimbledon hoping for test cricket. There are expectations, there is fancy footwork to be admired, as well as a certain metronome (but not a rhythm as such, not merely more of the same, in the same rhythm, as we got in the venue the previous day).

Ira Lightman, Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper (a critique)

I have been thinking about the artifices of art, the superficial surfaces, the pleasing semblances. “It looks just like a photograph,” said someone approvingly of a realistic scene painted in oils. (No one says of the photograph, “It looks just like the real thing.” They might say, “It looks like a painting.”) And the so-called “real thing”? What does it look like? And a misty version of that realistic scene? Is that integrating something of emotion, or the murkiness of memory? And the impressionistic version, is that closer to how the brain grabs at colors and edges and scents and sounds and forgets all kinds of details? And if the surface of the scene is nubbled with thick paint, what then? Are we disappointed to find that the painting is a painting? Or does it enhance the experience with its tactility, its boldness? And if there are other substances on the surface — tissue paper, string? And if someone sticks a sticker of a dinosaur and calls it absurdist? That too can be pleasing. Or not. What does it mean to “enter” an artwork? What does it mean that something of the work prevents entry? I’m reading a collection of poems that have a lot of…er…words in them, but I can’t quite make sense of it all. I can’t gain entry. A poem is all artifice. Text and space and form. No one mistakes a poem for a photograph or for the “real thing.” But I can get lost in fiction. Can look up suddenly from the page, disoriented to time and place and even myself. Isn’t that funny? And music — it’s all artifice! Banging and strums and dingledingle. And it can make me cry. What is up with that? Fool me once. Fool me forever. Please.

Marilyn McCabe, Tell me, train-sound

I attended a talk on Sylvia Plath and Mysticism and Witches by someone who is publishing a book on the subject. Almost everyone in the Zoom room had a Dr. before their name (except me), but I felt so comfortable during the talk—after all, I’ve been studying Plath for over thirty years, before it was cool! The talk itself really inspired my thinking about witchy poets, too. And about whether or not I should go get that darn PhD, health issues be darned. I really could use more intellectual stimulation—after all, I might have limitations in my body, but my mind gets really bored with limitations. […]

This also caused me to take another look at the relative witchiness of the manuscript I’m currently circulating to publishers. […] I did work with changing the manuscript’s title again. How do you land on your titles when you’re sending out your books? Do you fiddle with them, adjusting them to what you think a particular publisher might like, or do you just stick with one until it’s taken? I’m afraid I am a fiddler. But it is good to step back and look at a manuscript as a whole and ask—what story is this book telling? What characters are central? What are the general vibes? Are there too many books out there with a certain title already?

I like anything that puts my work in a different light, that helps me think of it in a different way.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Superbowls and Sunshine, Witchy Poets, Wordclouds and Titling, Changing Perspectives and Losing Control

When Red Hen began growing, I went to New York, and for the first time, I met with a few agents with the idea that in some glorious future, we might be significant enough to take books from them. I met with one well-known agent, Georges Borchardt, who told energetic stories about his years in the business. “When I was first working with Sammy,” he said. “Sammy wasn’t that famous.” I didn’t know who Sammy was, but as he kept going about the times that Sammy flipped between French and English, I looked behind him on the wall, where he’d hung a large picture of Samuel Beckett receiving the Nobel Prize. Sammy!

I was fascinated. I asked about Marguerite Duras, the French author whose work I knew he had introduced to Americans. He spoke about her like he’d just talked with her yesterday, like she was a dear old friend. Speaking of T.C. Boyle made him light up. He loved talking about his legendary boots, the California rush of his books. Then he started on Eli Wiesel, one of the most notable voices in Holocaust literature. After Wiesel became famous, they held parties in his honor, and he asked Georges to come along. At some point, Georges would decide to leave, and as he stood by the elevator, Eli’s footsteps would rush up behind him.

“The party is for you,” said Georges. “You have to go back!”

“I’m coming with you,” Eli would say.

“No, you’re not. You have to stay.”

After an hour of meeting, Georges invited me to dinner at his home. His wife, Anne, made a lovely soup, and I marveled at their two libraries: one in English, one in French.

After that, I thought maybe we should try to last longer as a publishing house, meet more people like Georges Borchardt. But there was no one else quite like him: erudite, well-read, generous. He was curious about what I was reading, what books I liked, what authors I had met and wanted to meet. Being in the room with him was like a crash course in publishing. He explained to me that the whole publishing business used to be built on midlist books—those that weren’t blockbusters but were still viable and worthwhile to publish—but then it changed, and it was all about the big sellers. Mid-list was an easier category, he said. Ian McKuen and T.C. Boyle started as midlist. They had breakout books, books that took longer to catch on, but Georges stayed with them.

Across all these years, I’ve still never met anyone quite like him. He just died at ninety-eight, and his daughter, Valerie, has taken over his agency. He will be missed. […]

Publishing is a kind of madness. Anything else would be easier. But we remain in the hard work and tumble, thinking bigger, building our legacy. Borchardt stayed in the thrum of it until the end. A hero of literature.

Kate Gale, On Georges Borchardt & The Maddening Dream of Publishing

I wrote this poem for the late Richard Sanger, with whom I had the pleasure to work on his last collection, Way to Go (Biblioasis, 2023). It was published posthumously, which Richard knew would likely be the case while we were working, and I remember how inspiring I found his patience about this fact. By that point I’d seen the publishing industry rush enough books to press for one reason or another, few of them matters of life and death. That he remained more committed to making the best poems he could make than to whatever personal edification or pleasure he might take from seeing them published was rare, and inspiring. I admired him very much. Here in the uncertainty of my own illness, his conviction about how a poet lives—how a poet dies—is even more profoundly moving to me.

I don’t much care for opining about my own work insofar as intent or, ack, interpretation, but in the spirit of engaging with all of the poems I share in this newsletter, a bit of context. At Richard’s memorial, speaker after speaker got up and remarked on his humour and playfulness and irrepressible verve, but I noted how a handful of remarks—mine included—commented on the seriousness with which he regarded poetry, in both his teaching and his own work. A young woman who’d been his student remembered being advised to set a draft in blank verse, and that it had unlocked an entirely new dimension in her writing, and so, for both of them, this one is blank verse as well: five beats per line, which alternate between rising—the iambic da DUM—and falling—trochaic: DA dum—rhythms. I didn’t undertake the last part consciously, but I’d hazard that my ear was appreciating the tension between fear and acceptance: the pounding of the fearful heart, the gentle acquiescence of the resting.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Elegy for Richard”

January was a blast, despite the year’s first rejection winging its way to me on only the 5th: I’ve been far more productive, poems-wise, than usual. That may in part be due to reading the long, elegant, syntactically-gorgeous lines of C.K. Williams’s poetry at bedtime, which seems to have unlocked a part of my brain hitherto securely bolted. I’ve been to two fantastic weekend workshops, at both of which the other participants wrote amazing, inspiring poems. In editing my own, I’ve found, not for the first time in the last year or two, that I’ve spent at least as much time adding to the poems as I have deleting or tweaking phrases and lines; for me, that’s a very happy place.

I’ve been delighted to see some poetry pals buoyed by recent successes, a reminder, if one were needed, that the poetry world has room enough for everyone with flair, imagination and a willingness to work hard at their craft.

Something else which has made me think a lot about the use of language is learning Italian: I’m in the second year of evening classes and I’m at the point now where I relish the challenge of rendering Italian into idiomatic English. (Or even idiotic.) I can’t say that I’m speaking Italian with great confidence, but I like having a go and I enjoy how the words flow into one another more seamlessly than English words do.

Matthew Paul, February update

Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the architects of post-independence anglophone poetry in India. With 18 books of poetry over 5 decades, his work is exemplary in the way it is located in his immediate landscape – physical, social and political – and in its ability to overcome all linguistic hurdles to evoke deep Indian sensibilities. But he was also unsparing of himself, bringing a brutal honesty to his poetry. His poem ‘A tale, to begin with’ is one of his many attempts to articulate what he saw within. It starts with this line:

“Jayanta Mahapatra never did anything worthwhile’

When did a line like that not make the reader hold their breath till the conclusion? When did the end of such a poem not become the beginning of a thought experiment? I was moved to write something that was not as much response as it was salutation, not as much “shalI I” as it was “do I dare.”

Here’s the poem I wrote. I hope you will be kind to it!

*

The poem expands in the hollows inside me
like sacredness slowly builds up to ten-
dimensional rapture. Silence echoes like
a refrain. I imagine the poet must have dipped
his pen deep into atmosphere and amygdala,
into myth and maelstrom, into singularity
and solitude, to find these words. Or he
writes like the river flows: through physics
and compulsion and irrepressible love.

I become a figure by his window, behind
his retina, inside his nights. I can see where
my shadows intersect with his shadows. [….]

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Of love and self and a poet and poem

I’ve written a lot of poems based on fairytales in the past. In fact, I often chide myself for doing so almost too heavily in my early work (things like literature, folklore, art, and history are great subject matter when you haven’t yet lived enough or learned to harvest your own life for poetic material).  In some ways, it felt like a crutch. In others, writing about cultural touchpoints can be a great way to connect with readers and explore retellings of stories they already know.  These iterations can sometimes offer more in-depth examinations of themes–those drawn out by the author or already there in abundance. I tend to also gravitate to works, both as a reader and editor for the dgp series, that work and re-work fairy tales and folklore.  One of my first artist book projects was a series on Little Red Riding Hood called THE BOOK OF RED. My third full-length book THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS had, at its heart, the Goldilocks tale. Later,  I wrote a more witch-sympathetic interpretation of Hansel and Gretel with PLUMP. There are also other loose poems that do similar things with existing stories. 

As someone newly married, Bluebeard has been on my mind. Probably because the first couple years we were seeing each other, I had not been to J’s home and was completely convinced he was too good to be true. So obviously had to have a basement full of dead women he was hiding somewhere.  It’s also especially funny since he actually eventually moved in with me, so all the secrets and locked rooms had to be mine. (I did tell him to avoid the entryway closet with its ever-avalanching mounds of press and art supplies I shoved in there when I moved out of my studio space and just haven’t found a home for elsewhere in the apartment.) For this project, I was also a little inspired by the musical SIX, which details Henry VIII’s wives and their mishaps, which, while all did not die at his hand, can be an interesting correlative in terms of the powerlessness of women historically.   

The poems are going well, and I will be sharing bits from them in the coming weeks. They will also be part of the Patreon offerings for February (still working on what that will look like. I decided the epistolary was a perfect form for them, as in letters from the last wife to Bluebeard himself, though she becomes a chorus of other fragmented voices of dead wives. 

Kristy Bowen, the abattoir letters

In stories, you’ve learned that the blackbird of what holds all of us together sings when we’ve lost our voice.

That the blackbird of our shared joy lends us wings when we’ve forgotten how to fly.

Sometimes in sleep, you see your other half.

You ask one another what the weather is like in your different states of being.

You ask one another what the world looked like before guns, before hate,

before all those broken mirrors ago.

Rich Ferguson, Somewhere in the World

Before yesterday, I had planned a snow/winter weather theme for my Advanced Creative Writing class, and having snow drifting by the window was the perfect touch.  On Tuesday, I read Dave Bonta’s Poetry Blog Digest, on his Via Negativa site, as I do most Tuesdays.  He linked to this post by Kristy Bowen, which concluded with ten wonderful poetry prompts for winter.  They’re the best kind of prompts, the kind that work not only for poetry but for all kinds of creative thought.

I put each prompt on a slip of paper and had them put the slips of paper face down on their desks.  Every five minutes, they turned over another slip and wrote for five minutes.  At the end of five minutes, they could keep going, or they could turn over a new slip.  

They were all writing on laptops, which was fine with me, although I did realize that I had no way of knowing if they were really working on prompts.  But from observing them, they did seem engaged, and they did turn over slips.  At the end of the process, I had them select one line from their writing and put it on a blank slip–and then I read all the slips as one poem, an interesting experiment.

I did a variation of the writing too, although since I was the timekeeper, I couldn’t lose myself in my writing the way I might have.  I did come up with some interesting lines that I hope to continue to work into a unified poem. 

By the time I got on the road to drive home, the sun was shining, and while it wasn’t warm, I wasn’t afraid that the roads would freeze–it’s the best kind of winter weather, the kind that doesn’t disrupt but does inspire.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Weather and Writing Prompts

I haven’t posted a good stuff round-up in a while—and frankly, the news feels like a relentless round-up of bad stuff, so I need to shift my attention. Last night was some very, very good stuff, between Bad Bunny’s joyful celebration of the Americas and Brandi Carlile’s moving performance of “America, the Beautiful.” I don’t know about you, but I needed that. My kids did, too.

What else is good these days? My birthday is this Friday, and my fifth book of poems, A Suit or a Suitcase, is out next month! […]

That opening couplet of “A Suit or a Suitcase” has me thinking a lot about my country right now.

You ask what I’ll miss about this life.
Everything but cruelty, I think.

The cruelty has been devastating to witness. We have a long way to go and a lot to learn—about ourselves, our history, and each other. In these harrowing times, I’m so grateful for writers, artists, and educators, and for their work—films, plays, books, and music—that teaches us about ourselves, our history, and each other, and that reminds us of what it is to be human.

Maggie Smith, The Good Stuff

i am the idea of a limb.
you can chew on me
until you’re bored. you can
give me a little hat. tear the clouds
out of my chest. make a sky.

Robin Gow, dog toy

I’ve given myself a difficult task. Yet we learn through difficulty, do we not? Often, too, the unlovely poems are those that deal with how rotten human beings can be, or illuminate the worst of times and offer us insight and information that we had not been taught, hidden horrors, trauma, all of the above. I have written many lovely poems about lovely things. The world, however, manages to be far more complicated than beautiful, a mixed bag of joys and miseries, and it seems to me that literature and art ought to reflect that fact sometimes.

What I’m posting below is a very rough draft, just to demonstrate how I begin a difficult poem, a poem based upon historical facts that I’m learning myself. It’s a completely different process from when I write from an image or observation of my own. For example, the “Librarian” poem, which is about 15 pages long, took me a couple of years and a visit to the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) at Carlisle Barracks, PA! First I pull some quotes, make a lot of notes, highlight images or place names that seem most resonant. Then I develop these into what I call “jottings” and fragments, and start setting them into an initial sequence–which I often change later.

Stanzas? Line breaks? Metaphors? Meter? All of that can wait; I like to work on structuring the narrative first when I try something in this vein, and I want to find images that might speak to a reader. So it is clear to me that this poem is not one I’ll have finished before the end of the 5-meetings-long workshop. Assuming I ever do finish it. Yes, poetry is hard work.

Ann E. Michael, Unlovely drafts

And the seeds under our steps sleep in vernalization.
It is a patience I wish I had, staying hard until things turn.
Until the snowmelt and soil-shift are messages beckoning warmth.
And the smallest tendrils inside us crack through the crust of ourselves,
and shove granules aside, one instant at a time.

Sarah Lada, Vernalization

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

free fall and crystalline

intricate machines of vanished moments

the outside of silence

Grant Hackett, snow

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, the methodology of giving up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelli Russell Agodon, How To Live in a Broken Country

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, Book Tour Announcement

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Furious Poems For Infuriating Times

The sky above:

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

The world below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Ferguson, The Sky Park

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

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

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

Mark Strand writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Come

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

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

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

for one hundred years
hope was tranquilizing

despair a mountain
of solid stone in hands
crippled by manacles

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

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

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

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

Maureen Doallas, one nation

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

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

Beth Adams, Two Polish poems, and a sunflower

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Arthur Sze’s mushrooms

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

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

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

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

Donna Vorreyer, Slowing My Roll

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

Katie Manning, “Love Poem with Tumor” in Asterales

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

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

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

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

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

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

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

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

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

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

His poetry is

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

O ye undiscriminating minds!

Brad Skow, Tell Me What You Really Think

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

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

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

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

but the idiom is too much for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don Paterson, The Burns Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Noel-Tod, We Speak From Out There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #51

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Shirt knowledge

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

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

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

Life
Candle flame
Wind coming on

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, This Wilderness & Other Concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alina Stefanescu, A few by William Heyen.

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

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

JoAnne Growney, Reading Numbers Like Poetry

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

rob mclennan, the green notebook,

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

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

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

Tim Love, Rejections 2025

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

Sue Finch, HYDRATION, CONVERSATION, AND GOOD COMPANY

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

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

Kristy Bowen, on poetic drama

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

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

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

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

Saudamini Deo, The Fallen People: Paul Verlaine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, two feet

独り言落として枯野から帰る　山路　花

hitorigoto otoshite kareno kara kaeru

            dropping a monologue
            I return
            from the withered field

                                                            Hana Yamaji

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

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

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

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

Yes Yes

I see it

so they won’t keep telling you

where it is

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

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

Sarah Lada, And the Rest Is Rust and Stardust

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Returns

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

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

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

Matthew Stewart, The book knows…

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

PF Anderson, untitled

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

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

I did not write. Not even my diary.

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

The world didn’t end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, the decline of democracy doomscroll

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

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

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

Maureen Doallas, Who Gets to Speak

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, Our story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Anger Issues

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

From page 79 of the 50th Anniversary edition:

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

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

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

*

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Delicious Books, Beauty Shocks

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

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

Jill Pearlman, Bowl of Mysteries

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

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

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

Kathryn Anna Marshall, What I learned from the snow

snowmelt puddle
while it can
holding a tree

reflection by tom clausen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, At the lip of the cave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Nomenclature

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Hurt Hawks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, nail in the coffin

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, THE MOON POEMS ARE WAXING LYRICAL

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

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

Kim Moore, A late November and December Reads Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So many conundrums to solve. 

Pearl Pirie, Digital Chapbooks

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Small, refreshing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to the episode here.

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

Anthony Wilson, Poems on the Underground is 40!

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

Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa Brockwell, Burn Your Notebooks

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

Edmund Prestwich, Such dazzling genius

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

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

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

R.M. Haines, Four Poems of Petty War

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

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

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

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

I can’t remember.

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

Alina Stefanescu, James Tate

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

Bob Mee, EARLY MORNING, JANUARY 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would we call it? When would it be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My tongue is always bathed
with longing.

Luisa A. Igloria, Hunger Wakes Me

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

Grant Hackett [no title]

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

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

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Window strike

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

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

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

Sue Finch, WOLF MOONS

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

Here are some things that brought me joy:

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

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

Sandra Beasley, Farewell to 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Pollard, Into the Woods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristy Bowen, myth and the female epic

A poem by Basho

(tr. RH. Blyth)

Toshi doshi ya
saru ni kisetaru
saru no men

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

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

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

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

Marilyn McCabe, Toshi doshi ya

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

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

Matthew Paul, A Twixmas Meditation

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

Luisa A. Igloria, Leaps of Faith

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

Laura Grace Weldon, Favorite 2025 Reads

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, 2025 in reading (playing Yesterday)

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

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

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

Kersten Christianson, 2026, Snow, Much Writing

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

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

Writing Intentions

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

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

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Intentions for 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Donna Vorreyer, Out with the Old and All That

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

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

Sarah Russell, Butterfly

The complement to mindful living is mindful reading. 

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

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

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

Pearl Pirie, 2025 Self-Audit

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

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

Ruth Lexton, Watching, January 2021

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

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

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

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

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

My dad had a beautiful overcoat.

The lamb’s white fur got smudged.

My brother was a baby,

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

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

Maggie Smith, Behind-the-Scenes Look

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

Alina Stefanescu, For Lynne.

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

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

Brad Skow, Found / Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gerry Stewart, Scottish Book Tour 2025

Literature works through a special force of language.

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026

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

conglomerate by tom clausen

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

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

Josephine Corcoran, Hello, China

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

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Two Books

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

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

Jill Pearlman, New Year’s Spin/Reboot

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

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

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

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

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

Happy beginning and ending to you.

Sarah Lada, Annus difficilis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rachel Barenblat, A prayer for the first Monday of the secular year