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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Broken Things.

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

Sarah Lada, Donna

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

Dale Favier, Fetch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue Finch, MY YEAR IN REVIEW

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

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

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

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

Robin Gow, football tv

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Collected Poems 1964 – 2016, Barry Tebb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanessa Stauffer, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Oliver, Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My pamphlet Cry (Valley Press, 2025) is all at once a delving into the ego, a rumination on the difficulties of accepting one’s suddenly-changed identity as a creative mother, and a heartfelt expression of love for one’s child. The subjective viewpoint is that of a woman who tries to carve out time to maintain her ‘writer self’ alongside the newly acquired ‘mother self’, and she wends her way between the mundanity of chores and the space needed in order to write. The poems veer from warm love for her child to frustration to exhaustion to annoyance at a husband who doesn’t consider the mundane aspects of parenting to be part of his role. Freedom and space are craved.

The poem ‘Floating’ appears almost half-way through the collection, just before the central crux, and I have chosen to offer it here for all its metaphor, psychology and symbolism. As a poet, I find it hard to escape the metaphor; indeed some things are better said through it. It lends an “otherness” which can encourage a freer voice, more immediate language, and something concrete on which to base an idea or feeling. For otherness, think of the patient’s chair facing away from the antiquated psychoanalyst to garner honesty and openness, or likening a person or feeling to a piece of fruit to detach them from yourself and describe them better: hard skin, pith, juice… One can really have fun. In ‘Floating’ I give you water.

Drop-in by Katy Mahon (Nigel Kent)

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

Ann E. Michael, Systems

We watch other writers making best seller lists, winning awards and feel like we could have had that if only we’d set up an instagram account and promoted our books, or made lots and lots of contacts that we could pull in for favours when we needed them, if we’d set the alarm for five am and pushed out 2000 words fuelled by caffeine before shuffling the kids to school and keeping house, not forgetting making time for health and happiness, reconnecting with nature and reading fifty two books a year. We have this pushed at us from every corner of the internet. The dream writer life can be achieved if you do more than other writers. If you fight harder you will achieve more. If you push harder you will be the one that makes it. Added to this, we crave the validation of our peers, naturally, and as a species we are drawn to the idea of a hierarchy, that there must be a way to attain the top tier if not the top position. If we knew what the key to it all was, we could make it. If we took the right course, the right workshop, if we made the right friends we would, finally reach the golden summit of being successful. There are many people making money selling writers a key to success that doesn’t really exist. If you can’t physically fight, will you drown? If you can’t keep up, will you disappear? This is one of the fears that comes up the most when I am mentoring. I have that fear in me too. But our perceptions of what the writer life looks like, and about success are skewed by that fear.

Wendy Pratt, I don’t recognize the writing road anymore, or even the creative landscape my mind is waking up to.

What a lovely event it was at The Brunswick in Hove on Sunday, at the awards event for the Brighton & Hove Arts Council Poetry Competition. Jeremy Page had kindly invited me to read alongside him (he was the adjudicator) and the audience was very receptive, especially given that they were no doubt there to hear the results of the comp! One of the poems I read was ‘She offers her defence’ from The Mayday Diaries, not one I’ve ever included in a reading because it’s written in two voices and without having the poem in front of you it’s possibly a bit hard to follow. Then I had the idea of asking poet friend Jill Fricker to read it with me. I knew she would be there as she had been shortlisted for the prize. And I think our team reading went well!

Come the second half, when the results were announced we found out Jill won first prize for her poem ‘NW3’ – very exciting, and a massive co-incidence that she’d already appeared on stage in the first half. Huge congratulations to Jill. She’s actually a pretty successful poetry comper. I must ask her what the secret is.

This week I was contacted by Rebecca Leek, whose podcast The Ditty Bag is a lovely thing: she records a new episode every week, featuring five or six poems that she has chosen, sometimes on a theme. This week there’s a fair bit of water, and Rebecca included my poem ‘Before the Splicing’ which was originally published in Prole magazine. She liked the poem because of its rope-making and boat-ish references, and actually explained what ‘splicing’ is. Very helpful! The poem is a sonnet spoken by a woman having doubts (or not) ostensibly about whether the rope she’s working on will hold tight, but also whether her impending marriage will work (the sense of ‘getting spliced’). I was delighted to hear Rebecca read it.

Robin Houghton, Readings, and a poem on ‘The Ditty Bag’ podcast

I live in a world of books, in the over-passionate, underfunded world of the arts. It’s messy and uncomfortable. But art is. The billionaires are in tech in the Bay Area. While thriving financially in the artistic sphere may be near impossible, reading enriches my life in every other area: it allows me to expand my mind, travel the world, imagine myself anew, be everywhere all at once.

As a publisher, I always think about who will read the books we publish. As a reader, I read all over the place, tumbling through genres, styles, poems, stories. I like to envision that we will all keep engaging with literature, whether we read books physically, listen to audiobooks, or consume bite-sized essays and poems throughout the day.

Kate Gale, Read to Me, America: For The Love of the Arts

Many poets seem to leave their book behind as soon as it’s published, but at that point I feel I’m only just getting to know it.

First of all, the reviews it receives (if the poet’s lucky!), provide an excellent sounding board. Which poems do reviewers highlight? What elements are cast into doubt? And secondly, what about the readers who buy the collection? These days, they often select a favourite poem or two from the book and post them on social media. Which ones are chosen? And thirdly, the poems that the poet might also decide to share. Which generate most traction? Which are most popular? Which garner most sales of the book? And then there are in-person readings. As mentioned previously on here, those events enable the poet to explore their collection again, to test which poems go down best in person, and which appear to disappoint.

And finally, the poet often benefits from time to weigh up all this feedback, to gauge it, to avoid dramatic, knee-jerk reactions to it, to compare and contrast it, to consider how it might (or might not!) contribute to the writing of their next collection. Of course, none of this process is possible if they turn their back on the book and immediately embark on another creative project as soon as a copy reaches their hands. The seemingly fallow period that follows publication is, in my view, a necessary pause, a pause that may be filled by the satisfaction of engaging with readers.

Matthew Stewart, Getting to know your own collection

My poetry book now lives in over 120 homes, across 28 states and 5 countries. I want to say these numbers are far beyond what I expected, but I don’t think I really let myself “expect” anything. Regardless, every time I try to picture it—these little blue books sitting on nightstands, tucked into bags, resting on coffee tables—my whole body hums. […]

I’ve learned that marketing is much less fun than writing, and I’m not really the type who can do both at once. So for now, I’m letting myself lean into sharing this book and finding my readers.

Originally, I planned to spend a few quiet months focused on online sales before moving toward in-person stores. I wanted room to breathe after the marathon of finalizing the book. But my ADHD brain saw shiny opportunities and sprinted straight to them. I ended up pitching shops almost immediately.

From everything I’d read, I expected a long string of no’s before even one yes. Instead, I got two early yes’s (woohoo!), followed by two no’s, and two that I have not heard back from yet. Of the six places I pitched, half were boutiques and half were indie bookstores. And incredibly, A History of Holding is now available at Golden Hour Goods in Ventura and The Bookworm in Camarillo.

I’ve already sold a few copies at Golden Hour Goods (in fact, the first copy sold before I’d even left the shop)! The idea that a stranger could wander in, pick up my book, and decide to bring it home? That still feels unreal. […]

Another surprise was just how time-consuming and expensive it was to sign and ship orders. Each packaged book included a custom sticker, bookmark, plastic envelope to protect the book, gold wax seal, bubble polymailer, and shipping labels. By the time all was said and done, I spent about $7 on materials and postage per book. Still totally worth it, in my opinion. There are cheaper options, of course (ahem, Amazon), but I loved sending out the highest-quality book, infused with special touches directly from me. I wanted opening my book to be the highlight of someone’s day.

Allison Mei-Li, My First Month as a Published Author

The early half of this week has been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on CLOVEN, whose release is pending just after the beginning of the year. The initial proof copy was lost in the mail or swiped from the package room (or has somehow vanished into a dimensional divide along with a bottle of nail polish and some air fresheners) so I had to order another. Given shipping times, I assumed [that] would set me back a few weeks on the release, but I there wasn’t much that needed adjusting besides some margin/gutter issues, so I was able to make those changes in the master file, get it approved by the printer, and place an order for my first stack, which given it’s the 10th, may guarantee me copies before Christmas.  It feels like a more wintry book than GRANATA, which was all spring/summer, the first book in the series, so this mid-winter debut seems perfect. […]

I was thinking the other day, when I had to order another stack of an older self-issued volume, DARK COUNTRY, how much releasing my own work has changed my view of what’s possible for so much the better. On one hand, the benefits are immediate, like control over timelines and the book’s launch into the world. It also feels good and more sure-footed to not be waiting on submissions and schedules and just feeling like there are blocks and bottlenecks that are ultimately a zero sum game, at least for me and my needs/wants. If I could go back a couple decades, as enjoyable as its been to work with other publishers, I’d switch to self-publishing much faster than I did (for zines and chaps, I’ve been doing it all along through the years, but I’ve only had the design/layout skills in the past half-decade or so. )

Kristy Bowen, self-publishing diaries | the final stretch

I am excited to say that I have just received advance copies of Polar Corona, my prize-winning ‘crown-of-sonnets’ poetry pamphlet, published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press.  

For further details: click here. 

From the blurbs:

“In Polar Corona, Caroline Gill offers a vivid and precise depiction of Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife, especially the seasonal rhythms of penguins’ lives, interwoven with a poignant exploration of human fortitude in this most testing of environments. Her marvellous ear for the music of a poem is evident throughout and the intricate pattern of mostly half rhymes cleverly accentuates the pervading sense of risk and unpredictability.” 

 – Susan Richardson, Author of Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022) and Words the Turtle Taught Me (Cinnamon Press, 2018), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 

Caroline Gill, ‘Polar Corona’, my prize-winning poetry pamphlet on Antarctica

Are you surprised to see me so soon?—me too! I’m usually more of your every-so-often friend who arrives with poems and snacks, but I just got the word I could officially share this with you (and I wanted to share here FIRST before you saw it on social media, etc.—Accidental Devotions has its FINAL cover—and I’m trying (um, failing) to act casual about it.

But the day is perfect to share as today would have been Emily Dickinson’s 195th birthday and Emily D. is braided all through this next book (her and Darling Sue and even pressed jasmine)! So maybe this is not just a cover reveal, but also a little birthday offering to Emily’s altar of em dashes and devotion. (Side note: I recently read that AI is using dashes now, and I wanted to shout—Grrrrl, I got here first! I know there are a lot of dash-happy poets out there—maybe we need to start an Em Dash Society or at least wear t-shirts: The Em Dash: Because Periods Are Too Final).

Kelli Russell Agodon, Dropping in Briefly with Beauty

My Creative Retirement Institute class on Emily Dickinson’s fascicles wrapped up yesterday. The beauty (and the weirdness) of it was that focusing on the fascicles made it impossible for me to turn the class into “all of Bethany’s favorite E. D. poems.” In each class I asked, “What caught your eye? What do you want to bring to our attention?” As a result, we put a microscope to poems I’ve barely given a glance in the past. And everything we picked up gave us so much to talk about. It was ideal.

Today I’m having my writing group here, at my house. I’ll bake Emily’s Coconut Cake, and we’ll drink sparkling water, and read poems to one another. What could be better?

Bethany Reid, Happy 195th Birthday, Emily Dickinson!

Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.

It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.

I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.

If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.

Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.

Fokkina McDonnell, If there were no wind, cobwebs…

I woke up this morning thinking about publication opportunities as the year draws to a close.  There are book contests that seem interesting still, like the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.  At one point in the last few months (see this blog post), I thought about revising the last manuscript of poems that I created in 2019.  I even printed the table of contents to see which poems have been published since I last sent out the manuscript, and I made a list of new poems to include.  I put question marks by the poems I might take out to make room for the new.  I thought I would change the title and have the manuscript ready by mid-December, so I could send it to a few contests.

But this morning, I have a different vision.  I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly.  I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground.  The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.  I’m going to let the idea percolate as I send out poems for publication and think about the larger themes of my body of poems.  I think it will be a much stronger manuscript if I take this different approach of creating something new, not grafting onto the old.

I am aware that I may only have a chance to publish one book with a spine when it comes to poetry, given my age and how long it takes to move a poetry book manuscript from submission to publication.  So I want it to be good work on several levels:  the best poetry that I have written, the poems that work as a cohesive whole in the best way.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Publication Ponderings in Mid-December

Perhaps it is my southern hemisphere background, but I find it hard not to feel gloomy in the cold, dark, dreary months of northern winter.

This December has been particularly depressing. In the part of southeast England where I live, issues with mains water quality led to a disruption in supply; ironically, given the fact that it has been raining for weeks. The lines from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner acquired a new context:

Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

There have also been reports of an alarming surge in flu cases, including advice to wear face masks in public settings. On a global scale, events seem to be increasingly turbulent, the background noise more dissonant, the outlook ever more chaotic and uncertain. In some ways it feels reminiscent of the pandemic: that sense, in early 2020, of flailing around, panic-stricken and directionless. Then there was the alien state of being in lockdown; schools, businesses, leisure facilities all closed, no physical contact with wider family or friends, daily announcements of grim statistics and ever more stringent protocols….

That was nearly five years ago, and it feels like another lifetime. We don’t talk much about that period of lockdown any more,  yet the repercussions continue to reverberate in deep and subtle ways. It features, directly or indirectly, in a number of my poems: ‘Post Lockdown’, for example, which was written in 2021, or, more recently, ‘Discontinuity’.

May we all survive asymptotic times unscathed.

Marian Christie, Asymptotic Times

the world is sky, lake, three men and a killing. it is winter.

deer flying overhead. branches delicate, vibrating.

veins of this world. blood splattered across the snow.

Grant Hackett [no title]

I must admit, these short, dark days are hard to take. Being more of a night owl, I miss part of the limited daylight we get in the mornings, then feel shocked and cheated when twilight approaches before 5 p.m. So unfair! 

How to cope? I try to appreciate merino wool sweaters, flannel sheets, and our wood-burning stove. And ignore the fact that spring is still months away—in fact, it’s not even officially winter yet! Still, it’s cold, dark and damp, and I struggle.

otter dusk
what’s left of the light
slips downstream

But it turns out that the worst is already behind us: yesterday saw the earliest sunset of the year here, at 4:48 p.m. From today on, the days will feel longer even though the winter solstice is not until December 21. So hurray for the return of the light!

Annette Makino, Glimmers in the dark

It’s cold in these darkest days of winter, the land having turned its face away from the sun. But you are warm here, sleeping heavily under your down quilt, your worries scattered lifelessly about the rug where your mind dropped them. In your dream, you are following a white fox who trots through the frozen forest, leading you further and further away from the safety of your cabin. Where is he taking you? The way he darts between the trees, his thick fur lit only by the moon, makes him disappear for whole minutes. Many times you think you’ve lost him and begin to panic, only to glimpse the soft plume of his tail leading always just ahead. And now, what is that singing in the distance?

A sound dissolves one dream into another as candlelight fills your bedroom. It’s the children who are singing so beautifully. Do you know them? Yes, they are the same ones who, during the day, bicker over toys and leave clumps of porridge on the table, but are now revealed as children of light. Leading them is a woman wearing a crown of fire and carrying a tray of coffee and yellow buns. The smell of saffron is the smell of the sun. She invites you to taste it.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Bringer of Light

I am sheltered on the second floor,
the house, when lit, is a fishbowl. 
Helicopters never quit whirling over Providence.
They clip the air, giant locust wings, clip
and clip and clip, over gardens, greens, 
sewers; when they quit, the silence of grief. 

In and out of the buzz of numbness. 
We live it viscerally but our experience, 
not yet cold, is already cliché. 

Jill Pearlman, Providence, Numb and Number

I wrote to my community this morning about the horrific shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island yesterday, and the horrific shooting at the Chanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney today. Over the last several years I suspect every rabbi I know has gotten better at finding words to say after unthinkable tragedy. A skill none of us wanted. […]

When life feels dark and overwhelming, Jewish tradition teaches us to come together and to let our light shine. Over the course of the coming week our literal flames will go from one tiny candle to the blazing brilliance of a chanukiyah full of light. When we come together, the lights of our souls become more than the sum of their parts. The best response I know to anti-Jewish hatred, or any hatred, is to bravely let our light shine.

That’s the best wisdom I have to share today. For those who about to be celebrating (or are already celebrating — hi antipodeans!), may this Festival of Lights be a time of joy even amidst this sorrow.

Rachel Barenblat, Light – even now

We have names for our dark forces.
We have names for things close to us.
Different names when they become distant.
We have names for our separations.
And names for the shadows that grow
when the moon rejects us.

I hold this evening up
against that incomprehensible design.
A cold front has crept down from the north.
Clouds obscure everything, even reason.
Even the light from Cassiopeia
that has been stubbornly travelling in my direction
for thousands of years.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, About two-thirds

It seems like a good time of year to remember the goal of Christianity used to be “peace on earth, good will towards humanity” and “love thy neighbor” and you know, welcoming the stranger and the immigrant because after all, Jesus was born in a foreign land and no one gave his family shelter—all that stuff that seems to have fallen out of fashion among too many who call themselves Christian. Whew! All right, maybe this post got heavy. I also lost another poet friend, the great Connie Walle, who was a fixture in the Tacoma poetry scene and a great poet besides. It made me sad I had not expressed my admiration to her more while she was still here—a theme of this year for me, as I cross the names of old friends off the holiday card list because they are no longer with us. We really do a bad job of this remembering to express thanks, love, and appreciation for those friends and family, writers and artists, who have made our lives better, our memories short, our ability to remind ourselves that even our lives are not “forever,” and even small things cannot be taken for granted. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dangerous Floods All Around, Trying to Holiday Despite

Brown eyes peer through a back seat window, gazing at the sparkling white powder on the city sidewalks. A small mittened hand swipes a red runny nose then dips quickly back into the pocket of the threadbare rumpled jacket from which it emerged. Festive shoppers with bulging bags walk gaily down the street as brown eyes watch in wonder. The family in the old red Chevy sits in the background of busy streets and merry anticipation, waiting at a red light as the sputtering heater blows hot then cold and the children sniffle and cough the carol of the hungry and homeless. Down the snowy street it chugs, straining on its last fumes to reach the red door of the shelter where warmth and food and one cold night off the streets awaits if the line isn’t too long or the shelter too full. Belief is a word pregnant with hope.

Charlotte Hamrick, Red

Some leave, some arrive.
Flaggers waving lit-up wands
before the train station.

*

For a few moments,
the silhouettes of trees pressed
against the sky’s burning throat.

Luisa A. Igloria, Dusk, December

Welcome to the Some Flowers Soon Christmas Poetry Quiz! Questions this week, answers next Monday. Then I’ll be away for a fortnight and back in the New Year.

All the answers, except the last one, are the names of modern poets. The usual rules apply: strictly no Googling, but you may consult poems learned by heart. Previous editions of Some Flowers Soon may also, in some cases, be helpful. […]

Which Swiss-Bolivian poet, who died this year, wrote a poem (in English) which begins:

snow is english
snow is international
snow is secret
snow is small
snow is literary
snow is translatable

[…]

Which poet wrote a “Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan” which ends:

Christmas is the time of cold air
and loud parties and big expense,
but in our hearts flames flicker
answeringly, as on old-fashioned
trees. I would rather the house
burn down than our flames go out.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Some Flowers Soon Christmas Quiz 2025

Sixty was the new sixteen in that night club among a diverse age-group of parents and teenagers: people living and reliving their youths. And even better, the day before I got to walk with Suzanne on the beach. We spent the afternoon in Aberdyfi in the clear November sunshine. It was the perfect, peaceful preparation…

… for the noise of it! The exultant, white, brash, crashing, strident, energetic noise of drums and bass and guitar and that voice (what a voice!) calling out the patriarchy, misogyny, injustice, racism, homophobia … and there was tenderness too, and joy, and hurt and crowd-surfing and an enormous mosh pit, and all of it LOUD and PASSIONATE and UNAPOLOGETIC! 

It’s the un-apology that mesmerised me. And when I opened my birthday card from my younger son yesterday, he framed the thought for me in a way I could apply to my day: Have a lovely day Mum, “doing what you damn well please!” Something about his turn of phrase, the love expressed, opened up my birthday to me in that moment. I’d planned, for example, to postpone my present-opening till the evening when his big brother would be home. “But I please to know what my presents are now!” I thought, so I damn well opened my presents over breakfast, and I’m so glad I did, and I knew my sons would be too. What I found was that there are people who clearly know and care about me. So much thoughtfulness in the givings. It made me very damn pleased.

I’d already planned to take the train (I damn well like trains) with my friend Paul (a damn good fellow) to Aberdyfi (thank you for the reminder, Suzanne, that Aberdyfi pleases me). Before boarding, I had damn pleasing coffee and a bacon roll at Shrewsbury Coffeehouse. I took pens and paper on the train and we did some damn writing and drawing.

Liz Lefroy, I “Do What [I] Damn Well Please”

All that I am
is the question of
a crow against the sky
on a cold morning
when it is too bright
to see,
too blue and white
to believe.
The tree against
the landscape. One thing
depending on the other.

John Siddique, A Wintery Poem

This week: the grey scale, a rain of earth, a detailed intimacy, a Tennysonian absence, and much more. Enjoy.

A walk in Parc Angrignon yesterday felt like a respite from the extremely difficult time in which we’re living. The world is screaming and yet so many are silenced, afraid of what will happen if they voice the truth or even simply say what they feel, as human beings. It’s a time when truth itself is under attack, as well as the institutions that teach people how to think critically, how to discern the truth for themselves, and express it in a coherent and rational way. A time when we are witnesses every single day to horrific violence perpetrated on the most innocent of victims, when sheer cruelty, corruption, utter disregard for the most vulnerable, and endless lies are becoming normalized. A time when being a journalist, a doctor, an aid worker, or a foreign student has never been more dangerous. A time when our own options for living with integrity seem smaller and smaller, and, as another Substack author writes, one longs for retreat from the madness:

Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing.

Not dying.

Just logging off.

Getting a job no one cares about.

Growing tomatoes.

Writing poems in the margins of a notebook no one reads.

Not as a failure.

But as a kind of freedom.

—Huy Nguyen

For those of us who do write, it becomes harder and harder to know what to say.

Beth Adams, A Letter from Canada, at the end of May

You said if we kept on, worked hard enough,
we’d feel warmth from the centre of the earth,
that we’d know by laying our hands flat
on the bottom of our freshly dug hole.
You told me Australia was right beneath us.
It all seemed so worth digging for.
I pictured us emerging in a different country,
staying there until teatime,
coming back to tell Mum.

Each time you pressed your palm to feel for heat
you looked hopeful
silently inviting me to copy.
But I only ever felt the cold damp
of earthworms.

Sue Finch, Turning the Calendars Over

My daughter asked to read some of my love poems recently. I tried to find some that were understandable and appropriate for an eleven-year-old. Not surprising that this was difficult, but what did surprise me was that they didn’t feel like love poems when I read them, though when I wrote them they felt so overly emotional. 

I struggled to find one that felt a good example of how I write love poems, but I guess they all are. I don’t gush or really even praise the other as there is no particular person in mind. I focus on the moment and the whirlwind of emotions I’m feeling. There is often a sense of sadness on the edges, that the flush will fade, that reality will set in. So they don’t always feel like the giddy heights of love poems, but maybe the more realistic confusion of love. 

I read a few of my poems out to my daughter and while she didn’t get most of them, they’re maybe a bit thick linguistically and not aimed at pre-teens so she was ok with that, but it did open a nice conversation for how love is such a big emotion that it’s confusing and often leaves us feeling very overwhelmed. How it’s important to express how we feel even if it doesn’t always make sense to others. It’s part of understanding how we fit into the world. If she walked away with that sense of it’s ok to express being overwhelmed however and whenever we need to, then I feel pretty good about my poems. 

Gerry Stewart, Expressing Big Emotions

I just found this piece and thought I’d share it today. It is a recording from a live performance at Spoken Beat Night, Bimhuis, Amsterdam, June 2016. The evening was totally improvised and LIVE, a beautiful combination of spoken word and poetry, art and drawings, and jazz performances with the always incredible Shabaka Hutchings and the Spoken Beat band.

This piece feels like a calm voice from another time to me. I love Amsterdam and love to go there, to visit friends and perform. Every time I go I feel rather nostalgic for the summers in 1990s inter-railing around Europe. This poem really captures that moment when you stop and feel it, time shifting, changes occurring, the moment passing and a new moment beginning. I feel it now, the tide turning, I feel a shift, this poem reminds me of that and a young and fearless hope.

This poem was published in my first collection ‘Fishing in The Aftermath’ by Burning Eye Books in 2014. I reckon the poem was written almost 20 years ago and I can picture the bar where I wrote it, it’s a glorious gay bar, overlooking the water, oh you know the one … ah how the years are flying by…

Salena Godden, All We Can Do Is Hope

Another memoir I’ve enjoyed very much recently is Authentic Embellishments, by poet Joshua Davis. Since I work as a book designer, I get the opportunity to read a lot of terribly good small press titles well before the general public, and this one hit my desk at just the right time, I feel, as I struggle with several kinds of interconnected grief—that I may lose my mother sooner rather than later, that our shared genetic condition could mean a similar journey for me or my sisters, and the regret and loss I feel over these pockets of time where I can’t live the way I wish to because I’m needed more urgently elsewhere. Some of this grief is current, and some of it is oddly anticipatory? And yet “grief” does feel like the best word.

I’ve wondered whether my attraction to found materials, both visuals and sound, has to do with these feelings of loss. I can say that collecting the sound effects I used in the collages was directly related to the experience of missing them in the world, so maybe?

Josh beautifully traces the paths of loss, absence, and abandonment in his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, husband, and child. “A life saved by poetry,” the subtitle promises, and the moments where Lucille Clifton or Ruth Stone appear (or are found? he was definitely seeking!) in his life to guide him emphasize to me, again, how keen a tool art can be for comfort and survival. Yes. 

Shanna Compton, INKY 2: Room Tone in June + On Loss & Found Materials

My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories leaving and arriving as unpredictably as fish to the surface of a pond. If she goes out of her house for a walk, she can’t always find her way back. If she wakes up after a nap, she might think a new day has started and begin making breakfast. She knows there’s a number you call in an emergency, but usually can’t recall what that number is. She has forgotten much of our family and most of her friends. She has only once forgotten me, her only child, and then only briefly—but it’s a sign of what’s to come.

I should be precise: my mother’s conscious mind is disappearing, not her body or her unconscious mind—the mind of dreams and reflexes; the mind our conscious mind tries futilely to claim dominion over. For now her body is very much present, and for her age, thriving. When I take walks with her, I hardly have to slow my pace. When she accompanies my two year old daughter to story time at the local library, she sits on the library carpet with the kids and young parents, then pulls herself up to standing at the end, to the amazement of all present. This is not how I have come to understand death’s arrival, especially here in our death-averse society, where we whisk away bodies and scrub rooms clean, buffeting ourselves from the reality of what’s happened with expressions like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.”  My father died of cancer when I was eleven, his mind sharp up until the final weeks. The day he died, surrounded by family in our living room, I stood by his body and held his hand, still not quite cold. Soon after, the paramedics took him away and I never saw my father’s body again. My mother has been dying for years but her body is, for now, undiminished.

And my body, too, persists, though my conscious mind doesn’t understand quite how. While it worries over prescriptions and home healthcare workers and nursing homes, my subconscious is drumming up lines of poems, or the sentences that I’ve cobbled into this essay. I sometimes find myself with a pen in my hand, with no memory of picking it up. And my conscious mind asks the obvious questions: Why? And why now? Why persist with poems and stories and all this fancy language in the face of unavoidable loss? They’re questions I’ve asked myself often over the years, with no final answer arriving beyond the knowledge that not once in my life has my devotion to writing been a conscious choice. All I did was read, innocently at first, oblivious to what I was getting myself into.

Rob Taylor, “Why? And Why Now?”: On Poetry and Companionship

Storyteller Poetry Review has just published 5 of my poems about my wonderful mother-in-law. Some have been published before; some are first-timers. My thanks to editor Sharon Knutson for this opportunity to share an extraordinary life.

Sarah Russell, My Mother-in-Law Boby Clariana

I had been revising som old poems of late, and after some feedback on one it dawned on me that I am pissing about, and that I need to focus on newer stuff. So I am. A new draft emerged this week, and two very recent things are shaping up nicely. I need to go back to the piles of notes I have and perhaps, just perhaps a collection might have started to take shape by the end of the year. A long way to go yet, so no getting ahead of myself, but there feels like light at the end of the torch I intend to take into the tunnel for the first time in a while.

Mat Riches, A jumping off point

How do you build a poetry community? Is it a bit like gardening, in that you have to work at it slowly over time and then all of the sudden, blooms everywhere, and hummingbirds? One thing I want to do is to prioritize time with poets online and in-person, catching up over coffee or the phone, or having people over. Sometimes, it takes a lot of energy, but I think it’s worth it. Even this blog, or social media, can be part of building community. I think we writers work better when we have community. We need to support each other and recognize each other and shout “good job” when someone gets good news and “so sorry” when they get bad news.

Despite setbacks, I did write a poem this week, and I started submitting again. I’m editing my book for sending out again. But there has been a tick-tock in my ear lately (and not just because of the ear infection). It’s how fast time passes these days, and losses that come with getting older, and the feeling that my time is limited.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Ups and Downs, Birds and Blooms, and Building Poetry Community

Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I always have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain. The facts! The worlds. The perspectives from people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet or places I will never go. Thoughts, philosophies. Lives lived. Lives! Life!

I love holding books. I love re-reading the books I love. I love taking photographs of books! Books, I love you. I love watching a movie based on a book I love and then going back to the book and loving it all over again in new ways. I love talking about a book with someone and they saw something I didn’t. I love taking a single sentence from a book and typing it out and saying it and sharing it. I love being regularly astonished by how words spark one against the other and how sentences somehow contain a style that you have never until then come across. I love how a sentence by one author will resound and then take you to another author and you will learn to hear echoes and rhythms.

I love words. I love sentences.

In an epigraph to a chapter titled “What is a Sentence” in Jan Mieszkowski’s book Crises of the Sentence, John Banville says, “The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.”

The greatest invention is still the sentence. The book, another great invention. Best technology. Poems, another great invention.

Fernando Pessoa:

“I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.”

Pessoa, my soul to your soul.

Shawna Lemay, The Greatest Invention

This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves

— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks#32: Try a Poem Staple Gun

As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.

I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.

As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.

Matthew Paul, On The Last Corinthians

Thanks to being published by a small press with an open attitude, I persuaded them to use a photo I’d created myself.

I took this photo in my living room (the colour on the wall is French Grey from Farrow and Ball, in case you’re interested!) My idea was to assemble a ‘still life’ in the Dutch tradition of ‘vanitas’ paintings. ‘Vanitas’ being the genre of still life that is supposed to suggest the brevity of one’s time on this planet, and the futility of everything we strive for, since it has to end in death.

This isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, trust me! What I gathered together were pieces of memorabilia, items referenced in the poems, signifiiers… all arranged in such a way that I hope engenders a feeling of a life lived, in all its messiness, chaos, mistakes, serendipity, quirkiness and yes, beauty.

If you look closely you’ll see a Korean Coca-Cola bottle (I used to collect Coca-Cola cans and bottles from all the countries I visited through work!), burnt-out candles and a half-drunk glass of wine (I’ll leave you to decide on the significance of these), rotting fruit (=decay) and a fox’s skull (mostly in pieces). Skulls, and timepieces, are very common ‘vanitas’ tropes. There’s no clock or watch here, but I have included pages from work diaries, a (laminated) production timeline (we had a new product range every quarter), my old Filofax from the 1990s, even some pages from one of my teenage diaries. There are also photos of me as a Brownie and later as a jaded employee posing for yet another visa application. And let’s not gloss over the blister pack of paracetamol. Pills, childhood terrors, stupid work schedules and endless long-haul trips are well represented in the poems. As well as the internet, computers, magnolia flowers (artificial in this case) and ‘burning the candle at both ends’.

Robin Houghton, The Mayday Diaries cover art: what’s it all about?

Many thanks to Arts ATL for selecting Wonder & Wreckage as one of its 13 must-read poetry collections for National Poetry Month. I was in fine company with Beth Gylys, Andred Jurjevic, and Elly Bookman. See the list here.

And also many thanks to friend and fine poet Steven Reigns, who recommended Wonder & Wreckage in his selections for National Poetry Month that appeared on The Poetry Foundation website. See the list here.

Wonder & Wreckage is also a nominee for the annual Georgia Author of the Year Awards, which will be announced in June. I’m among a very crowded field, so not hopeful about my chances, especially since the great Alice Friman is in the running. 

Collin Kelley, Wrapping up May

On the very first day of June five years ago, this little book dropped into the world in the form of a box of copies left downstairs. Chicago was literally on fire from protests (which I still think were outside agitators, rather than the Chicagoans who had been protesting Friday and most of Saturday without incidence.) What would follow was curfews that lasted a couple of weeks and increased policing on Michigan Ave for a couple more years. In the thick of Covid lockdowns, that morning, I sat in a zoom meeting, in which a bunch of librarians fretted over return protocols coming a month later despite not a single one of them actually returning to the office during the remaining year and a half I still worked there after. I wound up texting my boss to say I was taking the day off and depression napping, but later I went to fetch the cat litter downstairs and found my newest book. It was a moment that should have been one of celebration, but I wasn’t feeling it. In the coming months I did my best to market the book, making my first video poems and web content, but it was hard to get traction. In retrospect, it was [the] last traditionally published book I published before moving on to issuing titles myself a year later (after what I like to call now the “Poetry Mid-Life Crises of 2020” ).

This bones of SEX & VIOLENCE started in early 2015 with the blond joke poems, and through 2016 with the Plath centos gleaned from lines in ARIEL. It continued through slasher movie fragments and what was initially J’s Valentine’s love poem series from 2017, but which broadened over the next few months and took on a life of its own. Right after I lost my mom, I sat down to send it in time for the end of the month deadline BLP had for new submissions. When the acceptance came during the early spring, I sat and cried at my desk over not being able to tell her first thing. 

The time since that first spring without her and lockdowns/riots to now, five years later, always feels like it is collapsing in on itself.

Kristy Bowen, book birthday | sex & violence

“Fierce” and “fearsome” offer the perfect segue to the Taylor Swift component of how I’m channeling my rage this spring. Ever since hearing “Look What You Made Me Do” in the opening scene of the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale series, I’ve had it on repeat. I’ve been loud about it. Very loud. (Sorry not sorry!)

I’ve declared it my twisted summer anthem of 2025. Or my anthem of twisted summer. Or the summer of twisted me. Let it be a season of retribution. A season of reclamation. Let it be a season of taking back our power. A season of kingdoms crumbling and artists rising. […]

I’m happy to say I’ve also reached the defiance stage in what has been a season (or seasons) of rejection for my poetry manuscript. Over the last three years or so, my Gertie manuscript has been rejected dozens of times, while also receiving a handful of finalist nods.

The most recent rejection — which came with a lovely note from the editor about making the final round of consideration — arrived in early May, a couple days after I returned from a writing retreat at Mass MoCA. The press that had it was not only one of my dream presses. It was also the last one to respond from a big submission push I did last spring and summer. And since I had paused submitting and revising after that, it meant that Gertie was no longer a contender for any reading period or contest anywhere.

It also meant that if Gertie was to get published, I’d need to jump back into the whole process, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I spent some time entertaining the fear that the last and latest rejection signaled that book publishing wasn’t ever going to be for me.

I indulged the idea that there simply wasn’t a place in the world for my work, but I took lots of deep breaths, gave myself a good talking to, and consulted my writing community. And … wait for it…

I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time …

Defiance has always been one of my strengths, and I plan to keep fighting for Gertie. It’s partly because I believe in the book. It’s also because, despite constantly wasting energy entertaining negative self talk, somewhere deep down I believe in myself.

Carolee Bennett, Artmaking as Pleasure: “Uncontainable, Unmanageable”

I had a student who is now a Very
Famous and Important Poet; I don’t
think she remembers me much
anymore, if at all. I had a teacher
who said, It’s really about who you know.
But I still believe in the poems I want
to write, believe in the air I breathe,
the tiny electric pulse which begins
as a prickle somewhere in the brain
or sensorium, informing me I need
to sink into the shag carpet of that
moment and stop asking only the logical
questions; because then a trapdoor
might open and who knows what bright,
surprising universe I might fall into?

Luisa A. Igloria, Partial Self-portrait as Poet, with Novelty Cakes

My husband and I recently visited David Austin Roses in Shropshire. It set me thinking about why I love roses: the scent, the sweet-shop colours and the silkiness of the petals. But they also have thorns and are beloved by insects such as earwigs. This links to my latest poetry collection, Earwig Country (Valley Press 2024), where the main theme is ‘beautiful things have inner horrors’.

We do have a small Tudor style rose garden within our back garden, with box hedges and some David Austen roses, and others that need a little work, pruning etc. We also have a few which were standard roses but have reverted to wild roses, and are far too large for this miniature parterre. So our visit was partly scoping out replacements. I liked the Olivia rose, and hope to order bare rooted in the correct season. I can’t see a rose without sniffing it for its scent, and will only buy scented ones. Everywhere I go I see roses and apply my nose to them, and have done since I was a small child. They are indeed ‘olfactory delights’ (quoting one of my own lines there). […]

Your parents’ tangled minds
are clogged with memories, resurfacing
as they approach their nineties.
We have assumed control.

Safe in their new apartment, they cling
to routine, repeat old stories, laugh,
are mostly thankful for our care: roses
late flowering against the dark of winter.

Angela Topping, David Austin Roses

[E]astern Pennsylvania finally moderated its weather enough that I got the weeds and the seeds and transplants more or less under control this past week–“control” being a general term subject to, well, Nature. The peonies bloomed gorgeously on schedule, as did the nefarious multiflora roses and Russian olives that plague the hedgerow. The catbirds and Eastern kingbirds are back; the robins’ first brood has hatched; the orioles are insistent in the walnut trees and brilliant in the garden, chasing the barn swallows. I’m not doing much writing, though I drafted one or two beginnings of poems. Outdoors takes precedence–not that I can’t write out of doors, I often do so. But poems can wait in a way the garden cannot.

And, speaking of poems (and Pennsylvania), I returned from my trip to find this Keystone Poetry anthology awaiting: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09990-3.html–the followup to 2005’s Common Wealth anthology, also edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple.

The new anthology, 20 years after the initial one, has poems by about 180 poets–yes, I am one of them–covering the corners and the center of the Keystone State. I like it even better than the first collection, and it is clear the editors learned much from the experience of curating poems and creating a cohesive “experience” of the regions. Granted, since I know both of the editors personally and appreciate their poetry and their visions, I may be biased. But that’s okay. Objectively, I truly get how huge an undertaking this was and how well it has turned out. For educators, there is a section at the close of the anthology full of suggestions for reading, writing critically, and writing creatively based on this anthology, and even in comparison with the previous one. As both editors are college professors who teach creative writing and critical writing, these appendices are well-thought out and worthwhile.

I miss the aridity of New Mexico, which seems to benefit my overall health. And I miss my daughter immensely. But springtime in eastern PA has many compensations, not the least of which are blooming even as I write.

Ann E. Michael, Back in PA

I think Palgrave’s decision to exclude contemporary work – he would not ‘anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries’ – was an excellent one. Absolutely no one can ever assess its merit, because it hasn’t had time to accrue any yet. Not that this stops us doing it. Young poets are always certain they live in a golden age; if it were left to them, they would include few poets beyond their brilliantly relevant coevals. But what they imagine the intrinsic value of their poetry is often just its extrinsic attitude, which is half the point of young poets in the first place: to take a stand, and demand a corrective to the inequities and distortions of the establishment. Today, ‘identity’ is still the main game in town, just as ‘class’ and gay visibility were in my day; in my mentors’ day, it was feminist corrective, and in their mentors’, anti-metropolitanism and fighting for the representation of the regions and the Celtic fringe. While one’s day passes quickly enough – the identity-obsession will eventually find its level, like everything before it – it always leaves the year ahead looking different in prospect. In time, I believe things tend to be changed for the better and the fairer.

Old poets, on the other hand, know that poetry has never been in worse shape, and would exclude everybody, bar themselves and their one remaining friend. I’m not even too sure about him, to be honest. But for those reasons, the young and the old can make poor anthologists. The young are too short-sighted and the old too long. Those who enjoy the brief, bifocal wisdom of the mid-river perspective (a mixed metaphor which seems to have conjured a specky fly fisher in waders; my apologies) know that the truth always lies in balance. You want a book which looks both forwards and backwards, because those are the books truest to their own time.

Tennyson, Palgrave’s great friend and advisor, wisely insisted that his own poetry be left out of the Treasury – a stroke of genius, because he knew would put the kibosh on Palgrave using any other contemporary work. Had he done so, it would have done nothing but draw attention to Tennyson’s absence. In vetoing his own inclusion, Tennyson underwrote the Treasury’s own longevity and success. […]

My favourite version of the do-I-put-me-in dilemma is actually a Tennysonian absence: The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry was edited by my favourite living poet, Paul Muldoon, a choice Faber must have instantly regretted. In it, Paul more or less explored the set theory complexities of self-absence. He had already made the most insanely Palgravian choice – a mere ten poets were included in the book; but Muldoon then doubled down on his honourable self-omission by not just leaving himself out, but annihilating his own existence altogether. Instead of an introduction, there was an excerpt from an interview with Louis MacNeice. Given that even back then Muldoon was, by common consent, one of the most important living Irish poets, the book was now rendered self-evidently and gratingly incomplete. The cleverness of this almost situationist piece of publishing is so Muldoonian I could spend an essay unpacking it. But it remains a brilliant anthology, in the true sense, I think – provided you read it with a copy of Muldoon’s Selected in the other hand.

Don Paterson, ‘Here by effacement the poem is restored to unity’: The Genius of Francis Palgrave and the Golden Treasury – Part II

If you enjoy reading poetry and are, at least in principle, interested in reading contemporary poetry and responses to it in “real time” — following poets as they publish new material, getting a sense of new directions and experiments as they evolve — then the obvious thing to do is to subscribe to a handful of poetry magazines. There are several splendid online poetry magazines now, but I still much prefer to read both poetry and criticism in print. This is partly because I just don’t remember poems I read on a screen in the same way. I don’t believe you have really read a poem at all if you’ve only read it once — and certainly, from a poet’s perspective, you haven’t really “succeeded” unless your reader comes back to your poem time and again. Online venues are quick and convenient ways of getting a taste of many writers, but it’s hard to revisit things. You can’t annotate or turn down pages as you can with a physical book or magazine, even saved links often go dead, and the lack of manual interaction I think also impedes memory.

So for me, at least, printed poetry magazines still matter. But if you’re new to reading poetry magazines, or even if you’re quite experienced at it but fancy a change, it can be hard to know where to start. Most print magazines, unsurprisingly, only offer a very small amount of their content for free online, and very few libraries and bookshops now carry them so the opportunities for browsing are limited. (At least in the UK; I see them more often in France.) And it’s hard to find “reviews” of magazines that aren’t aimed primarily at people thinking of submitting, rather than those who are potential readers.

I’ve written reviews of three of the magazines I receive regularly before (Poetry Review, Interpret and the French rbl), and I’ve put the links to those pieces at the end of this post. But today I thought I’d take a look at three very good magazines, all of which I value and read loyally, and all of which print a good deal of prose as well as poetry, with an eye for their differences — what might attract you to one of these over the others if you are a potential new subscriber. These are the spring (i.e. most recent) issues of the long-running PN Review; Poetry London (also well established, but with a recent change of poetry editor); and the quite new, and still evolving, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. All three print poetry, literary essays and reviews (of poetry) in broadly similar proportions.

Victoria Moul, Poetry magazines: three spring issues

I’m always on the look out for books that deepen my understanding of creating poetry and am eternally grateful to writers such as Ted Kooser (The Poetry Repair Manual) and Steve Kowit (In the Palm of Your Hand), who supported my early attempts at writing myself. Last year I was moved to congratulate Isabelle Kenyon of Fly on the Wall Press for the publication of a truly inspirational book (The Process of Poetry) in which British poets of the stature of Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Liz Lochhead and Gillian Clarke reflected on the development of one of their poems through discussion with editor Rosanna McGlone. I was, therefore, particularly excited by the news that McGlone was working on a sequel, an Australian version, called The Making of a Poem (5 Islands Press, 2025) and wanted to review it. […]

Whilst there is some commonality in the different poets’ approaches, such as in their shared view of the importance of reading others’ work and in their willingness to experiment, there is diversity  too and, at times, contradictions. John Kinsella, for example, does not believe in giving up on poems, even if they are not working.

‘I’ve never abandoned a poem. If a poem doesn’t work, it gets rewritten and reworked. If I’m doubtful about what I’ve said, the piece then becomes a questioning and an investigation of that doubt.’

Whereas Sarah Holland-Batt, admits to giving up on poems that she feels aren’t progressing

‘All the time I have poems that I feel won’t work and I just let them go.’

Such contradictions are inevitable in a book that seeks to provide insights into the highly individualistic practice of writing poetry. As The Making of a Poem is not a simplistic handbook on the dos and don’ts of poetry writing, the reader must use the poet’s different accounts to reflect critically upon their own practice. Some insights will confirm and some will challenge their approaches and through that challenge produce the potential for its development.

Three of the insights that have led me to reflect on my own practice are: Jaya Savige’s statement that: ‘If I feel I’m getting too confessional, I try to rebalance things by banning myself from the first-person pronoun for the next few poems;’ Mark Tredinnick’s advice  to his students that  ‘ the poem you’re writing isn’t about yourself; it’s about ourselves;’ and Bella Li encouragement to ’trust in your particularity: the subjects you’re interested in, the forms that you want to use…don’t try to change what you’re doing to suit some sense of an audience.’  I have no doubt the lessons other readers will take away  from engaging with such poets will be different. That is the beauty of this book: there will be something for everyone!

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Making of a Poem’ edited by Rosanna McGlone

The latest from Birmingham, Alabama-based poet, fiction writer and editor Alina Stefanescu, and the first collection I’ve properly gone through of hers, is the remarkable My Heresies (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2025), a lyric exploration of being and becoming, of family histories and geographic shifts. “The first word wasn’t love, was it?” she writes, within the first poem of the two-part “Cosmologies,” “It was this once that sat upon a time we can’t locate / in physics. It was the science of bread / being broken and eaten. // I am still terrible at division.” My Heresies is a collection of big, complicated emotions, cultural collision and a fierce intelligence, composed with such a delicate and careful ease of the line. “I, too, would appreciate / being courted at the leveling / of the sacred.” she writes, as part of the short poem “Little Things: A Ring,” “If I can’t partake of the trifecta, / I will settle for that flaming / thing in the angel’s right hand.” The poems are expansive and intimate, containing the whole world and the author’s entire life in the smallest moment, the most contained set of sentences. […]

With opening poem and five carved, numbered sections, there is an element of My Heresies of being constructed as a long sentence, a book-length suite of poems seamlessly stitched into a single, ongoing conversational thread. The poems are propelled by hush and halt, a tempo of thoughtful measure, articulation, excavation and archaeological play, but one that loops and reels and revels in repetition, managing to find new elements across familiar stories, familiar lines and phrases. “Failure to absorb the verb / and modify the actor accordingly.” begins the poem “Indictment for Failure to Conjugate,” “To sit and / play dumb.” There is also an interesting thread contained within this collection of the moments and lyrics of the late German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a poet with whom Stefanescu feels both cultural and poetic affinity. “Paul Celan begins with an act of self-naming.” begins the poem “Sonnet at the Ghost Commune,” “The poem claims the invention of self / on a Bucharest windowsill. Poets put // the moon in its place / at the horn of the table / on the shoe of the satyr folding laundry into bohemian ballet.”

There is such a detailed intimacy to this collection, and a sharp and open intelligence at play, one that invites the reader in as an equal, unafraid of what these lines might reveal.

rob mclennan, Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies

The second section of Thomas Meyer’s Fisher King, ‘Adages Agenda’ begins with these words:

Have I said more than I meant. Or mean to? I mean have I said too much, shy of either revelation or burden. Not so much said as wrote. Letter. Poem.

It’s a significant question for a writer who’s launching into a book a significant part of which consists of the relation of memories of personal relationships from teen romances through his 40-year-long partnership with Jonathan Williams to his current marriage to Michael Watt. It also bears on the idea that people as written have their own reality as compared to their ‘real’ one, as in this poem, poem ‘x’ from the short first section, which shares the book’s title:

I am Merlin.
I only exist in books.

An empty place.

For us, as readers, Meyer’s cast of characters also exist in the empty space of the book but are none the less as real as Merlin; ‘memoirs are inventions, fictions autobiography’. […]

Much earlier in the book, thinking of Bunting and Pound’s ‘Dichten = Condensare’, Meyer writes:

Could it be that an aesthetic invented at the beginning of the twentieth century in reaction to the nineteenth might lack application at the beginning of the twenty-first? We don’t need to compress, we need to expand. Slow poetry? Take time, make time?

It strikes me that in these closing pages, Meyer achieves a kind of slow poetry, a poetry with time and room to think, without succumbing to prolixity:

Something about a peony.
Full blown on the table in a jar.
The whole room filled

with that pink light
coming from

it having us in mind.

Fisher King is a book to inhabit, to move around in, slowly. Inevitably in a review of this nature, I’ve only skated over a few of its surfaces. As a reader, I’ll be back for more.

Billy Mills, Recent Reading May 2025: A Review

There’s no getting around the fact that everyone’s future involves some form of disability. As we age, our bodies show the results of living, i.e., aches, stretch marks, and memory lapses, to name just a few. Poets, it appears, intuit this reality more readily than others, even embrace it. As Loveday puts it, poets, “though not necessarily identifying as disabled themselves, turn to language in order to speak to those instruments of human greed and violence that disable us.” As I read those lines, I thought of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” which includes these familiar lines:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poised between kindness and sorrow, poetry beckons us towards what Loveday calls “connection, mutuality and simultaneous recognition.” How often have you read a poem and felt a deep gratitude, something far beyond the words on the page? This is poetry’s gift. It delves into our shared humanity, reminding us that the world of poems includes all of us. “What poetry embodies, deliberately or inadvertently, fiercely or with great subtlety, is a kind of seismic registry of the zeitgeist, what’s coming and what’s possible.”

The article goes on to connect poetry and disability: “Contemporary poetry, increasingly, registers our proximity to disability…Poetry, like disability, is charged with response in real time.” You could say that poetry takes a stand against ableism, which the American Psychological Association defines as “prejudice and discrimination aimed at disabled people, often with a patronizing desire to ‘cure’ their disability and make them ‘normal.’” 

But is, as the title asserts, poetry disabled? Or is it “differently-abled,” a term sometimes used as a kinder-sounding alternative? I don’t have the answers to those questions. What I do know is that this article made me think hard about my assumptions regarding both poetry and disability.

Eric Goss, “Is poetry disabled?”

“Put it down
on the page” – a writing
teacher says,
“…metaphorically speaking”

Meaning the page pales,
letters on paper have been eaten
and digested (as metaphors do), 
transmuted into light and hovering figures

On a backlit screen, the page
a wink in language, a vestige 
holding its head aloft in a 
restless, churning language. 

Jill Pearlman, The Page, the Page!

Our stories are sighs. They are corporal. Even reading the writing on a page, in a book, we don’t experience the fullness of the words without our lips moving, our tongue only partially restrained, our breath carrying the story into the world with intimate, involuntary utterances.

I once saw the exhibition Body Worlds in New York City. I was fascinated by the plastinate network of blood vessels in the torso. It was as delicate and beautiful as any lace. It made me wonder if the very first artist to make lace knew, subconsciously, of the pattern within us all.

I imagine stories are like this, too. Invisible to us, but like delicate lacework that begins in the brain and traces its way down our spine, into our solar plexus, wrapping our heart. The stories that I’ve heard from the women in my life, the stories that have warped like meaning in a game of whispers, from one mouth, to one ear, to the incidental bumping of other, foreign stories, flattening or rising like a relief in time—these stories are part and parcel of the body with which I move through the world.

Estranged is not the same thing as extricated.

I am a consolidation.
I am a dust devil in the desert,
coming into being
of the dirt
and the spores and the heat

writing a love letter
from and to my mother’s cursive language
from and to her mother, mother’s mother

And in the dark
I will end it all
in a rain of earth
between the yellow lines
of the highway

Ren Powell, A Score of Sorrows

In early spring a book arrived that I had been eagerly anticipating. Atomic Masquerade by Clara Etherin did not disappoint. Witty, exuberant, layered and innovative, this visual poetry collection is full of delights, from brooding palimpsest portrayals of Dracula and Frankenstein to the vivid pair of asemic sonnets “Heaven & Hell” – written in collaboration with AI – with which the book concludes.

Each piece has a distinctive energy, generating an impression of rising out of the page into some intangible third dimension. […]

I have read and reread Atomic Masquerade with great enjoyment; but the enjoyment has been bittersweet, for the book represents the final publication from Penteract Press.

Founded by Anthony Etherin in 2016, Penteract Press has been a leading independent publisher of innovative constrained and visual poetry for almost a decade. The press has given a platform not only to established avant-garde and experimental writers but also to new, previously unknown voices (my own among them). You can read my interview with Anthony about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close here.

Penteract Press books are unique: often sumptuous, always elegant, and characterised by verbal and visual delights and surprises. Moreover, like all good books their intrinsic value to the reader extends beyond the simple pleasure of reading. Diving into a Penteract book is an adventure, an exploration into the art and craft of poetry, an opportunity to investigate the possibilities of language and the space in which letter, word and image coexist.

I have learnt so much from Penteract poets. Luke Bradford’s lyrical Zoolalia, for example, has taught me the beauty of lipograms and how we can tune in to their potential for music and rhythm and energy. The magic of palindromes is revealed through Merlina Acevedo’s Mirrors. Visualising the formal structures in Shakespeare’s sonnets with BardCode by Gregory Betts has suggested new and interesting ways in which I might use rhyme and metrical patterns in my own work.

Marian Christie, A Paean to Penteract Press

I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World.

Han VanderHart, Finding Shape in the Dark (on writing difficult narratives) – Two Online, Generative Writing Workshops, July 5 & 19

One of the things I’m looking forward to exploring in my upcoming workshop Rumination as Route is a practice I call ruminative reading: a way of engaging with texts that invites lingering, layering, and the kind of close attention that reveals deeper textures over time.

I’ll be sharing how I approach reading as a writer, and how I tease out unexpected meaning through methods that mirror the digressive and associative structures I write in. This kind of reading isn’t about decoding a text once and for all, it’s about returning to it, turning it over, letting it shift in your hands and your memory.

My ideas around ruminative reading were shaped by my time writing creative reviews for The Bind, a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Though currently on hiatus, The Bind remains a rich and inspiring archive, a space where reviews take many forms: lesson plans, maps, quizzes, writing prompts. It honors writing at important intersections, and I encourage you to spend time on the site if you haven’t already.

José Angel Araguz, on ruminative reading

Daily I am perplexed by, well, the day, what is transpiring, what has happened in the world since I last checked, what the day will bring and how I’m supposed to respond, what I want and what I have and how to reconcile the differences and align the two, who I am, who I was, what I’ll be, how I’ll manage, what it all means, when I know meaning is a made thing. There are other questions. How do birds fly in the rain? Don’t they feel the pelt of drops like bullets on their backs? The rabbits in the backyard are racing around and leaping over each other in play. Does everything play? Are bacteria on my skin doing their own version of Miss Mary Mack with their flagella? There is so much we don’t know.

I used to be a strict believer in the black-and-whiteness of things. With age I’ve settled into a certain comfort with the gray scale. Nevertheless I’m often an impatient reader of poetry that does not show itself to me right away. I won’t name names at the moment. Too much gray and I’m just wandering in the fog, and really, I’d rather not. This little poem, however, has pleased me over some weeks as I’ve turned it over and over in my mind’s hands like a pretty rock.

Marilyn McCabe, a moment

i ask my friends,
“how have you been keeping yourself
together?” i do not actually want
advice but i want to hear if/how
we are surviving. i look up designs
for a plague doctor uniform.
needle in my teeth, i get to work.
sew together old jackets.
i stop sleeping. sleep is for a different time
with less fire & less windows.

Robin Gow, plague doctor

I struggle for language in a murky space. Must I write an ode to this insistent despair? Be thankful for its amorphous presence, its angled ambiguity, its sightless eyes that berate me in silence? The music obfuscates the light. Separates word from meaning. What is the edge of gratitude? What birds listen in the trees beyond it?

talk to me
broken moon:
dark side to dark side

There is the crescendo. Then the quiet. Then the flapping of wings. Then the jacarandas straightening. Then the echo. Then the hum. The tune running in my head.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Purple song

This week: painful radiance, a bear-shaped shadow, the sound of the axe, a single brahminy kite, and much more. Enjoy.

The dawn rouses so many creatures.
Watchful, they emerge from burrows.
If one sneezes, they scurry into shadow.
It’s us that award names to the nameless.
Our responsibilities stretch wide and far.

And in the freezing wilderness of Wonderland
Alice clutches at the last straws of light.
Her mother has no idea where she is.
A dog with gravestone eyes lies at her feet.
The Mad Hatter is long gone, presumed dead.
The Cheshire Cat plays the saxophone, alone.

Bob Mee, VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS

On the bus today, I watched a little boy in a stroller, whose mother was ruffling his abundant black hair. He turned his head and looked up at her with such a beatific smile, and she looked down at him the same way — a sort of Madonna and child moment — and I thought of what was going on in Washington and how little it had to do with that, with these most basic ways in which we are human. And of course, it has everything to do with it, if you are one of the unlucky ones caught in the crosshairs, like countless mothers and children in the world’s war zones, or those who fear deportation or persecution.

I’m not watching the news or reading it today. That’s a choice. We can actually limit the extent to which we allow ourselves to be invaded by negativity, threats and pronouncements that may or may not be acted upon, and the resulting stress and spiraling worry they create. I am not advocating putting one’s head in the sand, or failing to name, protest, and resist all the wrongs that we can. However, the period we’re entering is going to be rough and invasive, and our first responsibility is to ourselves and those around us: to be as strong mentally and physically as possible, and to remember and celebrate our own humanity in the face of a darkness in which it’s so easy to become lost.

My primary job, as I see it, is to be a person who carries, communicates, and encourages hope, joy, creativity, and a positive lifeforce — in spite of everything. And this IS a job – it takes work. What helps? Using my senses to pay attention, because there is almost always something life-giving to notice, like the mother and child on the bus today. There is color. There is music. There are words. There’s the smell of food being prepared, or flowers in a supermarket display. There is the cold of winter on my cheeks, and the warmth of the distant sun which can still be felt even in sub-zero temperatures. There’s the taste of coffee, salt, lemons, chocolate. We miss so much when we’re wrapped up in ourselves and our worries — and our screens — and we have to train ourselves to turn back to the actual world, which is right there, existing, waiting to be noticed — full of sorrows, yes, but also full of beauty, joy, and simplicity.

Beth Adams, How to Survive

Remember Spring my love,
hold tight with me.

Look how the snowdrop
umbrellas lime-green down there.

Remember Spring my love,
hold on.

Let me show you sunrise
clementine the sky.

Sue Finch, WHAT WAS I THINKING?

This week I received my PLR statement and it informs me that thousands of strangers have taken time to borrow my books from their local libraries. I am immensely moved by this and grateful. I had no idea. Thank you. 

Here’s a picture of a happy day, this day in January in 2022, when the paperback was in the big window of the flagship store of Foyles on Charing Cross Road. This was a huge moment for me, I recall, I was very excited about it. I have never been in a big shop window before, and this is a particular favourite bookshop I love to visit all the time, especially as a baby poet when I worked and partied in Soho every night. 

I always said ‘one day I will be in that window’ and back then this seemed like a big dream of a thing to say out loud. It was something I really fought for and believed though. I look back and love the punky baby poet who starved and fought for me.

I have to salute her. She, who is not me now. I think about that, how we have to thank our past self. The person who writes the first draft of the book may grow to feel differently about things than the person who signs the published article. The poet that started this WAITING FOR GODDEN blog all those years ago isn’t me now. We are all complex, multi-layered and messy human beings, and all of the eras of you being a human being get you to this place, which is always in the here and now.

I am inside these thoughts and memories and also in the here and now, January 2025, I’m in hibernation and buried in the darkness of January tasks, it is a sad mixture of death and taxes, virus and sickness, bereavement and deadlines, sorrow and bewilderment. 

Salena Godden, Blue January 2025

the plant by my front door
blooms purple every spring
grown from a cutting
from my mother’s garden
who grew it from a cutting
from her mother’s garden
long ago i forgot its name
but never its provenance

Dick Whyte, Nina Catherine Howe – Meditation (1926)

After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog that contains no commentary. That poem was Tollund, by Seamus Heaney. I felt I took a risk in not saying anything about it – I thought readers would be able to join the dots between political events across the pond and Heaney’s description of ‘low ground, […] swart water, […] thick grass/ Hallucinatory and familiar’ which culminate in the self-reflexivity of his final lines, where his group (of friends? family?) stand:

More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad
Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning:
And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.

Everything in that stanza fulfils what Heaney sets out in my favourite of his essays, ‘The Government of the Tongue‘:

In the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves.

I find it poignant to read it again today, not least because of the person who now occupies the White House, but also because Heaney prefaces his remarks with one of his grittier sentences: ‘Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.’ Again, the links to current events are there to see in plain sight.

The good news is that he does not stop there:

Yet they verify our singularity, they strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil – no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.

When you think of hope, what do you think of? I was asked this at about 11.00 on New Year’s Eve, and, introvert that I am, I went blank and have only thought of the answer now: the power of the imagination to strike out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life – even though no poem has ever stopped a tank.

Anthony Wilson, Ourselves again (again?)

Knee-deep in reflected gold, I wait
for news. Recently, there’s been nothing
but the wish to hang on. Overcome
by the shedding of everything familiar,
 
there’s nothing left; hope’s been and gone. News
will come, and the river will stop running;
everything familiar will be shed,
and each part will fall to meet its gold reflection.

Karen Macfarlane, 6 TIMES (II)

We need to be careful with money. Go easy with food. Cuba is cut off from American banks. We have the money we came with.

But in Matanzas, our room is quiet, except for a bird singing. Tomorrow or the next day, we will swim in the Saturn cave, go to the Coral Beach, and we will see about writing.

I am blessed. Today, a man named Amed drove us here in a classic red ‘57 Chevy.

Despite the struggles of an isolated country, Cuba has light, magic, and music. Where we are sleeping has high ceilings, a blanket, nice towels, and in the morning, there will be Cuban coffee on the rooftop.

Tomorrow, we will swim, and then we will go to the coffee shop in the town square, and we will write!

I am ready for swimming. Writing. Cuban coffee. Cuban music.

In this adventure, I will polish this book, so it shines in the dark.

Kate Gale, I Can Sing for You: Our Adventure in Cuba

That we may escape this American psych ward; this red, white, and blue panic room; big-moneyed brotopia speaking in sieg heils and high-fives. This hot-wired joyride of a truly hot mess; PSA for DOA; all-night fear factory where vindictiveness hosts an open bar. This fork-tongued freedom machine; autonomous vehicle steered by the unseen hands of autocracy; this bad-rappin’ nation where the words ICE ICE baby take on chilling new meaning. This Guernica aneurysm; babel-mouthed alphabet of scrambled belonging. This burn church; this scorched land; this scorched psyche, a Rorschach posing the question, What’s next? 

Rich Ferguson, Red, White, and Blue Panic Room

To live in a city of over ten million people, one bird in the formless murmuration, is to normalize erasure. How easily you stop hearing the noise – of people, of traffic, of need, of despair, of failure, of persuasion; stop seeing movement as individual action: not this person walking, not even that one running for a bus, not a car in a rush hour crawl, not a street dog marking corners and gates and curbs as its own, not the woman with two children, on a rickety scooter, doing a school run. Instead, they all merge into one still background: you disconnect from the city and walk between rickshaws and bikes, sidestepping footpath vendors and the sleeping homeless, brushing shoulders with shoulders and awnings and nameless hurry, comfortable with your thoughts, comfortable in your square of earth, ring of sky, wall-less silo, comfortable in your alone.

Here, in the city, poetry is birthed in imagined silences. On grey canvases. In the belch of trucks. In the queues. In the lifts. In the waiting. In the contrary being. In the pulse of a time that is both tomorrow and yesterday – the long monsoon days both relief and rhythm, the scorching summer both mundane and midwife, the muse as temperamental as the moon, the mind as unwilling as morning.

A single brahminy kite draws slow, taunting arcs over the frenzy. Loneliness, you learn, has nothing to do with the crowds. Clouds have nothing to do with ascent. Peace has nothing to do with chaos. The city, like the word, like the birds, like the night, like the solitude of the moving sky, is within you.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Imagined silences

It’s freezing cold again:
we leave the hot water tap on as a thin
drizzle. All morning, I have felt
the sort of heaviness that sometimes
remains, even after a long bout
of crying. I listen to a livestream
where the panelists speak of ways
we might lift each other up when we
feel like that. One of them says,
hard as it seems, we must laugh
together, even be silly. Feed each
other, come together, hold
each other up. We can still burn
bright as the burning hills. We
can burn even brighter.

Luisa A. Igloria, Monday

I was playing around with the idea of titling a post, “What Will You Inaugurate this Year?” The idea came via my brilliant friend and piano teacher, Susan, who recently told me, Your year—your next 4 years—do not belong to any politician, they belong to you. Following this advice, however, is one of those “easier said than done” things (as a lot seems, lately).

And, as for the lofty title. I find I haven’t the heart to give anyone inspiring advice, not today. To keep it simple, a better title—maybe for my intentions this whole year—is simply, “What Bethany Is Reading Now.”

Of course I have been reading (reading has been my life-line!), but I’ve been too distracted to share on the blog. The main distraction: my 84-year-old husband fell off a ladder and down our front steps. (Throughout a hospital stay, follow up appointments, etc., he has insisted he is fine. No, he has not gotten rid of the ladders.)

Meanwhile…I had earlier committed to several local poets to review their books. Leaving aside large concepts (suggested by Latinate words such as inaugurate), spending some time on poetry sounds good.

Bethany Reid, Taking Leave, poems by Mary Ellen Talley

A friend sends me haiku most days, under the rule that I don’t comment on them because I do that for a living and it can wear me out–it’s a pleasure to just watch them float by. One of the latest was addressed to a black widow living near his bed, informing it that he wouldn’t yet oust the spider into single-degree temperatures. I did comment on that one, remarking that I would not be so compassionate, and then we had a brief conversation about feeling tender-hearted lately. It’s the cruelty of the world, we agreed.

The term is in full swing–W&L starts early so I’ve been teaching for more than two weeks now–and I feel the same way about the students in my introductory poetry workshop, whose first poem drafts I’m writing responses to today. Gentle, Lesley. People are fragile.

I feel some kindness beaming back at me, too, from other people. A former student is teaching Poetry’s Possible Worlds at a military academy (!) and just sent me the loveliest response paper his own student had written about it, commenting that I made myself vulnerable in the book and it touched her, made her feel connected. And then there’s kindness from the universe: a new poem came to me, which hasn’t happened much lately. A good EMDR session made my tense muscles feel softer, as if I am beginning to release that braced feeling I’ve experienced for as long as I can remember.

Lesley Wheeler, Tender and furious

i love that the word “hives”
for the rashes on my skin
is the same as that
of a thrumming hornet body.
i run my fingers
across the raised flesh.
never the same. sometimes
a bracelet. sometimes
just one like an angry lonely star.
my body rejects this world
so it maps others.
says, “here is where
our treasure is buried.”

Robin Gow, hives

A couple days ago, J and I were talking about Dead Poets’ Society, which, to many people’s surprise is not a movie I am enamored with (in a similar vein, I prefer Mona Lisa Smiles so much more.)  Once it was on video, I  remember our sophomore year teacher rolling in the VCR TV on its cart and having us watch it, though I’m pretty sure I had already been writing poetry (or maybe quotes should be around the “poetry” part ) for a year. Since the end of freshman year when we were charged with writing them. I don’t remember what models were give us. Whitman? Dickinson? Frost?  Either way I wrote a bunch–about flamingos, kittens, unrequited high school love. I wrote them out on notebook pages, on pen pal stationery, in the blue lockable diary a cousin gave me for my 14th birthday. They may have rhymed, but it got much worse later on in college. Beyond some Poe in Junior high, I wasn’t that familiar with poetry in general, so its no wonder I was clueless those first couple years. But I was also writing lots of other things–papers on UFO’s, essays on the 1st Amendment that won prizes, flawless 5 paragraph essays, a term paper on Shakespeare’s women, newspaper editorials on environmental issues. And I was reading–still lots of horror and some romance. I still have those early poems, what I’m guessing was most of them in a folder somewhere, though I threw a lot of things away a while back, mostly things that already exist in book form. But I kept all those early fledgling drafts, mostly for my own amusement. 

Kristy Bowen, true north

Sunday morning was cold, and clear. I headed to the theater to help strike the Panto set. The day after a long process is something like the day after a binge. I walked up a narrow space between two office buildings and nearly stumbled on a little ceramic angel, sleeping, head rested on folded arms propped up by a ceramic tree stump. All around him were off-season rhododendron bushes and empty bottles: cheap whiskey, dark beer. He was sleeping. Passed out, maybe.

Is there a word for looking back on an earlier time in your life, not with a sense of loss and longing, but with an objectivity that has your mind bouncing between shame and pity for your former self? Compassion may be years away, but I am learning to stay in the difficult spaces when I stumble upon them: face-to-face with memories that are mine, but that haven’t been polished by my rumination—that haven’t been made familiar. That is what it means to tame something, isn’t it? To be made familiar to it. Can these memories, tucked into my being like parasites, tame me?

Will they break me?

Ren Powell, A Beautiful Life Story has More than One POV

I’ve lost count of how many pieces I’ve read about the powers of going local, connecting with community, continuing to create, not letting them steal our joy and attention, not letting them live rent-free in our heads, not letting them destroy our humanity, etc. and I appreciate the sentiments and where they’re coming from, I really truly do, but…enough, already. It feels a little too much like 2017 resistance to me, if that makes any sense. Like, it all sounds good, and there’s good in doing those things, for sure, but is it really going to do what we hope it will? Any more than our protests and postcards and phone calls and donations have? Does it acknowledge what’s really happening?

Reading these pieces has begun to make me feel not OK (because I really don’t want to go back to 2017 in any way), so I’ve mostly stopped doing that. I seem to have joined a church, despite my atheism, primarily because of their community-based activism and because it’s nice to meet with other folks once a week who share my values and learn new things about organizations doing good work in our city and just sit with it all for an hour in a safe, loving space. (The pastor says my atheism does not disqualify me for membership, so I don’t feel I’m there under false pretenses.) I start volunteering with the library this week and I’m learning how to get involved involved in the church’s projects. I’m greatly limiting my time with social and other media.1 I’m focusing on the day I’m in. I’m reaching out to my people. I’m doing my best to put healthy things in my body and to move said body. I’ve deep-cleaned our house and I’m back in therapy for support with my personal stuff.

These are all good things and I will continue to do them. And I’m still not really OK. Some of that is because I’m in the midst of a personal firestorm—and isn’t that true of many of us? We are still navigating all the hard personal things we always have, but we’re doing it on a foundation that is not what we’ve long known it to be. And yes, sure, the shifting has now been going on for a long time, but it’s suddenly accelerated and there’s just no denying what’s been happening any more.

I’m coming here just to say: We’re not OK. It’s not OK. Something has died or is dying and I don’t know much about grief but I do know that denial is the one sure-fire thing we can do to prolong it and make it hurt even more than it already does. I’m doing the thing writers are often advised to do: I’m writing the kind of thing I want to read. I don’t want cheerleaders right now. I don’t want false hope or platitudes. Don’t you dare tell me that this is all for the best in the long run, or part of God’s plan, or that we’re lucky to have had what we had for as long as we did. Don’t tell me that the country is rotten from the core and it all needs to burn down anyway. There are parts I love. There are ideals I love, as far short of reaching them as we have always been. And even if I can’t name exactly what it is, I know that something precious died this week. (And for the love of anything holy, don’t you dare tell me that it hasn’t. Don’t you even think about gaslighting me that way.) I need to mourn with those who are also mourning, and I want space for all the feelings that come with loss: anger, depression, sadness. I want to rage against the dying of the light. Don’t rush me and those who are feeling as I am to some false kind of feeling better. I’m holding out for the real deal, and the only way to get there is through.

Rita Ott Ramstad, I’m not here to comfort or inspire

Some will look for a way out, an end to history; 
the woman who swallowed pills,
was rushed to the ER with an inked note
pinned to her sad, sallow blouse: 

DO NOT RESUSCITATE if Donald Trump wins.  
That was November, 2016. My doctor-friend had 
his orders: she won; she doesn’t have to relive 
the second debacle. […]

No reason to leave this beautiful world just yet.  
The deep processes of awareness unfinished.
The blanks & pits & recommitment. 
Painful radiance will survive. 

Jill Pearlman, ER & DJT

To the Little British Girl

on Gardener’s World who grew her first garden this year. Your tour of the garden was just what my tired and sad eyes needed this morning. Walking the garden in your pink wellies, you proudly showed the dahlias you grew from seed, the roses you rescued from black spot, tending them with care and fresh compost, the tomatoes (toe-mah-toes) and peppers bursting with life, and everything you declared as “lovely”. Little British girl, you are lovelier than the loveliest flower. Your delight is contagious and a reminder to observe the small things, to nurture the broken things, to share the beautiful things, when we can. Your corner wildflower patch feeds the bees and butterflies just as you, little girl, have fed me this morning. Stay wild, little girl. Stay safe in your lovely garden.

[…]

My garden today is under snow! New Orleans is forecasted to get 4-6 inches and it is coming down hard and fast as I write this. Since I moved here in 1978 we’ve had four previous snows but nothing compared to the forecast for today. The city is shut down including all the interstate highways coming in. It should be interesting and it’s certainly pretty but, oh, I’m worried about my garden.

Charlotte Hamrick, Something Small, Every Day (or so): To the Little British Girl

I’ve now posted for 100 weeks in a row!

I’m seeing quite a few writer and poet friends arriving on substack from other platforms, hoping to build an audience here. It might be nice, on this 100 post milestone, to talk about what I’ve learned along the way. […]

There are all sorts of different writers on substack and all sots of different models for writers posting on substack. You have to find the one for you. […] My hot take here is to write what you are already writing. It is far more enjoyable than trying to be what you are not. Substack is a stall for your wares, or a museum for your writing artefacts. It’s another way for you to connect to people, your readers. It does not have to be a whole new fangled sparkly version of yourself, it just needs to be your passion. Look at what is important to you and write about that. I can see the irony in my saying this and then doing a ‘how to write on substack’ post.

Wendy Pratt, 100 weeks of posting on substack

Social media – at least the bit of it that arrives on my screens – is alive this morning with many expressions of sadness at the announcement of the death of Michael Longley. I heard him read just a few months ago to launch his most recent new selected poems, Ash Keys, at the LRB Bookshop in London. He insisted then on trying to stand to read his poems, though his breathlessness and physical wobbling often made him have to take his seat again; but the humour and mischievous twinkle were as powerful as ever. Over the years, I have to admit it took me a while to really come to appreciate his work; I think I did not really ‘get’ the force of his brevity, his precision. If you have not seen it yet, do watch the brilliant, moving, inspiring BBC programme about him, his life and work here.

Martyn Crucefix, RIP Michael Longley

I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:

Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.

The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.

The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.

Matthew Paul, January reading (2)

The longer poems and sequences based on [Elaine] Randell’s social work experience (‘Along the Landings’, a late addition to the ‘Beyond All Other’ section, and many poems from Faulty Mothering and The Meaning of Things) also show an Objectivist influence, I think, but this time it’s the documentary poems of Charles Reznikoff that I sense behind them. However, she makes the method her own, partly because the documents she’s working with (I imagine a combination of case notes and memory) grow out of her personal experience but largely because she has grown completely into her own voice:

The boy looks at me for a long time studying me;
he says he knows why I have come today.
“It’s about the baby;
he’s cute” he says.
The boy’s long white thin arms are like glass
His face his face his face is totally opened to me.
Is the baby dead now, he asks.
I tell him so.

The almost flat tone, the complete refusal of melodrama, is so perfectly undercut by that gut-wrenching ‘His face his face his face’ in a moment of genuine emotion. And yet, there is always hope, as in these lines from ‘For Andrew and Beatrice’, one of a number of epithalamia that appear in the uncollected poems, which also serve as an instance of the interplay between the human and natural worlds that is another thread running through this book:

We watch as two become constant against the ever changing sky.
Our hearts look up as skylarks greet your steps together.
They, knowing more
radiate their song, soaring evermore in tune.

In her introduction to the 1987 North and South edition of her first prose collection, Gut Reaction, Randell wrote that the pieces in the book were a kind of record of 10 years working in childcare and mental health, and that the pieces are factually accurate apart from the removal of ‘identifying attributes’. She goes on:

The humour, courage, conflict and pain contained in the lives described is clear. The reader may be disturbed by the realities of the facts.

These prose pieces, and the ones that follow in the ‘Prose from The Meaning of Things’ and ‘Uncollected Prose’ sections defy easy categorisation; they are not fiction, not prose poems, not journalism. In a sense, they are like pages from the documents that the poems grew out of. And, as with the poems, Randell avoids the perils of anecdote; these are not neat little stories that point towards the snap closure of an easy moral, she has too much respect for the people she’s writing about for that.

Billy Mills, Collected Poems and Prose by Elaine Randell: A Review

The more you read of Swinburne’s poems to other poets, the more the relationship to Catullus emerges as a kind of model. Here for instance is the end of his poem for François Villon, who died in the mid-fifteenth century, addressed once again as a poetic ‘brother’ across the ages:

Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
      Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother’s name.

When I read Catullus at university — memorably, we were supposed to prepare every one of the 108 short poems for our first tutorial, just a week into term — our prescribed edition still left some passages decorously unannotated and untranslated. Of course there’s nothing like a blank space in a translation to send readers straight to the original, suddenly filled with enthusaism for a spot of unseen translation.5 I was amused to find in my edition of Swinburne that — presumably in imitation of this practice — he does the same thing in the one of his Villon translations. Here is the seventh stanza of Villon’s ‘Les Regrets de la belle Heaulmière’ (‘The Complaint of the Fair Armouress’), as she enumerates the physical beauties she has now lost:

Ces gentes espaules menues,
Ces bras longs et ces mains tretisses ;
Petitz tetins, hanches charnues,
Eslevées, propres, faictisses
A tenir amoureuses lysses ;
Ces larges reins, ce sadinet,
Assis sur grosses fermes cuysses,
Dedans son joly jardinet?

And here is Swinburne’s translation, as it teasingly appears in my (admittedly pretty ancient) edition:

The shapely slender shoulders small,
Long arms, hands wrought in glorious wise,
Round little breasts, the hips withal
High, full of flesh, not scant of size,
Fit for all amorous masteries;
** *** ****, *** *** ***** **** ***
****** ***** ** **** **** *****
** * **** ****** ** **** *****?

I love the way this asterixed-out version retains the punctuation and indicates the length of the missing words, so you can have a go at guessing what they might be! (Even if you don’t have a French dictionary to hand, you’ll no doubt have realised that the lines describe the woman’s genitalia.) I’m afraid I know nothing about the textual history of Swinburne’s verse, and my edition is an old one — but presumably he did actually write these lines, which have then been suggestively censored, just like so many school editions of Catullus down the years.

Victoria Moul, Swinburne, Catullus and expurgating Villon

Chopping kindling from
a knotty block … in each stick,
a part of its shape.

James W. Hackett (Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac, William J. Higginson, Kodansha International, 1996)

The Yorks/ Lancs Haiku group met online yesterday for the first meeting of the year. The theme was ‘winter’ and there are so many good winter-themed haiku that it seemed to take me ages to select one to share with the group. In the end, I went with the above. It’s probably more heavily punctuated than is the fashion these days, plus the syllable count is 5-7-5, although unlike many poems that adhere to this, it doesn’t appear forced. I like it because it encompasses a complete idea – much harder to do, I think, than to juxtapose two images. It’s onomatopoeic too – I can hear the sound of the axe striking. Much of what I read these days is quite minimalist, even by haiku standards, so I’d almost forgotten how much I like these type of poems (fuller, more rounded somehow). So, I’m sharing it again here, in the hope that you like it as much as I do.

Julie Mellor, Winter …

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

Most of my poems have written themselves, honestly. From the beginning it has flowed easily. I didn’t choose this shit, it chose me. I am just a monkey mouthpiece for the ghosts.

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?

Oh no, no notes besides maybe an idea or a vignette. I will write myself a note or an email to remember for later. An example is last night my son turned in his sleep and said “read it.” I wonder what book he wanted read to him? There is a poem there I will have to sit down and write. Once I open up to the subconscious, I just let it go out and direct it a bit and maybe fix a word later. Most of my poems are first and final drafts. I don’t agonize over them at all. They are better when they are allowed to just spring out and splat!

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?

With the last two books I had an idea what I wanted to do from the beginning. Sapphires on the Graves was going to be a book of prose poems with very little punctuation and a cyclical and surreal feel. 500 Hidden Teeth began as a project where I was going to write 500 separate poems in one-line sentences. As the book progressed the sentences began to connect and waver and connect again and many of the sentences ended up as groups that could be seen as poems. Yet, my intent is that each sentence is still a poem and the whole book is one large poem. I like the last description best. […]

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

Shit. Like I said I am here for the harpies and the shadows and the veins. I only tell what I have heard in trance. My job is to go into that broken avalanche of ribs and bring out spells and ash. I strive for magic. I strive for honesty. In that place it is all one water.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Scott Ferry

A secondhand bookshop here is selling recent issues of the TLS, North, Magma and Poetry Review for a quid. The’ve all been going for a long time. The TLS (weekly) has one poem and a few reviews. The others are leading UK poetry magazines with articles and reviews. I’ve not read them for a year or so. I found them all a worthwhile read.

• The Times Literary Supplement (a tabloid newspaper) has reviews that always include some adverse criticism. The other mags’ reviews tend to avoid saying negative things.
• Magma’s issues vary according to the guest editor(s) and theme. I read the Physics issue, which wasn’t one of the best. They get 5,000 submissions/issue.
• The North has so much in it that there’s bound to be something to like. They have guest editors. They’ve rejected me the last few times I’ve tried. Decades ago, I used to have more luck – have they changed or have I?
• Poetry Review is the Poetry Society’s magazine. If poetry is going to try to distance itself from prose, then the poems in recent Poetry Reviews show the way. Hit’n’miss, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I didn’t like were the discussions, interviews and joint reviews – too much waffle and mutual praise. What’s wrong with good old-fashioned essays?

Tim Love, Magma, North, TLS, Poetry Review

A few years ago I was contacted out of the blue by Michelle Moloney King, the founder of Beir Bua Press. She had read some of my blog posts on mathematical forms in poetry, and offered to publish them as a book. The result was From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry, which was released in autumn 2021, with stunning cover art by Moloney King herself.

Following the closure of Beir Bua Press in 2023 the book is no longer available in print, so I am now making it freely available in downloadable form. I’ve posted the Introduction below, followed by pdf versions of each of the chapters (including an additional chapter on geometrical forms). Enjoy!

Marian Christie, From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry

Poet Jonathan Holden (1941-2024) — who, early in his career, was a math teacher — died just a few weeks ago.  Seeing his death notice has reminded me to revisit and again enjoy and appreciate his work.  My first mention of Holden’s work in this blog was in this posting in January, 2011 — and here is a link to the list of postings in which his poetry is featured.  

Two of Holden’s mathy poems are included in the anthology that was gathered by mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and me — Strange Attractors,  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/ CRC Press, 2008).

JoAnne Growney, Poet and Math Teacher Passes On

I’m not going to be all evangelical about handwriting vs typing. I have terrible, almost illegible handwriting, but I do both, although it’s probably more typing than handwriting nowadays. However, I still like to make notes for poems and works on paper with a fountain pen. I’d take a photo of my main pen (only because is came up in conversation at work this week), but a) I can’t lay my hands on it now, and b) there’s a purring cat next to me that can’t be moved. I think you’ll survive. It’s hardly a vintage one.

I mention this mainly because I read this interesting article earlier in the week about the apparent decline in hand-writing, or at least wonders if we are…

It’s an interesting, c. 15 min read. The passage below was one that stood out

“When we focus on making a physical object, or on playing a musical instrument, our concentration level is mainly self-directed,” the sociologist Richard Sennett argues. The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. This form of “situated cognition”, as Sennett calls it, takes time to develop. It also forces us to slow down, as we see when we study people who make things by hand. “Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labour,” Sennett told American Craft magazine. “Making is thinking.”

I’m mainly using this as an excuse to post a poem of my own this week. I’ve not got round to asking anyone for permission.

The poem is called Unlimited Texts. It’s taken from Collecting the Data (Copies left, folks…get ’em white they’re hot, etc).

Unlimited Texts, V19, 25.03.23

What does your scrawl even look like these days?
No more chits or kites dropped. No more post-its
hidden in lunchboxes, or weakly glued
to flyleaves. No more doodles by the phone.
We’re pointing fingers and thumbs here and there
to jab and send, send and jab, send and jab:
Get bread. Love you…We need milk. XXX.
I want this written down.

Mat Riches, Hand Wri(ti)ng(ing)

I had a dream in which I was writing the Psalms in uncial script in walnut ink with a reed pen. I had already made ink from black walnuts fallen from a tree in the Bishop’s Palace Garden in Wells. Jane had recently given me some reed pens harvested on the Somerset Levels. I’m using these and a couple of steel-nib dip-pens to write a brief erasure of each of the 150 Psalms, one per page on heavy handmade paper. I’ve progressed as far as no 28. The writing improves as it goes on! […]

drawing with smoke
ten words
found in a puddle

like a magpie
looking for shiny things
in St Cuthbert’s Gospel

Ama Bolton, ABCD January 2025

This has been a busy week: I got a crown in my front teeth (sorely needed,) tore my rotator cuff (a first for me,) got new glasses, and did my first live in-person reading in a very long time with three other lovely poets at the brand new reading series at J. Bookwalter’s Winery (fourth Thursday every month, includes features and an open mic, plus wine!)

The reading was Erika Wright, Catherine Broadwall, Michelle Schaefer, and myself, as the featured readers, with John Campos as MC, and a very civilized open mic afterwards. There must have been fifty people in the audience, and I didn’t know many of them, but did get a see a few familiar faces, and met a lot of new ones. It seems there is, after all, an interest in poetry in Woodinville! Catherine, who has two books already, and I both sold multiple copies of our books (which seems miraculous these days) and the energy in the room (as you will be able to tell in the video) was just joyful and energetic. It was such a relief after the relentless bad news (I’ve been trying to avoid it, but it is difficult to avoid it all) to have a moment like this of happiness and wine and friendship and, um, dare I say community?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Wonderful Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, New Glasses, Changes Coming and Looking to the Future

In three out of four ways
  this is normal rain
    and all its bombs
      raindrops.
 
But I’m pulled as Yeats predicted.
  Holding on for dear, dear life.
 
Deaf to the need for the sure untrue,
  the caught-on-a-tide, the do-not-do
 
of Lao Tzu, the impossibility
  of joining minds with a family
    sinking in an ancient
      boat.
 
When the word comes down
  for opinion forming,
    pressure applied
      to vote

it’s not the politician in my soul
  I fear as I scratch out my x
    but the imperfect rhymes
      of the poet.

Chris Edgoose, A Political

In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”

What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.

So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.

Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.

I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.

Ann E. Michael, Curriculum vitae

As artists, I think right now there is the inclination to just disappear for a while. And that’s understandable. But also: Shine. Do your work. Share it when it feels good to do so. Put your energy in the right places for you. Go where the love is. Take up space. There’s no one right way to do things. But I do think we have to insist on our presence. We deserve to exist and we make the world a better place. We’re even good for the freaking economy.

Keep making your art, and writing your books. Each thing you make is a lamp.

I re-read Li-Young Lee’s words on writing a poem:

“A poem is a lamp, and it’s got just enough oil to last for you to write the poem down. And when that oil is gone, the lamp disappears, and you can’t translate it to the next poem. There’s just enough oil there to guide your way through that poem — that’s it. The next one you start from scratch.”

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Shine with Strange Courage

The wonders of modern marketing means the word Epicurean brings an instant association with food and that unique scent of fancy delis which in many ways is an ideal backdrop for thoughts around happiness. Steer your mind from delicious cheeses and odd things in pretty jars for a moment. I’ve discovered something else about Epicurius. Amongst his many concepts and theories is one that seems particularly prescient in the age of social media – a content life can be best attained when one seeks to live without being known.

This idea is often misconstrued as seeking to live in isolation. It can be better described as seeking to live without craving the validation of strangers – a direct contrast to our modern cult of celebrity, influencers and the lure of the like. Understanding that the drive to appeal to whims of those who do not know me can only cause anxiety puts the pull and power of social media into sharp relief. Using this media to gather support for that which I cherish is a risk and one that needs to be handled with care. I am not advocating the abandonment of the internet, or the abandonment of open mics, live readings and performance. I am suggesting that perhaps this is not the way for every poet to be. Of course, publication houses need a writer who is marketable and being an engaging, likeable person who can sparkle at will (however much that exhausts them) makes it much easier to sell books, which is a pretty essential part of being a publishing house.

Despite this economic necessity, a swift glance through the works said publishing houses share shows there are those who do not follow this path and are just as loved and cherished. The pull for external validation has diluted both work and pleasure in equal measure and seeking to shoehorn myself into being someone who sparkles means a detrimental diversion of energy. In a world where everything, from what we grow in our gardens, to our favourite pet to what we’ve had for tea is so very public, making the decision to seek to live unnoticed, to live free from the validation of strangers feels like a kind of freedom.

Connection with others is important to our wellbeing, but contrary to the nature of our ever homogenised world this connection looks different for everyone. Platforms like Substack, where one can choose to sparkle or not, where one can have 20 subscribers or 20 million and still publish are helpful, if used with care. The pull of the like is still there, the articles about how to make your fortune still create the feeling that there’s something else to be done other than enjoying writing, but if those of us who need to can just hold fast to the essence of building a community of like minded readers, of people who know us, then this platform can offer way to connect without sacrificing authenticity. Now I just need to be brave enough not to sparkle and quell the need to see those little hearts light up.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, No need to sparkle, no need to hurry, no need to be anyone but oneself

I saw the sign early,
walking by flashlight, startled
by my bear shaped shadow.
In the summer, I scrambled up the rock face
to gather berries. In the fall,
I fight the urge to hibernate.

We will comment on the coldness
of this winter. I struggle
to stay awake. In my sewing
basket, a small ball of yarn.

I think of my grandmother
who knitted socks of all sizes,
her form of resistance.
I prefer scarves. I have always chosen
long lines: poetry or code or check out line,
a chain to connect us all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem Made of Abandoned Lines

This week: hard rain, thoughtful grunts, vagaries of the heart, a family of dreamers, and much more. Enjoy.

It’s been a while. I’ve been coming through things, and still am, but here I am, writing again. 

In the café at Wrexham General station, the kind barista is putting up the Christmas tree while I drink my morning coffee. I choose to take it as a sign of hope. 

It may snow before November is out. I will love again the way snow falls through the street light outside my living room window.

And I’m listening to Haydn’s first cello concerto on ear-pods. It drowns out the hiss of the coffee machine. Moderato – cheerful, adagio – poignant, then upbeat allegro to the resolution. Three movements. Three moods. Nothing authentic can be expressed in a singularity.

I move through things by sitting still, writing, going with the music.

Liz Lefroy, I Write Again

My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy Fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected to look is not going to help matters. I’ll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)

I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, “You can’t make socialism without socialists.” Likewise, you can’t make democracy without (small ‘d’) democrats.

Dale Favier, Contraction

The fact is that you cannot have a social democracy and support a massive military budget at the same time. You cannot have a social safety net for all citizens, and also have a corrupt government that’s completely enmeshed with, and beholden to, corporate, military, and special interests, including foreign ones. You cannot reward corporations and the wealthiest individuals with tax breaks, power, and influence while the citizens who keep the economy going through their labor become poorer, and increasingly feel that they have no voice. And you cannot wage endless wars that destabilize other parts of the world, or fail to deal with climate change as the global emergency which it is, and expect other countries to shoulder all the burden of refugees fleeing desperate situations.

Into that situation of growing inequality, instability, fear and discontent rode Donald Trump, with his promises and lies, his anger and threats, ready to say whatever played the best to his audience, willing to subvert the law, and democracy in the process. It makes me think of a marriage that’s been failing for years, but the husband has been so busy and satisfied with his outside life that he’s refused to see the signs. Then one day, the wife comes down the stairs with her suitcase, and tells him it’s over; she’s leaving with Mr. Right. He’s astonished: “You’re such an idiot. You can’t possibly think he’s going to take care of you or treat you better than me! He’s a liar and a cheat, and everyone knows it!”

“Yes,” she says, “maybe that’s right, but you’ve been calling me stupid and fat and lazy for years. I’ve worked hard forever. I’ve told you what we needed to do to keep our marriage going, but you wouldn’t listen. There’s barely enough to pay our bills, and you’re always giving money away to strangers I don’t even know! Now I just want to feel some hope and some pride again. He may be everything you say, but he understands me, he seems to like me, and doesn’t talk down to me. He understands why I’m so angry and scared. I just want to try it. I want things to change.”

The husband can’t believe it. “What about your commitment to marriage? I thought you believed in it.”

”That’s just a piece of paper. I want to feel better.”

”Wait and see,” he says. “You’ll come running back to me. And I’m sure we can work something out.” She walks past him, out the door, and then turns for a moment, “By the way, I’m taking the car and the keys, so you won’t be able to drive for a while.”

Beth Adams, The Price of Arrogance

The roofing guy last week, the night of the election, told us that a new roof will come with a 50-year guarantee.

“Well,” I said, smiling, “that’s nice, but we sure don’t need one to last that long.”

“What?” he said. “What do you mean?”

I smiled. “Oh,” I said, “I guess we’ll be dead before the new roof gives out.”

He laughed in the way people do when they are startled and uneasy and don’t know what to say. I might have said something to smooth the moment over, but even then, even before we knew what was going to happen later that night, I had become tired of the ways in which we all avoid uncomfortable truths. Cane and I have entered the stage of life where, increasingly, we know that we might be purchasing some things for the last time. It’s unlikely that we, personally, will need anything to last for 50 years now. That’s just a fact, one we are both making peace with.

*

It can be hard to know the true beginning of something. If I told you that the water leak and all that came with it was the beginning of the end of my previous marriage, it might seem absurd.

It might be absurd; I can trace the fissures in our union back to its very beginnings—can even trace them back to before there was any kind of union at all. But the breaking of it? I could make a case that it began with the water leak and how we each saw and responded to it.

By the time everything in the house was repaired, all evidence of damage erased, the kitchen nicer than it had been before that October day when we finally learned what the bump was all about, the marriage was too far gone to save. Hard things happened during the months of repair and reconstruction, and then more, different hard things happened (a home invasion, a friend’s terminal illness, major surgery, a grandmother’s death). Interpretations of those events and their aftermaths were shaped through a lens created by the water leak.

You know how people lately like to say of great changes that they happen slowly, then all at once? After the bump and the mold and everything that followed them, I became aware of all kinds of leaks in our life. I saw how quickly everything could change if we didn’t repair them, how a person could leave for work one morning and not return to the same home in the evening. We were all fine, in the sense that we were all physically safe, but it does something to you when you are told you have 15 minutes to gather whatever you think you will need and don’t know when (or even if) you might return.

It changes you.

Rita Ott Ramstad, It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

I still sometimes imagine your face rippling beneath the surface, peering at me from pothole puddles and glasses of whiskey – your lips lifting and lowering in ambiguity. Your freckles, miniature galaxies of melanin, spiraling over cheeks. Pale eyes pin pricks of confusion. 

Your sister and I skipped school together, hid on the floorboards of her rust-pocked truck, her fingers entwined in your long red hair as she held down your head, tires slinging gravel out the gate after the bell. We’d spend the day smoking weed and sketching, you showering us with Fritos and reading Moby Dick out loud. 

You were the perfect foil for our willful ways, the tether to our hot air balloons. We wallpapered those crumbling walls with our trippy imaginings and your favorite passages, wrote our names in decades old dust. But for you we might have ended up in a ditch somewhere, might have become the drowned ones.

They say shafts of sunlight set your hair afire even as errant strands languished in sediment, in a turbid haze of creek and twisted metal. Your sister  used to say,

“Be kind and the universe will take care of you.” – but it didn’t take care of you, the kindest boy I knew.

Charlotte Hamrick, Aqua Pura

I still believe in “keep moving,” the way I still believe—must believe—that we could make this place beautiful. We can, and we must, despite it being an uphill climb that just got a lot steeper. “Keep moving” is what we’ll do, because what choice to we have? Giving up isn’t an option. And—not but, but and—I also believe that taking some time to be still, to listen to one’s own inner voice and to listen to others who are grieving, is essential. I want to move forward with purpose, intention, and care. I’m giving myself permission to slow down, to keep the door to my heart open, and to see what steps inside.

I’m listening hard, the way I might after hearing a sound in the woods. My experience tells me that sometimes the answers to difficult questions are whispered, and I don’t want to miss them.

Maggie Smith, On Stillness

These past days feel to me, in some ways, similar to the early weeks of Covid lockdown. People (including myself, those immediately around me) seem raw, a little shaken and bewildered, like they’ve woken up to find the wind has blown their tent down on top of them, and they’re pushing and pulling to find the shape of things, to locate the pieces they need to prop back up their fragile shelter. 

Also the same: A common desire to reach out to those most vulnerable, to support those most at risk, coupled with the need to care for the people in our own homes, families, neighborhoods (sometimes these two groups are the same or overlap). 

What’s blessedly different is that we can, safely, reach out to each other now, rather than further atomizing in our separate spaces, behind our separate screens. We can hold potlucks and book groups and hiking trips and dance parties and teach-ins and game nights and funerals. We can stand or sit alongside each other. Hold hands. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Tangled in the Tent

I am
pulling the voices of people I desire
and love and trust and worry over
into me. I am inviting them into the bright
dark of my soul. I am gonna live forever
because all the money I touch looks at me
and says e pluribus unum, out of many,
one. I am the water Jesus drank in the desert.
I am god talking to herself. I am evicting
America from my body and making room
in the borders of my black bad bitch body
for everyone I was sent into this life
to love loudly.

Saeed Jones, “My Project 2025” A New Poem By Me

I dreamed that Trump had asked me to be in charge of the Department of Education.  In my dream, I thought, I don’t have the experience to do that.

I woke up thinking, well, I have been teaching since 1988, so there’s that.  And in the days since that dream, as various cabinet candidates have been announced, I’ve thought of that dream and who has qualifications to lead which parts of our national government.  I still think that I don’t have the right kind of qualifications to lead the Department of Education–that person should have K-12 teaching experience.

Of course, I will not be asked to be part of Donald Trump’s cabinet, and if I was, I would say no.  I hope to avoid that kind of toxic workplace going forward.  I feel incredibly lucky to be responsible for teaching, not administration, and that’s how I want to end my working days.  I am under no illusions that “I alone can fix it.”

In fact, in moments of despair, I have doubts that anything can be fixed (see hurricane in North Carolina mountains).  But then, through the magic of technology, I see good theatre, and I am once again inspired to write.

Last night, we watched Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a play I read long ago in high school.  It was the 2019 London production with Sally Field and Bill Pullman, and what a performance!  The play, which was written in 1946, still feels fresh and also timeless. 

It also reminded me that I’m teaching the American survey class next term, and I am so looking forward to that.  In these days where there’s so much happening to upset us, let me remember how much joy we can still have:  good literature, good teaching opportunities, good theatre, and vegan creations that give us autumn in a casserole!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Friday Gratitudes Two Weeks Before Thanksgiving

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Bethany Reid, Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

A few months ago, I had a meltdown. Societal and political discourse – not only where I live, but everywhere – has become so troubled, so vitriolic, so angry, so polarised and so polarising that I became overwhelmed by words. It felt, and still feels, as though everyone is shouting but no one is listening. No one takes the time to ask thoughtful, constructive questions, to examine assumptions or consider nuances. Humility and compassion seem to be absent.

I retreated from words. Silence, always precious, became even more so. I stepped back from social media, withdrew from poetry communities and book clubs, ceased tuning in to the news and consciously limited my reading. I cut back on social engagements. I stopped writing.

Instead, I sought refuge in the natural sciences. I turned to equations. 

Like passages of text, equations contain their own resonances, depths and layers of meaning. We can think of them as visual poetry. Yet they transcend the egocentric world view that preoccupies us much of the time. Their symbols, letters and numbers represent our efforts to understand, to seek coherence in a vast and complex universe.

Marian Christie, The Poetry of Equations

My college roommate, Tara Polek, who helped get me through Organic Chem and went to UC basketball games with me, who moved from Ohio to Seattle just like I did, who was the smartest, kindest children’s cancer researcher ever, passed away.

I feel like this is where I should have poetic thoughts, but I’m still mostly in sad mode. Tara had two young children and a husband, and I never heard she was even sick. In college, she was the friend who, when I caught pneumonia and the girl across the hall had to be airlifted to the hospital with even worse pneumonia, never even got a sniffle. She ran—for fun—ever since I knew her. She spent her entire life doing cancer research. I wish I had told her how much her 30-year friendship meant to me while I still had the chance. […]

One thing that the death of a good friend will do is make you reconsider your life and where you are in it. At 51, I have spent too much time in the last decade in doctor’s offices, not enough having adventures, traveling, seeing the world. The world seems to have shrunk, especially since the pandemic, and now, with the election, it seems more dangerous than ever to just elect the status quo.

So, I signup up for an online class called She Hits Refresh, about women over thirty moving out of the US, and I’m researching grad schools, cities, visas, vacation time, disability, and medication rules. It’s been my dream for a long time to live in France, and besides that, visit England and Ireland.

On top of that, I’m sending my next manuscript out to new publishers. I’ve got be braver with my art, and my personal life. I feel like I’ve seen my life shrink and I don’t want that to define the rest of my life, or my writing. I don’t want to live in fear.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, When You Lose Old Friends, Interventions at the Zoo with Snow Leopards, and Contemplating Changes in a Supermoon

It was a good run, better and longer than I could have imagined, and yet I’m still somehow surprised that it’s over. I thought I’d be the one to turn off the lights. 

Sorry, I’m not trying to be cryptic here. About a month ago, I guess, I changed my bio on the few places online where I post. I added a “Ret.” to “Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus.” I considered changing it “Emeritus” but that’s too academic both for The Rumpus and for me. Retired is the appropriate term.

I was with The Rumpus almost from the beginning. It was December 2008 and Amy and I were back in San Francisco for the first time since we’d moved away 3 years before. Amy had an interview at MLA and I met up from some old friends from my time as a Stegner and they told me I should meet a bunch of them later at a bar in the Mission to talk about this online magazine Stephen Elliott was starting because they were looking for someone to write about poetry occasionally. […]

We went live for real on January 20, 2009. Kind of a slow news day as I recall, though there was a bit of controversy on the internet about a poem by Elizabeth Alexander read during a ceremony that morning, a controversy that required (not really) a response from the new poetry columnist at this website that had just gone live. 

So that was the first thing I wrote for The Rumpus. Not a column of links, though many of those would follow. Nope, I wrote a response to the reaction to Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.” (I didn’t even have to look that up.) I dug up the poem Robert Frost actually wrote for JFK’s inauguration (which is just goddamn terrible) as opposed to The Gift Outright, which he recited when the wind blew his papers all over the place. I looked back at the offerings from Maya Angelou and Miller Williams (who was one of my professors at Arkansas where I did my MFA) and came to the rousing conclusion that, as inaugural poems go, Alexander’s was pretty good, given the competition, and was certainly poetry no matter what some Impressive Critics had claimed.

It was published as the top story on the site for a little while. Maybe a day? Nothing stayed at the top for long in those days. And I have no idea how many people read it. But a day or two after that, I got an email from Stephen asking me if I wanted to be poetry editor instead of just a columnist. I’d be responsible for soliciting and editing book reviews and occasional essays and I’d still have my column and no we wouldn’t be publishing poetry yet but keep it in mind.

I almost said no. Seriously, I was torn about this. I’d never edited anything before, I’d never written a book review, much less solicited one. I had no idea how I’d even get books to reviewers. I’d never even heard of an ARC. So I mentioned it to Amy and she was like “Of course you have to do it are you nuts?” 

Brian Spears, Time and The Rumpus

So, in the video he talks about the Law of Assumption. This is different from the Law of Attraction, which, as I understand it, focuses on bringing something you desire to you. Positive thoughts attract positive experiences, etc. By contrast, the Law of Assumption encourages you to operate under the assumption that you have the thing you seek already.

Here is an example. You seek to have your poem published in The New Yorker. The next step would be for you to spend time envisioning exactly what that feels like. Close your eyes, picture a specific scene. Let’s say it’s the day the issue comes out. Imagine yourself holding the magazine in your hands. Where are you? Who is with you? What does the glossy paper feel like on your skin? How is the light falling across the page? What does your name look like in that magazine’s print?

In other words, the idea is not just to fantasize about getting your work in this magazine. (Or getting the fellowship, the grant, the teaching job, the dream journal acceptance, etc.) But really, go deeply into the specific moment of its occurrence. Live it out in your mind.

There is actually all kinds of neuroscience that explores how the brain does and does not distinguish between lived experiences and imagined ones. As one researcher has put it, “Neuroscience has discovered that imagination and perception rely on overlapping brain circuits.”

Anyway. I watched the video. Thought, Huh, that’s cool.

The next day, I was in the sauna at my gym (my thinking place). I thought, Hm, let me try that visualization-assumption whatever thingie. Can’t hurt, right?

What happened was the following. The simple act of trying to visualize what I wanted forced me to articulate what it is that I do want. As if my brain said, Okay, you have ten minutes to picture something. Anything. What is it you truly want to picture? What matters to you? Really.

I realized in that moment that the thing that truly matters to me as a writer is readers. Awards and acceptances are amazing when they happen. But to me, there is nothing like someone reaching out to tell you that your work meant something to them. To me, that’s it. That’s the gold star. That’s why I do this work.

For you, it might be different. Each one of us has our own path, our own vision. We all have to satisfy various demands and yearnings. But to me, in that moment, it was connecting with readers that I found myself focused upon.

I also realized, as I sat there, that I had not done a public reading of my creative work in a very long time. Could it be ten years? No. But maybe? Close? I moved from a big writing community in one city, had a baby, then there was the pandemic, then we moved again…and lo and behold it’s been maybe close to ten years since I’ve read my work in public.

I remembered that I used to love doing that. Hearing the laughter, the thoughtful grunts, the intakes of air, the listening. Creating something new, something alive, right there in the room with an audience.

So that’s what I pictured. I closed my eyes. I pictured the stage, the dark room, the rows of people in chairs in front of me. I knew the exact outfit I was wearing, felt the weight of my necklace, the white paper in my hands, the white glow of the spotlight. I heard my voice in the mic, felt the smile around my words, the excited jitters in my knees.

Then I left the gym and went home.

Two emails were waiting for me.

One was from a Facebook friend, not a writer, who used the contact form on my website. He was reaching out to me out of the blue. He’d found my stories online, wanted to let me know how much they meant to him.

The other email was from an old friend. She said she will be visiting my area in April. She wanted to know, would I be interested in doing a reading with her?

I kid you not.

This same day.

Less than one hour later.

Now, two things. First, some of you are thinking, well, that’s not a big deal. Writers get emails like that all the time. But I do not get emails like that all the time. Like I said, I have not done a public reading in nearly a decade.

Second, you’re probably thinking, well, that’s just a coincidence.

And yes. I agree. Obviously. It is a coincidence.

But I think perhaps that is the whole point. Visualizing very clearly what you want allows you to notice coincidences as they happen. Arguably, it is the noticing of these coincidences that allows you to feel that things are working for you.

Becky Tuch, Q: How woo-woo are you?

Turning to my own work, I wonder: what is the role of dramaturgy in a memoir in verse? How does the poet create the distance required to invite empathy, without eliciting pity, or demanding privilege?

I am looking to Schechner’s idea of “Restored Behavior”. While he analyses performance, I can see parallels to the written word: the ecstatic element in automatic writing, and the reconstructed events of first and second drafts. After all, aren’t theatrical rehearsals essentially sequential drafts?

History is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study. — Richard Schechner

A lot of dancers have said that dance itself is a language. But language is also a dance. It can move the spirit that would move the body.

I wrote about my Trauma Box last year, unpacking and repacking it after my cancer diagnosis. Some things become little more than artefacts, conjuring soft aches and compassion for the person who put it in the box for the first time.

Maybe the distance of time alone is enough to make a biographical work inherently a work of verbatim theatre.

I knew this person when.

Her narrative is meaningful.

But none of us owe her anything.

Ren Powell, The Trauma Box Redux

six thousand years we lay
face to face
in a fierce embrace

limbs twined together
as twins in the womb
we two entombed

with flint weapons
sharpened for the afterlife
arrowhead     dagger     knife

Ama Bolton, Contextual 31: a virtual reading

Among things from the intersections of yesterday’s notebooks, scribbled in a parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama, between pages of [Giorgio] Agamben’s self-portrait and the uncertainty of my own.

I have many times thought about writing a book that was only the proem or postlude of a missing book. Perhaps the books that I have published are something of this sort — not books but preludes or epilogues. (Agamben) I winced. Like blinking away the thought that hurts. As if to pick it up with a tiny pincer and drop it outside on the asphalt. The feeling of touching, not touching. Flamenco, and what the dance wants . . . is nothing like writing. The dance seeks to avoid the hand that could slow it or mold it; heat is the friction of what could happen. But you can smell the other dancer; they are not an abstraction. “Tangibilia”; from tangibilis, “what can be touched, is palpable.” On the object reduced, tamed, made familiar by the encyclopedic enterprise. Margins where semiotics creep in.

A writer’s secret lies entirely in the blank space that separates the notebooks from the book. Hypervigilance; hygiene of grammar when editing begins. Will do nothing with October’s Sacrifice to Priapus. So-called. As if naming itself provides evidence of its existence.

Alina Stefanescu, Agamben, and the self-portrait of notebooks.

“Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning”
Giorgio Agamben on poetry, When the House Burns Down.

What luxury, this rage! 
It keeps me hot and vital as any 
heart medication.  First the human project, 
then the sputtered failure of words.

Bereft; the minutes and hours 
of flame give way.  My desire fades, 
no rays of sun light the heartbreak.

Jill Pearlman, Continue to Speak this Dialect

And J T Gillett is still writing his last poem somewhere in the vicinity of Ashland, Oregon. And talking of J T people, I think of J T Edson and all those paperback westerns and I find a photo of him on-line with mutton-chop whiskers and the information that before he died at the age of 86 he wrote 137 novels from his house near Melton Mowbray and sold more than 27 million copies. When he was feeling good he would write a novel every six to eight weeks. Before he hit on writing for a living he was an army dog trainer for 12 years. His first book wasn’t a western at all. It was Hints On Preservation If Attacked By A War Dog. He also ran a fish and chip shop and was a postman. He said he’d never even sat on a horse and had no desire to live in the Wild West. All this stuff comes from Wikipedia by the way. I only remember the Corgi paperbacks that were everywhere. I read one once sometime around 1968. Thought it was crap. I like J T Gillett’s This Is My Last Poem though or at least the version of it that’s in a book called Ends & Beginnings edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that I bought for six dollars second hand in 1999.

Bob Mee, THE WAKE AND OTHER SCENES FROM LONG AGO

Last night, I was thinking about Novembers past and all their pitfalls and was trying to remember what was happening in November of 2004, somehow impossibly two decades ago. I decided to scan through the most recent files and see if I could get a feel for that fall. Its tastes and textures. One thing that stood out to me was disappointment over the 2004 election and Bush’s re-election. Little did we know things would get ever so much worse. 

Also, there was, at the forefront, my book fever struggles. At the time I had completed what I thought was book #1 in late 2003, but I was also going through a lot of evolution and learning new things as an MFA student. Just reading a lot more contemporary poets who were influencing me in various ways. I was coming into a fall where I felt like people were just beginning to notice my work, having won a fairly large contest in the spring and starting to do more and more readings. That initial book wound up being just half of the mss. that eventually got a publishing deal a year later. The work itself was rough, but getting better. I was working on the errata project for a hybrid class, which was changing my basic style in new ways. The version I turned in was a little corset book that you unbound to read it. A year later I also issued a chapbook version. 

The book fever may seem, in hindsight that is 20/20, ridiculous–the poring over contests, the money and effort spent. I managed a couple of close calls and then found a publisher in a very old fashioned way. I queried, submitted, and they said yes. The result, the aptly named the fever almanac, was a beautiful book and a great start to my publishing career. Of course, all the handwringing about never finding it a home was bracketed by frustrations over suspect contest winners and bottlenecks. I was determined to self-publish if no one wanted my strange little book. Having both traditionally published and self-published these past two decades, its amusing to me that the latter is where I actually cast my lot these days, mostly due to control over when things are released and just making more income from my work than conventional royalties allow.  I also just write A LOT, which means finding that many publishers would be more exhausting than just issuing my own titles as they are completed. 

Overall, I was more trusting, more passionate, more enthusiastic in these entries, so they feel strange to have been typed out by my fingers all those years ago.

Kristy Bowen, from the long lost xanga archives

I needed some rest from exertion and from social media, so I’m re-reading Les Misérables. In which Hugo seems to be trying hard to convince readers that compassion and goodness can be awakened in the hardest of hearts through the process of gentle persistence and genuine decency. Radical decency, as a friend of mine put it. Well.

I won’t write that off as an impossibility, since lord knows many things that seem impossible are not. But yes, Hugo was writing fiction, and one turns to fiction for escapism but also for reference, and for understanding human actions and feelings, and for perspective, and for information. I just completed Richard Powers’ Overstory, which offers a vast range of perspectives on the above-mentioned and adds ecology and forest infrastructure and the psychology of groups into the mix. Novel-reading has been giving me a sense of overarching historical range that lifts me a bit from my too-close focus on my own small life and my ability to sustain hope and make art. That acts as a form of recuperation, if you’re me.

This week, though, happens to be full of poetry. Tomorrow, I’m attending a reading at a nearby public library, where I’ll see many poetry colleagues, the sorts of folks who create a community of local writers. Friday, I’ll be reading with Montgomery County’s Poet Laureate, my friend Lisa DeVuono, at the retirement community where my mother resides. Saturday, I’m heading down to Philadelphia to read with another long-time poetry community in celebration of Philadelphia Poets, a long-running zine established decades ago by the late Rosemary Cappello.

Ann E. Michael, Recuperating

I’ve been a keen poetry reader all my life, but one thing I still don’t quite get is the point of the ‘pamphlet’ (or ‘chapbook’). These are small collections typically of between 15 and 30 poems, not usually running to more than 40 pages, and generally — as ‘pamphlet’ suggests — simply stapled rather than bound. Publishing a pamphlet, either via open submission or through success in a ‘pamphlet competition’, has become a pretty standard way of launching oneself as a poet. Wikipedia quotes Jackie Kay as saying that a pamphlet ‘has always been a good way for new poets to reach an audience’. This seems to be the received wisdom — it’s a way of finding your audience. But can this really be true in any significant sense? I read — and, crucially, buy — loads of contemporary poetry in both English and French, as well as many poetry magazines, and even I almost never buy English pamphlets or chapbooks. For the first perhaps 15 years that I was reading poetry pretty seriously, I don’t think I even knew they existed. Pamphlets are hardly ever stocked in UK (or, I assume, US) bookshops so there are almost no chances to browse them and pick up a few on a whim, which you might think would be the point of a smaller, cheaper category of publication, and they are only very minimally reviewed.

Does anyone at all who is mainly a reader (rather than a poet themselves, scoping out the competition) actually buy the things? I would love to see some sales data, or even anecdata. (Do you buy them? Please let me know in the comments.) Or is publishing a pamphlet really just a kind of rite of passage, aimed only (really) at catching the attention of editors and judges. Perhaps it’s the tiny poetry world equivalent of the way in which junior academics are expected to publish at least a couple of articles in scholarly journals, which in 99% of cases almost no-one at all will actually read. Such articles may (though probably won’t) eventually be cited once or twice by other scholars working on the same extremely specific topic, but really they are there to establish that you are a bona fide scholar who has been assessed as such by several more senior scholars in a few bruising rounds of peer review. Publishing them gives you a crack at an academic job and/or a contract for a monograph or an edited collection.

As any academics reading this will know, the problem is that the skills and techniques required to write an excellent, or even reasonably good, article for a specialist scholarly journal are actually quite different from those that you need to write a good, readable monograph with an overarching argument or perspective — even in the case of monographs published by scholarly presses and aimed primarily at fellow academics and advanced students. 

Victoria Moul, What’s the point of pamphlets?

I’ve been happily giving away my writings for years to appreciative readers locally and around the world, but I’m sad to say I didn’t believe anybody would actually pay for my work. “Nice book!” I imagined them saying, followed by “Oh — you want how much? I’ll … I’ll think about it.”

Actually I don’t have a book, but recently I did make a little magazine and (smothering my doubts with courage) I hawked it at a small local poetry reading. I went with an attitude of objectivity — a market study of sorts. Would anyone be interested?

And the answer was … yes! :- D

The theme of my first issue is lo-tech — a nod to the unplugged life and to a time when “digital” referred to an LED watch and little else. The analog era was also a time where the only intelligence was human. The world was a simpler (though not necessarily better) place back then!

Bill Waters, This & That: A Creative Writing ’Zine (Issue 1: Lo-Tech)

I don’t know if you’re the same as me, but when reading a poet’s debut publication, you look for those qualities that have drawn the attention of a publisher. In the case of Desmond Childs and his The Vagaries of the Heart (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024), I believe it is his original perspective on one of the great enduring themes of poetry and his ability to produce economical, layered poems. In this chapbook of six poems we find Childs engaging with the nature of that elusive emotion that has fascinated and challenged poets through time, love. In the first poem, Verities Gown, he writes about the idolisation of the object of our affection and the inability to repress such powerful emotions. In Yield and Jig he brings alive the excitement and fulfilment of a loving relationship and in the aptly named Fracture, We’ll Meet Again and Stone he describes the effects of the end of love. […]

Jig, my favourite poem,  with which the chapbook ends, portrays a more complex picture of relationships through the use of the extended metaphor of the ‘jig’. The poem opens with the line ‘with her tune, she bound me/ her melody’. The comparison of love as music evokes its captivating, sensual quality, perhaps drawing on Shakespeare’s notion of music as the food of love.  Interestingly, however, Child, unlike the Bard,  uses the verb ‘bound’ to describe its effect. Not only does this suggest the compelling nature of his attraction, but it also implies loss of power or agency. The object of his affection is in control: an idea given further development in the remainder of the poem. We are told ‘she played the tune’, that she ‘subdued’ him, that he is metaphorically tied up by her (‘she wrapped heart strings around me’) and she brought him to his knees. These are not romantic images. He is totally subjugated by his feelings for her and there is something of a feeling of loss. This is reinforced by the poem’s concluding sinister lines ‘she drew the bow and slew me/ I dance a deathly jig/ to the tune that she plays me/ upon her violin.’ Whilst the bow is one for a musical instrument, it also references cupid’s bow and arrows, evoking the all-consuming love he feels for her that results in the death of self: she ‘slew me’. Childs suggests that love may be a jig, a joyful, wonderful, exuberant emotion, but it also, as one of the other poems suggests, necessitates ‘yielding’, a loss of control, the end of a former life.

Jig is a fine poem and displays Childs’ strengths as a poet. There is much to be enjoyed in The Vagaries of the Heart. At a time of crisis in poetry publishing, it is reassuring to find small poetry publishers like Hedgehog Poetry Press providing debut poets like Childs an opportunity to see their work in print.  Long may it continue.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘The Vagaries of the Heart’ by Desmond Childs

I discovered two of my favorite love poems in high school. The first is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. It is easily recognizable, and many people can quote the first line. I remember reading this poem in junior English with Sister Angele. (She used it as a cautionary tale about boys who say mean things about you behind your back even if they are nice to your face. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, and the nuns were always very concerned about our boyfriends. It was a little bit weird, yet a little bit sweet.) Shakespeare famously lists all the attributes of his mistress that do not match the beauty ideals of the time, yet uses the closing couplet to say she is valuable and rare. In this way, the negation in the main body of the sonnet turns from insult to inspiration.

The second is a little more obscure, but means a lot to me. It was given to me by a good friend who said that he saw me in the poem. […]

In [John Frederick] Nims’s poem, the negative aspects of the poem’s subject are alternated with her virtues, giving the reader a picture of a real human being with flaws, one who is seen and loved despite them. I am clumsy and awkward, and as a teen I was often unpredictable and felt out of place. (I still do in many situations.) But to know that someone recognized me as a person who was welcoming to others, kind, helpful and witty; as someone who exuded love for the world; as someone who brought laughter and joy to others? That was a gift, one that has stayed with me.

But writing a love poem can be fraught with worry. Will the beloved recognize the intention? Appreciate the images, the sentiments? Will the poem be interesting enough for anyone who is not the beloved? The concept of negation is one that is especially tricky. How do you ride the thin line between fact and insult? (This is something that the Nims poem does particularly well – even the negative aspects have an air of charm about them.) Well, you’ll never know unless you try.

Donna Vorreyer, From Dissing to Kissing

It’s been a while since I read Chris Edgoose’s admirable and enticing review for The Friday Poem, here, of Geraldine Clarkson’s second full collection, Medlars, available to buy from its publisher Shearsman Books here (with free p&p, might I add); and therefore about time I bought and read a copy. That I have now done, and what a deferred pleasure it was and is!

Mystifyingly overlooked for the major prize shortlists, Medlars is simultaneously both a state-of-England-post-Brexit collection and one which explores the nation’s folklore and psychogeography. It does so in rich, often tongue-twisting language; the wordsmithery of Shakespeare by way of Raymond Queneau and even, perhaps, ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin.

Matthew Paul, On Geraldine Clarkson’s Medlars

“Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” recalls family stories and heritage from ancestors along with the necessity of remembering in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide (1915-1917). “Morning Stories” starts with a speaker, a granddaughter, begging for stories from her grandmother,

Gram said, My grandmother made kufta
with me, and I carried lunch to my grandpa
when he worked in the fields. Sometimes
she rode the donkey, other times a horse.
Gram said never ride a horse, or a camel!
And we never did, in our Boston neighborhood.

I watched her story unfold in my mind.
Her final day home, when she and her sisters
returned from school and found the family murdered,
the locked church set on fire. A silent village now,
except for soldiers that gathered the survivors.

They walked from their mountain village,
part of the desert death marches,
thirsty, eating grasses and weeds,
anything they found.
Two sisters fell in the desert,
three trudged on to Aleppo
and onward from there, survivors.

It’s noticeable that grandmother’s story about taking lunch is in reported speech, a story actually told. But the story of the grandmother as a girl coming home to find her family murdered, is not in reported speech, but something the granddaughter/speaker pieces together and imagines. It’s a story the grandmother does not want to tell and it becomes a known secret with grandmother not talking about it and granddaughter not letting on that she knows. Or at least knows the facts and has to imagine the emotion.

Emma Lee, “Stories Told in a Lost Tongue” Elaine Harootunian Reardon (Finishing Line Press) – book review

Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?

Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it. 

Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma. 

Rob Taylor, A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

I was the guest for the Madrid Review podcast last week. Grace Caplan was the interviewer with all sorts of unexpected questions, leading to discussions on belonging and estrangement, on the difficulties of translation, and on the genesis of my new poems that are in Issue Two of the mag. And I even gave a reading of them! You can have a listen to the podcast on Spotify via this link.

Matthew Stewart, The Madrid Review podcast

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”

I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff

It’s a book of statements by poets about poetry. I’ve added the below quotes and more to my Literary Quotes page

• “the concept of poetry … as self expression has always repelled me” (John Heath-Stubbs)
• “a poet goes so deeply inside himself to write a poem that he ceases to be himself at all” (P.J. Kavanagh)
• “The sestina strikes me as the poetic equivalent of an instrument for removing Beluga caviar from horses’ hooves – bizarrely impressive, but finally useless” (Craig Raine)
• “Is God dead? The very mention of his name and of prayer in a poem now arouses the derision of jobbing reviewers. Generally speaking, contemporary English poetry is cheap and shallow as a result”, (R.S. Thomas)
• “I can foresee a time when poetry as we have known it will, like the Marxist state, wither away, and only poets be left”, (Peter Whigam)
• “In keeping with fashion rather than strict honesty, I put the poems to do with unhappiness and searching at the end of the book, but the wheel has gone round often since then and most people read slim volumes backwards”, (Hugo Williams)
• “one cannot help remembering how few poets have improved much after forty if indeed they didn’t get a lot worse”, (Hugo Williams)
• “Listening to English writers talking about surrealism is about as fruitful as listening to Frenchmen discussing a cricket match”, (John Hartley Williams)
• “Pity for the poets who have no subject save themselves”, (Christopher Logue)

Tim Love, “Don’t ask me what I mean” by Clare Brown and Don Paterson (eds) (Picador, 2003)

I often say this in workshop, when you put something in a poem, even if you are describing a literal event, it becomes metaphorical. The reader might think of it as emblematic of something deeper.

This poem appears in Susan Rich’s book Blue Atlas, which centers around an abortion that the speaker of the poems had thirty years earlier. When I spoke with Susan on the podcast she said that originally this poem was titled “Self Portrait with Abortion and Beesting.” Even though the speaker doesn’t put it in the title or say it directly, I could tell that this poem was about more than just a beesting. The sting is a metaphor for other emotional hurts, the hurt of a losing a relationship, being coerced into an abortion, and about other hurts the speaker may not even be able to name. […]

The bee is bathing in a “galaxy of purple aster” when she accidentally elbows it. They accordion and then they seperate. But here the poem becomes about something else.

“We’re both shaken / by the brokenness of surprise.” This is about more than a woman encountering a bee or wasp. The phrase is about all surprises. It’s strange wording makes me wonder, are we broken by surprise? is a surprise just anything that breaks us? It’s an odd and intriguing way of describing the encounter and it elevates the experience from a singular instance in the garden to a more general meditation on life.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Self Portrait with Bee Sting by Susan Rich

I keep thinking about that scene
in The Morning Show where Chris
wrote ABORT THE COURT in pink pink lip
stick my house floor hort monster my abor shun
my aborted fast blood slipping out
of a woman’s sacred body I never write SACRED
it’s too

sacred

big or small or big tied with green garden wire
thump thump a war in the capital city is moving
SSslip sliding under my floors flooding out into

all you beauty
all you strong
all you sacred

women

bleeding for the land

Rebecca Loudon, red november

In my recent article about being a neurodivergent writer, I described finding it much easier to run – rather than participate in – workshops. When I teach and facilitate, I know what’s expected of me. I have a clear role, which I’ve practiced and finessed over years. I’m confident and comfortable – and I know won’t be bored.

I don’t experience boredom passively; it’s not the absence of entertainment. It’s an active state, akin to severe thirst. It hurts, physically – a sort of painful anxiety. When a facilitator stalls the start of the workshop to wait for late arrivals, when introductions drag on interminably, when the same voices are allowed to dominate, when the facilitator talks and talks, when there’s lots of theory and much less writing, when everyone reads out their work at length – my anxiety builds from pulse-racing alertness to sweat-drenched, frozen fear. Making the decision to attend a poetry workshop is a serious business for me.

As a participant, I absolutely have to be interested. And to allow myself be engaged, I need to feel safe: to know what is going to happen within the session, when it will start and end, when the breaks will be. Most importantly, I need to trust the facilitator – are they kind and authoritative, informed and prepared? Are they committed to the wellbeing of the participants, are they excited by the subject they want me to engage with?  It’s frustrating that my anxieties and hypersensitivities, my struggle to concentrate and keep still, can stop me from taking part.

That’s why I’m interested in learning from other neurodivergent learners how they manage to engage; and I’m delighted to hear examples of accessible and exciting workshops and courses – not least because workshops which are accessible to neurodivergent learners can be the most engaging for all learners.

I’ll offer you my own example: on November 9^th, I went to an online workshop run by Georgia Conlon –  Happily Ever After – which as you might expect, took fairy tales as its leaping off point. It’s part of a series of “Material Girl” workshops … with Georgia as the facilitator who supplies us with endless material for our poetry.  

I worked as a mentor with Georgia earlier this year. I’ll write more about the mentoring experience in another post – but in brief, it’s an intimate, committed relationship, so I only work with people I like, and whose work I respect. I admire Georgia’s work very much – especially how she tackles challenging subjects through form. She’s also an experienced teacher and tutor, with her own “Prompts for Poets” podcast series, which offers creative ideas and  prompts to help you with your writing. A quick scan through past episodes –  celebratory festivals through Nina Mingya Powles “Mid Autum Moon Festival”; magic realism in Richard Brautigan’s “Boat” – evidences wide reading and really interesting choice of poetry and subjects.  

It’s a rare workshop which keeps me engaged throughout, and Happily Ever After did just that – through Georgia’s ability to quietly yet firmly hold the space and guide participants through a series of really interesting prompts and discussions, in a workshop which felt rich and full, rather than rushed. In two hours I wrote five poems, two of which will be included in my next collection. Result!

Kim Moore, The importance of being interesting

You have a career background as a Clinical Psychologist. What inspired you to become a Clinical Psychologist? How has your career as a Clinical Psychologist influenced or inspired some of your poetry?

I was always fascinated with people and their lives. I could have become a writer, but it’s rarely a sustainable profession. Psychology was the route I took. I loved it. I see a lot of overlap between those two choices, so one fed the other.

In your book Sea Trails (Lummox Press, 2009) you include poems based on your 1977 sailing trip in your 22-foot sailboat and you include portions of Lognotes and charts. Where did you go sailing on this trip? What initially inspired you to become a sailor? 

I loved the ocean and wanted to be out on it, riding the waves and wind. It takes skill and courage, at times, and that appealed, too. We stopped at multiple harbors. Best to read the book for details, still on Amazon, but we left from Boston and ended up in Florida. We anchored out, except for bigger grocery runs. I loved secluded harbors. Some of my favorite non-secluded stops were Newport, Block Island, out to Nantucket (rich people’s haven, and breathtaking), City Island before the run down the east river past Manhattan, including a day in Manhattan, all through the Chesapeake Bay- such beauty, and then into the waterway with such exciting places as Albemarle Sound, Savannah, St. Augustine, and all the interesting places in-between.

Jacob D. Salzer, Pris Campbell

その奥に梟のゐる鏡欲し　正木ゆう子

sono oku ni hukurō no iru kagami hoshi

            an owl resides

            in its deep place

            I want such a mirror

                                                            Yuko Masaki

from Haiku, a monthly haiku magazine, March 2018 Issue, Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 16, 2024)

Iris Murdoch—you know I love her—said that a bad review was about as interesting as whether it is raining in Patagonia. I tend to think about rejections this way. (Except: isn’t it interesting whether it’s raining in Patagonia? Shouldn’t it be, to a poet? Anyway, anyway…)

But here is the thing: I think about rejections as uninteresting when I am at my healthiest: mentally, physically, spiritually. When my chronic pain in under control, by some seasonal miracle/existential lottery. When my mental health is bobbing along like a rubber ducky in relatively calm bath water. When I’m not dwelling, to quote one Anne of Green Gables, in the “depths of despair.”

Roll back the camera to 2022, when I began trauma therapy, and found myself wildly outside my window of tolerance. I was hypoaroused after therapy sessions, which basically translates to a numb or dissociated state, which required (for me) a lot of processing time spent listening audiobooks and sewing. This whole year was not a good time for me to be submitting and receiving rejections on creative work—the emails literally made me flinch, and I deleted them as swiftly as possible—so I stopped sending work out. My inbox became peaceful, and my mind with it. I safeguarded myself, as much as I could. I wrote a little, but mostly I listened to audiobooks a LOT: Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—books I could not have read before the therapy itself.

Consequently, in the year following this intense therapy (2023), I published a single poem. It was in a small journal (shout out to River Mouth Review), with editors I knew and trusted. Which brings me to my first point: I was in a survival state in 2022, and I reeled myself back and in, made my world smaller. It felt safer. For those of you coming back to writing after an absence of any kind, it might feel good to start with smaller journals, or a journal with an editor you know and trust, OR you might feel great sending your work out to a wide variety of journals. Do what feels best to you at that time, and be open to the fact that you will feel differently at different times in your life: moving, changing jobs, having a child, elections, health events, new school—any life events also affect how you feel about your writing, yourself, who you are, what it means to be you in the world, sending your work out, sharing it with others. Be gentle with yourself as you recalibrate, as your life changes. It is yourself that you revise.

Han VanderHart, On Rejection and Dwelling in Possibility

I find myself connected to the physical land around me through the interface of my body, and that gives me the same thrill as being connected to the fast, organic rush of writing a poem. Perhaps they are the same thing. […]

There are lives here
that I will never know:
the hand that cut the tangle free
the fish that witnessed its descent
the people walking past
on the beach where it is washed up
in blues and greens.

It is too heavy to remove.
I leave it where it is
and worry about its dangers
for days afterwards.

I become a part of its story.

Wendy Pratt, Found Poem/Beach Walk/Found Poem

Everyone is shell-shocked from the recent election. I kind of expected it, but to be honest, I can’t summon up much emotion towards its aftermath. 

I’ve been on this slide into disbelief, dismay and depression after most elections since the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014. Even the Tories being ousted this year felt hollow as I knew Labour wasn’t going to do anything differently, and the SNP faced significant losses. 

Now, I just kind of hang around in the numb depression area when it comes to politics and society. I can’t summon up hope in the run-up and don’t feel the raging disappointment others feel when it all goes badly. 

I don’t have the energy really, my personal plate is full. I’m balancing so many things for my kids, my own four and the sixty-plus I care for at school. Their needs are my full-time job, my focus is always turned towards them.

And then on the way home from work last week, I received a phone call that dropped another weight onto the pile. A small bump on my nose was found to be skin cancer. I’ve had it for years, but it was beginning to grow and change so I wanted it removed as it’s ugly and annoying to me. Both the doctor and I were surprised by the results. […]

So with all that’s going on in the world, selfishly I’ve turned my thoughts inward even more, towards the people I care for and even towards myself for a change. I just have to keep moving forward, holding so much afloat, as if there is a future for my kids worth moving towards. To give them the foundation and the skills to keep moving forward themselves. 

And poetry is left to fall between the cracks of all that. In the summer, my editor said we would try to get my book out in November and, of course, I haven’t heard from him since. After 5 years, I can no longer summon any enthusiasm for his promises. My other collections have been declined by 15 other publishers this year, yet I submitted to another publisher this week. 

Gerry Stewart, Turned Inward But Moving Forward

After I sent the book off, I went downstairs in a daze, and sat on the sofa and poured a glass of wine and watched the US election, or perhaps we could call it another episode of the end of the world as we know it. Then I got a phone call from Holland that a very dear friend and big sister of mine died, just as they started calling Trump the winner. I felt it, all of this, at once, letting go, saying goodbye, the changes and shifts, happening out there and in here, all at the same time. Needless to say, I finished the bottle of wine, and wept with you and the rest of the world.

We have so much work to do, to continue to do, but we know that. The work is continuous, the work is the journey, the work is the point, the work is what we were born to do. I cannot ever imagine thinking that all the work is done out there in the big world and in here in my world of words. We live in a work in progress, we are a work in progress, growing and learning and loving.

As for the book, this grassy new-born foal trying to open her wet eyes and stand on her wobbling legs, the new book ‘The Life of Life’ will be published in 2026 with Canongate Books. It feels so far away and in a future world. Who knows who will be here then? Who will read books, who will keep fighting the good fight for books, who will keep championing libraries and indie bookshops and find funding and platforms for all of our beautiful poets and story tellers and for literacy and humanity … and who knows what happens next to our worlds and words and hearts.

Salena Godden, The End … which is a beginning

The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves, honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life’s best teaching tool: suffering. Otherwise it becomes that most untrustworthy of transmissions: preaching. It is in speaking to ourselves that we practice speaking the truth — the unflattering truth, the incongruous truth, the truth trembling with all the terror and tenderness of knowing ourselves in order to know the world, of loving ourselves in order to love the world.

That is what Native American novelist, poet, and children’s book author Louise Erdrich offers in “Advice to Myself #2: Resistance,” originally published in a special edition of Orion Magazine — a poem evocative of Derek Walcott’s classic “Love After Love,” of Leonard Cohen’s lyric reckoning with resistance, and yet entirely original for the simple reason of drawing from the freshest spring of the universal: the most deeply personal.

Maria Popova, Louise Erdrich on the Deepest Meaning of Resistance

It is a small miracle we can still hold
gatherings around the kitchen table,
share meals of soup and bread and rice
piled on breakable platters. Here are
perhaps the first of those days we thought
would never come— war at every window,
drought kindling fires through evergreen
forests; men in suits and ties trading
our bodies and freedoms for a world
shrunk to the proportions of their minds.
But here we are, offering prayers to our dead,
sharing what they taught us of ritual and
remembrance—fruit for sweetness, water and
oil for balm; garlic and onions for strength.

Luisa A. Igloria, When We Gather

2 AM: a completed poem
a sated silence
a full moon in the sky, a full moon in the lake
only the poet –
empty, awake

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Fifteen lines is one quintain two many

This week: a side course of flutter, spiny dry isolation, enormous compound words, dancing with dragonflies, naked meditation and more.

One housekeeping note: You may notice a couple of posts more than a week a week old in this week’s digest. I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the sporadic manner in which many WordPress sites’ RSS feeds are being updated, causing me to miss some great posts in recent weeks, so I’ve decided to be more flexible about the time-range from now on. (If you have a WordPress site, I’m afraid I don’t have a whole lot of advice; I’ve yet to find a solution that really works, aside from creating and advertising a JSON feed and/or switching to a more reliable platform, such as Substack.) Anyway, enjoy the digest.

My body never tells me “it’s a full moon,” but I have a strong sense for the wheel of the year. Something shifts in me, an internal reorientation, and I think oh, August 1st, Lughnasadh, Lammas, midpoint between summer solstice and fall equinox. First fruits of the harvest, here we are!

Of course, the US academic calendar is also in my bones by now, so an occasional yellow leaf below the green trees triggers another kind of knowing. In early August, I’m still writing and revising, this year an essay on Bob Dylan and a more lyric piece on H.D. Yet omens of academic fall are piling up. […] It’s now #sealeychallenge month, so there’s lots of poetry in the mix from my to-be-read tower, although I’m not strict about the book-a-day rule (it’s good to celebrate poetry but not if it becomes a chore I rush through). […]

I sometimes write blog posts as a way of revealing to myself what’s in my heart, and right now I see it’s change with a side course of flutter.

Lesley Wheeler, Calendaring, with palpitations

It looks like a vintage photograph but it was taken this morning.
The grainy texture is dust from the explosion, the shadows are people running.
Mothers clutching babies has become such a cliche, says the woman, yawning.

Bob Mee, I CAN’T SAY ANY MORE

I’m dying oh sugar I’m drowning in meetings twelvestepping through America slap me sugar I have done violence unto myself I ate the grape the priest the host oh sugar I have done violence unto myself slap me awake I’m dying under your strap your heel I have done violence unto myself this little war of mine I’m gonna let it shine

let it shine let it shine let it shine

Rebecca Loudon, The butcher

these rough sketches of our lives,
lives in which we grit & grind
& grieve through the currents

that sweep past us dragging all
the longings that didn’t hold
us, that didn’t hold us back,

that we didn’t hold onto …
at least, not long enough, not
strongly enough, not enough

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 36

Yes, reading a poetry book all in one go IS a different experience, opposed to reading a poem here and a poem there, or even reading a book straight through but only a few poems at a time. I promise you, the difference is interesting, and will teach you different lessons.

Most years, as I read a poetry book (and review it) each day during April, National Poetry Month, I don’t do the August marathon. This year, I’m tackling it, and I invite you to read along with me.

For more details, check out the challenge at this site: https://www.thesealeychallenge.com/.

You can post your results on social media (a picture, a title, a line), or you can keep track all on your own.

Bethany Reid, Join the Sealey Challenge

Sometime back in the spring, my image generating experiments led me to pull together a fun little series of Alice in Wonderland inspired fauxtographs.  At the time, I intended they be just that, some fun visuals I could share on IG and the blog. While I was never that into the Dineyfied version of Alice, and came to the Lewis Carrol original as an adult, not a child, I was fascinated by the actual Alice Liddel and the world that Carrol created for her. I did a deeper dive a couple years back for a lesson I was writing and made notes for a project that took quite a while to happen and kept getting shoved aside for more pressing things. 

This April, as NAPOWRIMO dawned, I decided to finally take my notes and scribbles and see if I could shake out some Alice pieces to go with the images for a zine. At first it was harder, then it was easier, and while I did not devote the entire month to writing them (another series took my attention the latter half of the month) but I wound up with 15 or so pieces I was happy with and have spent the past couple months tweaking them and working on a version for this latest zine. 

It was serendipitous that we were planning on seeing another Alice adaptation on stage at the end of July, so I held off on the final design to see if that inspired me further, and it no doubt did. In that case, Alice is a teen caught in the middle of war who sees Carrol’s strange world as a refuge from adulthood and reality. My version moves back and forth and back again from child to adult Alice echoing themes that are true to the original and superimposing other themes like body image and domesticity on top of them, with a slightly more macabre take on magical world. […]

You can real my little Alice project , SPILL, here... 

Kristy Bowen, spill

Heartfelt thanks to all who came to the Fountain Poets’ meeting on July 1^st and contributed to such a successful launch for Sara Butler’s newly-published collection, Waiting for a Change, available from bookshops and (if you must) Amazon, ISBN 978-1-914398-15-5. Sara was a regular reader at Fountain Poets. This was an emotional occasion for her friends and family, including her sister over from New Zealand. The book was a labour of love for Bob, who retrieved lost poems from forgotten digital and paper files, and for Mo whose long and patient struggle with recalcitrant publishing software (designed for prose) paid off in the end. Mo and I selected and edited the 104 poems in this collection. Poems were read for Sara by some of us who know her and remember fondly her performing at our meetings until ill-health prevented her early in 2020. I can hear her voice clearly as I read this collection. What she leaves to the imagination is as effective as what she includes. She is a unique and wonderful poet.

Ama Bolton, Waiting for a change

I’m writing this whilst riots and violence are erupting in various cities and towns in the UK. I feel sickened by what I’ve seen on social media, repulsed by the way that mainly white men are behaving on these videos, not just the violence, but the way they enjoy it, the way they seek out opportunities for it. I can’t stop thinking about my friends who live in those cities who might be scared to leave their homes, to go to work.

It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m writing this tonight then, finding a way of retreating away from social media and into poetry land, which I think is perhaps both a form of cowardice, and necessary survival. […]

I took part in the Northern Poetry Cabaret in July in Haworth, reading alongside Michael Stewart, Steve Ely and Clare Shaw. It was a lovely gig – a few of my friends who I’ve met via Ally’s new school came to listen, as well as a member of staff from Trafford Hospital where I was a Writer in Residence last year. Clare and I went to the pub for a quick pint afterwards, and managed to leave without talking each other into running a festival or any other equally mad idea so we were quite pleased with ourselves.

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary feat. a poem by David Tait

In the recent Harper’s, poet Christian Wiman has written a review the letters of Seamus Heaney. Normally, I would not pay attention to this, but I got tricked into reading it via a somewhat misleading tweet. The essay is mostly unremarkable, and there is nothing truly egregious about it. Wiman represents a very conservative tendency in poetry, but he is a sensitive thinker who proceeds with humility and evenhandedness. Still, it’s partly these inoffensive qualities that make it such a powerful distillation of American literary ideology: for many, Wiman is speaking common sense in a respectful way, and this makes his essay highly revealing of norms and values. But it goes deeper than that. Yes, Wiman thinks in terms of prestige and “greatness”—he sees Heaney as a quasi-mythical “great poet” who is quoted by US presidents, as if this were something to aspire to—but he also inadvertently shows the limits of a spiritualizing tendency in poetry and the politics that come out of this. Wiman thinks in terms of a dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, and in examining and questioning this, I want to redirect attention to psyche and imagination as world-shaping forces not reducible to either side of his binary. Further, I want to show what this has to do with fascism.

RM Haines, Poetry, Fascism, and Imagination

yesterday i woke up
& was hunted by wolves. the next day
i was the wolves. i wept when
i saw my face in a darkened dead television
on the side of the road.

Robin Gow, 7/31

I wrote in my journal last night: Made it to August, no thanks to July. It’s been tough. If this is you and your situation as well, please know you’re not alone.

This week, I’m sharing some quick news as well as two new additions and an update to the Debate series of erasures I’ve been doing. […]

A few updates to the project:

• First, I’d like to recognize that the presidential election (and the whole world it feels like) has changed since the first debate.
• That said, both sides continue to place emphasis on the border in their campaign speeches and talk.
• For that reason, I plan on continuing with the project and eventually have a series that includes the 38 times the word “border” was said during the debate.

José Angel Araguz, news + new Debate erasures

Monasteries and hermitages, a faint silhouette in a shimmering light. As we arrive by car, then foot, or by tortuous road, the outline thickens against the ochre stone and cliffs. They loom as minor fortresses, angled like a prism, slim windows for spying enemies or contemplating empty skies. Such extremes, oh monks, for what? Why load your donkeys with marble and limestone, why live in spiny dry isolation far from your fellow humans? What lay on the other side of the extreme – what wretchedness, what bitterness.

What closed door to a human garden?

Then again, I’m climbing these roads for what — To stay in a renovated monastery, to sit on your stone bench by the small window, to escape what chaos, to rest in what calm.

Even as I carry my backpack dotted with buttons: “all is chaos” and “restless recalcitrant.”

Jill Pearlman, Silence of the Monks

This morning, I’ve been a writing a poem, just for the joy of it.  The joy is part of my poetry process, but I’m usually looking for a poem to have some deeper meaning.  This morning, I’ve been remembering how intriguing it is to collect images that go together, without straining to put them into a larger context with a deeper meaning. […]

Now I’m taking a break.  The poem could talk about climate change.  Those surprise snows seem a feature of a different geologic age, but perhaps surprise snows are the future in a climate that is increasingly unpredictable.

But maybe a poem doesn’t need to have that kind of exploration weighing it down.  I do see one of my flaws as a poet is to try to make the symbolism carry more than it can sustain.

I’ll keep thinking about the poem, but for this morning, I wanted to record my joy in having memories that prompted other memories and my happiness that I remembered to start a new Word document, just to see what might happen.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Winter Memories, Summer Poems

Here is a handful of sentences, stripped of the line-breaks, from poems in ‘Lanyard’ (Carcanet, 2022), which book we considered in the Finding Poetry book club. I’ll say a few words about each sentence, but it’s what they have in common that I’m keenest to display. Each is rather long, and somewhat grammatically complex, with embedded clauses and asides. Yet each is extremely efficient, conveying more, it seems to me, than is typical for the word- or phrase-count.  By modelling speech and inner speech, with their momentary digressions, the sentences give us, at the same time, a lot of interesting information and Sansom’s mood, his own response or attitude to the information. It’s one of the tricks that makes the poems so touching. You could say that the writing tells as well as shows, but it does so, in my book, subtly and attractively. […]

“Who’d have thought that suddenly it’s this year and here we are with the youngest, the teacher, by the pigeon cotes at Sky Edge.”  
(‘Pigeons’)

Every part of the sentence works together to emphasise the mystery of time’s quick passing.

“Footpaths go off in all directions, up through history and geology, keeping fit, walking from friendship or grief, or just instead.”
(‘Kiosk at Ladybower’)

As it happens, the footpaths and walks work as a metaphor for Sansom’s poetry, its movements through places and times and emotions.

Stephen Payne, Finding Peter Sansom: sentences from ‘Lanyard’

I know the dried necks
will be impossible
to tie again, they will
flake to nothing 
between my fingers
and for as long as 
they hang there
I can conjure my father
in his garden, his own 
plaits of onions 
in the dark hold 
of the coalbunker
or the lean-to shed
their papery skins 
loosening 
and floating 
to the floor
like whispers 
like memories.    

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Like whispers

A clerihew is a quatrain with rhyme scheme AABB and which typically has irregular line length and metre. The first line features the name of a famous individual. The challenge is to find a rhyme for the second line to match the person’s name in the first line – the more comical or absurd, the better.

You can read a fine selection of clerihews at the website Brief Poems, including examples by G. K. Chesterton, W. H. Auden, George Szirtes, Derek Mahon and of course Edmund Clerihew Bentley himself. 

The July 2024 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (Volume 14, Issue 2) includes a portfolio of clerihews by contemporary mathematician-poets, curated by E.R. Lutken. It’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek guide to the history of mathematics, that includes a couple of contributions by me. Here’s one of them:

Pythagoras
alas
had no clue what to do
with the square root of two.

Limericks and clerihews are great fun to create. In their own way, they can also be healing and cathartic. Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park:  “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can…”, which is a sentiment I relate to more and more. 

Marian Christie, A Little Light Relief

The title is from an Emily Dickinson poem that starts, “Because I could not stop for Death —” and ends “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads/ Were toward Eternity —”. It’s apt because this taut but discursive novel, initially set in the near future, is a dialogue about language and translation as well as a story about a medical discovery which resulted in the development of nanites, small machines that replace diseased human cells so curing illnesses such as cancer which were previously terminal. A side effect is that recipients of nanite technology are prevented from ageing, becoming sick and gain immortality. An early section of dialogue has Ellen, a world-class cellist, and Youghun, a poetics researcher, discuss how Ellen sees her body and cello combined as a machine that translates musical notes into moods and modes of communication. Youghun is training an AI he has named Panit in classical poetry. Panit introduces themself as “a computational heuristic utility for literary analysis, an artificial intelligence project first instantiated at the South African University of Science and Technology’s Singularity Lab.”

Emma Lee, “Toward Eternity” Anton Hur (HarperVia) – book review

I write a few more stories for The Daily, but “I Was an Undercover Bunny” is the beginning of the end of my work as a journalist. After that, I admit to myself how much I dislike cold-calling people or asking questions that make them uncomfortable. I admit that it bothers me that I covered an entire season of the crew team without ever attending a race. I admit how much I hate that, for my editors, the Playboy piece was mostly an attention-getting gimmick, and that my “victory” of getting double-pay feels like defeat. But what puts me off most is feeling I didn’t have enough time to get an important story right. That is the deal-breaker.

I switch my writing focus from non-fiction to poetry (no deadlines there!) and get a different job that pays more. I also, finally, break up with my boyfriend who took me to the strip club.

Rita Ott Ramstad, It Took 39 Years to Write This

マネキンの手足抜かれて夏の果　藤森ひろみ

manekin no teashi nukarete natsu no hate

            mannequins

            their limbs taken out

            at the summer’s end

                                                            Hiromi Fujimori     

from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 31, 2024)

In “The Park,” [David] St. John offers an ekphrasis of Klimt’s painting—one that refuses the separation of landscape and portrait. Like many of us, he reads his affective landscape into the painting. He figurates.

Each line begins in the majuscule: there is a formal presence that undercuts itself by resorting to ampersands. How do you capitalize an ampersand? What is the majuscule of a shortcut?

We are reminded that the poet is looking at the postcard rather than the painting. I don’t see St. John’s “solitary figure”?

The poet keeps this image on his wall: he preserves it.

Moyra Davey has written about single images and fragments, how they possess  “miniaturization”, the “possibility of possessing the thing.” Images locked to the wall in her room form a  “psychic landscape”.

Alina Stefanescu, Parks.

Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark
This book of poems, largely formal, has at the center of the collection poems about the loss of his stillborn son, a twin to a son who survived. The poem that touched me the most was “Ultrasound: Your Urn,” where the poet compares the misbehavior of the living twin, Peter—who is “teething / on your mom’s Bluetooth” and “found the scissors / to derange his hair,” to “the tame and quiet twin / the easy one” “who never cries, or fights,/ or takes a breath.”

As a mother of an infant that died, I know precisely how your parenting is changed in that way. When our youngest was born, I couldn’t help but look at his wild shrieking and think that I wish Kit had had the lung power to blow all our eardrums like that. How I wish she could bite her sister or pull my hair.

If you are a reader of formal poetry interested in modern formal poetry, I recommend picking this book up. The sound and style of this collection is reminiscent of our formal great poets, so it would be a nice homey jumping-off place before entering the wilds of today’s modern free verse.

Renee Emerson, Stolen Moons, Stolen Buttons, Stolen Hearts

[W]hat do you say to the birds
whose voices are unchanging even as
October spills into August; what do you
say to real life that spins in and out for
a few minutes, a few hours, a cold cameo
player, pirouetting between headlines,
who brings grocery lists and doctor’s bills
and things to do and books to read and
doesn’t care about what you’re not saying?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, What do you say to yet another morning

One of the best experiences I have yet had as a creative person was a videopoem I made interlacing a poem of mine that mused about the landscapes of war, and the words of four war veterans I interviewed about their recollections of the landscapes of the war they were in: Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. They detailed for me the peculiar beauties of war, the strange mix of emotions, the bewilderments. They were so thoughtful, with a hard-won insight into what they had experienced, still shaking their heads about it all, that they were there. One active duty soldier may have been sent out again. She reflected on the great privilege of comradeship. That too is a part of war. As well as, of course, the opposite of comradeship, whatever form that takes.

What I appreciate about this poem by [John] Balaban is that he shows the sharpness of senses that someone in wartime evolves — one of my respondents said he felt like he saw everything through a wide lens, and continued to do so well after he returned from war. The poem also shows the heightened fears that affect the senses — are the shores bristling with guns? Is that a bomb floating in the water? The poem details the quotidian moments, the dew dripping down a gun, the local woman pausing to wash her face. And it details the boredom. The terrible dailiness of the possibility of violence and the terrible dailiness of its absence — the endlessness of that tension. Then the final chiasmus of the word “idly”: the movement of the river, which could carry a bomb or blood or bodies, but in this moment does not, and the idle aiming of the gun, which could kill but in this moment does not. But it is no relief, that final moment.

A richness of consonants moves this poem along and carries it lively in my mouth as I read it aloud. I’m alert to its rolling vowels. And yet it moves slow as the river, this poem, with its tidy couplets, its sight moving, idly, from mist to bridge to bank to barrel, but it carries as much dark possibility. I am the watcher, the guard, the woman, the river.

I appreciate this way in which poetry can show us the world anew and starkly, and can remind us of the gift of our humanity. And its loss.

Marilyn McCabe, The boring dry

Another significant problem for the translator is that formal literary Sanskrit of this period has a particular tendency to form enormous compound words, which is unlike anything in Latin or Greek (or any modern literary language that I know). Such a long compound may include a complex series of implied case relationships within it, a sort of little sentence of its own, though treated grammatically as a single word, with a single grammatical ending. There is no very challenging example of this in this poem, but the second line starts with a modest instance of it: tarucchidraprotān. This means, literally, something like “sewn (or inset) into the lattice of the tree”. It’s in the accusative plural, agreeing with the moonbeams of the first line: seeing moonbeams woven amid the branches of the tree, the elephant takes them to be lotus stems.

This is a very minor example. In more elaborate Sanskrit poetry, compounds can be extremely long, complex and often ambiguous with multiple possible ways of resolving their constituent parts. Antonia Ruppel, in her excellent recent Sanskrit textbook, gives the example of a single compound from the Aryāsaptaśatī (a collection of 700 short poems from twelfth-century Bengal) which means: ‘Whether I get up, sit down, lie on my bed, turn around, twist my body, or walk about.’ A. A. Macdonell in his Sanskrit Grammar for Students pithily remarks: ‘Thus Kālidāsa describes a river as ‘wave-agitation-loquacious-bird-row-girdle-string-ed’, while we should say: ‘her girdle-string is a row of birds loquacious because of the agitation of the waves.’

I’m not sure how to describe it, but there is a specific intellectual and aesthetic pleasure in encountering such complex, but grammatically unmarked sequences — in most compounds, only the final element has an ordinary grammatical ending — in a language which is so highly inflected. It creates a pleasing oscillation between inflected and uninflected forms, and also a space for interpretation, a sort of parallel grammar supplied by the reader or commentator. (There is an enormous tradition of Sanskrit commentary, quite a lot of which, you may not be surprised to hear, is devoted to helping you puzzle out compounds). At the same time, there is another kind of counterpoint created between the ordinary syntax of the Sanskrit sentence — with subjects, objects, verbs and so on — and the alternative syntax of a long compound, which is held fixed, syntactically speaking, as a single noun or adjective. There’s nothing really like this in any European literature that I have encountered.

Victoria Moul, Translating Sanskrit poetry

This poem comes from the MT Vallarta’s book What You Refuse to Remember, published by Small Harbour Editions. As the title suggests, and as Vallarta told me in our interview, the book is about what the speaker does not want to remember or discuss. The title of this poem is 10 Confessions, and yet a person who gives the poem a cursory read may walk away asking, what are they confessing?

The poem directs the reader’s attention to imagery that might seem mundane. The speaker has a sweater that smells like sun, they watch a neighbor create a hammock out of a tarp, they get their sister to eat a violet. But there are three lines inside these little vignets that point to something darker going on for the speaker.

They say in the beginning “I dreamed of being a girl who walks into a grave.” Later they say their mother calls them every evening to make sure they haven’t killed themself. The last line is “I draw plans about jumping into a frozen river. I burn them later.”

The speaker does not say directly what makes them have such ideation, nor do they say what makes their mother worry about them and call them every evening. This is part of what remains unspoken. This is what they write around. It is left to the reader to decide what might be at the root of this ideation. At the same time, maybe the fact that the speaker never pin-points it is part of the experience of the poem. It’s clear that the speaker does not want to discuss the issue directly. Maybe the reason is not something that can be boiled down to a thesis statment, and hence why it demands expression in poetry.

An essay asks you to say things more directly, to explain your point, to reveal your sources and to bring the receipts. If what you want to express is also something you want to hide, it’s impossible to do this in an essay. It makes poetry a much more appropriate vehicle, which is why MT Vallarta may have needed to write this poem, and the full book in poetic form while writing about the more “sayable” things in their academic work.

Tresha Faye Haefner, “10 Confessions” by MT Vallarta

high summer
a fly comes in one door
goes out the other

Jim Young [no title]

Earlier this month I was invited to speak about my books at ALSO Festival and I loved both of my shows. The With Love, Grief and Fury poetry set was on a stage in the forest, it was such a magical sunset gig, we were surrounded by ancient trees, the leaves whispering poetry back to us. Then for my memoir event the next day, we sat together on the lake stage on a gloriously warm and sunny Sunday morning and talked about Springfield Road and the process of writing this memoir and the women in the heart this book.

Thank you so much to Ben Pester who asked all the right questions and gave such a brilliant and generous interview. I’m so grateful for the opportunity and space to share my book in this way and to speak about the inspirational women in my life. To be honest, in almost every interview I have ever done with this memoir, the focus has been on the darkness and loss and the males in my family. So I was delighted that Ben and I talked about the women. The story of my mother and grandmother taking a boat from Jamaica to arrive at Dover to start a new life in strange country, the story of my father’s mother Edith adopting my father aged thirty-five and alone and unwed.

I know now that these women are the reason I wrote the book, the heart of the story. I felt like my grandmothers spirits were there with us on that stage, dancing in the soft July light, with the dragonflies and butterflies. 

Salena Godden, The Heart Of The Story

Because of the timing of my travels this summer, today was my last Early Bird lap swim, peaceful, meditative, and smooth, with country music and Carole King on the pool loudspeakers in the background (and louder in the locker room). I continued with naked meditation, today being the Throat Chakra, about communication, a troublesome spot for many women, given…all of known history. And now. The mantra for that meditation stone is “I speak my truth freely and positively,” which is pretty much true for me. I am not afraid to say what I think, modified in certain situations by politeness, professionalism, and compassion. There is also a time to be quiet. 

But once again I am glad to be reading the right book at the right time. After sitting peacefully with the throat chakra, I read these words in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz: “the bruja feeling that comes singing out of my bones, that takes hold of me the way blood seizes cotton.” Wow! I’m still scared of my own bruja feelings when they take the form of dreams or premonitions, but when they come “singing out of my bones” as poems, I am more than grateful! And that narrator is Oscar’s sister, Lola, the name of my grandbaby, the one I am going to see!

Kathleen Kirk, Last Swim

August is great for gardens – lots of sunshine – but the heat and haze have taken a toll on my body, already run down from a couple of weeks of poor sleep. On the plus side, have watched so much Olympics coverage. LOL.

On the poetry side, I was briefly interviewed on the Slowdown this week as they chose my poetry pick, Kelli Russell Agodon’s “Hunger,” for their audience choice show. Here’s the link – you can hear me say a couple of things about the poem before Major Jackson reads the poem (what a great voice for radio, am I right?) 1175: Hunger by Kelli Russell Agodon | The Slowdown (slowdownshow.org)

Another thing our area has during August is amazing views around our home – this week, we followed a sinking hot air balloon from our house to the lavender farm, and we caught a particularly lucky shot, with the balloon, Mt Rainier at sunset, the lavender garden, and a v of geese! Woodinville just has some above average chances to catch beautiful things. So even if I’m not at my peak right now (and rarely am in August,) the world is still beautiful. Just got to get through a couple of weeks of heat waves and smoke and make it to September!

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Welcome to August, on The Slowdown, Hot Air Balloons

“I’m prone to forgetting,” Calgary-based poet Tonya Lailey writes to close the opening poem, “Farms and Poems,” of her full-length debut, Farm: Lot 23 (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), “the purpose / of a farm / of a poem / has always been / the living in it.” According to her author biography on the back of the collection, Lailey “spent her childhood on a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake. She started a winery there in 2000 with her family and winemaker Derek Barnet. Certified as a sommelier, she worked in the wine trade until 2020.” The length and breadth of the poems within Farm: Lot 23 explore and examine her relationship with that plot of family land, from the days of her grandfather and a history of that particular corner of Ontario to her own experiences growing up and eventually working within those particular boundaries. “I think about the new reaches of peaches,” she writes, to close the poem “Peaches,” “the cultivars we’ve bred and breed for travel. / And that year, after the war supports ended, // when my grandfather still farmed peaches / and Wentworth Canners closed, unable to compete / with plantation agriculture to the south, // all around the township peaches ripened / then rotted in piles.” She writes poems from the Niagara Peninsula—wine country, for those unaware—managing the music and rhythms of daily activity on a working farm, offering these as both documentary and as a way to speak to the human elements of familial life, such as the poem “The Give in Inches,” as she offers: “My parents sum / up the farm in twenty acres; the survey says / eighteen-point-five. They never do agree // on boundaries.” These are sharp poems, composed with enormous thought and care, composed as both portrait and a love letter to an eroding space.

rob mclennan, Tonya Lailey, Farm: Lot 23

One of my favourite songs of the last few years is a song called Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it here before. It’s been about three years since that song and it’s parent album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature came out.

So it was very pleasing to see she’d put out a new record in the last couple of weeks, called ‘My Light, My Destroyer‘. It is excellent (Other reviews available) and I commend it to thee, but I also enjoyed this recent interview with her, and in particular this passage.

There’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask all day, about all these distractions and detours for which we spend our life apologising, that magic that can only be found in the interstices of daily life. I read a little from Half Waif’s recent substack entry called The Mind is the Candle, in which she describes being “so immersed in a project that I tune into a new frequency, and every element around me begins to resonate in one magnificent chord,” accessing a new lens on the world in which “everything is connected” and the incidental details – that which might otherwise be out of focus, blurry, discarded – becomes the focus itself. Isn’t that kind of what it is to be an artist?

“Exactly. It’s both that you’re constantly distracted, but you’re also in a constant state of wonder about everything that’s around you,” she says, sitting up, in her element now. “It is about noticing. It’s about slowing down enough to be able to notice, getting out of your head enough to notice. It’s a very beneficial mind state, to be an observer.”

It resonates as someone that is struggling to slow down and notice. To “notice I have the time to notice” to paraphrase one of my own poems (buy the book to find out which one, yeah?). I’m not going to start grumbling about not writing though. Instead, in the week the Forward shortlist came out, I will link to this article by Brenda Hillman called ‘Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets’. The cynical part of me thinks it’s a bit too much like a self-help book, but a larger and more positive part is finding it instructive and helpful, so I’m going with that. The article ends with a reminder to celebrate good work by other people, so let’s do that.

Mat Riches, Astronomy For Bees

Stonehaven may well be my new favourite Scottish town. In spite of the nightmare of cancelled trains, the journey turned out to be lovely – I must admit, Scotrail staff are enormously kind and helpful if you get caught up in this kind of thing. I was only just thinking how much I missed the open fields at harvest time, but going up through the East coast big sky country, there were fields of wheat, packed heavy and still in the gentle morning sun – how good the weather was! – hayfields all harvested and open to the sparrows and finches, cows and sheep, white houses knee deep in the hedgerows and little green wooded river valleys. […]

The Festival is brilliant. It is very well-organised – communications from the organisers have been uniformly timely and helpful, and the venue Number 44 Hotel was very generous and hospitable. I hope they made a packet from all the poets and friends who came, because they deserved it. The contributors are a rewardingly diverse bunch – different levels of experience, different genres, different backgrounds – and the audience was the warmest and most receptive I’ve seen in a long time. I sold a book, and bought three – that’s how these things go – and we swapped books and news and met and made friends as happens at all the best festivals. And heard some great poetry.

Elizabeth Rimmer, The Wee Gaitherin

My summer break is almost over, I return to work in a few days. I feel like I’ve barely done any writing which is frustrating when I think how much time I have off from school in the summer. Finland’s had an amazing summer this year, really warm and sunny, but I haven’t taken advantage of it either. Having a week teaching summer school in the middle of the summer broke the time up weirdly. […]

I then brought the kids back to Scotland to visit friends and family and that turned a little difficult, I hover between the words traumatic and miserable, but that seems a bit dramatic. All three who came, went into surly teenager mode, even the pre-teen. They didn’t want to do anything, even eat and I felt stressed and put out. It left me wishing I had travelled alone as no one seemed to enjoy it. 

I remember a similar disastrous cross-country trip when I was a teen, my headphones on the entire time, not wanting to do anything but wander about alone, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it did put a damper on the summer. […]

I’ve written a couple of new poems over the past two days which is more than I’ve written most of the summer. I’m still in the first flush of love with them, but I will let them mellow and see if I can live with them. I have no focus just now, no collection I’m trying to round off or theme stuck in my head. Random words or ideas set me off and I just let my writing flow from there. Hopefully, the fallow writing summer will allow for some more growth later on. 

Gerry Stewart, A Fallow Summer

Do you recall mornings when fog or mist 
    rested low on the ground, so the world looked both
        hurt and tender? Nâzim, I have always taken to heart

what you say about living and how it is no laughing matter. 
     Even as a chorus of raucous gulls will circle tourists 
        basking in a haze of sunscreen at the ocean front,  

I can never forget what it is that should be my whole 
     occupation; how much work it requires, in these times 
        of sorrow, to concentrate on breath after breath like belief.

Luisa A. Igloria, Letter, with Lines from Nâzim Hikmet

Grief says
the poem ends here.

And still
there are cornflowers
amidst the froth
of Queen Anne’s Lace,
the moon peeking
through cotton candy clouds,
your voice in my ear.

Rachel Barenblat, Chord

This week: an orchestra of inflammation, a library of lost chapbooks, words written in eyeliner on a band aid wrapper, and a complicated kind of joy… among many other things. Enjoy!

We heal in small ways. Bread, milk, and honey. Kindness. And through the magical science of blood clotting around the break, its meshwork of proteins plugging the gap, the immune system’s orchestra of inflammation, stem cells migrating from tissue, bone marrow and blood to form cartilage, more bone.

We are our own small miracles. We remake ourselves over and over. Tell me now of your own renewal. How you rose again from pain, loss or grief.

dislocation/fracture
we are so much more 
than the bones of ourselves

Lynne Rees, Haibun ~ Remade

As a teacher, I am more concerned with my students’ process of exploring poems than I am in any final analysis paper or final product. I do not teach this poem or that poem. Doing so is a surefire way to kill students’ love of poems, resulting in students thinking they just need to create some “BS” that sounds “deep” to try to impress me or to succeed on some highfalutin, raised pinky explication or literary analysis paper. Well, that’s not my concern. What impresses me is when a student notices all of what is literally there in a poem and making their own connections about what they notice. The exploration of what’s literally present in the poem and all of those nuances allow for connections to be made across “noticings”. Those connections result in observations and idea-making. It does not need to happen in the artifact of an analytical paper (it could, but it’s not necessary for me to see students’ engagement, understanding, and ideating). I’d much rather students share what they notice in a Socratic Seminar or even a less formal dialogue.

Scot Slaby, Exploring Poetry: 5 Strategies & Best Practices for Teachers & Students

I write this today to celebrate digital chapbooks and little self-published collections. Stuff that doesn’t make it to Amazon or the corner bookstore. Stuff that has no Goodreads review or ISBN number. May they all reach many, many hands. May they all be passed from reader to reader. May they all rest, worn and creased and loved, along with precious others. May they be read. A little. […]

Should there be a library of lost chapbooks? Should anyone care? Should they die like they were born, quietly, wearing their Adobe best, in the archive of a blog or a social media post?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, For what? For whom?

In Paper Doll, this notion of self is developed further. This time the focus is on the separation between the public and private selves. The public self’s function is to protect. It ‘kept us alive,/ deflected blows,//absorbed each wound.’ Whilst the public self is portrayed here as singular, the private self is referred to as ‘us’,  as a multiplicity of selves, portrayed later in the poem as a ‘chain of paper dolls’. This image is powerful and telling, for like a cut out paper doll, these selves are featureless, indistinguishable from each other with ‘featureless hands’. The poem ends with the symbol of a paper doll’s hands ‘reaching for the air’ in help, or possibly in desperation: a sign, perhaps, of the narrator’s inability to locate her true self, if such a thing exists.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Company of Ghosts’ by Lucy Dixcart

My poet friend
messages me to say we are or should be
writing just for the sheer joy of creation
and being in conversation with the dead—
I agree one hundred percent. In that the world
constantly, intensely, makes us aware of our
own mortality, I guess you could say we are also
always in conversation with ourselves.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Eternal Recurrence

When I’m commenting about poems I try to be aware of some of my prejudices –

• I fall for poems about unwanted childlessness and dying children.
• I like new metaphors (though I take marks off for ones I’ve heard before).
• I admire technical mastery (e.g. a sestina that works!).
• I like poems that seem to be about one thing until the last line.
• I’m suspicious of “simple but strong” poems.
• I distrust poems that look too much like confessions or therapy.
• Poems like “The Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin trouble me too. It’s prose until the killer final line. Should a single line be sufficient to win a prize? If it’s memorable enough, perhaps it should.

I try to compensate for these idiosyncrasies. But what about the ones I’m unaware of?

Tim Love, Impartiality

I don’t submit to as many literary journals as I once did, and I have a variety of reasons for that state of affairs.  The main one is that it costs so much more than it once did to submit.  I know that journals will tell us that they aren’t charging much more than the cost of postage, printer ink, and paper, but I can do math, and that’s just not true.  They charge 3-5 times more than the cost of postage.  

And yes, I could afford a year’s worth of fees, but do I want to spend my money that way?  Just on the slim chance that a poem will appear in a journal?  If my goal is to have readers, I’d have more people see my poem if I published it on Facebook or on this blog.  If my goal is to have my poems in a form where future generations might see it, I might be better off taking all those fees and self-publishing in book form, and then sending that book to as many libraries as possible. […]

One thing that’s strange about me is that I like the process of submitting.  I like going through my poems and putting together a packet of poems that speak to each other.  I like remembering the poems I’ve written and thinking about them as a larger way.

Still, I submit occasionally, especially when it’s free, and I’ve gotten encouragement in the past.  This morning, I submitted a packet of poems to Beloit Poetry Journal.  Long ago, when I was first submitting poems printed on paper and mailed in envelopes, I sent a packet to them, and they published it.  That was in 1997 or so, and I’ve been submitting regularly since with no luck.  But I submit because it makes me happy to remember that long ago acceptance.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, My First Publication

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 have a very dark bent. I see the shadows in everything and in all my work (poetry, short fiction, long-form narrative) I am definitely trying to see into that grey space. What’s in there? How does it affect us? How do we affect it? In terms of technical concerns, I do struggle with the parameters of genre writing, in particular. It is a difficult balance to produce original work that still adheres to the word counts and plot movements that publishers and agents are looking for. Mostly, I want to write what excites me. If I am laughing diabolically at my desk, I feel that is a good sign. […]

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Well, the first piece of advice that I received at large—and actually attempted to follow—was to write daily. You learn so much about your own process, and it’s good to maximize your productivity once you understand what the best writing times are for you … but it’s not always possible. That’s an ideal situation to aspire to.

The best piece of advice I’ve received recently came from the editor of this collection, poet, and novelist Sue Goyette. When we first met virtually, I was nervous about what was expected of me. She said: “Your orders are to prepare to do the work. Get yourself in the right headspace. Spend some time clearing your mind.” I don’t think anybody had ever given me permission to do that before! To just take some walks, dabble in reading, relax, and ponder. Very helpful advice.

And my own advice is: Keep those scraps! Every bit of writing that actually makes it onto paper or into the screen has some value. You wrote it down for a reason! Last Hours was very much conjured from literal scraps of paper, accumulated during a hectic time of raising young children. I tried so hard to “write,” but the time just wasn’t there. Those scraps and fragments ended up holding so much beauty and meaning, and I feel very proud that I fought to get them recorded, whatever way I could—I think there were even some words written in eyeliner on a band aid wrapper!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer May Newhook (rob mclennan)

The thing about attempting to write as beautifully as love, is that one is in the joy zone, in the radiance. One begins to insist, and things happen. Maybe heartstorming is just figuring out new ways for us to be in communication, to generate ideas while insisting on a stance of love, on a stance of the good. I keep writing things in my notebook, like, what are some ways of talking to each other, truly communicating? How to create the conditions where excellence speaks to excellence? What hunger and emptiness can our art fill now? Praise, excess, love, blessings — what happens when we start there?

I also write things down, like: Do not complain; be reverently content; raise a little hell.

I write, in my mad-about-AI moments: Artists will adapt — they always do, always have. Creativity is joyful and tricky and innovative that way!

I tell myself, and I write this again and again, Do not squander and be a good guardian of your gifts. Persistently perceive. I write, you don’t make art so that people will like you, you make art so you can love yourself, and love your life. I write, be a joyful weirdo.

Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Heartstorm

The creative act is not a party trick, it is a deep seated evolutionary need that, although not everybody can take to professional level, everybody is capable of. I think we lose sight of that, sometimes, in a world utterly swamped with voices, comparison and competition. My courses, my workshops, my methods tend to focus these days on the act of creation itself, as a catalyst, as well as a career. My style is holistic – finding the interconnectedness between the writer and their work. Sometimes that is less obvious than it should be.

Wendy Pratt, Self-Portrait as a Door – a writing prompt based on Donika Ross’s poem

Then bits of language foiled and curled in my mouth – funny what autocorrect does with words. My mouth has a bit of autocorrect in it. Dada, surrealism. Sometimes you get what I mean. When I hear lies, I think I’m on another planet. Those ten insane minutes before everyone in the world slagged off. (We might be ready for the metric system, if we base everything on measures of ten.) Anyway, the car was wrecked. It took the Russians Ten Days in October to change the world. We’ve had future shock; it took me ten minutes.

Jill Pearlman, Sorry I Crashed Your Debatable Car

Human beings are not problems to be managed. The scapegoating of migrants has broad implications. It perpetuates stereotypes, fuels division, and distracts from addressing the systemic issues that contribute to migration flows. It risks normalizing discriminatory attitudes and policies that can have far-reaching consequences for our communities and abroad.

This presidential debate serves as a stark reminder of the power of language and discourse in shaping public opinion and policy. I mean, the word “border” was used a total of 38 times—which is to say that 38 times I felt the world get smaller—and here I am trying to show how presence is political.

My act of presence this time around includes this post but also a series of erasures based on the aforementioned transcript. I’ll be sharing the Debate Series here and on my Instagram account, @poetryamano, over the next few weeks. See the first set below. I ended up doing two takes on each quote to represent the “two sides” of the debate.

José Angel Araguz, Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential debate + new project

truly, everyone’s tongue is just
a temporary salamander. in the night
mine goes looking for rocks to tell
the truth to. i don’t need
a shoe box for my lungs. i need
a sail boat. i need a man made lake
where all the shorelines are
rolled-up sleeves.

Robin Gow, eyes in the back of my head

I had observed without really realizing it some of the details that poem invokes — how wind kicks up a brook, carries and takes away scents and petals. But I had not been conscious of knowing those details until this poem asked me to conjure them up. Isn’t it magic, how language can do that? How words make memories come alive. How stories activate the memory and the senses.

I was reading a review of a book about adolescence recently. The author had interviewed some thirty-somethings about their recollections of their adolescence. The interviewees told the stories of their profound moments in that turbulent time in their lives. And the author found that even in the telling of the story of their own lives, the interviewees were changed, and began to re-understand the stories they had understood about themselves.

Marilyn McCabe, My mind lets go a thousand things

Though these poems are deeply influenced by my response to the attacks in Oslo and Utøya in 2011, Impermanence isn’t about that terrible day. It’s not even about death — though it is a meditation on how things fall apart, including our bodies.

Someday I may write more specifically about July 22, 2011: how the grief was simultaneously mine and not mine.

But for now: on July 23rd, 2011, while I was running along the beach, I was smacked by the absurdity that I wasn’t dodging the usual bird carcasses that morning (that would have been a tidy metaphor). Instead, I found a lemon, a head of cabbage, and a potato in the surf. I felt like the universe was mocking the absurdity of all those deaths, trying to overwhelm me with meaninglessness. Maybe forcing me — by the means of a summer salad — to make meaning.

Ren Powell, 3 Poems from Impermanence

To write ‘Blade’ I saved a link to a photograph of a dagger from a news article. I also put my writing journal on my desk so that it would be the first thing I saw the next morning and would therefore remind me that I had something particular to explore. It was such a great picture I knew I wanted to create a response of my own to mark it. You can find an image of the blade here: Crystal Dagger. 

I got up the next morning ready to write, and set a seven minute timer. The writing desk in the lounge is tucked in its own corner and feels like a solace all of its own. Like going somewhere you can visit and come back from. It’s very old, and very small but as a space it works! 

The ‘grassed air’ bit of the poem comes from my memory of visiting the circus with my sister when she was young. Entering the warm humid space to find our seats (or perhaps bench space) I was hit by the seeming greenness of the air I was breathing. I do love it when a phrase flows when I am writing and that one seemed an appropriate description. I imagined being a sword swallower with a dagger carved from ice. The poem was starting. I had to let the images of the lion and its trainer work their way out of my head, and the memory of me and my sister re-enacting the part where the trainer put his arm in the lion’s mouth. We were in awe when it didn’t bite him and loved the way he rubbed its forehead gently to get it to open its mouth in the first place. Filtering out the real and keeping my pen moving on the new felt fast and furious and that’s a good way into a poem in my opinion.

Sue Finch, Running Away with the Circus

beside the whitewater
a faint fluttering
in the ferns

Tom Clausen, fern

[I]t’s noticeable that none of the authors of the “best first collections” are now, 25 years on, what we might broadly term a “major” UK poet, and in fact a quick review of the other shortlists between 1994 and 2005 suggests this is quite a consistent pattern. There are a few names which are now high-profile, and some years had a higher predictive hit-rate than others, but in general being shortlisted for — or even winning — the “best first collection” doesn’t seem to mean that much, longer term.

I suppose there are different ways of thinking about this. It might be that it’s just quite hard even for experienced readers to spot the most promising authors on the basis of a first collection. Conversely the pressure might be more the other way: when judging that year’s crop of collections by established poets, the committee is under pressure to shortlist mainly or entirely a handful of well-known poets who have already been widely acclaimed, so surprises are rare. And of course, some authors of genuinely excellent first collections will go on to do other things, while the most original poets might tend to be passed over at the first collection stage. Winning or being shortlisted for a first collection prize must create certain opportunities, but perhaps it also creates quite a burden of expectation.

Victoria Moul, First collections and poetic “careers”

I first came across Wahtola Trommer in the Poetry of Presence anthologies. Based on the evidence of those few poems, I decided I had to see a larger sampling. Along comes hush. And it lives up to its name. The poems are lullabies for a troubled spirit. They spell us into nature and soothe us into becoming cottonwood tree, becoming larkspur. “There is no way / to be anywhere but here,” we are reminded. But we are also reminded that we have some control over where we place our bodies. […]

The epigraphs are a map to the poet’s influences— [Rachel] Carson, William Stafford, Shakespeare, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry. Praise poems, lamentations, and invitations to healing that arrive “so soft that at first / you aren’t sure / it is raining / but the fragrance / overcomes you” (“Wish”).

In this weirdly busy season of my life (broken engagements, family dinners, an aging dog; political and international news insisting on attention alongside daughters’ road-trips and their cats needing to be fed; classes and readings and writing conferences) this book was a balm.

I read it twice.

Bethany Reid, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, HUSH

morning sunshine 
a cobweb thread is shining 
on the lavender 

Jim Young [no title]

A writer friend shared a poem recently from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I’ve seen so many of you share her work, I decided to click over to her site to learn more about her.

Oh, my.

It would be so, so easy for me to slip into a pit of bad feelings about my writing, seeing how very prolific and accomplished this other writer is, especially as she is a woman whose writing career began at about the same time I had the beginnings of one. She has been writing a poem a day—a poem every single day!—since 2006! AND she publishes prolifically AND she teaches widely. And her work is beloved by many. Rightly so, I think. Damn, but wouldn’t I like to be like her!

But I am not. There are things that have kept me from being the kind of writer she is, and I could probably list them here, but I don’t think that would be helpful or useful. Not for me, and not for any of you.

We are, each of us, who we are. We do what we need to do and what we can. If we can look back on our time at the end of a day and see that it was full of what matters to us, we don’t need to be more disciplined. We don’t need better strategies or more organization or new jobs or different family members and friends. I mean, maybe we do, if we want to create differently than we now are, and maybe we will someday (people and circumstances can and do change) but I don’t think we can will ourselves to be who we currently aren’t. And thinking we should is probably not going to take us anywhere other than into that bad-feeling pit.

I think if it really mattered to me to be that kind of writer, I would be. I think you would be, too, if that mattered to you. Or you would paint or knit or sew or bake intricate loaves of gorgeous bread.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Free to be you and me

During the past few weeks, I have been reading–one at a time, with pauses–the essays in Ross Gay’s book Inciting Joy. His earlier book (The Book of Delights) was easier, a bit less complicated. About, you know, gratitude–even though he describes his father’s death in the first essay of that one. He gets to something about grieving in the 13th “Incitement” of this book, however, that made me put the text down and say to myself: This is what I have been trying to get my poems to do for some time now.

(I did pick it up again and finish reading it, by the way.)

He insists that we remember how transforming grief is. Not can be, but is. Always: “When that one thing [that we grieve] changed, everything changed. Light through the trees in October now different. The sound of the playground…cooking a meal. The future. The past. All of it changed. That is what the griever is metabolizing.” He points out this metabolizing can’t be timed, that grieving pays no attention to whether it has been a day or a year or decades: “It seems to me that grief is not gotten over, it is gotten into. And the griever teaches us, or reminds us, there is no pulling it apart. Because grieving, alert to connection, is never only one person’s experience.”

Maybe we grieve for one person, or one beloved companion animal. Maybe we grieve that our youth is over, that our children are grown, that our favorite mom & pop store has been razed to make way for a Starbucks. Or perhaps we grieve for our planet, as Greta Thunberg does: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words…People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.” There are so many reasons why we feel loss. Loss is what life offers us, loss but also transformation. I think what Gay tries to say in his recent essays is that because there is something to sorrow that we all can connect with, our grief itself can connect us, give us understanding–maybe even joy.

A complicated kind of joy. A joy that acknowledges that life can be tough and sad.

Ann E. Michael, Transformation & intention

I’m not even going to attempt to paint a full picture of Jackie [Hagan], and her legacy. That will have to come over time, because Jackie was a solar flare and a dormouse and a lovely sofa and a battlefield and loads more. But Clare Beloved got me out of bed this morning telling me it’s time to find the words, and Conor Aylward suggested that the German language probably has some sort of compound noun for the laughter and the hurt, and that poetry, with its infinite possibilities of form and music, is the best way I know.

After my mother died, and my ferocious migraines started, I fell out of love with reading. It had been a particularly co-dependant lifelong relationship, and finding myself unable to read more than a book every couple of months was a profound loss and a big shift in my identity. I’ve had around five years of reading very slowly and sporadically – relying largely on audiobooks. But the last few weeks of intense grief and burnout have returned me, somehow, to the act of reading – often with a pint, in the company of my post-GCSE teen, in the pub.  I’ve just finished Airea D.Matthews’ Bread and Circus, Jodie Hollander’s Nocturne, and Amanda Dalton’s Fantastic Voyage – and I would be reading Kathleen Jamie’s Cairn if the teen didn’t keep on stealing it.

And of these wildly varied books are a beautiful, genius lesson in form, and how it can hold almost anything – philosophy, illness, neglect, love, 18^th century economics, abuse, racism, post-structuralist linguist theory, trauma, and in Amanda’s case, the grief  of losing a life partner, which finds both its metaphor and form in water. Like Conor just said to me in a text – “We need crutches to talk/walk around death”, and as one of Jackie’s closest people, he should know.

Kim Moore, On Losing Friends and Finding Words

Occasionally, I will be working on a poem and the words do not even feel like my own. Maybe some communication from the ether or the netherworld that channels itself through my hand, down into the keys and onto the screen. Other times, the lines are hard wrought and feel more like sowing something, planting something in a dark little garden that may hopefully bloom by the end of the poem. Or other times like a machine that clicks and winds and begins to purr. I never know which of these things will happen in a given piece of writing. Or if any will. Or, if I am really lucky, all of them at once. 

Different things have taken precedence at different times in my career as a poet. The early poems were so hard and so fretted over. I barely knew what I was doing. I slogged along and each line felt like pulling something out of my body. I knew what I wanted and went hunting for it. Later, I would jumble the words and images and spangled contents in a bag and shake them out onto the page, much in the way I would make a collage. While this was not as difficult as the first few years of writing anything worth reading, it was still hard to have them fall into line in a way that made sense. That seemed like I wasn’t just randomly making word salad.

There was a shift slowly over the last decade toward poems being more sound generated than image-or content generated. Like if I could just get the first few lines rolling, the poem would almost unwittingly write itself–that tiny machine–that hopefully would get me to the end point. Unlike the order of the early poems, or the chaos of the later ones, these poems somehow assemble themselves according to their own logic and feel much smoother going. So much so, I never quite trust them. 

Kristy Bowen, notes on process

I believe in the magic of index cards. When I get stuck on a poem, essay or review, I will stop everything and revert to my trusty pack of unlined index cards. Just shuffling them for a few moments can give my brain the break it needs. Then I grab a pen and start writing things down on them, after which I spread them over the floor. Staring at these white rectangles helps me figure out a path through the piece I’m writing, sort of like Hansel’s white stones. The interesting part of this exercise is that I don’t always stay with the outline the index cards suggest. In fact, laying them out seems to reveal a new path that I hadn’t seen before, hidden in the spaces between the cards.

Erica Goss, How I try to be a better writer

I was reading over my notes from Essay Camp when I realized that in several times of intense stress I have manifested ear worms. Music is an important part of my life – I listen to it almost daily. I don’t play an instrument and it’s a regret in my life that I never learned how. I guess it’s not surprising that music fills my head when I’m exhausted from a smothering level of stress. […]

The other song was “Room at the Top” by Tom Petty.

“I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
I got a room at the top of the world tonight
And I ain’t comin’ down, I ain’t comin’ down”

This one really, really almost drove me wild. It was the worst earworm happening at the worst time. Looking back I remember just wanting the situation to end. Wanting to go away somewhere and leave it all behind. But we can’t do that in life, can we? We face the darkness and work our way out.

Charlotte Hamrick, When Music Hurts

Patton Oswalt has a great talk where he says There are No Gatekeepers Anymore. He says that today’s artists no longer need gatekeepers to give them permission, “Because of this,” he says, and takes out his phone. He points out the phone is now a home studio anybody can use to create and distribute their work.

And this is true. My husband, who is sixteen years older than I am, keeps reminding me that there was a time when there were only three networks—CBS, ABC and NBC. Now there are seemingly infinite numbers of channels and sources of media. The market is divided, and any artist can find their own “tribe.” They don’t have to pander to masses so much as they need to amass the people who will “get” them.

Be the Change You Want to See on Social Media

If there is something you want to see changed on social media, change it.

After Stevie Edwards gained traction with her vulnerable poems about mental health, she wanted to then write poems about pleasure and happiness. She founded Elysium Review to do just that.

In my interview with Rita Mookerjee, she told me that for years she gave up on poetry because people told her there was no market for the kind of work she was writing. It wasn’t until Dorothy Chan (also a fabulous poet we interviewed) encouraged her to write that she started to see how wrong those people had been. Now she’s the editor of Honey Lit, which gives voice to writers who have traditionally been marginalized.

As she says in our interview, nobody is paying us enough to keep quiet.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Be the Change You Want to See on Social Media

Sheffield was wonderful. It was nice to go back. I’ve been back once or twice in recent years. I used to go across when I was at uni in the first year to see my then girlfriend, Jenny. The last time I was there was to record a Northside gig with another mate called Simon (he’s also a fan of Flowered Up, and my closest mate).

I think we walked past the Air BnB he’d booked for us last weekend, and I think I walked past a park near where Jenny used to live. I recall writing a bad poem in there. It was called Endangered Species. I think it was about our relationship, and I know it made reference to a Smashing Pumpkins song called Rhinoceros. I know this as I’m looking at the poem now. I was going to post it, but it’s too bad. It can stay in the juvenalia folder.

Mat Riches, Flowered up afternoons of the rhino

I do love the fact that the island wildlife is so different than ours in Woodinville—filled with blooming orange and red poppies, lush pink dogwood, and of course, more foxes and whales. I loved watching the sea for seals, porpoises, and orcas, although I consider myself more of a woodsy/mountain elf than an ocean elf, if you know what I mean.

And I really did have time to write a few poems, look at the order of the manuscript, tweak it a bit, and cut about ten poems (needed, unfortunately). I think the real benefit of giving yourself a dedicated writing retreat—be it in the desert, or the woods, or an isolated island—is that it forces you into new thoughts, new perspectives, and maybe even new inspirations. Does seeing new flora and fauna, even experiencing the discomforts of being in a new place, cause our brains to work a little better, a little harder?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, San Juan Island Report Part 2—This Time with Hospitalization at the End

A poem for the 70 individuals who walked to Singapore’s Istana to deliver 140 letters to the PM on 2 Feb 2024, as part of the National Day of Solidarity with Palestine. 3 of them–Sobikun Nahar, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori, and Annamalai Kokila Parvathi–were ridiculously charged with disturbing public order by illegally organizing, or abetting with organizing, a public procession in a prohibited area. […]

They do not need a head nor do they want a tail.
They are all heads, all eyes, all mouths, all legs, all hands,
umbrellas up against the onslaught of the sun.

They are cool, and young as the crescent moon
lighting up lovers’ rendezvous and drinking parties
and the unworldly debates of secret handshakes.

Jee Leong Koh, Walking to the Istana

In what feels like a year of elections around the world – India, South Africa, Europe, Iran, France, Britain, the USA – “Soundscape” also expresses my belief that we should all spend more time listening. The shoutiness of political discourse is deeply, deeply dispiriting. Politician or poet, farmer or officer worker, pensioner or student, we need to pay considered attention to the voices with which we disagree as well as to the voices with which we agree. We must take time to listen, not only to those who shout loudly and incessantly, like the traffic on the motorway, but also to the quiet conversations in the reeds, the trees, the marshlands.

Most importantly, we should listen to the silence that underlies the sounds. 

Marian Christie, Listening

It’s just a fragment of moon,
I think, that stabs thru the trees
into my night-blinded eye,
astonishingly bright, white —
I think it’s bleeding light — wake
up, it’s trying to say, time
to vault right out of yourself.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 35

This week: a floating typewriter, a poet in a lighthouse, bombing the moon, marble peaches, the hum of our own truth, and more. Enjoy.

The Fernando Pessoa House in Lisbon has recently been voted the best museum in Europe. I understand why. As I entered the exhibition space, I heard the familiar sound of typewriter keys and at the same time, saw Pessoa’s red typewriter floating in space. There are recordings of Pessoa’s poems in Portuguese and in English as well as his letters to his one known girlfriend.

“To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand.”

Susan Rich, Happy Birthday Today (June 12th) to Portuguese Poet, Fernando Pessoa

shady lake
the clattering cry
of the kingfisher

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: June ’24

Summer always feels like it should be a time for writing things. When I was a freshman in college, freshly sprung from my semester at the community college and starting RC in the fall, I spent those days poring over issues of Writer’s Digest checked out from the library. Typing my way though drafts of slender, terrible poems on paper thin typing paper rattled with correction fluid. Every afternoon would find me waiting til after lunch, when the mail delivery crept past, to run, usually shoeless and cutting though the grassy field, down to the boxes at the end of the driveway waiting for those thin or thick envelopes back in the day when many publications still returned your drafts to you with a polite no. […]

Another summer, 2005, I spent ripping my first book down to the bare bones after a two years of submitting a couple different versions of it here and there to contests. That summer found me often escaping the heat and distraction at home in the air conditioned interior of a Barnes & Noble cafe downtown, going poem by poem, page by page, and reconstructing the house. Other summertime projects over the years like the exquisite damage poems and overlook. Two summers ago when I took a deep dive into the Persephone series that makes up my latest book. Or the summer I spent a portion of wandering around the Field Museum, writing extinction event. 

There is always a renewed seriousness in the fall, with big projects and plans, but summer always feels like stolen time, particularly when I was entrenched in an academic calendar, which meant a lighter load of obligatory work June-August, and even still now. This morning I wrapped up the final piece in the series I was working on and am set to move onto something else, which I may choose tomorrow morning when I sit down to draft the first piece, there being a list of potential directions and paths. One of which I will just choose and start off into the woods. 

Kristy Bowen, summertime poeting

The Torah of knobby roots
protruding from sandy earth.
The Torah of watch your step
in every language at once.
The Torah of Duolingo lessons
teaching me to praise God
for Duolingo lessons.
The Torah of my heart,
a fragile paper balloon
buoyed by candlelight.

Rachel Barenblat, A barukh she’amar for Shavuot morning

As the church bells began ringing, we were off – like thoroughbreds out of the starting boxes. We’d arrived on Saturday, inspected the spacious and comfortable rental property. Then enjoyed a delicious fish dinner at No. 1 Cromer Upstairs. […]

Curved around Cromer Pier a twitching mass of legs,
sturdy calves, socks, sandals. Fathers scoop up bait,
wind black thread onto pink plastic spools.
An old couple, in matching anoraks,
watch a thin man, wheelchair-bound.
He shakily lifts his thermos flask.

Fokkina McDonnell, Cromer, June

incessant
the sparrow fledglings
a sea breeze
privet flowers opening
hawk moths in the trees

Jim Young, june into july

A restless, rustling north wind pins us down all afternoon.
Weakening light as a squally rain sweeps in off the sea.
A blue and white boat meets the swell head-on.
No one on deck. Its lights glow. In our cliff-top room just
the sound of the wind and you turning pages in your book,
me writing this, looking out into mist and cloud three hundred
feet above waves crashing on black rocks on a day where
a small fishing boat moving slowly north is an event.
This is all we need. The peace between us, as it is.

Bob Mee, SEVEN-PART POEM WRITTEN IN A LIGHTHOUSE

I’ve been devouring stacked piles of books, especially poetry, with a high quotient of Caledonian work in the mix, because I’m off to SCOTLAND tonight! Two of the most striking books, though widely different, are both hybrid in form. On the US side, Gregory Pardlo’s new collection Spectral Evidence: the subtitle may be “poems” but many pieces are essayistic, idea-driven and bibliographied, and one of the most powerful is a short play, complete with dramatis personae and stage directions, about a vengeful white neighbor calling Child Protective Services on someone named “Greg” and his family. The book is essentially critical of supernaturalizing. “Black men and white women are similarly pressed into service as both muse and monster,” Pardlo writes in a prose preface to Spectral Evidence; the ghost “haunting the mind of Western patriarchy… omnipresent but rarely named, is Black women.”

An Orkney Tapestry, a 1969 book by Scottish poet George Mackay Brown, celebrates hauntedness. Trows (something like trolls or elves, I’ll clarify that for you if I meet one) enchant fiddlers. Saints intercede in ordinary Orkney lives. In short, he’s celebrating mixed forces of weirdness, and in fact critiques early on the popular myth that these far northern Scottish islands are “pure Viking,” which to him has a whiff of eugenics. I love his strange blending of original poetry, translated poetry, prose history, and playlets. Yet women–and Black sailors, in a fleeting historical episode–are definitely monsters and muses to Brown, and it sometimes drove me bananas. No one labors on the holy days, yet special cakes appear on breakfast table: magic, it turns out, depends on women’s drudge-work.

I speak, of course, as the trip-planner who spent days researching and plotting a complex route, and making all the reservations for this family of four. At least my husband will perform the magic of driving a manual on the wrong side of narrow Scottish roads.

Lesley Wheeler, Spiral aboveground, mycelium beneath

We take a ferry to an isle that’s stocked with whelk
and wild horses, grateful for a vast expanse
of shoreline, water celadon and crystal clear and warm.
We sift among the bountiful array of shells
but never catch perfection’s glimpse, just weather-worn
and gnarly specimens like us, a shadow of
their younger selves: catch and release, release and catch.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Welcome

If you risk your life by sailing to Greece, and get caught in a storm, are you the agent or the victim of events? Why does innovation and ambition always also cause unforeseen suffering? And if you find yourself caught in a tempest of political upheaval, fraught with the essential wrongness of a people set against themselves, how should one act or allow oneself to be acted upon? (Not an entirely irrelevant question this week, in France.)

All readers, I think, agree that political crisis is part of the backdrop of the whole of Odes 1, and that something great is in play in its third poem. The Aeneid is, for sure, a great poem, one of the very greatest, and Virgil’s enormous talent and literary daring are surely relevant to the poem. But all the same I feel that if we make this a poem about the Aeneid, we risk losing sight of the ethical and religious questions that Horace himself places at its heart. Most people don’t need to decide what they think about the politics or the sublimity (or otherwise) of the Aeneid. But everyone (even President Macron) has to grapple with the fallibility and the unintended consequences of human action.

Victoria Moul, Veer o veer ho! Horace and the poetry of political crisis

When the moon was bombed, it broke open like a water balloon, wet silver running down the hills of debris, carrying with it a giant rabbit, its head split open, feet lost in a tangle of concrete and moon-spill. Something: a shadow, a crater, a crater in the face of a shadow – was screaming, its mouth wide, soundless.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Fading to dark

Danielle Jones’s “Baptized” chooses a more narrative route, a very short story almost, where the narrator shows both a brief action and the inner flight of thought that accompanied it. Here are words I think do the heavy lifting in the poem: mercy, stone, hook, drowning. I love how the poem turns on this well-worn phrase “put it out of its misery.” I love how the image of a “storm of fish, bubbles rising from their mouths” flashes a sense of that drowning, even though, of course, fish are just doing what they do. Why does that image make rise in me a bit of panic? Then that hook between the shoulder blades, that drowning in the blood.

Leila Chatti’s “Mary Speaks” is a poem of a moment, that famous moment when young Mary is chosen for her brutal task. Its images call up too the Greek tale of Leda and the swan, the seducation, or was it rape?, of the queen of Sparta. The Bible does not give much of the inner life of Mary, so poets, perhaps, the imaginations of every era are left to fill it in. Here a bit of rue, at least, maybe resentment, regret.

I appreciate these poems for the deft way they make the best of poetry’s tools — image, word, line break — to create a world and a moment that overflows with experience. All this from a handful of text on a page. Small packages to address issues of faith and doubt, trust and its betrayal, what life asks of us and how, in heaven’s name, how on earth, do we respond.

Marilyn McCabe, no one. Perhaps I’d have been

When people ask, “When did you start writing poems?” I have a clear answer: age thirteen. But if someone asked, “When did you feel like you could claim the identify of poet?” my answer would not be so clear. Honestly? More than twenty-five years after writing my first poem.

What does it mean—what does it take—to be a writer? To be able to claim that identity?

“I’ll feel like a poet when I start to publish poems in journals.”

“I’ll feel like a writer when my first book comes out.”

“I’ll feel like a writer when I make enough money from my writing to pay my bills.”

You think “If I get X” or “If Y happens” then you’ll finally feel like a real writer. There’s a hint of the Pinocchio tale here. That’s imposter syndrome at work, and it leaves a kind of stain that’s hard to scrub out. You might think it would vanish when you publish a book, win a prize, or read a generous review of your work. You’d be wrong. It’s something that many writers and artists live with—the fear that we aren’t that talented after all, or that any success we’ve had has a been a fluke and will end at any moment. What if that last poem was, indeed, your last poem?

That voice is one we must work to quiet. The best way I’ve found to quiet it? Keep writing. Prove it wrong.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

This week my planner greeted me with this phrase

If we can unplug from the voices of others we will begin to hear the hum of our own truth –

Cedrice Webber

My planner does not know that I’ve had several weeks of intense mental crisis, culminating in me finally seeking the help I’ve needed for the past few years. I’ve had the necessary referrals but diagnosis and treatment are a long way off of course. Nonetheless this is an important first step and is a reason that nugget of planner wisdom seems so apposite.

The hum of others’ voices. The voices that tell me I’m not as good as them, the voices that mean I’m grateful to be asked to do anything remotely related to writing, the voices that mean I shy away from submitting my best work just in case I’m right and I am actually a terrible, useless writer. Quite a hum to handle.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Creative Tuesday a day of trying to understand how me and my work can thrive

By the time you read this newsletter I’ll be in a recording booth recording the audio book version of my memoir, The Ghost Lake. I am so nervous about it that my teeth are tingling. I keep imagining scenarios in which I mispronounce a word, or somehow read my own book wrong, or someone rolls their eyes at me because I’ve had the audacity to not only be up my own arse enough to write a book but now, look at her, bloody reading it as an audio book, like a making herself out to be a proper writer. Who does she think she is? This is clearly imposter syndrome. I think to myself. And tomorrow, or right now (because I am Wendy from the far distant past of Wednesday afternoon) I have gotten into my car, driven to the studio and am settling myself down, trying not to rush, and trying not to wipe away my accent. I am sitting there allowing myself to read the book that I wrote in my own accent, in my own style, with no apologies. I hope.

It is so easy to dismiss your own voice as not valid, or your background or your accent or your style as too different or not good enough, isn’t it. Particularly true of women I think. Or at least, this has been my experience of working with women, often working class women, often older women. My style of workshops and facilitated groups welcome more women than men. It’s not deliberate, I love having men in my groups, but I made the decision to go with my gut more when facilitating and teaching and start leaning in to what I feel is core to my own work. I work around really quite difficult levels of anxiety (of which imposter syndrome is a big part) and I realised recently that some of the work I do is not helping that. Part of me feels that i should simply push through this. But in the past, if I knew I had a class to teach on a Friday, I would be almost catatonic with anxiety, unable to think because I could see it grinding towards me. The irony is, I love teaching. I love working with people. after I’d taught a class I’d be on a high. But how much of that was relief?

What writing The Ghost Lake has taught me is that my approach to my own writing is instinctive, even my editing style is instinctive. It’s something I have developed over years and years of writing and editing, and interacting with poets and authors and reading, reading, always reading. But it is still quite instinctive. There is nothing wrong with that. That’s the bit I’ve been missing, the validation of my own voice and my own style as valid, valuable even, because it is something I do instinctively, not despite that.

Wendy Pratt, The Dawn Chorus Zoom Writing Group Returns

I’ve been feeling disappointed and disillusioned with PoetryWorld in general. I haven’t been writing or submitting much. It feels like a stacked deck that after 30 years I’ve never truly cracked. My last book, Flare, Corona, which I had high hopes for (and hired a publicist for), just didn’t get much in the way of attention, reviews, prizes – and this after 25 years of doing poetry book reviews for others, which makes me feel a little…bitter? […]  There have been scandals in the lit mag world, closings of MFA programs and journals, and people on social media lamenting this way and that, plus rage and accusation at different literary organizations for various sins that I don’t even know much about. It seems like a toxic stew out there of anger, grief, disappointment. And that’s just the poetry world—I’ve turned off the news in the last two weeks—I’m usually a Seattle Times, BBC news regular—as my stress level can’t handle more bad news, though I’m sure it’s out there.

I need to figure out my inspiration again, why I write what I do, the things that bring me joy about it. Right now, I can’t really remember, or worse, feel stupid for once loving it. I should have known it was a closed system 25 years ago. Or that’s what my bitter cynical side tells me. I try to ignore that voice. […]

Here’s hoping that a little time away in the wilderness—where power and internet are not a given—will give me some much-needed perspective and a chance to spark new ideas and a new mindset. I truly am an optimistic person, so maybe this trip will reset me.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Two Week Post: a Bunch of Small Disasters, June-uary in Seattle, Hoping for Inspiration, Poem in The Shore, Plus Roses, Typewriters, and Cats

Probably because I have been stalled on my manuscript (see previous post), I’ve been reading blogs and speaking with friends about the whole “project” of publishing poetry books. People sure have widely varying opinions. It had occurred to me there would likely be some controversy over this even in a world as small as poetry; but I am surprised at how heated poets, and publishers, can get concerning the whys, whens, and hows of poetry collections. Whether a poet’s work is ready, for example, or–as some folks might put it–worthy of a book or chapbook, and when in one’s “career” is the time to put a book out into the world…and whether the time it takes and the costs of submitting and contest fees are worth the effort or act some sort of barrier to the underfunded, the less-known, and the uninitiated (or to people who just are not very good poets).

Where a writer is in her poetry (career, journey, artistic path, life, whatever) surely makes a difference in whether or when she pursues manuscript-making. Some folks suggest getting a chapbook out as soon as one has enough good poems because a chapbook looks good on a poet’s CV. Others insist it is better to wait and get work published poem-by-poem in journals and literary sites. […]

My feelings on getting my books in print have evolved over the years, and I think that they should. I am no longer a young poet new to the challenge of getting my poems into magazines (they were all print when I was starting out) and thinking about whether I wanted to work in the creative writing field or not. As it turns out, while I did earn an MFA, I never really used it in the academic area where I ended up. But I attend writing conferences, engage in critique, send my work out for publication–singly and in manuscript form–which are all parts of the poet’s career (if you can call it a career).

At this point in my life, I want to make books! I love books, and I love reading poems in books and not on a screen of any kind. It doesn’t matter to me if my books win prizes (though one did!) or are published by top-tier literary presses (er, no…), or if they ever result in my earning anything from my writing (not yet…). Yes, I want my manuscripts to be worthy–by which I mean that a few readers find something of value and enjoyment in them. On balance, that seems good enough for me.

Ann E. Michael, Milling & worthiness

As many of you know, June 16th is Bloomsday—a celebration of Ulysses, which was set on that date in 1904. This year, the date also falls on Fathers Day—a fact that anyone who has read the book would appreciate. […]

When I was a kid, maybe 12 years old, the 1961 Vintage edition of Ulysses made an uncanny and lasting impression on me—and this was before I could even read it. It was a total oddity on the family book shelf. My parents were readers, but they were not into stuff like Joyce. Prior to that point, I’d never picked up a book and found it almost totally incomprehensible. It was like going back to a time before literacy.

I made no real effort to read it then. But two deeply personal facts emerged from my incomprehension that cast an aura around the book: 1) this was the first book I’d seen in which the name Haines appeared (a character goes by that name alone, no first name, and 2) my own father’s name appeared in ink on the inside cover, but written there in a form I’d never seen before or since: “RS Haines”—the form I’d later take in publishing (I did not make this link until much later). I assumed he’d read it, but later learned he had not. Regardless, the book was” his.” The fact that a central character also shares my father’s name, Stephen/Steven, made this all the more “dad-coded.” But my recognizing this did not mean I could connect to him through the book—in fact, the precise opposite. The alienation of that—knowing that everything you write separates you form something—has been a part of what writing means to me. Ultimately, this may have been the moment the idea of “Literature” first arrived to me: it was a signal of massive, alluring confusion that was tied up with the idea of my father and with feeling alienated form my own name by seeing it in a book.

RM Haines, Himself the Ghost of His Own Father?

She heats the milk in a pan, pours
it into calming Christmas mugs (no matter the season), dusts
each with a sprinkle of nutmeg. She goes
from room to room, checking closet doors
and dimming lights. And she sings
the special lullabies, that repertoire of sleepy songs.

He sits in the armchair in the den
and sips his mug of milk.
The cats linger in his lap
as he leafs through the books his children used to love.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Poem for Father’s Day

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?
A poem begins with either a line that I can’t get rid of in my head, or a desire to capture or express a particular feeling or thought. I think of my writing as going from project to project, definitely thinking of the larger whole as a book instead of writing short pieces and compiling them in a book. In seeing the project as a whole book, I like the investigative, interrogative function of writing poems – you’re telling one larger story but presenting different facets or experiences within that narrative. Poetry has built-in gaps in its form – it doesn’t pretend to tell the whole history of anything – and I like how each poem can evoke a glimpse of something and shed light on it. I see the thing as a whole, with me trying to help it come into being. […]

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 guess I’ve been concerned about how to express the intangible and unsayable. How to translate a particular emotion or the inner experience of something into a form that will be able to be shared with the world, to make the subjective less objective. I like finding moments that resonate, that ring out, that confirms, that makes you tremble and feel joy and weep and be in awe. I also think that I’m just the conduit for the art; a lot of my concern is trying to let go of ego and control and let the thing be what it wants to be. It’s important to accept emptiness, free up space, and receive the art. Observing and allowing, and doing only what is necessary.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Onjana Yawnghwe (rob mclennan)

Now, the fragmentary journey that is my memoir, Ruin & Want, is a challenge but one I hope people will take on. Which is to say: if I could have written this in a straight line, I would have, but please know care and heart went into this just like anything else I create. […]

I remember describing the project early on as a book where each page creaked like loose floorboards late at night when you’re simultaneously hoping to not be heard while also hearing everything around you acutely.

José Angel Araguz, reading afterthoughts & intro

By criticizing marble peaches—and the momentary appeal that such an object might hold—Coleridge articulates a position against the manufacturing of wonder. Illusion and imitation do not lead to true wonder: we might be charmed by the effect, but wonder is richer, deeper, and more psychically complex than mere artifice can sustain. The real peach, with its brief and soft shelf life, is enough to sustain us.

“The well-disciplined mind,” Coleridge argues, is “offended by delusion,” which proves little more than a ploy for inducing something like passing wonder without the benefits and potential for self-questioning and development that wonder provides.

Remember, wonder isn’t “Wow! That’s amazing! Cool!” but “Wow! Huh? Hm…”

Why this matters…

Wonder isn’t the mind’s final resting place. It cannot be permanently sustained. The mileage comes from what happens after a powerful aesthetic experience: the need, as Matthew Scott writes, “to answer its place in our emotional make-up with the act of critical reflection.”

This is where poetry proves an invaluable vehicle for cementing wonder.

Maya C. Popa, Against Manufacturing Wonder

Unlike, say, a sonnet or a sestina, a Fibonacci poem is not determined by the number of lines. It can be as elegantly succinct as a haiku, or as long as a book: Inger Christensen’s remarkable alphabet extends, in Susanna Nied’s fine translation, to almost 70 pages. Depending on the message the poet wishes to convey, a Fibonacci poem can open out, or close down, or both. It’s a dynamic form, with a strong sense of movement and direction. The sequential variation in line length provides an inherent visual component. One of the joys of writing Fibonacci poems is the freedom to play with their appearance on the page.

The form can also be combined with other constraints. Sky, Earth, Other includes a lipogram; an abecedarian; variations on the trimeric; Möbius poems; a fractal poem; and poems that can be read in more than one direction.

The Fibonacci sequence has many associations: organic growth or decay, population dynamics, combinations, spiral forms, the golden ratio, unendingness. Mathematically, there are still unanswered questions relating to the properties of Fibonacci numbers. For example, it is not known whether there are infinitely many Fibonacci primes (Fibonacci numbers that are also prime numbers).

In Sky, Earth, Other I have sought to integrate content and form in both a structural and a visual sense. The book is divided into three sections, with 8 + 13 + 21 = 42 poems altogether. Although the poems do not cover everything, life and the universe definitely feature.

Marian Christie, The space within the nutshell

Sivvy is the name Sylvia Plath used to sign off some of her letters – mostly those to her mother – and this micro-chapbook is a sequence of erasure poems based on her letters where the original text is used but punctuation/capitalisation modified to fit the poem. The cover image shows the flats on Fitzroy Road, Plath had the top flat where the light is on. Poem titles use the date of the letter being erased and take epistolary forms. […]

“Sivvy” uses erasure to offer a new view of Plath’s life through her letters, albeit in a small selection largely focused on the last two month’s of Plath’s life. However, I’m not convinced the micro-chapbook is aimed at a general readership. The lack of contextual information, the failure to name who the letters are addressed to and the foreshadowing imply the audience is people who already know Plath’s life and work and are familiar with the letters. The focus on two key events, marrying Hughes, and the last two months, plus splitting one letter into three poems, reveal an intention to give a foreshadowing to Plath’s life that Plath did not have. Plath frequently wrote to her audience and her letters are no different. Erasing the letters down to a single message does them, and Plath, a disservice. The Plath in “Sivvy” is melodramatic and eager to please. The Plath in real life employed humour, sarcasm and, aside from a few letters in 1962/3, determined to paint a cheerful view of her life to not worry her mother. “Sivvy” is a talking point, not a set of answers and its main interest is the methodology.

Emma Lee, “Sivvy” Lauren Davis (Whittle Micro Press) – book review

I don’t write many reviews just now—children and my job and River River Books (joyfully!) receive most of my hours—so I want to celebrate this review at Poetry Northwest with you, because Diane Seuss is doing work that I genuinely think most major American poets cannot: writing poetry that has a clear-eyed gaze towards class, and life lived at the wide and rural borders, edges, margins.

Han VanderHart, All of Us Come with a Ballad

“My poems are to be taken as careless sketches,” wrote Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran in 1918. In fact, Södergran was a formal innovator, a modernist pioneer writing across linguistic and national borders while suffering poverty and illness in the shadow of world war, and a feminist who challenged gender binaries. She died at the age of 31 from tuberculosis in her hometown of Raivola, Finland, which is now part of Russia. 

My favorite quotation from Södergran’s writing about her work, which I keep taped above my desk: “My self-confidence comes from the fact that I have discovered my dimensions. It does not behoove me to make myself smaller than I am.” 

I first came across Sodergran’s poetry over a decade ago when I asked a close Swedish friend of my sister Brita who her favorite Swedish-language poets were. When Brita then loaned me the volume she already happened to have on her shelf (which I’ve never returned to her, I realize as I write this) and I began to read the poems of this authoritative, cosmic voice, I was amazed. How did this mysterious young woman write with such boldness and brevity, tethered so completely, so purely, to both heaven and earth? To the pure joy of existence, and to mortality? 

The bilingual (Swedish/English) selection of her work, Love & Solitude, translated by Stina Katchadourian, has been an honored companion for me over this past decade (it appears to be out of print, but another wonderful translation is this one by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström). It is one of the three or four books I always bring with me if I’m going off to write for any length of time, and I turn to it again and again for inspiration and poetic and spiritual sustenance as one would a sacred text. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The First Thread of my Red Dress

I first came upon the work of Sean Thomas Dougherty through his poem “Why Bother” that at one point a few years back went viral. I chose this next poem because I think it goes with the song [“Downbound Train” by Bruce Springsteen] nicely. I chose it because, the words, “I’m still here” speak to me. Dougherty works or has worked as a “third-shift caregiver and med tech for folks with traumatic brain injuries.” But his bio in the book I have of his that I love, The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, says, “By the time you read this book, he might be unemployed or on to different work.”

In the Forbes interview he says, “We don’t need to win the Pulitzer Prize, just one poem to save one life, to recognize one life, to witness one life. What is more righteous and humbler than that? ‘To be righteous in small ways,’ says the poem, says this labor.” And he writes about work with such grace. I’m interested in writing that talks about our life in work — which for most of us is a great portion of our existence and one that we are largely stymied from talking about due to privacy and policy and etc. The dream of letting the Sisyphean boulder roll though…just for a moment….it’s rather life-giving don’t you agree?

Shawna Lemay, Mixtape – Springsteen, Dougherty, Gilliam

Overall it was interesting to note the poems that seem to drop at the audience’s feet when I finish reading them rather than hang in the air. I think I have done some learning about which poems to leave on the page and which ones are in their element when floated out into the air to be listened to.

Alt text says this week’s photo is, ‘A person standing behind a sign’. I say it is a poet slightly on tiptoe because they didn’t really adjust the mic properly for themselves reading the first poem in their set at Oswestry Pride 2024. I also say they must have disappeared behind the sign each time they bent down to select a different book to read from and missed the opportunity to milk that moment by popping up like a puppet!

Sue Finch, The Bandstand

For Barthes, the author was nothing, the reader everything; and Underwood’s analysis seems to make the same claim – any point of stability that we might designate ‘The Author’ simply disappears in a puff of smoke, replaced by a multiplicity of shifting and subjective interpretations. A thrillingly postmodern view of what it means to know a text. 

But now, here comes generative AI with its Large Language Models that can generate texts of increasing complexity and nuance, literally without the need for an author. And it seems to me that we finally have on the near horizon the possibility of the actual death of the author – a death which when it comes down to it, Barthes was only fantasising about. Now we can really have stories and poems whose meaning really lies only with the reader. Barthesians should celebrate, should they not? Or if they are not, they should at least ask themselves why they are not pleased that we can finally bid farewell to that outmoded and unfashionable concept of ‘authorial intent’. 

The truth is, and I don’t think I need to point out the wider cultural relevance of this, theoretical musings on what something is or isn’t make for wonderful philosophy, but they don’t seem so much fun when that thing is actually faced with imminent destruction. Suddenly all the old, simpler, more unfashionably obvious definitions seem important again. 

Chris Edgoose, The Day the Author Died 

The playwright Mike Bartlett does an exercise with aspiring playwrights where they take turns lying on a large piece of paper while a fellow student draws an outline of their body. Then the aspiring playwrights write down, within the outline, an event for every year of their life. Each of these memories is paired with a larger cultural event for that same year. Finally, the aspiring playwrights brainstorm a dozen or so storylines.

This exercise scares me. Maybe most of all because I’ll discover how little I remember. Also, what if memories come rushing back? No. Honestly: memories don’t come rushing or flooding back for me. They come like links of a thick chain I pull out of dark water. I can often feel the weight of them before I know what I’ve got. Each linked to the next.

And there is always a fear of what might come up. […]

When you slowly pull a chain out of dark water, there is a moment when the link is reflected on the surface and you aren’t able to tell if it’s really a reflection, or the obscured view of the next link—the one we may not want to acknowledge is really there.

If I were to lie on a piece of butcher paper and you were to trace my body with chalk, you’d see I leave behind the outline of a solitary wasp.

There are millions of us. And countless have been before.

Ren Powell, An Outline with Memories

there is so much
we do not know about the body.
it is more like the ocean
than i even thought. the waiting room
where i stand up & leave
deciding i need to be a dragonfly
for just today. to be gloriously unfixable.

Robin Gow, my doctor tells me “there’s so much we don’t know”

On the side of the road a woman stands, holding
her offering of fish. Their silver bodies slung together, tempting
the sun to glint and reflect their scales.
Do you see it now? The generations and generations who have pulled
life from the earth and used it to build their bones?
Your breath?
What can you do to return
Such a favor, but hold still, as the trees fatten
with new rings, and mangoes fall into your hands, ripe
as you open your eyes to watch
this ancient flock of conures teach you
how to look up, dreaming yourself into their old sky.

Tresha Faye Haefner, What I Learned from Ada Limon’s “Failed” Novel and My Own

We are waiting
for a pause in the air, that hour
between the golden-leaved
light of afternoon and the moment
the blue-black shade unrolls.
We are waiting for the matchstick-
struck lights of fireflies to radio
the location of stones, to signal
that it is time to draw one more
oracle card—here is a bee
and here is a hummingbird;
and here is a cormorant
with a fish in his mouth, larger
than he could swallow.

Luisa A. Igloria, Juncture

This week: grief’s alphabet, moon menders, insect-poets, a paradise of sentences, and more. I challenged myself to quote just one paragraph from each blog post, and mostly kept to that. I’ll probably return to my usual pattern next week, but it was fun to court brevity for a change!

Life has been rather lifey of late, which is why it’s been a bit since I’ve shown up here. Working off and on on this essay, as well as writing in response to Jeannine Ouellette’s latest Writing in the Dark intensive, has been a great balm, but it means that my creative output has been slow and underground. That’s how a small creative life goes sometimes. A lot of the time, for me. I’ve made my peace with that. I’ve got faith that a different kind of time will come along again.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Counting them all

A mourning dove coos, well, mournfully, through Bill Evans’ solo on “Very Early.” A Danish musician had these tapes for years before finally deciding others might like to hear them. What other treasures are hidden in attics and under beds? What magic waits behind downcast eyes? A neighbor drags his garbage to the street, then walks back to his house to do – what? Now it’s a bass solo with catbird accompaniment. The chai in my mug has gone cold.

Jason Crane, Very Early

Usually grief and bereavement are presented in poems at one remove as the writer has begun their journey to acceptance and the poems are written with the benefit of that hindsight. Here, Etter has captured the rawness of grief and the complexity of distance, whether geographical or as an adopted child. With tenderness and compassion, “Grief’s Alphabet” vocalises that keening in the immediately of death and its aftermath. Etter’s poems have a quiet power, forensic attention to rhythm and sound patterns and readers are not left with the impression they are intruding on a personal grief.

Emma Lee, “Grief’s Alphabet” Carrie Etter (Seren) – book reviews

Our house is sounding very 19th century, very tubercular, lots of coughing, as we are both fighting off colds. This week-end, I’ve often thought of John Keats, who got up every morning, coughed up a bit of his lungs, and then went to work writing the poetry that he knew he didn’t have much time to write. […]

You have placed your faith
in tangerines, bright baubles
in a battered, wooden bowl.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Apocalyptic Inspirations

Somehow, I realized the other day that this year is an anniversary of sorts, it being 20 years ago this November that the first DGP chapbook came into the world. The late and amazing Adrianne Marcus, who I had been publishing in wicked alice from early on, asked me if I knew of anywhere she could submit a chapbook she was finishing up. That spring, I had been slumming over in the Fiction writing department (at that time separate from the English/poetry department,) in a great Small Press publishing class. I did not go into the semester planning to start a press, but somehow came out of it that way. The goal that spring was to publish a print annual of the online zine, as well as a chapbook of my own (I had recently had the first accepted, but it was going to be a couple years til publication and I wanted something to sell or give away at readings.) When I made those two things happen courtesy of a cheap home printer, some Paper Source cardstock and some staples, it occurred to me that I could do this thing. 

Kristy Bowen, dancing girl press & studio notes | may 2024

Moon menders bring the moon
to full circle, then go on vacation.

They return to find every carefully
threaded crystal has been nibbled away,

Ellen Roberts Young, A Fanciful Poem

I am not sad, not exactly. One cannot keep a semi circle of tools on a garage floor just because it still carries the shape of your father, it’s not practical and probably not healthy to hold onto empty air like that, but I find it interesting to notice, to realise this graduation of change, the moving away from the life that a person lived. It is like visiting a landscape that I used to know and realising that it wasn’t what you thought it was. It was a temporary place, not a permanent place. Life is temporary. People are temporary.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from My Dad’s Garage where he is Fourteen Months Dead

It’s been years
since my mother put the Virgin
in my hand and closed her fingers
around mine, wishing me good
journeys: my dark, palm-sized
plaster Madonna, in a skirt
belled and blue.

Luisa A. Igloria, Amianan, Abagatan

Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious as a reader, I’ll get hold of a book by Anne Carson. The reading adventure generally takes the form of a wow-hunh?-yeah-er…-okay-hm-wow wave within which I tumble over and over. I feel like I grab her mind’s coattails and get dragged along and dusty, but I get somewhere sometimes. Sometimes I get somewhere.

Marilyn McCabe, Rearranging the stuff at the front

One of my favourite constrained poetry books on a sporting theme is Chris Kerr’s visual poetry sequence Extra Long Matches, which was inspired by the longest tennis match in history, between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010. Kerr uses arrangements of matchsticks to guide us through the first and last game of the contest, which lasted an extraordinary eleven hours and five minutes, ending 70-68 in the fifth set, and which contributed to a decision to change the tournament rules as of 2019. Kerr’s take on this memorable tennis match is witty and elegant – by the end of his book, the matchsticks are burnt out, as were the two players, and the umpire!

Marian Christie, The constrained poetry of sport

One poet wrote to his daughter that if he must die, she must live to tell his story. Then he was killed. Then she was killed. The poem is a ghost. The story is alive. If you say its name, what will become of time? What will become of the half-light?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Untitled -20

briefly, the tour guide turned off
the light. the deepest dark
i’ve ever seen. i loved it. i imagined
spending the rest of my life
in that shadow. knowing one another
only by touch & question,
“is that you?”

Robin Gow, in the dungeon with my mom

I wrote the below poem this morning, because it is upsetting to see someone in need, and feel like there is nothing you can do, nothing you can give them to ease where they are. This person’s mental agitation was high, and they did not want food, and did not know where they wanted to go (which I did not expect/anticipate, and I should have allowed for this possibility—but so often folks want a ride to the bus station, which is such a gentle ask). Sometimes all you can give another human is water, and it doesn’t feel great. To be someone with mental health needs, and medication and therapy, and to see someone who needs exactly the same—it sucks. In the very least, give water. In the very least, listen.

Han VanderHart, “we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business” Gwendolyn Brooks

The rock amid a storm (or a person upon a rock amid a storm) is a very common image of endurance, though in this poem the natural perils also seem to be produced by the poet himself, rather than those around him: ‘My teares a quicksand feeding, / Wher on noe foote can rest, / My sighs a tempest breeding / About my stony breast.’ The storm he must weather is somehow also himself. (We all know that feeling.)

Victoria Moul, Rock Constancy presenting

Many people use it for magical purposes, to protect against evil, or to develop their feminine side, their sensitivity, or prophetic abilities. It is one of the large group of moon herbs, perhaps because of the silvery felted underside of its leaves, and Lucy Jones, the herbalist, says ‘If you find yourself travelling along (country) lanes by the light of the moon, you will notice that the silvery leaves of the Mugwort shine prominently…. if you have never noticed the appearance of Mugwort on a moonlit night, you have missed something special.’ In my garden it is just to the left of marshmallow, and in front of elecampane (also known as elf-wort), behind the ‘little wizard’ alchemilla, and not far from vervain and yarrow, so this is one powerful magical cocktail, if that’s your thing. I’m not sure if it’s mine, but I like the idea of the mugwort leaves at night, like Coleridge’s icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Elizabeth Rimmer, How Green is My Hilltop

Last month the sun turned black
and its revealed corona poured into me.
It hollowed my heart out on the porch
of a complex I share with strangers,
children, birds, couples, lawn chairs,
sidewalks, windows, airplane, Mercury.
I am forty thousand dollars in debt—
the moon slid into place and held—
and this is my paradise of sentences.
This is how I greet the years, saying
Welcome. I have digested my own past.

R.M. Haines, Poem at 44

[Adam] Chiles might be publishing in the U.S., but his aesthetic refuses to plump for either side of the American binary polarity between formal and free verse. Instead, he adopts the more British approach of playing with both methods, often fusing them within a single poem. As such, Bluff offers an excellent bridge across the Atlantic, a reminder that what unites us is far stronger than what separates us. It sets out to include both nationalities and achieves its aims, dodging false polemics, which brings us neatly on to the poems themselves.

Matthew Stewart, Transatlantic communication, Adam Chiles’ Bluff

The land of war sends her here.
She adorns her torso with
mouths. Mouths full of love and seeds
from ripe pomegranates, mouths
biting into the crisp days
of the month, mouths wilting,
mouths dripping with tears, mouths stuffed
so full of the edges of
shark’s teeth they overflow.

PF Anderson, Postcard Poem 32

A self-described “OCD memoir in prose poems,” the poems of Exploding Head are clean, clear and deliberate, and clustered into four numbered sections. “After some time,” she writes, to open the poem “Beasts,” “you realized you had to get the beasts out of the house, so you dragged them by the horns to the farthest corner of the backyard. Look how they cower at the fence when the sprinkler spits at them in the summer.” Constructed as a quartet-suite of self-contained and compressed prose blocks—one stanza per poem, one poem per page—Hoffman’s lines are straight but the narrative is built to bend, counterpointing the perspectives of the child against that of the mother. In certain ways, the what of her approach is less interesting than the effects, offering a straightforwardness that bleeds almost into a disorientation, before landing utterly elsewhere. “If you stare into the dark hard enough,” she offers, to open the poem “Of Feather,” “something glitters.”

rob mclennan, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Exploding Head

We follow the prints of a fallow deer in drying ground.
I struggle to find the meaning of words I used to know.
I think of you and you and you. What was it we found?

Bob Mee, THE MAGICIAN AND OTHER TROUBLES

It’s clear that the current landscape, dominated by algorithms and constant exposure, shapes our behavior and norms. This pressure for perpetual engagement is becoming the norm, leaving little room for introspection or privacy. This is a very specific form of technocapitalism that is increasingly defined by opaque algorithms that privilege constant, interactive public exposure (understood in all its different meanings). This requirement of constant interactive public exposure is making this Being Outwardly the norm. Nothing worth it seems to escape its grasp- if it happens, it should exist as content one can and should engage with. Death is the lack of presence, exposure, and engagement.

Ernesto Priego, Finding Equilibrium in a Hyperconnected World: The Struggle Against Burnout

Say instead

the angels have forgotten how to hear
and the algorithms never learned

what yearnings underlie the words
we use to disguise our fragile hearts.

Rachel Barenblat, Translation

In times past, when poets retreated into the mountains (Basho, Yuanming) or into monasteries (Gerard Manley Hopkins), or into their upstairs bedroom (Emily Dickinson), what were they retreating from? How did their poetry help them to survive? (How might their poetry help us to survive our times?) Nothing too shocking or earth-shattering, but these are the questions I would like to sit with for a while.

Bethany Reid, Good Poetry for Hard Times

button box . . .
amidst the jumble
a peppermint

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: May ’24

Poet Alice Oswald says the Greek mind listened hard [to cicadas] and heard the “thin piping quality that is common to old men speaking.”  Plato has a story of turning cicadas into poets.  In a CBC radio interview in 2016, Oswald continues, “I have interest of the cicada as being the insect that poets turn into, if you going on speaking and speaking and speaking, you become nothing but a voice.  A high continuous voice.”  

Trillions of poets living underground for 13 to 17 years, co-emerging, trying urgently to convey their one untranslatable song. Imagine!

Jill Pearlman, The Insect-Poets

who wrote this :: her mind must be all around

here is my father :: hiding the universe

life, leave me untitled :: encourage my sound

Grant Hackett [no title]

Last week I was saying I didn’t feel much like a writer, but then I got an acceptance and a handful of rejections (editors clearing their desks for summer) and wrote a few poems and sent out one or two submissions, so I guess that didn’t last too long. That’s usually how it is – I might have a slow period where nothing happens, then I’ll get inspired by something and get going.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Serendipity” on LitBowl, Hummingbirds and Baby Bunnies

For me, work is something you do indoors, in cold climates, when it is raining and you have to stay inside. You do it when it is frigid and you need to cuddle up next to a fire, doing something that keeps your hands warm. It’s best if you can stare at a blank wall or out the window at a brick fire escape and be forced to turn inward and imagine a better or more exciting place. That’s why New Yorkers are notoriously productive, fast-paced, angry. Their drive is caused not just by a desire to get things done, but by a need to not freeze to death during the winter cold.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Getting Misled by Butterflies: Or Why I Could Never Write a Novel While Living in Costa Rica

Four years ago, I began writing the longest poem in Wound. I was sitting in the grass in Central Park, where I worked each day that uncertain spring, when I mustered the courage to start looking at the notes I’d been taking on my phone for weeks.

March and April were nightmarish. This sentiment rings true for everyone in different ways. As a New Yorker living two blocks from a major hospital, I can attest that the constant blare of sirens will fray even the steadiest nerves. But it was also a remarkable spring—or else, having slowed to a standstill, I could watch what is ever remarkable from the window day in and day out and appreciate it fully for the first time.

Maya C. Popa, “Pestilence” Four Years Later

Life is not like crossing a field
it is more like crossing a road
by weaving through six lanes
of slow-moving traffic

Ama Bolton, Poem beginning with a Russian proverb

The poem begins “Here the water is silt brown / stretches mile-wide, / flat as a washed-out conveyor belt.” I feel like I’ve been here, both on the river and with the conveyor belt from my days working in a grocery warehouse, the flatness disappearing into the distance, the heat engulfing you, not quite smothering but let the sun crawl past noon and the humidity come up a couple more points and you’ll be sweating without moving. Even the lukewarm water of the river feels cool then.

Brian Spears, The River Remembers

The space feels blessed. In addition to their individual pieces, the three artists collaborated on a sculptural piece made of bamboo stalks and hung with ethereal, lacy textiles. When people entered the space, they were invited to write a water memory that is significant to them on a slip of paper and to tie it to this sculpture, co-creating an altar to our collective relationship with the spirit of water.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Emotions Visible for Others to See

How to live like an artist, then? How to be cool, and honourable, and generous, and further ideas? How to just carve out time? How to scrape by? How to be dignified, live and create with integrity, but also with a certain amount of ruthlessness? How to do all this with the presence of the internet and AI and who knows what comes next? How to cultivate the conditions for creativity and keep alive, and Alive? The artist is not a machine, we know that. And the process, the PROCESS, is what keeps moving us forward.

Shawna Lemay, TwB Reboot

Tremendous thanks to the editors at Does It Have Pockets for publishing four of my poems in their May issue from my most recent book A Godless Ascends, including: “Aftermath: ~48 Hours,” “Intensive Care,” “To My Unconscious Son,” and ” “Back to Life.” These four poems are from the fourth section of the book dedicated to my son and are poems of recovery. It’s important to me that these personal poems are out in the world.  Many of you know that in 2015 my son (21 at the time) was in a horrible accident in which he was hit on his bicycle by someone in a pickup truck in downtown Salt Lake City. He nearly lost his life. Recovery was difficult, but he made it through and I’m grateful every day that he is still the same amazing, creative person he was before the accident.

Trish Hopkinson, 4 poems published in Does It Have Pockets

a young lad bought himself a book
‘teach yourself poetry’
it taught him nothing other than
there was a void that had to be filled […]

sometimes one learns not what is taught
but the direction of a signpost’s finger
under the stars the moon flares
under the sun it acquiesces
the leap is faith indeed

Jim Young, was it all those years ago

after he had carefully read the small print, three pages of dense, legalistic type he decided to reorder his life as the experience so far had not been what he had been led to expect no it had been uneventful, dull even, he felt bored surely he had picked out something better when he had perused the brochure back in the pre-existence café something more exciting than this monotonous round of bills and work

Paul Tobin, ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS ACT

I should be stopping now, at least to have a bit of lunch, but excitement rears its head again as I remember a poem I’ve begun about snails, and think has potential to become a poetry film. Out I head to find the stars of the show. There are none. Usually my garden seems like a Snail Travelodge, but today they’ve all eased their way elsewhere. I look a little closer and find myself crouched behind a bin filming the prettiest ochre shelled snail, desperately hoping the air bnb’rs next door can’t see me. Will I make the film? Who knows. I hope so.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Creative Tuesday

I am a raven’s nest
of shiny odds and ends

buttons that close nothing
attach no intentions, make no mistake

I am a loose gathering
of loose talents

in a tackle box in my granddaughter’s crafts room
and she will piece something together

a framework
a new skin to hold it all together

Ren Powell, We Start with the Skin

A shorter digest than usual this week, reflecting I suppose a general exhaustion among poetry bloggers after NaPoWriMo and the winding down of the academic year. Those who did blog were in a reflective mood, writing about self-acceptance for poets, points of connection, finding balance, considering the reader, and more. Enjoy.

I love being a poet. I love expressing myself in words. There’s nothing quite like that feeling when a poem begins to come together, the words and images connecting in moving and surprising ways. I happily devote innumerable hours to building an object from words, trying out various expressions, line breaks, and odd enjambments in order to create the zing that only poetry delivers.

On a good day, when the topic for a poem arrives seemingly out of the air, I’ll drop everything to engage in that delightful back-and-forth activity we call writing. Wherever I happen to be, the poem is with me, working its way through my neural pathways, altering and enhancing my thought processes. As I push a shopping cart through the grocery store aisles, or wait for an appointment at a doctor’s office, or pull weeds in my garden, the poem never leaves me. Once begun, a poem takes on a life independent from mine, offering new possibilities for me to write down.

So why do I hesitate when people ask me what I do?

Erica Goss, Self-acceptance for Poets

In Assam, India there are women are call themselves the hargila army. The hargila, or greater adjutant, is an ugly bird. I don’t believe there is any way around that, even if the woman who runs the army finds them beautiful, talks about their blue eyes. No one is going to convince me these are beautiful birds.

The hargila are a kind of stork. They’re carrion-eaters, with the distinctive bald head and neck that marks scavenger birds. They’re nearly five feet tall, with a wing span of eight feet. During the colonialization of India, British soldiers would feed the birds explosives. Today they are a threatened species. The army of women are doing their best to educate the local population regarding their niche in the ecosystem, and to celebrate the birds. They weave fabric with images of the hargila, and make brightly colored saris from it.

Since learning about the army, I’ve been returning to the image of this fabric, and our valuation of “beauty” with regard to what we deem worth celebrating, and what we want to/dare to associate ourselves with. I’ve been thinking about the wasps that I’ve been reading and writing about for so long now: how seeing one still triggers my body to want to run, or swat; how no matter how closely I look at the details of an antennae, an eye, a mandible, I can’t find a perspective from which to see beauty.

I’m beginning to think this is about humility. My role here isn’t to find beauty. It isn’t even to cultivate a kind of tolerance. It’s to acknowledge, and attend to life. Wasps. Cancer. These god-awful, ugly birds.

Ren Powell, May, Maia, Growth

Before the book tour even began, I had a surprise visitor from India (Niranj Vandinathan pictured above) a man whom I had met on the internet. Let me explain. One of the great joys of publishing a book is getting to choose its cover art. This varies from publisher to publisher, but I’ve been lucky.

After looking at literally thousands of images on the internet, I found myself returning over and over to Niranj’s photograph of four indigo pots along a steep stairway. I’ve already written an essay on why I chose this image as the cover in Lit Hub. However, once chosen, I needed to track down the original photograph. With the help of Red Hen, I had a name—-now all I had to do was find the human connected to it and convince him to let me use it. Niranj was remarkably generous and even when he needed to go back through documents to find the raw image of a photo he had shot in Mauritius 12 years earlier, he came through—only asking for a copy of the book. I was thrilled and said.. “if you ever come out to Seattle…”

The mileage between Bangalore, India and Seattle, Washington is 8084 miles (thanks, Google!) so this seemed an easy invitation. Imagine my surprise when I learned Niranj would be coming to Washington State for work — just two hours from where I live. Of course I invited him to visit —- the weekend before BLUE ATLAS launched.

In just three days we went from shy strangers who had bonded over a photograph to (I hope) lifelong friends. I showed him my beloved city and he in turn, told me stories about his life in Bangalore. That’s him holding up his copy of BLUE ATLAS on Vashon Island after his first ferry ride. I’d love the cover image from the moment I saw it, but now it means so much more to me. It means friendship discovered on the other side of the world.

Susan Rich, New Notes from the Blue Atlas Tour

It happens most likely when I am out. I am in a crowd at a ballet, a play, or last night, a concert of some bands that J is into. At some point in the night, every time, I look around and feel both inspired and hopeless by the sheer number of people who seem to be interested in this thing–whatever it is—and how books in general, poetry in particular, will never garner this much enthusiasm and adoration from even a fraction of the number of audience members I am looking at in that moment. I suppose in some ways it’s positive because this many people are gathering around the arts. On the other hand, it kind of makes me feel like casting my lot to poetry may have been the worse thing to do if you are actually looking for an audience. […]

With all the internet buzzing lately on the sad state of traditionally published titles that barely earn their advances (as a poet who mostly self-publishes and has never had an advance even from trad published releases), I watched last night as every single person who passed by seemed to have not just a piece, but a load of band merch–t-shirt, giant posters–not to mention forking over hefty ticket prices. It seemed a crazy juxtaposition with books that most writers have to promote within an inch of their lives and sometimes even that makes nary a dent in book sales. Or even visual artists who are struggling to be seen and supported amidst ever-changing google and social media algorithms.

Kristy Bowen, points of connection

The seasons in Alaska make balance particularly elusive. Winter is dark, cold, and interior. Summer is bright light, intense, and frantically exterior.

Case in point, gardening. First weekend in May usually heralds trips to the local greenhouses and planting things like radish and carrot seeds. So, that’s what we did. We purchased some tomato starts (mine this year were just miserable) and flowers. Everything else was started months ago in our living room, and has mostly been transplanted or moved to the greenhouse. The cole crop starts could possibly have gone in today, but my back is saying no.

That’s the thing, the relentless light makes Alaskans push ourselves too hard. Push ourselves until our bodies say no. […]

I feel myself stretching thin and I know that I need to give myself some grace. I know that sometimes I have to back burner my own poetry to get other things done, especially this time of year. 

So, if you’re out there hustling and working and trying to squeeze in writing and submitting and taking yourself seriously as a poet, I see you. Thank you for knowing that your writing and other people’s writing is important. Thank you for being part of the big web of writers and poets. Thank you for making art that makes all of us feel less alone.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Elusive Balance

So many touchpoints for me in this poem by Tomas Tranströmer, details noted that I too love: the dim, dusty, quiet spaces of churches, for one. I am fortunate that my husband and I are compatible travelers in this: our delight in wandering into churches. Cool spaces on hot days, calm amid clamor, details of art and light, cunningly carved wood, soaring architecture. And we’ve often had the unexpected gift of stumbling into music there. Once in the cathedral in Orvieto we were dismayed as a group of American tourists shuffled to the front of the nave, noisily in a bunch. We thought, oh, no, what are these idiots doing? Then they began to sing. It was a traveling choir group who wanted, spontaneously, to hear the acoustics. We were chastened and thrilled. But what I also love is the way the inherent quiet of a church folds around the noises, the music. As soon as an organ silences, the church quiet leans in.

Another touchstone is the encyclopedia: the red stretch of World Books was an architecture of my childhood, the slippery pages a quiet cathedral of knowing things. Yet the gloriously random juxtapositions: a photo of a chalice under the solubility chart of chalcedony.

But it’s the atmosphere of the poem, its wonder, doubt, unknowing that ultimately interests me here. Life as waves of experiences, of discoveries and losses, of the possibilities, the “adamant perhaps.” Most days I could do with a reminder of the adamant perhaps of life. The enlarging maybe.

Marilyn McCabe, Slowly death turns up the light underneath

Right now I’m in the middle of writing at least half a dozen manuscripts, and each one is wildly different. I am as scattered and active as I can get, and I’m reading a lot too. Something is going on because I get further and further away from the ways I used to write. A few weeks ago I shared a cut-up poem here, and I’ve continued working with this mode alongside other modes. Each of these was written in a different way, but all use some measure of cut-up and appropriation. Not sure what else to say about it right now but thank you if you are reading this. Truly.

Sheila Squillante, Music in Scraps of Payment

MY MANUSCRIPT MADE FINALIST FOR THE CARDINAL POETRY PRIZE!!! I cried when I received this news. My most heartfelt thanks to editors Suzanne Tamminen, John Murillo, and Oliver Egger of Wesleyan University Press for including me in this amazing group of fifteen finalists. Such a thrill to know that Robert Pinsky will be reading my manuscript! I’ve been sending out ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH for about a year and half now and have prepared myself for a long haul, and I am just so grateful to have my work seen and affirmed in this way. I’m going to hold onto this feeling of joy and gratitude while waiting for the winner’s announcement on June 1st.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

It took a while, but I’m just now getting to Great Lakes poet Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s full-length poetry debut, Dereliction (The Song Cave, 2022), a collection of poems composed in two equal halves that fit together perfectly. The first section/half is the extended sequence “Murmurs,” a poem composed with such a delicate and light such across nearly fifty pages of short, sharp declarations, observations and meditations. The lines are nearly whispered, none of which reduce their force. As she writes, early on: “I’ve been giving to mourning my gifts, / faithfully aiding in deception of self, seeding forgery, / a ritual of fictitious charm thrown against me, stuck / to the nape of the neck, barely visible, little lime green ticks.” Through these pieces, short sketches resonate one per page that thread across the distance, she composes thought as much as silence, an afterlife as much as presence. Further on: “There is no formal, no one familiar body.” The second section, “Dereliction,” offers a gathering of some forty pages of self-contained, first person narrative lyrics. There is something interesting in how the collection generally, and this section, specifically, works to place the narrative itself in context, attempting to find and place the narrator, the self. “I got older,” she writes, as part of “Practice for My Birthday,” “I remembered / a lot. Still remember / a lot. Everything / began to make more sense, / less too as the glass dome fell / reflecting off the distant moving / of the blurry Otherside.” The subtlely of her work is divine, and I am very much looking forward to seeing what she publishes next.

rob mclennan, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Dereliction

In public
gardens, irises start to unfurl their frilly skirts,
and hydrangeas rise from the tight whorls
of leaves. Born and raised in a house
where people came and went and doors
were never closed, an armchair in a corner
or the top of a double bed became a whole
planet; became a vessel for sailing away.

Luisa A. Igloria, On Solitude, Later in Life

Many of the editors of small poetry presses I’ve spoken to have expressed their concerns about the challenges the sector currently faces, particularly in terms of marketing, sales, and costs. Several have also mentioned workload and the risk of burnout. Black Cat Poetry Press is a relative newcomer to the field of poetry publishing: what has been your experience so far?

Satya: We’ve been running for about two and a half years now. I think I’d agree with all of this. It is a very challenging environment financially, we receive far more submissions than we sell books!  Arts funding is very competitive and most presses are unsuccessful so the press has needed subsidy from my savings account!  Both Catherine and I are unpaid, all the work we put in is out of love for the art form.  I’ve noticed in our short time in the publishing world several presses/magazines closing their doors which is always sad. We hope to keep going as long as possible and be a consistent presence.

Catherine: All the work that the press does is unpaid. As Satya said, it really is a labour of love. But also an honour to help bring new voices into the poetry world. Poetry is, for both of us I think, a kind of devotion. Being so involved in a small press I have an appreciation for the work and time that goes into each and every manuscript. It’s useful to see that from the inside, it has deepened my respect for all the work small presses and journals do. As poets we do not gift our work to small presses, the gift is given in the press devoting their unpaid time, believing in your manuscript and making it a real book in the world.

Marian Christie, Love for the art form: An Interview with Satya Bosman and Catherine Balaq of Black Cat Press

First, a quick update on Conscious Writers Collective.

The first writers joined this week, and I hovered on the sidelines like an anxious parent waiting to see if they would make friends. This trepidation lasted all of five seconds—I’ve never seen such a welcoming, present, and participatory group. Writers are exchanging writing playlists, posting work for feedback (and getting impressively perceptive edits!), and hyping each other up in a forum dedicated to celebrating wins. Friends, it is beautiful. After months of work with web folks, it is unbelievably gratifying to see writers connecting with each other in this vital way. […]

I’ve been revisiting Audre Lorde’s prose this week and wanted to share this passage, which is one of the most brilliant, spot-on encapsulations of poetry’s power:

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.” (The Selected Works of Audre Lorde ed. by Roxane Gay)

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I’ve been posting a different poet I love almost every day this month in my Notes. Almost. I missed a few days. Today is the last day of April and I saved the best for last. My poet friend, Jen Rouse, writes wonderful poetry and I selected the above poem for today from her award winning book “A Trickle of Bloom Becomes You.” I love the way she entwines botany, women botanists, and social commentary so expertly and pleasurably. Recently Jen was awarded a fellowship for the International Poetry Conference in Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria themed “Endangered Nature.” She was one of only eight poets selected – Wow! I am very happy for Jen and she definitely is deserving of this honor.

In these unsettling and stressful times I turn to poetry for solace, beauty, and a template for what life can be and should be. I think it’s great there are so many subjects and inspirations for poets to explore but I personally don’t read it to be lectured to. I read it to get away from the almost constant politicisation and virtue signaling so prevalent in recent times. I don’t think I’m alone in this. There must be a balance and poetry provides that for me.

Charlotte Hamrick, Balance & Poetry

Thus
it is that the price
of love shall be grief
and the gall of grief
shall match within
the mirror the light
and beauty of that
love. Such is the
symmetry that pairs
the seasons, gives
the sun its heat,
the moon its ice
and takes us from
our mother’s arms,
along our way of
chance or choice
and so to sleep.

Dick Jones, AS IT IS SAID

A third of the year has gone and I’ve written 1 poem. Prose is gushy in comparison – 2 nearly-finished stories and 4 completed Flash pieces – about 5k words. Nothing written this year has been published yet. Old stuff is being accepted about fortnightly. A few of these pieces are old favourites of mine.

Victoria Moul, reviewing a Poetry Review issue, wrote “I think a new reader would be forgiven for concluding that if you want to write a straightforward poem, which uses language in a fairly conventional way, or has any significant narrative content, then you do so in prose.” I think I do this nowadays, sending the result to prose/Flash (rather than poetry) magazines.

Tim Love, 2024 so far

Well last week’s piece caused a bit more of a stir than I anticipated. If you are one of my small flood of new subscribers, you are very welcome. And if you’re part of the old guard, and read last week’s piece in the original email form, you might be interested in looking at some of comments it has attracted, many of which are very thoughtful and well informed. A lot of people disagreed with the review, and a lot of people agreed with parts or all of it: the only responses I found silly were those which suggested the exercise itself was improper. Overall, and leaving some lame ad feminam tub-thumping in the murkier reaches of the internet aside, it is encouraging to see that lots of people care about poetry and care about what’s in the UK’s major poetry magazine. At some point I will edit the piece to add to it a summary of all the magazines readers mentioned, either in comments or in private correspondence, as ones they particularly recommended.

Last week’s piece was by a wide margin my most popular one so far, but before that the most popular — by an equally wide margin at the time — was my January essay on why I thought the collection that won this year’s T. S. Eliot prize wasn’t that good. There’s a trend here, and it’s interesting that people seem so excited to read fairly straightforward but somewhat critical poetry reviews, but it’s not one I really want to lean into. I write about poetry and translation here because these are two of the things I enjoy thinking about the most. I hope, I suppose, to celebrate and inform, myself as well as others: expressing doubts and reservations is, I think, a proper part of that, since taste depends on acts of discernment, and we acquire it by practicing it and by listening to others doing so. For the most part, though, I want to share my enthusiasm, so if you’ve signed up in the hope of weekly take-downs I’m afraid you’ll be a bit disappointed.

Victoria Moul, What pipes and timbrels?

Japan offers so much insightful thinking that choosing to consider the role of Omotenashi in our writing may seem a strange option. How can giving incredible service help with writing? As with so many things, the meaning has roots beyond our initial concept, and these roots inform and enhance our understanding and application.

Dating back to the Heian period (794-1185) Omotenashi is built from two words “Omote” which represents your outward persona and “nashi” which denotes absence or lack. Read together, Omotenashi represents a lack of pretence or artifice, and a desire to wholeheartedly contribute to the happiness of others.

The concept is beautifully demonstrated in Sado, the tea ceremony, where the tea master makes tea in full view, showing their guests the entire process with humility and care. These qualities are present across the Japanese hospitality sector, from the most humble convenience store to the traditional ryokan, and are a central concept of everyday life. It is more than the somewhat performative service found in much western retail and hospitality, it is a core value that demands any service be wholehearted, open, and honest.

Flawless skills are not required (but are a goal, of course). The most important thing in Omotenashi is the pureness of heart behind the action – the desire to serve wholeheartedly.

So how can this apply to writing? One of the key phrases I remember from poetry workshops is “what do you want the reader to take away from this”. In my early writing days, this felt odd. Surely, I just have to write what I want, and the reader will take what they will?

This is true, up to a point. If we look beyond the initial writing stage, which can often be a blur of emotion, and move to the editing stage, considering the reader is essential in helping crystallise our concept. Applying Omotenashi does not mean dilution of our self to please another, it means giving our whole self to please another. As a writer I can hold something back, or I can give my whole spirit to what I’m creating, to what I want the reader to experience.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Omotenashi

Maybe this is a problem of being chronically ill and disabled—neither of which I’ve had a choice about, of course—or also a problem of being labeled “gifted” at a young age, having high expectations about what you were expected to do with your life. Heck, even Barbie was President. I’d meant to go to med school, and when my health got in the way, I veered to corporate work—and when my health got in the way of that, I veered again, to writing full-time (among other ventures). And writing, though I’ve published six books (eight, if you count non-fiction books), has definitely felt like less than a triumphant path. Maybe it feels like that for everybody, although I know people who experienced a lot of wins early in their careers, so who knows? Sometimes I feel like a lab mouse in a very specific maze I haven’t quite figured out, but I keep getting shocks instead of treats. On the other hand, still alive? So, that’s a win.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, May Arrives with Lilacs and Hummingbirds, Art Show Reports, Birthdays, and Down Days

Lately I’ve been trying to spend less time refreshing the news and more time working on my next poetry manuscript.  The news is grim and there’s so little I can do. Despair is corrosive to the spirit. Better to work on making something — even if that something is just words.

Of course, poetry isn’t wholly a distraction from the sorrows of the world. Especially given that this week I’ve been working on revising a series of poems that originated last year in a trip to Israel / Palestine. (Some of these lines first found form in the blog post Fifty truths, posted last June.) 

A poem is not like an essay or an argument — at least most of mine aren’t. My poems often originate in yetzirah, the sphere of the yearning heart, rather than in briyah, the world of clarity and intellect. For me a poem is more like a painting or a collage, hopefully functioning on an associative level. 

A friend remarked recently that she’s never before experienced a situation where so many people are not only utterly divided on an issue, but not even agreeing on basic facts about it. That’s another thing that can feel corrosive to the spirit. Another reason that lately I turn to poetry. 

I think of poetry the way I think of midrash: no single poem is “the right answer,” but the totality of poetry taken together can offer a glimmer of ultimate reality. That’s maybe especially true when it comes to poems about this contested, complicated, beloved place. 

Rachel Barenblat, Place of promise

On the first day of graduate poetry workshop with Linda Gregg in 2006, I was surprised when she began class by talking about her daily practice of walking around her neighborhood (NYC’s East Village), and then went around the room so that each of us—by way of introduction—could share what we did for exercise. Though I don’t remember her exact words, the point was about how we poets must remember our status as physical bodies in a physical world if we are to connect with that world, and ourselves, in our writing. While surprised by the conversation as an entrée to the semester (in my four years of undergraduate poetry workshops and one semester of graduate workshop never had a teacher mentioned physical activity as part of the writing process), the point struck me immediately as being right. I had come to college originally as a dance major, and had been practicing various styles of yoga since the age of thirteen. I felt, but had never articulated before that day, the connection between my compulsion to move and my compulsion to write.

The first assignment Gregg gave us that semester was, for a week, to write down six things we saw each day, trying our best to notice the “luminosity” in the everyday and, through the plainness and clarity of our language, retain it. In class the following week, we read our lists aloud and Gregg reacted to each item, sometimes with nothing more than a “Mmmmm…” or “keep going,” sometimes “No. This one is trying too hard” or “Yes, read that one again.” There seemed to be some sort of magic or divination at play: this was not the poetry workshop I was used to, and the rules were not only different, but also difficult to define. I had my doubts, as did some of my classmates. “How can she workshop what we see?” we wondered. But this wasn’t just a new way of writing or even seeing, it was a new way of being. Gregg’s weren’t assignments one could sit down and do at the last minute, or even in designated hours of the day; we learned that we had to see more often to see what mattered, and we couldn’t just watch our books, our screens, slot in our writing time like a class or coffee date. Being a poet was, we learned, a full time job. I’ve now used this exercise in many of my own workshops that I’ve taught over the years, and though I try to make the method and goals more transparent than Gregg did, I find it to be a wonderfully useful practice for poets and artists of all kinds, as it invites us all to be more present in our own lives.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, The Source of Poetry

I’ve also been thinking about old poems that could be worked on to revive what could have been a good idea with bad execution. One such poem is one called ‘Souvenirs’; it’s about accumulated stuff, old coins, postcards, things slung in drawers as keepsakes, etc. It was written as a much younger man, and I think I could do it more justice now, but I’ve shifted that back down the pile as a result of reading this week’s chosen poem.

I told you I’d won a copy of Will Burns’ natural burial ground a while back (and that this lead to Pear Rust appearing in Caught By The River. Well, I’ve been reading natural burial ground in the last week or so, and knew straight away I’d want to feature one of Will’s poems here. His writing is the sort of nature writing that I’d love to be able to master. Despite being a country lad, I’ve lived in London for so long now I think I’m more urban than rural…the countryside hasn’t leaked into or appeared in my work as much as I’d like. I’ve not quite got the edgelands into my work in the same way either. This is not to say that is all Will does, far from it, but when reading a new writer I am simultaneously reading for enjoyment and education…the ‘how do they do that?‘ part.

Mat Riches, Things

The collection’s title means ‘rage/to rage’ in Indonesian and Malay, which in English is conceptualised as ‘running amok’, as in a ‘frenzied indiscriminate homicide’ and the poems explore the ongoing effects of the word’s mistranslation. “amuk” is split into two sections, the first appropriately opens with the sequence “amuk” which explores the challenges of translation […]

“amuk” is more than a rage against colonial powers and the refusal of colonisers to respect indigenous peoples. It offers defiance and hope, in search of finding communal values through language and acts of translation, by stripping words back to their origins. “Doa”, through prayers, offers a beginning, a hope. Through “amuk” Khairani Barokka demonstrates an intelligent craft, understanding the power and misuse of words as well as the function of language. Questions are asked about translation: who gets to translate, who is translated and through whose gaze is the translation done? “amuk” is an important collection.

Emma Lee, “amuk” Khairani Barokka (Nine Arches Press) – book review

Seven years after the improbable idea of cross-pollinating poetry and science came abloom on a Brooklyn stage in a former warehouse built in Whitman’s lifetime, after it traveled to the redwoods of Santa Cruz and the sunlit skies of Austin, The Universe in Verse has become a book — fifteen portals to wonder, each comprising an essay about some enchanting facet of science (entropy and dark matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers), paired with a poem that shines a sidewise gleam on these concepts (Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou and W.H. Auden, Tracy K. Smith and Marie Howe).

It was a joy to write, and a joy to collaborate with two of the most thoughtful and talented people I know: The print book features original art by Ofra Amit (who painted my favorite piece in A Velocity of Being), and the audiobook features my favorite voice in the universe — the magnificent Lili Taylor.

Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse Book

I’ve learned so much from the writing of Ondaatje, as a writer — minor writer though I am. The moving from poetry to prose and back and forth and in between was certainly an early gleaning. Permission.

And the idea that one could be happy and write.

Probably I was first led to Rilke via Ondaatje? That makes sense. And to Cary Grant, which might not make sense. There was a time in my life when I took copious notes about the influence of Cary Grant and his films on Ondaatje’s work. But it was all speculation and I would have been too shy to approach him in any way and ask if I was being ridiculous.

The first time I heard Ondaatje read was when I was doing my library tech diploma at what is now MacEwan U but was then a small community college. I’d bought a few copies of the book because I wanted my friends to read this book — In the Skin of a Lion — which blew the top off my head. I stood in line after the reading to get them signed but I was so shy then. I still am but I just hide it better now. I was maybe three away from my moment and you know, I just couldn’t. I bolted.

Shawna Lemay, Reading Ondaatje

Because it is the last day of National Poetry Month, I decided this morning (April 30) to reread Sally Albiso’s Light Entering My Bones and share it with you. I hardly know where to begin, so, simply: these 61 poems, divided into 4 sections, completely bowled me over. Bittersweet? Poignant? Of course. Sentimental, not at all. Bold, yes. Deeply and beautifully wrought, moving? So much.

You’ll want to have your tissues nearby—the poems document Albiso’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and her decline. But be reassured, too. She holds our hand all the way through, a close friend walking us home in the dark. “When the Snow Falls,” begins one poem, drifting from the title into the first lines: “and stars congeal, plummeting to earth / in frigid descent, we go out to greet them. / We make angels of our bodies / and petition the stellae to remain with us.” I think that sums up the book’s task as well as anything. Life is precious and fleeting; pay attention.

Bethany Reid, Sally Albiso, LIGHT ENTERING MY BONES

i almost text you
as if we are still in a different world.
as if you are still outside
of my dorm waiting to be let in.
instead, i pause & delete the conversation.
it is like losing a limb
all over again. burying a hand
& waiting for another to grow back.
do you still have our messages? do you
still have the thumb i gave you?
come inside. let’s be fists if not wings.

Robin Gow, 5/1

This week: meaning in fog, emergency language, an inconvenient cemetery, a home make-under, World Poetry Day, the spring equinox, and more. Enjoy.

Today is the 21st anniversary of starting this blog, and it’s also the spring equinox…seeing the snow that fell overnight, I’m tempted to contemplate spring rather than the reasons why I continue to keep this space. However, looking up at these objects on my desktop, all of which represent parts of my writing journey, a few words come to mind.

With all the changes that have happened during the last two decades, both in my personal life and in our world, The Cassandra Pages has always felt like home. My home, as a space for working out my own thoughts, but also a place of hospitality where I could open the doors and welcome you, my readers and friends. In that respect, it’s very much like an extension of the home that we all carry inside ourselves throughout life. That indestructible home continues in spite of physical displacement, changes in our life situation and in our bodies, the loss of people dear to us, pain and suffering as well as joy, changes in society and the world. And it provides a ground and a center for that private awareness of ourselves moving inexorably through time: shedding, learning, pondering, understanding, letting go. I’m not who I was 21 years ago, and I’m also the same person. It’s a mystery, and also utterly natural, even if it’s difficult to understand or put into words.

Writing this blog has helped me follow myself and the world more consciously and more intentionally, and, unlike a journal, it’s been a way to do that in company. The rewards have been friendship, and also the sense that I’ve sometimes been able to give something meaningful or helpful. The longer and more reflective blog form has always felt more suitable for me than social media, and now, with more than a decade of the latter having altered society and our own lives in innumerable ways, I feel this even more strongly.

Beth Adams, Cassandra’s Blog Day

Yesterday I charged my dead reMarkable. I am ready to write poetry again, despite the chemo-induced fog I’m still experiencing.

A person can find meaning in fog. It can be very soothing actually, fog filling the little depressions in the landscape. Depression is the actual scientific name for places where the fog gathers here on the Jæren bogs. No metaphor intended. All truths converge at some point – maybe language with the landscape especially. […]

Someone will read Billy Collins’ The Lanyard at B.’s memorial service next week. It didn’t surprise me to see it in the program. It’s her favorite poem. She told me a few times. But until I saw it in the program, I didn’t think it could be a metaphor for what we try to do with our lives – in her case – a life that is a gift from God. I’m feeling a bit foolish now for not having seen it before. But I think we all have our blinders when it comes to possible perspectives: our biases, our traumas, our investments.

I am not invested in mother poems. Or God poems. But I should be invested in opening up to the perspective of people I love. I think I need to start looking to understand what other people see in the poems I first think “aren’t for me”. It is embarrassing to admit, but I’m not very good at this.

Ren Powell, Embracing the Fog Creatively

“You must provide
a chapel
for those who wish
to worship it,”
they said.
“You must nourish it
with costly food,”
and: “It is meant
to ruin you.”
I was ashamed
of its gawky
wings,
its very rarity.
It lumbered
in my nightmares,
unwieldy
in its fragility,
burdensome
as a dead
bison.

Kristen McHenry, Orchid

It was all going so well. I’d set myself the challenge of writing a quick post while the cake I am making is in the oven. I just had to finish blending the soup I was making (Turns out I was making the wrong soup according to my wife, but hey ho)….I turned around for a second and then heard the hand-held blender, the jug of unblended soup and the jug of blended soup crashing to the floor I had mopped a few hours ago. I am not ashamed to say that language was used. The wonderful poet (check out his latest at the FRIP) Christopher James described my language as “emergency language” on Friday when I commented on his poem. I like that.

Mat Riches, No use crying over spilt soup

My poem “Inconvenient Cemetery” was just published in a British poetry anthology called Enclosure, exploring how we partition land for the public good or private use. It’s available on Amazon, and has a wonderful selection of poetry. Here’s my contribution, previously published in Red River Review.

Inconvenient Cemetery

At a corner where two 6-lane highways cross
lies a 32-soul cemetery. 
Bindweed crawls on crooked markers
reading Beloved Mother, Cherished Child
Too Soon Gone, R.I.P. George Lindstrom 1842-1905.
Around it sprawls a shopping mall
with Neiman Marcus and Forever 21.
Home Depot is across the street
and a Landmark 12 Screen Cinema’s nearby. […]

Sarah Russell, Enclosure

Happy World Poetry Day! I’m almost always reading a poetry collection and right now it’s Life on Earth, Dorianne Laux’s newest.

I’ve been a fan of Dorianne’s work for quite a few years and have had a few interactions with her on what used to be Twitter. She has graciously allowed me to use lines from her poems in some of my own work such as this Creative Nonficton piece published in Love in the Time of Covid Chronicles that I wrote during the early days of the pandemic. Her poetry speaks to me because it’s about the joy and tragedy of everyday life, the hard work and love of relationships, as well as some really great pop culture pieces such as this favorite of mine that I share often. Her poem “Cher” spiked my memories of Cher as a teen growing up in the 70s, watching the Sonny and Cher Show religiously. It inspired a paragraph in my flash fiction piece Hot, Cold, & Blue published in and nominated by Still: The Journal for Best Small Fictions 2022 – and ultimately chosen for that anthology. I was thrilled since it is a favorite piece of mine. So, Dorianne has been an inspiration and I buy every book she publishes. Life on Earth doesn’t disappoint – every poem is a gem and right up there with her other stellar work.

Charlotte Hamrick, World Poetry Day

I played basketball in high school and at one point in my early twenties was so in love with weight training. I really found some poetry in it, honestly. If it had been even in existence in my youth I would have loved to have played women’s hockey. (My uncle had played pro hockey and that just seemed like such a dream game). So while I haven’t been into sports for a very long time, I still get why people are into them.

We recently watched Quirke on Kanopy (free with your library card). And it’s probably something I wouldn’t have ordinarily tuned into but we cancelled all our streaming services ages ago to save money, as one does these days, and once in a while just need to zone out and watch something. It turns out Quirke was based on the novels by John Banville — he writes his crime novels under the name Benjamin Black. And so I came across (on wikipedia) a quotation by Banville that I have been pondering:

“His typical writing day begins with a drive from his home in Dublin to his office by the river. He writes from 9 a.m. until lunch. He then dines on bread, cheese and tea and resumes working until 6 p.m., at which time he returns home. He writes on two desks at right angles to each other, one facing a wall and the other facing a window through which he has no view and never cleans. He advises against young writers approaching him for advice: “I remind them as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere.” He has compared writing to the life of an athlete: “It’s asking an awful lot of one’s self. Every day you have to do your absolute best — it’s a bit like being a sportsman. You have to perform at the absolute top of your game, six, seven, eight hours a day — that’s very, very wearing.”

The trouble with the picture Banville paints, is that most writers have to also squeeze in a job or two, family, cleaning the house, making dinner, etc. But I still think he’s correct about thinking about your writing as an athlete would training. The trick is to never let yourself go, keep your focus. Keep the writing muscle in good shape. Do your drills, watch the game videos, learn, learn, learn. Push yourself. Don’t get distracted. Of course for writers, this translates maybe to: read voraciously but choose carefully, (read like a writer), write something every day, do your warm-ups, open your file. Actually write. Don’t talk about it endlessly, don’t just wish you were writing, don’t talk about how you wish you had more time to write. Don’t squander your time. Don’t squander your soul, your energy, your words, your dreaming. Don’t go to writing retreats to meet other writers. Don’t bother with courses, or visits to the writer in residence, don’t ask for advice — no one knows what the fuck they are doing really anyway because each book is a whole new thing. Get alone, and get cool with that. Also, find your people, find your community, but do not waste your (or their) time.

Shawna Lemay, Spring Training for Writers and Other Creatives

Fortunately, to take my mind off things, I got an ARC of Loving Sylvia Plath: a Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne. If you felt like maybe Red Comet left out some details, you’re right, it did! But this book explores more than unpublished letters and medical documents which Van Duyne carefully researched, it re-raises the idea of respecting Sylvia Plath’s work and reclaiming the reputation that was sullied not only by her husband, Ted Hughes, but also mountains of critics (who were mostly ex-boyfriends!) and just that feeling that you’re a silly, emotional girl for liking Plath’s work, which the new critics were out there saying for years. You’ve been gaslit, dear reader! And this book shows the exact path to how critics, terrible husbands, and so-called friends of Plath’s went about belittling Plath’s legacy and her fans.

If Plath made a terrible decision marrying Hughes and leaving America (and her support system) behind, this book made me realize just how few resources she had and how little people who could have helped her, did. It also made me value my friends and family more, because when you get yourself in a tight spot, it helps to know someone—as many someone’s as possible—have your back. This is not to belittle Plath’s mental illness, or explain how she was some kind of saint, but it does highlight the practical ways women still have to fight to be supported, to be taken seriously, to be heard.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Palm Sunday! A New Poem in the Shore, Under the Weather Reading Sylvia Plath (and Parents in the Hospital), and Finding a Way Forward

Have any of you heard of the poet Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Sarah Piatt (1836-1919) was a highly accomplished American poet who was widely published during her life but who, until recently, had been forgotten/lost to readers and scholars alike. She’s one of the women poets who has benefitted from recovery projects such as the ones undertaken by Second Wave feminists in the latter decades of the 20th century, though Piatt’s recovery was more recent.

Piatt grew up in a blueblood family on a plantation outside Lexington, Kentucky, and several of her poems interrogate the institution of slavery and her personal implication in that institution. The persona she assumes in her poetry is not the conventional naïf or simple and virtuous wife and mother, but a sexually mature woman with her own history, her own desires, her own thoughts: In short, a fully-formed person.

Likewise, Piatt’s poems often imbue domestic landscapes with a complicated and unsettling atmosphere, steeped in American sins. For example, “A Child’s Party,” a narrative poem about a childhood memory at her grandmother’s home, reveals how every element of the domestic sphere under the institution of slavery—from the fine china, lace, and carpets to the children’s games—is infected with racism such that no one and nothing is innocent. The poem “The Funeral of a Doll”* contains a similarly eerie domestic atmosphere in its description of a funeral for the “waxen saint” of a girl, “Little Nell,” about whom the reader can never quite discern whether she is a doll-like girl, or an actual doll. In the process, however, the speaker emphasizes the smallness, daintiness, and femininity of the occasion so consistently (“She, too, was slight and still and mild”; “Her funeral it was small and sad”; “And there is no one left to wear/ her pretty clothes”) that the poem becomes saturated with irony and unease. By emphasizing the cuteness of the funeral rather than its grief, Piatt points at the trivialized lives of women and girls. 

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Women and Wilderness (2)

In her essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1972), Alice Walker explores the legacy of Black women artists (“artist” denoting who one is, rather than what one does) denied the material conditions needed to create the kinds of work we define as art (paintings, poems, essays, musical scores, novels, etc.). Writing about an anonymous Black woman who created a quilt that hangs in the Smithsonian, Walker states that she “left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only medium her position in society allowed her to use.”

I read this essay not long before I became the keeper of Anna’s quilt. My great-grandmother was neither Black nor a slave, but like Walker’s ancestors, she lacked the kind of materials and position she would have needed to create traditional works of art. One day, remembering the essay, I began studying it for possible clues to the woman who’d created it.

Only then did I see that the placement of color and pattern was not random. Only then did I see that there had been an attempt to create something pleasing from a jarring array of fabrics. I thought I saw that the most subdued fabrics were at the outer edges, while the most vibrant—tomato reds, deep navies, thick white stripes and polka dots—were in the center of the quilt. I wondered if it had been a kind of self-portrait, if the young woman who had spoken sassily to her employer had remained alive inside the staid woman—my father’s Nana—she became.

I wrote a poem about the quilt, wanting to honor in her and her experience what Walker said her mothers and grandmothers had given to her: “the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see… .” I wondered what she might have created if, like me, she had been able to go to college and work and create with words.

And still I wrecked it.

Rita Ott Ramstad, Everyday Use

I feel a peculiar shame when people come round and tell me my house is clean.

“isn’t it immaculate”

“sorry, I just get really stressed if it’s messy”

“I wish could be organised”

“I wish I could leave the house without having to tidy everything up first but there we go”

Behold, yet another way to pit people against each other over things that don’t matter. I’m kind of irked that I’m writing about it if I’m honest. Whereas women of my nan’s generation and (crucially) class would whisper about those with less than immaculate houses, there’s been a shift to proclaim that those who choose to be neat are somehow failing – they are dull. Why is so much store placed on housework? Why do I feel I need to apologise for doing something that makes my life simpler and my mind more calm? […]

While “dull women have immaculate houses” sounds kind of liberating, it merely strengthens the idea that carrying out household tasks somehow correlates with our own worth. Sneering about a person being “immaculate” is the same as sneering about a person for being grubby. Both acts perpetuate the myth that we are somehow defined by the state of the kitchen floor or our whether we have shiny bath taps.

Shiny bath taps may not bring me the same joy as a writing a poem or seeing new shoots emerge from carefully tended soil, but for others they might.  Some days, shining the taps may be the only thing a person can do– and on that day, that bit of reflected light brings joy.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Dull women have immaculate houses

I look around at my resoundingly not-fashionable home and yes, I’d like to replace the peeling linoleum and the falling-apart kitchen cupboards. I’d like to finally get the molding nailed in place instead of stacked in the basement. But I can’t imagine tossing out the memories embedded in the furniture, the art, the books, the dishes, even the Pyrex measuring cup so old its markings are no longer visible.

The things that mean something to us are uniquely embedded in our memories. […]

There’s too much to show you, but I’ll close by telling you about the spectacular nose at the start of this piece. It was carved by my brother when he was 13 or 14. It has always hung in my kitchen and is one of the things I’d save if there was a house fire.

In a world of crass materialism, appreciating what we have isn’t just about frugality or simplicity. It’s about quiet satisfaction found in meaning and memory. Things made with “wakened hands,” as D.H. Lawrence wrote, “are awake with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.”

Laura Grace Weldon, Home Make-Under

Something apocalyptic lurks in the background of my thinking this morning.  I like the idea of linking hobbies that we see as evoking a cozy domesticity to larger societal collapse–I have always loved that juxtaposition.

I also like the idea of something that most people see as useless–embroidery, for example–to some larger skill that will be needed in the future.  The woman who can embroider will be able to suture your skin together when the emergency room has collapsed when the power grid went down.  Too much?

I only have a few hours left of Quilt Camp, so let me return to fabric arts today–back to art with words tomorrow.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Domestic Arts and Societal Collapse: An Overview

Once, what came before the trucks
with their sacks of flour,
before the bread to be baked
and then heaped with hummus,

before the fattoush salad,
the soups of lentils and fava beans,
the eggs or chicken,
the copper pitchers of sous,

was the anticipation of taste,
the clarity of a satisfied stomach,
eyes delighting at the sight
of knafeh and date-filled ma’mool.

It is four forty-five a.m.,
the morning of February 29,
and the trucks arrive.

So, too, do the soldiers.
Look: they are anywhere,
even everywhere,
the aid trucks are.

But these soldiers,
they make no exceptions
for the food-deprived.
They feel the hunger.

Maureen Doallas, Flour Massacre (Poem)

Ugh, reading the news again. I turn away. I can’t turn away. I turn away. Reading the newspaper on my computer screen sometimes I catch a glimpse of something on the screen.

Startled, I say, wait, what am I looking at? Is that a double image in that photo from some war front?

No, it’s me, in reflection on the screen. A trick of light and angle.

I’m in it. Of it. And not. It has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with me. What do I do with it all? How to respond? I’m sure we all feel a little of that. I hope we do.

Anyway, that sort of cognitive dissonance makes me think of this unforgettable poem by Yusef Komunyakaa called “Facing It.” Although it’s of a specific place and experience, I think it is exactly what I’ve been feeling, this sense of being outside and inside the world, part of and apart. Confusing things for other things, being with actual people and with ghosts. In it. Of it.

Marilyn McCabe, I’m a window

When I write poetry, for whom am I writing? Who is my intended audience?

This is a question I have only recently started asking myself. Perhaps it is different for novelists, or storywriters, or memoirists. Perhaps it is different if you seek to earn a living from your writing; but my answer, at least until a few weeks ago, would have been in the first instance I write for myself. I need to translate thoughts, feelings, memories, impressions, imaginings,  experiences, observations, into words and structures, driven partly, I think, by a compulsion to generate some sort of order and meaning out of chaos and confusion.

It continues to be a pleasant surprise when others read my poetry and relate to it in some way. My prime motivation for writing, however, is not a desire to be read. […]

In recent weeks I have […] ventured into a new genre, writing poems with a very specific constraint for an audience of one. At the beginning of every week my grandchild is given a list of ten spelling words to learn for a Friday test. This is a chore. My grandchild enjoys reading but is not enthused by practising how to write out the words with the correct spelling. In an attempt to make the learning process more interesting, I have been constructing poems that contain all the words on the weekly spelling list. I’ve sought to incorporate characteristic elements of children’s poetry: strong rhythm and rhyme scheme, a lively narrative and plenty of visual interest using stock images, emojis, font and colour. Humour and surprise are important too. Characters, events, and vocabulary are all chosen specifically to appeal to my solitary reader.

This is not my natural genre! However, the poems are fun to write, and have certainly given me insight into the craftsmanship required to create good children’s poetry. Most importantly, my audience of one has been appreciative of my efforts. My grandchild enjoys the poems, reading and rereading them over the course of the week. And the spelling test results have improved significantly! 

Marian Christie, Audience as Constraint

I’ve been thinking a lot about why we do what we do. To be clear, I’ve been thinking about my work because I’ve been answering questions about it. What inspired you to write a children’s book? Why did you write a memoir instead of grappling with the same material in collection of poetry instead? What’s next for you? At a book festival last year, after I’d read fromYou Could Make This Place Beautiful and talked a little about it, someone in the audience asked, “Why write an emotional memoir?”

I think my eyes widened. I mean, I genuinely didn’t understand the question. So I asked, for clarification, “You mean, why take the heat? Why put yourself out there?”

“Yes, why did you do it?” This person wasn’t being confrontational. The question seemed to come from a sincere curiosity.

What might you say, if someone asked you why you wrote about your life?

I answered in the most succinct way I knew how: “Because I’m a writer.”

I didn’t say much more at the time—there were other hands raised—but I’ve been thinking about it. I could unpack the question the way I unpacked several anticipated questions in You Could Make This Place Beautiful:

I could say that I don’t write things just for me. I don’t keep a journal; I don’t write morning pages for my eyes only. If I write something down in one of my many, always-at-risk-of-being-misplaced notebooks or legal pads, or in the Notes app on my phone, or on a scrap of paper I have handy, or in the margins of a book I’m reading, my hope—and more than that, my intention—is that this idea, phrase, metaphor, or scrap of language will someday make it into a piece of writing I share with other people.

I could say that when I write, even if part of the purpose of to grapple with or puzzle over something myself, I’m always writing to the reader. For you.

I could say that writing is how I make a living. I could say that I can’t imagine anyone asking a professional baker, “Why not just bake things for yourself?” I could say that writing—whether it’s a book, an essay, a poem, or this newsletter—is how I keep the lights on, the water running, the fridge reasonably full. It’s how I pay for my kids’ clothes and shoes and extracurriculars. And it’s how I can afford to fix things in this hundred-year-old house when they inevitably break.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

At the end of December, 2023, I wrote a blog post about some writing goals I’d set for myself:

“I’m more interested in what’s to come, not what’s past. When I ask myself what I want to accomplish as a writer in 2024, the answers come back loud and clear. I want to take more risks in my writing, to challenge myself in what I write about and how I write it, and to help others with the same goals.”

Taking more risks, challenging myself—this reminded me of the Japanese word “shoshin,” which means “beginner’s mind.” It comes from Zen Buddhism, but the concept applies to any endeavor that requires effort and dedication: when we start to practice an activity, we lack preconceived ideas about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s horseback riding or running for public office: the idea applies equally to all pursuits. 

Something happens, however, as soon as we achieve even a small amount of proficiency. Our openness to new ideas narrows. The better we get, the more close-minded we become. When we rise to the level of experts, we are in danger of becoming conventional, of rejecting new and challenging ideas, and gradually sinking into obsolescence.

Erica Goss, Back to Beginner’s Mind

It is a truth universally acknowledged that to run a print literary magazine in the current climate of cost of living crisis, post brexit red tape and continuous reduction in arts funding, is to be slightly insane.

Spelt is a full colour print magazine which seeks to celebrate and validate the rural experience. We feature poetry, creative non fiction, poetry film author interviews and columnists.

In issue 09 we worked with an intern at York St John university whose interest was in children’s writing. We decided to devote a section to poems for children. It was a beautiful issue.

I founded Spelt magazine during the pandemic in 2020 with a £1600 crowd funded pot and a great deal of ambition. I felt there was a lack of non romanticised rural writing. When I looked for creative writing about rural life, nature, ecology etc, it was so often an observed act – a person moving to the countryside after living in a city, observing the difficulties of no buses past 6pm, the eccentric characters that lived in the village and the glorious, simple life of the rural; abandoning the grind of the hard city life for birdsong and grow-your-own. Rural life is glorious, but it’s not simple. It’s no more simple than anyone else’s life. When I looked for creative non fiction books about rural life, I found the same thing. There was a lack of creative writing about, and by, working class rural writers and rural people from minority groups, and rural people who lived rurally and had grown up rurally. I’m from a working class background myself and grew up rurally and didn’t see myself represented in the rural and nature writing that was out there.

Wendy Pratt, Notes from Spelt Magazine – The Impossibility of Producing a Print Literary Magazine

I can probably do better with
the broad bean seedlings:
after their tiny muscular heaves 

through the month’s wet earth
they are now shaking off their casings,
revealing their purpose. 

This is the truth of Spring,
its irrepressible pulse of growth, renewal.
What else can we believe in?

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Searching for words (World Poetry Day 2024)

[I]t’s World Poetry Day on Thursday, 21 March. This year, the theme is ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’. More about World Poetry Day here. My own offering for the day is a postcard I made for World Book Night which features a poem, ‘The Sweet Arab, the Generous Arab’ by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Josephine Corcoran, Informal Poetry Feedback Session with Trowbridge Stanza

I’m not sure I’ve ever really celebrated World Poetry Day, which was apparently adopted by UNESCO in 1999 with the aim of “supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.” It’s held on March 21st each year, and this year in Eastbourne the indefatigable ‘Mister John’ who hosts a monthly poetry open mic is staging a special event on the theme of ekphrasis. The Hastings Stanza will well represented, and I’m taking along poems inspired by contemporary artworks by Anish Kapoor and Jann Haworth. […]

Reading poems based on artworks is tricky. If they’re famous paintings then at least some of the audience might be familiar with them. If not, do you spend five minutes explaining what it’s a picture of before reading the poem? What if the artwork is a piece of performance art? I’ve written something inspired by The House with the Ocean View by Marina Abramovic, but decided against reading it this week because explaining the artwork is too time consuming. Even with static art, ideally we would have a projector and be able to show it while reading the poem. But what if that’s not possible? I’ve opted for putting a copy of the art next to the poem, printing it out and taking a few ‘pass around’ copies with me. We’ll see how it goes.

Robin Houghton, On performing ekphrastic poems, Poetry Book Fair etc

The Qiu Jin translations include the ones shamefully used by the British Museum for their “China’s Hidden Century” exhibition, without credit or compensation. It was only by chance Wang discovered the use of her translations. It took two months for the museum to reach a settlement since the museum’s initial reaction was to take out the poems and translations as if they had never been used. Wang wanted the poems and translations reinstated with chance to check they were displayed correctly and to be credited and paid for her work. It is astounding, but sadly not surprising, that such an established museum could have budgeted and paid for the curation of the exhibition could overlook copyright of translations and then let the translator crowd-fund to take the museum to court. Translators’ work is often undervalued. It should not be. Based on data from “Publishers Weekly’s” Translation Database, of English translations of Sinophone poetry books published from 2008-2022, only 26% were written by women poets and 26% translated by women translators.

Emma Lee, “The Lantern and the Night Moths” Translator Yilin Wang (Invisible Publishing) – book review

Today. I doubt Hamburger would’ve wanted much fanfare, but I can’t let it pass.

His 2000 collection Intersections (‘Shorter Poems 1994–2000’) included, on facing pages, two of his loveliest poems, ‘Spindleberry Song’ and ‘Swans in Winter’. The final two quatrains of the first provide another example of Hamburger’s earth-rooted melancholy:

Fallen leaves, let them stay
Where they stopped, weighed down with rain.
From the season for lying low,
Get up if you can.

But time’s the mere measurement
Of motion, mutation in space.
Unbleeding though bare from this plant
Hangs the heart-shaped seed-carapace.

‘Swans in Winter’, though, is a beautiful affirmation:

Has their long marriage ended? On pastures separated
Less by our culvert than their chosen distance,
Composure that seems indifference to our eyes
While each unhuddled picks at low herbage, grasses,
Their slow necks rippling as though no fang, no weather
Could ever so much as ruffle the silk it wears.

I especially like that ‘unhuddled’, and how he presents it without commas either side, the effect of which is to change the word into a noun. Making nouns into adjectives (or verbs) is common poetic practice, but to do the reverse, other than by sticking a definite article in front, is, to my mind, very rare.

Matthew Paul, Michael Hamburger’s centenary day

equinox
            the widower has grown
a new beard

Grant Hackett [no title]

Winter is kicking us in the teeth again. Of course it is. Spring always arrives in fits and starts, keeps us on our toes. It’ll be weeks before it’s safe to trust it up here in the Northeast. Like right now, for example. After a string of warm, sunny days, it’s been windy, frigid and snowy all week. And today? Slush and ice.

It’s a good day to stay inside and write, I suppose… except hiding out and writing is all I’ve been doing the last few months. That’s not a bad thing, but I am a little punch drunk from it.

I’ve been pushing hard since Christmas, and while it’s been fruitful in many ways — an assortment of new drafts, some good thinking on revisions — it feels very scattered. I can’t seem to direct my efforts and energy toward anything that looks like progress.

Ideas are expanding out instead of laser beaming themselves at a version 2.0 of the manuscript, which is what I’ve told myself I’m “supposed to” be doing. In fact, every edit I make seems to prove that version 1.0 is nothing more than a house of cards. Every gesture — the wild ones, the quiet ones — levels the whole thing.

Carolee Bennett, Hey, Mama, How’s That Poetry Manuscript Coming Along?

I am here to confess that I have been making everything hard. What brings on such a mood—a straitjacket twisting my arms up and bunching my shoulders so my muscles cramp—is often the newspaper, its heavy thump on the drive, the leaden headlines, the AP wire photographs of bombed buildings. From there it spreads, so that my life seems difficult. A daily walk becomes a burden instead of a gift. Instead of happily co-existing with my old dog, I begin worrying over him. Gratitude, another daily habit, is only one more chore.

In such a state, how lucky to have picked up this book by Nebraska poet Ted Kooser. From the back cover:

Great poetry, like Kooser’s, like Chekhov’s stories, is not sentimental, but it is characterized by a kind of tender wisdom communicated with absolute precision.
–Jonathan Holden, The North Dakota Quarterly

I have sung Kooser’s praises before, and so I won’t go on and on today (for two of them, see links here and here.) In brief, this book came about when Kooser was recovering from cancer surgery and radiation; he writes  in the short preface:

During the previous summer, depressed by my illness, preoccupied by the routines of my treatment, and feeling miserably sorry for myself, I’d all but given up on reading and writing. Then, as autumn began to fade and winter came on, my health began to improve. One morning in November, following my walk, I surprised myself by trying my hand at a poem. Soon I was writing every day.

He walked before first light—his oncologist had told him to stay out of the sun for a year—and each day he wrote a short poem, pasted it onto a postcard, and sent it to his friend, writer Jim Harrison. What could be simpler? And how lucky are we, to have the record of these poems, a whole chain of 100, stepping stones, or a daily prescription to be taken, each made of close observation and (often) dazzling metaphor.

Bethany Reid, Ted Kooser’s WINTER MORNING WALKS

I am aware that the above poem is, like all art, a product of a particular time and culture, and so is informed by important sub-texts. These days, I feel affinity with writers in general, regardless of whether I like their work. When I read something that is flagged up (often as ‘heart stopping’ or ‘breath-taking’) that isn’t to my taste, I generally don’t spend time wondering why others like them. ‘Good for you, best of luck,’ I tend to think, and move on to seeking out something I enjoy. This evening I started to focus on why this poem didn’t appeal to me, and I found myself writing this. It isn’t meant negatively. I get carried away sometimes…

Roy Marshall, A take

Before Combustion opens with a suite of poems that focus on the new moments of parenting, of fatherhood, offering such clear and quiet moments I haven’t seen prior around the subject, one I’ve also had the experience of enjoying three different times, three different ways: “I am the oldest / living thing // you know,” he writes, as part of “In the Beginning,” “an unshaven // bristlecone / bent over // your bed.” While there is an enormous amount of territory worth covering and recovering on parenting generally, the subject matter of fatherhood is still one that emerges with hesitation; a poem or two at most by any new fathers, perhaps, although there are exceptions [something I covered across 2012-3 in my four-part “Writing Fatherhood” essay over at Open Book, which Benjamin Robinson reminded me of recently].

Bradley’s Before Combustion is a collection sectioned into quarters, with the opening cluster of poems focusing on that newness of life, that newness of expansion, becoming and being. As the two-page poem “Waiting Room” begins: “Your third night alive / I drove home // from the hospital / to find sleep // and left you sleeping / those few hours. // In darkness, having / forgotten // everything but food, / water, and how // to keep you fed, clean, / and quiet, // I entered the house / a stranger // and failed to notice / the oak leaves // letting go.” In certain ways, the entire collection is centred around that opening moment of new life, new fatherhood, echoing the way one’s entire world compresses into a single, singular moment at the birth of one’s first child, slowly rippling out a return to the world but with an entirely new perspective, an entirely new lens. The poems of Bradley’s Before Combustion begin with new life, but slowly do edge out into that return, offering graceftul turns of phrase and line-breaks and short phrases, each of which do provide a slowness, requiring deep attention, even through poems such as “There Must Be 50 Ways of Looking / at Mountain Goats on the Internet,” that begins: “Stoned, blindfolded, one /goat dangles above / a second, horns / sheathed, four / ankles bound / and then four more, / rhyming quatrains.” In certain ways, each section provides its own impulse, less leading up to combustion than reacting to a change or changes so life-altering they seem akin to an explosion. Or, as he writes to open the poem “Parable of the Drought”: “Not the end of the world but the onset / of another.”

rob mclennan, Nicholas Bradley, Before Combustion

In this deceptively simple poem, we hear not the thrush’s song in the abstract — not just a thrush singing — but its content, what the thrush is actually singing about. This is the first poem in a book of odes, and the songbird as a figure for the poet is of course a traditional motif: that is partly the force and irony of the repeated ‘familiar things’. We are used to encountering singing birds in lyric verse.

For any twentieth-century reader, the most obvious connection here is surely to Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’, whose ‘ecstatic sound’ in the bleakest of landscapes seem inexplicable to the speaking voice of the poem, forcing him to conclude that the bird must have access to ‘some blessèd hope, whereof he knew / But I was unaware’. Like Bunting’s thrush in the thunderstorm (‘From a shaken bush’), Hardy’s bird is ‘blast-beruffled’. Hardy had recently turned 60 when he wrote ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in 1900, the year of Bunting’s own birth, and the ‘agèd thrush’ suggests the poet himself, reflecting on why he sings and of what, and on what kind of knowledge is involved in writing poetry.

Bunting’s relationship to the darkling thrush is ironic. Hardy imagines that some kind of hope must ‘tremble through’ the thrush, and Bunting’s poem starts and end from the perspective of the interpreting observer, from as it were Hardy’s perspective (‘O gay thrush!’), but he answers Hardy’s poem by purporting to record what the bird is actually singing about: not some powerful but intangible hope or ‘joy illimited’ but death; hunger; lust; ‘familiar things’.

Victoria Moul, One poem

If you follow me on social media, you know that fairly regularly I throw up a plea that people who run conferences or reading series or just any old writerly opportunity consider inviting writers from Alaska to take part. I mean, there are so many writers in Alaska, and we so rarely have those doors opened for us. I want to stress that this lack of opportunity has nothing to do with how talented writers in Alaska are; it simply has to do with the fact that we don’t have the same ability to make connections. Or, as I’ve been told a couple times now, travel is expensive from Alaska (not that most of us wouldn’t use some of our huge stash of air miles to teach at your conference or appear in your reading series). 

All this to say, Michael Mercurio, a poet and editor who lives in Massachusetts, asked me if it might be possible to put together an all Alaska poet edition of the What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series that he curates and runs. And of course, I jumped. I thought of two poets, Peggy Shumaker and Annie Wenstrup, that continually astound me with the depth of their work. There was some back and forth about what to read and how to read, but the whole process was so smooth and downright fun! 

Let me share the video of the reading and also say See, that wasn’t so hard; Alaskans show up for these opportunities. To all the people who attended the reading and to all the people who might take a bit of time now to watch the video of it, thank you. Thank you for your support of poetry in the world. And to Michael Mercurio, thank you so much for your taking a chance on us and for contributing rich readings of our work and making us all so comfortable and taken care of. Thank you for not only opening the door, but for bringing us right across the threshold into a beautiful event.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Grateful for an open door

It’s been a busy week that began with seeing The Penelopiad at the Goodman, which was just the sort of female epic I would have loved to have seen when I was working on the Persephone poems. There were quite a few other movies, including a French movie where people inexplicably turned into animals (The Animal Kingdom), some monster-laden Korean sci-fi (The Host), and the remake Suspiria, which was as confusing and dream-like as I remember from watching it before. In between there were late night diner meals, lots of writing, and slow, but productive, mornings. 

In this last week or so of March, I am gearing up for April, which seems odd to call a national poetry month, since every month is poetry month round here, but it gets an undue amount of attention each spring. April is always a month of note for me with my birthday and in general, just a new momentum as the weather changes and days get longer. I am still waffling over which of a few ideas for series I want to tackle to start off NaPoWriMo, which I always have mixed feelings on. Not the daily writing, of course, but more the daily posting, which feels like dropping a dime into a deep well and never hearing it hit bottom. I post a lot of work, usually after it’s had some time to gel and gain its footing. Those new drafts can be rougher, and infinitely more vulnerable. And it’s all shouting into a void, a void that gets more echoey during April. However, some of my favorite series have had a birth or been completed in Aprils past. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 3/23/2024

At the beginning of 2024, I had grand plans for my submitting my poetry to journals across the world. I would write and submit every single month, update my submission spreadsheet regularly, not delay in resubmitting work when the inevitable rejections came through. etc. etc. How’s that going for me? Well, I did submit work to 4 journals in January then wrote a submission for an arts grant in February, and haven’t submitted anything since! I planned to get back into this month and was all set to submit to Westerly Mag but I didn’t bcs I wrote the wrong date in my diary & missed the deadline LOL. Truth is, I suck at these kinds of plans, and I know I suck at them, so why do I persist in the planning?

I think it has to do with intention and process. Firstly, intention. It’s a little trick of the mind. I know that if I intend to submit to 3 journals every month, then I’ll submit to 3 journals some months (maybe 3 or 4 months in the year), and I’m okay with that. I don’t always get published, but when I do it’s a good little dopamine hit. I love seeing my work in context with other writers & artists. I really am blown away by the number of excellent writers, poets & artists in the world. […]

Secondly, submitting work is about process. I spoke to another poet recently who said it takes her all day to prepare and submit poetry for a journal. I understand. Sometimes the guidelines for formatting are fiddly and it takes time to check and re-check that you’ve got em right. But it’s also lovely to spend a whole day with your poem/s. I know they’re not babies or children (I kinda hate that comparison), but the spit and polish we apply at the submission stage is a tender act. Even when we send a poem out that we know is not ready, it lives in our bodies, our thoughts & emotions and we hope that it receives a soft landing, even if we did send it out in a cardy when it really needed a coat. Or sumthin.

Caroline Reid, POETS, How Might Submitting Your Work Work For You?

drive me home wordlessly.
here is the way i conjure a broken world.
tell me, what do you know
about mending. when i say,
“here is the fault line i am sewing”
then you know i really mean it.
i do not want to need a cipher
but there are crickets awake now
& they are speeding up time.

Robin Gow, i’ve been telling everyone “i’m sorry”

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Whitman, who called himself a kosmos and believed of “the true poems” that “whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars.”

Shortly after Whitman returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, when quantum mechanics made it impossible to take seriously the image of the atom as a miniature solar system of electrons orbiting a nucleus but no one yet knew what image to replace it with, quantum pioneer Niels Bohr told quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg:

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Another half century later, after we had split the atom and split the world, James Baldwin insisted that poets are “the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” And if the truth, the elemental truth, is that we are matter yearning for meaning — “atoms with consciousness,” in the poetic words of the physicist Richard Feynman — then poetry, this supreme instrument of self-knowledge, is the mirror consciousness holds to the cosmos.

That is what poet, translator, and Chinese literature scholar David Hinton explores in Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry (public library) — an inquiry into poetry as spiritual practice, lensed through the life of Tu Fu: a man of uncommon depth and breadth of spirit, who lived as an impoverished wanderer through a civil war in the eight century to become China’s greatest poet.

Maria Popova, Awakened Cosmos: Poetry as Spiritual Practice

I’m sorry, I don’t know, I’m not from here.
Well, certainly, you could try following the blue railings.
I think it’s a long way, it might take some time, maybe.
Yes, if you keep walking I’d say you’ll get there by Monday.
Perhaps even Sunday night if you don’t mind the dark.
But then I’ve been here four days and recognise little.
I’ve seen that blue building over there before.
And that blue bus. Yes, yes, I know it’s all blue.
The whole town, the road, the pavement, the park.
Even when it’s cloudy the sky is blue, too, yes.
As I said, I don’t know. I’m not from here.

Bob Mee, TRYING TO BE HELPFUL

And we talk about Orkney, how the darkness came without warning, the way we clumsily tangoed through my grief (which was the sore, raw, pulpy blue of a bruise) every night to the songs of Carlos Gardell in my father’s dusty workshop surrounded by bald, white, un-glazed vases and death masks and raku bowls and jars of pigments.

We talk about how, despite all the whiskey and the weeping, we almost remembered the dance in the morning, how, some nights we slow-danced together in our dreams.

We talk about how we kept missing the bright blue, electric green, flashing, pulsing, peep show of the Aurora Borealis because we were too tired, because I was too blue, because I needed to dream of other colours for a while.

We talk about the way we made a bed up on the floor of the damp caravan, angled the pillows so that we could see the sky before we slept. tried to rename the constellations to match our moods and drifted off with sharp, bright lines of stars glowing on our tongues.

We talk about that snowy dawn in May when  you dragged me down to the harbour in my pyjamas and wellies, to hear the seals singing, to see jellyfish, the colour of Turkish Delight, wobbling amongst the deep, green dulse on the strandline.

And you say this blue I’ve brought you is the colour of a robin’s egg.

And I say this blue you’ve brought me is the colour of contentment. If I’d known before, this is the kind of blue I’d have asked for.

Gaia Holmes, My kind of blue

Leave the silence to the earth.
It learns quietness from the
countless graves in its womb.
There are scenes behind the
scenes. There are things in
motion behind the things that
cannot move. Like flowers.
Human, write of flowers that
yearn for graves and hair and
homes and the slight breeze
that said, perfumed, look, there
is love behind love, look, there
was a lover behind the lover.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Write Right…