This week: the veil of the quotidian, a perfectly demotic raven, unborn stars, line breaks in the day, and much more. Enjoy.

Those mornings when I wake and everything feels metaphorical, in the sense I feel the connection, the similarity between each thing and another, see, as a matter of course how a chair is a kind of shoe, a rock is the cupped space a hand makes. Perhaps this is a continuation of a sleep state when the narrative of dream is able to draw into its current any thing viewed on its banks. Or it might be that some of the veil of the quotidian has been drawn back, the pataphysical separation of things, the pre-emptive division of the world into non-contiguous categories in order to enable our movement from one point A to another point B, rather than being pulled into spiritual or philosophical reverie by the vortical relationship of things.

Gary Barwin, Waking up metaphorical

Whew! And wahoo! Like many of you, I’m still absorbing the impact of this historic blue wave, and feeling some combination of elation, exhaustion and relief. It will take some time to clean up the mess this regime has made, and to build a more fair and functional system that works for all of us. Still, we are definitely on the right track now!

Through these difficult years, the day’s headlines have seemed to run on an infinite doom loop.

tipping Monday
out of the pill box
deep November

And while this historically cruel, corrupt and incompetent administration slides towards authoritarianism, making art sometimes feels pointless. But the saying, “Joy is an act of resistance” has guided me. And creating bright, beautiful art has been one way to light a spark in the darkness.

Since Tuesday night, I keep finding myself unconsciously letting out a long, deep breath. There is work ahead, but we can finally exhale. Congratulations to everyone who helped generate this blue tsunami, and thanks to all who were drops in the wave!

deep breathing
the shift from estar
to ser

Annette Makino, Exhaling after the elections

Tonight it’s all you can do
to keep from dissolving—the sight of people putting
their I Voted stickers on lampposts near where Alex
and Renee were murdered, the news of blue wins in near
every state. Someone you love telling you this is the first
time in years they did not wish, almost every minute,
to die.

Luisa A. Igloria, What’s Visible

After thirty-seven years in power, Robert Mugabe was ousted by a faction of the military and later died of advanced prostate cancer at the Gleneagles hospital in Singapore. When I learned he and his wife, Grace Mugabe, had been placed under house arrest, I flew to the capital, Harare.

If you’d asked me at the time—why is it you’re going to Zimbabwe?—I would’ve said that I wanted to learn from writers and artists and musicians. First, after decades of creating work that might speak truth to power while that power was actively suppressing the people (as well as their own imaginations within the artform), how would the fall of the dictator affect their creative work? And secondly, would they need to reinvent themselves, or learn who they are within their artform, now that they might not be creating work in direct relationship to the power structure of their country as they’d known if for much of their lives?

I landed in the capital in December of 2017 without knowing a single person in the entire country. As I booked the flights, I reached out to poets and friends who had contacts there—and this helped a great deal. Soon enough, I made my way under a canopy of poinciana and jacaranda trees in the Harare Gardens to a thatched roof lapa, where a session of the Zimbabwe Writers Association happened to be meeting. […]

I won’t name the writers and artists that offered me contextual insights into the political nature of their work, or how Mugabe’s rule had affected them. Why? When I asked them, several shared variations of this response: With the old leader gone, the system hadn’t changed; rather, everyone in the power structure simply moved up one rung on the ladder.

That leaves us with Emmerson Mnangagwa, the current president. He was already in charge by the time I’d landed in December, and now, as recently as July of 2026, he’s forced a constitutional amendment to extend his current rule (postponing the planned 2028 elections) to 2030. Even more alarming, direct elections have been abolished in Zimbabwe. Going forward, the president will be elected by a vote of the Senate and the National Assembly, rather than by a direct vote of the people. This is widely considered a constitutional coup, all of it done with pen and paper, under the guise of democratic legitimacy.

Again, I will not name the writers and artists who spoke with me about the politics of making in their society, but I will share that the transparent subtext of my own country seemed self-evident within my questions about power and authoritarian rule, the role of artists under structures designed to silence voices of dissent, the many ways that artists themselves might self-censor within these contexts, and more. In essence, I’d gone to Zimbabwe to consider how writers and artists might survive within my own country, given time, given a deepening authoritarian divide, given pressure from the despotic nature of power in its corrupted state.

Brian Turner, After the Fall of the Dictator

This Sunday morning, I’ll be leaving the Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival at the crack of dawn, because if you’re a brass bander you always have somewhere to be at 11am on Remembrance Sunday. Provided the M25 is kind to me, I’ll be standing on soggy leaves by the war memorial with the band. We’ll play the laminated hymns we always do, the principal cornet will play the Last Post and Reveille, sighing quietly with relief when he completes it clean, all the names on the stone will be read aloud and we’ll God-Save-the-King everyone home. This happens across the country, in tens of thousands of towns and villages simultaneously, and poetry is at its heart:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

And we do. Religion or politics aside, I’m someone who is immensely comforted by a ritual. I love a ceremony. I love a plaque. I love a memorial bench. I wish that more people could be honoured like this every year, that we knew more of their names: people caught up in recent conflicts, people who have been victims of discrimination, people who were just nice people. I’d like to stand on soggy leaves and hear their names and play brass band versions of songs they liked. I’d like little plaques on the handles of supermarket trolleys (for Doris, who always came in for corned beef on a Saturday morning). It would be the opposite of morbid, if you ask me. And there should be poems. Poems everywhere, because poems are for remembering.

This week’s book is an anthology that does just that: it charts the history of the 20th century through poems (The 20th Century in Poetry, Michael Hulse and Simon Ray, Ebury Press, 2011). It’s the size of a breeze block and it came to me as a gift from a lovely student of mine when she left the school. It’s an interesting book because it’s a history of the 20th century via poetry, NOT a history of 20th century poetry, so while there are a lot of famous poems in here, it doesn’t feel like they’ve felt the need to cram every famous poem in for the sake of it. Instead, they’ve chosen poems that specifically address things that happened in the 20th century, poems I would probably never have come across. It’s sobering to flick through, I’ll be honest. There is so much bloody war.

Nia Broomhall, Week 34: The 20th Century in Poetry

The main body of the protest was kettled for a couple of hours very close to my office; I could hear them singing (this video shows the group I could hear, and the very catchy song you suddenly hear everywhere). A few hours later I walked home down the street they’d been on for a while and, along with several less original bits of new graffiti, found this quotation of Victor Hugo, from his poem ‘Au Peuple’ (‘To the People’):

Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,
Voici les rats et les belettes,
Pourquoi t’es tu laissé lié de bandelettes?
ils te mordent dans ton cercueil.

Here is the jackal on your threshold
Here are the rats and here the weasels
Why did you let them bind you in grave-clothes?
They are biting you even in your coffin.

Hugo strongly opposed the military coup in 1851 by which the President Louis-Napoléon assumed absolute power and became Emperor Napoléon III. Hugo went into exile on Jersey and from there wrote a collection of political poems, Les Châtiments, excoriating those in power and calling upon the people to rise up. These lines come from the first stanza of one of these poems:

Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres.
Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?
Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort.
Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?
Ce n’est pas l’instant où l’on dort.
La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte.
Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte.
Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,
Voici les rats et les belettes,
Pourquoi t’es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes?
Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil!
De tous les peuples on prépare
 Le convoi… —
Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!
Lève-toi!

Everywhere tears, sobs, mourning cries.
Why are you sleeping in the darkness?
I do not want you to be dead.
Why are you sleeping in the darkness?
This is not the time for sleeping.
Pale Liberty lies bleeding at your door.
You know, dead yourself, that she is dead.
Here is the jackal on your threshold
Here are the rats and here the weasels
Why did you let them bind you in grave-clothes?
They are biting you even in your coffin!
From every people they are preparing
The funeral train —
Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus!
Rise up!

Hugo, like Melville, had a gift for memorable invective, here combined with political urgency. (It’s only at the very end of the poem that he hears the distant hum of the people stirring at last to action.) But I was struck by the similarities between Hugo’s rousing call to arms and that of Fisher’s Satan, instigating civil war:

“Surgite Concordes Socii, coeptisque favete:
Ulteriùs pigeat, pigeat latuisse pudendo
Pulvere, & Ignotis animas traxisse tenebris.

“Rise up Allies of the Heart, continue what we have begun:
It would be more shameful, more shameful to have lain low in humiliating
Dust, and to have dragged our souls along in shadows of Obscurity.

Whether the cause be wicked or just, the call to arms is the same, and perhaps equally seductive.

There’s a topical resonance here too, intended or not. Hugo’s poem laments that the people — like Fisher’s Satan and his minions — are sleeping in the darkness, in the repeated line Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? (‘Why are you sleeping in the darkness?). A common trope of Gunpowder Plot poems is of Jesuits (or the devil himself) putting on a disguise in order to infiltrate the corridors of power. One of the catchphrases of the current school protests in France, which you might have seen on placards in the news, is Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres. This means literally (but rather nonsensically) ‘In the name of Allah, it’s the darkness’; bismillah is an Arabic phrase that has entered French. It went viral after someone who was widely taken to be an undercover police officer making a risible attempt to imitate the speech patterns of young French men of North African descent in order to gain access to information about the school protests posted this phase in a school students’ Snapchat group (before following up “so when’s the blockade? please add me to the blockade group”). I think it’s unlikely that the hapless police officer was thinking of Hugo, but the student who wrote out voici le chacal to stir passers-by to action might have been remembering les ténèbres.

However inconvenient endless school closures may be, it is hard not to be moved by the energy, joy and determination of French children and students. I am repulsed by what feels now like a police state, with the threat of violence always close at hand. The way the riot police here are clothed makes them genuinely alarming at close quarters, but also easy to demonise: like Melville’s imaginary flocks of Jesuits, they all look the same. (The students often play the Imperial March from Star Wars at them.) A generation of young people are forming their political identity in relation to these (mostly) men in helmets, many of whom must have children of their own. You have to wonder, what is it like to be them?

Victoria Moul, Dans les ténèbres

In Minnesota, where I live, the law gives poll workers the overly dignified name of “election judges,” which is why the sequence that includes the poem below is called “Judgments.”

This year, I chickened out on serving as a poll worker: those fifteen-hour days are hard on my body. But I’ve served several times since first signing up in 2016, and while the job is usually uneventful, it can be challenging. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—duty requires that we tell a voter she’ll need to return with different documents in order to register and vote. Sometimes doing one’s duty gets a testy response. It can be hard.

But then there are reminders that voting itself is sometimes a difficult duty and privilege, as it was in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Thus this poem.

III. Afterword

Maybe it makes a difference. In that year
when a vast rage had torn the whole East Coast
to sodden shreds in late autumn, I slumped
at the stove in an election’s morning-after,
absently stirring breakfast. And my brain
snagged on the radio’s voice, the quiet story
telling how voters in a broken city
stood stoic in the day-devouring lines.
People with shattered homes, people exploring
the strange new depth of their old powerlessness,
shivered and shuffled toward their polling places
under a lead-white sky.

                                                      The voice signed off.
I wept in silence into my scrambled eggs.

(From “Judgments,” in the book In Code)

Maryann Corbett, Aftermath of a Different Election Day

We also had a bunch of literary shakeups this week, including the shuttering of Salon, which I remember reading in the early days of the internet, and which I was so proud to be published in, and even more to be listed as “best of 2020” in that publication. Soft Skull Press is disappearing. And the Poetry Foundation did layoffs this week and a huge redesign of its magazine, plus cancelling most of its local programming. Who do they think they are, Amazon? For a place that still has over 300 mill in the bank, it’s interesting to hear it’s shrinking staff. Is it also building a data center? Just kidding, I hope, Poetry. […]

Then we were surprised with the offer of tickets to the ballet to a spook-themed show I really wanted to see. (I mean, when someone offers you tickets to the ballet, or the opera, or a concert, you go, right? It’s a sign from the universe you should be going out into the world even after the Big Dark!)

So, Friday night we got dressed up, went out into the rain and traffic downtown to the PNB Ballet Company’s opening night for Ghost Stories, which is really a set of four smaller ballets.

The most grand of them is the final La Sonnambula​, with big costume numbers and grand music, but my favorite (probably not shocking to those who know me) was “The Raven,” an all-dance interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem with lush music from an obscure musician of the 1840s that captures the gothic drama of the piece. The dancer who played Poe did a great job, but the real standout dancer was The Raven, who has to stand perfectly still for long periods of time and then violently start flapping, attacking, emoting a perfectly demotic raven. Costumes and art were beautiful too. And in the last piece, a woman dancer literally picks up and carries out the main male dancer, who is supposed to be dead. Talk about back strength! 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Surprises: Blue Waves, Ballet, and Literary Shakeups, and More

For a reading in an old church last weekend, I chose ghost poems. I’ve written a lot of them, even though I’m agnostic about ghosts. I feel certain lost loved ones hovering occasionally, or the versions of them preserved in my mind. I’ve had odd Ouija board experiences and heard strange voices seeming to whisper from the borders of sleep. Yet part of me rejects the idea as too awful. Certain politicians, well, if they’re doomed to haunt their ill-conceived ballrooms after death, fine. But most humans, after long difficult lives, deserve a better renovation: escape from suffering and worry.

Anyway, for the Samhain event, I read a few poems then sat down in a pew to listen to Jim Peterson. I’d recently read his new-ish book The Towheaded Stone Thrower, about the life and death of his wildly beloved wife, and it left a sort of halo around the world. The autumn seemed brighter and more beautiful, because he had reminded me that darkness was coming.

Then a shadow caught my eye. Something about its movement said cat. But I was in a deconsecrated little church in the woods, next to an old graveyard: no pets. I turned to look harder and glimpsed, more clearly, the fleeting shape of a tail.

My heart started pounding. My first, highly questionable reaction: I’d actually seen a ghost this time!

Then a living cat ducked under the pew in front of me, allowed me to pet its utterly real warm furry head, and drank from a cup of water I’d left on the floor.

More facts: two days later, amid a paperwork tsunami at work, the so-called blue tsunami hit. Even amid cheering news trickling in Tuesday evening, I’d gone to bed with a sense of doom, expecting to wake up to an enraged president bombing someone in vengeance. That specter hasn’t come to pass (yet?–the appointment of Stephen Miller is ominous). I’m sleeping a little better. Fear hasn’t vanished–hope for change is not yet actual improvement in people’s lives, which a disparate, feuding cast of Dems and independents may not be able to conjure–yet dread has ebbed to a more manageable wariness.

Lesley Wheeler, Cat ghosts and rock tripe

Shifty, the morning. We’ve fucked with time again, just as the day is shrinking, and I’m off kilter. Looked up in the morning sky in time to see a wide wave of small birds unroll, moving crosswise to the lowest clouds, which were moving faster than the higher clouds, which revealed some pale sky. Hard not to read signs and portents in all this change. But that’s just the human need to control things, right? Our need to know stuff ahead of time, what’s coming. We’re an anxious species. Jumpy as the rabbit who sometimes shows up in the backyard. Munch munch, then freeze, then leap off into the underbrush, or the squirrel, fervid, burying nuts in the flowerbox. Or is that just me? Who would know the future? Who would tattle? The little birds disappear into the distance. A breeze picks up and the brown smell of downed leaves and wet wood wanders past. If I and everything around me is the inevitable outcome of biological and physical functions, what could the future be but some kind of past? Still, I watch and listen. What should I be paying attention to? Is there something I should know? How should I be preparing myself? Here’s a little poem by Tomaž Šalamun, translated from Slovenian by the author himself and Michael Waltuch.

[untitled]

Tomaž Šalamun, tr. Tomaž Šalamun and Michael Waltuch

Little robin,
bones pinned to the cosmos.
Who whistles, who calls?

Marilyn McCabe, bones pinned to the cosmos

— I’ve been reading poems on happiness just now and it’s interesting how many have people splitting a sandwich, or a dessert, or sipping a coffee. It’s happiness in spite of, often.

— The poem by Raymond Carver is no exception, beginning, “So early it’s still almost dark out. / I’m near the window with coffee, / and the usual early morning stuff / that passes for thought.” (Continue reading).

— Before you die, you should know that Ilya Kaminsky’s doctors “have prescribed happiness.”

— The poet Maggie Smith has gifted up with a list of “poems that make you glad to be alive.” Down with that, yah. Fond of this one by Cameron Awkward-Rich.

— There is no guarantee of happiness. Never has been.

— Some might say the world has enough poems. I say the world needs more poems written by the light in your own skull. How about writing a poem about happiness?

Shawna Lemay, The Taste of Happiness

Mirage of Burning Things [by Ryan Di Francesco] feels like it was born out of a compulsion – a compulsion to notice, to put things on record. The poet-narrator moves through mostly urban environments, less flâneur-ing and more reportage on the fragility of modern life. A tumble of images follows us from page to page. Most of the poems are quite pared back in language and form, with little punctuation and short, staccato lines. […]

Insomnia stalks the collection, bringing a jaded and somewhat hallucinatory atmosphere at times. I particularly enjoyed the poem 3-5am. ‘Enjoyed’ is the wrong word, as the poem deals with some very difficult things. But Ryan has a wry humour that deftly punctures the relentlessness of things when a little levity is needed:

“You know, I have read poems in high-tier journals with whimsical lyric
turning insomnia into a pearl sky.
Those poems make me sick.”

There is tenderness to be found, too. In fact, there are two poems called Tenderness: Part 1 and Tenderness: Part 2. But, as ever, the white peonies of love and beauty co-exist with ugliness and decay. The closing poem, Animal Dreams of Other Animals, is an interesting one, as it leaves us with a note less of hope, than perhaps resignation. But maybe there is some comfort to be found in the idea that we are all animals, dreaming of a place of shelter.

Victoria Spires, Mirage of Burning Things

Twenty years ago, Hamish Ironside – freelance typesetter of poetry and academic books, and later to be the driving force behind publisher Boatwhistle Books – wrote a haiku a day and collated the best of them into his first collection, Our Sweet Little Time, published by Iron Press in 2009 (and available here). Here are a couple of my favourites from it:

at the book fair
Darth Vader
gets in everyone’s way

my daughter’s screaming
settled by footage
of war in Iraq

As both of these show, Ironside, like a contemporary Logan Pearsall Smith, has a gift for noticing small but quirky things, and for turning them into art: whereas the wording of the first one probably chose itself quite naturally, the choice of ‘settled’ in the second may have needed more thought and is inspired in how it enhances the irony.

Ironside repeated the one-a-day trick in 2017, resulting in a second collection published by Iron in 2018, Three Blue Beans in a Blue Bladder (available here). Again, here are two favourites of mine, both of which speak for themselves:

in her newsreading voice
she tells me someone’s selling my book
for a penny

all things must pass
including my copy of
All Things Must Pass

In the interests of transparency, I should disclose here that I provided some (fairly-limited) assistance in the editing process of both books.

Ironside has now completed the hat-trick, having written a haiku every day last year, a selection of which can be found in Down Falls the Lark (hereafter referred to as DFL), which is also available from the Iron Press website, here.

As you can see from the poems above, Ironside is best-known in the small pond (replete with frog) that is the English-language haiku world for his senryu; that’s to say haiku that are principally concerned with the foibles, frailties, confusions and contradictions of human behaviour, not least his own, and which are often very funny. His preoccupations are largely unchanged: the pitfalls of the day job (‘before I press send / I check the pronouns / for the fourth time’); passing observations of creatures, including humans, acting in unusual ways; jokes at his wife’s and his own expense; wry existential despair (‘in the middle of the night / I can’t help imagining / the unimaginable’); the parent–child relationship; the similarity of birds’ flight and other actions to other objects (‘pelican preening / unfolds itself / like a Swiss Army knife’); and – among all the levity and self-deprecation – the occasional humdinger of a poignant, heartfelt and resonant haiku.

Matthew Paul, On Hamish Ironside’s Down Falls the Lark

The poems of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), as we’ve had ample opportunity to contemplate here, bear their freight of emotion beneath a skin thin to the point of translucency. Even joy, as in “A Winter Blue-Jay,” has its boundaries; beyond those boundaries lies grief. The beauty of the titular “Blue Squills” assails the senses as, almost, a form of pain. The love in “Summer Night, Riverside,” is no sooner experienced than lost. Even the consolation that “There Will Be Stars,” always and forever, fails to promise that anyone will be alive to see them.

In Today’s Poem, part of Teasdale’s 1926 collection Dark of the Moon, landscape — or rather, seascape — functions as subtext. In three tetrameter abcb quatrains, this brief lyric sketches physical detail, but also emotional undertone, to create a compressed drama of things that go unsaid. But then, those things hardly need saying, once the scene itself, as narrated by the first-person speaker, has fallen silent.

The first stanza might be the beginning of any nature poem narrated by an observer who might content him- or herself to remain outside a visual frame dominated by murmurations of migratory birds, whose presence on the sky overshadows the briefly mentioned dunes. With the synecdochical “wings” of line 3, the speaker in one rhetorical stroke reduces the birds to one great motion of leavetaking. These “wings” become a tide themselves, more real on the page than the actual sea, as they swirl away “[o]ver the dunes and out of sight.”

In Stanza 2, however, the seascape gains a human population, a “you” and a “me,” and with these two characters, a new level of clarity. We know now that the “I” is speaking, and that whatever this “I” narrates is meant as half a conversation, aimed at the “you” who might or might not answer. The second stanza, actually, poses a question for the “you”: Why did you bring me here? Or more precisely, Why did you bring me here NOW? And what is the here? What is the now? It’s the sea at ebb tide, the cold, uncongenial end of the year. Everything is departing: the sea, the birds, the time itself. Even the fish-hawk, there in its natural element, isn’t fishing, but “flying.” And why? Because “[n]othing is left,” that’s why. “Nothing is left but the old year dying.”

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Low Tide

The latest from Pennsylvania writer Kirsten Kaschock is the poetry title AutoPortrait (as flotsam) (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), following Unfathoms (Slope Editions, 2004), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press, 2011), WindowBoxing (Bloof Books, 2013) [see my review of such here], The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press/winner of AWP Donald Hall Prize, 2014), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press, 2017), and Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press, 2020), with a further, Docenture: A Tale of Hue as Told by the Estate, forthcoming from South Indiana Review Press. As the back cover offers, this collection is arranged as a kind of gallery-walk response to the works of other artists (predominantly visual artists), as Kaschock offers individual responses across the lyric to works by Paul Gaugin, Alice Neel, Mark Rothko, Vincent Van Gogh, Joan Miro, Amadeo Modigliani, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Theo Jansen, Arthur Garfield Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pablo Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Stipe, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Donovan, Eva Hesse, Berye Saar, Joan Mitchell, Lucille Clifton, Romaine Brooks, Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Chagall and Francisco Goya. “They will never know what not to do / with you. This is a layering,” she writes, to close the poem “Contingent,” citing Eva Hesse, “a vanish into / potential, a technique to impossibilize / biography. My material they may long to have // illuminated. But I am no monk, no man- / uscript. And within this doubt / no woman you cannot.”

Structured in three parts—“Maiden (woman),” “Daemon (bird)” and “Nomad (star,” each section holds a cluster of poems, offering her individual responses to specific artists, many of which then extend from that initial response as a kind of prompt into further exploration through memory, memoir and specific experiences. It is as though her poems responding to artists are utilized as touchpoints; offered as a way to jump further into and through specific subjects, memories or conversations. “What happens / happens because of the way light twists / as it filters in.” she writes, earlier in that same poem for/after Eva Hesse.

rob mclennan, Kirsten Kaschock, AutoPortrait (as flotsam)

I’m curious to hear about your career. What do/did you enjoy the most about your career? How has your career/past jobs influenced the way you live and write poetry?

My career was a way to engage with people and make my mortgage payments. In that way, it was a win-win. When I worked as a lawyer in Tokyo, the partners would help translate my haiku in Japanese. They encouraged me to send my haiku to the English-language newspapers published in Japan, most of which have a haiku column.

You have been a long-time haibun editor at Modern Haiku. What advice do you have for those who are new to writing haibun?

Modern Haiku, under editor exemplar Paul Miller, is a multifaceted journal which is known for its high-quality haiku, essays, art, book reviews, and haibun. We publish only a handful of haibun in each issue. It is a very high bar. My advice to those new to haibun is to read as many haibun published in Modern Haiku (and other high quality publications, including both haibun and literary journals), as possible. Don’t waste time on cover letters that list all your awards and publications. Just send your single best haibun. One other thing: if your haibun is AI produced or is plagiarized in whole or in part, things won’t go well for your submission. Similarly, try to get along with the editor. Don’t complain to the EIC (Editor-in-Chief) if your haibun doesn’t get picked. And remember to treat your editor as you would like to be treated, both privately and publicly. Give credit where credit is due. The relationship between haibun writer and haibun editor doesn’t end when one’s haibun is published. Currently, Modern Haiku nominates haibun for various awards, including Touchstone, Best Small Fictions, and the annual Red Moon Anthology.

You co-authored Haibun: A Writer’s Guide with Rich Youmans and Lew Watts. What did you enjoy the most about working on this project?

It was wonderful to finally get the project up and running, which wouldn’t have been possible without my two co-authors. I had the publishing contract in my hands for a couple of years, but it was only when Lew and Rich came aboard that things coalesced. We each have our strengths and they came together, thanks in large part to an outline for the book Lew did early on. Rich and Lew really kept me on my toes! I love them both for their willingness to go above and beyond to make Haibun: A Writer’s Guide a resource with universal appeal. I would encourage anyone submitting haibun for publication to do a close read of our book.

Jacob D. Salzer, Roberta Beary

The narrator continues to wander and finds himself walking past an advertising hoarding, “The slogan: A home with no food/ Is no home to embrace” and reminds himself the advert isn’t targeted at him, “For I be the one who wanders/ I can survive the cold”. His wandering continues, waiting for the sun to come back, until he finds himself “Waiting for the sun to get its comeuppance” where he’s been awake all night and

“My arms are like octopus arms
My soul is a trash can overflowing
Because my body won’t go
To sleep I know it’s irrational
For one who’s been awake too long
The fear I’ll explode
This body, viscous flesh bomb”

That liminal state between awake and asleep  turns into a nightmare until,

“I’m awake
For a moment in time, I see you
Watching me from the foot of our bed
As golden morning light peeks in
I reach out to touch your hand and I’m not sure what I grab
And I explode
Again and again and again”

The sense of explosion recurs, however, this time it’s positive, bathed in sunlight so the sequence ends in love.

“Sun Come Back” lives up to its promise of a narrator journeying to find his way home. Elements of the journey are dream-like and other elements more rock solid. Ultimately, [Daniel] Newcomer posits that, even on a solo journey where the traveller is seeking themselves, we are seeking connection because that’s what makes us human. “Sun Comes Back” reflects that with its pared back, focused, plain-speaking vocabulary that eschews overly-poetic language in favour of seeking to connect with readers.

Emma Lee, “Sun Come Back” Daniel Newcomer (Resource Publications) – Book review

I spent the first half of the retreat obsessing over my Walt Whitman class for the Creative Retirement Institute. (Inspired by him, I confess to writing some “catalogues” of nature observations, including the miracle of six deer pecking along the shoreline like sanderlings.) Now that the class is behind me, I’m working on my new poetry manuscript, and reading books by local writers: The Light Between the Pines, a novel by Warren Read (which I recommend), and books by poet, poetry mentor, and therapist Joan Fiset. […]

Last month I attended the launch of Joan’s latest book, Unborn Stars. I brought it home, along with some other titles from Joan’s book table, and put them in my To-Be-Read pile. Not long after, while talking about books of “flash” fiction or nonfiction, my friend Andrea Lewis  recommended Now the Day Is Over. That title sounds familiar, I said. It’s the title of a  hymn, Andrea said. Not just that, I said, I think I own that book.

A local writer, Andrea told me. Joan Fiset.

I went home and began reading. Then I read the next book, Namesake, also flash non-fiction, then I read the two books of poems in my possession. In a nutshell, Now the Day Is Over is about Fiset’s father; Namesake, about her mother. Both delve into substance abuse and mental illness. Unborn Stars is about Fiset’s son and their delicate relationship. All of them interweave external, exquisitely detailed events with interior awareness, doubt, and a growing sense of dread. […]

Although Unborn Stars is better described as hybrid, and includes some longer, prose pieces, most of Fiset’s poems are short and imagistic. The science of protostars is a thread running through and pulling the sections together—”Luminous fragments / too tiny to gather or shape”—though the poems are as much about human grief as astronomy. Here’s one example:

Quickening

overgrown with weeds
a further silence
where the nest was

close to the water
I recall a first flutter
becoming you

—Joan Fiset

In her poem, “Grief,” she writes: “Grief // moves slowly through afternoon, stands / behind me as I wrap gifts // snow has fallen all day and will continue…” Exactly that. Quietly permeating every moment.

Bethany Reid, Back to Glen Cove

Nonsense is hard. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense verse, and is famous for it, but his verse ‘has an idea behind it’; there is a perverse kind of sense, or a shadow of sense floating on a darkness void of meaning:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

[Marcel] Duchamp wanted none of that. He wrote his piece Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916, with ‘great pains’: “It took me at least two weeks to do it because I would immediately see some sense coming up, so I’d have to rewrite it.” To sweep away every speck of meaning was an exhausting enterprise. Here’s part of the result:

Afterward, seven or eight posts drink some consequences now appointed; not to be forgotten, between brackets, that without the économat then, with many a similar occasion, come back four times their enormous files.

Duchamp does not say (in the interview I’ve been quoting) what he aimed for, with all these renunciations. Skill, taste, sense—these had to go, but for what? Fun? The sake of something new? He thought they’d lead him astray, they were corrupt, not to be trusted, but what was the pure or perfect goal that could be reached once they had been, painfully, removed? Maybe it was a kind of freedom.

If not in his aims, at least in his methods, Duchamp is a strange echo of St. John Climacus’s advise to ascetics, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a 7th century treatise written for aspiring monks. Climacus tells the “athlete of Christ” of the need to learn obedience, which is “the tomb of the will.” One must become as a corpse, which “does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad”:

Obedience is an abandonment of discernment in a wealth of discernment.

Abandonment of discernment: in a different domain, that’s what Duchamp wanted.

Brad Skow, Ascetics / Aesthetics

A book about faith is as much about “engagement with beauty, hope, doubt, and fear” as about belief (or not) in your god. Nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2014).

In their co-edited collection of interviews, which are presented in essay form, author and translator Ilya Kaminsky and novelist Katherine Towler share their conversations with 19 poets about the “difficult topic” of creating and sustaining a spiritual life that is not defined by the limits of being named Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant, “believer” or “atheist,” unaffiliated or “non-religious,” but by willingness to be, in the words of contributing poet Kazim Ali, “not certain” and ever-seeking. […]

The following brief quotes are intended to give readers some idea of the line of thinking of the interviewed poets, whose writing lives, it is clear, are bound to and animated by a connection to the spiritual or the divine that finds its most personal expression in language.

Carolyn Forche´ — “We are beings in process, in a deep spiritual process that we recognize and intuit and do not understand at all. . . If we live long enough, if we are given enough time on earth, we can live to see the spiritual potential of human beings. What else do we need? We’re in an incredible adventure here with God.” (p. 16)

Gerald Stern (1925-2022) — “ Poets — maybe all artists — get away from their own religious upbringing in order to arrive at a condition of faith.” (p. 21) “My faith is in existence.” (p. 26)

Kazim Ali — “Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. . . Prayer is not a refuge of shelter, so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance into whatever storms exist in the world.” (pp. 41, 42)

Jane Hirshfield — “The only way we can know anything is with our own eyes and our own looking.” (p. 51)

Jericho Brown — “. . . poems ask us not to understand in the same way that we often find ourselves not comprehending the possibility of a God in this world.” (p. 89)

Li-Young Lee — “For me the question of what is poetry is very narrow, but then my definition of what is God is very wide.” (p. 130)

Alicia Ostriker — “Like other poets, I am often asked if I have a spiritual practice. Yes, writing is my spiritual practice. Ultimately, the words come from somewhere beyond myself. . . .” (p. 146)

Marilyn Nelson — “Surely everyone has a spiritual journey. . . Mine began with wonderment.” (p. 153)

Maureen Doallas, ‘A God in the House’

when i say “god”
i always mean the soil & sometimes
i mean the sky. i hope in my next life i get
to be at the purgatory of the food chain.
call me a decomposer. my friends
are isopods & earth worms. my friends
have eyes in the roofs of our mouths.

Robin Gow, supply chain issues

I’ve been in Banff, Alberta for a couple of weeks now: teaching, researching, listening. Every time I visit, I try to find a route I haven’t run or walked before. A few days ago, I struck out past the historic Cave & Basin site (home to lemon-seed sized endangered sinister snails) and ran to Sundance Canyon, along a snow-feathered trail. Apart from two ravens, I didn’t encounter another soul. This was something of a relief after days of rich conversation, artistic revelation.

I wanted to be a path-out-of-season, unvisited.

Whenever the programme for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival gets underway, I begin to suffer from something I call ‘epiphany fatigue’. It is a great privilege to call oneself a sufferer. The panels and presentations and films are so numerous, so varied and thought-provoking I need a notebook next to me at all times. Each event tends to spark intense conversation from the attendees, a lithe and intent questioning after. I need space between things to take them in: little stanza breaks and line breaks in the day.

Yesterday’s epiphany-fest included data scientist, artist and climber Heather Dawe talking about her book ‘Think Again’. Heather’s latest work draws links between a career working with data and artificial intelligence and a lifetime spent moving through mountains. In it she explores her own understanding of intuition: what it is, where it comes from, and what is at stake as we hand more and more of our thinking to machines. How might we intervene in the human-AI relationship at this critical juncture?

Later in the day, I heard Gloria Dickie, Trina Moyles and Claire Cameron discuss their research on bears around the globe and bear-human coexistence, how the possibility of bear encounter can make us pay closer attention to the land. Things I wrote down in my notes included:

Do bears have ‘main character energy’?

Bears are a mirror species that complicate our lives.

A skinned bear looks a lot like a dead human.

To get to know a bear, you follow its stomach.

What I didn’t scribble down but logged fiercely in my brain was the discussion around misogyny in bear studies and bear biology, from one woman being described by a male scientist as a ‘bear groupie’ when doing fieldwork to the sexualization of women researching bears (Gloria Dickie was often asked if she was going to call her book Bear Naked. And that’s before we’ve even talked about the ‘Marian Engel effect’ – if you know you know, and if you don’t know, you must read her brilliant, uncanny ‘Bear’ novel immediately).

The panel was revelatory in its format too – no chairperson, just three women giving each other equal space, a perfect balance between structure and spontaneity, no talking over each other, no questions-that-aren’t-really-questions.

In Banff, I always roll into bed with my mind fizzing.

Helen Mort, Epiphany fatigue!

Last night I went to an interesting talk by Dr Kate Rhodes. She said that she wrote nothing but poems for a decade, getting poems shortlisted for the Bridport and Forward Prizes and having books published. She thought of a poem as “a bullet to the heart”, something that had to be written. Then she went on to write about 20 thrillers and YA novels, including 2 series. One of those novels was self-published because the publisher didn’t want to continue the series but she did. That novel got the best Goodreads reviews, she thought. She’s also ghosted books with non-disclosure agreements. It seems to me that she’s covered the spectrum of answers to the “Who do you write for?” question.

In Whom Should You Be Writing For? Yourself or Your Readers?, K.M. Weiland has “7 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Yourself” then “6 Reasons You Should Be Writing for Your Readers”. I think it’s quite possible for a writer to agree with all these reasons. She writes that “If you’re writing solely for yourself with no thought for the reader – or solely for the reader without tapping the purity and sincerity of your own artistic instincts – then your writing is bound to suffer”. All that sounds useful. Someone added a comment that first drafts were for the writer, and last drafts for the reader, which also makes sense to me.

I think the viewpoint I find difficult to agree with (I’ve seen it online) is that writing for oneself is free and pure, the only alternative being to write for the market. I think that even if you’re writing for yourself, there’s likely to be an implied audience and self-censorship, and your writing will be influenced by the styles you’ve read. I think one can write with others in mind without pandering to market forces. I think I most often write with readers of literary magazines in mind – me, friends, and people I’ve never met with similar interests to me.

Tim Love, Who do you write for?

I was on the verge of deleting this entire publication the other day: I felt it had served its purpose, and I am increasingly conscious of not wanting to leave the world strewn with my digital garbage. Too, I am deep in the unbelievably rapturous throes of another project that has retaught me how to really write, and my scratchings here feel vaguely embarrassing. But something told me to chill the fuck out and I am glad I listened, because this morning I couldn’t stop thinking of this poem, which is speaking to me in a way it has not in decades, and I wanted to share it with you. My Lynda Hull attachments are on display in the post below, which I wrote more than a year ago. I am not going to reread it. It feels like a lifetime ago, and I think, in some ways, it is.

This is the first poem in Hull’s first book, Ghost Money. It acts as a kind of prologue, so it’s set in italic with centred stanzas, and as far as I am concerned is the only acceptable example of the latter to have ever existed. (It’s also gonna display weirdly on your mobile device because of it; sorry about that.) Typing it out I noticed, for the first time, what a perfect pair it makes with “The Window,” the last poem in her last book.

It was the phrase “for they have carried you to this / wild incompletion” that suddenly rang like a bell in my noggin this morning and called me back to the book to read the whole thing. I have so much to say about that. For now I’ll only say: I am surprised by joy.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Spell for the Manufacture & Use of a Magic Carpet” by Lynda Hull

I told the dead about you, how you were saving all the broken things,
that’s what you called it. The fairy damaged in a storm, the plate,

slipping from my hand—Do you remember? We were washing dishes.
You fixed that plate. An antique window you wouldn’t let go of.
You found other uses. “Everything has a purpose,” you said.

Especially the little things, I added.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 18”

Everything at the moment feels like a box-ticking exercise to get to a place I’m not even sure I want to go. My life is full of shoulds and have-tos and I feel their tug-of-war with my wants constantly. Even the cakes and now the salmon in the oven are things on a to-do list, I have to feed the kids and use up the apples from the garden. 

So I steal little things for myself, a poem written in a cafe on a wet Sunday with a big pot of tea, a game of 4 deck solitaire online between working on plans, not folding the laundry, but giving it to the kids to do and having rugby on as much as possible on the weekend. 

Mini-rebellions from being a mum, a professional and a student. I’d love to just be a writer again, but it’s just not possible. 

I see people on social media who are at residencies, travelling to or living in interesting places to write. Finland no longer seems like someplace interesting. It’s a have-to. 

I once had six months of just being a writer while I was on a bursary, over twenty years ago and it was so amazing. I’m jealous of others’ creative lives, but I have to accept the choices I’ve made and where I’ve ended up as a result. In Finland, fitting writing in the cracks of an over-stuffed life. 

I’ve been working on my Scots poem inspired by my Scotstober snippets. I’ve also had a couple of acceptances in the last few months though I’ve barely submitted to any journals or anthologies. Those should come to fruition by the end of the year. I need to record myself reading one of the poems. Not my favourite thing to do and with my students searching me up on the net for kicks, I’m wishing there was a way to do it without my face.

Gerry Stewart, Wasting Time in a Life Full of Have-Tos

Ok, why would these people contact me? Why would they want to push my book, of all books. Oh, yes, yes, they find the title interesting, the whole thing fascinating, a literary gem, blah, yes, blah. But so have others – and they haven’t asked me to join in a community and do interviews.

The idea of an interview confuses me anyway. I can just imagine it now. Along the lines of:

Interviewer: It’s an interesting title, Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. What made you choose it?
Me: Well, there’s a poem in the book called Poem In The Key Of Aardvark. So it kind of fitted. Or seemed to.
Interviewer: Yes, I read Poem In The Key Of Aardvark. It’s a strange poem. What inspired it?
Me: I don’t know.
Interviewer: There’s a whole range of different types of poem in the book, aren’t there? Did you set out to write a book like this?
Me: I don’t remember.
Interviewer: There seem to be so many different realities on offer in Poems In The Key Of Aardvark. Is this intentional?
Me: Well, there are so many different realities on offer in life. [This would be the most meaningful answer I could come up with and the sheer effort would reduce subsequent answers to ‘Maybe’ or ‘Probably’ or ‘I’ve forgotten’.

This is a fairly extreme stretch of imagination, of course. As stressful as I might find the moments leading up to it, if anyone were mad enough to want to interview me I would try harder than that. (A reading of one’s work or an interview on YouTube is obviously a perfectly valid idea in itself.)

Nevertheless the base rule is that chats with poets are usually about as insightful as chats with footballers at the end of a match. And about as relevant to normal life. I write the poems. Mostly I don’t know why. Mostly I forget them quite quickly. I suspect that only very rarely might I have anything interesting to say about them. And I suspect that the more co-operative I might try to be, the more confused – and confusing – I might become.

Bob Mee, ANOTHER LITERARY OFFER DROPS INTO THE IN-BOX…

The question you get asked the most when your book is on a shortlist is what does it mean to you to be on the shortlist? I think for lots of people this feels like a very easy question to answer. People say ‘It’s amazing’ or ‘I feel so lucky”. I feel those things as well, but when someone asks me that question, my mind spins off into other answers that are less easy to articulate clearly. I want to say it means both everything and nothing to me.

Being on a prize shortlist changes things externally, and winning one certainly does, and it might even change things internally for a while in terms of how you feel about the work – and that can be very seductive. But it runs out – and then you are left feeling how you always felt about yourself, about the work – and this is where the nothing comes in. I have to feel the way I feel about the work, despite what happens to it. And that still doesn’t say how I feel about it. […]

One of the things that winning a prize does, or what winning the Forward Prize did for me was to make it impossible to justify. I couldn’t say ‘yes, but it only happened because’ without insulting the judges and the rest of the shortlist. I couldn’t make an excuse or be self-deprecating. It is a gift – but it is a gift that I didn’t need to pick up and carry – it’s more like a bird that sits on your shoulder, but it’s more active than that – a bird that flies before me, a bird-shield I can hide behind. […]

When I won the Forward Prize, I wore a dress covered in birds. A few weeks later, someone sent me a painting of myself in that dress. It’s one of the few visual records I have of my outfit – I don’t know where the photos are from that night. Perhaps I didn’t take any. I still don’t know who sent that painting. It arrived on my desk at work without a note, and I still don’t know who sent it. I close my eyes, imagine one of the birds lifting away from my dress, taking on its own extraordinary life. […]

Imagine divorce as a body of water I am swimming through. Imagine the Eliot shortlist as a raft that I can use to get me through the year. I don’t think that is one of the things that people usually answer when they are asked how it feels. It’s a raft to get me through the rest of the year.

Kim Moore, On Friendship and Prizes

We spend a lot of time pathologizing and romanticizing the writer’s life—the writer we used to be, the writer we want to be. Maybe that is a sort of fuel. Or maybe it’s an albatross. Our lives change as we grow up. Our bodies change as we grow up. And our writing may change as we grow up. I think we ought to spend more time practicing empathy for our creative Creature selves—how we shift, adapt, and show up. Can we be every writer within us? Can that be enough?

In the writing workshop I’m guiding right now, I gave everyone an exercise: Write a beautiful poem just for the sake of it. Don’t worry about linearity, message, or sense, I told them. Just unravel into the meadow. Don’t question it. Be in the hugeness of it all.

I did my own assignment the other night. I did it in earnest. And it let me access a place inside me that felt luminous (numinous!) and familiar and messy. It didn’t cost me my marriage or my friendships or my reputation. I didn’t have to ruin anything. No devils, just a little darkness.

I’m her, I’m me, I’m all of us in here.

Lisa Marie Basile, When writing is like bloodletting a stone

I have never followed or for the most part particularly liked the music produced at Def Jam records, but I’m finding Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being to be a calming, Buddhist approach to living an imaginative life. It’s the kind of book I can read in short bits at a time; frankly, having studied creativity and Buddhism and the arts for many years, nothing in it is exactly new to me. Yet the book acts as reminder and affirmation, for which I’m grateful.

Reminder that with a little objective space between me and my life sometimes, I can be reminded of my perspective and think more kindly about others’ perspectives. Reminder that whatever my readers take from my work, however they interpret it, however they critique it, whatever does or does not resonate with them–the work remains my own expression. It’s the best I could do at the time.

Reminder that the work of creativity doesn’t have an end point. Well–death, I suppose, ends the individual body’s ability to create; but if there is work out there in the world (music, poems, novels, films, paintings, sculpture, and so on), the creative acts of the past can continue. They continue to offer perspective. They continue to invite interpretation and expression.

This sort of reminder is good when I’m involved in making an ephemeral and very limited set of objects, a poem series made into an artist book. It’s so minor in the scheme of US culture in the 21st century, and so very much an expression of my own thinking, about which a limited number of people can possibly care. Rubin says that doesn’t matter–the culture, the popularity, the quantity. [Interesting, coming from a guy who has clearly made considerable money, and helped musicians earn considerable fortunes as well, and who hangs out in Tuscany much of the year.] But I don’t discount his words. Certainly, if I had been writing to make an impact on culture, to be popular, or to make money, I’d have stopped long ago. So I keep working, all in the fullness of time.

Ann E. Michael, Kairos

The title of my poet-friend Robert van Vliet’s excellent book seems very apt, for poetry : Vessels. A poem is a sailing ship, each scribbled canvas-page pregnant with sea-wind. Words strain against the narrow ribs of rhyme, syntax, form – they would be going somewhere, as fast as they can.

But then perhaps the deeper secret of poetry’s power is : stasis. Not the sailboat, but the Chinese vase : Giorgio Morandi’s clay pots : the “Grecian urn”. Pure stillness at the center.

I’ve been writing poems for over 60 years. Many of these poems are in books. Books which are still in print. Nevertheless I can identify with that Distinguished Author Conrad Aiken : mentor of Malcolm Lowry, Poet Laureate of the State of Georgia – who late in life described himself as “the best-known unread poet of the twentieth century”. (I feel (un)seen, there.)

After a few decades, you have this curious sense of being systematically ignored. But then you think : That’s sour grapes. You’re just not that interesting. But then you think again : hopefully, because you have to have hope : underneath everything, the root cause is that primal stasis – silence, Holy Sabbath, rest note – which is true poetry.

Maybe. I really don’t know. All I do know is that apparently I’m like the loud Mississippi cicada – buzzing, droning, unmoving, one deep note (OM?), unceasingly. And also emerging from hibernation every 17 years.

Henry Gould, Same Old, Same Young

Something else that I enjoyed here was the love of language this poem embodies. Like an actor interrogating a script, or a therapist noting a client’s phrasing, the poem invites us to be curious about words. At the centre of the poem is that word attends, which feels exactly what the poem does itself – a conscious, step by step by step attending to the fabric of a word, the meanings and worlds half-hidden within its utterance.

 You’ll often hear poets talking about how a poem can surprise them in the writing. Similarly, as therapists, the destination is never fixed, the journey rarely clear, and typically littered with surprises. Such is the potency of language; far from a “code” or set of tools whose use we can master, working with words is almost like working with living, breathing creatures. They speak to us in ways we can’t always fully discern, shapeshifting in the hinterland between conscious and unconscious. Peopled and historied.

All therapists will recall moments when they have somehow landed on a particular phrase or metaphor that speaks to a client, which can almost seem to unlock something for them. In therapy, as in poetry, it seems to me, experimentation with words and language has the potential to change our relationship to our experiences, and with language itself. As Seamus Heaney put it, “If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way”.

Jonathan Totman, On Weariness and Wonder

This week I needed a poem for a thing, and I wasn’t sure whether I had already written something useful or not. This sent me searching through a variety of folders on my computer. As I was searching, I found a poem from 2023 called, THANKS FOR READING EMILY DICKINSON TO ME OVER THE INTERCOM AT PRICE CHOPPER. It’s one of those poems that wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t been scrolling social media at a particular time on a particular day, and I decided it would enjoy another outing of its own in this blog. It was a post from Rishi Dastidar that inspired the poem, and I rather like the fact that I can clearly remember writing it even if I had sort of forgotten it existed.

And this makes me think of the joy I get from setting down words. Often that joy is from setting down my own words, but I am also lucky enough to spend time at a Retirement Village setting down words with members of a poetry group there. A session there last week started with me reading back to them the group poem we had created for National Poetry Day on my previous visit. And the part that made my heart sing this time was that there was something palpable about the way the poem landed in the air around us as we listened to it again.

I love the solitary nature of poetry where I am reading silently to myself or being a member of a zoom room audience, but I also love poetry in different places.  It was my passion for poetry being out in the wild that spurred me on to find a place to be for National Poetry Day each year when I was no longer working in education. That’s how I found a seat in a comfortable chair at The Retirement Village. Prior to that, in 2023, I walked up and down my local high street asking people if they would like to hear a poem about conkers or a poem called Darling. (It was a 50:50 split.)

I still take poems to the local town on National Poetry Day. And recently it delighted me to discover that one of the people I gave a poem to now has it taped to the wall next to their work area. “Now I can read my poem whenever I want to,” she told me when she showed me where it was.

Sue Finch, THANKS FOR READING EMILY DICKINSON TO ME OVER THE INTERCOM AT PRICE CHOPPER

Thank goodness for a good election result. The whole planet can let out a shaky breath. It’s not solving everything by itself but at least it’s a good direction again, to build safety and justice, health and hope.

What I hope is that locally, we come together for that shared purpose of exchanging ideas, whether in conversation or in zines, poems, weird art. I love a room of people who gather for mostly leftist aims. The small prophets of our time, instead of profits necessarily. Trade economy, giving your ideas a shot without quite so many intermediary agents. Author to author.

I like the openness of it. I also work well with constraints and deadlines. It’s good to have the Ottawa small press fair twice a year to corral my focus. To have an excuse to make, collaborate. Making is healthy more than consuming but we need to do both.

Some new poets like to llama and [ahem, excuse me auto-correct], like to la-la-la, and insist they don’t want to be influenced by others. I’m a big fan, me, of being influenced. I like to hear what others think and how. I like to be swayed, changed, engaged.

So Saturday is a blow out for that sort of thing. This Saturday afternoon the fair is back at the Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road, Ottawa, courtesy of our local super-connector, rob mclennan. […]

If you can come, do set aside a chunk of time, and take breaks, because there are lots of tables of goodies. And a free table to unload what needs new hands.

Pearl Pirie, All’s Fair, love not war

This week: papery interlunations of literary history, the fading brightness of the dead, the weight of the sky, cows in the wilderness, and much more. Enjoy.

The young man leaps up.
We fully expect a gun
to come out of his case.

Bathed in the sunset,
he plays his violin.
Serene music lifts our spirits.

No longer haunted
by our tasks left half-completed,
we settle into the ride.

The train trundles north,
past urban blight and clogged rivers,
the skeletons of new condos straining to the sky.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poem for the Feast of All Souls

It’s just over five years since I started writing these weekly posts about poetry. I don’t plan ahead much in writing them, as I find the pieces that interest readers most seem to be those that emerge from following a stray observation or a chance connection. So it’s perhaps not a coincidence that I seem to keep coming back to the idea of the ghostly in the way I imagine poetry: as something glimpsed, half-hidden, haunting.

“Ghost words” was the term I used last year to describe a particular hallucinatory effect in The Waste Land — and searching back through the Some Flowers Soon archives makes me realise Eliot’s poem has often made me reach for my thermographic camera: Under London Bridge.

But I don’t think The Waste Land is uniquely ghostly in its qualities. One of my favourite definitions of poetry is from Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” (1821):

Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind

An “interlunation” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the period between the old and new moon; figurative a blank or dark interval” — which makes me think it has potential as an alternative term for “line-break”. The ghostliness of poetry is partly to do with the way that it works with the gaps between words, allowing hidden doors to creak open in language. But it is also to do with its aural spirit, its invisible life as meaningful sound that haunts the interlunations of our inner monologues.

I also think of poetry as haunting not only individuals but whole cultures, over centuries, disappearing and reappearing across the papery interlunations of literary history. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Haunting the Interlunations

Van Gogh’s severed ear wanders the countryside,
auditioning sunflowers for the perfect shade of yellow.
Beethoven’s ghost feels the underground rumble
and turns the earth’s rotation into a symphony.
Lorca catches the fascist bullets that murdered him
and forges them into diamonds for the oppressed.
Lovesick Mayakovsky, suicidal over a woman’s rejection,
finally gets it:
heartbreak hurts less when the masses adore you.
Hemingway plays his own extermination backward, 
watches the shotgun inhale, the bullet climb back into the barrel,
and finishes his sentence.

Rich Ferguson, The Shotgun Inhales

It’s late Autumn now, and in Herefordshire that means the orchards are being picked, there might be a first frost and the clocks have just gone back. It’s always a shock to find the evenings suddenly darker, and I have an urge to withdraw into the lamplight. Alone perhaps, but I don’t feel isolated. The streetlights are on, there are friends along the road.

1. A poem to enjoy – Thomas Hardy, During Wind and Rain (1917)

Hardy draws on the material he found in Some Recollections, the book he found ‘bound in brown paper, made from the pages of exercise books and stitched together with red thread.’ This home-made book was written without Hardy’s knowledge by his wife, Emma and he only discovered it after her death.

Each stanza shows a family scene full of life (singing, clearing the garden, taking breakfast outside, moving house), and each time Hardy turns to the refrain: ‘Ah, no; the years’.

The refrain is followed by one more line, each one worse than the last: the leaves, the storm birds, then the rose torn from the wall, then rain running down the carved names on the headstone. That build toward the grave drives the poem.

I love this poem because like all successful elegies, Hardy never refuses the happiness he records.

Adam Cairns, Three by One

Walking towards Halloween

Autumn arrived
with a good slapping
of wind and rain
but today the sky
is a perfect blue,
the sun a gift,
under which even
the Halloween decorations,
draped over doorways
and across gardens,
seem quite benign:
skeletons, giant spiders
and their webs, and, 
my favourite, this
shrouded creature
designed to scare us
to our own bones,
because, after all,
which one of us,
on one of those days,
hasn’t felt like rushing out
into the garden to have
a damn good scream.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Walking towards Halloween

In this poem, I wanted, like Yosa Buson, to strip away as much as possible, and that’s what I did. The writing is barely there, but is.

And there’s this: “There is a deep, communicative power in silence and what remains unexpressed.” Emerson

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 17”

This ongoing poem, like many of my ongoing poems, lives in hope. A new passage was written just this evening, on Halloween. Even John Keats popped in tonight, whose birthday was yesterday – holding out his dead hand, so to speak (actually a living hand). & reminded me of this sweet poem , delivered to me by seagull, from the Petersburg poet Elena Shvarts, back around 2003 (wherein kindling Keats appears once more).

But be that as it may, this poem (Grassland Jubilee) has its own promises to keep, so to speak, which I certainly hope it will do (in time). These things encrypted here are strummed upon in my previous (many) poems of the last 5 years – in Restoration Day, Green Radius, Parmenides in Minneapolis, Shield of Mnemosyne… Because we are facing life’s high meed right now : in a national, global, political, ethical, eschatological, or shall we say human sense…

Henry Gould, Grassland Jubilee, forthcoming (#11)

This year’s firework display for me was two rockets. One viewed from the M25, and one viewed from the M1. It was nice to see them as I travelled back North from a visit to Kent. I took sparklers with me for Hallowe’en/Bonfire Night wishes, but somehow we forgot to light them so now they will become Christmas or New Year wishes. Luckily we remembered to enjoy sharing time and chat and café visits!

There’s something about noticing the smell of the air at night at this time of year which signals the coming of Winter. It’s not always dependent on bonfire smoke mixing with the cold crisp air although that can be part of it, it’s something that seems to happen on cold clear nights as November opens. It was lovely to notice that very smell while waving goodbye to lovely friends before travelling the 300-mile journey back home. A definite contrast to breathing this morning’s air and a rather lovely one to note.

It’s not quite November cold here yet, but this poem sets down what the month may hold in store…

NOVEMBER COLD

November cold
is bone cold,
chalked moon cold.

November cold
clouds breath,
stencils ferns on glass.

November cold is fragile echoes
of clenched words,
it is spiked metal railings silvered.

November cold is
slippery white shine
grinning under shoes.

Sue Finch, NEW PHOTO

The other night, at a reading, I sat next to a young poet who has accrued almost a quarter of a million followers on Instagram and most of you probably won’t have heard of him. Like the man once said, being famous on Instagram is like being rich with Monopoly money. We know our digital avatars are not a true reflection of our talent and popularity on these channels doesn’t suggest any merit beyond the ability to post likeable content. But who wants to hear from a poet who has just three friends on Facebook? Genius or not, two likes on an Instagram post puts you in the loser bracket not in the niche artiste camp. […]

The other week I gave a walking performance of my poem My Name Is Swan from the Swan pub next door to Shakespeare’s Globe, across the Thames to St Paul’s. It was awful weather, the rain lashed down and unsurprisingly, no one turned up. A crowd in cagoules emptied into the streets from the theatre as I set off howling my poem to no one but the wind and the river. And it felt mad. And it felt magnificent. And it was tragic and it was insanely heroic all at once. I longed for a quarter of a million followers to live-stream my reading to and yet I was thrilled by the singular anonymity of this solitary soliloquy. And then I got a call from the BBC.

It’s hard to measure what size audience I was broadcasting to when I took up the Friday afternoon Poetry Corner slot on BBC Radio London. The station has a daily listenership of between 50,000 and 100,000 people and I think I read well enough, came across as competent and confident and I thought Don would probably be smiling from wherever eternity had taken him to. A friend called me, someone who loyally listens to my woes and complaints about engagement. He was impressed and said, “I imagine your optics are soaring.” I checked my website stats. A huge spike when I posted online about my appearance and then a drop off before I actually went live. The notification had brought more attention than the show itself. The announcement had become the event.

The day after the broadcast I gave another walking performance, meeting at the birthplace of John Keats, the pub previously known as the Swan and Hoop and I braced myself for another lonely poetry walk. And then out of the shadows my audience stepped forward.

It wasn’t a large crowd. It wasn’t a small crowd. It was an audience of just one. A singular Keats enthusiast who’d come to celebrate the poet’s birthday. And we drank apple juice in the sun outside the pub that Keats was born above and then we walked along London Wall and I performed to the weekend streets. And my unique audience listened, seriously, attentively, at times a little nervously and when I was done I parted company with my audience of one. But something significant had happened, a shift that can only be measured in poetics: I had jumped from nothing into numbers. And this, this is the greatest leap of them all.

Jan Noble, Nº88 The photo my agent didn’t want you to see

For All Souls’ Day a haiku by our November poet Ian Storr from his new collection Late Light, with Alba Publishing.

Orkney graveside
lost in a hail wind
the shouted committal

Fokkina McDonnell, All Souls’ Day – haiku

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Forty-One Jane Doe‘s by Carrie Olivia Adams, which originally came with a DVD of short films back in 2013—which I did not get but sure seems like a cool extra, especially considering the tone and subject matter of the book, which I would call “Film Noir” poetry. (Another book in this kind of genre might be Karynna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, from 2009 from Sarabande Books.)

In this book, the poems in which sometimes a “Jane” is the speaker, sometimes a detective is speaking, and always addressing a nebulous you that might be the other Jane Doe’s? For those not acquainted with the terms, when police find an unidentified female corpse, it is often labelled “Jane Doe.” This use of Jane Doe draws to mind serial killer victims, nameless runaways, and other tragic figures often at the center of crime shows and film noir. The book’s nine sections, with titles like “Mystery Story,” “Intermissions with Aviators,” “Intermissions with Scientists,” are all seemingly trying to identify and/or learn the origin of the Jane Doe’s. The writer never really satisfied our curiosity, although I wonder if the missing short films would give us more hints? But the mood of the book cuts through, spooky, sneaky, sullen, shattered; women challenge both the men who investigate and measure their disappearances, and the ones who caused them. This was a great “mood read” for Halloween, I have to say. Carrie Olivia Adams is also pretty accomplished as she’s poetry editor for Black Ocean Press, works in PR for University of Chicago Press, and is the author of a number of chapbooks and a total of five poetry books. I am lucky to have found this book after some 13 years, because it is one of my favorite reads this year. It is weird how poetry books can slip through the cracks and end up in your hands at the right time.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Halloween, Feeling My Way to the Future, Film Noir Poetry

Following this initial meeting, the poem leads us to infer a certain post-war optimism, but it is doomed by an inevitable failure to live up to its own promise amidst 20th-century horrors. There are striking contrasts between life’s sweeter moments, filled with the arrival of “children and seashore days,” and a domestic happiness threatened by “men in black shadows, a 3 AM / pounding-on-the-door-raid” and bittersweet divorce.

Even the stubborn determination that “We shall overcome / someday they said, / with cars, TVs, and American dreams” is unable to ward off the eventual disillusionment with society.

And yet, it is within poetry’s power to reimagine…

The poem’s final stanzas suggest that maybe this life is not the full story, after all. There is something beyond our material existence:

still, they were pages bound in a book,
the marginalia and notes
all part of the same story,

stitched together with invisible thread;

he lived hemmed in her mind’s seams, hung
on memory crossbeams, on lines
remembered and words unspoken
not in this life, not anymore,

but I like to think,
they’re together now,

somewhere in time
walking hand-in-hand
across an endless beach.

(’At the Corner of First and Always’)

Within the grounded realm that we inhabit each day, there may be clues to this other world. In another tender poem, Merril [D. Smith] writes that “Potato latkes fry with sizzles and pops, / percussion to the song of laughter—and in the small house’s / dark corners, the ghosts of ancestors tap their feet and smile.” (’Echoes’)

Jenevieve Carlyn, “Birds Sing the Harmonies of Stars”: Reading Merril D. Smith’s poetry collection, Held Inside the Folds of Time

The falling-off of autumn finds its expression in the days of the dead that come at the end of October and the beginning of November. Or maybe that’s better put the other way around: The season finds its corollary, its physical manifestation of the deeper spiritual truth, in the leaves that flash in one last bright color, then turn to brown and leafmeal on the ground.

And here on All Souls Day, I find my mind coming back to this poem, “They are all Gone into the World of Light,” by Henry Vaughan (1621–1695). Generally, I’m not much drawn by Vaughan. He lacks, for me, the phenomenology that Thomas Traherne brings to human perception, or George Herbert’s inspired willingness to be simple (though Vaughan describes himself as a disciple of that “blessed man,” Herbert). But . . . Vaughan’s “They are all Gone into the World of Light” has some deep turn from grief to faith, from the brightness of memory to the brightness of heaven, that speaks to us in a way we need as we contemplate the dead on All Souls Day.

Published in the 1655 second part of Vaughan’s collection Silex Scintillans, the poem consists of ten quatrains, rhymed abab and built from three line lengths: 5-4-5-3, five feet in the first and third lines, four in the second, and three in the fourth. The poem has some good lines: “I see them walking in an air of glory, / Whose light doth trample on my days,” and the famous first line. But the drive of the poem lies in its argument.

The key is its use of light as a metaphor and explanation. The poem opens with the grief-trope of abandonment: “They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling’ring here.” The dead inhabit “the world of light.” Their memory “is fair and bright,” and “glows and glitters.” They walk “in an air of glory,” while the speaker lives in “dull and hoary” time, “Mere glimmering and decays.”

Grief inverts the world: the absent thing more substantial than present things, the ghost made real and reality made ghostly. For the grieving Vaughan, memory is still illuminated, even if it be only like the afterglow of sunset behind a hill:

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,
After the sun’s remove.

And yet, the fading brightness of the dead in memory provides an image of Heaven. Or, even more, an actual presage of the afterlife, the “world of light” transformed from the contents of memory to the population of Heaven. Immediately after being crushed by grief — “I see them walking in an air of glory, / Whose light doth trample on my days” — Vaughan turns in the fourth stanza to apostrophize the virtues of hope and humility:

O holy Hope! and high Humility,
High as the heavens above!
These are your walks, and you have show’d them me
To kindle my cold love.

Were that not enough, he turns in the fifth stanza to apostrophize death: “Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just, / Shining nowhere, but in the dark.” Death is not the background of darkness into which gradually fade the lights of those who have died. It is instead the condition of the lights themselves, presaging Heaven.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: They are all Gone into the World of Light

I have a few friends who are religious, that is, who take their commitment to their religious teachings seriously. One is studying for lay ministry. In response to the entrance committee’s question about when she “heard her calling,” she said that she didn’t “hear a calling,” but that when she asked her god what she should do, the answer was always “Help,” and she did: the hungry, the dying. One friend told me he strived “to be the face and hands of Jesus in the world.” He assists immigrants, the elderly. I find their commitment profound. More profound than my vague intention to be kind, or kind-ish, to be a good person, or good-ish. I think about the men of my friend’s synagogue, who would volunteer on Christmas for the dispatchers at the fire station, police station, emergency services, whatever they could do as civilians so the Christmas-celebrators there could have an evening with their families. It interests me, this level of taking seriously the best teachings of deism, which, to my mind are less about the deity than about each other. But so much of what has spilled out of religious belief through the ages is something exactly other. Exactly the opposite of this axiom to take care of each other. As a species we are fearful, it seems, of the unknown, and particularly and most of all of the unknown other human beings with whom we must share this earth. I like this poem by Lauren Camp because of its almost inadvertent empathy, the startlement of the speaker to this moment of unlikely, even reluctant, resonance with an other.

Marilyn McCabe, in my melancholic friendship

My dear friend and fellow Bayit builder Steve Silbert just underwent chemo for Hairy Cell Leukemia. And from the infusion chair, he wrote and drew an extraordinary series of prayer-poems — the prayers he himself needed to pray, which he realized midweek could also probably speak to / for others navigating cancer and their caregivers / loved ones.

I remember sitting with my mom when she was in the infusion chair. Not for chemo — to treat her mycobacterial lung infection. The cocktail of meds she was on gave her neuropathy and destroyed her hearing before she and her doctors decided to stop treatment. Anyway: maybe that’s part of why these speak to me and move me so deeply.

I also know what it’s like to write one’s way through something difficult or painful. (Miscarriage poems are still available as a PDF, though the lulu chapbook has disappeared. And there are postpartum depression poems early in Waiting to Unfold that I hope have offered hope and companionship to others in those particular tight straits.) […]

Anyway: I hope you’ll click through to Steve’s beautiful work and will share it with folks you know who are navigating cancer or similar illness.

And while I’m talking about illness and healing, I also had the privilege of midwifing Adam Green’s beautiful collection Recover: A Teshuvah Journey Through Eating Disorder Treatment into the world. A different kind of illness, a different kind of healing, but kin to Steve’s work in the sense that both grapple with embodiment, suffering, and finding a way through.

Rachel Barenblat, Prayers for healing

Death can mark every door with soot
from a torch, let loose a plague of insects
from the sky. No coin can appease it,
but perhaps an amulet pinned to your
undershirt creates some kind of force
field. Still, the body is a hard book to read,
immersive text swirling with dull humors.

Luisa A. Igloria, Home Remedy

Perhaps the clearest example of the personal intersecting with the cosmic is the title poem, Pedestrian in the Multiverse. It plays with the idea of multiple universes in which every event may have different outcomes, recalling Schrödinger’s cat: alive in one possible universe and dead in another. The poem juxtaposes ordinary human concerns—the speaker ‘needs a jar of preserved lemons’ and carries ‘a shopping bag heavy with// apples’—with international violence, as bombers have ‘scored a direct hit’, and with cosmic conditions in which ‘there is only helium’, ‘the sun is a red giant’ and ‘gravity// is dead’. Written in the present tense, these moments appear to coexist, while the absence of a clear temporal relationship between them gives the poem a deliberately disjunctive structure. Its principal thread is the transformation of the opening phrases ‘my father runs towards me’, ‘he looks happy’ and ‘I am almost exactly the same’ into the concluding ‘he looks happy’ and ‘he is almost exactly the same’. The subtle exchange of identities suggests an ordinary consciousness moving through everyday life while surrounded by innumerable unrealised possibilities. In Booker’s hands, a scientific hypothesis becomes a metaphor for human experience: for all the lives that might have been lived but were not.

Throughout Pedestrian in the Multiverse, Booker brings apparently separate realms into productive contact. Memory revises the past, encounters with nature illuminate human vulnerability and responsibility, and cosmic speculation enlarges the significance of ordinary experience. The collection’s formal and thematic diversity is therefore not dispersive but integral to its achievement: each poem tests what happens when one way of seeing meets another. Intelligent, compassionate and alert to both intimate feeling and the wider world, this is a collection whose transformations continue to resonate beyond the individual poem.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Pedestrian in the Multiverse’ by Claire Booker

There’s a strand running through Jon Cone’s No Vibrato Hard Transcendence of engaging with other poets, with a tradition of his own making. These poets include Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, Jack Gilbert, James Wright and Jean Valentine, so it’s a specifically American lineage. His Dickinson poem, which has a title that’s too long to type out in full here, is the nearest thing he comes to direct imitation:

The strain- the pain
Of pale souls who wear
Winding sheets of rain –
Bent under the turning year –

Other poems are less directly acts of homage. ‘Throat Singing, for William Stafford’ takes Stafford’s ‘Traveling through the Dark’ and turns it into an account of Cone’s own encounter with a dead deer, one which, though it ends similarly to Stafford’s, represents a very different kind of moral dilemma to the older poet’s. But you need to read it yourself, I won’t spoil it for you.

Later in the pamphlet, we meet ‘MEMO: To Be Considered Later in the Cool of the Aleph Inn’, where the conversation with the poet it responds to is of a different order. The piece opens with a prose introduction that starts:

You utter maroon, you Billy Wordsworth! Not lonely as a cloud. No way. Clouds are pack animals.

The reference is clear enough, and the criticism to the point. The rest of the text consists of a list of potential alternative similes that Billy might have used, or maybe not. Here are a few:

Wander lonely as a process server
Wander lonely as the wildfire particulate
Wander lonely as the thick-headed levitator
Wander lonely as a receipt tossed by the curb
Wander lonely as the final horn

Any of which would have made the original poem more interesting and accurate.

But I don’t wish to give the impression that Cone only writes this kind of response poems. There are a range of more or less short pieces that deal with the poet’s direct experience of the world, often with pointed wit:

POEM

I visit the gun shop
to look at death poems

There are also a number of very fine prose poems, including the extraordinary ‘Father Gustav, S.J., Recalls Seeing the Jackson Pollock Exhibit for the First Time at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1967)’. Here’s an extract from around about the middle; ideally I’d give you the whole thing, but it would be better if you got the booklet and read it that way:

And thereby distractions were prevented from entering the cell of my consciousness as if I had shut a massive iron door. I saw a forest become a thick bank of cloud transform into the surface of a sea. I saw a strange bird with long beak and legs, wings outstretched, as if dancing. I saw snakes extended through thick clouds, and black creatures with bodies smudged and weird tongues where faces would be. I saw a large flatfish with the face of a woman, and a series of ghostly apparitions floating upon bandages stained red and green and yellow. Tall grasses marched toward me going this way and that. Eight tall black trunks seemed to lead a furious parade. The colors were feverish, dirty, dull. Gray and black, orange and yellow, and beige. I did not know how to calibrate the noise the sounds made as I looked at them with my eyes.

Cone is a fascinating writer who, in his own quiet way, is setting about the task of redefining what an individual poetic voice might be like. Go read him.

Billy Mills, A Plethora of Pamphlets Reviewed for your Pleasure

It’s been far too long since I shared a poem I love by another writer. But we’re back! This week’s featured author is the brilliant Jennie Owen with an evocative piece from misty Lancashire. Halloween may have been a few days ago, but Jennie’s poem speaks to Pendle and the ghosts of wronged women.

The trials of the Pendle witches in 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history, and some of the best recorded of the 17th century. Jennie is looking at ‘dark tourism’ across the north of England in her creative-critical PhD and has written a cycle of poems that respond to the landscape and history of Pendle. I’m thrilled to be able to share one of them here.

Jennie Owen is a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in Creative Writing with The Open University. She is a Pushcart, Best of the Net and Forward Prize nominated poet, who has been published in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and anthologies. Jennie is currently reading for her PhD with Manchester Metropolitan University, with a focus on poetry and traumascapes. Her collection Tips for Collectors of the Macabre, is available from Yaffle Press. Hagstruck, a collection about the Pendle witches, will be published Spring 2027.

I love how Jennie works with sound in her poetry: the layering, the litanies. This poem is richly evocative of both time and place and calls on the sense that landscapes ‘remember’ or hold the things that have happened on them and in them. Read this piece out loud. Then read it again by candlelight. It becomes a kind of spell.

Pendle, Winter 2024

Hiking down down down
to the distant demdike,
we finally understand
that this is an earth
that shifts in an instant,
shaped in the daylight palm,
it warms wax to cold curse

it bends liquid to solid,
jars and drowns strangers
as they shin up far green folds
traipse through redfearn,
in and out of wet robey moss,
past bulcock grass so sharp
it bleeds pins at the scar. […]

Helen Mort, Featured Poet: Jennie Owen

This poem gets much of its power from simple phrasing and a clear overall arc, contrasting meek stillness and suppression with the grand cosmic and historical movements that are first presented, as it were, in an objective point of view, then, in a startling twist, from the point of view of the deaf and silent dead. What makes the poem marvellous and hauntingly memorable is its combination of forceful simplicity with ripples of suggestion that tug the mind in many different directions, hinting at complicated, contradictory, fluidly shifting layers of feeling as we read.

Some ripples flow from the associations of words. Take “safe” for a start. Metre gives this word quiet but thought-provoking emphasis, making us hear it simultaneously in very different ways. We can hear the speaker as contemplating and envying the way the dead are shielded from the shocks of worldly life, like snails in their shells. Or it can suggest that the dead are safely disposed of, tucked away and kept from bothering the living. In this sense, we may think of Hamlet’s words as he hides Polonius’s body – “Safely stowed!” or Macbeth asking the First Murderer whether Banquo is definitely dead and hearing the reassurance that “Safe in a ditch he bides / With twenty trenched gashes in his head, / The least a death to nature.” As the stanza develops there’s a constant flickering between thinking of the dead as enviably protected and thinking of them as deprived. If “chambers” and “sleep” suggest comfortable security, “Untouched by Morning – / and untouched by Noon” suggests deprivation. “Meek” suggests that the submissiveness of the dead is a matter of weak will but it also invokes the blessing of the meek in the Beatitudes. To some the “roof of stone” in line five might suggest the strength of protection enjoyed by the dead but the word “Stone” seems to me to fall with a chilling weight, and its contrast with “Rafter of satin” makes me think of the iron fist in the velvet glove, the implacable force behind the superficial comfort of the padded prison.

Edmund Prestwich, Emily Dickinson’s Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Ach, it’s sad to watch them, busing to ad-biz
boredom every dawn—grown up now, the scruffy
crew we used to shepherd to school down six
dutiful blocks. The things we dreamed for them! Raw
enchantment. Princess-oranges from Prokofiev.
Firebirds from Stravinsky. Ghazals from Urdu.
Grammars turned to glamours, that little tongue-twist.
How’d they get stuck here, in the world as it is?
In nothing more ensorcelled than turquoise hair,
jewelry-glitzed? At least they’re not in Iraq,
karma be thanked, but the state of the S&P
leaves them slack-jawed, hanging like zombies onto
morning commutes and late-night television.
Numb, we wait. They don’t tell us what they dream.

Maryann Corbett, A Slant Approach to Halloween

— On a cheerier note, one of the things we/I still can do is talk up our favourite authors, humans, and perhaps especially those who publish with small presses. Alice Major is a beloved poet and essayist from my hometown. Her latest book is Triangularity out with University of Alberta Press.

— I can tell you firsthand what a delightful and kind person Alice is and what a rock she is in our writing community. Her thoughts on poetry, and reflections on her history of writing poetry, and on living a whole life in and with poetry are so worth reading. I love that she talks about not imposing her own “concerns and preoccupations” on the poetry and poetics of others. She says, “We haul our whole life history into our poetics, even if any given poem has nothing to do with personal biography. We each bring our own ways of exploring the multiple dimensions of this world and assumptions about what matters in creating a poem. I have decided opinions about what matters to me, my own belief systems. But I try not to lay my triangular expectations over the work of others.”

— And this for me, really encapsulates the truth and generosity of Alice Major.

— One more quotation from the book which I also love: “But I do believe, as an article of faith, that the only route to solutions starts from individual bonding and the way it leads us to a wider narrative of love.”

— The way Alice lives is an example to anyone embarking on the creative life. She lives her words about love and community in such generous ways.

Shawna Lemay, The Writerly Ecstasy

As most of you will have noticed, France is being particularly French at the moment, and in Paris there is a rather oppressive atmosphere as everyone waits to see what the weekend and the start of next week will bring. On Monday the lycée and university students return after the Toussaint break, and we’ll find out whether we are back to the impromptu homeschooling of our lively (*euphemism alert*) 11 year old. He’s away on a rugby trip with his team all this week, and yesterday they won a tournament. To celebrate, they built a barricade of suitcases and furniture across the door of their dormitory, sang some patriotic and/or vulgar songs, and threw shoes at the “police” (their coaches). Suffice it to say, I’m not sure things are going to calm down in France any time soon.

This is all highly traditional of course. France is in many ways a much more conservative and traditional society than the UK. One of the many positive aspects of that respect for tradition struck me this week after I picked up a pocket-sized paperback that caught my eye at one of the local bookshops. Cent poèmes pour voyager is an anthology of the 100 poems shortlisted in this year’s RATP poetry competition. (The RATP is the Parisian transport authority, the equivalent of TFL (Transport for London) in the UK.) Paris, like London and no doubt many other cities, has a poetry on the métro scheme, in which short poems are displayed in métro carriages. But this anthology is not a selection of existing poems that were chosen for display, but the best 100 entries in a national competition — a concours — for amateur poets from anywhere in France and of all ages.

There are two shortlisted poems here by seven-year-olds. Here’s a prize-winning single couplet by Amélia Lepeltier, aged 7, from Maisons-Alfort, south-east of Paris:

À mon rêve, tous les jours, je mets un marque-page Pour que le soir je retrouve tous les personnages

Every day, I put a book-mark in my dream To find my characters at night again

I also really liked this one by Noé Potocki, aged 8, from Montreuil, east of Paris:

la vie c’est des virgules à l’infini

life is commas unendingly

And what about this one by Adèle Fleurot, aged 10, from Paris (tricky to translate because the words are so ordinary, but it has a lovely sound and rhythm as well as a clever meaning):

Vivre et mourir Telle est notre destinée Cher avenir je te souhaite Un beau passé

To live and to die Such is our fate Dear future, I wish you A beautiful past

What is particularly delightful about these three little epigrams by children is not only that they are so successful and accomplished but also that they are so unmistakably French — in their forms (alexandrines in the first; the sort of short lines and scattered rhyme we recognise from the major surrealists in the second), but also in their style and preoccupations. Two are unselfconsciously about the meaning of la vie.

Generally speaking I’m a bit of a sceptic about poetry competitions (the recent UK Forward Prize results were as dismal as ever), and the resulting publications can often be pretty deadly. But this one is charming! How did they pull it off?

Victoria Moul, Gangster toads and the meaning of life

If I ever cross paths with Ruth Padel, I should probably buy her a pint. In 2019, I was about to start an MA in Creative Writing, specifically poetry, after 20 years out of academia, and even though I’d spent those 20 years teaching in schools, I was at that point still woefully unaware of great swathes of modern poetry. I knew it. But I hadn’t waited this long just to do a half-arsed job. I hit that reading list hard. The poetry, of course, but mostly the books about poetry. My reading notes from that time range from delighted (‘YES!’ / ‘Love this’ / ‘Zeugma is the best word I’ve ever seen’ / ‘THIS’) to the anxious (‘I can’t get my head round this’ / ‘I am hating this book’ / ‘WTAF’).

Thank goodness, then, that quite early on, before I got myself entirely overwhelmed, I read 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem by the poet Ruth Padel (Vintage, 2002). It’s the book that came out of The Sunday Poem, the column she wrote for The Independent on Sunday between 1998-2001 – each week, there was a modern poem, accompanied by an essay that turned it upside down and shook it until all the good stuff fell out of its pockets. 52 of those columns made it into this book. They’re technical, microscopically closely-read, and just what I needed back then to get my head in the zone. I was startled by them at first, worried by all the things I hadn’t spotted myself. But by number 4, I was hooked. […]

In her introduction, Padel laments the fact that so many people see modern poetry as difficult: ‘many people today … no longer expect poetry to be there for them, to welcome them.’ She’s on an absolute mission in this book to show us poems and say ‘Look at what this poet’s doing! Isn’t it fantastic!’ I love that. I’m all for that. It doesn’t have to make us feel stupid. ‘The point is pleasure, after all,’ she says. And it is a pleasure, to witness her digging iambs and consonant rhymes and transferred epithets out of poems and holding them wriggling up to the light. When she shows us Sean O’Brien’s poem Rain (which, she says, should be cartoon-captioned BLOKE LEAVING PUB IN RAIN FAILS TO HUMOUR FURIOUS GIRLFRIEND BY WRITING POEM ON WET WALK HOME), we’re shown how the poet uses dactyls (DA-dum-dum) and anapests (da-da-DUM) to mimic the hammering rain, and then we’re shown how this metrical wizardry only begins when the rain does. (My 2019 self wrote SO COOL! next to that bit.) This is not stuff that you have to be aware of to enjoy a poem, of course, but Padel gives us a ‘technical illumination’ that lets us glimpse the workings of each poem, and that is a gift.

Nia Broomhall, Week 33: 52 Ways to Look at a Poem

even the light is gold
with loathing. to go in
terror of the calendar;
the pink and waferish
moon. who do i think
i am? this black
discerning skirt hangs
slack upon the wire
frame of failure. no
good can come of it.

Fran Lock, “OPTIMUM TRAJECTORY”

Ghazals, it turns out (and I knew this on some level already), satisfy one aspect of my sensibility while offending another. I love phrase repetition. It’s one of the first exercises I do with first-year students — a simple technique that lends a piece of writing an unmistakeably poetic character without the need for end-rhyme, fixed meter or floweriness. It disrupts narrative flow — that is, it makes it hard to slip into a prosaic account of a series of events, because some feature of the whole must stay fixed even as the rest moves forward. The attention of the writer must also stay fixed.

Because I am a creature of many and various fixations, therefore, I find it easy to think in the broad shape of ghazals. On the other hand, a ghazal is made out of couplets, and each couplet must be syntactically complete, ending on the repeated phrase. This allows for very little variation in build-up, and restricts the extent to which a poem can shift in tone and intensity. My instinct when first drafting ‘Asteroid City’ was to alternate between short and long sentences, gradually extending the long ones, to give the impression of something heaping, gathering — a tower starting to list. The ghazal won’t let me do that. It’s made out of equal units, evenly spaced footsteps.

I suspect this is why you don’t see many ghazals published in leading journals. Difficult to describe any one template that dictates the shape of poems prized by journal editors, but certainly an extremely common feature is the parting blow, the sting in the tail, the ending you don’t see coming. Here are a few from journals I have immediately to hand:

“how do you get rid of what you loved / when it no longer works” (Sirka Elspaß, translated by Martyn Crucefix, in The Little Review #2)

“In the third person I exist for now, / a sentence in his mouth.” (Megan O’Rourke, Poetry Magazine, October 2026)

“We already know, he sighed. / We already know all your questions.” (Per Olvmyr, Poetry Wales, Summer 2026)

Hard to pull this off when some idea of your ending has been advertised in the very first line of the poem, then immediately reinforced by the second. Instead, I suppose there has to be a sense of inevitability, of being followed or haunted, as in Dorianne Laux’s ‘Moon Ghazal’, or of the speaker performing a reliable ritual, as in Patricia Smith’s ‘Hip-Hop Ghazal’. The poem, in effect, has no ending — only a jumping-off point, like a ghost train coming back to where it started.

Jon Stone, DIARY / On Ghazals

The little pig’s house of straw. K’s bed. The second pig’s house of sticks. Ophelia’s river. Often the main characters are neglected. Which birds lost their feathers for Icarus, which bees their wax? What about when you were turned to stone by Medusa—were you wearing a scarf? Where’s the scarf? Look how a baby lamb leaps. That’s gravity, spring’s main character. Your honour, it was the bullet not the gun.

Gary Barwin, Two Fairy Tales

Poetry often dodges commercial reasoning as most sales are generated through readings and festivals or directly from the poet themselves rather than bookshops. However, the cover still has to attract potential readers and be distinctive enough to stand out on piles of books on a stall.

I’d been lucky with my first two poetry book covers, for “Yellow Torchlight and the Blues” and “Mimicking a Snowdrop”. The publishers took the title poem and found an image that reflected the poems: a battered jazz poster featuring a saxophone, and a snowdrop emerging as a sign of hope from rubble. The third, “Ghosts in the Desert” could not take that approach as it did not have a title poem so the publisher took their favoured poem from the collection and illustrated that. Hence the collection having a figure skater executing a layback spin.

My fourth collection “The Significance of a Dress” presented a challenge. The title poem is set in a wedding dress hire shop in a refugee camp. Visiting the camp just to take a photo for a book cover was both impractical and expensive. Using an existing photo would require buying a licence due to copyright and might come with conditions for use. Taking a photo of a new wedding dress would also come up against copyright issues. While walking around Leicester’s city centre, I saw a dress hanging in a charity shop. It was a perfect match for the dress described in the poem and very much preloved. I took a photo and converted the photo to a cross-stitch design. I’d not long finished the cross stitching when my publisher suggested having some textile design for the cover. My cross stitched wedding dress was then adapted for the cover. My cross stitch is done is shades of white, but the cover is sepia.

This too was a deliberate decision: clean white covers on a book stall at a fair or festival discourage browsers from picking them up since sticky finger marks stand out. That’s not a problem with a sepia cover. It’s also a reason to consider matt covers rather than glossy ones: it’s not just that gloss reflects light, but it also marks more easily. Sometimes the tactile nature of covers – how does it feel to pick up and read the book – gets overlooked.

My original embroidery had another outing when Arachne Press held a “Ten Years of Cover Art Design” at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in London.

Emma Lee, The Art of Book Cover Design

Poetry Hikes is my new YouTube channel in which each episode I go on a hike somewhere, show off the woods and any interesting features, and then sit down to read a few poems to viewers. That’s it. Nothing complicated. But why?

I’ve been thinking of ways to share poetry with more people, especially people who maybe aren’t already on my “friends” list or follow me on social media, and people who may not regularly read or even seek out poems. Exposing people to new poets is one of my favorite things about teaching. Poetry readings at colleges, bookstores and other venues are great, but they tend to have limited audiences—mostly people who are already eager poetry readers (or are friends with the poet).

And somewhere along the way I was inspired by several YouTube creators who post videos of their hiking and camping trips. The Wondering Woodsman, Maxim Outdoors, Walter Zolna, and Chimfwembe are among some of the accounts I follow. These channels have helped me find new places to hike, offered useful tips, and are just relaxing to watch.

I don’t have much to offer on hiking and camping that those creators don’t already do, but the outdoors is a big part of my poetry life, and I thought maybe if I combine the two interests, I could open up new readers for some of my favorite poets. And there are lots of good poetry podcasts, so I didn’t want to start another.

So I bought an inexpensive GoPro camera, picked a poet for my first hike, and headed to a local trail to see if this was something I’d want to keep doing. The result is Episode One, which takes place on Haycock Mountain in Bucks County PA, and I share two poems by Todd Davis. Episode Two continues that hike with two poems by David Budbill. I also get a little lost.

Grant Clauser, I Started a New Project: Poetry Hikes

いつせいに雁翔つ空の重さかな　高久清美

issei ni kari tatsu sora no omosa kana

geese depart
all together
the weight of the sky…

Kiyomi Takaku

from Seika (Blue Blossoms), a haiku collection of Kiyomi Takaku, Honami Shoten, Tokyo, 2010

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (November 1, 2026)

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

I was actually just asked about my process and I ended up writing a response in a day-log Susan Sontag-style:

My Process: How to Write a Poem

1.     Alarm at 5:20

1 go to bed early the night before. It helps.

2.     Up at 5:30. Put on the kettle. Put on music—loud, perhaps Julieta Venegas or Natalia Lafourcade. Or maybe something in English today. Go outside—Stuart and Zapote are howling at the door for breakfast, and the rest of the cats come running when you call them. Pick bitter herbs from the garden. Venus is still bright at dawn.

3.     Bitter tea, then make espresso for LG and me, while he makes breakfast for the boys

4.     6:20 Boys to school. Start chores: feed horses, birds. Check for new calves

5.     8 AM breakfast with LG. We wonder what we are going to do with our house problem. Maybe cry, maybe not.

6.     9 AM get distracted with hundreds of things that are not on the to-do list, or distracted with what is on it, or talking or observing or bringing a calf down from the cerro or making yogurt or teaching a kid how to communicate with the horses or school meetings or gardening.

7.     Forget to do some things that should be done

8.     12:14 PM sit down to write. Feel like a fraud. Write a paragraph of nonsense. Give up.

9.     12:56 hang up a load of laundry

10.  12:58 there are swallows and clouds crisscrossing the sky like the clotheslines

11.  1:10 something terrible in the news. Make lunch.

12.  2:50 kids home. Eat lunch with them and whoever else shows up. We laugh, talk about all the things of the day. Beautiful.

13.  4:33 Do dishes and other things that no one else notices. Something terrible on the news. Write another line.

14.  7:35 boys come in from chores, playing, etc., sit on the couch and listen to their chatter or silence. Make something for dinner. Close the gate, accompanied by 6.5 dogs. Stargaze for a moment. Call the cats. Check on the horses.

15.  8:58 Sudoku in bed with help from SK. M tells me about the birds and his homework. Maybe write a poem tomorrow. Or maybe this life is one already.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine trees, VapoRub, cold mountain air on fallen leaves, stammpot or Beppe soup remind me of Canada.

It’s a little cliché, but the petrichor of the first rain on the soil after eight months of dry season is something I first experienced in Mexico. The wild cempesuchil (marigold) in the fall is also so evocative of Mexico for me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lisa López Smith (rob mclennan)

The truth is, we poets don’t have a bloody clue what we’re doing most of the time. Phrases and lines arrive out of the nowhere, as if the poem were busying itself writing us. That’s why ars poetica poems are so common: we’re desperately trying to figure out why we don’t have a clue. I flicked through Nick Laird’s Up Late and picked out four artes poeticae. One about paper clips; another, a night sky; another, a marriage:‘Poetry’s the art of introducing words / that haven’t met & getting them to sit together / in a small room…’ and one where the terrible fish he spots in a mirror isn’t his ageing self, but a poem, which ‘swims off immediately / and with good reason. / I would eat it for its secrets.’

Last week I was in Edinburgh to hear Alice Oswald reading from her new book Rhapsody, A Manifesto. At one point (I’m probably misquoting here) she said ‘I’d rather teach luck than teach poetry workshops’. Of course, I immediately wondered how I could go about teaching luck. There was some research in the 1990s which identified the key elements that make us ‘lucky’. Most, if not all, might apply to good writing practice too:

• Stay open to your surroundings. (Absolutely. Pay heed to the world: it might not be around tomorrow. The task of the writer, says Anne Carson, is to pay attention to the small things, because they make big differences.)
• Listen to your intuitions. (Well maybe. Go with your gut instincts, but be prepared to challenge them later. They’re as often as not banal and predictable.)
• Think positively. (Actually – most of the time I encourage writers to write their way through their doubts and nurture their uncertainties, because doubt is always so much more interesting than knowledge.
• Be determined – stick with it. (Stop moaning. Writers write. End of.)
• Expand your networks. (Read lots of poems. Find a writing group. Go to readings. Read lots more poems.)Subscribe now

Psychologists explain the mystery of the writing process by describing the competing Default Mode Network, which draws together memory and emotions in the daydreamy background while the Executive Control Network keeps things focussed and ordered. But when the ECN relaxes a bit (when you’re out walking the dog, listening to a concert, or lying half awake), the DMN delivers that killer line you didn’t know was there. And then there’s Hyper-Associative Thinking, Semantic Priming and Transient Hypofrontality. No wonder we fall back on the poem as paper clip.

It was Horace who wrote the first verse ars poetica over two thousand year ago – a letter of advice to a Roman family aspiring to be poets. He reminds them that a poem requires unity, underpinned by harmony and proportion; that a poet’s qualifications should include common sense, knowledge of character and high ideals. Gosh, that last one’s been lost in translation. I could count on one hand the poets I’ve met who display anything like common sense. But he did hit the nail on the head when it comes to process versus product: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus – ‘Mountains groan in childbirth and out will pop a silly wee mouse.’ I know the feeling.

John Glenday, Ars Poetica: on Poems about Writing Poetry

Sometimes, I’ll get overwhelmed thinking about how Catapult, Soft Skull, and Counterpoint just went out of business. I never thought that they would be gone. They were well-funded until they disappeared, taking their books with them.

Then, I remember the stars. The stars have been here for millions of years, glowing in the night. In the end, our existence is tiny, and everything I do is both important and unimportant at the same time.

But I remember, too, that literature has endured through centuries, others believing in the magic and wonder of story. I believe in books. I believe in my upcoming memoir, Little Soldiers. I believe in publishing. I believe in Red Hen Press.

On days when we don’t have enough money or will to keep going, we have joy. We have wonder. We find more books that bring us to the light, that reach across time like stars. We believe there will be a way to keep publishing non-corporate books, that people still believe in this work.

We are about to launch a new website, which is going to help us. We aren’t due for anything big or transformative or earth-shaking. We are due to start dancing. To notice the sky. To note all the things that we have to be grateful for, including the people who keep holding us to the light. So here is to wonder and magic, to more than survival—to thriving.

Kate Gale, Our Flash of Stars: On the Wonder and Magic of Living

This week’s task is to get the final proofs out for the eco-gothic anthology, which is slower going than I’d planned. I still have a handful of chaps to make decisions on left from the summer reading period, plus some really great new full-length projects to choose from coming in now. We’ve already released a couple of longer projects this summer and will be adding more to the schedule in among the shorter books. The recent Sharon McPeter’s Jewels and Amy Lyon’s Seizures are prose memoir hybrid projects that have turned out really nicely and I can’t wait to do more. They take a little more time in the layout, being longer and more dense than the usual poetry chaps, but are highly enjoyable to work on. I also found a cool way to still add a handmade touch on a recent chap […] by creating a slip-cover edition you can get in the shop exclusively.

In other news, ballots have been delivered to drop boxes and we are staring down what is likely to be a batshit November, so I am struggling hard to stay away from social media when not work related and avoid the usual doomscroll to protect my own peace. November, with the drastically shortened days and the turn toward winter is already filled with landmines and losses, I don’t need to make it worse.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 11/2/2026

Three days later, I email my publisher. So…what now? Do you sell it? Do I sell it? How do I sell it? How do I get anyone to read this thing?

And that’s the big problem. Now that there’s a product, how do you sell it? Well, as an independent writer working outside of “traditional” literary circles, I have no network, no built-in inner circle to cross-promote with. I don’t have thousands of social media followers waiting for a buy link. It’s just me.

My publisher, as incredibly kind as he is, can’t give me the calm, stolid heart needed to just let things fall where they may. For the first month, I become utterly obsessed. I have got to sell this book! I send out email after email, asking for reviews. I change my author profile on the publisher’s site every hour (how do I make myself more exciting?). I want the names and numbers of anyone who buys a copy so I can add them to the tally in my head (maybe I’ll get one of those giant fundraising thermometers and keep it by my desk, or just scratch tally marks into the wall like I’m in an 18th-century gaol). And, on top of that, I want the names and numbers of anyone who doesn’t buy a copy (that’s another thermometer) so I can ask them to explain themselves. I stay up all night, a promoter who only knows how to write, and that’s when it hits me—there’s no joy. I am not happy. My book has been published, and I am not happy. What, am I going to start badgering people on the street, thrusting books at them, demanding their wallets? Buy my book! I promise you, it’s good! And then another realization hits me: nobody is asking me to do this. Nobody is keeping track. My friends are proud; my family’s proud; my parents are proud. And since I am my father’s daughter, I do some digging too. Most indie poetry books sell at most 50 copies in the first six months, maybe 75 after a year. The math doesn’t math, but, okay. Okay. This is…reasonable. The whole world won’t read it, but nobody was reading it before, right? You kept it to yourself, remember? And now, it’s out there, in the world. A small, few corners of it, but hey, what do you want, the moon? (Yes, but that will have to wait.)

The Infinite Digital Shelf

Looking over the table of contents of my own book (a collection structured as an almanac of dates spanning from 712 CE to the 2020 pandemic—yes, this is a plug, yes, it’s good! I promise!), the irony hits me. My writing ‘explores the slow passage of time and the voices that refuse to be erased by the years’ (per my incredibly kind, incredibly thorough, incredibly encouraging publisher). If the subject of the art itself spans centuries, why am I acting like if a certain number of copies don’t sell, the door’s going to slam shut? After all, I’m the one who opened it. It’ll stay open as long as I want it to. Books, as any motivational library banner can tell us, are forever.

There’s no expiration date on literature. A collection doesn’t vanish if it isn’t cleared from a bookstore display in thirty days. It can sit quietly on that infinite digital shelf, just waiting for anyone browsing the catalog to happen across it.

So, once I let go of the anxiety of immediate validation, a plague we have never been able to eradicate, I stop expecting to sell a million copies. I look at my book, a bound copy of my words that I can hold in my hands, and the joy, miraculously, returns. I start focusing on slow, meaningful connections. My dad tells people at church. I tell people at work. I join Bluesky. I become a Goodreads author. I donate a copy of the collection to my local library. I drop off a few at the indie bookstore down the street. I reach out to Trish Hopkinson. It’s small, and it’s manageable, and with each action, there’s that joy.

Thirty Years to Publish, Three Days to Lose the Joy – guest post by Kate LaDew (Trish Hopkinson)

It’s been a week since the most extraordinary event.

From the moment that the Brontë Society asked Anna and me to curate this year’s Poetry at the Parsonage, we knew we had to seize this chance to do something out of the ordinary. On 1st October, I published “Neurodiversity, accessibility, bogs” on this site, explaining how the radical, rule-breaking nature of the bog has not just inspired us to write differently, but to live differently. And this applies to the way we organise events.

For the first time, in this article, I spoke about a time when I’d been singled out and publicly criticised in a conference by a speaker who had been distracted by my inability to sit still and quiet during her presentation. And I wrote: “inspired by the queer, fluid, rule-breaking ecosystem of the bog, and determined not to organise the sort of event which exclude me or anyone else who cannot or will not be still and silent, we’ve mixed it up. Or mossed it up. We’ve fenned it, moored it, queered it. Bogged it”.

We took our lead from the moors, and we broke all the usual binaries of audience and reader, and we smashed the expectation that poetry audiences sit in silent rows facing at the stage. Instead, there was constant movement, constant creation, audience members writing and painting and gluing their own Book of Bogs throughout the day as they listened and responded – you can see some examples here. [photos]

The open mic happened in a circle, as a conversation: speaking to and with each other through poetry. At one point, I remember saying to Jane Clarke, who was sitting next to me “There are so many writers” – because this event brought beautiful poetry, beautiful thoughts, out of everyone. And such beautiful listening – look!

But what about those poets who’d travelled across the country – in Jane’s case across the sea – to read to us? How did it feel to tables of people who were busily engaged in creating their own work as they listened? Was it distracting? Disrespectful? Did they feel ignored? No, it seemed, they did not. When an event is framed by an expectation of interaction and mutuality, it seems that readers and speakers can reframe movement and noise in the room. Participants who are painting, writing, sticking, moving between tables to borrow a crayon in the right shade of green are expressing interest, engagement, and enthusiasm. The experience is transformed.

So Victoria Gatehouse said “There was so much joy and a real sense of connection in the room … it was truly inspiring and memorable”, Jane loved it and said it was”epic”, David Morley called it was “one of the most exciting poetry events I’ve ever had the honour to be part of …. It was a total symphony of poetry. Beauty and truth”. When we make events inclusive, they are better not just for those who are usually excluded, but for everyone. Rebecca Yorke, Director of the Brontë Parsonage who funded and hosted the event, said it was “extraordinarily beautiful.”

Then to finish it off, a Mass Wuther, of course, and dancing away the adrenalin and joy to an excellent set by DJ Poppy Turner, and a drive over the moors through the wild winds, flooded roads and sideways rain of Storm Boelo with my co-host and good friend Anna Chilvers smiling next to me, and something in my broken, moor-loving ADHD self was healed.

Clare Shaw, Bog magic

I’ve noticed a bit of recent grumbling in the poetry zeitgeist, some opining and gnashing of teeth. I’ve done a little myself, about prohibitive submission fees that suggest a poetry Ponzi-scheme in all but name. I hear of algorithmically calculated formulas for prize-winning poems, the word ‘gatekeepers’ gets wheeled out into the light for some exercise with depressing regularity, and we all secretly cower in fear of being mauled for our wretched doggerel by the Moul. On BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Verb’, Poet and Sunday Times poetry critic Graeme Richardson suggested a flooded market of forgettable poetry, destined not for the canon, but an inevitable oblivion. In Poetry London, Joey Connolly lets fly the barb of a ‘wildlife-encounter-anecdote-to-epiphany pipeline’ which certainly finds its mark in this wet flesh.

All the while, we poets have one eye on the machine-mediated possibility of the day when an AI generated (stolen) poem prompts a quivering, numinous ecstasy in the masses like nothing before it, and we shabby pen-people are dispatched to the dustbin of history. I don’t think that’s going to happen, and not because of some shiny ‘100% human-crafted’ sticker on the front cover of a collection, as though it were a hipster’s spelt sourdough from Borough market, but because of the effect of writing poetry on poets themselves. Poet brain, is a thing.

There’s no money in poetry, at least not beyond that enjoyed by a vanishingly small cohort and good luck to them, say I. If the gatekeepers are editors and academics, coffee-circles around their eyes and much put-upon, publishing each other’s collections, surely that speaks of nothing darker than simple friendship? I don’t think the general warmth and kindness of the poetry community is celebrated enough, and to be a little corndog about it, ya know, the point not being the destination, but the friends you made along the way and all that. (I just sicked a little into my mouth, so you don’t have to.)

I suppose the reason I bother with such a potentially pointless endeavour, grimly freighted with its yearning for self-actualisation and frequent disappointments, is all about the process of neural re-wiring that it inevitably stimulates. The act of shaping a language as exquisitely nuanced as English, with the potential for subtle shifts of meaning underwritten with music, its vast colour palette of graduated shade and light, the warp and weft of its textures, is compelling because of what the making of it makes of me. I can hold in my mind layered, structured abstractions in a way I once couldn’t, can feel currents of thought eroding damns and dykes and flooding forgotten plains. Poet brain has taken me by the hand to the edge of the ineffable; ‘bursting out most bright/From a great mountain’s heart into the light.’.

I lay in bed this morning, idly musing over a possibly arcane mathematics, in which a sonnet, or sequence of sonnets, might build through sound into a Mandelbrot fractal, precipitating the volta as an event horizon, or enacting an entanglement through the ‘spooky action at a distance’ of its structured music, perhaps even tricking us, like Zen’s Goose-in-the-bottle koan into a glimpse of the tesseract, or the Godhead.

This, this is the kind of shit I write poetry for, not for prizes, or likes and clicks, but the personally transformative indulgence of curiosity bordering on obsession, an immanent gnosis in the effervescent and eternal present.

Robot poets, do your worst, I’ll be out here like always, biting the day to the core, 100% human-crafted.

james mcconachie, Poet Brain

The night sounds louder than day because the mind amplifies what the senses cannot experience. Above the crunch of the wheel on the road, the darkness outside pours in through the windows left open. Beyond a sharp curve, a sudden light swings into view- two men with a bright torch walking toward a destination they appear confident about.

We slow down when we see the first herd of cows sitting on the road, and then many more along the way. I had thought the cows came over to graze and at sunset return home to the villages and the families that tend them. The driver tells us that these cows have neither bells around their necks nor ropes through their noses. They are cows that have passed their productive years, he says. Often after six calvings, they are turned out because they no longer yield enough milk.

These cows sit in pitch darkness, surrounded by the forest. It’s not about food, there is enough grass to graze on the slopes of the hills. But is that what makes a home? Do they carry memories of the human family, warm and dry spaces smelling sweetly of dry grass and hay?

We assign value to living beings based on their usefulness. What makes me useful? As if in response, the engine of the car switches off. I share the darkness with the cows turned out into the wilderness.

Uma Gowrishankar, The Cows in the Forest

This week: a poem with a gun in it, some semblance of silence, kernels of clarity, an obsession with ephemera, and much more. Enjoy.

“Is all poetry about death?” someone asked at a poetry reading recently. Sometimes as I read, it seems that way. But I think all poetry is about uncertainty, insecurity, a whistling in the dark. Is a lot of the insecurity about life’s end? No doubt. No doubt. I try to avoid poems about mortality, although they are ubiquitous. I like the poems that grapple more with the other half of the equation. As Annie Lennox sings, “Dying is easy. It’s living that scares me to death.”

Marilyn McCabe, I should not exclude myself from this

When I was writing ‘No Map Could Show Them’, I was commuting to Leeds every day from my little corner of South Yorkshire. I was working at the university. From my tiny office window, the view was dominated by a tree – I couldn’t tell you what kind, just that in my memory it was aways in autumn plumage. Impossible.

Today I went back to Leeds and walked past my old room. Blue skies, liberatingly blue. An encroaching cold. I didn’t look up in case my ghost was still there at the desk. I carried on, past the School of English towards the sports centre.

There: a poem I wrote a decade ago emblazoned across a series of giant climbing holds, multi-coloured and bright. A poem inspired by Alison Hargreaves. A piece set on Stanage Edge. Its stanzas were intended as a spell of sorts, a plea for days when nothing amazing happens but nothing awful happens either. Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

You can now sit on my poem if you want and eat your lunch. I like that. I like the sense of it being overtaken by everyday events, dominated by the mundane or the suddenly important. I like the idea that people might ignore the words entirely, too busy having conversations that matter more. Or less. Or just as much. Or saying nothing, meaning just enough.

Here’s the text of the piece in full:

Prayer

Give us good days.
Days unspectacular but adequate:
the weather neither calm nor wild,
your coat zipped nearly to the top,

a silver thermos cooling in your bag,
the sky at Bamford reddening, as if
embarrassed by its own strange reach
and day-old, pipe-smoke clouds.

Above the Hope cement works,
crows wheel arcs of guarded flight
and when you touch the rock
your fingers hold.

Helen Mort, Is it a poem? Is it a climb? Is it a chair?

When we first moved to South Florida, I didn’t realize how different the seasons would be.  I didn’t miss winter much, and summers seemed similar to South Carolina, but every year I had a fierce yearning for fall.  One year we bought two puzzles, and I still remember the one with the autumnal picture.  It was a nineteenth century town with horses and wagons and a big dance happening in the center of the village.  The trees had the perfect assortment of autumnal leaves and pumpkins dotted the puzzle landscape.

We put that puzzle together in the fall of 2001, when the world felt so topsy-turvy.  It was soothing to put the puzzle together.  

 I was teaching the British literature survey class, and I had Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on my brain–those figures on the urn, forever frozen in whatever emotional moment they experienced right then.  I thought the puzzle offered a similar dynamic.

It’s an interesting spiritual question that Keats poses:  is it better to be forever poised to kiss the beloved?  Is it better to live in the moment of anticipation, rather than having to deal with all the messy humanness that comes after the kiss, once we truly know our beloved?

And there are larger questions posed by both the urn and the poem:  how do we stay in the here and now?  How do we not get distracted by our sorrows?  How do we maintain our faith, in the face of enormous woes?  For me, during that autumn of 2001 that broke our hearts in so many ways, the answer came in the jigsaw puzzle.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Autumn Odes and Puzzles

After months of reading and recording poetry aloud — my own poems and those by beloved poets (Emily Dickinson, Rilke, Sara Teasdale, W.S. Merwin, Teresa of Ávila, and others) — my voice went unexpectedly and inexplicably quiet.

When I look back at this time last year (and the year before that), I experienced something similar, so it might be seasonal. An energy-conserving form of hibernation. A time to reflect rather than speak. […]

Recently, I had a couple of poems accepted by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire for its quarterly publication, Touchstone. The poems are from a chapbook sequence I have been working on about four generations of family history. Touchstone also has an audio edition that will feature contributors’ poems, and Friday is the soft deadline for sending audio files. This means, it is time for me to find my voice again.

Jenevieve Carlyn, “A Song Sparrow Singing in the Fall”

Up and down this alley of student rentals,
ritual takes hold of a waning weekend:
late October, Indian summer, ash trees
showering leaf-gold

on back-yardlets churning with youthful bodies,
muscled, sweat-slick, bawdy, lit up with victory,
drunk and singing, roaring the last hurrahs of
Homecoming game day.

Noise, grill smoke, and memory hold the neighbors
spellbound at it all, at the pure unknowing
lifted up in these chesty pop-punk odes and
beery libations—

Maryann Corbett, Kudos, O Victors

Here in London, Autumn is finally here and today my little backyard is exploding with bright orange marigolds that I do not remember planting, but seem to be blooming just in time for Halloween, All Saints Day and for Santa Muerte herself. With these flowers, I feel blessed.

Before I begin I wish to do some shout outs and thank yous to all the superstar poets I have seen since I last wrote, massive thank yous to all I drank rum with and danced and howled at the moon with. Thank you for joyous times down at Arvon and Totleigh Barton, Hastings Book Festival, Morecambe Poetry Festival, The Hastings March for Unity and to stand up and support the RNLI and also the Cable Street 90th Anniversary. Thanks also to Bradley Taylor, the new Poet Laureate of Birmingham, for one of the happiest National Poetry Day nights ever. This seaside photo above is by photographer Richard Davis taken on the seafront at Morecambe Poetry Festival, ahh we had such a lovely long weekend, an epic marathon of poetry and pints, thank you.

Since I last wrote a long substack post, I have spent most of my hours working on the final fiddly tweaks of The Life Of Life. The good news is we have now managed to send the proofs to print, just around the time of Autumn Equinox and the Harvest Moon. My new novel will be in all of your favourite bookshops in time for the Crow Full Moon, Spring Equinox, on March 25 2027. I’m enjoying my book making being back in synch with the moon cycles again.

Salena Godden, Gathering Sweet Octoberries

I went for a swim with Julie the other day. It was cool and blissful – about the same water temperature as the day in spring when I took a call from photographer Alex Ramsay He rang to let me know we’d been offered an opportunity in Salt, Girona, at the Casa De Cultura Les Bernardes (CCLB) to exhibit Os – a collection of Alex’s exquisite black and white photos of bones and my poems written in response.

I took Alex’s call on my Bluetooth earbuds while swimming head-out-of-the-water breaststroke which added to my sense of being translated, suddenly and unexpectedly, into glamour. “This is what it must feel like to be a star,” I thought. 

Everything about our journey to Girona for the launch of the exhibition last month felt like being suspended in good fortune, fun, and generous kindness. We were held up by forces I only partially understand: all travel arrangements made for us; a taxi to meet us at the airport; a fine hotel; dinners of delicious tapas and wine; profound and light-hearted conversations with artists and people who’ve dedicated their lives to bringing the work of artists into collective spaces.

And at the heart of my involvement with Os was collaboration, which for me has been a means of multiplying my creative potential to make more than the sum of the parts I brought to the endeavour. I’ve so enjoyed working with a photographer of such skill and experience – the trip and exhibition were a wonderful bonus.Central to the Os experience at CCLB was seeing my poems translated into Catalan by award-winning translator Jordi Fité – an act of artistic intimacy which I experienced as my poetry being deeply seen. What a privilege to have every word considered, held up to the light, weighed in the palms of someone who is passionate about a language so often persecuted. When I saw my poems in the exhibition space, and heard a couple read aloud at the launch, it felt as if my words had been set to a precious and rare music. 

Liz Lefroy, I Am Translated

Generally speaking, ekphrastic poetry is not my thing, but I was recently invited, along with several other poets, to be part of what sounds like it will be, assuming it gets funded, a very interesting public art project that will combine poetry and painting, and that got me thinking about my first ekphrastic poems, which I wrote, also as part of a public art project, about fifteen years ago. I was one of several poets each of whom were paired with artists associated with the Upstream Gallery. My partner was the artist Allen Hart, who provided me with images of some of his paintings. Most were from a series of paintings of insects. We did not use the two original poems that I wrote, “The Praying Mantis” and “On The Mating Of Rhino Beetles,” which made it into Words For What Those Men Have Done […]

For the public component of the project, Allen chose to use our pairing of his painting called The Dwarf In Armor and the title poem from The Silence of Men. The gallery mounted each of the poems next to the artwork to which it had been a response, and I have this memory of Allen being at the opening in his wheelchair, listening intently as each poet read their work in turn, and of him smiling from ear to ear when my turn came and I read “The Silence of Men,” almost as if I was reading it exclusively to him.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, On My Desk Now: Ekphrastic Poetry

I dreamed the first two or three stanzas of this poem, and when I woke the next morning, parts of the dream were still vivid for a short time, so I wrote as quickly as I could. Much of the phrasing and imagery in tho early stanzas are extremely close to my recollection of he dream. Unfortunately, it faded as they always do. The rest of the poem emerged as it wanted. I should add that Guy Clark wasn’t in the dream but did find his way into the poem, and I’m glad he did. […]

This is a poem with a gun in it though I don’t know
how it entered, and I guess I should ask why it’s here.
It was already in place when I woke up this morning
and began to write. I look at the page, and see the gun
resting in the first line as if it belongs there, as if
it were waiting, and I don’t know exactly what to do
to get it out of my poem, so I close my journal and
fix some coffee, then come back to the work, slowly
opening to that page— It’s still there.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 15”

The artist is a child, with a gift. One who, so endowed, steps forth into the unknown – hopeful, proud, subject to stumbling. The gift is simply an intuition of beauty : coupled with a talent for expression. A capability.

I have been making poems since 1956, when I was 4 yrs old. That was three score years and ten ago, by my count.

Since around 1986, my attention was drawn to long poems. That’s about 40 years ago, by my calculation. And it strikes me sometimes that all these longitudinal efforts seem like variations on one very long poem. I don’t know : they change, they shift into different keys and registers… but the focus remains unchanged.

Henry Gould, Breezeway

I read something this morning that was both reassuring and revealing – a comment by poet and novelist Fred d’Aguiar, about a new collection by Grace Nichols, The Tracks of My Name. 

He’s written about her book, “‘To write beyond middle age with anything like the transmuting fire of youth requires – so the adage says – much wilful forgetting in order to remember at a deeper level of meaning for readers.”

I haven’t heard it expressed so well before, this issue of post middle age atrophy. I’ve heard about poets who shone when they were young and never again but not such close attention to that phenomenon. Beyond middle age where do we find that fire, how do we forget? This is going to keep me going for a while. 

Jackie Wills, Turning up every day

I have tried various things for Scotstober over the years including finding the words used in other poets’ work when I didn’t trust my own attempts. The past couple of years I try and write a wee poetic snippet using the word each day and then try and knit them together into a poem at the end of the year. Sometimes it works, sometimes, no. I can see a glisk of something coming.

No apologies for my use of Scots. I’m not a native speaker, but I do my best, trying to use the language as I’ve heard or read it in Scotland, usually Glasgow. I’m just having fun.  

Day 10

girse – grass thi scrab aiples rottit oan thi girse birsin unnerfit thi juice av October

Day 11 jalouse – to suspect, to think few wad jalouse thi mirk in me tae bite doon on its cauld steel expectin tae taste licht

hinnied-sweet

Day 12 thrawn – very stubborn ah ken theres a hoolin o wind ootside but ahm tae thrawn tae switch oan thi heatin hap yersel wi stockins an woolen blankets jist coorie in

Day 13

stroop/stroup – a spout thi cauld leavin mah banes lik thi hush frae thi kettle’s stroupDay 14 – deave/deeve – to annoy, to deafen murrin at mah feet ah can maistly forget she wis deavin me fur fuid i thi wee oors

Day 15 – quine – a young woman or girl ahm no a quine no a carline no a wifie naebody cries me hen or missus ahm a wummin an auld soul a new soul

a body in mah ain body

Day 17 – flech – a flea or a restless person flechin – to be restless mah hert unsattelt flechin at thi sicht of thi sun trinnlin doon yer jaw ah mind yer wairmth

Day 18 – wrang – incorrect, wrong

smitched wi autumn amh drawn wrang i thi city av gowd and crisp-blae ahm thi shaddae-hauf

Gerry Stewart, Scotstober 2026

holy heck! the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award last night! Huzzah! I mean, I am rather shocked, given how many times I’ve been up for this thing over the years (seven, by my count). My thanks much to the judges, and to Arc Poetry Magazine, as well as to the other shortlisted authors: Nina Berkhout for The Great Wake and Vera Hadzic for Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery. It is an unexpected thing, and a great pleasure and honour! Of course, this means that I can no longer complain about never having won a book award (whether as the Diane Warren or, as Andy Weaver prefers, the Susan Lucci of the Archibald Lampman Award, but that joke may have also just run its course). Also, Christine and I are the only couple to have both (so far) won the award, given she won same in 2018 for her second poetry collection, Charm (Book*hug Press, 2017). Which means: every adult in our household has won the Archibald Lampman Award. Might this put undue pressure upon our young ladies as well, to eventually produce poetry titles to perhaps win the award themselves? We shall see. Aoife (my ten year old) insisted on being at the event last night, and she took an array of photos with my phone, some of which were terrible, and others that were of herself (it took me twenty minutes to get my phone back, once leaving the stage), but at least she did capture the moment itself: [photo]

rob mclennan, the book of sentences won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award!

Have you heard the big news? Kim’s current collection – The House of Broken Things – has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. You’ll probably know that her previous book – All The Men I Never Married – won the Forward Prize. Personally, I think this collection is even better, so I was genuinely surprised when it didn’t make the shortlist for this year, and wasn’t PBS recommended. All that amounts to nothing in the face of the Eliots: it’s safe to say that it’s the most prestigious poetry award in the UK, arguably in the world.

So whilst Kim is in a state of disbelief, I am not. And whilst she won’t allow herself to consider actually winning, I am already planning what she will do with the prize money. First on the list, obviously, is champagne for all the people who are going with her to the awards, ie her family plus Me. Second: a lovely new sofa for me to sit on when I come round. And third on the list is a lovely holiday with her best friend, aka Me.

Other prizes Kim has won include the Eric Gregory, and the Geoffrey Dearmer, the Northern Writer’s Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Award. She’s been shortlisted for a Forward Best Single Poem. She’s won the Ledbury Prize, and the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and recently she was given the Cholmondeley Award just for existing. There are others, and many more to come.

My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet

by Meg Cox

Of course I had to say I was delighted for her.

In fact be the first of us to say it.

I didn’t think it necessary to mention

that I too had entered the competition.

Of course I smiled and smiled

and said I loved one particular line

in her winning poem – the last is a pretty safe bet

but I hadn’t actually read it

and I won’t be fucking reading it either.

I wonder if the lovely, late Meg Cox was taken aback by how popular this poem is! But if the point of poetry is to speak truths which are otherwise unspoken, to give voice to the things we feel but didn’t know we could say out loud – this poem does it in bucket loads. Being jealous of our friends, feeling somehow diminished by their successes, is an unpleasant quality and a painful experience, and it’s hard to admit that I sometimes feel like this. And in the last week, I heard that my DYCP Arts Council application had been rejected (again), which inevitably added more fuel to my insecurity.

There are ways of facing it. Chief amongst them is the fact that Kim is my friend and a glorious person and I love her, and regardless of my own fragile ego, what makes her happy ultimately makes me happy too. I could tell myself that competitions and grants and awards and book sales don’t matter, but that’s a massive lie. Economically, emotionally, professionally, they make a huge difference, and working very closely with someone who enjoys those benefits whilst I don’t – I have to allow space for how that feels, so I can respond to it and cope with it. I could remind myself that a publisher can only submit four collections to the Forwards – plus any authors who have previously been shortlisted – which means that authors published by big publishers like Bloodaxe are at a disadvantage. But that’s not true for the Eliots. So I remind myself that whilst you have to be an outstandingly good writer to win any big poetry prize, there are lots of excellent writers who never win. So I look after the bits of me that feel sore, and work hard at the things I do well, the things that matter to me.

Clare Shaw, My Friend the Prize-Winning Poet

I’ve been lucky. I’ve won a couple of poetry things, and I’ve come close a few times. I’ve also come nowhere near about a bazillion times; the scrappy Word document on my computer that pretends to be a submissions spreadsheet is highlighted almost entirely in a peppy and upbeat shade of red. Still, lucky. Last weekend I got to go to the Winchester Poetry Festival and my poem wild was commended by judge Julia Copus, which was lovely. Of course it would have been nice to win, though Vanessa Lampert’s winning poem The Rub was a beautiful choice that is still burning away gently somewhere at the back of my head. The best thing about being at these things, for me, though, is seeing your poetry people and meeting new ones, the people that don’t glaze over or look uneasy when you mention the word poetry. It’s nice to be in the room, literally and figuratively, and OK, fine, it’s even better to be on the list.

But here’s my hot take, for what it’s worth. It’s not original, but it bears repeating: I’m not a better poet if I win something, and I’m not a worse poet if I don’t. Nobody is. Winning is lovely, and I don’t want to take anything away from that, because that person has always written something that has genuinely stood out. They should be proud of it. That’s incontrovertible. But it’s also true that there’s a hefty dose of chance in the mix. Right place, right time, right judge, right poem, right time again. Lots of people find this stressful, too subjective, maybe even a little unfair, that it comes down to the subjective opinions of a handful of people, maybe just one person. Judges – and winners – can be hauled over the poetic coals, and it’s not pretty. But do you know how unbelievably fascinating this is to someone who’s marked GCSE papers for a quarter of a century? There’s no rubric! No set of externally determined criteria set by shadowy figures who don’t actually do your job! It’s THRILLING. And actually, it takes some pressure off, doesn’t it? All we can do is write our poems and send them, and send them again. We can’t control any of the other factors. And I’m not immune to jealousy or wishful thinking. I’m not a robot. But this way it’s easier not to let these things get you down, and not to let them go to your head. Winning, or not winning, doesn’t change the quality of your writing. It’s not the poetry.

In 2023 I won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize and here’s how down to chance it was: the day after I entered, the week before the deadline, I realised that I hadn’t received a confirmation email for the pamphlet prize, though I’d had one for the single poem competition. I sent a ‘sorry to bother you, just checking! No worries if not! Probably being stupid!’ email (I’ve GOT to stop emailing like that) just to check, and then just to cement my extreme lack of cool, followed up. And it turned out that in fact I hadn’t completed my submission properly and they’d never received it. I squeaked it in by the deadline and that’s how I was even in the running for the thing that changed my whole career. I KNOW, RIGHT?! And even then, on a different day with a different judge and the wind in a different direction, it wouldn’t have happened. Think about it. There are far more excellent, talented, skilful poets out there than there are poetry prizes to win.

Nia Broomhall, Week 31: The Live Canon Poetry Prize Anthology 2024

There are some poets who don’t believe in editing their work. “Once you have finished a piece” they say “It is done, No need to fiddle about with it, Move on to the next one”

Perhaps for them this is true. I’m not sure that I have ever heard anyone who I would consider a brilliant poet say it, but I certainly understand where they are coming from. Occasionally I have a burst of creativity, and a piece just flows from the end of my fingers onto the page and looks great. But in 99% of cases (and yes, I have written enough poems to give an accurate percentage, they need a whole lot of fiddling about with.

I do enjoy those online poetry prompts on Bluesky. I have got into the habit of doing one every Friday morning over breakfast, like some people do the crossword in a newspaper. I take a perverse pride in the idea that I can read the prompt, dash out a dozen or more lines and have it up on the feed all in the space of three quarters of an hour, max.

Of course, once they are posted I usually noticed how I could have said things a little better. And if I ever use one to send to a journal or somewhere, I generally updated it with the improvements that I have noticed. That way I can claim that it’s never been published even on my own social media1. A handful have accepted too. I have to admit that they probably wouldn’t have been quite as appealing in their untweaked form.

Mike O’Brien, A Day at the Races – Poetry Workshopping and Editing

Basically, as soon as I got to ‘Hygge’ and looked up I knew I was living the poem. It’s not a complicated poem by any stretch. It’s short, no big words, no rhyme to skip it along, but it paints a beautiful picture of a time of year that at the time of writing is only 63 days a way. But if ‘Hygge’ is about comfort and conviviality, this speaks a little more to locking the world out, and I like that challenge to the concept. I wonder if the first line of the third stanza can be read as a rule for hygge…”there must be no-one else for miles”, or as a description or observation that follows the second stanza…there must be no-one else for miles”. I’m not sure my italics/bolding makes that clear, but I hope you see which tree I’m barking up.

I think it’s the former on the grounds of the second stanza…the world is being shut out, the night is being held at bay under strain. Some semblance of silence is hard to find and this moment the poem capture is hard one and well-earned (we assume). This peace is needed for good health…and I love the way the poem closes on another word imported from elsewhere into common parlance, Sláinte. This simple thing, this simple moment requires a lot of fighting for. And that’s not a bad thing to capture in 11 lines.

Mat Riches, Harvey’s Rabbiting On

For the English poet John Clare (1793–1864) — born two years before Keats, whose “To Autumn” we revisited last Friday — the sentience of the natural world was as much a given as it was for the more famous Romantics. “All nature has a feeling,” he proclaimed, in the poem of that title featured here in May of last year. Like Keats, Clare intuited the particular “feeling” of the year’s wane. But in Clare’s poetic imagination, as Today’s Poem makes clear, autumn could be less a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” than a season of apocalyptic end, foretelling the death of time itself.

Interestingly — though not that surprisingly, given that the seasons have ever offered themselves as go-to subjects for poetry — Clare wrote many autumn poems. Of all times of the year, for the emotionally fragile Clare the autumn was both the most beautiful and the most troubled. The critic Jonas Cope relates an incident in August 1811, during the harvest and on the cusp of true autumn, to which Clare attributed his subsequent physical and mental afflictions. Eighteen years old, Clare witnessed the fatal fall of a man named Thomas Drake from a “load of hay,” an experience set down ten years later in his Sketches in the Life of John Clare: “the gastly palness of death struck such a terror on me that I coud not forget it for years.”

The trauma, it seems, lay in the instantaneousness of the event: life, its neck snapped, transfigured as death in the time it took a man to fall off some hay. For Clare, this shocking revelation of the nearness of death resulted in disturbingly vivid dreams of churchyards and charnel houses. It also overlaid his waking perceptions with a veneer of horror; in another part of his Sketches , he describes being chased at night by a terrifying fiend that turns out, in the end, to be a neighbor’s stray foal. Told this way, the story sounds comical, but to the poet, as Jonas Cope points out in his account of it, even this mundane explanation for the “monstrosity” amplified, rather than relieving, the grotesquerie of the encounter.

So although Clare would assert that autumn was the season he loved most, the year’s cyclical wind-down brought with it a recurrence not only of the physical illnesses that inevitably attend the colder, wetter weather, but also of the emotional breakdown which, as Clare himself insisted, derived from his experience of that 1811 harvest tragedy. When, in his own “To Autumn,” he exhorts the season to come, it is as “pensive autumn,” whose melancholy and minor-key disorder seem to accompany — and oddly console — his own unsettled mind, haunted by the twin specters of natural and human mutability.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Autumn

There’s a gentleness to the way the lines unfold, a tender sensitivity to the things around him, that seems to suffuse the stanza with love. The combination of gentleness with metrical regularity adds to the sense of security that the stanza creates.

So far so delicately lovely. What’s utterly ravishing, though, is the sudden change of tempo and rhyme scheme in the next four lines. Though the underlying sense of security persists, the change itself is as electrifying as the sudden soaring of the treble or soprano high C in Allegri’s Miserere. Steady alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables dissolves into swiftly gliding runs of unstressed or only lightly stressed syllables between the two dominant stresses in each line. The change of metre and rhyme pattern makes the stanza’s form seem alive and vitally engaging, while the shift from more separated to closely successive and very strong rhymes create a feeling of order and containment. Images undergo swift transformations – moon to flower to smiling woman, heaven’s high bower as a trellis woven with the smaller flowers of the stars to high bower as windowed boudoir in a castle – but these images don’t displace each other, they accumulate and shine out together in the imagination.

Shining together is the key. Heaven and earth, the vast spaces of the cosmos and the tiny lives within it are as it were equalised in the loving gaze of trusting innocence. The harmony evoked by the images in this humanised world is underpinned by a lovely pattern of echoing sounds. Among the phonetic echoes I think the long /i/ is particularly important, heightening the impact of shine, silent, I, mine, high, silent, delight, smiles, night. Richly evocative in themselves, it’s as if each calls the others forth as natural answers or complements to it.

Edmund Prestwich, Ravishing metrical beauty: Blake’s “Night”

There’s something slightly complacent about ‘Late Empire’. Partly I think that’s in the verse — the style is just a little bit lazy and redundant around the edges (‘burned to ash’, ‘in the lamplight’), and the simile in the middle of the poem, which compares the boredom that keeps us awake to ‘a mouse chattering on midnight floors’, felt somewhat random and anti-climactic. Why a mouse? Wouldn’t a more specifically modern example have been more effective here? And why chattering? Mice make tiny, annoying scurrying, scuffling and scraping noises, and occasionally you can hear them squeaking to each other behind the wainscot, but then you would need mice, and I still wouldn’t call it chattering.

But the complacency is also in the tone and in something like the rhetorical attitude of the poem. This is hard to pick apart because of course the poem is about a kind of complacency or at least passivity: the ‘we’ of the poem didn’t do anything to change or even object to their circumstances; they just got on with life, taking comfort were they could — going to ‘noisy bars’ and, as the last line has it, ‘We gossiped. We believed what we were told.’ The poem is obviously not condoning this; it is asking us to recognise it (in ourselves) and condemn it. I think what bothers me about the poem is that it feels rather as if it is calculated to acknowledge the reader’s guilt and complicity just enough to make them feel as if they have done something by reading it. Ultimately, I find its rhetorical strategy slightly revolting. (Though you might of course feel that this is both intentional and indeed the point.)

All the same, it’s impressive to see a contemporary poem in English even attempting to ‘capture the mood’. Rarer still, I think, is the topical or political poem that does something more than just package and present its readers’ attitudes back to them — I mean, one that attempts instead to intervene in our interpretation. I’ve written about it briefly before, but the example of this that has stayed with me the longest is Heaney’s ‘Anything can happen’, a version of Horace Odes 1.34 first published as ‘Horace and the Thunder’ in the Irish Times a couple of months after 9/11 […]

Victoria Moul, What makes for a good topical poem?

In 1922, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) wrote a curious sonnet — a poem that essentially undermines a good portion of the endeavor of poetry. We may think we see the beautiful or sublime in the striking vistas of nature. We may declare the power of art to find the truth of beauty. But if beauty is a formal entity — an Idea, in Plato’s sense, as something supersensual that is imitated, instantiated, or shadowed in the physical objects that participate in it — then beauty in itself, Beauty, is beyond all sense. And the beauty of mathematics, geometry in particular, can give an intellectual vision of that Beauty, unhidden by the masks of the physical: “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”

A Petrarchan sonnet with a slightly eccentric sestet (rhymed abba-abba in the opening octave and cdd-ccd in the final six lines), “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare” dismisses those who “prate of Beauty.” Millay, in fact, compares them to geese who gabble and hiss — “but heroes seek release / From dusty bondage into luminous air.”

“Luminous” is a curious word here. I suspect it’s drawn from the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where those who escape the deceitful, non-philosophical life, taking shadows for reality, emerge from the cave into the light of the true sun that is the Good. But Millay extends the image into a description of Euclid’s grasping a Platonic form: “O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, / When first the shaft into his vision shone / Of light anatomized!” (“O holy, terrible day” gestures, I think, toward Good Friday, and “light anatomized” toward Newton, a curious combination.)

Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō (“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter”) was inscribed above the door of Plato’s Academy — or so the almost certainly apocryphal story has it. Millay echoes something of that thought, at least in the sense that geometry is a flowing of Beauty into intellectually graspable shapes that are true, elegant, and universal — transcendental characteristics of Ideas. And she calls “fortunate” those who have heard, even if “once only and then but far away,” the sound of Beauty’s step: a “massive sandal set on stone.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare

No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says “I AM,” a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us. It is our existential wanderlust that makes us what we are — pilgrims of mortality, forever coming home to the horizon of tomorrow.

Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) captures this paradox, with subtlety that doesn’t offer an answer but whispers the living question back to you, in an unedited poem found among his papers after his death, beautifully read in the original Spanish by my Patagonian friend Manuel Gutiérrez — a communicator of wonder through theater, music, and humor, whose hospitality made the serpentine birdworlds possible and who is always teaching me how to navigate the terrain of life with an open heart for a compass.

Maria Popova, The Map to the Route of Your Life

I am the king of poems
because of the wings in my head
and I bow before my sandwich
like time before space
where do we put the bullet holes
except in place of stars?

Gary Barwin, On Detective Fiction. Also Moby Dick.

Bishop enjoyed her comforts. She took many lovers, including the wife or a prominent visual artist in Seattle, but that’s another story. There are, however, at least three novels written about Elizabeth Bishop’s life. Her reticence to expose her private life when she was alive, seems to have left space for others to make her life their own imaginary pathways into her private life. “Sometimes I’d rather they simply kept things to themselves,” Bishop said in an interview when asked about the confessional poets. She was not a fan of self disclosure. She was a fan of beauty and truth and Keats.

We do know that Bishop wrote some of her first great poems while in that Paris apartment. My favorite of this time period (one of my favorites is, “Paris, 7 AM,” which begins here:

I make a trip to each clock in the apartment
Some hands point histrionically one way
And some point others, from the ignorant faces.
Time is an Etoile; the hours diverge
So much that days are journeys round the suburbs

Those first days in a new place. Time is a star! Time has a fluid character all its own that changes with the hands of one clock to another. And yes, the apartment was known to house the Contesse’s impressive collection of clocks. I believe Bishop wrote this poem during her first weeks in Paris, still adjusting to the time difference and exploring a city that looms large in any writer’s imagination. The poem also has her (and us) staring out windows:

Look down into the courtyard. All the houses
Are built that way, with ornamental urns
Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons
Take their walks.

There are echoes of her earlier poem, “The Map,” here. And I wonder if this is where “the suburbs” first shows up in a poem. The camera angle of “look down” creates a cinematic touch to the poem — something Bishop became well known for: a shift in perspective, a sleight of hand.

Susan Rich, Elizabeth Bishop in France: Mystery & Adventure

maybe I’ll call gillian anderson (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), a pamphlet by the award-winning Welsh poet Rhian Elizabeth, is a candid and psychologically astute exploration of maternal identity at a moment of profound change. Taking a daughter’s departure from home as its emotional centre, the collection moves between the mother’s difficult memories of her own early independence and her anxiety for the daughter now making a life beyond her care. Throughout, grief and vulnerability are tempered by sardonic humour, while ordinary domestic details acquire the weight of symbols. The result is a distinctive and accomplished meditation on memory, separation and the painful but necessary transformation of love into trust.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘maybe i’ll call gillian anderson’ by Rhian Elisabeth

“Sappho Wept” has a strong feminist viewpoint and focuses its concerns on how women’s voices and art have been erased from the history books, not just by simply omission, but violently, e.g. through paintings being drawn over and replaced with men’s art. Dunn also explores how traditional roles for women have restricted their ability to speak and explore their own talents in favour of being pushed into a supporting role, away from the limelight and away from historical records. Dunn uses direct, straightforward vocabulary so her point does not get lost through misinterpretation or euphemisms. Although “Sappho Wept” will strike a chord with women generally, it deserves to be read by men too. The poem “Robert Dudley” asks them to consider what it might feel like to be overlooked and sidelined.

Emma Lee, “Sappho Wept” Wendy J Dunn (Other Terrain Press) – book review

In a 2009 interview, in response to the question of how closely [Claire] Crowther drew on her own experiences, she said:

In a way I always do but only as a starting point. I have always felt what I write about – that’s the genesis of a poem. But the detail varies from my own experience – it could be that I observe other families interacting and freely bring in their details. I never feel I have to stick to any one set of facts – I mingle and match facts I’ve observed to serve the poem which becomes something different. In the end, there is rarely any autobiography at all – the poem has taken over completely.

The innate questions of this mix’n’match approach are whether the effort required to try to locate the emotional heart, and the point, of each poem justifies the time spent. I confess that my first read-through was challenging and that the poems – or, rather, some of them – only came alive on a second reading. Perhaps that is a good thing – like music whose depths only reveal themselves over several listenings. […]

In reading such a generous selection of Crowther’s poetry, it becomes a struggle to know when she is making serious points and what they are. The density of her writing, albeit often exquisitely crafted in musical lines, inhibits simple, or simplistic, exegesis and therefore prohibits much in the way of an emotional reaction other than a degree of frustration and, inasmuch as one can judge the tone, a wry smile at the fun Crowther appears to be having, as if one isn’t quite allowed in on the joke. Surely, though, kernels of clarity are gradually revealed over multiple re-readings.

Matthew Paul, Three reviews I wrote two years ago

The remarkable late flowering of Peter Dent continues unabated in these two most recent pamphlets from two of his own micro presses. To quote the opening lines of ‘Market Reaction’, one of the twenty prose poems that make up Riverside Scuffle:

Being at the peak of my decline she grumbled they’ve finally
caught on and realised my achievement.

Where the ‘she’ could just as easily be ‘I’, the poet whose decline peak is higher than the peak of many another’s success.

These prose poems consist of sentences placed beside each other that both resist and strive towards narrative coherence; our readerly urge to create coherence is an intrinsic part of the making of the text. They are, in a way, instances of the ideogrammatic method operating at the level of the sentence.

But I find it hard to articulate the experience of reading these poems. It might be better just to read one, a reasonably straightforward one, at that:

CONSTRUCTION SITE

The girl in front’s hair is dipped delicately into an inkwell.
A sign on a classmate’s back says ‘beware’ or words. An-
tics help pass the day taking the edge off a teacher’s stare.
Oh the angst of mother the chuckle of father the symm-
erty of our days. I repeat myself ad nauseam but still
don’t vomit – why? Latin wasn’t English but that was its
virtue. I flip and flop to the whims of the monsters I’d
like to believe in but can’t. Cuffs override my thumbs –
a useful feature in Winters like this. Homework tonight
will no doubt be no more than half-done and not by me.
I’m just a card in a box the Head relies on come Parent’s
Night. Thoughts of getting at it will keep me awake.
‘Lord’ – I turn the dog-eared page – ‘dismiss us with thy
blessing…’

The basic analogy of school = construction site, a place engaged in the making of educated adults, is clear and obvious from the beginning, but one subtext is that teachers, creatures who, by the nature of their job, tend to repeat themselves ad nauseam, are also being (re)constructed at the same time. And all of this is underpinned by the careful selection and placement of individual words: ‘vomit’, a word with deep Latin roots not the more English ‘retch’ or the more recent and vernacular ‘throw up’; ‘override’ with its sense of replacing or controlling the thumbs, not merely covering them; ‘beware’, a sign more often seen on an actual construction school than on a student’s back; that deft, illuminating ‘delicately’, summoning up an entire relationship; the final quote from an 18th-century hymn written in that fiercely unreconstructed of places, Hebden Bridge. And then there’s the enjambment, the syntactical motor that drives poem and reader forward, creating linkages across images and ideas.

There is an element of social commentary here, alongside some degree of implied autobiography, given that Dent was himself a school teacher; these are not hermetically difficult texts designed to alienate the reader, they just require us to engage beyond the surface, to participate as readers in the act of creation.

Billy Mills, Two More by Peter Dent

I wrote several poems this week. I credit the book of poetry I’m reading, Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola, as recommended by Alyson Dutemple. It’s extraordinary and is seemingly jumpstarting my poetic impulses. All the poems are fresh and exciting to me but I particularly like “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” and “helen of troy goes parking with the defensive tackle”. My unexpected explosion of writing (right after I said I’m not) reminds me of the song “All Four Seasons” by Sting. Well, I do tend toward mercurial. I feel a bit relieved to be writing for myself in this way with no plan or agenda or timeline or desire to share it.

Charlotte Hamrick, Unexpectations Do Happen

My Name is Swan is a book best encountered out loud, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said that about a poetry book before. I enjoy a good poetry reading or performance immensely, but for me, nothing beats the quiet, private hours I spend communing directly with the words on the page. Swan, however, is a different beast, and I strongly urge you to watch this poetry film in full before you encounter the book. Go on, it’s incredible, and award-winning.

Have you watched it now? Good. Now you have entered Swan’s (and Reynard’s, and Body 115’s) world, and you will hear their voices when you read. You will read with their rhythms and cadences, and that is important. Jan has talked on his Substack about how three sequences that, together, make up My Name is Swan came into being, how they lived in other formats for a long time before they made it into print. He has also spoken, in a recent interview with Cara Waterfall, of how

“My Name Is Swan owes much in its construction to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in pace and composition to Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, in beat and meter to Art Blakey and Elvin Jones”

Without knowing all of these musicians terribly well, I can hear these sonic influences in the ebbs, flows and stutterings of his lines. The book has a compelling forward momentum – being composed of three long sequences (or one longer meta sequence in three parts), it’s not one to dip into, but one to be carried along with. My initial read was of the whole thing in one go; subsequent reads have zoned in on different segments but you can only really grasp it as a totality.

As such, it’s very difficult to quote from (although I will try!). There are many blindingly good turns of phrase, many skillful sonic echoes and syllabic reverberations, but plucking them out of their place in the score steals away some of their impact.

Victoria Spires, Swanning around with Jan Noble

Mike is an actor. He’s been in films with Peter Sellers and Kevin Kline and has spent decades in TV and theatre. He came to see my show Body 115 on one of those Tuesday nights when there was nobody in. Afterwards he told me a story about a similarly grim experience he’d had when he was starting out, a matinee performance where the theatre had sold just one ticket.

There’s an unwritten rule that if the audience numbers less than the cast then you don’t need to go on. There were two of them in this particular play but they decided that instead of heading off to the pub for the afternoon they would treat it as a rehearsal before the evening show when a decent crowd was expected. They went on and did it, for the joy of it, and performed to an audience of one. They took their bows at the end to a solo standing ovation. Later they learned that their singular audience member was in fact the show’s writer, that he’d driven all the way down from the North of England in order to see his work staged London. He was thrilled. And so were they. And this is art.

It doesn’t stop being art if nobody sees it or buys it or reviews it. Mike told me that he read my poem My Name Is Swan aloud in his flat on his own the other afternoon and loved it. “It’s just magnificent” he said. Sure, a mention in the TLS would be nice, coverage in the Paris Review would boost sales and bring me greater visiblity but Mike, Mike the actor, performing a one man show of My Name Is Swan to no one but the gods poetry, that, my friends, that is art.

Jan Noble, Nº86 Absent without leave

What Emil Cioran called “the curse of being born” was not far-fetched to Delmore, whose own family hailed from what was once Romania. Even his own name placed him beneath the cursedness of his birth in a land without roots, in what Mlinko calls “the the social covenant of his very name — Delmore, a clumsy attempt at assimilationism.” Throughout his writings, Delmore would mock and parody his own existence under the sign of “Delmore”, playing with alter egos or secret “Others” like “Hershey Green” and “Shenandoah Fish.” 

“In his last years, Schwartz had girls like houris lining up to take care of his sorry alcoholic ass, and it still didn’t matter. He wrote almost nothing after his mid-forties, held forth at White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas met his demise (beware those Mozartian talkers!), and died alone,” in Mlinko’s words.

When Delmore Schwartz had a heart attack in the hallway of a cheap Manhattan motel, it took more than an hour for someone to call an ambulance. By the time the sirens arrived, Delmore was dead. His corpse lay unclaimed in the morgue for two days. And his literary corpus remained unfinished. Delmore had started an epic poem titled Genesis, but the protagonist only reached the age of seven after two hundred pages… If Delmore wrote himself repeatedly, he was also written by friends. Saul Bellow painted a portrait of Delmore in his roman-a-clef, Humboldt’s Gift. Ashbery said Delmore’s late poetry seemed “to lack the electric compressions and simplifications that animate his early writing, tending toward bald assertiveness.” James Atlas says Delmore spent his last days sitting in the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, “filling one notebook after another with incomprehensible novels.”

Alina Stefanescu, Dream addenda: 1

There is space here and no need for ghosts
in this thin strip of life we walk through
today, temporary as bees and butterflies

between celandine and thistle heads,
the flash of silver birch tugging our eyes
in wind warm with rain. Birthdays,

deathdays, and what lies in between:
about five miles from here where we can walk
way up to where we can no longer breathe.

Chris Edgoose, Sweetbriar 7

When I learned in August that Seattle poet, memoirist, and editor Koon Woon had died, I added to my morning list, “write blog post for Koon.” What happened?

This morning, I am remembering Koon’s generosity. And I have much to be grateful for, as Body My House would not exist had Koon not contacted me in 2018 and asked if I had a poetry manuscript Goldfish Press might publish. I recall that I was busy with teaching, and with family responsibilities. I didn’t have a manuscript. Although I was already percolating the poems that would become The Pear Tree, I wouldn’t be able to finish that book until after my mother’s death. And who knew when that would be?

You must have so many poems, Koon said. Send me sixty other poems and we’ll talk.

Toward the end of the process, I wasn’t happy with the design. After much hand-wringing, I contacted him, offering to pay an outside designer. I feared Koon would refuse and we would end by parting ways, the book unpublished, feelings stomped. Instead, his email back to me was jolly. Yes, of course, whatever I wanted. He ended with “Less work for me!”

So, my apologies for the late eulogy, coupled with my certainty that Koon would laugh, and respond in his typically gracious manner.

In addition to his work on Chrysanthemum and the press, supporting other poets and the poetry community, Koon wrote several books, including Water Chasing Water, poems, and Paper-son Poet, his memoir. His poems chronicle his journey from China to America, from Aberdeen to Seattle, through bouts of homelessness and mental illness to his life as a writer. His particular genius is precise description and image, as in this passage about his grandmother’s hands:

The past folds up like an origami bird,
Will not dissolve like candy.
Grapes cling to the vine, hands weave bamboo baskets,
Hands supplicate and light incense,
Buddha holds her in his palm.
I fold paper for hands of ancient vine,
Hands that couldn’t come along
And hands will open gates if I should return.

—Koon Woon, excerpt from “The Memory of Hands”

I found other tributes on the Internet (see below), and want especially to point you toward this one (courtesy of Cascadia Poetics LAB) with its link to Koon’s interview with David Gilmour.

To Koon Woon, life is a series of rented rooms. Some—like the village [where] he was born or the three-bedroom house on Oak Street in Aberdeen that he moved into at age 12—are literal. “Everybody in a sense is living in a rented room,” he said in a phone interview last week, “In a more profound way, we are all renting time on Earth.”

—Ryan Teague Beckwith, Daily World writer (from Paper-son Poet, p. 130)

Koon Woon’s influence will continue, but his physical presence in the world is much missed.

Bethany Reid, Koon Woon, 1949-2026

My nose has been deep into books and other fancies, so my apologies for not publishing here. For the longest time, Anne Carson’s book Autobiography of Red has been on my shelf. She recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature and thus, like many folks, my eyes gravitated to her work which I’m learning I love very much.

Also. About half my life ago, I picked up Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, a very compelling look into the senses. I loved the book so much—half my life ago—that after a few dozen pages I had to put the book down. Her mind resonated too much with my own. I couldn’t continue. I had to go live my life and live through my senses as deliciously as possible before I could open the book again. So, half my life later I decided it was time to pick the book up again. But I also wondered what Diane Ackerman had been up to lately. Where is she? What is she doing? And it turns out that she has another book coming out in January and miraculously, it’s a compendium book further examining our senses. What are the odds? And then I realized that she has a Substack. I’m not too sure if it’s because she wants community online but part of me suspects that it has a lot to do with marketing for her new book. But there’s something so intriguing about inaccessibility, as well. Or is it just me? And wow was I star-struck when I commented on her Substack, telling her my story of reading part of her book, and she responded! She was touched!

Anyway, like many folks, I’m sorta demystified by the internet lately. I have been finding it easier and easier to miss out and instead take a walk, read, spend time face-to-face with folks, and create/enjoy things. During a commute home from work, I listened to a commute-long (35 minutes) poem/performance by Anne Carson called “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”. It inspired the following poem about unwebbing.

Sarah Lada, A Poem about Unwebbing

A while back I had not one but three people contact me about a poem of mine titled “What The Onion Teaches.” This is a highly uncommon occurrence for a writer of my anonymity. Even stranger, that poem had been published a decade ago.

It turns out my short and simple poem had been assigned in some college lit class (I’m guessing freshman) along with the ubiquitous questions on what the poet meant, why the poem’s images were chosen, and worse. I had an engaging back-and-forth with one student who really wanted to get extra credit on his assignment. But I didn’t have answers for his professor’s questions.

To me, none of those questions get anywhere near why we read, let alone write, poetry. Such questions often turn readers away from their own experience of a poem. (Reading imposed for the purpose of assigning a grade may be a main reason why so few people read for pleasure once they’re out of school.)

I am incredibly fortunate to be in a longstanding poetry workshopping group. The five of us gather once a month around a picnic table in a quiet nature preserve to read, discuss, and hopefully improve each other’s newest poems. Very often we find meanings, metaphors, and other juicy bits the poet hadn’t anticipated. The eye of the beholder and all. Oftentimes the poet, too, finds what they hadn’t realized was there.

The process of recognition can be delayed, the way it was when I asked an artist friend about her fondness for painting a pond close to her home. The spring pictures were gorgeous, but I thought my favorites were her autumn scenes. Until I saw her winter versions. Each painting included three foreground trees and a misty, out-of-focus tree beyond the water. I asked if it was always misty when she painted. She told me there wasn’t really a tree on the other side, it just made for good perspective. Much later, when we were talking about our offspring, she mentioned for the first time that she’d had a fourth child, a full-term stillborn son. I asked (probably too directly) if he might be represented by that fourth tree, always present with the other three trees. “Oh my God,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”

The poems we’ve loved have a way of deepening in us, so I’m no longer surprised when a poem I haven’t encountered for years speaks to places in me that have evolved since I last read it. That’s true of poems I’ve written too. The presence of something significant can be right there, waiting till we see it, like that misty tree.

Laura Grace Weldon, What A Poem “Means”

Long ago in a foreign land I attended a reading by the poet Les Murray. One poem I wish I could remember had an epigraph to which he referred, with what degree of irony I couldn’t gauge, as a ‘sky note’. All at once that evoked music, elevation, weather, flight.

Some years before, engaged in the trying task of judging poems for a competition, the panel was considering one example. A gifted younger poet dryly observed ‘This poem has two things I dislike: one, an epigraph, and two, worse still, an epigraph in Latin.’ I was struck by his assurance on an issue I’d never considered an issue. It came as a challenge and a breath of fresh air. I also agreed with what was being implied: that poems shouldn’t be a display of learning. They shouldn’t strive to be excluding. Heavens knows, with such a small audience, why try to thin it down even further.

Still, I didn’t feel the argument was settled. Something should have been said, and wasn’t, on the other side. Firstly, what’s so wrong with having another voice positioning or counterpointing the voice of the poem? Secondly, although it’s the source of a large portion of English vocabulary and ubiquitous in college and institutional mottos, Latin is for most of us a dead language, and yet…do we want it proscribed for that? The continuing emergence of new translations of poets such as Virgil, Ovid and Catullus would strongly suggest there’s life in it still, even if a borrowed one.

Another consideration that has surfaced decades after this discussion is the presence of the internet and the facility, a matter of seconds, to track down, source and translate any quote from another language at least in roman script. Latin presents no obstacle. So, the question comes down to whether an epigraph, in whatever language, in whatever way, adds something to the poem. If so, well and good.

Gerard Genette in his great taxonomical treatise Paratexts is surely right to see paratexts as thresholds (Seuils is the French title), as “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition, but also of transaction.” Only in his claim that paratexts are “in the service of a better reception for the text” does his argument seem too functionalist. What about the possibility that they may serve to confuse or subvert or discomfort reception? That they may challenge or even discredit the text, or indeed vice versa?

Jamie McKendrick, The Use of Epigraphs and the Importance of Patches

One thing I appreciate about the current generation of U.S. undergraduates–at least the one I get to teach–is how literate many are about mental health. They reveal more of this likely hard-earned knowledge in writing than in classroom conversations, not surprisingly. I just finished grading a batch of short essays on mid-20th-century US poetry. Some students wrote insightfully about the activist dimensions of poems from the Civil Rights era or related later work–Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa. Others focused on Confessional poetry that overtly engages psychological crisis. The last few considered how Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” suggests an author trying not to fear bipolar disorder; a young mother’s detachment from her baby and her own body in Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song”; and anaesthetized avoidance as a way of coping with trauma in Plath’s “Tulips,” a poem the student argued characterizes identity as a state of change. The prompt was to consider what authenticity and/ or selfhood seem to mean in a single piece. Through all the essays, I sensed real humans engaging with complicated poems they felt drawn to. The essays weren’t perfect, of course (no AI assistance allowed), but it was a pleasure to spend time with them.

In our classroom discussions, we’ve been probing what the textual markers of authenticity might be among these poets and among readers now. Not that authenticity, whatever it means, matters to everyone. Plenty of poets and critics don’t find the concept useful or interesting, and that’s fair. Poetic voices are shifty, performing selves as well as expressing them, even when the material is autobiographical. But authenticity certainly meant something to the Beats, Confessionals, Black Arts, feminist, and gay liberation poets of the era we’re considering.

Some stylistic elements can make a poem feel real, beyond pronouns and paratext: sensory and other details that conjure an experience with vivid authority. The dashes and panicky pivots in Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” suggesting PTSD. Obscenities and painful bluntness about taboo material: allowing yourself to look bad, in essence. Self-questioning moments that manifest the process of thinking and writing within the final product of the published poem (“(Write it!) in Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”). Documentary elements such as referencing history, dating or footnoting poems, etc. If you register other kinds of textual detail as signs of authenticity, whatever that means to you, I’d be interested to hear them.

Lesley Wheeler, What makes a poem feel authentic

I returned home yesterday after spending 4 days/5 nights in Grand Junction, CO, at the brand new Grand Lodge Writer’s Retreat. This retreat is a new endeavor run by writers Tammy Bendetti and Minadora Macharet, who I have long “known” on the Internet. Due to some last minute cancellations, I had the whole comfortable house (used as an Air BnB during non-retreat times) to myself. Being at the beginning of what could be a new manuscript in a place that is just beginning to provide a space for writers seemed like a great fit.

And it was. I was very productive, taking time to work on things that I would not do at home. Wait, I thought you were retired? some imaginary reader just said. Don’t you have time to do this at home? That is technically true. But home always has other callings. For example, spending three hours finding a poem I was unfamiliar with and loving it, clocking that it used some sort of nonce repetitive form, color-coding the poem to see how the form worked, and then trying to use that form in a draft of my own? All in one sitting? That would have been a week or more of work at home.

I also began the tedious task of going through poem files to see if any of the new work I’ve been doing plays nicely together. So…an hour plus re-reading about 50 poems, deciding if they might work or not, pulling titles into a document. Then my favorite thing to do when starting to see if the poems might flow together in a new manuscript: first lines/last lines.

This also takes a long time as it requires opening each individual file to pull those lines (I don’t have all of my poems memorized, sorry, not sorry) and place them with their titles into a document. (I think it took me a couple of hours to do this with 50+ poems. ) Why? This resource, once I think I might have a manuscript, is the first way for me to see how one poem flows into the next. It gives me the entry and exit points of each poem so that I can find language, images, or ideas that connect the individual pieces, even if they vary wildly in content. It also saves a lot of paper—before I print anything, I can just move the blocks of first lines/last lines around in a document.

Did I do new drafting? Yes. Did I work on revisions? Yes. Did I accomplish a couple of submissions? Yes. Did I read? Yes. I spent approximately 8-10 hours of my day engaged in language with no interruptions except walks, stretching, and food. That is not something that is tenable to do when at home. And that’s the beauty of a retreat or residency. It’s permission to do whatever you need to do in service of the writing.

To eat hummus and pita chips and olives for lunch or dinner because you are in the middle of an idea and you don’t want to stop. To work diligently in the morning and give yourself the afternoon to walk to the Botanical Garden and Riverside Trails for time outside to think and look at something other than a screen or a blank page. And for me, a change of landscape, the high desert mesas and rock formations a complete departure from the suburban Midwest.

Donna Vorreyer, Begin At the Beginning

I love seeing where poets choose to break their lines and I so admire a great line break. It brings me great joy when I see it done well and I aim to improve my work in this area.

So this week I was editing some poems and thinking about how effectively I had broken the lines. After a while it was becoming laborious and not very productive, so I went for a walk to clear my head. As I was pacing out, I remembered the time I stole a ‘word break’ from a newspaper article about a discovery in the woods… I was lying in bed one morning completing my daily word puzzle and contemplating the things in my day. I happened then to skim the news just to check in on the world before my shower. After reading the main articles I came to one about a discovery in a wood. And it was with such delight that I saw the word broken over two lines so that it became ‘disco very’. My poet brain was alive and I recalled a dream where I had looked out of the window to see a pelican dancing on the patio. That was it. The two things had to go together. And later that day I wrote the poem.

Sue Finch, A PELICAN IS DANCING ON THE PATIO

A good friend often likes to remind me “the journey is the destination”.

Poetry’s a long game, and if we’re playing to get the ‘endpoint’ there’s a lot along the way that could leave us sad and demotivated. If, however, we’re playing for the love of the game there’s a lot about this strange bumpy ride to enjoy.

I’m prone to emotional permanence, present time orientation, and black and white thinking. What that actually means is that I find my current NOW all consuming; it’s really difficult for me to zoom out and see the big picture. In practice this usually results in: ‘today I received a rejection therefore all my poetry is awful and I should just accept I’m a failure and give up’ or ‘today I received an acceptance/good news therefore the future is bright and glossy, I’m unstoppable and all my dreams are about to be realised’ or ‘I’ve had a run of being at work and not having time or capacity to write much therefore I’m no longer part of the poetry world’. The reality? Somewhere in the middle: good things and less good things are ebbing and flowing, every day I sit down to write is a success because I am writing, I’m still a poet even if I’ve not been very involved recently.

A poetry life isn’t just about submissions and rejections, though I know I get sucked into focusing in on that pretty regularly. It’s also about connection with other poets (even though my Au side finds this haaard), reading and/or listening, enjoying the act of writing, spending time at poetry events, moving around the poetry world, and just knowing I’m still a poet even if I’ve not got out much.

Rachael Hill, A recent writing-life roundup

Looking for work gave me a chance to ruminate on years of getting by on freelance writing and editing, teaching adjunct at an MFA program, and generally trying to make a living as a writer of poetry—it’s tough! Until we get more support for the arts, I suspect I’m not the only creative that’s putting their resumes out there for jobs so we can continue buying candy for neighborhood kids and paying for good and shelter and expensive doctors. What do you think, fellow poets? As long as everything keeps getting more expensive and poetry continues to pay almost zero, I think folks with trust funds or tenure track jobs may continue to poet, but the rest of us may be forced into commercial work for a bit, at least.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Week of Job Interviews and Medical Appointments, Fox/Coyote Magic, Fall Reading and All the Fall Feels

I was approached to run some children’s poetry workshops on the theme of autumn. I did some research and was fascinated by the fact that deciduous trees don’t turn red, orange and gold, but are always that colour. It’s just that sunlight sparks the release of chlorophyll in them, and a green colour comes in and dominates. Trees shut the tap on this come September, and so the leaves revert. They don’t become red, orange and gold.

I asked the children to imagine this, and to consider it as a metaphor for everything else about aging (in grandparents, say) as not decay but revelation of what lay under all along. I thought I was being terribly clever.

Then I came across exactly this idea in an Annie Ernaux book. I’ve Googled it just now, because I couldn’t find it in my downloads or kindle library, and I definitely didn’t read it on a physical page. The infernal kid brother know-it-all that is Google’s AI assistant tells me that Thomas Merton said it first. I ask for specifics and a text, and it backtracks.

I am immensely comforted that in an Annie Ernaux book I may never encounter again there is a development of the autumn leaves idea, and sounded out as much texturally as anything else. I’m also glad for the children’s excited faces and also giggles as they pitched variants on the theme, more of them SNL joke makers than future Nobel prize winners. But I can’t remember any specific line or even concept that the children created (a decade ago).

In something of this, is a joy AI will, at best, facilitate. I did once meet a young man now all grown up who had attended one of my workshops, and he was very kind and flattering, despite the fact he was a sober and not particularly arty Geordie male. Again, this is about the near misses, and the nebulous that might rain down complexity. And somehow AI is chlorophyll in my allegory and we need something else in (as) autumn, winter and spring.

Ira Lightman, Bots and Bods

Interviews With Vampires is a series of poems I’m writing about evil. Many of them are about Nazis, or atrocities the Nazis committed during the Holocaust. I can’t say I quite know why I am doing this.

Evil seems at once easy to understand, and completely unintelligible. The Nazis as a whole, and some of them individually, were bent on pursuing evil in its most pure and total form. When a thing is done as part of this project, the connection is usually easy to understand. See, to become good is to acquire the strength to do what one knows is right, and the ability to see opportunities for good that before one was blind to. The inverse of this, the truly evil man, is someone who notices ways to do evil that would never occur to the rest of us. The death camps were set up to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies with maximum efficiently, to make possible the destruction of human life on a massive scale, and their design, while horrifying, is not surprising. What’s surprising are the ancillary evils the Nazis were able to insert into the process. Why did they shave the prisoners’ hair? Wasn’t that a waste of time—in camps that often “fell behind schedule,” with transports lined up waiting to be “processed”? You might think, well, they wanted also to humiliate their victims, not just eliminate them. And that’s true. But they also packaged the hair up and sent it off to factories, to be made into textiles for personal and industrial use. It was even used to make mattresses. Who even thinks of doing that? The surprise is not that an evil person could do such things; the surprise is that anyone could have so much talent for evil, that doing them would occur to him.

Brad Skow, The Kindly Commandant

/ this poem is my going and i cannot stop.
/ silence has an anger. has an edge.
/ how spite can enter a gesture of retort.
/ make a rage beyond retort. is its own shuddering nest.
/ i survive.
/ to become an arbiter of dull expletives.
/ how laughter gleams between the teeth.

Fran Lock, “a song and a mistake”

— If you’re a poet, I recommend reading Ars Poeticas by Julianna Spahr. Don’t hold the Pulitzer Prize against her. The poets are frayed, (I never know whether to say we or they anymore, lapsed poet that I am), we, let’s say we, have a “frayed relationship to poetry” which Spahr says is “an almost universal condition.”

— “A poem, I understood, to be a place for the questions, not for the answers.” Spahr. It’s a book I’ve read but am still absorbing. It’s a book I want to absorb though. Not to be read just once and set aside.

— That poetry can still get at the predicaments we are all in. It feels she says, as though “there is only one way out.” And this is an idea that feels “impossible / to include in a poem tells us something / about the new feats of imagining we / have yet to embrace.”

— I’m always returning to C.D. and her Cooling Time. “We are indispensable to one another. We keep the language machine going — often in different directions at once.” I do think this is our obligation as writers right now. To guard your writing, to be fecund, fertile, protective. Language, says CDW is a bloody Odyssey. Okay what she really says is, that we must “rise above one’s failures, to wrest hope from the next disappointment, to feel such clarity and happiness, to indulge in one’s own fertile mind — the great rush to participate in the odyssey of language, to take up the leaky pen of a long, wended life…”

Shawna Lemay, Basket of Flowers

What do you enjoy the most about haiku?

This is perhaps a strange claim, but I am convinced that haiku already exist, and until they are written, they are waiting to be discovered and uncovered for the world to read and hear them. I have come to realize that is how I approach writing haiku, as a process of revealing and liberating, rather than creating. The method is simple: we experience the world with our five senses, which when we write become images. The experiences might be from our earliest childhood memories or as recent as this morning’s tea and toast. We recognize, though, that our moments, no matter how small, are all momentous. The challenge, which makes writing haiku such an arduous task (at least for me), is to find the right words with the right sound in the right order. I think it is not enough that a poem pleases the poet. I see haiku as a communal process, and so, during the drafting, I believe the poet must serve as a proxy for the reader. The closer a poem becomes to being finished, the more the writer has offered to the reader. The path is difficult and the responsibility is profound, but I thrive on the process. When my haiku have the right sound and cadence, when the fragment dovetails with the phrase to fit together seamlessly, and the gap of understanding has been narrowed just enough for the reader to bridge it, then I know I am on the cusp of giving life to one breath’s worth of words.

Jacob D. Salzer, Steve Bahr

Around two and a half years after I first heard the quiet but insistent voice of the book that would become Wilderment: Creative Writing in the Time of Climate Change asking to be written, I’ve just last week submitted the final draft to my publisher. There is still much to do–permissions requests to make, and all that goes into the copyediting, production, and promotion processes–but nevertheless it feels like a huge shift, a turning point in my mind and heart. That particular labor is in the past, and I’m trying to allow myself to rest, at least for a moment, in the satisfaction of having done what I set out to do and said what I wanted to say. […]

The book submission was perfectly timed, because it coincided with the inaugural Hellbender Gathering of Poets in Black Mountain, North Carolina, amidst the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains. (A naturalist there told me that the Appalachian Mountains are older than the rings on Saturn!) This new conference, named for the beautifully primordial hellbender salamander—the largest salamander in North America and currently listed as a Vulnerable species—and born from the chrysalis that was the Miami Beach Poetry Festival, is the vision of the wonderful poet and human Nickole Brown. Its mission is to combine poetry, environmental science, and community, and after spending nearly a week at the gathering, I believe they are already successful. Like the School for Living Futures, Hellbender sees potential at the intersections of artistic practice and other kinds of earth-knowledge, and I was inspired to meet so many other poets who are also tuned and tuning into those connections.

The defining feature of the conference was its bringing on local naturalists and botanists to lead a series of “awe walks” on the surrounding trails, helping us poets learn more about what we’re seeing, new ways of looking, and what questions to ask. For this purpose each participant was gifted a magnifying loupe along with our information folder and tote bag upon registration. I learned quite a few things I’ll be taking with me from these walks, including how to distinguish between white and red clover, the best time (spring) and place (the very center or very edge of a patch) to find four-leafed clovers, three styles of spiderwebs (orb, sheet, and tangle), and how oak galls—little ball-shaped things I’ve been noticing all my life but didn’t know what they were—are made. Our guide, Haley, told us that she’s in the habit of collecting oak galls whenever she finds them to give to an artist friend who uses them to make natural ink and dye.

Sarah Rose Nordgren, Hellbending

I’ve read several poetry books in the last few months. Hundreds of poems from books published through traditional or hybrid publishers, by poets known and unknown. And I have, more often than not, come away dissatisfied. Not dissatisfied as in critical. No. Not even as in unmoved. There was so much to love. So much that I have underlined, so much I have noted in the margins. But dissatisfied as in a little heartbroken. And it is not the fault of the poems.

Are we expecting too much from a book of poetry. Expecting it to elevate the reader – into a vault of stars, into clear air, into the swirling heart of a tornado? Or at least to leave them stranded on the highway, in the path of incoming traffic? To reveal the eighth colour in the spectrum? To be god?

I have no illusions about my own ability as a poet. Remember when they used to say (was it Malcolm Gladwell who said it first?) you have to put in 10000 hours to become a master at something complex. I have barely notched a thousand. And it shows ever so often. Even as I cover those failings with linguistic straw and dung.

And there are a number of masters. Their shadows fall in rarefied air. But the world is changing every day. The problems are bigger and harder and more obvious than ever, yet seemingly unfathomable. So much seems existential that each day is like an unearned reward. When our eyes shift from the news to a poem, are we expecting to be lulled into a false calmness, find validation or reprieve, or discover a silver bullet between the lines? Or all of those at once?

I will quote Amiri Baraka because I feel that hope and that sadness. Both.

“And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won’t come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.”

All over the world, young people are on the streets, trying to win a future that is sustainable, meaningful, safe, equitable, and free. What is the lexicon the older generation must employ to echo their voices? What are the poems they should write? Or is that poetry redundant already? I see how my words mock me – old, rusty, and anachronistic even as I write them. I have spent the last few weeks desperate for new words, even as I have been following the news and reading other poetry books. The intensity of the written word is still fumbling for the intensity of a single morning of rebellion.

I have nothing. No answer. No solution. No poem. Not even an apology.

What is the purpose of poetry?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, A little heartbroken

writing downwards into the spaces

adding wisps of colour
dripping the modifier into
the origins of the alphabet

the point is the paper
start with collage
and a Blackwing pencil

Ama Bolton, ABCD October 2026

Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.

I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.

I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.

Ann E. Michael, Paper

This week: gods in the undergrowth, a hue of metaphysical blue, the traffic of Jacob’s ladder, the low notes of the left hand, and much more. Enjoy.

I’m not religious but I like a sense of the spirit behind the natural world and our interactions with it. The Finnish concept of väki encapsulates this; everything, living or not, has an energy or spirit and it impacts our lives as we come into contact with it. My poetry has been bringing all these influences together recently.

The wet dark, the thick gold light, the spiral of leaf fall, the gods in the undergrowth, creeping age, desire. Though I try to vary what I write about these are popping up again in my poetry at this time of year.

In a strange coincidence as I’ve been reading Sappho, connected to those last two themes, Anne Carson arrived on my radar and on my Substack feeds. I love some of her Sappho translations, so I bought Autobiography of Red a couple of months ago though I haven’t read it yet. I’ve read some her own poems and essays and she kept showing up. I clicked more links. Last month, I wrote a poem inspired by her and Sappho which starts ‘she keeps arriving in worn stone and sandals’ trying to capture this sense of the two of them stepping into my life now.

And then to hear she’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Do we shape the algorithm or does it shape us?

I wrote algorhythm at first which must be a poem.

Gerry Stewart, The Gods in the Undergrowth

I’m sitting in Ted Hughes’ house writing about Sylvia Plath. It feels strange. The desk in my room looks out onto a steep pitch of dense, dark trees on the far side of a valley that reaches almost to the top of the window. Blurry birds occasionally fly past below me. It’s a wonderful, wondering house.

And my random book picker picked Plath this week. This week! The week I’m on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank, her ex-husband’s house, by the village where she is buried. Honestly, it did. I don’t know how I feel about coincidences, and I don’t go looking for signs in my life, as a rule. But I also don’t mess with them if they do show up, and I will tell you that a whacking great black butterfly flew into my window as I was deciding whether there was enough light left to visit her grave yesterday afternoon, and that when I left the house and started up the lane, a whacking great barn owl wheeled silently over me three times and flew away. I’ve been surrounded by poets and poetry and trees all week, so maybe I’m seeing metaphors everywhere, but obviously, I went to see her. The sun came out, and I told her about the owl.

Nia Broomhall, Week 30: Ariel

The back-yard maples are still perfectly green […] but the city’s ash trees are dropping their little tongues of flame on streets and sidewalks and front lawns. They give the lie to this poem, since the summer was terribly dry, but they’re still brightly golden. I’m not complaining.

It’s odd that the yearly change of the leaves appears to be changeless, given how much has changed in the twenty years since I wrote “Suburban Samsara.”

Substack doesn’t do well with stepped lines, so I present these four-stress alliterative lines with verticals to mark the midline caesuras:

Suburban Samsara

Season finale: | last fall, the street
was flaked in yellow, | flecked with sheet-flame,
leaf-gold layering | over the lawns.
The garden buddhas | sat bare-bellied,
navel deep | in a dreamed nirvana,
almost conceding: | Not all is suffering. […]

Maryann Corbett, Leaf-gold Season

As I’ve settled into a regular cadence of writing poetry again, as well as reading a fair bit of it, I figure this is a good time to bloviate all about my pretentious literary thoughts and theories. What else is a blog good for, after all? Here are some of those thoughts, in no particular order:

I don’t think that poetry always needs to be about the sparse and the spare and whittling everything down into the leanest language that can possibly get the job done. I think some poems need space to blunder around on the lawn, mumbling under their breath and slopping their drink over the edge of their glass. Some poems need a thick mattress to jump on as they scream into the void and poke at the sky with a gnarled stick. Some poems are born chubby and need a little more elbow room than others. Some poems need to put on every coat in their closet all at once. Some poems need four cupcakes and the entire jar of sprinkles to self-actualize. I’m beginning to discover the satisfaction of giving them exactly what they want. That’s its own kind of precision.

I’ve never before felt compelled to write a response poem, but I’m writing one now in response to a poem by Daniel Berrigan, and although the topic is grim, it’s an interesting experience, and after this I may want to write more of them. Maybe a poem gets lonely sometimes and wants to hear itself echoed. Maybe a poem wants to know how it affected someone else. Maybe a poem just likes gazing at itself in the mirror.

Kristen McHenry, What a Poem Wants, What a Poem Needs

There are eight months until the publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise. I’m still editing a bit here and there and adding some poems, while waiting for more comments from my editors. Here is a paragraph I added (spoiler alert!):

Up to a point in my life, I appeared to be fearless. People often said that having a baby in a hotel room in Kabul was courageous; rarely did they say it was foolish and dangerous. As a teenager, I went through an illegal abortion, traveling to Nepal while pregnant, and having an unattended birth. I felt confident that I could do these things. If there were setbacks, I found it possible to move forward. Whether it was fearlessness, naivety, or hubris, my thoughts were free of regrets. There would always be a way forward.

All of that crumbled after my son was kidnapped.

In the interim, I’m working on some other things. I am submitting a poetry chapbook (titled My Private Tornado) to presses and contests, and, with the advice and help of a friend, have done an extensive reordering of the poems. As a general rule, chapbooks should stick to a theme or tell a story. The ordering of poems in a chapbook can make or break its likelihood to be accepted for publication.

Risa Denenberg, Month Minus Eight

I am happy to share that I have a wee poem, “Heat Lightning” in the new issue of Tiny Wren Lit. I’m grateful to EiC Dana Knott and guest Editor Kipp Knott for selecting my poem for inclusion in this special Ekphrastic issue.

I’m partial to ekphrastic poetry because imagination is set loose by art and can end up anywhere. Anywhere at all. I chose a piece of art (above) from a collection in The Public Domain Review, “Studies on Twilight Phenomena, after Krakatoa”. The artwork is part of a set of chromolithographs from water colors by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche. They depict the skies after the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia which created strange optical effects all over the world. Fascinating stuff that linked to more fascinating stuff and down into the rabbit hole I fell. My poem has nothing to do with volcanoes and has only a passing reference to skies so where did it come from? Even I am not sure.

Charlotte Hamrick, Poem in Tiny Wren Lit

Last Saturday I had the absolute pleasure of being part of an art & poetry workshop (part of the ongoing Sun Inn Poets project in Manchester) with local artist Ian Ecclestone.

Alongside wonderful poets Tom Branfoot and Adam Taylor I read my poem ‘I am glad to be your daughter’ to a room full of poets, artists, and doodlers and then watched those lovely people draw all over our poems.

Ian had stencilled each poem onto a large piece of board and placed them on tables in the studio at Altogether Otherwise along with a bunch of coloured pens. Participants were invited to listen to each poet reading their poem and to begin drawing, colouring, or mark making in response any time they felt drawn to. There were zero restrictions. Participants could draw on one poem, each poem, every poem, and they could draw whatever came up for them.

I adored seeing how different each poetry board came together (they were each so very different!), and seeing the gorgeous colour added all over my own poem.

I also loved chatting with people as they drew; with poets I knew, and with people I’d never met who’d come along to hear some poetry and try being creative in a slightly different way.

There were several discussions about cross discipline work and the labels we adopt that can then often keep us hemmed into a single discipline. We also spoke about how creativity stems from a similar inner space for all of us, and how although we’re drawn to certain forms much can be gained through exploration into others.

I suspect something exciting happens within when we bring disciplines together. Art of any form is about emotional response, connection; it’s why we care so much whether our work gets published – not just so we can see our names in print but because the other half of creating anything is that creation impacting and/or being witnessed by someone else. Art is communication and connection, and when we use art to respond to art magical things happen. Just watching what emerged across those boards and listening to people’s experiences during the day was testament to that.

It was interesting too to experience this while I’ve been delving further into ekphrasis. My focus has been on writing in response to visual art, yet here was the opposite, drawing in response to written/spoken art, and it had a similarly wonderful result. Some drawings responded literally to images and concepts within the poems, others appeared much more abstract or to be the result of something internal within the artist that had been sparked through either listening, reading, or being in the space. What emerged through the collaboration was a gorgeous array of imagery that spanned styles, colours, and influence; the interaction of different people’s responses alongside the poems led to wonderfully rich final boards.

Rachael Hill, Colourful Words: Expressive Art & Poetry

This month, I’m guest-reading for ‘s journal After…, alongside the main man himself. In case you’re not familiar with it, After… is a high quality, free online journal of ‘after’ and ekphrastic poetry.

So far, it’s involved some enjoyable reading, a colour-coded spreadsheet, and several surprises about where our tastes converge and diverge.

Since the poems are scheduled to appear only on the date of a full or new moon, there are a strictly limited number of slots for 2027 and I am looking forward to having some wince-inducingly tough decisions, and maybe even the odd arm wrestle, over what to include.

Of course, I have been thinking during this time about what makes a good ‘after’. I started to loosely categorise them into three things I made up: implosion, explosion, and refusal-to-detonate.

An implosion of another piece of art is something that condenses it down to its absolute essentials. It finds the inner mood of the thing (be that another poem, a piece of visual art, a film, etc) and collapses it into itself. It’s not simply a “re-telling” or a describing of what is happening in the poet’s own words. It’s not a pastiche. It’s more like inhabiting the thing from inside itself, perhaps saying something the original thing didn’t even know it was saying.

An explosion, by contrast, blasts the thing wide open, scatters its constituent parts all about the place, and goes for a rummage. It might pick one particular fragment and ruminate solely on that. It might try to make some kind of completely new composition out of the original art. It’s an expansion of, and perhaps a detour away from, the original. Sometimes only the slenderest of threads may remain to connect it back to the place it started from.

A refusal-to-detonate is … well, I’m not quite sure yet what that might be. What would it look like, to create an after of a work that refuses to engage with the work’s own original perspective at all? Is that possible? Can you create an after to a thing from entirely outside of that thing’s frame of reference? I’d like to find out. Perhaps someone can submit one and I’ll be able to say, I’ve seen it, and I now know what it is.

Victoria Spires, A month of afters

I have been thinking about photos and about the Instagram account I started. I’m not claiming to be without a significant ego, but I’ve never been a “look at me” kind of girl. I don’t take center stage, though I’m bossy behind the scenes. The idea of recording myself doing things and recording myself talking about it, or talking directly to the camera doesn’t work for me. It would feel (and in my case, it would be) performative. Instead it is our “hyttebok” – a simple and straightforward amateur photo album that isn’t trying to create content.

I’m a teaching artist, and I think that even my poetry is about teaching—in the Socratic sense: Look at that!

What does it mean to you?
Maybe it means puppies and carburetors.
No wrong answers.
Maybe it is entirely silent: experiential meaning, somatic meaning.

The forest doesn’t need to be performed. And it is full of meaning already. There’s no need to assign it anything that our bodies don’t already understand. Even the shivering.

I’ll know if you’ve got the answer when I see clarity on your face.

The second night of our trip, the temps dropped to freezing. In the morning, we kicked up the heat, had our breakfast and our coffee, then stepped outside to find that all of the trees that had been yellow-orange just yesterday were a deep orange now.

You just stand there, shivering in the breeze, listening to the trees, the treecreepers, and the redwings. Thinking: Why am I not doing this every chance I get?

Ren Powell, Our First Week Out

One day, our class falls into a deep conceptual conversation around the verb, “To miss.” In English, I miss you = I am experiencing the absence of you. We perform the missing. It lives inside of us. We feel it. We inhabit the wound.

In Italian, the speaker is not performing the missing. Mi manchi (I miss you) = You are missing to me, or from me, you are missing. In a way, there is no action. There is only a gaping hole. A missingness. An absence being bestowed upon the speaker.

My classroom is made up of a Swedish person, a Brazilian person, a Polish person, a Mexican person, and an English person. We are not encouraged to default to English, although many speak it; rather, we stay in Italian, no matter the level. We all engage with the concept of the verb from the starting point of our native tongues, bending ourselves around the language, decentering what we know to be true.

I think this is a doorway into poetry.

~~

In my blank moments in Italian, I learn to cherish what I do have. If I have verde, affamato, caldo, incantevole, strano, esausto, e benedetto (green, hungry, warm, enchanting, strange, exhausted, and blessed), I learn to love those words. They are my words. They are what I have. They become close to me. They open doorways to new words. They make me hungry for other sounds.

So, I realize the abundance I was born with. That I have not only Longing at my disposal but want or wish or yearning or burning, or even predilection or proclivity. Or perhaps thirst or itch.

I exist as two selves, then. In English, I am whole. I am lush and wild and feral. I dream in English. I house a thousand variations and build worlds that not only convey meaning but subvert it, double it, contort it, or conceal it.

My mother-in-law once said to me out of nowhere: You know, you are the most erudite person I’ve ever met. She meant it as a compliment, maybe, and I think I took it as one, maybe. But I never stopped to consider who I would be without all that language at my disposal. But I know a new me now, and I am missing fragments.

~~

I wrote my first poem in Italian a few years ago, for my wedding. It was edited by a wonderful Italian poet (Alessandra Bava), and read aloud at the ceremony by my dear Italian-born friend. I want to try to write another—this time without help. In Italian, I am at sea. I have enough to survive. But I barely have metaphor. I have almost no idiom. Can I render beauty? Can I make anything dimensional? Am I dimensional?

How can I compensate for linguistic austerity? How can I make what is concise also soft and also delicious?

And beyond language, I also think of poets who’ve had to relearn how to write due to physical or cognitive disability (see Richard Siken’s newest book, I Do Know Some Things), how my own disability has changed the way I come to the page.

Yet another doorway into the house of poetry.

Lisa Marie Basile, What learning another language taught me about writing poetry

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve never been in a place that so openly honors writers. The park with the busts and the benches shaped like books with the writers’ words on them already pushed them to the front of the line, but anywhere I go in Iași, I see streets named after poets and novelists, placards on walls talking about how such-and-such writer used to walk through this alleyway on his or her way to go to the university or to write in a park or go meet with fellow writers for some purpose. (I need to get better at reading Romanian so I’m not forced to use Google Translate for these moments.)

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Copou Park is also home to the Mihai Eminescu Museum, a play house, and a small bookstore that’s connected to them. And so, before we moved away from this little park, I made sure to stop in there and look around, and I purchased these volumes. [photo]

Now to be clear, I didn’t know what I was buying in either case, though I expected that “An Extraterrestrial in the Palace of Culture” would be closer to my reading level. (I was not wrong). I didn’t know anything about Magda Isanos when I picked up her book from the others on the table. I was going with my gut, and with this Google translation of the portion of a poem on the back cover.

How bright you are, my unlived day… Your halo measures up to my forehead. I walk through the forest of people and happily say: “I want to kiss a single star on the mouth…” My youth shines straight like a sword And every dream guided by it blossoms. My lips sometimes said; “I will die”… But on all seas, I had a ship.

The title of the collection comes from that first line, “My Unlived Day,” and I thought, yeah, if the machine is doing this anything close to justice, then I want to know more about Magda Isanos.

Luckily for me, a Romanian writer named Luciana Moroianu (who I have never met) decided earlier this year to devote a week to telling the story of and translating some poetry of Magda Isanos, and it’s one of those poems I’m highlighting today.

Brian Spears, “Dumneaza” by Magda Isanos

Now that Nell, aka Helena Nelson, aka Helen Beaton, founder, publisher and editor at HappenStance Press, has sent out her final newsletter and announced that the press is winding down, I felt this might be a good moment to celebrate its achievements.

HappenStance started out as a poetry pamphlet press in 2005, publishing slim volumes by all sorts of poets, gaining most recognition for the début pamphlets by up-and-coming names. Several significant contemporary poets cut their teeth with HappenStance. People such as Niall Campbell and Will Harris, etc, etc, not only benefited from Nell’s editorial input at an early stage in their development, but they also obtained a calling card from HappenStance, in the shape of their pamphlets, which enabled them to make the step on to bringing out their first full collections with major publishers. All of the above led to the press being awarded the Michael Marks Award in 2010.

Moreover, in editorial terms, Nell ran a system of submissions windows. Poets sent her batches of their work, and she then replied with detailed feedback. Numerous well-known poets might never have been published by her, but her crit of their work still played a huge, invisible role in their development back in the day. Just imagine how many hours she dedicated to this selfless task!

And then there was Sphinx. Sphinx Reviews was a project that ran alongside HappenStance. It specialised in reviews of poetry pamphlets, a format that has long struggled to receive critical attention, and provided an incredible service to poets, publishers and, of course, readers.

By my tedious manual count, a total of 1461 books were reviewed on Sphinx, many of them by more than one person. That’s the equivalent of over 2,000 pamphlets that were received by Nell, repackaged and sent back out to her loyal band of reviewers. 2,000 batches of stamps to be paid for. Countless treks to the post office. 2,000 reviews that were edited by her (often to the huge benefit of the reviewers themselves, whose prose style and critical approach to poetry were often transformed via this process). 2,000 posts that were formatted, uploaded and optimised for search engines.

In later years, HappenStance shifted its focus to full collections. And again, it punched above its weight, garnering a T.S. Eliot shortlisting for Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point, providing opportunities to fine poets whose writing didn’t fit in with the criteria that major publishers employed to select their manuscripts.

And though Nell would probably admit that she was far more comfortable editing poetry than selling it, let’s not forget that HappenStance Press shifted several thousand units over the years, all via an unfunded subscription model with barely any distribution through bricks-and-mortar bookshops. What’s more, it published several volumes that reached out beyond the poetry bubble and found their way to readers via farm shops and wine merchants, etc, finding new readers for the genre.

Matthew Stewart, An appreciation of HappenStance Press

The Frankfurt Book Fair was a good book fair. Our new titles are getting a lot of attention, and it went by quickly. At some points, I would sit down with someone who was clearly just focused on rapid-fire selling, but this happened rarely. I don’t like it when the meeting is just about selling. We don’t buy often, so a meeting where they try to sell me several titles without real excitement for the discussion of great books is not going to go well.

I often forget something, and in this case, I tried hard not to forget anything, but I ended up losing the computer cord for this laptop, which means that I have only an hour or so, and then it is out of power. Mark will be sad that I’ve lost the cord, but glad that I’m home. He’s used to my losing things, here and there and everywhere. I do lose things. This time, Frankfurt.

I am going to have to get home by reading books and watching movies, which is good for me. I want to move into a new place, charge my life by not working on the weekends. By writing, spending time on my own creations. I am ready to have a new book, a new kind of wild.

Kate Gale, A New Kind of Wild: On Transformation

I have a proof copy of Reznikoff, Testimony. It’s the size of a good brick, the kind you might want to throw through the plate-glass window of an investment bank, or the windscreen of an SUV in Mayfair. (I am not advising this: they are made of shatterproof toughened glass.) I’ve been carrying this proof copy around in my bag, showing it to people in car parks who might be interested in my wares.

On the website there is now a page for the book, with links to other places. There’s an essay by me on the book in the new issue of The Little Review – little in price (£5) but otherwise (176 pages) not little at all. […]

Reznikoff bought a second-had printing press in the late 1920s and both printed and published (in editions of around 200) many of his own books. ‘No more rejection slips,’ his wife noted. 

Charles Boyle, Newsletter October 2026

As you may know, I run a small press called Dead Mall, and on September 22nd, we launched two new books: Alex Tretbar’s Dogsmind and a revised/final edition of my own Interrogation Days (which also comes with a supplementary pamphlet of a closely related poem, “Futures”).

Alex’s book is a wonder and unlike anything I’ve published or read before, and you can read an interview with him here. Both books also features a new physical book design: the cover is gatefolded, which really changes the look, feel and physical experience of the books.

Lastly, we are raising money with each sale, setting aside 25-50% of each purchase for the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio (very near the press’s Dayton home). This org provides much-needed aid to the Haitian immigrant community in that city which has been cruelly impacted by the recent Supreme Court decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status2. We currently have $125 collected, but I am hoping we can add to that amount! Consider picking up a book to add your support.

RM Haines, EXITING THE DOOM LOOP

The weekend also brought another mini-retreat, though my charger [is] on the fritz so I spent the day writing notes and outlines for the play that I started earlier in the summer and never finished about teenage girls and demonology, which seems fitting since we are mid-stream of the new Mike Flanagan Carrie, which is about the rage of young girls, and more broadly, women in general, which is spiking more and more as the country degenerates. So much good horror stuff is coming in the next couple of months on both small and big screen (as well as the stage locally that we are hoping to get to). The Crystal Lake series. The new season of Yellowjackets. Films like Other Mommy and Victorian Psycho as well. 

I am finishing up the galleys of the eco-gothic anthology this week, and once approved by the authors, we will be planning the release. I am also still in the thick of submissions for next year’s book series, so if you have not heard from me, you will be soon. Since we only had a handful of full-length projects, we are starting a second reading period for those through the end of this year.    

Fall feels like it’s slipping away, so I am hoping to inhabit the space of it a little bit more. Since we were out til 4am last night, after a big brunch of biscuits and gravy that J made this morning, I am mostly taking a lazy Sunday to plan the week and reset the apartment. Then tonight, the rest of Carrie and maybe another movie on streaming. We have tickets for a cool horror shorts screening tomorrow called Fresh Meat and maybe another to make it a double feature since we’ll be out. 

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 10/11/2026

After months of work, I have an abundance of news and new items to share this harvest season. My 2027 calendar of art and haiku is now available online, with a dozen new artworks of landscapes, flora and fauna. I also have eight new card designs for everyday, birthdays and holidays, plus four holiday notecard sets and three for everyday.

My children’s book, Yung Stands Strong, will be launched this Sunday as part of the grand opening for the Eureka Chinatown Monument. Then the following Saturday, October 17, there will be a book reading and tour of Eureka’s historic Chinatown. There are two more book events after that—see below for details and other Makino Studios events. The book had a limited first printing. You can pre-order copies online now, for shipment around October 31, and find it in local stores soon after.

Annette Makino, It’s harvest season!

I’ve made a decision about my chapbook-length, hybrid-poetry manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong: I’m going to make it into a handmade artist book. I came to this conclusion after meeting with artist/poet MaryAnn L. Miller (Lucia Studio), who was generous enough to listen to my ideas, explain the process(es) necessary, and encourage me to go for it even though I do not feel fully prepared to embark upon, let alone complete, such a project. For people who are thinking of doing this themselves, and for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I figured I would use my blog to write about the process. It will also serve to goad me into staying on track and actually completing it! Because you know how it goes. One gets distracted, or gets mired in details, or flags in general.

MaryAnn provided meaningful inspiration when I visited her at her studio. She has produced numerous artist books, and they are beautiful objects. Photos do not represent what a joy it is to handle an artist book–the textures of the papers, the feel of the book in hand, the subtleties of color. The book feels like a completed project, and this manuscript really needs that. Or I do, since I embarked on research about Harold Dunn in 2008 and have been working on the poems and historical excerpts on and off since then; it’s something I want to do to honor my friend David Dunn, to learn his father’s story, to help me to understand David’s story–cut short by his own early death.

I have sent the ms. to numerous chapbook publishers, but although two of them expressed some interest in the poems they also acknowledged that the layout of the work would pose challenges for their small presses. I understand that. I looked into print-on-demand options for self-publishing this text, and…let’s just say the process would not have been smooth. Since I’m not doing this to earn any profit, I may as well do it as art for art’s sake rather than tearing my hair out over tech issues. If I make only 10 or 15 books, at least I will have finished this particular project. If I consider this “artistic,” the process becomes more interesting and the result can take its time. I can make a lot of mistakes, and learn from them. Which I fully intend to do.

Ann E. Michael, New project

The latest from award-winning Alberta poet Derek Beaulieu is the deliberately provocative Do It Wrong (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2026), a title subtitled “How To Be A Poet in the Twenty-First Century,” an absolutely readable assemblage of critical essays, offerings and manifestos collected into what might actually be essential reading for those interested in writing and publishing, especially if the very idea confuses, intimidates or frightens. For those unaware, Beaulieu is not only the current Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, but the author of an absolute ton of published books and chapbooks across North America and Europe, including titles such as Surface Tension (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013) [see my review of such here], seen of the crime: essays on conceptual writing (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2011) and with wax (Coach House Books, 2003) [see my review of such here], as well as a long-established micropress publisher of chapbooks, pamphlets, small journals and other ephemera.

jwcurry once suggested to me that the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was a great writer, to his mind, in large part because he was willing to fail (and therefore manage to achieve what hadn’t even been attempted), but Beaulieu takes that idea a step further, suggesting that anyone who wishes to engage with art generally, or with poetry and/or small press publishing specifically, should be willing to completely go against how it has always and ever be done. “Given the meagre audience for poetry and the microscopic financial rewards,” he writes, early on in the collection, “I suggest that you not only dance as if no one is watching but write as if no one is reading you. Because metaphorically—and mathematically—no one is.” Through a collection of short first-person essays, Beaulieu works through ideas on composition, community, publishing, education, awards, experimental writing, influence, mentors, support and other threads around literary production and engagement that so rarely get discussed, let alone in such detail. Referencing an ethos of sharing and community around The Grateful Dead, for example, in his piece “EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WRITING I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD,” he ends with:

The Grateful Dead and their fans see the music as only one part of a wider artistic life, and they eschew power and ownership at every opportunity except when it can be wielded to increase awareness, make space, or fund colleagues. The Deadheads I know trade tapes, jam together, offer ideas, play their favourite moments for unwitting converts; they are dedicated to being kind. We need more poets to act like Deadheads.

Do It Wrong is incredibly positive and generative, and strikingly honest about how literary publishing works and doesn’t work, offering his years of experience through the literary and small press trenches on how best to approach the work, and what one might expect (and not expect), and how best to propel the art forward. He speaks of experience over commercial reward, and pushing to purposefully make it weirder. Honestly, this is a book I wish anyone engaged with this kind of work, or wishing to, should pick up and read, from the established writer to the emerging ambitious kids seeking glory and career through poetry (and they are very much part of the landscape), to the moody teenager secretly scribbling out lines in their notebook. Beaulieu’s voice is clear-headed and optimistic, articulating a joy through the process of exploration, learning and risk-taking, and a suggestion that those merely in it for themselves will end up in frustration, missing out on all the possibilities that an engaged community offers. 

rob mclennan, Derek Beaulieu, Do It Wrong

“Mistress of accurate minor pain, / Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane,” Marie Ponsot whispered in the privacy of her profanations, in the folds of the poem titled “Private and Profane,” where the enumerated saints are the humans who influenced her intellection rather than Jesus’ obedient followers. The supplicant’s voice knows its address is heretical.

This Kierkegaardian love/mistrust binary fuels the tension in Ponsot’s poetry, where recognition is often derailed by gender socialization and social constructions of identity qua being. I’m thinking of how Soren Kierkegaard put these “two equal possibilities” in Works of Love:

When deception and truth are presented as two equal possibilities in contrast to each other, the decision is whether there is love or mistrust in you. For example, one says, “Even what appears to be the purest feeling can nevertheless be a deception – certainly it is possible; it must be possible– ergo I choose mistrust or belief in nothing.”

The problem is the how much depends upon this facile presumption of equality.

Enter Louise Nevelson, the sculptor whose work moves in counterpoint to Ponsot. Nevelson crafted an exquisite persona from excess and old furniture fragments. She invented a usable childhood to leverage her countercultural choices and never sat still long enough to commit to her shadows and shades. Like Lady Gaga, she was ‘born this way,’ hatched by artifice, wed to self-fashioning as a means of escape. Nevelson’s Philosophy of the Egg, in her own words:

I remember when I was six years old at play recess in school. One girl was taking advantage of another. So I went up to the girl who was being bullied to reassure her that she didn’t have to be conned. And she wasn’t even a friend of mine. At six years old you don’t battle for people unless you’re born with it. It’s like an egg; you can scramble it, soft-boil it, hard-boil it, even devil it. But it is an egg. The ingredient of an egg is an egg.

After turning a hue of metaphysical blue with Ponsot, I burrowed into Louise Nevelson’s genderfucking sculptures for respite.

Alina Stefanescu, Some, sum, somme.

The last installment [link] of my five part review of Living In History by Luke Roberts is about how challenging VAWG [violence against women and girls] was a risky political act for a woman poet, more so in Britain than in America. This has obviously changed since but when, how and why? I look at poems by half a dozen women publishing in the 70s and early 80s. I use the discussion to re-evaluate an often critiqued poem by Denise Riley, “A note on sex and ‘the reclaiming of language’ “. If, as I argue in the essay, there was a wave of defiant semi-autobiographical poetry about rape in the USA in the 70s, led by Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, and yet the subject could lead to being typecast if done by a woman in the UK, then the airport becomes a very interesting place indeed. In Riley’s poem, the speaker is “flying back from the New Country”. In Riley’s allegorical poetics, this could mean, with arch and ironic reservations, that the speaker has declared herself a feminist, that feminism has a zion not necessarily in an actual physical place, and is anyway being looked at differently because she is clever and assertive and therefore might be a feminist, and second wave feminism was the New and Dangerous Thing. But there is more than a hint of the literal USA in 1970. For a woman in 1970 to shuttle between the USA and the UK is to exist between two feminist cultures, and the USA and the UK are the Scylla and Charybdis of talking about VAWG.

To me the feminist finale of my essay crowns the theme throughout, of how the simile, metaphor, metonymy, atmospheric craft of poetry picked up some undercurrents we now value, and by what battle (and also did poets glance off things in the air, and then leave it at that?).

It’s been very interesting observing my networks and some newcomers reacting to my five part essay. Most responses have been about technique, and that I’ve made a good case for reading poets unfamiliar or neglected. Some appreciate my academic backbiting about another writer (and let’s face it, backbiting is a muse for me).

But I think of the last as the best part of the essay, because it exposes the cult of free association as reserved for men, and the club doesn’t allow in all the feminisms. I argue that freedom and poetic license have long been valued and have their own pedigree and chain of references (I remember the 90s when Tom Raworth was admired for the fastest reading style in the West, and then Miles Champion beat his time). To have proper intertextual allusion, as opposed to the nod and a wink of a sect, we have to ask if women had the same audience interrelation and, well, freedom of legacy, in being freewheeling and tangential (why is a Raworth book not about Cancer titled Cancer).

Women were policed and pigeonholed and everything was serious: seriously nice, seriously sexy, seriously angry and violated, mannishly anarchic, writing a (sexual or psychoanalytic) écriture feminine etc. If we look at how 70s women navigated this double standard and this pigeonholing, then we don’t get people “ahead of their time” making the out there agit prop theme poetry de nos jours, avant la lettre. We get to see the actual culture, how it was changed and resisted change.

During my lifetime so far, it has suddenly become easier to write about sexual violence, but in what exact year? Marital rape was made a criminal offence in 1991, so I suspect after 1991. And what were the green shoots and who fell in battle?

Ira Lightman, What we stomach, rumbling

The “Lucy Poems” of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), all but one of which appeared in the 1800 second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, make a curious collection. By his own admission, Wordsworth never intended them as a sequence. As he wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1799 — the year following his time in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, with Coleridege as his near neighbor and literary collaborator, and the year when he was drafting these poems, one after another — his writing constituted a kind of emotional “self-defense.”

With the lapse of Wordsworth’s and his sister Dorothy’s lease on the house at Alfoxden, they had decamped to Germany, where they had hoped once again to join forces with Coleridge and his wife, Sara. Economic disparity between the two households, however, meant that while the Coleridges lived and entertained glitteringly in Ratzeburg, in Schleswig-Holstein, the Wordsworths found themselves isolated, in modest and limited straits, in a small town in Lower Saxony.

It was in this isolation, envious of Coleridge’s circumstances and resenting his sister for whose upkeep he was responsible, that Wordsworth began the Lucy Poems. Scholars have quibbled for two centuries over Lucy’s identity. Perhaps it’s safest to say that — however we might read these elegies on their surface, and whether or not she had any counterpart in reality — the Lucy of these poems provided the poet with a repository for his own complex emotions in that low period following his first great artistic surge.

If “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” serves as self-defense, it seems meant to ward off an existential crisis. Wordsworth, feeling that he languished in obscurity, with the malaise that often follows bursts of productivity, could — we imagine — console himself a little with the thought that “a violet by a mossy stone” might still shine with the brilliance of a single star in the sky.

The making of a perfect little thing, in three common-meter abab stanzas, might not thrill as the first large-visioned passages of The Prelude would have done. Still, the poem’s formal effects are worth noting, particularly the way that small disturbances in its tightly controlled iambic meter point to the unrest, buried like Lucy herself, in its speaker’s soul.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

Despite her ongoing health problems, it’s hard to imagine a 27-year-old poet consciously setting out to write her last poems, and yet that is the title of the final section, comprising 14 pieces. There’s a numbered sequence of 12 sections bearing dates from the 2nd to 13th of July 1994, the first of which bears the title ‘Ephemeral Beat’ after its number. This sequence is sandwiched by two short stand-alone poems.

However, the first line of the first poem does seem to signal a sense of impending endings: ‘Adieu aux mots sertis, aux mots de gloire. / Farewell to inset words, to glorious words.’ This premonitory feel is echoed in, for example, the closing lines of the seventh section of the sequence:

But the sea loved us
The lyre of glassware and sunsets
Laying hands on time
We have carried out the simple act
Of growing old

(Note the absence of terminal punctuation.)

And then the book ends in a flourish of something like hope, in this three-line poem:

Waiting among the palms
Full of auburn kisses
Whose splendor astonishes

One of the great joys of this blog is the opportunities I get to discover work that is entirely new to me, and this is certainly the case with Béatrice Douvre, who I’d never heard of before John Taylor kindly sent me this book. She’s an intriguing voice, and one I’ll be returning to.

Billy Mills, Inhabit the Brief Halt by Béatrice Douvre: A Review

The moon was saying goodbye to the sky and opening its
doors to the sun.
I had been sitting barren, on a dusty rock staring at a desert
that was apathy, tightening and the end.
There was nothing, and the nothing was everything and
everywhere.

(‘Chasms’)

So begins the collection, Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser, published by Alien Buddha Press this year. I read it in a flurry when it arrived, then read it again more slowly, and recently found myself coming back to it once more. It speaks a magic spell over the exhaustion many of us have been feeling.

My day to day work is digital-heavy research and writing, while my time is tracked: each minute, keystroke, scroll, and pause for thought accounted for. There is no generative AI involved, blessedly, and I’m grateful for that. My thoughts and words are my own. By the end of the week though, after all those intense computer hours, I’m too zapped to open a social media app.

It weighs on my heart that there are poets I only have contact with via Bluesky, because I wish I could approach poetry differently, with more rest and spaciousness. Poetry began as my creative outlet and I’d like to keep it that way, not see it turn into some grand competition or race, even as I keep reaching towards growth.

Here’s more from the opening poem in Carmella’s collection:

And of the chasms between the everything and the nothing?
That speak silently, between and across, the human and the
desert and the rock.
They are immeasurable!
Fathomless! Illimitable!
Greater than our nothing and everything,
Portals into further suns, into chasms!
And I am unafraid.

(‘Chasms’)

While reading these expansive, searching poems, I was reminded of a painting on view this week at the local gallery. Music was abstractly personified in it, and there was also some connection to quantum theory.

The artist, Ava Orphanoudakis, said, “The more deeply I contemplate the processes of Nature, the more I find myself in a musical space. I have ventured beyond the bounds of the physical to explore a deeper unseen spiritual realm that gives birth to our sensory reality. The essence of a melody lies not in the notes, but in the relationships between the notes, intervals, frequencies, and rhythms. All living beings, all of nature is interwoven in a cosmic symphony.”

She quoted the physicist David Bohm: “What we experience through the senses as empty space is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.”

That same impulse is threaded throughout Chasms, which is full of music (and at times, the absence of music) […]

Jenevieve Carlyn, “The sky flashes gemstones across her eyes”: Reading Carmella de Keyser’s Chasms

If the unearthly and the uncanny are real, then why don’t we see them all the time? And a common answer is that something inside us stops us — some blindness, some blockage, some failure to see what human beings are actually equipped to see.

That, at least, is the range of mystical thought developed by Today’s Poem, “In No Strange Land,” by Francis Thompson (1859–1907). The only work by Thompson widely known is “The Hound of Heaven,” a 182-line ode published in 1890:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

“In No Strange Land” never had the same fame, but it deserves a place in anthologies. Written probably in the 1880s, when Thompson was on the streets, sleeping under Thames bridges, it was posthumously published in 1908. And it captures, from the first stanza on, a sense that the otherworldly is simply in place, marvelously and brilliantly present, could we only see — see Christ walking on the Thames, see the shining “traffic of Jacob’s ladder” (the word “traffic” perfect) in Charing Cross. The numinous is nearby, not off in some strange land.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In No Strange Land

The form echoes the subject matter beautifully. Written in iambic tetrameter, the short lines bear a steady musical beat while the ABCCAB rhyme scheme creates stanzas that weave in and out like the circular design of a web. That turn at the end toward Halloween makes it a great poem to share with my kids who know about E. B. White’s spider from bedtime readings. In fact, my 9-year-old recently chose to reread Charlotte’s Web for her literacy free reading time at school. It’s amazing that a 192-page book published in 1952 still resonates so strongly with children in 2024. But then again, it was written by a man who believed this:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth… Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net.

I’ve told my youngest that E.B. White was also a poet and read her “Natural History” which he wrote to his wife Katharine while he was traveling away from home. Since I will be at an out-of-state conference this week, this last stanza seems especially befitting:

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

“Natural History” was written in 1929, the same year that E. B. White and Katherine Sergeant Angell eloped. The next year, Katharine, who already had two children from her first marriage, gave birth to Joel, her first and only child with White. The small family ended up moving up to Maine, and they remained married for 48 years until Katharine’s death in 1977 at the age of 84. E. B. White would follow in 1985 at the age of 86.

I‘ve always been intrigued by E. B. White’s relationship with Katharine—the whip-smart, divorced mother of two who worked as an editor at a fledgling magazine called The New Yorker. It was there that she and Andy (as White preferred to be called) met and fell in love. An intellect in her own right, Katharine was the magazine’s first fiction editor and she helped develop the careers of Vladimir Nabokov, Elizabeth Taylor, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, and John Updike among many others. Those who are interested in learning more about Katharine can pick up Amy Reading’s new biography, The World She Edited: Kartharine White at the New Yorker (which I have not read yet since it just came out this September).

Zina Gomez-Liss, On the Silk Thread of Invention

In Denise Riley’s recent short collection of essays, A Chorus of Ears (Picador), she reflects on the way the persona of the poet frequently gets in the way of the reader and the poem. Her convincing argument – or part of it – is that during the writing of a poem the poet is effectively ‘anonymised’ by the process of writing; what appears on the page ‘runs ahead’ of the poet’s intention and so the voice of the poem is exactly that, the voice of the poem not that of the poet. At one point Riley conjectures that there may be shy poets out there hiding in the contemporary poetry landscape to whom the idea of standing on stage to receive a prize is horrifying and any attention at all is anathema. They may not even be particularly shy, but they are aware that the poem is one thing and they are another – and so they step aside.

I cannot help wondering if Geraldine Clarkson is one such poet.

The tribulations of sense-making have always been front and centre of Clarkson’s work because she challenges, to a greater degree than most poets, orthodox approaches to understanding language. In previous work, such as the wonderfully baffling Medlars, she has pushed this challenge to delightful limits; and in two relatively recent pamphlets, Singletary (Shearsman) and The Vitalist Sees the Signs (Broken Sleep) and the brand new Palomines (Blue Diode Press), she continues what appears to be an ongoing experiment in how far language can be coaxed to drop its everyday sense in favour of its prosodic-musical features as a means of expressing the inexpressible. Actually, ‘experiment’ is probably too analytical a term, Clarkson’s poems are more like instinctive activations of the latency in words to extend outwards into the abyss, in joy and horror and – as we shall come to later – in praise.

It is a gross simplification of Riley’s ‘voice of the poem’, but true nonetheless, to say that in poetry like Clarkson’s the sense-speaking, linear meaning making poet herself, whether it be GB or Geraldine, necessarily disappears; she fades into nothingness as wordplay, surrealism and double-entendre take over, metaphors bounce joyfully off one another, symbolism seeps through the poems’ fabric, and soundscapes of echolalia and lexical resonance descend. You would not get far in conversation with Clarkson as a person if she spoke the way she writes; and so, she is anonymised by the flamboyance and vitality of her poetic choices (to the extent that they are her choices).

Chris Edgoose, Voice Beyond Sense: on Geraldine Clarkson 

I’ve chosen this poem from the collection as I guess, I think, it sums up what it’s all about. Me looking back and reflecting on my life and my choices, or at least some of them, all triggered by my daughter leaving home for University. I would argue though that I’m not sure I entirely believe the last lines I wrote. While of course my daughter is something I believe I did right, because she is just a top notch person who I am exceptionally proud of, I don’t truly believe she is the only thing I ever did right. Perhaps only in moments of deep self doubt/pity do I think this. You could say this is a collection of regrets but I’m not sure I believe in them, either. While obviously there will be things we all wish we didn’t do in our lives, if we are happy with where we are now, in this moment, and I am, then I don’t think you can regret anything. Because if you went back and course corrected, or made even the slightest, most subtle alteration, you probably wouldn’t be where you are. So even though I don’t truly believe this poem, I still don’t regret writing it!

Drop-in by Rhian Elizabeth (Nigel Kent)

My boxing coach is always telling me to stop telegraphing my jab, stop giving telltale movements that show or imply what I’m planning. Trouble is, you don’t always know you’re doing it. Telegraphs can be all sorts: pulling the fist back (‘loading’) before a strike, dropping your hand, flaring at the elbow, tensing, dipping, lifting…. the list goes on. I can hear him muttering: “stop loading that back hand!”. Ironically, it helps if you can relax: loose limbs are less likely to give away your intentions. Power should come from the body, from core rotation, not just from the arm. But it isn’t easy to relax when the stakes feel high.

Last week, shadow boxing in front of the mirror in the gym and feeling appropriately ridiculous, I started to wonder whether the trouble with some poems is ‘telegraphing’ too. Can a giveaway moment ruin the effect of all those carefully-crafted stanzas?

Poems always have designs on the reader. They seek to make us feel / think / recognise / unlearn. But I hate noticing that they do. I feel deflated when I can see a poem’s workings. I am elated when I can’t, when I read someone’s work and wonder ‘how did they get there’?

The poetic ‘telegraph’ might be an unoriginal metaphor, a movement towards a conclusion that holds no revelation for us, an overstated rhetorical argument, the sound of a line snapping shut too neatly. I dislike the sense that the poet knew where an idea would take them all along and we’re all just watching them get there, politely clapping at the end. I hate it when I spot it in my own writing. Yes – I hate that most of all.

This week, I’ve been reading ‘Red River Valley’ by Ian McMillan. He’s a poet who doesn’t telegraph his shots. Sometimes he likes to leave the reader deliciously suspended at the end of a poem. It’s as if we’re Wile. E. Coyote and we’ve carried on running off the cartoon cliff, feet pedalling air, eyes bulging.

Here are a selection of last lines from ‘Red River Valley’, in no particular order:

1. He felt an almost overwhelming urge / to eat pound coins.
2. Even the bushes were frightening / in a language nobody knew.
3. I ask him to sign it / But he already has.
4. But you couldn’t see my nails / In the shadows.

I could go on. Even without context, you can tell there isn’t a telegraph in sight. McMillan is a surreal realist, faithful to the moments of ordinary life so weird you couldn’t possibly make them up. His new collection brims with these observations.

Taken out of context, perhaps these McMillan quotes are misleading and don’t help build my case. To avoid the telegraph, you don’t need to deal in non-sequiturs. In fact, they might become telegraphs in themselves unless you use them sparingly. The best writing sneaks up quietly and takes the chair from under you. It’s as if the atmosphere in a room has changed but you couldn’t say how or when. Goosebumps. Hairs on the back of your neck. The sense you’re being watched. No – you’ve been watched for a long time. The poem sees you.

Helen Mort, “I can’t look you in the voice”

I love a list poem, especially one I don’t see coming.

My high school English teacher, the wonderful writer Christine Schutt, argued that there were two temperaments in American poetry—the Dickinsonian (here she drew her arms in) and the Whitmanic (arms spread far out). One seemed to work by subtraction, the other by accumulation.

Though I’m firmly in the first camp, I’m drawn to both approaches. I enjoy poems that enumerate and accrue, poems whose cadence, momentum, and music are shaped by the list.

Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and scholar, argued that “The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions.” Elsewhere in the interview, he offered a zinger: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

If we see the list as a ritual against death, one we practice to mark our lives, apportion our responsibilities, and organize the unwieldy contents of the mind, then there’s something quite moving about its appearance at the heart of poetry…

There’s a latent narrative even to tasks or appetites (the plot of the grocery list, for example, is the dish to be prepared and enjoyed solo or otherwise), and beneath that, a second, more unexpected (and existential, if we agree with Eco) meaning. We don’t want to die. Here, in this list of errands, tasks, and ingredients, is proof.

Maya C. Popa, And then, and then…

i am still collecting
patterns. turns of the tongue. blood
dried on a microscope slide. the bulb
glowing in the corner of that demolished house
across from the park. so many fly-wings, beating.

Robin Gow, snowflake photographs

When I was a young teacher, I tutored a student who was reading Romeo and Juliet in his high school English class. He insisted that he could make no sense of it. At our session, we opened to Act 2, Scene 2 – the balcony scene – which the class was required to memorize. When I asked him to read it, I understood why he didn’t understand. He hit every second beat of the line with the ferocity of a bass drumkick—“But SOFT what LIGHT through YOnder WINdow BREAKS?” The sing-song back and forth of his cadence stripped all nuance from the text, made the words into mere beats, a pattern like my elementary music school teacher used to make us match by banging wooden sticks together. We then spent the whole session talking about what had happened previously, which he had a decent handle on due to class discussion, and what was happening now as Romeo catches sight of Juliet but she hasn’t yet seen him. We talked about the meaning of the scene before we tackled the mechanics.

I thought back to this lesson as I tackled memorizing Sonnet 116 as a part of participating in Poetry Memorization Month for October. Conceived as a way to spend deep and meaningful time with ONE poem at a time, it invites participants to memorize one poem a week in October. I chose to begin with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, my favorite sonnet. (Yes I have a favorite sonnet. If there was a Shakespeare concert, I’d be screaming “116! 116!” while waving my arms in the air. )

I first memorized it in high school, then again late in college while studying Shakespeare, then again in my 40s. Now that I am in my sixties, when trying to recite it, I found I could only get the first 6 lines and then things got fuzzy. And, since I own a beautiful Mobius strip bracelet engraved with the first three lines of the sonnet and wear it almost everywhere I go, I figured it was only right that I get the thing into my brain once and for all.

I love this particular sonnet because it tries to define love, names it as something that cannot be changed or altered by circumstance, as something lasting and stalwart. As a young person, I found it incredibly romantic (it is). Now, having been with my husband for 45 years, I find it incredibly moving and recognize that this type of love is indeed rare and something to be treasured. (Guess who bought the bracelet for me? You are correct.)

Just memorizing the words isn’t enough for addressing a feeling this big. My student learned this about Romeo and Juliet all those years ago, and I needed to relearn it myself for this first challenge.

Donna Vorreyer, O no! Returning to An Old Favorite

Trained to gaze outward: the loudness, gesture
of excess, boldness of lovemaking. Eyes dilate,
the moon floods the cornea, tears flood to blind.

                    Looking not to see is dṛṣṭi.
Focussing into the keyhole without willing is darśana.

Regard the regardless by cleaning the lens—
a blur first, unwoven strands of fibres, an imprint
of fading mist, scab of a wound in memory scar.

Uma Gowrishankar, Dṛṣṭi vs. Darśana

Congratulations to Anne Carson on the Nobel nod.  I really know very little of her work beyond what I see shared online. I find the idea of the vastness of the back catalogue a little scary. It’s like trying to get into Bob Dylan ( another Nobel winner…you may not have heard of him), but I guess I should just dive in somewhere. And I will,  but I’ve got to get my TBR pile down a bit more first…

To that end, I’ve been working my way through Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of novels (as well as watching the TV Show). I’ve been collecting them all through the medium of charity shops (with the exception of the first and 4th novel), and I finished book 5 at the start of the week. And I enjoyed this section from early on in the novel.

Flyte looked at Lamb. ‘Ever considered instilling discipline into your staff?’

‘All the time. I favour the carrot and stick approach.’

‘Carrot or stick?’

‘Nope. I use the stick to ram the carrot up their arses. That generally gets results.’ Lamb frowned. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m using metaphor. This is not a fucking poetry reading.’

It looked like a fucking poetry reading, though, inasmuch as there were few people there, and none of them stylishly dressed.

Taken from London Rules, Mick Herron, page 100-101

Mat Riches, Lines of Compost Upon Westminster* Bridge**

As many of you will be aware, things are pretty lively here in France at the moment and the school my two older sons go to has been shut by a blockade every day since the end of last week. Since my middle son is only 11 and needs constant help to navigate the bewildering variety of emails, online documents and video links the teachers are scrambling to provide, it has not been the most productive work week chez nous. Indeed, I was woken at 6 this morning by the distinctive sound of teenagers trundling wheelie bins around to build barricades, and I am putting the finishing touches to this piece to the distant sounds of singing and chanting. (When my middle son and I took a break on Tuesday morning to walk around our local area, we passed five blockaded schools or university departments within five minutes of us — from each one you could hear the noise of the next.)

I’ve been meaning to write something for a while about what it’s like to read Greek but with all this going on I didn’t have time to finish that piece, so here instead is something about Sophocles Philoctetes, a play I read in the summer and have been rereading this week, alongside Shakespeare, for comfort amid the chaos. […]

One of the pleasures of reading Greek tragedy is the variety of the Greek, both formally and stylistically. Much of the dialogue is written […] in iambic trimeter, a line which is metrically quite similar to the iambic pentameter we are familiar with from Shakespeare. This alternates with lyric passages in much more complex metres. Stylistically, tragedy encompasses rapid repartee, the concise aphorism, longer speeches of careful argument and/or consummate oratory, and the elaborately lyric […]

Victoria Moul, This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine

So where am I taking this postage-stamp post? Poetry is the expressive double, a specific coral formation of the logos of the sea – which grants the poet the full evocative power of language… as it were, the double soul-companion of the sun.

I am trying to build ambitious sandcastles with my poems, full of fragile seagull gleanings, detritus, bric-à-brac. And I struggle strenuously to keep them together, as architectural constructs, with a special salt-water adhesive. The Rhode Island touchstone upholds both my foundations, and the keystone of the arch. It is the double soul of Roger Williams – both the religious enthusiast and the fierce prophet of secular, cosmopolitan civil liberties, the rule of law – who informs my own point of view.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Which is why only poetry can adequately express this mysterious domain, this earth, this cosmos – “that hath such people in’t.”

Henry Gould, The Logos of Poetry

from far and wide they converge 
upon conversation’s terrain to uncoil 
a group as a line looking to where the 
sea’s amalgam sands their landed sky

drawn by a poem’s flowing lines they wait
for their ears to grow accustomed to hearing
the words paint a picture within a picture
and to feel the seance of bygone times 

funny sunny or bane of rain
heads lift   hearts sore
for the poet has captured more 
so much more than they can say

Jim Young, Gower Walking Festival 2026

I’m teaching a class at the upcoming Skagit Poetry Festival, a class titled Thinning Veil and Poems inspired by the Spooky Season. I’d taught a smaller version of the class, but now I’m expanding it, and I find this season to be so inspirational—Edgar Allen Poe, sure, but I’m also featuring early poems by Sylvia Plath and Louise Gluck. Some of you may know that some consider me a writer of horror poetry—it may not be the main thing I’m known for, but I’ve done it enough to be in some anthologies.

And let’s face it, mythology and fairy tales and pop culture are full of terrific and terrifying tropes perfect for the seasonal poetry. Persephone in the underworld? Check. Cinderella and those bloody shoes? Yes. Children being tossed into the woods to die? Absolutely. In the pop culture world, shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, Twin Peaks, and even lesser-known jewels like Reaper and People of Earth, as well as movie franchises and the tropes they’ve created, like the Final Girl. […]

You may be sleeping more, looking with trepidation each morning at the weather forecast, and digging out throw blankets and sweaters you’d put away months ago. Just remember fall is a great time for inspiration, reinvention, and retreating into a great book.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Perfect Moments and Plans Gone Awry, Social Media and Promoting Poetry Now, The Jobs that AI Can’t Do, Spooky Season

My job was giving birth to the work not selling it on. And I still believe this to be essentially true, not because I’m trying to shirk responsibility in curating opportunity for my poetry, not because I’m arrogant or lazy or even fearful of stepping out of my comfort zone. I’m just not very good at it. I’m not a salesman even less a hustler. I know poets who are both and I reserve a measure of admiration, envy and suspicion for them.

The suspicion I hold is, I think, the same suspicion I have felt levelled against me or against those who ‘make a show’ of reading their work aloud. It can be considered an act, something superfluous to the integrity of poetry, an undignified dance where you are regarded as a ballad blagger, a poem peddler, a pusher, a dealer, a taut. You are looked upon as entering the arena of sales and marketing rather than inhabiting the shadows where poetry stirs nervously, quietly, in secret. The reading of a poem out loud involves both the breaking of a spell and the casting of new one.

Marketing involves a similar sorcery and I’m less inclined to immerse myself in its dark arts. I do to some extent. Anyone with an Instagram account is in sales and with autumn creeping I see my feed filling with a flutter of seasonal images: golden leaves, leather bound journals strategically positioned on tables in hazy cafes, fountain pens and fruit bowls and inspirational post-it-notes, cappuccinos with heart logos in the foam and poets lost in the filter of mist and mellow engagement. All portrayals or projections, depictions or deceptions, representations of a certain kind of writer, one the author hopes will chime with an audience, up their optics, service their numbers. This particular image grift, that of the autumnal elegist, is distinctly virulent at this time of year. But we’re all at it in some respect, to some degree we’re all hawking impressions, selling reflections, hopeful our poems may get a little more traction. Please note: I have never once posted a picture of my morning coffee with the caption, “Waiting for inspiration from these dark grains.” But perhaps I should.

Jan Noble, Nº85 I have new wounds to pursue

— A library can be a space of blooming, of dreaming, of thinking. A place to ask better questions. What is possible. The public library is wonderful. But you can make your own library too. If you’re here, I know you probably have a lot of books :)

— From Cixous’ book Coming to Writing: “The more you let yourself dream, the more you let yourself be worked through, the more you let yourself be disturbed, pursued, threatened, loved, the more you write, the more you escape the censor.”

— She also says that with patience we can give the world life. This is the patience of thinking, of paying attention. Without that we have a “world without flowers” and that is a world that is “bored to death.” […]

— I’ve been slowing down on my insta for a bit now and plan on taking an internet sabbatical for the month of November. I’ll probably pop in once or twice there to check for messages but will be otherwise working on my novel. I’ll be here but perhaps a bit less. Thanks in advance for bearing with. Maybe the role of the artist now is to disappear a bit. And maybe it’s the opposite, given this moment in history. But there has to be some way to subvert the algorithm or make it work for us right?

— How to escape the censor? Write alone, toward excellence. Make your art. Disappear for a bit. Go to art galleries, visit your library. Spend some time reading there. Keep yourself for your self. Take some time and look at a flower. Seems kinda radical. Georgia knew.

Shawna Lemay, The Library is a Bloom Space

Years ago,

when I left my first country, my mother placed
a plaster saint in my hand and wrapped my fingers

around it. Its painted skirt is still blue, its halo
a chipped gold. It stands on a shelf of drawers

dwarfed by the telescope which was a birthday
present for my husband, but which he has not

yet trained upon any corner of the night sky.

Luisa A. Igloria, Inventories of the Missing and Not Yet Used Up

Katie Paterson is an internationally renowned visual/conceptual artist whose projects consider our place on Earth in the flow of geological and astronomical time. Collaborating with scientists and researchers, amateur and professional, she uses both sophisticated technologies and local, DIY apparatus to create intimate, poetic and philosophical encounters between ourselves and our environment, both at its most personal and at its most distant, hypothetical reach.

In 2007 Paterson asked a group of amateur radio operators to create a transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Morse code. She then arranged for the signal to be transmitted to the lunar surface, which acted as a huge reflector mirror and bounced it back to Earth.

In the early days amateur radio, earth-moon-earth (EME) stations needed huge antenna systems, very high power transmitters and complex receiving set-ups. Today EME operation is within reach of most amateurs, and reflecting your signal off the moon, or layers of the upper atmosphere, or even the aurora borealis, are standard ways to send a signal round the curve of the globe. (I know a tiny bit about this. My father is a ham operator and true radio geek; throughout my childhood I went to sleep listening to him tapping out Morse code on the other side of my bedroom wall.) Depending on the moon’s orbit and the tilt of the Earth, your signal might be reflected straight back to you; or if you transmit at an angle (like standing side on to a mirror to see the other side of the room), the signal you send will bounce back somewhere else. Katie Paterson’s Morse-encoded Moonlight Sonata was transmitted from Southampton and received a few minutes later in Sweden.

This was then translated back into a musical score, which for the installation Earth – Moon – Earth is played on an automated grand piano.

When you hear it played, you recognise it immediately. Yet soon there are gaps and absences, new intervals and rests. As the piece unfolds, the gaps become more frequent. Towards the end, whole chords are missing, and the last bars are almost entirely the low notes of the left hand. ‘I wanted it to come back sounding as if it had been touched by the moon,’ says Paterson. ‘By encoding information, absences become present, and presence become audible.’ There is a sense of the music having been frayed or scattered by the empty ridges or swallowed somewhere in the darkness. It produces a real sense of melancholy – or of insentience, or indifference. Though the keys are moving up and down, the present moon is very, very remote.

Earth – Moon – Earth might at first seem to be a sceptical response to our romantic/Romantic appropriation of it. Says Nicholas Alfrey: ‘from Paterson’s perspective, the Romantic Sublime has had a long afterlife in the arts, to the point where the imagery of vastness, distance, luminosity, darkness and elemental forces has become something of a debased currency.’ However this is not her intention. Her work, says Alfrey, is ‘a search for ways to convey the most astonishing subject matter through the most mundane means, and by the cultivation of understatement, irony and deadpan effect’. ‘Very generally, I make work that collapses distance and time,’ says Paterson, ‘bringing together the commonplace with their very vastness.’

But wheels turn; things come full circle. In Cabinet Magazine, our newest Nobel Laureate Anne Carson ponders the moon, and its absence.

The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on color. What after all is a color? Something not no color. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind? There is a moment of reversal within totality.

Totality: The Color of Eclipse

Lesley Harrison, Earth – Moon – Earth

As if reading my mind her mouth opens,
those pupils flash wild.

I have nothing to offer.

A cloud of hayed breath
puffs between us.
Before I can release myself from her gaze,
she clamps my arm.

When I was young
I used to bite my forearms
to feel the resistance of flesh
imprint my incisors.

I bit my brother once.

Now there is a horse,
with blunted yellowed teeth,
latched on hard, biting my skin to burst it

to taste the metal of my blood.

Sue Finch, A PEDESTRIAN WALK AND A ‘P’

This week: September tomatoes, ghost pixels, locoweed, rejection season, an ode to the multiple orgasm, and much more. Enjoy.

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

Ann E. Michael, Poetry online

When fall ends
my neighbors trim their gardens

down to nothing,
mulch and soil.

But I like my unruly garden,
refuge for tiny native bees

and the rabbits
under the bush.

Once the bears take a nap
I’ll feed the birds.

For now the name of God
we’re drawing down

is drying stalks
and first frost.

Rachel Barenblat, New name

Is it too early in the season for autumnal lament? Well, yes. But the furnace is kicking on now some mornings, and I’ve started to pull out the cold-weather clothing, and I’ve had thoughts about draining the hoses and closing the combination windows. One becomes conscious of things, of their relationship to to time and change, and of the sense that certain things are passing out of our lives. All this has a way of dredging up elegiac poems, like this one.

The Vanished

In the autumn of 2015, the production of paper cards for library catalogs ceased.

No matter how long ago they completed their disappearance,
I still expect them,
perhaps in a sort of narthex just past a pillared entry,
or off to the side
as if in a private chapel, or straight ahead like an altar.
Shrined in the silence,
modest and single, or ranged in ranks and banks and rows,
the gods of Order
lived in their tabernacles of honey and amber maple
or oak like chocolate,
darkened at times from the touch of a hundred thousand fingers. […]

Maryann Corbett, Of Objects and Elegy

These anniversaries are tricky: the push of the past on the tenderness of the present, coupled with the uncertainty of the future, can make it scary to keep going. I do wish I still had my husband’s wisdom and strength to fall back on, but I’ve grown more self-reliant and self-directed in these years without him. I think he’d be proud of me. People tell me he is, but there’s no way to know for sure. I can only live the life I think he’d cheer on, because he was always my biggest advocate and my greatest fan. I was also his biggest fan, reminding him to send out his poems, hyping up his books, announcing his publications proudly on social media.

In the end, despite all the pain of loss, I’m so glad for those decades spent together. These anniversaries can be tricky, but as each passes, I have to acknowledge that once upon a time, a man from Little Rock met a a newly graduated college girl from the Bronx, and that duo became inseparable until death did actually part us. I acknowledge that just as much as I acknowledge the loss itself. I move on, with gratitude and grief in equal measures.

Allison Joseph, Anniversary Season

now I lay me down
in a quiet wood
in the mossy
ripe-smelling
undergrowth

now I lay my head upon the leaves
still falling
still letting go
still greening before the coming storm

I lay me down beneath
the canopy of leaves
beneath the great
soft swelling belly of the Earth

Rebecca Cook, now i lay me down

My husband brings me bones of things, sometimes with a bit of skin, part of an eye. He brings me animals, both living and dead: a baby squirrel, a tiny snake, a bird skull tinier than the pad of your thumb, a mouse bone. He points out the birds nesting on his window ledge, the grasshopper stuck to your screen, the cool moth on the brick wall.

I know I’m in for a delight when I hear: Les, bring your camera. Hurry.

Wednesday, it was a baby snapping turtle! Marty discovered it on the road while walking Ziggy and brought it home in a dirty paper cup for me to see. He handled it carefully, set it on the blue table, held it again, then gently put it back into the cup and drove it to the river at Herring Run, leaving it at a prominent snapper mating spot.

After he released it, Marty took videos of the turtle getting accustomed to the water. He watched it swim against the current to get on a rock, miss, and try again. And off it swam.

In 2010, he returned with the dogs and a dead crow, frozen in the February snow, no blood, all intact. He knew I’d want to take its picture but had no idea what would happen after that. So it sat in a bag in a box on a table for several days, until I took it to a taxidermist. “Henry” has been hanging on my living room wall for 16 years. That crow inspired a short story, an essay, and a poem.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Creature Feature

My sister recently told me that our cousin, who has been reading along on this meta-journey of (not)writing about my mother, asked her if I was ever going to write another post…or anything connected to the project. On the one hand, it’s nice to know there are people (Brian! Thank you!) waiting for my writing to arrive. On the other…well, see previous post.

But! I do have something to offer in the interim: my third book of poems, Flor/elegy, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2027, and is now available for pre-order through the distributor!

As is my way with these things, the poems included span many years of writing. Also familiar to readers of anything I’ve ever written will be the themes. Motherhood, daughterhood, love, loss and grief for both the human and the natural world. The title is meant to play on the poetic form of the elegy along with the Medieval florilegium, a collection of botanical illustrations […]

Florilegium can also refer to a gathering of literary texts. How about that! Very grateful to my editor at CMU Press for helping me find the title. It’s perfect.

Sheila Squillante, Can I Interest You in Some Poems Instead?

This week sees the publication of two books with swans in their title. One, a collection of poetry that will glide slowly, gracefully, hopefully off the press at Ink & Ribbon, the other that will, no doubt, fly from the shelves in astonishing numbers with translations planned in 12 languages.

Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer, a portrait of the late Princess of Wales, has been described in The Guardian as, “a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer.” Around twenty major news outlets have so far given it coverage with international notices in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times as well as features in magazines like Vogue. In the UK The Daily Mail serialisation will tell you that the publicity engine behind this book is huge. ‘News’ items appear across the BBC where the author is afforded airtime to steer serious questions toward his book. […]

Both Swan books published this week are about belonging. Spencer’s to family, to aristocracy, to royalty and bloodline, to inheritance and celebrity. My Name Is Swan offers the opposite, a document of the outsider, the wayfarer, the fugitive, the marginalised figure moving, unwatched, unattached, dispossessed at the edge of the city.

Jan Noble, Nº83 A tale of two Swans

it rained all week at the beach.
what a gift to know so many forms
of water. we let the wind off the shore
make kites of us. our lungs in the clouds.
the sea gulls stood, beaks to gale,
cutting the wind into ribbons. we looked
far out where the waves argued
like old brothers.

Robin Gow, sea foam

It is almost a year since my friend, editor and publisher John Lucas died.
With John went his Shoestring Press, which was only right, given the hands on nature of his relationship with his writers, their work and with every aspect of his beloved Shoestring.

The book he was kindly going to publish for me, Light Work, was almost ready to go to print. I briefly considered approaching other publishers of poetry- waiting for submissions to open, entering competitions etc- but for various reasons, I decided to see if I might select some of the poems I liked most from the book for a pamphlet instead. I do love a pamphlet, and it also felt like a chance to re-evaluate what I had to offer, and to make something new.

After a productive month or so of drafting and redrafting – this tends to come in bursts in my case, with new poems putting me in a productive place to revisit older ones with fresh eyes – I had a good number of poems, older and newer, that seemed to work well together and that I was happy with, so I put these in a Word document and sent them off to New Walk Editions, publisher of very smart books and pamphlets.

Roy Marshall, New Pamphlet in 2027

Very happy to say I am honored to have an essay in Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, with some powerhouses like Diane Seuss, Brian Turner, Kimiko Hahn and some friends (who are also powerhouses) like Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oliver de la Paz, and Julie Marie Wade. I am looking forward to reading all the essays because the form is very interesting to me, and I like the idea that writing essays can follow the body or breath as form, that it can be experimental or traditional, that it does some things that poetry cannot do. My essay is called “When Poetry Gets Mutated: Writing Lyric Essays, Haibun, and Other Hybrids.” (Gotta represent the mutants!) Each essay also has a prompt, so it lends itself to teaching as well as just personal education. Check it out from Rose Metal Press! Also shout-out to the editors, Lee Horikashi Roripaugh and Heidi Czerwiec.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Adventures at the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Harvest Fairs, the Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, Harvest Moons and Looking Forward

I spent time recently along a portion of the iron curtain. All this time, I sort of thought that “iron curtain” was a metaphor, not a real thing. Not miles and miles of posts and barbed wire and watchtowers, and the band of no-man’s-land that ran alongside. It was chilling, to see among these benign rolling hills and fields of gourds and sunflowers, oak forests and locust stands, signs of those perilous times of desperation and cruelty. Of death and iron. Small villages dot the landscape, and old castles. The language is blurry with soft g’s and zh’s. The soup is delicious. The coffee is strong. The people impassive of face. At first. There is laughter not far below the stony surface. There are stories. And ghosts. And in the shadows, shapeless masses of unfinished things. Which is the definition of “golem.” I came back more afraid of the future now that I’ve tasted more of the past. Something of strangeness and the past and the future is captured in this poem by C.D. Wright, whose work often leaves me perplexed but moved, sometimes, as poetry can reach beyond the rational brain to the shadows within.

Marilyn McCabe, Against the cold spurs in the sky

Your stars wrapped me so tightly
I stayed.
Acquiescence was deeply blue,
striving for sunlight.

What is the texture
of the process, where is the binding cord?

Flight is the capacity of a place inside
us to forge a path. Cup your hands
and they fill with wildness.
Nurture it.
Deliver it.
Let the stars go.

Charlotte Hamrick, War: A Tryptic

It’s one of those weeks. I’ve reached an awkward point in putting together what will, hopefully, be my first full poetry collection, and I’ve got myself all tangled up with it. You know when you decide to clear out a cupboard and it has to get much, much worse before it gets better? Like that. I’ve no idea whether the jam jars should live with the bags for life, or where the seventeen single gloves came from. I’ve lost sight of the individual poems and what I want them to do. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, well, I can’t see the trees for the wood at the moment.

Luckily, I have some lifelines: the mantra your only job is to write one poem (courtesy of Jo Bell), the Arvon course I’m going on soon which I’m hoping will press the reset button, and, as always, poetry collections that make me think yep, that’s how you do it. This week, the hand of fate has given me Significant Other, Isabel Galleymore’s first collection, published by Carcanet in 2019. Thank goodness it has. I needed to be reminded to sweat the small stuff – to mix my metaphors even further, I needed to be reminded that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves.

This is a book full of small, careful poems, poems about sea creatures and other creatures and people creatures. Writing short poems well takes fierce focus and a bomb-disposal expert level of precision to make it look like you’ve got to the heart of something easily and without wasting a word. It takes confidence. It is far from easy. […]

The reason I’m so glad I’m reading Significant Other again this week, I think, is that this collection shows very clearly that if you pay attention to each tiny thing you’re doing, the book will sound like you and say the things you want to say anyway. Each poem here is a tiny glow made of finely-tuned language – a robin, a starfish, a seahorse, a scrotum frog. And the poems don’t all sound the same, or look the same, but the book as a whole becomes an ecosystem, almost a manifesto, that tells us about life on Earth. Maybe I can stop agonising about how tidy the cupboard is. Match up the gloves. Look after the pennies. Separate the wood from the trees. One poem at a time.

Nia Broomhall, Week 28: Significant Other

During the dog days of summer, I went with a friend to visit the bookshop at a local spiritual retreat center. Since we didn’t plan ahead at all, the bookshop ended up being closed when we arrived. Fortunately, an exhibit was on view. We were told, sotto voce, that we must be exceptionally quiet (!), as the overnight guests were enjoying a silent retreat.

I’ve been to several exhibits at this venue before, but never during quiet hours, and the silence added to the experience. As I live on the east coast, we battle humidity more than aridity. Two thousand miles away, the New Mexico landscape in these photographs might as well have been the moon. Compelling, bleak, and deeply transformative. […]

In the early 18th century, Miguel de Quintana, a devoutly religious Spanish poet living in a settlement about fifty miles from Pecos Pueblo, penned verses against the Inquisition, and for this, he was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church. His work was translated by Francisco Lomeli and Clark A. Colahan in Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana’s Life and Writings. One of the few lone voices in the (colonial) wilderness of New Mexico who wrote openly against the Church, these lines are from his poem, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’:

Gain that understanding
That the power of God has given you.
Perfect it, Miguel, and write,
For you have in no way strayed.

God’s strength moves you,
And there is no power
That can resist it…

Miguel, save and enlighten me,
For I burn on the coals
Of this sea of tears
Which I show to you weeping.

Fear not, for you are on the right path…

Today, there are institutions we must challenge, and empires against which we must rise. Although de Quintana’s poetry was not part of the exhibit, it could have been. That I came away feeling so moved by the people, places, and cultures of New Mexico speaks to the skill of the photographer, Bill Graustein, in creating a visual narrative, along with the artist, Magalis Videaux, with whom he collaborated. It is also a testament to the places and people themselves.

Jenevieve Carlin, Silent Hours

The poem’s speaker, from the first line, steels herself, as it seems, to confront a certain, and certainly awful, doom. Her composure in the face of a merciless God is a central fact of the poem. Strangely, it is by way of this very composure and resolution that the soul outwits the divine judge and slips free of the noose. First, although condemned as a “him” at the end of stanza 2, by the second line of the following stanza the soul has shape-shifted, rather like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and become female. Through this pronominal sleight of hand, remaking reality by an act of free will, the soul alters the terms by which the sentence has been pronounced.

Second, and more significantly, under these altered terms the speaker has “made my soul familiar” with the prospect of death. It’s as though, on leaving the courtroom, she sits down with the hangman to discuss the final plan, persuading him to agree that her end not constitute “a novel agony.” Instead of fearing it when it comes, “she and Death, acquainted / Meet tranquilly as friends.” Where in the terrible courtroom death has been presented as an enemy to be feared, and the meeting with death a dreadful punishment in itself, by the poem’s close all terror has been defanged.

This perhaps is the desired effect of Dickinson’s repeated poetic expeditions into the realm of death, and her working-out of its implications. Writing these poems between 1860 and 1862, in whatever order they were initially composed, her project seems to be to make death’s acquaintance, to cultivate its friendship, to develop the consequences of such a friendship, and so to cease to fear it. Ultimately the optimal outcome is that the soul and Death nod cordially as they pass, and “there the matter ends.”

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Read My Sentence Steadily

Requiem and Other Poems, by Aharon Shabtai, translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole:

But it wore him out
and he collapsed—
and lay there barely alive,
his head against the wall,
lazy flies
wandering across his bald spot,
and one particularly imprudent
large fly
indifferently
picking at his nose.

Since Israel began its devastating onslaught into Gaza, there has been a necessary, indispensable effort to amplify Palestinian voices, literary and otherwise. It is also, if differently, necessary and indispensable to pay attention to the Jewish and Israeli voices, literary and otherwise, working to come to terms not just with events since October 7, 2023, but also with the historical, political, and cultural context in which Israel and the Jews, both Israeli and not, are inescapably implicated. The poet Aharon Shabtai, whose work I did not know until I came across a review of Requiem and Other Poems, is one of those voices. Reading it, I found this statement from Publisher’s Weekly, quoted in the Poetry Foundation’s profile, to be apt: “His is ‘a voice mostly elided from American mappings of the Israel/Palestine question: acute, unblinking, unafraid to question, and aware of the stakes.’” The poem I have quoted from above, “Parable of the State,” is a devastating example, as it looks unflinchingly at what it costs to make cleansing your home of an Other your only and ultimate goal. It is only common sense that the discussion going on within Israel about “the Israel/Palestine question” is more complex than we in the United States usually hear about, even if that complexity does not now rise to the level of active popular resistance against the wars the Israeli government is prosecuting. I am not suggesting this one book of poems accounts for that complexity, though Peter Cole’s introduction suggests that the body of Shabtai’s work points in that direction. I am suggesting that grappling with “the Israel/Palestine question” should mean seeking out voices like Shabtai’s to place alongside the Palestinian voices so desperately in need of amplification.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #59

Boston-based Debra Cash writes about and consults on the arts, in particular dance, primarily for The Arts Fuse, a curated, online independent journal created in June 2007. She also is a very fine poet whom I might not have discovered had I not subscribed to The Arts Fuse soon after its inception.

Cash’s Who Knows One is her debut collection of 39 poems (pages are unnumbered), some of which, according to a cover review, are “based on stories, language, and associations with the Passover Haggadah.”*

Neither Jewish nor deeply informed about the Jewish faith, I approached the poems in this volume as I do the work of any poet, asking, for example: Do the poems “speak” in a voice anyone might hear and understand? What makes them work? What do they reveal about how the poet uses language? After reading the volume several times, I found myself by turns awed, delighted by the unexpected way that Cash gets us to “see” (as in her fine poem “The Raccoon”), and wondering why I had not come across her poetry before.

Many of the poems in Who Knows One are short; some are no more than five or six lines long. The longest, the apocalyptic “The Ten Plagues of Egypt,” runs to two-and-a-half pages but it is in no way over-long. Each stanza is self-contained and replete with highly evocative, sometimes even repulsive, imagery: the “river turned to blood”; the “plague of frogs . . . recoiling from touch”; vermin that are “the plague of the disgraced, the invisible laying claim, laying their eggs in heaps of the future”; the “plague of boils . . . self-hatred pulsing through the shallow dish of skin, domes of pain finally visible”; “a death of panting.” These are hell-plagues, as horrible as they are unimaginable to encounter. And then just five words bring this poem to its simple and stunningly powerful conclusion, its only possible ending: “That there is nothing after.”

Sometimes, Cash writes in the unmistakable voice of the story-teller and may even start out saying to her listeners, “Let me tell you a story. . . .” (”Our Taskmasters”) or “It came to pass. . . .” (”Wine, the Third Cup”). In the beautifully realized three-stanza, nine-line poem below, Cash exposes strength and weakness, revelation and cover-up, the truth and the lie:

Korekh

The scholar Hillel
took matzah and bitter herbs
and bit down.
The rabbis amended his practice
so that we smother the bitter
in the sweet.
It is still there,
bitterness,
but the tongue reaches out for apples.

In some poems, Cash speaks directly as “I” or “we,” part of the narrative and bound not just to remember and repeat the story but to give it its fullest meaning, as in the six rhythmically fast-moving couplets that comprise “Matzah.“ In a few poems, such as “Portal,” she foretells the story and then follows it up rather harshly with what she titles “Whipping chant #3” that she tucks on the second page of the poem near the bottom: “Where do you get off / I was only doing what was best / Can’t you put it behind you.”

Maureen Doallas, ‘Who Knows One’ by Debra Cash

The full-length poetry debut by Annie Wenstrup, a Dena’ina poet from Anchorage, Alaska, is the impressive The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a collection composed of an assemblage of remarkably-precise lyric poems articulating her immediate present, from cultural figures to what the cover copy describes as “the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved cultural violence [.]” Through an opening cluster and seven sections—“GGUGGUYNI TRANSCRIBES THE ARCHIVES,” “THE BLUE WING,” “POLICIES AND PROCEDURES,” “PERFORMANCE ART,” “RETROSPECTIVE: A MILLION CATACLYSMS LIVE INSIDE MY BODY,” “THE CURATOR’S OFFICE” and “FUTURE EVENTS”—Wenstrup speaks to cultural violence, erasure and revision, and the losses that continue to be felt, all framed through and against the argument of depiction, much of which has too long been shaped by those from the outside. “I imagine // the portraits of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s papoose,” she writes, as part of “Pretending to Be a Woman, I Roam, the Museum,” a poem that sits in the book’s untitled preface section, “Keep America Beautiful’s Crying Indian, / Mattel’s Eskimo Barbie, Disney’s Pocahontas, // and how they must face each other after the lights / darken, how they must wipe off war paint, how / they must unfeather their hair.”

Writes of cataclysms and depictions, Wenstrup articulates the voice and stories of Ggugguyni, named for the Dena’ina Athabaskan word for the raven, such as the opening poem, “Sukdu’a,” that writes: “Once Ggugguyni in her human form / walked by the river. She left her right eye / behind as a lookout. The eye saw the Dena’ina // draw near and it called to Ggugguyni. / Ggugguyni cried to the Dena’ina, Don’t touch / but watch! She tossed her eye into the air // three times. It looks out for your luck she said.” Her lines are sharp, enough to bleed. Through the voice of Ggugguyni, she articulates the frame of the museum, of the archive, shaping a context from within the context of that lived experience, offering portraits, transcriptions and self-portraits, working as a reclamation (comparable to elements of Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s ongoing work), and to navigate what might be seen as contradiction. “I ate and the fireweed blazed.” begins “As Persephone,” “Roadside blooms / snared roadkill while asphalt caught leaves, the way / calloused hands snag silk.” Writing through and around references to murdered and missing indigenous women to JonBenét Ramsey, Jackson Pollack, Rube Goldberg and Wile E. Coyote, each element speaks to not only loss but the need for agency, even in death. “How beautiful, how lovely the women // are. If missing,” she writes, as part of “Ghost Pixels,” “I hope they’re not dead. / When they die, we dissect their lives / into made-for-TV docu-dramas like bodies // preserved in formaldehyde. Blonde hair floats / on screen. Pale, blue-eyed women echo / here.”

rob mclennan, Annie Wenstrup, The Museum of Unnatural Histories

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to ourselves, helps us tell each other what it is like to be alive. It is not simple work, for its raw material is complexity. It is not easy work, for it demands a constant balancing act between passion and precision. Like most labors of the disciplined imagination we call creativity, it may not look like work at all. But it is the kind of work that helps us see the world and ourselves more clearly so we can love it and each other more deeply.

Elizabeth Alexander — the fourth poet in history to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration when she welcomed Barack Obama to the White House with her eternal poem “Praise Song for the Day” — takes up the question of what it means and what it takes to be a poet in Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales (public library). She writes:

I am a poet, having lived my life by and through the word. To me, being a poet not only means making poems. It also means being attuned and reverent to the power of distilled, precise words in the form of poems but also as carriers of souls… Being a poet means I believe in patterns, in serendipity. I follow the logic of Muriel Rukeyser when she says, describing islands, “O for God’s sake / they are connected / underneath.”

[…]

Poets — if we live up to our calling — are guided by a strange courage that takes us into thickets of self and society without fully knowing the answers, to bring into form what we see and seek to understand. We offer what we find to community, for the poem does not live until it has been set forth to be taken in by others.

If the pattern of revelation is woven on the enchanted loom of the poet’s imagination, its weft and warp are connection and contradiction: The poet’s job is to “make community through our words, and through listening”; it is also “to ask the mind to embrace paradox.” With an eye to Baldwin, she observes that great writing — truly transformative writing — “haunts you and makes you change your mind, and then change it again,” leaving you “multidimensional and enlarged.” Echoing Baldwin’s own insistence that “talent is insignificant [for] beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” she attests that such potency is achieved only through “discipline, without which there is no art” — something she first learned in her fourteen years of classical training as a dancer.

Maria Popova, How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction

San Pedro River Review, one of my favorite poetry journals, published this poem in the fall of 2019. In December of the same year, I included “Locoweed” in my nominations for the Pushcart Prize (as a 2018 Pushcart honoree, I had the privilege of submitting my own nominations). I’d not met Chera Hammons. Her name slipped out of memory—until April 2 of this year, when Chera approached me at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Oklahoma, and introduced herself. Chera was one of Scissortail’s featured poets. Before the festival concluded, I got to hear her read. I purchased a copy of Salvage List, which includes “Locoweed,” and Chera inscribed it.

For me this unassuming poem is a source of multiple surprises—from discovering it in the pages of San Pedro River Review, to meeting Chera at Scissortail, to re-discovering it in Salvage List, and then diving into the lines as I prepared to write about the poem here.

Locoweed is one of the potentially deadly surprises latent in plant life, like the cardiac glycosides in oleander. Here, locoweed is sentient. It is “certain of itself.” It waits “for the horses to believe in their hunger.” Don’t we all believe in our hunger? Don’t we want to believe the promise of green, the lies about goodness?

David Meischen, A Blur of Consequence

One thing I really like about the Internet Archive website — which becomes ever more essential as Google books degrades into complete uselessness — is that when you log in it shows you a page of suggestions of books you might be interested in. (Presumably on the basis of your previous borrowings, which in my case are rather eclectic.) Last week it suggested I might like The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry, which sounds at first glance beyond twee, except that it was edited in 1946 (an interesting moment) by none other than Alfred Noyes. If he’s known now at all I suppose it is for The Highwayman, which lives on at least in the UK as a particularly beautifully illustrated children’s book, but Noyes (1880-1958) was a hugely prolific, popular and highly skilled British narrative poet. He was a transatlantic literary celebrity, who traveled widely in America throughout his adult life and unusually had a high-profile reputation in both countries. He used to appear liberally in anthologies for reading to children — like The Book of a Thousand Poems that I wrote about in this piece — and I wish he still did because he wrote some of the best verse for reading aloud at bedtime, including one of my absolute favourites, the very funny ‘The New Duckling’ (recommended also for any readers with a pompous teen around the place) and the deliciously romantic ‘Sherwood’: […]

I have a cautionary tale about reading The Highwayman, however. Once when my elder boys were about 4 and 6 my husband and I had been arguing about what was OK for them to watch on TV. I was much more cautious than he was about them seeing films that might be too old for them and he thought I was being precious about it since (admittedly) they never seemed remotely traumatised. One evening when they were in bed — they had bunk beds at this point — I said The Highwayman to them both. They listened in complete silence all the way through. It’s pretty long and I was thinking smugly to myself how well this was going. After I finally got to the end, enjoying it enormously myself, there was a pause, then my younger son wailed, “But they’re both dead!” and burst into tears, and my elder son leant over the top of the upper bunk to peer at me and said rather censoriously, “I don’t think that was really appropriate for us, Mummy”. So that was me told: film violence is fine, but verse violence is not.

Victoria Moul, A good sword and a trusty hand

“Ouroboros” does what it says on the tin. The image of the snake/dragon eating itself becomes a wage-slave,

“To get to work
To buy the fare
To take train
To get work
To buy fare
To take train
To light train
On fire”

Humans aren’t built to do the same thing over and over to infinity. Mindless repetition will lead to breakage and rash actions. Not an original idea, but the staccato repetition and terse rhythm underline the point.

“With One’s Own Eyes” is a series of wryly observed vignettes on how to find one’s own humanity when life feels like a rush to keep up in a bombardment of FOMO-induced doom-scrolling. Crockford reminds readers that taking space to sit and be isn’t a waste of time and could be an act of rebellion in a life that asks us to be always connected and accept dismissal from people who are fixated on the next thing instead of seeing the human in front of them.

Emma Lee, “With One’s Own Eyes” C M Crockford (Moonstone Press) – book review

It’s possible (likely?) that lit magazine editors are tired of reading poems after “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. However, I’m not tired of reading them. How about you?

Like a game of telephone, I love it when poets use the device to riff on (and transform) the well known poem. And even if using the model limits your chances of publication (I imagine you’ll have to be VERY creative at this point to get one of these noticed), so what. Copying Stevens is a terrific generative writing exercise. […]

Famously, the poem is in 13 short sections, what Stevens called “sensations,” and if experience was his intention, I think the poem succeeds.

You can, for example, feel the stillness. For me, it opens with some of the most memorable language about stillness, and it achieve that — ironically — by noticing movement:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Here are some other qualities that attract me to this poem:

• It’s haunted.
• It’s fragile.
• It’s alive — and watching/waiting.
• It’s both vast (20 mountains!) and intimate/small (“the eye of a blackbird”).

And finally, Stevens closes with some of the most memorable language I’ve read about ongoingness:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.   

That “sensation” captures a moment by freezing it, another kind of stillness, which circles back to the beginning of the poem.

Carolee Bennett, “Thirteen Ways of Looking” Poems After Wallace Stevens

This week I had what was, for me, a unique experience: I enjoyed a filmed version of a poem much more than I had previously appreciated the poem on its own. It happened in a film-poem workshop run by a friend, who showed it on a large TV screen, a little like when we used to watch educational programmes in school. But this was much more illuminating than any poetry I’ve ever seen in a BBC arts documentary.

The challenge of turning poetry into film is that it needs constant visualisation. Most attempts, if they don’t simply go for footage of someone writing [cut to candle-lit quill nib dipping into ink] or reading aloud [cut to actor reciting from an old book into the middle distance], tend to head down the gently literalising route of stitching together a few key picturesque images [cut to lake water lapping on the shore as a crackly recording of W.B. Yeats quavers “I will arise and go now”].

But because poems are more than their images, such treatments ultimately feel reductive rather than enhancing. As W.H. Auden reflected in a lecture on “Poetry and Film” given to the North London Film Society in 1936, “highly developed metaphors cannot be included in the film medium”. He also observed that “a strong sound image added to a strong visual image tends to cancel out both”. Auden had recently finished work on Night Mail (1936), a General Post Office Film Unit documentary for which he was asked to write some verse. The result shows how well he understood the need to balance the two sets of images merging in the viewer’s mind, from literal descriptions of a train speeding through the night — “This is the night mail crossing the border” — to lives fleetingly imagined just out of sight in the framing darkness e.g.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches;
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course
They slumber on with paws across.

The film-poem that I watched this week, however, does the differently difficult thing of taking a poem already composed with a self-sufficient complexity, and finding new images that echo, interpret and enhance its words. The poem is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”, and the film is by the Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait. You can read the poem here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Gerard_Manley_Hopkins/The_Leaden_Echo_and_the_Golden_Echo

— and watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L080KSBxemg

Why does this work so well? Hopkins is a famously vivid seer of things: the “silk-sack clouds” of early autumn, for example, or “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim”. So on the face of it, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” is a curious choice to film, the text is a torrent of words that passes quickly over its concrete nouns into a semi-abstract incantation about mortality and immortality.

But here, I think, is why it was an inspired choice. As a voiceover — read with precise care by Tait herself — the poem becomes both meaning and music over the film’s images (Hopkins said of it: “I never did anything more musical”). This vocalised presentation also draws out the dramatic qualities of the verse […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Latch or Catch or Key

In my previous mini review of Flammable Solid, I wrote that you seem to be a writer whose craft is in the service of discovery, and that sparked off some interesting conversations between us. I’d like to explore that idea a little further. Why do you write? And what does the creative process look like, for you?

“It would not be a lie to admit that the ‘service of discovery’ takes a number of forms. I live in what can sometimes be a constant state of narrative assessment, with the need to reflect and consider everything in order to comprehend it fully. Writing has become a tool of service and increasingly memory: building a regular practice has become transformative and a pillar of my mental wellness.

I am also annoyingly prolific to some friends, until they accept I’m still, most of the time, using poetry as a mental health coping strategy. Some days I write because I want to, or I need to, simply to make sense of the ridiculousness of the current reality we find ourselves being exposed to. Other times, it has become an anchor to my perception.

My first pamphlet was very much a series of stand-alone pieces. FM allowed me to embrace the strength of the narrative arc in poetic terms.”

Forest Management seems to be grappling with an ecology vaster and more intricately-patterned than that which presents itself readily to us in our day-to-day reality. Could you talk a little bit about that?

“There is always more to reality than we are capable of seeing, for all manner of reasons. How we have been educated, how we were bought up, how we are treated will all feed into this ability to perceive. There were periods in my early childhood where food and money were both luxuries, and these things still influence decisions on a daily basis. My working class background may now be a memory, but it colours a lot of what now helps me navigate the complexity of current existence.

I feel too many of us are being distracted right now with trivial things, or are simply unable to consider the ecology of existence itself. The damage being done by human beings to the planet will continue to be exacerbated by climate change, and the movement of human beings across the planet has been a part of an ecosystem for millennia. The former will now make the latter an even greater concern.

Everything is connected to everything else on Earth. We are part of a vast and increasingly damaged ecosystem. There are very real threats to our individual stability, our ability to live in harmony with all that surrounds us. It is only when we are directly threatened that the fragility of those positions becomes apparent. It is time I think to accept our own culpability and actively pursue solutions to restore balance.

Those who have more than they need should be helping those with less. We need to return to an ecology based on empathy and co-operation. At the heart of this book is the acceptance that to make things better, sometimes parts of your own existence will need to be sacrificed in order to force that change upon yourself. What you leave behind sometimes becomes more significant than what you are left with.

This story demonstrates that horror can also be a transformative construct.”

*

Having read Forest Management a few times over, I think it is this sentiment of a transformative reckoning – the moment where pain, difficulty, horror become an awakening and a turn towards something else – that sticks with me. This is a theme that has been present in S’ previous work, but with Forest Management it comes to the fore as a narrative arc. In that sense, as well as a horror story, the pamphlet could also be read as a classic Hero’s Quest. I’m sure S would baulk at the idea of being cast as a capital-H Hero, but the ingredients are there. There is the sense of a struggle, moments of doubt and despair, and a bargain that has to be struck in order to move forward:

“these trees / will not / let me leave / without selling them / my soul”

But also:

“This germination will be mine.”

[…]

S. Reeson (she/they) is a working-class, neurodivergent poet whose space and shape poetry is underpinned by mental health, existential angst and the current state of the planet. After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest in 2018 they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which was included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury/One World. This poem was then reproduced by The Daily Telegraph and read on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night programme.

A debut pamphlet with accompanying art and photography, Flammable Solid, was published in November 2022 by Flight of the Dragonflies Press. In April 2023 a chapbook, No Gloss… No Veneer, No Filter was produced by Back Room Poetry. They were shortlisted in April 2026 for Poem of the Month by Verve Poetry Press, and have been published in over 30 magazines and anthologies, including Under the Radar. Both their poetry and photography has been formally exhibited.

In 2026 they were selected as Poet in Residence for the Leigh Art Trail in Essex, and a Writer in Residence at Metal Southend as part of the Essex Book Festival, where they also taught poetry on behalf of the South Bank Centre and the Poet in Every Port initiative. They are on the Steering Committee and an advocate for the Southend Creatives CIC.

They are currently putting the finishing touches to their first collection.

Victoria Spires, A sylvan reckoning

Maria Nazos is the author of The Slow Horizon that Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023), longlisted for the Angelo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, a collection of poems translated from the Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula, and a collection of poems, PULSE (Omnidawn, 2026), listed as one of Ms. Magazine’s Reads for the Rest of Us: The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026. Her poetry, essays, and translations are forthcoming or have appeared in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and The Adroit. Maria has held a wide range of jobs, including whale-watching boat attendant, table dancer, and, arguably, the worst waitress on Cape Cod. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she apologizes. You can find her at www.marianazos.com.

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare?

The way my first book changed my life was that it made me realize it’s okay to wait for work to become true.

I feel like I really, really rushed the river with my initial collection. In fact, I don’t really talk about it much for that reason. It’s a sore subject, but like most wounds, it’s worth returning to the scar tissue. Nonetheless, it taught me something I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

The biggest difference between that book and PULSE is that PULSE took sixteen years to write. I was so determined and so aggressive about cranking out my first book. What PULSE ultimately taught me is that sometimes you have to wait a maddening amount of time for something to come out right. It isn’t on your timeline. In fact, I think the more I tried to force it, the less worth it it became. The more I let the work tell me what it needed, the better it got. I think there’s so much wisdom in the waiting, even in the worst moments of it. Looking back, that’s probably the biggest lesson both books taught me.

How did you come to poetry?

I wanted to write fiction. I loved reading fiction, especially as an undergrad, and I just assumed that’s what I would write. What became immediately apparent to me was that, frankly, I just wasn’t that good. And I think people always want to jump in and go, “No, no, that’s not true.” But it’s true. Could I have become a good fiction writer with enough time? Sure. I believe most of us can become good at almost anything if we devote enough time.

But one of the greatest gifts in life is realizing what you’re naturally inclined toward versus what you’re constantly forcing. Meanwhile, my poetry just kept getting more and more attention. So, at some point I just naturally began to follow that.

I’m not advocating for the path of least resistance. I think the lesson is paying attention to where something feels alive. For me, poetry was where that happened. And it’s strangely liberating to accept in life where you suck. We’re taught to think we can do anything. That’s not true, and giving ourselves permission to accept our shortcomings opens us up to being honest with ourselves, our work, and our due north.

As I like to joke, but not really, my short stories just kept getting shorter and shorter until they became poems, which makes no sense, given the amount that I talk.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Maria Nazos (rob mclennan)

This section of Reclamation revolves around the Frost line “Something we were withholding made us weak.” Frost is claiming in this part of the poem that what really turned the British colonists into Americans was the surrender of themselves to this new land—he says that explicitly in the next two lines—and that it was the unwillingness to leave the teat of the Motherland that was making them weak.

I reframed this line first by breaking it in half at the word “were” so that it ends the sentence “It’s just / something we were.” The Frost line doesn’t always work as the pivot of my responses but it does here. The speaker, an adult remembering himself at around ten years old, first defines himself against another place, the state next door, a place he honestly doesn’t know well at that age. It’s just not here, and that’s enough for him because he exists in a place and time where allegiances are gut-level and local and the stakes are everything right now and won’t be remembered tomorrow.

Brian Spears, Reclamation part 8

It’s rejection season, as last week’s CWC Office Hours confirmed. Many writers are hearing back from multiple publications at once, and naturally “no” makes up the majority of the responses.

We talked at length about the questions rejection brings up: Is it the work? Is it the market? Is there something useful to learn from this, or is the best next move simply to send the work someplace else? How do we recover without letting this be an unhelpful pronouncement on the merits of our writing, or even less helpful, a foreshadowing of what’s to come (or not to come)? […]

If you tend to experience rejection as a blanket assessment of your worth—aka: “my submission was rejected” immediately becomes a sinking feeling of inescapable inevitability—your response will feel out of proportion to the event itself. This, in turn, can lead to despair, cynicism, and ultimately quitting. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Having a submission rejected produces a feeling—an uncomfortable one, certainly, but a feeling nevertheless. A feeling registers in the body, and whether it dissipates quickly or lingers depends partly on the story we attach to it. There are plenty of writers who hold rejection lightly; you can be one of them, but it takes deliberate practice. It takes identifying how and what you are making it mean for you, and actively choosing a different meaning. You are—we are—very often at the mercy of our first thought, but you don’t have to be at the mercy of your next thought.

There is an evolutionary basis for this sensitivity: humans are social creatures, as you might have gleaned, and exclusion carried real consequences for survival for millennia. Unless you train it otherwise, the nervous system can register a literary rejection as a form of social threat, even when what’s actually happened is that someone sitting at a laptop has clicked “declined” on Submittable. But “this poem wasn’t right for this issue” is not a reflection on your worthiness as a person or writer—that is not what has been passed over, nor what was being assessed in the first place. […]

Your writing has likely already given you more than almost anything else in your life ever could. It has given you thousands of hours in which to puzzle through thought and feeling, expanding your capacity for both. It has allowed you to experience your memories again in all their vividness, to draw on your inner landscape to create spaces another might enter, all through the vehicle of the page. It has challenged and delighted you. Maybe it’s even been the longest and most significant relationship of your life.

You write because you need and love to write, not because you need and love to be published. It can be hard to remember that in the moment you’re faced with the sting of rejection, but your comeback rate—the time it takes you to remember what truly matters—is important. It is what motivates you to return to the work. It’s what helps you stay in this for the long haul.

Protect your appetite for writing. Don’t lose it to your appetite for submission and validation. Thank your next rejection for giving you the chance to practice this reframing and for reminding you what matters most.

Maya C. Popa, Adjusting Your Factory Settings

I long ago came to the realization that my poems are usually different from others writing around and near me, both in the real world and virtual spaces I inhabit as a creative. It may go back to that realization I once had in an MFA classroom of going around the room and everyone saying WHY they write poems. Or what they want poems to do, both as writers and readers. How no one had the same answer and it explained a lot about why I felt like workshops in the program were like banging your head against a wall with everyone telling you to bang faster or harder or with more intention. While I would still way I am often unhappy with my fiction exploits, it’s usually my own narrative voice that irks me. I get tired of myself, even in the span of a short story. The poems, however, feel like snippets and much less insufferable. The plays on the other hand, nicely eliminate the narrative voice entirely leaving only the story frame-worked in dialogue. This may be why I’ve taken to it so wholeheartedly this past year.

Kristy Bowen, the science of stories

Recently I was asked the themes of my third collection of poems, Call Me Yes, forthcoming from The Word Works in October 2026. I launched into a description of the book: it traces the breakdown of my long first marriage, the terror and excitement of dating again as an over-50 woman, and the tumble into new love. Threaded through the collection are short lyric poems about living with chronic pain. Ah, love and pain, my friend concluded.

Yes, but. How did I leave out sex? Middle-aged lady sex, to be precise. The book is lousy with sex poems. Perhaps I left it out because – despite writing and publishing these poems for the past decade, despite the often wildly enthusiastic response the poems receive when I trot them out at readings – I’m still burning my female / belly with shame, as I write in “Divorce Dinner for Breakfast.”

In popular culture, when middle-aged and older women show up at all, we are most often depicted as either asexual or as cougars, somewhat pathetically pursuing younger men. (No need to get into the double standard here – oo wee.) But, you know what? Many of us continue to be sexual beings. In fact, my libido increased in middle age. Still, I could not have set out to write a book about sex. But because I was doing what I tell my students to do – write what is pounding up inside them – often it was sex: the act itself, the frustrated act, the sheer fact of desire. And because middle-aged and older women are so often silenced or dismissed or worse, mocked, the sheer act of writing our desires is a political act. As the poem, “Tongued,” which opens the book’s second section ends: the tongue writes its own / constitution right here in our beds.

The sex poems take many forms: an ode to the multiple orgasm titled, appropriately, “Ode to the Multiple Orgasm”; an “Abecedarian to the Aging Female Body”; a sonnet in the voice of the clitoris; a poem of extended metaphor; a goofy compendium of the bot (or human?) messages I received on dating apps (it suck been lonely); an even goofier riff on online dating titled “DrBigBeef, or Internet Dating Over 50.” The word desire appears at least eight times in the collection. One poem is actually called “Desire.” I brought an early draft to my writing group and the poet Venus Thrash, who tragically passed away a few years ago, far too young, looked at my short-lined straggly poem and pronounced, “Long lines are sexy, Sarah.” And she was right: the final version of the poem, with longer lines, is sexier, more languid perhaps.

Let Our Aging Bodies Sing – guest post by Sarah Browning (Trish Hopkinson)

The ache returns with its hands in its pockets.
It sets down its suitcase and hangs its head.
I open the door and say: only for one night,
and only on the couch. There’s a nor’easter;

set down your suitcase inside the storm door.
Don’t get any ideas though you’ve been here
before. And don’t get too comfy on the couch.
Let me have my pot of tea and my quiet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returning Ache

When I’m asked how I go about preparing for a reading, I say the poems are always the easy bit – because they’re done, they’re sorted, they just need read out. It’s the spontaneous stuff in between that I need to carefully rehearse.

This is one reason why I’m dubious, to say the least, when someone shows me a poem they’ve just rattled off, still hot against the page; a poem they’re reluctant to revise in case they edit the immediacy out of it. I worry that this is less spontaneous expression that deserves to remain so than something closer to incontinence. Yes, I know there are exceptions. I do occasionally write poems with minimal revision, poems that arrive almost fully fledged, but even with these I usually spent days fussing and fretting over the lines in my head before setting them down on paper, and then days – weeks, even – scrutinising them for imperfections. That bloody comma!

Though my first drafts often come very quickly – scribbled down on anything to hand, as often as not the flyleaf of whatever poetry collection I happen to be reading at the time (because we all know that words come from words) – I’m always keen to get it into typescript as quickly as possible. That way it looks a bit like a real poem even though it’s ragged and dull and saying nothing much yet about anything. And the words are easier to change on a keyboard, the lines and phrases can be quickly shifted around. All the time I’m listening for the music that carries the lines forward. Some argue that the drafts should remain handwritten as long as possible because the words and syntax are different when the line is typed, but I need to write as close as I can to the speed of thought.

Then I begin to root around for something interesting or perplexing that might have appeared in there, something the manipulation of the lines has introduced: an image, a phrase, a coalition of words. I expand on this, draw it out to see what it’s trying to explain to me … And the ‘real’ poem, if it’s going to grow at all, grows from there.

John Glenday, Off the Cuff

Last night I was in conversation with Helen Mort at Juno Bookshop in Sheffield. It was lovely to see Helen, who is both a good friend and a brilliant writer. We decided to improvise a call and response poetry reading – Helen read a poem, and then I read a poem and then we talked about some of the ideas in the background of the work. We hadn’t planned this at all – but I think it worked really well – perhaps because I’ve felt like my work has always been in conversation with Helen’s work for years. Below is a photo of us looking pleased with ourselves for pulling off a call and response poetry reading!

Now that the autumn is here, I’ve got quite a few readings and events on – which I’m going to try and make a list of below. If any readers can make it to any of these events, do come and introduce yourself! One of the joys of writing this Substack has been meeting people from all over the UK who are reading both our absolute nonsense and our more thoughtful articles!

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary

always an ache
in the bones when we yearn for
the suburbs, ascent into credible
air. but no, we will not go. we do
the quadrilles of confinement, up
and down this old particular. left
or right. ours is a compass without
cardinals, is a bright dial hanging
in the orange air.

Fran Lock, “HAWKSMOOR”

When I’m writing poems, I eavesdrop on birds more than people. When I’m writing fiction, I eavesdrop on people more than birds. […]

Reading somewhere that I’m a poet for people who say they don’t like poetry. Is that like being a chef for people who say they don’t eat food? Or a lake for people who say they can’t swim?

Maggie Smith, Scrapbook in Vignettes

Back in April, I was poet in residence at a festival, too, a festival and residency hosted in a crypt repurposed as an art gallery, right next to a historical church in London. Many things happened during that residency that will stay with me, but there is one in particular that haunts me. There was a young man there – not a crypt apparition, nor one of us poets-in-residence but a young man in flesh and blood who slept in the church garden, in a sleeping bag. It didn’t take me long to conclude, from silent clues, that he must have been an asylum seeker, one of those who had, eventually, been granted asylum then abandoned to the streets with no support or resources. His command of English wasn’t great but he got by, and every evening, when us poets held our open mic down in the crypt, he would leave the crisp April cold of the church garden to descend into the bone-biting cold of the crypt and listen to us. He’d sit or stand quietly in the corner nearest the exit, and listen to us speak of our loves, our lives, our grief, our anger. He always looked like he was paying attention, immersing himself in this foreign language, trying to absorb it, desperately.

Seeing that the weirdos who spent their days pottering about the house of the dead didn’t avoid him or chase him away, that we stopped by to chat with him every once in a while, ask if he’d eaten, and that he was able to use the facilities and make himself a hot cup of tea unbothered, he worked up some courage, little by little. (One of us asked him, at one point, a question they then regretted. They asked something like “where are you from?” upon which, reportedly, the young man pointed to the ground of the crypt and said “here”.) Eventually, one sunny morning, he came to one of us to ask for directions. He wanted to find the nearest job seekers’ centre. All he wanted was to be able to work, to live his life. We never saw him again after that, and I pray he’s safe now, that he has a roof under his head, a job with a salary, and food to eat; that one day, the poetry of this language will no longer be a ghost in the crypt.

His name, as I remember it, is Mukhtar. A name that won’t make the headlines. Mukhtar never told us his story, and we were too embarrassed, perhaps too ashamed of ourselves to ask. A story that will never make the headlines, a story like many others’. I have no idea what he must have lived through to end up homeless, to end up calling a crypt something akin to home. I can only try to imagine, and I will most likely fail.

I think of him still, listening to poetry in the cold of the crypt, as I watch the men wishing him and others like him dead infecting the news with their hate, men who would laugh at our poems.

Mukhtar, whose name means “the chosen one”, I’m sorry we have failed you.

Maria Cohut, A headline for Mukhtar, whose story won’t be on the news

A long time ago, I was Writer in Residence across the North of Ireland for The Poetry Society. It was my first visit since I’d lived there on our old family street, Obins Street, in the early 1980s, where I found myself many times thrust against a wall and looking down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle for simply existing. A writer is a dangerous person. We keep and steward notes for the days when we need them, and when the world needs them. The family had lived on John Street before that.

I think five of the poems I wrote during that time ended up in my first book, The Prize. But given the determination in recent days of those who would still keep the North of Ireland held in its colonial grip, and undo decades of work towards peace and community, I found myself looking back into my archive. […]

The bomb that took out
the town centre
killed my cousin Tony Brown.

His big round face singing songs
at Uncle Clancy’s in Criagavon
on a Friday night, not really my uncle
but all O’Neill’s are related by soul and time.
Tony’s wife Kathleen’s brown eyes.

There is no such thing as middle ground.
I put flowers in the middle of the road.

John Siddique, Two Poems of Portadown

Friends keep asking how I feel about retiring as if it’s a one stop shopping kind of deal. I will definitely keep directing Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women every September in La Conner, WA and I hope to be teaching “Taking Flight” in a gorgeous castle in Bordeaux, France and Poetry on the Water with Anil Oommen, in the magical backwaters of Kerala, if I am lucky…Perhaps be able to do more writing. […]

But I am also aware that I have a time limited offer on this planet, in this physical form. What do I want to do with the next twenty years of my life. And that’s an optimistic number. Both of my parents passed away in their early 70’s which is right around the corner. No time to delay!

It’s a weird feeling looking towards the big R. How long will I be able to travel? A long train ride across Europe? Perhaps the Orient Express if it’s still running or should I start with the Coast Starlight to Los Angeles to make sure I’m as enamored with trains as I think I am?

Susan Rich, Holding Fast to the Last Slice of Summer: Laughter, Poetry, Friends, and More

In the family room… there was a tv, our favorite chairs, a wagon wheel light hanging from an exposed beam… but the three clocks: a wooden heirloom on the mantle, one strange water clock on a table in the corner, and the grandfather beside the door, teaching my sister how to count even in her sleep, made the room feel as if it were something else… too informal for a living room, too focused on time for a den, so I named it the fireplace room, the room where Dad rigged a steel plate and wrought-iron arm hinged to swing a cast iron kettle or skillet from stone facing to the fire box for cooking, later, it became the dining room… but opposite the hearth and behind the desk, a bookcase spanned the back wall, and on its lowest shelf, a bit lost among seminary books, history, art, and politics, was the black cover of my Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a gift from Mother. Once, folded inside its pages for safekeeping, was my faded sketch of Montresor’s catacombs beneath his stone house in “The Cask of Amontillado”. The drawing’s thin lines, more determined than accurate, led the eye down a meandering and descending hall to a man in jester’s garb, the only blots of color on the page, moving toward a pile of skeletons, smudged in pencil, against a crumbling wall with an open doorway and the darkness beyond. I’ve no idea what happened to it.

The book taught me about the darker things in life, how our time is far too brief, then we disappear, how what we see is never what is. Like monsters, misunderstood, stomping through trees, they aren’t trying to hurt anyone. Like the thumping heart and the discolored eye, or the grave that’s covered too soon. Like bells jingling behind walls until there’s only silence. Like waking from childhood’s hour.

Its blessing wasn’t that Mother gave me something to read to direct my life the way she wanted, didn’t give me something hoping I would change or conform, though I’m certain she had her wishes. No. She gave me the pages she knew I wanted, the words she knew I needed. She gave me the world that would be mine. I didn’t know then how perfect her gift.

*

Decades later, near the end of a hard winter, seeing
her dead on the ER table, I thought of her gifting me
the book, of the many wonderful doors it opened,
of the mystery in her mind that pushed her
to give it to me, of the love she carried.

I swear, I could hear her voice in that room,
could see her chest swell and drop, her eyelids flutter.
I wanted her eyes open. I wanted to see her soul
one more time. But she was gone.

I kissed her forehead, and whispered
deep into her ear, willing my words to follow her.

Sam Rasnake, New hybrid: “The Basement Tapes: 12”

— Well, we are an exhausted body, an injured body, we writers, many, most? of us. We are dust, we dust, we are in a dust-up. Still, we persist. We will not be erased, though we have been pillaged. Though our work has been stolen. Though we be an injured body.

— Last post I talked about the years we might have left. (Is it ever too early to start thinking about your latter years? :) Memento Mori and all that. This one struck a chord — I got a lotta notes about that one and thank you.

— What I want for us as humans is more than just to live with the unbearable, the unthinkable, the violence, the injustice. As Lauren Berlant says in their book On the Inconvenience of Other People, “Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple, in the sense of resolved once and for all.” How can we go on asking better questions, repairing, when it’s all so overwhelming? How do we, as they say, “live on with.” Life is so grievable.

— How will we be when the dust settles? How many pennies do we leave in the rosebud ashtrays? How much ash? rosebuds?

Shawna Lemay, Dust and the Exhausted Body, the Injured Body

The poet of Ezham scents the grove with sandalwood;
ripe plantains sweeten the air,
inflorescences of tall bamboo
rise into it.
From metaphoric wilderness,
to the mythic southern island
the geography shifts beneath the traveller’s feet.

Uma Gowrishankar, For Valmiki, Kamban & Arasakesari

I love the fact that a yarn show for me is a wonderful blend of work and curiosity and playfulness. When we were getting everything ready to take with us for the weekend I even referred to the patterns as “our patterns” which shows that I feel very invested in this creative world of yarn. I now know much more about knitting and yarn than I have ever done, and I have Kath’s patterns memorised in a Pokédex kind of way, so I am pretty helpful when it comes to looking after things for her. I still am not quite sure about what happens if you knit something in 4-ply instead of DK, and am therefore not confident offering an answer on any such question, but there are always plenty of experts around me at events who do know such things.

There were lots of lovely compliments for Kath’s work during conversations over the two days, and I always love hearing these. In fact it makes my heart sing.

For me there were lots of first this weekend… the early morning shepherding of some sheep back into their pen, Yarndale versions of #SwishOrWaft, some human galloping in the aisles, and some wonderfully relaxing colouring-in time, along with my first ever experience of not feeling cold at any point during the show. It’s good to experience new things alongside the bits that I am expecting.

I love making the little videos to find out whether there is a preference for swishing or wafting whilst wearing a large shawl and love the panache with which people will get involved. It’s good to play. In fact I thrive on play and humour, so I am very grateful for all these kinds of interactions during the show, especially when there is also time for a gallop and neigh in the aisles with a like-minded soul. This makes this non-knitter feel like they have found their own little place to be amongst all things woolly.

I also found time in the quiet of Sunday morning before the show day began to stand on my own in my assigned sheep/cattle pen and draft a poem. It feels rather lovely to come home with some words to work with, and when this poem finds its place in the world it will be fun to remember exactly where it began its shaping.

Sue Finch, A SWISH, A GALLOP AND TWO LOOSE SCREWS

I am grateful for
days like these, the light,
the scent of woodsmoke,
a squirrel that stops
to stare at me, as if

it has no fear at all,
a tractor driver who
slows so the track’s dust
does not envelop me.
These gifts. My rich life.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ The seasons continue to confound us

This week: yellowing pears, oleander petals, the rattle of swans’ wings, the engines of our envy, and much more. Enjoy.

Last weekend at Lumb Bank a butterfly came into the cottage after dark and settled on my skirt, refused to fly away even as I walked around. Finally, it startled into a corner of my bedroom where it spent the night.

Next day I found it in the window above my writing desk. By the evening there was no sign of it.

I first came to Lumb Bank in 1998. I was in the dining room when it was announced that Ted Hughes had died. All morning, the door to the outside world kept blowing open and shut. This house has been far out at sea all night, I thought.

At Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in the early 2000s, I heard Christopher Reid perform extracts from the book of Hughes’ letters he had just edited. It was a chilly November morning, sober skies. Reid was reading a piece (from memory, I think it was a letter from Hughes to Ben Sonnerberg about the composition of Hughes’ The Jaguar) and as he got to the point in the letter where Hughes describes a bluebottle irritating him mid-poem in his room, those of us sitting close to the stage noticed a black butterfly circling Reid’s head. Very lightly, very deftly, it settled on the page of the book. A collective murmur rose from the crowd.

A black butterfly is thought to symbolise transformation, endings, and – in some traditions – a message from someone who has died. Readings vary slightly by culture: ominous in parts of Europe and Central America, auspicious in Japan, China, and the Philippines. Most modern interpretations read it as a phase closing rather than a warning (much like my understanding of the ‘death’ card in a tarot deck).

The night the Lumb Bank butterfly stayed in my room it rained with peculiar gravitas and I couldn’t sleep. It seemed as if the whole valley had been struck by something and it was ringing. The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills / Winds stampeding the fields under the window….

As I waited for morning, I thought about Hughes’ ‘blade-light…. Flexing like the lens of a mad eye’.

Helen Mort, A house at sea all night

i.m rachel blau duplessis (1941-2026)

/ i cannot face it: the diligent and scheduled day.
/ between endeavour and divide.
/ my cup runneth over. my cup becomes accustomed, is an eye.
/ what fresh hell is this? inside of which we recognise and formulate, traverse entrapment sadly.
/ a poem, aye. envoi of exhaustions. envoi of extremes.
/ to strive inside the limit and the light of it.
/ to swallow it, horoscope and gospel, down in one.
/ what is it – the necessary defect in our nature, a mercy owed to ignorance.
/ that keeps us here, softly espousing? […]

Fran Lock, AGLÆCA #2

At the Museo Nazionale Romano at Palazzo Altemps, we spend an entire slow afternoon with the Gods. There are sun-drenched terraces adorned with saffron murals of birds and plants; the sculpted stone limbs of Demeter and Apollo lounging in the high noon sun; amphorae and funerary reliefs and bones.

I am particularly drawn to Dionysus/Bacchus—always have been, with his pinecones and staff and grapes. I linger in rooms with him, wishing the sculpture would talk back to me. Like a child I covet his attention.

I have always longed for and feared the ecstatic. As a Scorpio, as a writer, I am always tugging at the precipice of ruin, peering behind its delicious curtain. I want the rush of abandon, and then I run from it. An erotic push-pull, where the threshhold is my kink.

Dionysus is the embodiment of The Me that Stretches Beyond Fear, into an erotic expanse that verges on the divine. It is the part of me that eats to excess and drinks and dances and gets lost in beauty and uses my sensuality as currency and lets go of expectation and order. Dionysus tells me to write poems, to lose my fucking mind. But it’s less about the wildness itself and more about what it takes to get there.

In Rome, the closest I get to bacchanalia is staying up late, laughing with my friend and the ghosts, drinking dark, thick wine and smoking a dozen slim Vogue cigarettes. My friend called our last night a “loopy giddy fever dream.” Dionysus would approve.

And then when things feel too heavy, I pull back on the ecstatic, march down the hill, pass through the scrim, and become good again.

Lisa Marie Basile, Missives from beautiful, bloated Rome

The academic whirlwind yanked me up into its funnel cloud this August with extra force, or so it seemed, after a sabbatical’s saner pace. Struggling with the workload, I thought with surprise, I do not want this. I definitely do not want to go to these endless workshops on how AI can help improve faculty efficiency. I want to take slow, inefficient walks in the woods, looking at mushrooms.

I was relieved, after that rush of meetings and paperwork, to settle into teaching. Preparing for class–reading, reconsidering old lesson plans (recently Rukeyser, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Plath)–I lose track of time. Running a discussion about literature or writing is all about giving texts and other humans the respect of unhurried attention.

Yet administrivia keeps pouring in, with deadlines that put firm boundaries on how much time I can give my students or my creative life. The latter involves its own administrative tasks, too: slipping a few submissions in before the windows close, checking proofs, booking a hotel for that writing festival, etc. When you get to the events, they’re often great. I LOVED the thoughtful conversation at the ecopoetry panel and reading I was a part of recently at Stone Soup Books. Blockage on the interstate, though, meant I broke speed limits getting there.

The unhurry-able process of writing, revising, and working to get poems in front of audiences has fruited lately, as a reminder of where rumination can lead.

Lesley Wheeler, Snailing along in the moonlight

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my Substack” if I’d get a different reaction, as that seems to be where the cool kids blog, at the moment. I had a podcast for a while, and a friend actually jokes about NOT listening to the podcast, as if I’d think that was funny, and I do fake-laugh just to make it okay. (But you know what, it’s not really okay.) In spite of this particular long-winded all-about-me blather of a post, some of my best works comes out on this blog: mini-essays, some, or prose poems, others. Not all of them, by any means. But as it turns out, this is my writing practice, this blog. Much to my surprise. And it won’t make me known to the world and has not garnered me many readers and will not turn into a published book, and I can’t turn around and try to publish these mini-essays/prose poems in lit mags because this blog is considered a published thing, and therefore no longer shiny new for most lit mags. I’m just pausing here to give myself credit for this practice. Turns out practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes purpose. It makes sanity. It makes a small grace. And I pause to thank you for reading.

Marilyn McCabe, It may be that when we no longer know what to do

A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:

thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl

In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:

The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.

As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.

[…]

I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.

Matthew Paul, September

As I was reading blog posts from past Septembers, I came across this fascinating poem possibility in this post from September 18, 2024:  “As I’ve been puttering this morning, I thought, I should write a poem with the title “Hildegarde of Bingen Forgets Her Feast Day.” The poem could go in several possible directions: she forgets because she is busy, she forgets because it no longer matters, she forgets because she has dementia.”  I went back to my files, and if I composed this poem, I didn’t do it on the computer.

Chances are good that I did nothing with this idea because a few days later, I was dealing with the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which left us without power for roughly 9 days, without internet for roughly a month, and boiling water until early December.  Again and again, I am a bit whipsawed when I think about all we have managed to survive.

Deep breaths–let me do something with poetry before it’s time to get ready for church–or just sit here and breathe deeply.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Guardians of Lesser Galaxies

At the beginning of 2023, I had my gallbladder taken out due to the presence of a stone so impressive that a someone from the surgical team came to find me afterwards to tell me she’d never seen anything like it. Naturally, I asked to keep it. They said no, but left it in a tube within my reach for a suspiciously long time. That same week, I discovered the poetry of Irish poet Eavan Boland. What a pair of gifts that week gave me. One of them looks better on the shelf, though. [photo]

The poem I came across first was The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me, and it stopped me in my tracks. For context, I read a lot of poems. Like, a lot. I’m also relatively easy to please, poetically speaking, which means that I read a lot of poems I like, like, a lot. It’s lovely. But very occasionally, I read a poem I can’t get out of my head, that I am compelled to play on repeat for weeks or months like I did in 1992 with my cassette of the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack (Jason Donovan version, obvs). I assume this happens to everyone (the poetry thing, not Joseph). I can never figure out exactly what the magic is that makes a poem shoot into my favourites like this, but maybe it’s more poetic that I don’t know. Either way, I fell hard for this one. […]

It’s possible that, in 2023, having had a small object recently removed, I was more than usually open to the idea of the enormity of tiny things. But I’m no less enchanted by this poem now than I was then. This collection, by 1990 already something like Boland’s seventh, is teeming with objects and specifics – her mother’s stockpot, a mug with a hunting scene, the ‘sugar-barley iron of a garden chair’ – which ground and colour the broad profundities and classical allusions that lie in seams in these poems. You won’t mistake this for cosy, domestic poetry. It uses those themes to tell us about women, and writing, and Ireland, and love, and the past, and the now. It’s remarkable writing, and I’m so happy to have spent time with it this week.

Eavan Boland only died in 2020, after a stellar career. I wish I’d found her earlier. But I’ve been making up for it and she’ll be making more appearances on this Substack. The gallstone, thankfully, will not.

Nia Broomhall, Week 27: Outside History

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away.

Ann E. Michael, Re-reading, re-learning

For Rachel Blau Duplessis,

Blue, legion. Drafts. A polyvocal entry. One’s ear, to lend. A visual, daily practice. Days and works and days. Cartographic, the position of collage. This vanishing point. A sure cure, applied. Categories. So necessary, membrane. How big a threat? What, temporality. How grand, this arrangement of stars. Encompassed. The onset, journey. Heart, and blood, and facts. An ocean. The structural divisions of trees, thin lines of fence. How redundant the aesthetic. Leaves tarnish, fall, and then. Thus, exegesis. These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus.

rob mclennan, seven poems from a new project,

“Up//Roar” is the follow up to “Joy//Us Poems of Queer Joy” also published by Arachne. Whereas the latter celebrated, the new anthology encompasses poems for bleaker times, although that’s not to say the poems are bleak or full of doom and gloom, there is a celebration of allyship and resistance. As the introduction points out even in 2026 some families still cannot welcome the spouse/partner of departed loved ones because they’d prefer to erase the departed’s love life. […]

“Up//Roar” brings together a wide range of queer voices, all celebrating resistance and strength gained from being true to oneself however that may to look to other people. It’s a timely reminder that currently there is still discrimination and exclusion faced by LGBTQ+ communities. But here are also glimmers of light within the darkness that come from shared experiences and ways of owning being the outcast. Humans should not be forced to pretend to be something they are not or suppress major parts of themselves to “fit-in”. Let the hyenas not change their spots, “Up//Roar” is a necessary demonstration that hyenas should find their pack and not shiver in isolation.

Emma Lee, “Up//Roar Poems of Queer Resistance” edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon (Arachne Press) – book review

The publication of Path means that, at last, the entire body of [Chris] Torrance’s 50-year engagement with The Magic Door is now available. Sort of. Unfortunately, the Test Centre volume is out of print with the occasional copy being sold online at funny-money prices, and the original individual volumes are collectors’ items, rarely surfacing at any price. And even the Test Centre edition excluded The Book of Heat, as it was originally written for performance. The inclusion of performance pieces here (RORI and Frinite) in Path would seem to indicate a change of heart on that front.

The Magic Door/Path is one of the most important long poems in British poetry of the last 50 years, and needs to be available to readers in its entirety. Now that we have the conclusion, we really need a reprint of the full pre-Path text, including The Book of Heat. Meanwhile, I urge you to read this book, whether you are familiar with the earlier parts or not. Torrance is quite simply a vital, important, dare I say major poet. We owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Maillard for keeping his work alive and to Aquifer for publishing this book.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

In an excellent prefatory essay to the Clay Sanskrit Library edition of the Gitagovinda (translated and also introduced by Lee Seigel), Sudipta Kaviraj very neatly summarises what Jayadeva achieves in these songs:

Jayadeva composed in an astonishing form of Sanskrit in which the visible marks of its complex grammar are so minimally used that it became intelligible, almost without residue, to a much wider audience of vernacular readers. Literary skill obliterates the formal boundaries between different natural languages. It is an ironically democratised Sanskrit which can be read and enjoyed by those who do not know it. It is a strange bridge language and it is a text that lies at the crossing and therefore joins the literary world of Sanskrit and of several vernaculars.

I think it’s fair to say that none of the translations I’ve quoted so far really come anywhere close to suggesting this extraordinary blend of tradition and innovation: a newly transparent and accessible style which nevertheless draws upon the long history of kāvya. Recently I received a review copy of Inderjeet Mani’s new version of the Gitagovinda. This is a very different approach to the text, which draws in particular upon a long-standing tradition of understanding the Gitagovinda as a kind of drama. Mani’s version isn’t a close translation at all but I admire the way it incorporates elements from the long tradition of commentary on and performance of the poem into the English text. 

Victoria Moul, Translating and re-translating the Gitagovinda

(Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)
The three peaks stand like flags piercing the sky.
Forested landscapes hide ponds, and streams
breathe a mist of autumnal clouds.
In the dense undergrowth, oleander petals
sequester light. He pauses, wondering how different
the smell of the earth is—the wild fragrance of long pepper
from coiled creepers. Purple Chironji berries
crunch under his feet, squishy pulp
yeilds crisp kernels his family cherishes.

(From Sarga 2)

I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.

Uma Gowrishankar, What the Land Unfolds

Readers familiar with these reviews will be aware that Indigo Dreams Publishing has established a strong reputation for poetry collections of consistently high quality. Zoe Brooks’s Something in Nothing (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2026) is a particularly compelling addition to its list, and one that is likely to stand among the most significant collections of the year. In this highly original volume, Brooks recontextualises figures from traditional fairy tales within contemporary social and political landscapes, using their familiar narratives to examine brutality, misogyny and the forms of violence that remain embedded within modern society.

One of the central figures in this reworking is Bluebeard, whom Brooks presents as a serial predator targeting vulnerable women. In Bluebeard’s Girls, she writes: ‘The first was a stepdaughter/ that nobody wanted. The second was a girl/ who knew how to give but not to take./ The third was a girl/ arms as wide as Clapham Junction. /The fourth was a girl/ you would step over quickly.’ The women are characterised as isolated and socially marginal, their vulnerability rendering them susceptible to exploitation. Brooks’s use of the phrasing and rhythms of nursery counting rhymes is especially significant: a form conventionally associated with childhood innocence and play is placed in tension with Bluebeard’s predatory violence, producing a chilling effect. At the same time, Brooks resists any tendency to blame the victims. Instead, she exposes the social attitudes that enable their erasure. In Bluebeard Likes to Entertain, these women are described as ‘like puppies/ that need drowning./ The sort of women/ that no one will miss.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Something in Nothing’ by Zoe Brooks

Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival is compulsively readable, if overly speculative. I’m glad to learn more about Marlowe’s love life and spy activities. Some of the comparisons between him and Shakespeare are telling. One was so reckless by temperament, the other so cautious. One became a gentleman via university education though from the working class; the other never went to university but managed to buy a title from his theater earnings. Because so little is really known about Marlowe, the book is as much about his contemporaries as him.

In The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, Nicholas Jenkins makes a convincing case for how the early Auden was preoccupied by the place of national belonging in modern identities. The impact of WWI and its aftermath on young Auden is nicely documented, as is his complicated desire to heal and restore English culture and tradition (Edward Thomas, Hardy, Graves, Owen). Jenkins’s writing is somewhat repetitive. The 537 pages could usefully have been reduced to 400, but the book is a hoard of striking details and insightful criticism of Auden’s major early poems.

Jee Leong Koh, Two Biographies

[Walter Savage] Landor was an interesting figure — a man as definitively out of time as any in English literature: an 18th-century Augustan, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his talent constrained.

One sign of the genuineness of the talent is the fact that other poets have always appreciated his work. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the industrial remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, or “Mild is the Parting Year.”

And then there are the two verses by Landor we look at today: “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and “Dirce.” A strict cataloger might argue that these are not precisely epigrams but simply brief poems, lacking the teaching element of an adage. Our sense of poetic brevity, however, has been shaped by centuries of epigrams. We read these verses from Landor in an epigrammatical way, and rightly so, as both have the power to stick in memory, which is the first quality necessary for a well-made epigram. And they have the second necessary quality for a satisfying epigram, which snaps closed like a well-made box.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The English Epigram

For Persuasion, I wrote about the recent brouhaha over the Princeton English syllabus. Yes, the syllabus has a lot of socialism, but the real problem, to my rather antiquated mind, is what it doesn’t have. The trend in so many places now is to require English majors to take only a single course pre-1700. So almost everything from Beowulf to Absalom and Achitophel becomes optional.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

Henry Oliver, My plea to English students.

Before I made the long, agonising (!) move into academia I worked as a court transcript editor in London for nine years. I actually trained as a stenographer, on a Kombu-green antique steno machine which stamped letters onto a roll of paper, like a silent miniature typewriter. Stenotype is machine shorthand; each keystroke completes one syllable of a word. Your left fingers, in combination, produce the beginning consonant, your thumbs the middle vowel sound and the fingers of your right hand the ending consonant. So ‘crossfire’ would be two strokes: ‘K R O S’, then, on the line blow, ‘T P AO EU R’. There aren’t enough keys for one per letter, so ‘tp’ represents the ‘f’ sound, whole ‘AO EU’ is a long ‘i’.

Anyway, I switched to editing transcripts because it meant more money in the short term (far less in the long term, but I hadn’t planned to stay on the job quite as long as I did). As an editor, I worked alongside some of the best stenographers in the world — that is, I literally sat next to them in court — and cleaned up the transcript as it emerged on my computer screen, typing in sections that had been missed due to mumbling or over-speaking (of which there is a lot in UK trials and tribunals), sorting out the spellings of names and specialist terms, and keeping a log of anything we would need to ask about or research in order for the transcript to be as accurate as possible. It was surprisingly gruelling work — often upwards of 200 pages a day — and I permanently damaged the nerves in my arms doing it, because most of the courts and rooms we worked in were not designed with ergonomic seating in mind.

I collected dozens of poems about or inspired by aspects of the cases we covered, and published hardly any of them. There’s one about the usefulness of the en-dash that appeared in Asterism: An Anthology of Poems Inspired by Punctuation, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut and published by Laudanum Books. And then there’s this, which was published in the first (and, thus far, only) issue of Cambridge Poetry, edited by Dan Leighton — which, by the way, is as comprehensive a snapshot of the current Cambridge poetry scene as you’re likely to find in print.

Like many other poems from that era, it’s about 96% collage. All of the questions are questions which were asked in various court cases, and all of the answers are taken from newspaper reports on accidental fires, with the word ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ substituted in for ‘fire’ and ‘fires’. ‘Cross’ is short for ‘cross-examination’ in lawyer parlance, so ‘Crossfire’ (with an implied colon between the two parts of the word) would mean cross-examination of fire. The plan is to collect these and other court poems up into a little zine at some point. That zine will be part of a series of zines that collect and organise work from the unpublished book I mentioned back in this post from October.

Jon Stone, POEM / Crossfire

Dear poets and friends. Most of you know that I am still “young” by some standards. Last February I turned 42. My husband and I live together with 2 cats, but no kids. We are childless by choice and this has given us a certain level of freedom that some people give up as they age. For example, a few years ago, we sort of spontaneously left our apartment in Los Angeles to go live in Costa Rica for 3 years.

Still, time and family obligations have caught up with us. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time care-taking for my aging parents, helping them make and keep dr. appointments, do their laundry, and trim back some of the trees in their beautifully overgrown front yard.

This has all gotten me thinking about both my relationship with my parents (naturally) and also my own mortality. I always knew that I was going to get older, in theory. . . but now it’s starting to feel real. I could go on about that (and I will in my own poetry-writing), but for now I just want to say that the 2 poems below really hit me where I live lately. I’m extremely grateful to each poet, Amy Small McKinney and Susan Michele Coronel for giving me a kind of language to use to start addressing these issues.

Tresha Faye Haefner, 2 Poems I Needed To Read Today

To be found as a shiny coordinate in the star-chart for lightning bugs on summer nights.

To be found and saved from the searing screech of sirens.

To be found as an escapee from an oracle hushed into tremble.

To be found sleeping in a calm so deep you can hear the trees breathe.

Rich Ferguson, To be found

[T]his week has been somewhat knocked off kilter by having my phone stolen in Shoreditch on Monday night. It’s partially my own fault for being too trusting, but some cheeky fucker ran off with my phone…And I couldn’t catch them. I don’t know what I’d have been able to do even if I’d caught them, so it was perhaps a pointless pursuit.

Not much more i can do, remind me to take out the phone insurance next time, yeah.

Anyhoo, this week has also been buoyed up by reading my copy of Andrew Jamison’s Swans We Cannot See  (You have sighed up for his newsletter, yeah? Go on. I’ll wait, etc). If I had a phone I’d take a picture of the folded over corners of pages for all the poems to come back to..And look, I’ve rattled through the book a bit quicker than usual this week without my phone being present, so perhaps a digital detox is on the cards, but take my word for it..I’ve turned over a lot of corners in this book. […]

Andrew writes movingly about being a parent, a husband, he writes beautifully about place, and to my mind a bit about being/feeling out of place back where you originate from…perhaps it’s displacement??? Perhaps it’s just me. NB You should also check out his epic potato poem in the book.

Mat Riches, A Drunk Octopus Behind The Pink Doors of Perception

[James] Dickey makes two big choices in the title and the first line. As titles go, “Adultery” is anything but subtle, regardless of where you feel it lands in the pantheon of sins. It’s jarring because it’s unexpected as the subject of a poem, especially if you’re not a wide reader. When I’ve taught this poem in the past, students have occasionally asked why write about this. They’re used to less messy love poems, or at least they think those other poems are less messy, but that’s another conversation.

The second big choice Dickey makes is to implicate the reader in the first lines. “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad.” My first thought when reading those lines, even now, is no we haven’t all been in those rooms. It’s the way he’s so casual about assuming that which carries the force for me, the way he reduces this sin of betrayal to something everyone has done, how he’s so matter-of-fact about it before going into this description of the bland, unchallenging cheap hotel room art that’s there mostly to fill space on the walls.

But it’s in that description where we first get to see some sense of guilt, which is the emotion that will drive the rest of this poem.

Brian Spears, “Adultery” by James Dickey

Do you know the long poems of David W. McFadden? I’ve always loved how they ramble, surprised at how they unfold and where they go. How strange, ironic, intelligent, tongue-in-cheek yet profoundly moving they are. They understand affect and composing with connotation, sentiment, form, narrative, beauty, and surprise. Over the last few days, I somehow felt compelled to write this sad poem about two brothers in a horse costume and I was thinking of David’s long poems.

Gary Barwin, Lament for Horse Costume: Tragic Novel in Two Parts

The Ancient Futures issue of Sage Magazine, a print publication from Yale’s School of the Environment, recently arrived in the mail as a beautiful, stitched book containing my poem, ‘The Woolly Kind,’ following an open call last autumn. The unique formatting in the pages below was done by the graduate students on the magazine’s design team. It’s a bit hard to read on screen, so I’ll include a plain text version at the end.

I wrote this persona poem several years ago after Colossal Biosciences announced it was planning to bring the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), back from extinction by 2028. In August, the company revised its timeframe, stating it might take until the 2030s. My poem imagines life from the perspective of this future creature.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Ancient Futures, Recent News

My bottle of ‘Glimmers’ pills came the other day and I was truly filled with joy at the sight of this little prescription with its contents of glimmering moments. What an honour to be one of the 26 poets selected to feature in this small but powerful collection.

Each morning for the past week I’ve been tipping out one at random and every single one has been a gorgeous gem (and a super way to start the day!). You can get hold of a bottle of ‘Glimmers’ through The Poetry Pharmacy’s website Here.

And if you’d like to have a little peak at some of the poems you can find out more about the project and read some editors picks in The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’ Newsletter.

Here’s my Glimmer

Branches raise fingers to sky—ask for a blessing of leaves;
ground is still wet with winter, sun rests her hands on my
shoulders, and a warbler hymns from the silver birch. Dear
Spring: eat me, swallow me whole, a seed into moist earth.

Rachael Hill, A Glimmer

The poems in “The Basement Stacks” have been about memory from the beginning of the series. An image or phrasing or action from one poem leads to the next piece, and so on. Part 10 helped me as a writer make some discoveries about myself, or at least remember things I’d forgotten. Writing, in any form, can have that wonderful outcome.

This new poem grew from my thoughts about the boxes in the stairwell in part 10. In the new piece I was following the imagery as I’ve done with all the pieces. There are many possibilites with each poem that could lead to any number of new pieces, but my process is to follow the first moment in a poem that speaks to me in a direct way, and the next poem find its own way.

“The Basement Stacks” is projected as one section of a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled “Portraits”. That’s an extremely uncreative title, but it does, in its own way, reveal clearly the subject matter of its pages. In the series and ms, most imagery and action originate in reality, but some have worked their way into the pieces by necessity, by a kinship to or a reflection of the truth. Even those few parts that are fictional are connected to the truth in some way. And here I’m thinking of Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 11”

Tradition offers explanations for why this piece of Torah is written in this way. To me what’s striking is the visual prosody — the way the shape of the poem sings a particular kind of song in my consciousness. The open space gives each line a caesura, a pause. I read the words differently, and feel them differently, because of the space between them. So that’s how I wrote this week’s poem: with pauses in each line. More white space / white fire, imbued with silent meaning, holding the words’ black fire.

This one’s kind of in the same vein as the poems in Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda). When I shared my new year’s poem just before Rosh Hashanah, my friend Mary Ann — who has known me since we were in seventh grade — said, “You always could write a hell of a love poem.” The older we get, the more (I think) we become ourselves. It’s funny, and sweet, and a little poignant, for me to see reflected in her eyes the fact that this isn’t new. This is how I am, maybe even more so in my 50s than I was before.

Rachel Barenblat, For Ha’azinu

‘John Rae and the Northern Telegraph’ was part visitation, part rethinking of his expedition. Music was commissioned from Scottish composers Stuart MacRae and Ailie Robertson, Eli Tausen á Lava from the Faroe Islands, and Arnanguaq Gerstrøm from Greenland. We worked independently and were given an open brief. Stuart MacRae considered the conflicting thoughts that might have filled Rae’s mind, a bit older now, leaving his new wife. ‘I imagine the form of the music as a line of communication,’ he said; ‘one idea suggesting another, passing on its energy to a different musical expression, in one direction, always transforming but never returning to the source.’ Ailie Robertson intertwined the ends of the route in a back-and-forth of laments and melodies based on Greenlandic beaded yokes. Arnanguaq Gerstrøm structured her piece around the breathing patterns and ornamented tones of traditional singers, with the mechanical pulse of the telegraph’s clicks and codes rising and fading like static. To prepare to compose, Eli Tausen á Lava walked the Faroese section of the proposed route, south to north. John Rae walked many thousands of miles on foot and in snow shoes : ‘Through this cold, unromantic labour, there comes some kind of understanding of the world’. Eli’s piece became a contemporary meditation on pilgrimage, of undergoing a hard physical journey in order to bring on an inner transformation.

In his substack last week, Don [Paterson] talked about the process of collaboration, in all its nitty gritties: ‘Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air’. On the night of the performance, yes: the poems, at a practical level, created distance, carrying the audience from one deep auditory reverie into the next. In these beautiful pieces I heard skeins of geese and the rattle of swans’ wings, foot crunch, threads of singing, odd strings of Morse. All art aspires to the condition of music, said Walter Pater: there is an immediate intuition of (some kind of) meaning, an immediate impact on the emotions. In between, the words, gleaned from real people and real places, pinned us back to our place on the planet : here, in these north islands, in this old kirk, watching the weather coming. ‘It seems to me,’ said Mann’s Dr Faustus, ‘that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits … I am devoted to it with all my heart’.

But something else happened too. In the St Magnus Cathedral, this continual transformation that Stuart described was vivid, almost tactile. Music in a mediaeval Romanesque/Gothic cathedral was intended to overwhelm, in the best sense of the word. The building’s internal proportions – the high, tiny windows, the placing of its columns, galleries and vaults – were intended to amplify unaccompanied voices, and create a rolling sound that would wash through its spaces like waves in the sea. Standing in the transept below the high central tower, it was as if we were placing the words and music into the air, letting them swell and breathe on their own.

Lesley Harrison, The Northern Telegraph

As part of the UEA Welcome activities last week, I led a “Word Walk” around campus, where we stopped to consider the roots and history of nouns we encountered, guided by Emerson’s observation that “Language is fossil poetry”. The walk zig-zagged interdisciplinarily between architecture (“concrete”), natural history (“butterfly”, “birch”), maths (“extrapolation”), and chemistry (“gas”, “helium”), before ending up at art history, with an Ancient Egyptian carved figurine of a frog in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Looking up the etymology of “frog” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I learned a new word: “hypocoristic”.

Ultimately related to Old English frosc and its cognates in other Germanic languages, although the nature of the relationship is uncertain; the present word was probably originally an alteration of frosc as a result of association with docga dog n.1 […] in which the geminate consonant perhaps originally had a hypocoristic motivation (< Greek ὑποκόρισμα, ‑κορισμός pet-name, < ὑποκορίζεσθαι to play the child, use terms of endearment)

The OED entry on the mysterious origins of “dog” is a lesson in philology itself. What I understand from the above, though, is that the written words “frogge” and “dogge” (the vowel-shortening double “g” is the “geminate consonant”) began as spoken terms, for which the “hypocoristic motivation” was that of the pet name: the playful diminutive applied to the familiar creature. And “frog” perhaps — though this is my own speculation — was an association formed through the rhyme it makes with “dog”.

For Gertrude Stein, this is the felt life of language and naming that eventually becomes formalised as poetry. In her essay “Poetry and Grammar”, she writes:

Think of how you talk to anything whose name is new to you a lover a baby or a dog or a new land or any part of it. Do you not inevitably repeat what you call out and is that calling out not of necessity in short lines. Think about it and you will see what I mean by what you feel.

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.

That’s not exactly how I put it below, in 2005. But it arrives at the same idea via a different route: that to read poetry, you start with the words, and listen for the feeling. To quote the epigraph from Nijinsky’s diary that begins “Friends”, the John Ashbery poem that I discuss here: “I like to speak in rhymes, because I am a rhyme myself.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Frog and Dog

I’m editing, editing. What could I do for break? I know…word games. There’s re-w-or-d-a-ble. (Not a sponsorship endorsement but word geek fun.) What else?

What do I like? Let’s see, poetry, remixing, chance operations, corpus studies, Good Omens and making stuff.

I have 5 sets of magnetic poetry. What if I made a Good Omens one? Which words are keyword bingo troped? I brainstormed some.

I have a base set, a gardening set, a CanLit set, a French base set, and some yellowed ones that I’m not sure what they were from. One of the sets came with blanks. And I have a labelmaker. We have a plan. 

So I made a thing. 

Pearl Pirie, Good Omens Magnetic Poetry

On the evening of the day we move I have to teach a step class and Nick has to take a choir rehearsal. So no putting our feet up that evening!  Then waking up the next day, clambering over boxes and hoping the boiler/shower/hob are all working…. wish us luck!

Obviously I don’t have a lot of time to noodle around on the blog. But I did want to mention these literary hoaxes that are doing the rounds. Maybe I’ve come late to this particular party. A few months ago I got an email from someone claiming to have read ‘The Golden Rules of Blogging’ and asking if I was up for any other projects with the publishing house she claimed to represent. I confess I fell for it rather stupidly – I looked up the sender on LinkedIn and she appeared to have a legitimate profile there, but I did think it very odd for her to pick up on a book that’s over ten years old. So I replied, albeit in a cagey manner. That’s when the penny dropped – another gushy email came back right away, and I recognised the purple prose of a crude AI bot. I’m happy to say I’m not the first to fall for it – for example here’s Julie Broad of Book Launchers telling her story. 

A week or so later came another similar email, this time allegedly from a professor at a West Country university who claimed he ran a literary festival and would be honoured to have me featured there! Woohoo! Except the ‘festival’ was starting the very next week, and the professor turned out to be a real person, but actually a professor of engineering. Since then the emails have arrived on a regular basis. It’s the present-day version of those misspelt email scams from twenty years ago. 

Robin Houghton, New beginnings and literary hoaxes

For the uninitiated, here is a quick overview of how publishing a book of poetry works:

Most poets don’t have agents (unless you are Billy Collins or James Franco and already important OR independently wealthy). The vast majority of poetry books are published via Book-Length Contests or Open Reading Periods, and even the biggest poetry press is typically a small indie or university press with only a few people running it and even less money keeping it afloat. Sending in your manuscript may happen in April, with nothing but crickets until Christmas, and the contests aren’t free – most charge $25, with the most expensive running around $35.

What do you get if you win? Maybe a $1000 prize, a few poetry readings, or free copies of the book, distribution to some indie bookstores, some universities inviting you to come give a reading.

No one will stop you on the street for an autograph – even the most famous living poet is not famous outside of poetry circles, and likely your book will be forgotten in a month or, worse, never even heard of. Ever.

Yet, the competition is steep – which makes me love Poets all the more. We are such a ridiculous, starry-eyed set! […]

The numbers can seem daunting, but, as I let my fourth-collection drift around the contest circuit, what all this tells me is that one rejection means basically nothing, that I need to be sending more places, and that I must persist.

Those numbers also remind me that every poetry book I adore came from the efforts of a poet who kept sending out their work despite the tiny odds and minuscule rewards because they believed their poems needed to find their readers.

Renee Emerson, Poetry Manuscript Contests

I remain the sort of poet who doesn’t get asked to do paid gigs, has never been published in reputable literary journals and has no book deal, but now I am the sort of poet who is resigned to that fate, and is enjoying a presence on the internet, and occasional publication in fabulous mags and websites that admittedly might not be quite as reputable as the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. As a consequence of that resignation, I am a lot less worried about reading at open mics. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to get up from time to time, and I still want to make an impact on the occasions when I do. But I have developed some strategies to avoid getting my knickers in a twist about it. Sometimes they actually work. I am not suggesting that they would work for anyone else. But they help me. Here they are.

One. I try hard not to care about how my reading will be received. I’m not going to put myself into that position of worry. When it’s my turn to read, I’m going to get up, say a few words, read my piece and get off.

Two. I’m going to do one, and only one poem, no haggling over a second, third or (God forbid) a forth one. I’ll save those for the rare occasions when I am actually asked to do a set. People haven’t come to see me at an open mic – I should have a bit of humility.

Three. When I am done, I should sit down, still my beating heart and do my best to forget about it. I can save the in depth analysis with Gary Lineker and Ian Wright for when I get home.

Four. I try to listen properly to the other readers. Not using them as yardsticks to compare myself to, but for who they are.

If you are a poet who regularly attends open mics, perhaps you do all of these things naturally. Perhaps you have always approached open mic in this manner. If so, I salute you. It’s hard work for a big headed egotist like myself to cultivate such an attitude. There is also the attendant worry of appearing arrogant, as if open mics are “beneath me” if I don’t get up, or appear too flippant when I do. Perhaps I overthink everything, but I don’t think that I am alone in such mental struggles.

Mike O’Brien, How to Enjoy a Poetry Open Mic

We read our work at the open mics, and this past Saturday I shared “Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan” for the first time. I didn’t realize how well it would play to a live audience, and I think it may become part of my memorized rotation for readings. After the event, Midge Goldberg and I were trying to describe to Tom the Aussie the tradition of singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” in the middle of 8th innings at Fenway Park.

I remember workshopping this poem during my residency, and someone complained about how many baseball references there were. Now that I’ve read it out loud I think I have regrets about not mentioning something about my mother bringing us home. I see a revision in the future! Good idea? Bad idea? Please be opinionated in comments.

I’ve pulled the poem out of the drawer every so often for over the past year, but 2026 is the 20th anniversary of my father’s death and September would have been my parents’ 53rd wedding anniversary. I decided that it was a good time to fly it out to journals, and it landed on the very first try.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan

The bookshops that impress me have “Short stories” sections. They’re mostly in Dublin, though the Amnesty International shop in Cambridge and Saffron Walden’s Oxfam shop have story sections. The Oxfam bookshop in Islington doesn’t have one, though it has a section for “Literary Magazines” – Acumen, Pennine Platform, etc.

Blackwells in Oxford has a “poetry pamphlets” section.

“Poetry” shelves often have an “Anthologies” section. The Islington bookshop has that, and also has a section I’ve never seen before – “Contemporary Poetry” – which includes pamphlets and many slim volumes. It makes sense to display the spineless pamphlets in boxes – it makes browsing easier, like fingering through LPs in the olden days.

Tim Love, Bookshops – specialist shelves

The CBe edition of Testimony by Charles Reznikoff, all 608 pages of it, has gone to print. A longish piece by me on Reznikoff will be in the imminent new issue of The Little Review (£5 for 176 pages: ridiculously good value). For a reading of the whole of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London next spring I applied last June for funding (for costs including gallery hire, video-recording, etc.), and I learned this week I didn’t get it. I spent a long time over that application; it was a beautiful application. But the reading will happen.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter September 2026

The neighborhood paper, which has little to report beyond the struggles of the city council, school board, and high school sports teams, informs us of an upcoming event: a tour of the city’s fanciest houses, built by men of wealth and ambition at the turn of the previous century. Why we tour such places—to gawk, to lust, to covet—is a mystery I’ve contemplated more than once. Here is one such contemplation.

[…]

Guidebooks lapse into silence on the sins
that undergird their granite disciplines:

the dark red sandstone brooding on the hill
over the history of a steel-spiked will
that built and built and never had enough—
a public treasure now, it rules the bluff
and makes us marvel at our rush to own
the memory of the men it turned to stone.

Which we preserve, the robber baron’s guilt
being gilded by the loveliness he built.
As for a feast day, every year we come
to hear the engines of our envy hum,
sighing for beauties, knowing what they meant.
Not quite complicit. Not quite innocent.

Maryann Corbett, “to hear the engines of our envy hum . . .”

Had you heard of “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” when you were eleven? I had not. I’m not even sure I had heard of Keats. My main poetry experience was Pam Ayres’ “I wish I’d looked after my teeth” (which I still think is wonderful, whatever the poetry overlords say) and a smattering of Patience Strong. My old and very posh art teacher was astonished at my ignorance. The memory of her astonishment pops into my head as autumn tiptoes in. Light recedes day by day, the air I breathe when I let the cat out (and in and out and in) in the morning has a faint chill, the smells change from sun warmed jasmine and barbecues to damp leaves and bonfires. Mists begin to wrap the morning, and supermarkets proclaim the arrival of “British season apples” which implies mellow fruitfulness exists somewhere. I’ll miss the light of summer but autumn brings the gift of time. The garden takes less attention, people stop having barbecues and other social excitements, trips out are replaced by staying in and watching Ludwig. More than anything, it brings me the time and energy to write. If you’re familiar with Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory you’ll know exactly what I mean. […]

Poetry has slipped to one side for a while. I’ve a new Poetry School course starting soon which I know will spark the poetic light again, but overall I’ve found I’m just not as excited as I was. I’ve reached a point of stasis. The giddy excitement of being selected to be one of Nine Arches Press Dynamo poets, learning that I could have work published and actually seeing my words and name in print has moved to one side. I’ve reached all the goals I set myself way back in 2018. I’m published in magazines including my goal of goals which was to be in Under the Radar. I’ve published two books, entered and been shortlisted for various prizes and I’m not sure where poetry will take me next. I’m not putting poetry aside forever; notes are still being made, the mysteries of the sestina still thrill and baffle me and I’m still writing poetry for wedding readings, which brings a joy all of its own.

As well as travel writing I’m dipping back into short fiction. I love creating worlds inspired by a photograph or picture (old postcards are especially exciting) and am acutely aware of the place all those poetry skills have in creating them. It’s a genre I haven’t worked in since my first forays (back) into creative writing and I’m hoping the quiet months of autumn and winter mean I’ll have time and energy to rejuvenate my skills.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Shine the sun and rain the rain

When I have seen jays before I have often caught of a glimpse of them as they have flown across short spaces within forest areas and I have always felt lucky to catch this rare flash of their distinct feathers. The one this week, in my own garden, caught my attention as I was settling to work at my laptop. On being observed it flew from the wall and thudded to a stop on the roof above me. I went outside to take a closer look, but it had already moved on by the time I got outside. The ginger cat had been watching me one night as I was unloading the tumble dryer in the back porch. I felt that wonderful sense of being lifted from my own world because I was being observed in a kind and curious way. And there studying me was the lovely solid looking cat that has recently been sleeping in a sheltered spot in our garden. We blinked at each other and then, as I smiled at the thought of being noticed whilst doing a boring but necessary job, off he went.

I am sort of making a note to self to notice more things on my daily walk and this brings to mind the fact that it feels like a solid fitness thing to do at this time of year when compared to the lightness of taking the same walk in spring when the daffodils are emerging. Photos at this time of year also seem to be of solid things like tree trunks against the sky or cows so maybe I will look for the light as I stroll out and see where it is that I find it in this new Autumn. I know it was in the sunrise and sunset of Saturday into Sunday, and I know those two studied views gladdened my heart.

Sue Finch, GLANCES, GLIMPSES AND OBSERVATIONS

This is our life, made of small
moments. Hearing the call

of a bird, resonant
as a bell, longing

and desire become
indistinguishable.

Luisa A. Igloria, Occasional

“I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” This was Annie Dillard quoting Vincent Van Gogh. Even though VVG said it, I’ll always connect the quotation to her. The way that a person looking at the intricate beauty of the world and interpreting it in the way only they can, is also an act of heartbreak. And for credibility’s sake, there is always bad news right beside the news of the beauty of the world. Thus heartbreak. Thus utterly.

Shawna Lemay, Because it is September

I had just been talking to a friend about how our social habits changed during the pandemic, and how I was so much less social than I used to be. Well not this week! Besides visiting with my farmer friends at the various pumpkin farms, we also had our Bookwalter’s Wine and Book Club, where we discussed Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. People were really taken by it, and I noticed this time around (I hadn’t re-read in a little while) the huge Bowie connection in the poems, and listened to the songs that were referenced. I was aware of Bowie as a kid but I think I mostly remember a couple of his later songs, but of course my main crush was Prince, who wasn’t quite as interested in space. Then the next day we had our poetry group, which was wonderful as usual and we talked about submission opportunities and shared poems and Glenn’s gluten-free red pepper and goat cheese pizza, and pumpkin cheesecake, and I ate more than my share of Witch’s Finger grapes (another seasonal favorite! And we’re even coordinating a pumpkin farm visit and maybe movie get-together. After being so sick back in 2016-17 and then the pandemic, this feels more like my life used to be. Did I mention I have updated my resume and will be job hunting as well?

Good News to Share…Soon

Do you hate when people in the writing world tease good news they can’t share? Me too. That’s why I’m definitely not saying that I got good news that I can share soon, and I have to say that after a period of discouragement with the poetry world, it’s nice to have a little good news in a while, right?

I’ve also been writing more poems and sending out more work. That’s September’s magic – unwrapping new pens, setting up new spreadsheets, a little more motivation to keep going, especially on the days when it’s in the sixties and sunny and the hummingbirds are still busy at the last burst of September blooms.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! And How Many Pumpkin Farms, Social Week, and Good News to Come!

糸瓜忌の紅茶に消ゆる角砂糖　秋元不死男

hechima-ki no kōcha ni kiyuru kakuzatō

            Shiki’s Death Day
            a lump of sugar disappears
            into tea

                                    Fujio Akimoto

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

Fay’s Note: Fujio Akimoto (1901-1977). Shiki Masaoka (b 1867) died on September 19, 1902.  Because his death haiku was about ‘hechima (gourd),” his death anniversary is called “hechima-ki.”

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 19, 2026)

The poet called this morning. My electricity had just gone out and I was plotting my next move in the dark. “Is it a good time to speak?” he said. I ran through a quick itinerary of pressing issues in my head with a rotating leaderboard of the top three items that consisted of: crippling existential loneliness, Chelsea Football Club’s current defensive frailty, whether rhyming ‘apothecary’ with ‘apology’ in a poem I’ve made about Keats was absolutely necessary or just plain clunky.

The poet was waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” I said as my phone pinged a notification from my bank. I’d exceeded my overdraft limit. Again. “It’s a great time,” I said.

I put the poet on loudspeaker and used my phone’s screen to light up the electric meter, to see if I had any emergency credit left. I didn’t. I gave the junction box a gentle tap, the analogue approach, hopeful I may nudge the circuitry back into action. Short of resorting to a hammer or a high kick, blending a lightness of touch with a belief in magic has never yet produced satisfactory results in terms of getting the power back on but this is not to say it wouldn’t work this time. I am not conducting the same experiment expecting different results, I am manifesting forces known only to the practitioners of poetry where subtle fluctuations are at play, creative oscillations that can produce unusual conclusions. We may sit at our desks at the same time of day, open the same note book, use the same pen, the same ink, the same laptop and software but different poems will appear. The outcome is always unique.

I reach out, focus, make a connection, I might, just might, channel enough energy to transfer some Wattage through my fingers and feed the supply. I feel alive. I summon my inner electricity. The spirit of Walt Whitman is here, with me, in a damp subterranean flat in Hackney. But I am all volt and no current. The lights do not come back on. I remain in the dark.

“What’s happening?” I ask the poet, “Talk to me.”

Jan Noble, N°82 How Swan made it to San Francisco

This week: a heady mix of scents, the spaces between pains, shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals, and much more. Enjoy.

The grass has sprung back into shape after plenty of rain and it seems strange to be needing to be cutting it after weeks of watching it turn yellow (and rather crispy) and not need much attention. Pleasingly its flourishing green renewal has renewed my energy for gardening, and I have thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air. I have also enjoyed the scents I have carried with me on my skin as a result of doing some cutting back and weeding. On the first day I smelt of rosemary, on the second lavender, and finally blackcurrants. A heady mix of scents.

I have often been found at my desk this past week squeezing in some extra writing time for the Tea Towel Poems. Those that have been out in the world have received feedback from their recipients, and for those yet to reach a couple celebrating their anniversary I have invited my lovely wife into poetry corner to listen to my drafts. She is good at giving me a succinct and honest reaction and can easily alert me when something I have written only really makes sense in my head. At one point I realised that I could make the necessary tweaks by changing the title of a particular poem. And Kath’s response to the fact it might mean the poem had a long title? “It can’t be any longer than that one about drawers!” Reader, there are drawers in the title of that poem but it’s not just about drawers!

Sue Finch, MARGARINE TUBS OF MARBLES AND ERASERS

秋晴や行きたきところとてもなく　片山由美子

akibare ya yukitaki tokoro totemo naku

            autumn clear sky−
            no particular place
            I would like to go

                                                Yumiko Katayama    

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 13, 2026)

Temperatures are cooling, but most of our days still have the blue clarity that brings people outdoors, the ideal weather for yard and garage sales. There are lots of them in this mixed neighborhood of homeowners and student renters. I’ve always had conflicting feelings about these sales; to me they signify endings or passages. To others, though, they connote neighborly conviviality. […]

What germ of evil in our past
infected this computer’s sheath,
once beige, now with a yellowish cast
like rotten teeth?

The screw loose and the weak-linked chain:
Nothing in literature or art
so bluntly explicates the line
Things fall apart….

They lie there derelict, unhaggled,
wasted, remaindered, on the skids,
redemptionless. But now a gaggle
of college kids

has blown in on a gale of laughter,
talking trash. May youth forgive
the faults age will no longer suffer!
May these bones live.

Maryann Corbett, Yard Sale Weather

I found my most beloved prose writer, Marguerite Duras. Just saying that feels as though I am a child and my favorite color is blue, or yellow. She is every color. If you know Duras, you know her work and life are things of pain, truly. And also immense passion, contradiction, expression. A constant looking back at childhood, at what is no longer, at the mother wound, the father wound. She told me early on that The Wound is the thing to be obsessed over, stoked, and alchemized. Abandonment, family dysfunction, alcoholism, douleur; these things pervaded her inner world, and she chased them on the page.

I did not expect this, but standing at her tomb, I felt a tenderness toward this woman I have never met and could never truly know. I suppose I wanted to see her grave to ask if she is alright, and to also be tended to by her as a woman and as a writer.

As I moved through the glittering carousel energy of Paris, I imagine her in these streets with her contemporaries, at cafes and bars, creating beauty while she moved through her own shadow. I asked her to bless me.

And then I went to César Vallejo, whose grave is tucked into a row. It is easy to miss, even with directions. Vallejo is the reason I ‘became’ a poet—not just dabbled in it. A friend of mine in college, Lisa, gave me a translated copy of his book Spain Take This Chalice From Me (note: there are other translatons of this title). It became my heart because he taught me the heart of poetry could be difficult, could be violent, could be wild and surreal.

His avant-garde tendencies (he even used automatic writing) and darkness showed me new doorways, new permissions. I was young and didn’t understand the politics of his world then, but I knew the language had a ferocity that could contain and express human suffering. He is the reason I love bold language, strangeness, fucked up syntax, the visceral, the embracing of the ugly and warped and broken. Seeing him moved me deeply. I thanked him profusely. I asked him to bless me.

Lisa Marie Basile, Literary ghosts of Montparnasse cemetery

I am absolutely delighted to share “’To Bear Witness to One’s Own Life’: A Conversation Between Hyejung Kook and Mia Ayumi Malhotra,” published in Poetry Northwest online! I only knew Mia slightly when I agreed to interview her about her latest collection, MOTHERSALT (Alice James Books, 2025), but now, after going back and forth for many months, I feel lucky to have gotten to know her and her work much more deeply. […]

I’m still a year out from my book release, but this feels like a pre-debut of my debut. It’s difficult to concisely sum up a book, but here’s my current attempt: ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH is a collection haunted not only by loss—death and miscarriage most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, peonies reemerging in spring, the taste of salt licked from your palm, the music of overlapping voices and languages.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

As I enter this new phase in the memoir project, I’m facing a fork in the road, and both roads give me agita. First, I’m spilling my tea to anyone who reads the book. But also, I have to figure out how to get people to read the book. It’s hide-and-seek. I’ve been hiding my whole life, and now I want to be sought after.

The count down to publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise, is now 9 months away: a full gestation. Due in Pride month.

Right now, I’m working with editors who want me to inject more feeling into some of the adverse events in the story. (Again, please. This time with feeling!)

But here’s the thing . . .

. . . there is some potentially upsetting material in this story, no lie. We even talked about content warnings, which I am not a fan of. Warnings weren’t a “thing” when my stories unfolded, mostly in the 60s and 70s. The truth is I didn’t know that the awful things that happened to me were awful. If you are a woman who lived through those decades, you know exactly what I mean.

Risa Denenberg, Changing Focus

Back in the mists of the 2000s, the GCSE poetry paper for our exam board had a section that asked students to compare a selection of poems from two set poets. You got to choose Duffy and Armitage, or Heaney and Clarke. This was the anthology that made headlines in 2008, when the government decided that the rising tide of knife crime in the UK must be due to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure, and removed it from the syllabus. Remember that? (Macbeth was absolutely fine though.) Anyway, that didn’t affect me because I was the only one in my department at the time who wanted to teach Heaney and Clarke. It was a perfect pairing. I had a lovely time teaching that syllabus. The students, who ended up spending great chunks of their exam time flipping back and forth through an unwieldy booklet of poems, not so much. But they didn’t hate Heaney, at least. And that’s how I got to know his famous, glorious, 1966 debut (debut!!! IMAGINE!!!) collection Death of a Naturalist. I could have taught those poems until the end of my days and never, ever got sick of them. […]

Throughout Death of a Naturalist, we are shown a childhood and a history that is ended, an innocence that can’t last, an anxious step into adulthood and the future. What steadies it in the end is memory, and love, and poetry. In the last poem of the collection, Personal Helicon, Heaney tells us ‘as child, they could not keep me from wells’ and ends by explaining that, because staring into wells is ‘beneath all adult dignity [.] I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’ It’s the best definition of poetry I know.

Nia Broomhall, Week 26: Death of a Naturalist

a rat will rearrange things:
loaf of bread
now by the back door,
candlesticks tipped over,
cupcake in the sink.
you with a boy inside
sprawl in a soft chair
counting the spaces between pains
while it cowers behind the washer.
we’ll get him later you call
lovingly between contractions,
your husband on his knees
with a knife […]

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Labor Day

I was delighted to find that fellow poet, Neil Leadbeater, had brought out another collection, shared this time with Lori Levy (interviewed by Neil here). The very title, Flavours, conjures up a lavish spread of glorious food for the reader’s enjoyment; who could fail to be drawn in by those zesty lemons that adorn the cover, painted in acrylics by Katie Bayer?

The first half is given over to Lori’s poems under the intriguing heading, ‘Lemons, Eggplants and Chocolate Chip Cookies’. Neil’s poems follow under the heading, ‘The Fruits of Our Labour’ (Psalm 128:2 comes to mind). The final section contains ‘Dialogue Poems’ which unfold in a poetic conversation between the two poets, with Lori’s words on each verso and Neil’s poems of response on the opposite recto. 

The Contents page alone is enough to set one’s mouth watering, with its mention of ‘Peach’, ‘Pomelo’, ‘Pistachio’ and ‘Olives’. Perhaps somewhat unusually for poets today, Lori and Neil have not shied away from the inclusion of humour, an ingredient (sorry…) that enhances these beautifully crafted texts and brings a wry smile to my face. To humour we can add a compelling sense of playfulness, an aspect that is particularly appreciated in these difficult times.

Caroline Gill, Poetry Book Review: ‘Flavours’ by Lori Levy and Neil Leadbeater

Hedgerow of Voices, Paul Brookes, Jane’s Studio Press, 2026, ISBN:‎ 978-1068432378, €6.94 (There’s an email contact on the publisher’s About & Contact page)

In Your Mouth, Paul Brookes, Culture Matters, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, £10

The Drey Skin, Paul Brookes, The Red Ceilings Press, 2026, £10

Paul Brookes is something of a polymath: poet, shop worker, interviewer and editor of, amongst other things, The Starbeck Orion. But it is his work as a poet that is of interest to us here, with these three new publications all out this year, but with a span of half a decade or more behind them, each one different but with overlapping formal and thematic threads woven through them. I’m reading through them in the order they came through the letterbox, but you could start and end with any of them, really.

Hedgerow of Voices consists of four sets of individually titled sonnets (with one outlier): ‘On River Dove’, ‘Old Moor’, ‘Hedgerow of Voices’ and ‘On North Star’. The first and third are linked sonnets by virtue of the last line of one being the first line of the next.

‘Woolley’, the second poem in ‘On River Dove’, opens with these lines:

Daced and Barbeled, swirls and ripples, rivered.
Cuts through an ancient sandstone riverbed
Ripples fossilised. Earth remembered
lost river. Water’s higher speeds thread

velocities sand grains roll, ripples
form, move with the flow, have short, steep downstream
sides.

The twisting, turning syntax enacts the fish-swim through space and geological time while the linking last/first lines pull us along. And the twists and turns move us from the deep geological past to the Anthropocene present with the closing couplet of the sequence:

A hungry AI data centre feeds,
sups my future till there is no more me.

‘Old Moor’ moves us to another part of the landscape, and also to another part of Brookes’ range, as the final poem in the sequence, also called ‘Old Moor’, moves away from the constraints of the sonnet form and finds its own verbal music:

In hush of sorting sidings,
A dance begins – Lapwing shadows shunters
each wagon, each bird, searches place,
pushed gently over the Hump,
A rise no steeper than a banked field
where Redshank pick through pools.

In ‘Hedgerow of Voices’, the linking again leads us through the weave of the hedge, a site teeming with life, feeding, breeding and renewing itself.

Billy Mills, Three by Paul Brookes: A Review

Béatrice Douvre was a French poet who died, aged only 27, in 1994. Although she published a few poems in magazines during her lifetime, the great bulk of the Collected Poems are drawn from unpublished material found in her papers after her premature death. The earliest of these poems date from 1986, when she was 19; the last of them were written just a few days before she died. In French, her Oeuvre poétique has been available since 2000; this is the first complete translation into English.

This substantial paperback edition, running to over 500 pages in a large format, prints the French verse and English translations (by John Taylor) on facing pages. The book also includes the translation of a brief preface by Philippe Jaccottet, written originally for the French edition. Jaccottet, who died in 2021, was a Swiss poet, translator and critic whose poetry and essays are still ubiquitous in the poetry section of even the smallest French bookshop; several of Douvre’s poems are dedicated to him. This gives you a sense of the extent to which her poetry was embraced and endorsed by the French poetry ‘establishment’. In his excellent introduction on ‘Translating Béatrice Douvre’, Taylor says her work has a ‘mesmerizing lyric élan’, while the publisher of the collected poems in French called her ‘a meteor avid for the absolute’.

Both these descriptions point to the signature intensity of Douvre’s lyric voice. The typical Douvre poem is short – less than a page long, and sometimes only a few lines; light on punctuation; musical without following any specific formal scheme; precise in its evocation of emotion (emotion more than particular recognizable experiences); surprising in its diction; and systematically slightly surreal – surreal, I mean, in its unexpected use of words, but also in its unusual angle of perception and a kind of hyper-focus on the minutiae of observation and response. This intensity of focus creates ultimately a sort of distance from experience as well as an intensifying of it.

Douvre’s use of language is frequently exhilarating. Here is Douvre’s original and Taylor’s version of the first half of the poem ‘L’outrepassante’ (‘She Who Goes Beyond’), dedicated to the poet René Char. The title of the volume, Inhabit the Brief Halt, is taken from the first line:

Habiter la halte brève
La rive avant la traverse
La distance fascinée qui saigne
Et la pierre verte à l’anse des ponts

Dans la nuit sans fin du splendide amour
Porter sur l’ombre et la détruire
Nos voix de lave soudain belliqueuses
L’amont tremble de nos tenailles

Inhabit the brief halt
The shore before the crossing
The fascinated distance that bleeds
And the green stone at the arch of bridges

In the endless night of splendid love
Bring onto the shadow and destroy it
Our lava voices, suddenly warlike,
The upstream tremulous with our pincers

Here we have several examples of Taylor’s great strengths as a translator and also the choices and compromises involved in any such translation. ‘Inhabit the brief halt’ is a wonderful translation for Habiter la halte brève, with just the right edge of peremptory strangeness. ‘Halt’ is also, of course, the most obvious translation of halte because it is etymologically the same word. Taylor quite often chooses the etymologically closest option, even when it is not the closest in everyday meaning. ‘Halt’ exists in French and English alike as both a verb (often a command: “Halt!’) and a noun, but in English the noun ‘halt’ is much rarer than the French equivalent. Halte remains a fairly common word for a pause or break in French; a halte-garderie, for example, is the standard term for a common kind of part-time crèche. We might notice something similar about ‘fascinated’ (fascinée) and ‘splendid’ (splendide): in both cases, the English word has a slightly different or narrower range of uses in everyday speech and a somewhat different tone or register than the French equivalent. In all three of these instances, the English translation arguably makes the line a little stranger even than it is in the original.

I think Taylor does this on purpose to create a sense of dislocation and disorientation. This reminds us that we are reading a translation and encourages us – if we can – to refer to the original, but it is also a translation strategy specific to, and appropriate for, this particular poet. Almost every one of Douvre’s extant poems suggest an experience of the world so intense and minute that it feels like a kind of dislocation. 

Victoria Moul, The foam or the blaze: the poetry of Béatrice Douvre

Patricia Lockwood is a wonderful prose writer — and also the author of one of my favourite tweets — but she hasn’t published a new collection of poems since Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014). Agate Head / Stone Soup (Bloomsbury) is a double volume with a preface that describes how her imagination returned to poetry through a combination of avoiding the internet, learning metalsmithing, going on bike rides, and taking what she sees as Sylvia Plath’s attitude to poems: “Write them straight through, from beginning to end, don’t mess with them too much, and tell people you’re doing it”. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #47: Newfangleness

Edward Lear (1812–1888) must surely count as one of the most interesting and peculiar figures to live in the Victorian age — and that’s saying something, for the Victorians were as interestingly peculiar a people as the world has ever known.

A commercial artist, best known for his illustrations of scientific and popular books about birds, he was also a musician. And painter. And composer. And eccentric traveler. And inventor of the limerick (leaving aside Mother Goose’s ur-texts). Out of all his work, it is his nonsense verse that has survived: poetic extravagances that, though they are mostly taken as children’s poetry these days, he intended as works to be appreciated by adults. Nonsense is serious business, and Lear was the best at it. Think of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” (which we offered in February), “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” or “The Table and the Chair.”

Or take Today’s Poem, the 1877 “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” In six eight-line stanzas, Lear shows us his rollicking meter of three and four feet, with just enough dactyls to make the lines tumble across the tongue. The comic poem shows a genius of a small kind: interesting and peculiar. And fun. What more could one want from nonsense?

But it’s also worth noticing how rhyme drives the internal logic of the nonsense.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Pobble Who Has No Toes

The second full-length collection from Montreal-based poet and intermedia artist Leigh Kotsilidis, following Hypotheticals (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], is Some of Us May Live (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection some fifteen years, one might reason, in the making. I’m intrigued by the steady punch of Kotsilidis’ sharp and short-lined lyric sketchworks, offering accumulating phrases that thread together to form narrative shapes. Just listen to the opening of the three-page poem “FIRST PRINCIPLES,” that begins: “A theory exists / for each of us. // To stop motion, / something heavier must intervene. // There is nothing / that won’t crush you. // The more you suffer, / the more you remember. // A crisis churns / out opportunity. // Fame promises fun / until someone ODs. // We pay heed / only to what is useful.” Kotsilidis’ narrative shapes nearly form rings, from the phrase and the sentence to the poem, and into the collection itself, a book-length single moment of perpetual clarity. One might say that the sentences and phrases of Hypotheticals extend and interplay with an ongoingness, almost as a book-length line, broken up into line breaks and individual poems, run almost continuous from the first page to the last. Or, as the poem “WHAT WE CAN’T SEE” begins: “We wade at the edge / of what is beyond us // There is nothing more / than delusion // Men mistake porch bulbs / for moons // A body drifts indeterminately / unnoticed // Every body leaves / over time [.]”

At nearly one hundred and thirty pages (albeit with thirty pages of endnotes, perhaps the most I’ve seen for an individual poetry title), there’s a heft to this collection, and a shift in an ecopoetic from focusing the impact of climate crisis upon the landscape to that of the world’s inhabitants, offering a kind of bestiary, one comparable to Vancouver poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s own full-length poetry debut from the same publisher, The Animal in the Room (2023) [see my review of such here]. “How / to communicate that / which has no name // or why a name said / again and again and again / dissipates.” she writes, to close the short poem “SUBLIMATION,” “Lying / among such incessancy / our bodies // concede; / a thousand bees / devour us irretrievably.” Kotsilidis’ clear-eyed interiorities ripple across the lyric, the landscape, attempting to articulate the question of how one is able to live amid such self-created crises. “We raise stone / and concrete edifices. / The only sounds between walls / the ones we create.” she writes, as part of “SCALE PROBLEM,” “We dismiss birds that signal / heavy weather. / Wait out high winds / threatening the next resonance disaster.” From stardust to oceans, suburbia to glaciers, selfies to snow fences, the scale of these accumulated poems, these questions, observations and life-lessons, is enormously rich, varied and complex, managing to encapsulate everything there is and might be, fully aware it can never be contained.

rob mclennan, Leigh Kotsilidis, Some of Us May Live

While waiting for the arrival of John Chmura’s new poetry collection, 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens, I listened to an audio version of John McPhee’s classic book, The Pine Barrens (1968), a seminal work of environmental and cultural reportage that began as a series of articles in The New Yorker in autumn 1967. McPhee’s descriptions of a vast landscape, ethereal and haunting, are echoed in Chmura’s poetry. Since this is a tale of two Johns, I’ll use their surnames throughout this blog post to avoid confusion.

Beyond the immense natural beauty, there are cultural and ecological tensions. Chmura’s collection opens on a winter highway with artillery practice heard in the distance, while “the only sign of life is roadkill.” There are road signs, though, and the green highway sign on the book’s cover is County Route 539 through the Pine Barrens, where he composed many of his poems. At times the signature trees are “phantom limbs draped in fog,” but the forest is always alive, and it is wiser than we are. From his poem, ‘Arborism’:

Never before has peaceable pine
or roving oak stumbled into a human grove
and thought how beautiful
are these creatures, snapping selfies,
to share with tendrilled friends.

After reading the collection, I commented to John: “I am tempted to blog this… not a review, but a reflection on your book in conversation with McPhee’s, as a reader encountering the region for the first time through these texts.” In response, he noted that the Pine Barrens are changing, not only from new development and natural disasters, but ethnic and religious tensions on the rise. In light of this, he wondered if some of his more speculative poems might come across as escapist.

Jenevieve Carlyn, “Histories in snakeskin and gossamer”: Reading John Chmura’s 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens

There is an early – now lost – paper by Boris Pasternak called ‘Symbolism and Immortality’ which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being ‘the common property of man’. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his ‘Essay in Autobiography’ written in 1956 and he goes on, ‘I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity – the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content’. He then remembers concluding that ‘the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience’ (tr. Manya Harari, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).

In Pasternak’s own work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as ‘I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings’ (‘I want the heart of the matter’) and ‘Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self’ (‘Fame’s not a pretty sight’). In struggling to complete ‘Essays in Island Logic’ I felt I had been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain, or assert, its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I felt more sanguine about this – chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience – it’s not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh – my set of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised, according to my personal self. As Pasternak argues though, each individual self has sufficient in common with all mankind so that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.

It strikes me this is not far from Keats’ valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being – a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship – and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more and try to understand it far less – the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It short cuts the truth – at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive at times (of trouble) but it is always an error. Odysseus learns this I think in the ‘Essays’ sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous – the perceiver of vivid contrast of necessity, us and them, victory and defeat). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade but rather to take life as a whole.

In contrast, his son, Telemachus, remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism – what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house etc) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical with her portrayal – yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poem sequence, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution – if we can speak in such terms – is an openness of soul. There: I’ve said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.

Martyn Crucefix, Another Look at Odysseus (after seeing Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’)

Here is my interview at Lithub with Emily Wilson. I really enjoyed doing this—keeping the focus on translation.

One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.

Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.

Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.

Leanne Ogasawara, Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It In Conversation

If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.

And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.

Nope.

I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.

Ann E. Michael, Radio Nowhere

I’m not a believer in a writer being a “channel” for receiving language from some other-worldly place. I know that it is me writing the things I write, though I try to remain open to possibility, to play with sound and language in ways that are pleasing to the ear, to freewrite into weirdness. And these can lead to unexplained juxtapositions and successful moves I would not have come up with otherwise. But sometimes, I can arrive at a place where I surprise myself, write a line or an idea that makes me wonder “Where did that come from?” or “Did I really write that?” And, in my experience, that is when I know I have something.

I think this may be the reason that topical prompts usually leave me cold. When I set out to write about a specific topic, or focus on a linear narrative type of prompt (i.e., “a time when”), I lose the very thing I love about writing—the play and the experimentation. The magic beans in the breakfast cereal. The horns pushing through a nightgown. The meandering and the mess. The trusting of the internal compass to lead me to a place that is both crafted and “witch-crafted,” by which I mean, built with intention but also allowing for the unexplained to creep in.

More often than not, this approach leaves me with poems that never see the light of day. Journals and computer file folders full of them, to be honest. I just threw away a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals that have been collecting dust in the basement for years, thinking they held some kind of magic or mystery. But as I flipped through them, I realized that they were not special. They were frighteningly similar in some aspects over the years—entries about teaching stress or my frustration with my weight in the pages that weren’t poem ideas, and poem ideas that had either been fleshed out and moved long ago to the computer or died on the page. There was no need to keep them, and tossing them out felt a little like lifting an anchor, leaving me ready to sail on into whatever unexplained mystery comes next. In writing. In living. In a place where not everything needs an explanation to feel true.

Donna Vorreyer, Unsolved Mysteries

Writing poetry is a bit like a sculptor at work, carving a block of stone. The art is inside the stone, and all the excess must be removed to get to the art itself. An important point to remember is the finished statue or carving already exists inside that block of stone, but excess and portions of rock must be continually removed until the art is reached. But it’s there waiting. It’s been there. […]

The poem I was trying to draft became knotted, jumbled, unclear – too much telling on my part and even, in some lines, too much showing. Both may be equally damaging to the piece being written IF the poem is something else entirely. If my feeling about the subject matter is large, I might think the writing needs to be large. No. It’s not always that way. With this poem, “9,” my feeling was large, but the writing needed to become more laser-like, more focused. I began to cut away, to let go of phrasing, of images – and the piece found the page. The poem isn’t haiku, but it is fairly brief, twelve lines. My feeling was intense, and I wanted the poem to be long, to be full. My want for the piece was getting in the way of a poem. The poem wanted and needed something else, something less.

Sam Rasnake, Here, Let Me Bore You for a Bit

I never automatically assumed that poetry primarily belonged on the page. I wrote exclusively with live audiences in mind. When I came into a windfall after doing the Nationwide ad, I never even considered a collection — my money went on taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, which then toured UK theatres in 2018. It was only when VERVE approached me to publish the show’s poems in a book that I even began to consider them on the page.

I also believe that class plays a role here. I come from a working-class background, and whilst creativity was always encouraged (my dad is a very talented painter), the publishing industry always seemed way out of reach, to the extent that it wasn’t even on my radar.

Finally, I have to confess that impatience is also a factor. Which makes sense considering I was diagnosed with ADHD in June last year, but when I first started, ADHD was just a lyric in a Natasha Bedingfield song.

If I’ve written a poem, I want it on MySpace Music within the hour, and I want to perform it at Escobar when I’m hosting an indie gig tomorrow night. No way am I spending two years chipping away at a manuscript with all of the poems in the dark.

Poetry is punk, it’s DIY, it’s urgent and essential. Spoken word poetry (or poetry spoken aloud) requires no barriers or equipment: it only needs an audience, an opportunity, a moment. This is what I loved about it in those early days and what I still love about it now. It can happen very quickly and spontaneously when it needs to, and if there are two things that a poetry collection isn’t, it’s quick and spontaneous.

On submitting my collection for typesetting – guest post by Matt Abbott (Trish Hopkinson)

Performance establishes the tone much more clearly, makes the main thrust of the poem unmissable. The print version, while initially harder to penetrate, permits more nuance and subtlety, and ends up feeling more complete and cohesive.

But is it true to say that there have emerged, broadly speaking, two distinct types of poem: one attuned more to the page, one to the stage? It’s hard to deny it entirely. When you listen to the kind of work performed at poetry slams, then turn to what is published in prominent poetry journals and award-winning books — or even if you compare poems distributed in video form to those published as texts — it’s apparent that different traits are prized. […]

Essentially, one might say that the stage poem is angled toward the limbic system — the part of us that feels and reacts instinctively — while the page engages the neocortex, the part of the brain that processes ideas, patterns and language more deeply and methodically. As such, the ‘page poem’ has come to be defined in contrast to the stage poem, as a primarily intellectual form — a vessel for new, difficult and delicate ideas which are unlikely to provoke immediate excitement.

The full picture is more complex. Page poems, of course, also make use of rhythm and rhyme — effects that are felt before they are understood. They are full, too, of emotional cues. And it is possible to find a balance; skilled performers and writers can come up with work that fits comfortably into both environments, even if it means they don’t take full advantage of one or the other.

Additionally, the two modes have actively sought compromise. Poetry publishers desire the larger, more diverse audience that the stage poem is able to draw so much more easily, while performer-poets and their promoters are attracted by the less short-lived nature of a successful book, as well as the stronger claim that page poems have to an artistic lineage. So both will sometimes imitate aspects of the other, and individual poets will often try to straddle the line, with varying degrees of success.

Jon Stone, RESOURCE / “Are stage poems and page poems different things?”

I suppose now is a good time to read the comments from one reader and then another. They represent two types of negative commentary: incurious and curious. One expresses what he believes is “fact” while the other admits his comment is an “opinion” based on evidence. One wants attention but is resistant to intellectual engagement while the other one desires a conversation.

From what I gather, the section of the poem which reads the most like “crumbly cement” is where I employed apophatic rhetoric, meant to riff on one of the most poetic sections of the New Testament, the definition of love explored in 1 Corinthians:

“Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited…”

There are things in the first half of the poem that have hidden meanings for me and my husband, such as the fact I have a severe allergy to the cherry blossoms that lined the large avenue near the university where we met. And there are no quiet Sunday mornings because getting five children ready for Mass isn’t a quiet affair. (It’s mostly me shouting, “No one’s going to church looking like a HOBO!”) However, I wrote all of these in a way that I thought would be relatable to any reader. Do they read like a string of clichés? I guess to some yes, and to others no? The editor who chose this poem for publication didn’t think this was a problem.

I tried to keep memorability and musicality front and center through the use of anaphora (“It’s not…”) and strict use of iambic meter with absolutely no substitutions, which is meant to mimic the beat of the heart. (The only line that appears headless or acephalous is preceded by a line that has a feminine ending.)

The “trite” title is borrowed from a song in Disney’s original Cinderella (1950). “So This Is Love” contains lyrics like “so this is what makes life divine” and “the key to all heaven is mine / my heart has wings.” In the movie, the words simply mean the couple has fallen in love, but when considered with my poem the “heaven” is more literal. The line “I heard you hum” which describes what I saw when my husband held our baby also evokes the humming in the original song.

I’ve been reading Joshua Hren’s title essay from his new book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature. He references Scottish philosopher David Hume’s thoughts about beauty as being personal sentiment. From “Of a Standard of Taste:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (ST 7, Mil 229-30)

However, many philosophers have argued that beauty isn’t purely subjective. To counter Hume, Hren brings up German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand’s “Aesthetics” which argued that beauty “adheres to the object as a quality, independently of whether someone understands it, reacts appropriately to it, or enjoys it.” Just because someone enjoys kitsch doesn’t mean it should be celebrated as beautiful. There is a certain level of discernment that must take place, not relying on pure sentiment, and this is something that Hren understands as the co-founder of the University of St. Thomas’s MFA program where I am a student. All MFA candidates are required to take a course called Philosophy of Art and Beauty where we become well acquainted with Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers who create a foundation for exploring Thomist aesthetics which defines beauty using the three main conditions of integritas (wholeness), consonantia (proportion), and claritas (radiance or clarity). These are things I constantly think about when I write my poetry. I’ve taken Craft of Poetry, another required course, where students learn the strictest definitions of metrical order. Most of the poems I have published are pieces that I have worked on for many months, if not years, because I am working to bring a wholeness, proportion and clarity to my verse. “So This Is Love” was written over the course of a year. I challenge anyone who tells me that I don’t know about craft and that this particular poem I’ve published in Nimrod is objectively and thoroughly bad.

I know people who hate heavy metal, and I know people who love it. I know people who hate modern art and those who love it. I know people who hate any trace of didacticism in poetry, and whose who don’t mind it, or even enjoy it. I know people who like dry, crumbly scones and those who like moist, buttery ones. There is such a thing as taste, and I am willing to concede that what I write is not to someone’s liking. What I would like critics to consider is that maybe there is something good and true about a poem despite not liking it.

I am the type of person who doesn’t want positive or negative critique; I want truly critical reviews that seek to improve poetry and ask questions about it, with charity and curiosity. The goal of my life is to seek the good of others, and one of the ways for me to help other writers is to understand the craft myself. One of the skills I’ve had to develop is how to receive negative feedback — publicly and privately. But I’ve also learned that sometimes the feedback reveals more about the critic than my actual work.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Love’s Labor is Lost on Some

once, in the early pandemic, i bought
a teeth whitening kit. i was spending
way too much time with my face. mirrors
bloomed where there never had been before.
i missed everyone who used to hold me.
my flesh, like a stage curtain. i put on
a whitening strip & turned off the tv.
silence, lapping at my feet. teeth ringing
like tuning forks. when i took it off,
there wasn’t as much change as i had hoped.
instead, a soft white across my mouth.
i smiled at every mirror i could. threw out
the rest of the box.

Robin Gow, 9/8

The trouble with literary criticism—whether it is done by school children or professors or freewheeling writers—is that it cannot be defined. Some critics write about biography, some about historical context, some about the dreaded French Theory, and some pick a poem apart word by word, as if they were stripping a Sunday chicken, ready to be broken up, put back into the pot, and boiled to make stock. This is by no means an adequate list of the various ways of reading. But we can make a distinction between those people who care about the way a poem makes you feel and those who care about how it is done.

This is the distinction, as Adam Kirsch puts it in The Modern Element, between “art and magic”. We call this the distinction between enchanters and engineers, or between Prospero in his cell and Faust in his study. The magic of poetry is the way that it can create a new sense of the world—can make you believe in things not merely unbelievable, but which we know to be untrue. The art of poetry is in the specific wording of the spell—change the words, get the order wrong, and the magic will not manifest.

Critics are often divided into two groups, like sheep and goats—Iliad people and Odyssey people; comedy people and tragedy people; Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people—and we can divide them along the lines of art and magic too. When I was young, the two most obvious examples of these groups were Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler was a practitioner of Art criticism: no word could be examined too closely, nor related too carefully to the rest of the poem. Bloom was a Magic critic, who believed poetry was what Keats called “A drainless shower/Of light”, which illuminated new realms.

Of course, all such distinctions are to some extent false. You might think Samuel Johnson was an Art critic, judging poets’ care for their meter and rhyme, but we find him under the sway of poetry all the time. He was often overpowered, especially by Shakespeare, who haunted him always, by what he called “the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” That force is the essence of poetry’s magic.

For some of the Magic critics, poetry gives us access to a divine realm, a place beyond this world, Platonic, eternal, higher. Poetry is Magic in the sense that it is spiritual, giving access beyond what we can ordinarily experience. For the Art critics, Kirsch says, following Poe, poetry is a kind of mechanism that plays upon our feelings and evokes sensations. Clearly, both sorts of critic believe in Johnson’s force of poetry, but for different reasons: one because of the spiritual power of the poet, the other for his ability to work a technical use of language.

Again, we are loaded with a false distinction, but still a useful one. It is merely a trick of the rhyme, or is there a “really real” dimension of poetry, something spiritual, closer to prayer? Is poetry Longinian or Aristotelian?

Henry Oliver, What is literary criticism if it is not close reading? Art, Magic, and Common Sense.

In my classes, I’ve often used the work of Federico Herrero to talk about attention. Herrero is a Costa Rican artist whose paintings bring together vivid color, irregular shapes, landscape, abstraction, and the visual language of lived environments. One piece I’ve returned to is “Caravan,” a large 2018 oil and acrylic painting on canvas.

In “Caravan,” blocks and patches of color gather across the canvas in ways that feel dynamic and alive. There are shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, signs and landscape. Color suddenly feels like movement. Some areas feel dense and social, others more open. The eye keeps having to decide where to go, then revise that decision. The painting does not give itself over all at once.

That is part of what I love about bringing this kind of work into a classroom. It asks us to slow down and notice how we notice. The more time I spend with “Caravan,” the more I see how attention and looking are active relationships. The painting changes because I change in front of it. Or, more accurately, I become better able to see what was already there.

This connects to revision because when we return to a draft, it can be tempting to arrive with an agenda. But sometimes the draft needs us to sit with it first and let the page teach us how to read it. Revision becomes a practice of renewed attention.

José Angel Araguz, Federico Herrero and Revision as Listening

A few years ago I received an email from the great (and now, sadly, late) theatre director Michael Boyd. He had been commissioned to direct a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for the Royal Opera House, and he asked if I’d be interested in making it singable in English. Michael told me he’d read and enjoyed a version I’d made of Rilke’s Die Sonnette an Orpheus, and had hoped I might do a similar number on Alessandro Striggio’s libretto for what is often considered the first modern opera. With the benefit of hindsight, ‘hard pass’ was the one sensible answer available to me; but in my defence, I was not in possession of all the relevant info. I forgot to ask. My ego – the antihero in this little tale – was too busy with ‘It’s Michael Boyd! It’s the ROH! It’s Monteverdi! It’s Orfeo! Maybe I’ll get on the poster!’ So I agreed, and with reckless alacrity.

I’d worked with composers before. These relationships were usually described as ‘collaborative’. In my experience they were more accurately ‘cooperative’, me with them, and correctly so. Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air; composer’s edits can therefore be anything between pitiless and nonsensical, and feedback can be light. (I recall David Harsent telling me that he once delivered a libretto to Sir Harrison Birtwhistle, whose only comment was to weigh it up in his right hand with ‘Well it’s not fookin Siegfried, is it’, and then open a bottle. I’m sure his subsequent notes were more extensive.) My previous disagreements with contemporary composers mostly revolved around a bizarre collective refusal – widespread, if not universal – to take much interest in either the prosody of the English line or the form the poem supplied. A poem written in ballad meter, say, would likely end up set as something totally bonkers that made no reference to the song-form from which it was derived.

No one is suggesting that all ballads should be set to ‘Oh Susanna’, but there are plenty of sympathetic alternatives; however the power imbalance has led to a general ignorance among composers of the better solutions available. For example, while iambic pentameter can’t be sung well in 5/4 even in Bulgaria, it’s very easy to set it in a half-time 3/4 – in other words, nearly all Shakespeare works just fine as a slow waltz, e.g. Shall ONE compare thee TWO a summer’s THREE [duh dah] / Thou ONE more lovely TWO more temper-THREE [duh dah] Rough ONE do shake the TWO-ling buds of THREE [duh dah] … etc. Which, while a useless way to scan it – Nicholson Baker got too excited over this old idea in The Anthologist – is an elegant way to sing i.p., and once the bar is established, you have a lot of freedom over placing the stress. (I.p. also works great in 4/4, where you split the line over two common-time bars: go and listen to Chet Baker singing ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, rare amongst jazz standards in that it features several lines of immaculate pentameter.) But surely L’Orfeo would be a far easier job? The music was finished. The text was already half written. Best of all, Monteverdi and Striggio were dead. Despite their poor rep, I have always found the dead to make wonderful and generous collaborators. I mean some of my best friends are dead.

Don Paterson, On the Importance of Doing a Bad Job

I’ve fallen in love with the wind.
Why? Because it sounds like poetry.
Like feeling romantic with the sea
or the barn one has already left
lured by what one imagines to be
(missing, after all, a front end) the scent
of long grass and the possibility
of great distance.
Plato believed in the primordial
horse costume, each of us united
with our other half in a utopian range.
I like the unobstructed view
and the gap.

Gary Barwin, Sonata for Horse Costume

If you, like me, have been saving up poems to send out in September when lit mags tend to open, albeit briefly (onto that in a second), you may have noticed a frustrating trend: the day the magazine opens for submissions, it hits its whatever cap on Submittable—and closes the same day. I spent two hours this week trying to submit but finding every place that advertised being open actually closed because of this “cap.” A terrible way to run a lit mag, and an institutionalized way of making writers feel powerless and worthless—and believe me, we already feel that way without lit mags charging $5 to reject us after six months if we are lucky enough to get in the three-hour window (East Coast time, of course). I almost gave up submitting poetry for good. I know I get discouraged with the poetry world, the lack of acclaim, money, respect, etc.—but this new hurdle is so rotten for any working person, caregiver, or West Coast person, honestly, I thought I needed to raise the issue.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Submissions, September 11, Setbacks, and the DMV

Over the past month or so, I’ve been seeing more and more publishing opportunities for AI-generated content.

Nicole Foor, Managing Editor of NewPages, has launched a new magazine, Beat My AI. She wrote to me,

[W[ith AI policies hitting more and more mags, it is always interesting to see how journals choose to actively incorporate AI into their journals. Such is the premise of Beat My AI which accepts two kinds of work: Works where 1/3 of content is generated by AI and original human works responding and changing the AI portion of a piece into something wholly human written and “better.”

The project looks interesting. The editors argue here that no matter what your opinion about it, “AI is here to stay.” Rather than draw a hard line against the technology,

Beat My AI implements a different approach. Because no problem has ever truly been solved by burying your head in the sand or looking the other way.

But before you rush to groan or condemn them, note that their submissions guidelines are not quite what you may think.

Here, they invite works that are human-created, but which have a clearly marked section that is AI-generated. This is called the “Original.” Writers are then invited to submit work, which seeks to improve upon the AI portion. This is the “Contender.” Over six weeks, readers vote for which contender piece fits best with the original. Hence, beat my AI.

It seems like a magazine actually more dedicated to human writing than AI writing, albeit using AI as, well, a prompt to stimulate human creativity.

Whatever you think about it, I’ve certainly never seen a lit mag that openly invites submissions which improve upon what has already been published. Since, in this case, the portion to be improved upon is AI-generated, presumably no one will take offense at the suggestions!

Becky Tuch, Happiness is a Warm Lit Mag!

I have the distinct impression that written-page poets and print-based publishers are currently suffering from a growing struggle to reach their readers and customers, having gradually shifted their means of communication from snail mail to email newsletters and then to social media over the past twenty years.

Insta has always been more focused on spoken word, so the poets and publishers in question tended to concentrate their efforts on Facebook and Twitter. The former is now weighed down by ads and reels, meaning that it’s hard for posts to gain traction. Meanwhile, the average age of its users is rising.

And as for the latter, Twitter became the social media of choice for umpteen publishers and poets. Many had huge follower counts, got numerous shares and likes on their posts, and managed to drive much of their online promotional, marketing and sales activity through it. However, Twitter’s change in ownership, name and algorithms has ripped all that asunder. Many people and organisations have given up on X or limited their use of it, while the reach of posts has dropped through the floor.

In this context, a lot of outfits and individuals in the poetry world saw Bluesky as a natural alternative and rushed to open up new accounts there. A few months later, the majority of those accounts have been abandoned. I’d argue that this is because barely anybody stopped to consider that Bluesky works differently from X/Twitter, and your posts will wither and die if you attempt to follow similar communications strategies on both platforms.

Nevertheless, whatever the arguments in favour or against Bluesky might be, the fact remains that the core of U.K. written-page poets and print-based publishers are scarcely using it. But what’s their alternative plan? How do they intend to maintain contact with their readers and customers over the coming years? Given the atomisation of social media platforms, many new titles, launches, reviews, sample poems, etc, seem to be disappearing into the void. As a poetry lover, I find this situation deeply concerning. How can we communicate better?

Matthew Stewart, Communication

To round off the review, Mark [Fiddes] kindly agreed to answer three questions about the collection [Hotel Petroleum] and I have included his answers in full below.

Your work combines elements of reportage with deeply impressionistic, lyrical expression. How do you judge where to strike the balance between the two in a poem, or indeed across a collection?

At a time when the leader of the free world has effectively turned current affairs into a reality TV show with him as the host/ringmaster, you want to say “Stop! These are real people. Real schools. Real bombs.” At the same time, you need to take a breath and say “Wait, have you tasted the pomegranate juice?” I believe our role as poets more than ever is to restore some sense of humanity and vulnerability to our increasingly transactional discourse.

Another strain within your work seems concerned with accenting, even playing with, the absurdities of modern life, e.g. rampant consumerism, the hyperbole of ad copy, the dehumanising language of bureaucracy. Where does this influence come from? Do you draw on your experiences as a creative director and formerly as a journalist?

Yes. I have had to write in many different modes and voices over the years, from investigative reporter at the Pentagon to scripting for National Geographic and even Durex. It’s hard not to let that language leak into the poetry – or sometimes to adopt it as a template. For example one of the pieces in the book came from an Out Of Office vacation message that grew into a poem. Last week, I flipped an irritated email to IKEA into a lyrical design brief for a new sofa.

I particularly enjoyed those poems in Hotel Petroleum where you seem to be in conversation with certain representatives of the canon (Larkin, John Clare…) and with the idea of what it is to be a poet. What do you think about the state of poetry today? Are we in good health?

In theory, yes. Global sales are up. Distribution via social media has never been higher. But poetry must take on today’s big challenges to remain relevant. First, Populism and its goose-stepping algorithms that divide and ‘other’ society. Poetry is the opposite. Its power is the power of belonging, to remind us of the basic humanity that unites us. The second challenge is artificial intelligence reducing the agency we have over our own lives. Poetry can be the wake-up call not to outsource our curiosity and experience but to relish the lucidity of the present moment.

Mark Fiddes lives in the Middle East and Catalonia, although he is currently in Prague as poet-in-residence in Kafka’s House for Prague UNESCO City of Literature. He has written three other books of poetry and a libretto ‘Threadlands’ with composer Joanna Marsh. His work has won the Ledbury Prize, the Oxford Brookes University Prize and the Ruskin Prize with awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Forward Poetry Prize and many more.

Victoria Spires, Welcome to your chosen moral universe, enjoy your stay

i’m currently preparing some notes towards a round table discussion on resisting the right through arts and culture. one of the provocations i’ve been set to think about is why the right are winning the war of ideas. to which my still incomplete answer is something like this: it’s not a war of ideas, it’s a war on ideas, one the entire media and communications architecture of the twenty-first century is geared to facilitate. it isn’t just that new platforms facilitate the spread of right-wing ideology, but that the kinds of discourse that they foster favour fascist thinking: shallow, aestheticised content, encouraging (also monetising) extreme declarative speech acts that admit no doubt, no otherwise, no challenge; information returned to us by algorithm, the nuance shaved out, instant answers only as good as the questions we know to ask. the medium matters, and this medium shapes and delimits thought, allows only certain forms of thought to root and spread. of course there’s a love-in between tech-bros and far-right politicians: tech is bringing about the material conditions for the fascist mind-virus to thrive.

sorry, that last sentence got a bit matrix-y, didn’t it? how early aughts of me. but it has been on my mind. it was on my mind when i sat down to write the poem [here], wondering if a poem could be a material tool/ an enabling architecture for (mental) resistance, could foster or incite another kind of thought – slow thought, ambiguous thought, historically and sympathetically rich thought? i don’t meant to suggest that my poem in particular was doing this, just that poetry in general, as a mode, might. which is where I chose to end the poem, on a fighting back that is first the writing of the poem, the reading of the poem – any poem – and a mental effort of understanding towards people whose moral position we find utterly repellent. can art create these conditions?

i don’t know, but my thoughts lead me back to “noli timere”, which is a call to courage, but also an offering of aid. the message i want the work to carry – the intention i want it to transmit, whatever it is ostensibly about – is something like “i am with you”. to raise a voice and a mind. like a shield, like sword. a torch to light our way…

Fran Lock, “NOLI TIMERE”

On the news this week, it was reported
that we claimed ownership of the moon—

its hammered surface rising over beaches,
schools, parking lots, and detention centers;

its cratered Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11
touched down and the astronauts left bootprints

that are still there because the moon has no weather
to wash them away. Perhaps someone will also try

to claim ownership of the bees and their gold
cells, the rivers and all their tenants folding silver

light beneath the bridges. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Declaration of Ownership

You will hear the word culture used a lot. Often angry, pink-necked men will roar about ‘their culture’ being threatened, perhaps without really knowing what ‘their culture’ is. And this is understandable because culture is always changing ownership. The other week I performed ‘My Name Is Swan’ at Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames. It was, you might say, an evening of culture, of music and poetry set in an idyllic location. For some, this kind of event is culture, high-brow, removed, separate. I feel uncomfortable with spaces that are reserved for art, domains distinct, detached, divorced. I’m not entirely sure this is where poetry belongs.

The Garrick Temple was commissioned by David Garrick, an actor and theatre reformer who changed culture, on one hand by making theatre more professional and on the other by making it more exclusive, expensive and elitist. He converted ‘the pit’ from standing to seating, championed a naturalistic, expressive acting style, introduced moveable scenery, lighting and stagecraft. He made theatre respectable but, with the introduction of higher ticket prices, he also excluded poorer, working class people who had made up the majority of the audience in Shakespeare’s day.

This is cultural erosion, this is the big steal. The denial of access to the arts leads to the kind of civil bankruptcy and social insolvency that has angry, pink-necked men roaring about the good old days without really knowing what the good old days actually offered. While they do know something is missing from ‘their culture’, while they may point accusatory fingers elsewhere, they are perhaps unaware that what they are being denied is poetry.

At the time of Shakespeare’s tricentenary in 1864 it was well understood that the poet had been appropriated by the wealthy and the well healed and that it was time to reclaim him for the people. Shakespeare had after all been born of the working man and the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee was set up in opposition to the official, government-backed National Shakespeare Committee who, it was felt, were using the anniversary to promote a pro-Empire, elitist narrative. To recast Shakespeare as a democratising figure, a satirist of corrupt kings and courts the Working Men’s Committee decided to mark the 300th anniversary of the poet’s birth by planting a tree. They didn’t create an effigy, they didn’t build a temple, they planted a tree in a public space as a reminder that poetry, as well as being a living art-from, should be free for everyone.

In 1864 100,000 people marched through the streets of London to Primrose Hill to witness the act of putting in a sapling for a poet. 100,000 people walking for poetry. I think it’s important we consider that occaision, reflect on what it was they were walking for and, at a time of huge social and economic disparity, think about who poetry belongs to today.

Last week two of us went to visit the tree. It’s not the original, it was replanted in 1964, but this what poetry teaches us, if an idea dies you plant another. Naomi [Foyle] spoke eloquently about re-enchanting the world with poetry and while walking is still free I’m trying to find enchantment between sites, at locations, in doorways and under the branches of trees. I am still moving toward poetry.

Jan Noble, Nº81 The Shakespeare Oak

“What I fear most is despair
for the world and us: forever less
of beauty, silence, open air,
gratitude, unbidden happiness,
affection, unegotistical desire.”

— Wendell Berry, from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, page 192

[…]

— I’ve been thinking about happiness, and the first poem in this post and the phrase, “unbidden happiness” has me thinking. I’ve been also thinking about contingency a lot lately, the idea that “if not this, then that.” And that led me to cracking open The Affect Theory Reader and looking again at Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Happy Objects.” Ahmed acknowledges “the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.”

— “It is useful to note that the etymology of “happiness” relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English “hap,” suggesting chance.”

— What are theories of happiness beside happiness itself? Does one practice happiness? One practices the piano, we take up a practice of writing.

— Bruce gets it. Trouble is never far behind. But we can hold another in our hearts. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi says that “happiness, in fact is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person.” (from TATR).

— What are the conditions of happiness now? Being human means we have the very weird capacity to be both happy and sad simultaneously. Melancholic with intermittent happiness. Wild, right?

Shawna Lemay, Against Despair

Dolly Parton’s death was a gut-punch. I was a lifelong fan, discovering her old 1970s television variety show when I was 5 years old. I was so obsessed that my parents bought me the Dolly doll that was released in 1976 when I found it at a KB Toy Store (remember them?!) in the mall. I’ve still got her, as you can see in the photo. […]

In 2023, my poem “Roosters & Hens” appeared in Limp Wrist and was then selected by co-editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E, Bloemeke for inclusion in Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology published by Madville (who also just published the Stevie Nicks anthology I co-edited). The poem is a roman à clef about seeing “9 to 5” that first time under very strange circumstances. You can read that poem here.

We are living through a particularly dark time, with the nonsense coming from Washington, D.C., the ongoing wars, the economy, the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Dolly was an antidote to that darkness. Her empathy, positivity, and embrace of all kinds of people were a counterbalance to the politicians and policymakers who try to divide us.

As a cancer survivor myself, I am awed that she was able to continue making in-person and social media appearances. Always with a smile, always with hope, even as she must have been exhausted and in pain. That selflessness is a lesson for us all.

Dolly famously joked about her appearance, often repeating the line, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” The truth is that behind that sassy persona was a woman who believed in the basic goodness of people. She didn’t make a spectacle of her generosity, ask for buildings to be named after her, or play favorites. Dolly said that when she saw a need, she immediately wanted to help, and she did.

May we all be more like Dolly. 

Collin Kelley, I will always love Dolly Parton

And of course the Contral, with its three wheels,
was never going to make it. And long before
it sinks into sand out in the fathomless desert,
Auguste understands failure is not the point.
He bends to kiss the clogged carburettor, sits
in the perilous seat one last time, weeps.
My beautiful girl, we did try, didn’t we.

He drains the radiator into a water bottle,
walks slowly east, retracing tyre tracks, dreams.
He prays for his miracle –  and nomads appear
on horseback, incredulous to see such a thing:
a fat man in a suit and beret. They give him tea.

Bob Mee, POEM IN THE COMPANY OF AUGUSTE PONS AND PETIN THE SHORT

This week, maps argue among themselves, the dark blooms and sings, a bookcase holds its breath, moths interrogate a porch light, and much more. Enjoy.

On the first day of September I am woken by geese flying over the house. They’re still going back and forth between two lakes right now, strengthening their wings, preparing for the long flights they’ll make in a few weeks. The sound is superb. They fly so low that I can hear their wing beats. The new season begins with watching the sky while the coffee burbles in the pot. I stand at the back door, the kitchen filled with low sunlight and long shadows, the garden white with dew and I listen to the plush feathery wing beats of geese over the house. Their calls are dark mornings and woodsmoke, and deep work, creative work. I take my coffee up to my writing room and settle in front of the monitor.

Wendy Pratt, I want to show my workings out

I’ve been in a state of ennui and mild hopelessness all summer, and I haven’t written since the Lenten Series earlier in the year. I needed some fresh oxygen. I bought a brand-new journal and headed to my neighborhood library, armed with a pen, a back up pen, and Lofi beats in my headphones. Regardless of output, I just wanted to feel the sensation of a pen moving across paper, my thoughts flowing freely and without distraction, and reconnect with my natural rhythm and intuition.

I’m a little surprised at how well it worked. There is something magical about the process of simply journaling, without expectation, without anxiety about “creating” or self-made pressure to produce. Threads come together in mysterious ways, your brain makes quiet connections, and somewhere in that tangled tree-light of messy ink, something begins to emerge that you can use as starter. I don’t know where it’s all going to go—I don’t have any big themes in mind for a series or any heart-pounding flashes of inspiration to run with, but it’s an opening, and that’s all I needed.

Kristen McHenry, Fall Metaphors

i go out in the morning
without my skin. i rush back inside
to put it on. the moment of light
free of all the flesh felt like
swallowing an antidote. what would
it take for all of us to write on the sun
like a marble notebook? everyone i know
puts their dreams into little envelopes.
mails them to a fire on the other side
of the world.

Robin Gow, sunlight diary

After fiddling with wires and remote controls and instructions on my mobile phone for half an hour I was ready to strike out for that corner shop, which is just over a mile from my house.

I almost went in the car, before realising that it would be more pleasant, healthy, and green to walk there, especially as I could take a path through woodland for about four fifths of the trip.

Walking through woodland is always rewarding, even if the particular woodland near me is very small, in parts not much more than a tree lined path, which may contain traces of dog shit.

Woods are poetic. We all know some poetry set in woods. Perhaps one of the most well known contains these lines:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by

However, I am not quite the literary gentleman I think myself to be. Before turning to Robert Frost, my mind always defaults to…

A mouse took a walk in a deep, dark wood
The mouse found a nut and the nut looked good

… the concluding lines from Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo, the well-known 1999 book for reading with small children. […]

A walk in the woods is a real mood lifter. Everyone with any sense knows so. Tree huggers, forest bathers, and normal people too. I am privileged to live within walking distance of several. Some of them are old and overgrown cemeteries too, which is doubly poetic. Not only do you get the sense of nature all around, but also the sense of your own impermanence within it. Those crumbling headstones and statuary reminding us that none of us live forever, and the unkempt vegetation reminding us that nature will go on thriving long after we are gone.

Mike O’Brien, Gruffaloes, Tree Huggers and Wood Pigeons

This poem grew from 8’s emphasis on the contrast between darkness and light. I began the idea with the image of the dark forest trail leading to the opening above a valley covered in light. I was thinking of the contrast, of this and the other, of darkness and light, and then I started writing. A storm moved in, and I began listening to music. When I viewed the video poem All the Places Light Lives by Amantine Brodeur and Alix Klingenberg, the connection between the words and the imagery of each photograph began to speak to me. I connected with that process. The poem began to move. The difficulty in this piece was that it was demanding the approach of less is more. Keeping this piece to a few lines was a major task. Only the essentials remained.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks; 9”

you walk the usual path 
when suddenly you have passed 
through a doorway you did not see 
the landscape has changed 
the road signs are in a language 
you do not read there are maps 
but they argue among themselves 

Sharon Brogan, snapshot poem 02 september 02026

Lucille Clifton’s “telling our stories” found me during a particularly rough stretch this spring. (I include a link to the poem below.) I was feeling haunted by some troubling flashbacks, and when I read, “the fox came every evening to my door” (and the lines that follow), I related immediately to Clifton’s fear and avoidance.

I also understood the depth of her connection to the fox. Dare I say, I understood it as a relationship with the fox… and with the “terrible stories” it — and the poet watching it — could tell. I felt deep resonance with the poem, and it spurred an obsession with fox imagery. I even had a close encounter this summer with a wild fox which had claimed a busy Cape Cod beach town as her hunting ground.

The Cape Cod fox startled me and I shooed her away, but normally when encountering wild life, I’m the sort of person who believes I’m having a shared moment with the creature. I even introduce myself to toads and newts. “I’m a human,” I say, and what I mean is I hold myself in high regard as the type of human an animal might like to know and befriend. When I hold the gaze of a deer or bird or, yes, a fox, I experience a true connection.

Intellectually, that connection is hogwash, of course. But spiritually? I’m a believer.

So when I read “Driving to Santa Fe” by Paisley Rekdal in a writing workshop from Two Sylvias Press (through their “Weekly Muse” Substack), I knew I needed to collect poems about wild animal encounters. The speaker in Rekdal’s poem […] comes upon a lynx crossing the road. Time slows, creating space for the speaker to understand what it means to be alive and to be humbled by it.

Carolee Bennett, “the fox came every evening to my door”

I took this photograph not understanding that perhaps it is a kind of self portrait. Balancing on one foot along the shoreline. The gull’s mottled coloring and black beak make me think she is a juvenile glaucous winged gull. It’s an unusual pose but as I stayed and observed her, she kept her balance and I hope I can do the same this September. But I am not so sure.

This is the last time I’ll begin the academic school year as a full-time tenured professor at Highline College where I will have taught for 27 years. Before I moved to Seattle, for this tenure track job teaching English and Film at Highline, five years was the longest I’d held any job. In my twenties and thirties, I changed countries seven times.

Now taking the water taxi downtown for the day is an adventure. I’ve just become a member at Folio: The Seattle Anthenaeum, located above the marketplace so the 15 minute water taxi commute will become more frequent. This is my first step in my retirement planning. My only one. Well, besides writing more poems.

At the moment, I’m working on two poems. One concerns a visit to my translator’s home in a refugee camp outside Ramallah in 1996 and the other is a memory of everyday life at three years old.

Susan Rich, Three Images and Prompts Before Summer Ends

The rest of the week was spent updating my resume (I’m tentatively looking for work again), writing poems, submitting poems (although not to Cincinnati Review or Prairie Schooner, which both closed in under a day, before I got in a submission, whew! Crazy! Submitting is an adventure sport these days.) Also, re-reading Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for book club. […]

Late summer all around—hot air balloons going up and down, hummingbirds at the final blooms of summer flowers, and earlier sunsets.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, September Submissions with Stressful Intervals, Storms, and Late Summer Sights

I’ve so many posts unposted, and a million distractions … but it seems important to share a Wendell Berry poem this morning.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

–Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/wendell-berry-dead.html

Also see Poetry Foundation, and this page at Grateful Living for a poem I’ve read dozens of times these past few years,  Berry’s “Our Real Work.”

Bethany Reid, Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

I was sad to hear of the death of Wendell Berry on Monday.  But why should I be sad?  He was 92 and had lived a good life, mostly on his own terms, from what I could see.  But the death felt like “one of the greats has left us” moments.  I remember reading him in college, so his writing has been with me a long time.

Back in my undergraduate days,  I felt somewhat embarrassed for liking someone whose work was so accessible.  Now, of course, I think it’s one of his more important traits.  Berry’s work has seemed vital for decades now.

What I value most these days is his ability to never sink into gloom for too long. He manages to sound prophetic (one of the prophet’s duties being to call people back to right living, as well as to warn), without setting up a house in the land of the apocalypse. He always comes back to one of his main themes: “. . . hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found. For one thing, though we have caused the earth to be seriously diseased, it is not yet without health. The earth we have before us now is still abounding and beautiful” (“Conservation and Local Economy” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 11).

He wrote those words almost 20 years ago, and yet, they still have relevance.  Some days, when the news seems unrelentingly bad, it’s hard to continue to hope.  But it’s one of the more important activities we can undertake.

Here’s a passage that reminds us of the miracles which surround us each day:  “Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine–which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes” (“Christianity and the Survival of Creation” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 103).

That passage made me gasp when I first read it, and it still does.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Farewell, Wendell Berry

The writer Wendell Berry often talked about how imagination is required in order to have hope. To imagine is to see a way. “For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.” When the tiny first leaves arrived after a few weeks, I continued the routine of light and water. The work of beckoning growth was not complete. Meanwhile, the soil outside grew soft with spring’s warmth and rains, so I turned it with my hands. Into the soil, I placed worms I have also grown and fostered over the past couple of years. Eventually, the ceremony of carrying the trays up the basement steps arrived and the seedlings saw sun for the first time. They learned outside. They learned wind.

Sarah Lada, The Art of Harvesting Brussels Sprouts

I’m sad to hear that Rachel Blau DuPlessis has died. I persuaded my local library to buy the two volume boxed edition of Drafts this year, and think it’s brilliant. A real way forward for people who love long poems, sampling as it does the style of many other long poems.

It manifests many worlds theory, shimmer within lines and word choices, so that all components are “drafts” stemming, branching. A commitment to an experiment for decades. And there are wonderful personal moments, with this contingent willingness to have one’s life be contextualised.

I was very lucky to see her read over zoom with Allen Fisher reading too. It was noticeable how curious she was about Allen’s formal choices and long poem procedures.

I love her book of critical essays on the long poems of others too. Like Alice Notley, a great master of unpacking technique and then trying new techniques herself (and not as pastiche, but as someone whose creative brain was revved up by reading FOR FORM, not sentiment).

Her death is a great loss. But I’m so glad she finished Drafts and got it to a handsome complete edition. It is best read complete, in my opinion, and a modern masterpiece when seen in one edition.

Ira Lightman, Rachel Blau Duplessis RIP

If you’ve never eaten at a South Indian wedding, then imagine this: at least thirty different dishes served on a large plantain leaf, non-stop, until you cannot possibly eat another morsel. But of course, you do! A hundred textures, a hundred permutations of flavour and colour and aroma, inundate your senses and you stagger out, not just sated, but telling yourself you simply should be more social and attend more weddings. If only for the food.

This book was that meal. At 240 pages, it is an extensive collection of fifteen years of Bob Mee’s work. The breadth of skill, imagination, topics, style and form is overwhelming. The poems zigzag across a vast landscape of masterful storytelling, wry humour, barely-concealed disgust at the state of the world, surreal imagination, love, and memory,

It is almost impossible to pick a favourite poem or line because his content and frequent stream-writing flit from the past to the present, from politics to pig-farming, from scarecrows to neighbours, from Pennsylvania to Peterlee, from haunted bars to forgers, from Ezra Pound’s trombone to the ghost of Ginsberg, from pianos on the move to a little girl sold in marriage, from the dead to the living, from war zones to the bottom of the sea (‘Poems leave Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Sudan. Reach out, gather them in.’ – Poems), until the reader is convinced that everything that has to be said about literally everything that needs saying, has been said, and said in the only way possible. Mee employs laugh-out-loud satire and humorous irreverence or dispensing with obscure subtlety, writes with delicate but chilling honesty.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, ‘Poems In The Key Of Aardvark’ by Bob Mee – If you’re going to read only one more book this year, pick this one

From across a wide ocean I look in astonishment and horror at what is happening in the United States.

Here is a poet in the midst of it and still writing about it every day. I can barely imagine how he keeps on keeping on, but the sequence of poems entitled Writing My Country continues to hold power up to the light and to find it wanting.

“Beau Beausoleil is the most important voice of witness in our country right now …” – Naomi Shihab Nye

These poems of compassion and loss and obstinate resistance use everyday events, conversations and observations on the street to illustrate ‘this ruinous work’ that is taking place in a country that no longer feels like home.

“Our lives are filled
with the debris
of destroyed dreams” (p 13)

The altered flag on the cover seems to speak of imprisonment and disempowerment, but the poem superimposed on it asks stubborn questions that will not be silenced.

Ama Bolton, Writing My Country

their viscous prick-song spit into
the wind. an old, infectious fable. says
that it will fill them up. it cannot fill
them up, so makes instead a virtue
of their emptiness, a weapon of their
emptiness. they are not men, not now –
the hot and crackling aggregate
of rage. now they are joy, torn along
its leanest length; the gutless conjuring
of power, each hood without a head.

Fran Lock, NOLI TIMERE

I have, out of an abundance of caution, not named the Iranian poet whose interview with me I’ve been posting here one question at a time. Perhaps I am being too careful, but given the fact that we are at war with Iran, even if the federal government is going out of its way not to call what’s going on a war; given the corresponding fact that Iran very clearly understands itself to be at war with us; and, finally, given how literature—writing it, reading it, discussing it—is an inherently subversive pursuit, an abundance of caution seems just the right amount. I’ve tried several times to get in touch with this poet since the war began but have had no success. If I do hear back from them and it turns out I can safely identify them, I will do so. In the meantime, I am going to continue posting my answers to their questions.

I was not expecting the poet’s fourth question: “There is a theory that says that all writers even the male, write with a feminine soul. After all, the Muses were goddesses and not gods. What do you think about this theory?” This was my answer:

While I think I understand what you want your question to mean, it has never been useful to me to think about where my work comes from in such explicitly gendered terms. I have never experienced myself as having a muse or my poems as being somehow “gifts” from the Muses. Indeed, the one and only time anyone ever talked to me about my having a muse was my graduate advisor, a critical theorist, who dismissed my desire to take a year off from the MA in Creative Writing that I was pursuing so I could work on my writing by saying, “If you want to go commune with your muse [the sarcasm literally dripped off his words], that’s your business. I thought you came to graduate school to learn something.”

His words had the precise opposite of their intended effect. I dropped out of the program that semester and never set foot in either a graduate English or Creative Writing program ever again. (I’ve written the longer version of this story here.) In thinking about your question, though—and I have to say that this is something I’ve never explicitly articulated before—I realize that I do agree with one aspect of the critique underwriting my advisor’s attempt to use the notion of the muse to shame me. The concept of the muse mystifies the creative process, turning it into something that is ostensibly separate and apart from the socioeconomic, political, and cultural circumstances in which creativity takes place.

I don’t mean to say, of course, that there is no such thing as inspiration; and I certainly would never tell a poet who experiences inspiration as somehow coming from outside themselves, who experiences poems as “gifts” from their muse, that this experience is somehow “wrong.” However, defining that experience in a way that elides the role played by society and culture in shaping both our conception of what inspiration is and how we give meaning to a poet’s response to inspiration ultimately weakens the role that the poet and poetry can play in society.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Do All Writers Write with a Feminine Soul?

“What the Mirror Tells” explores the origins of the word ‘mirror’ – from Middle English meaning “object with a reflective surface, reflection, model of conduct” and Anglo-French “to look at”, derived from the Latin “to be surprised, look with wonder at”. It also asks if events and people linger long after their passing, does an aurora of those still hang around? […]

In each poem, [Denise] O’Hagan has created a small theatre where readers see the show and get [a] chance to reflect and probe its meaning. She also picks up those hesitations, where speaking out may not be received in the way the speaker wants to achieve, where it might shatter an illusion. Many of the poems sit in that liminal space between an event and [its] consequences, allowing the reader to fill in the detail and decide what might have next, what the effect might be. These are thought-provoking and humane poems.

Emma Lee, “What the Mirror Tells” Denise O’Hagan (5 Islands Press) – book review

One thing I’m realising more and more as I write these pieces is that I acquired much of my poetry in a decidedly circuitous and fumbling manner. Philip Larkin came to me third-hand: at sixteen I hadn’t read a word of his poetry, and I hadn’t read Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him, but I had read Alan Bennett’s honest and affectionate review of Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him. The things we did before the internet. So Larkin arrived kind of distorted, a figure peered at through the wrong end of a telescope and through the lenses of two other men, this grumpy man in glasses who shagged his way round the library personnel of the North of England and had a soft spot for both Thatcher and Hitler, the kind of guy who’d take a girl on a date and later write to his friend

Don’t you think it’s ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE?

Based on this picture, I assumed that his poetry probably wouldn’t be for me, and I moved on. I was about to be swept off my feet by Dylan Thomas, who I hadn’t read a review of a biography of, so that was fine.

But over the years Larkin poems dropped quietly one by one into my life: This Be The Verse, of course, and then The Trees, An Arundel Tomb, The Mower. I found it hard to compute, having read the biographical stuff first, that the man who wrote such tenderness as

begin afresh, afresh, afresh

and

what will survive of us is love

and

we should be kind while there is still time

was in fact the same bloke who Motion refers to as ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’. Well, this is why you’re supposed to meet the poems before the poet, and sometimes not the poet at all. Poets are real people, and flawed. It’s the poems that keep us fond of Larkin.

Nia Broomhall, Week 25: High Windows

In Boswell’s Life, Samuel Johnson says of poor Christopher Smart (1722–1771), locked in a madhouse: “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”

That line, “I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else,” has stuck with me since I first encountered it. Christopher Smart was a madman, a genius, and a Christian poet. What is most powerful in him, or, at least has most influenced me, is his mysticism, for it is not a grand thing — not the loss of the self in the absorption into the numinous, not the flight of the alone to the Alone, not the ecstatic transport to the oneness of reality. Smart is instead the model — even in his madness, or maybe especially in his madness — of what I have elsewhere called the mysticism of small things.

This is not pantheism, each object in the world a little God-bit. It cannot be for Smart, because pantheism is irreconcilable with his orthodox Christianity — but even more because pantheism is ultimately a denial of the sharp and vital particularity of things. Christopher Smart sees every living being as entirely itself: distinctive, singular, quirky, special. And in that particularity he sees not God, but God’s grace, God’s plan, and, most of all, God’s creation — a creative power so vast that it can populate the world with real existences that are not God Himself. Smart sees the world as infused with grace, hungry for redemption, and alive with the interaction of creatures and Creator.

This picture of reality appears most clearly in Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), the incomplete poetry manuscript he wrote between 1759 and 1763, during his confinement by his in-laws in insane asylums. Not brought to light till the 20th century, the poem was finally published in 1939 and reordered in 1954 and 1980 editions.

Jubilate Agno consists of four fragments, totaling well over a thousand lines, nearly all of them beginning with the words Let or For. The generally accepted scholarly reading is that Smart intended the poem as antiphonal, the Let verses and For verses meant to be read responsively, Let X / For Y, the way a psalm alternates two voices in worship. The Jeoffry passage is all For lines, because it’s from the side of response (although we lack certainty about the corresponding Let lines). In other words, Smart isn’t just writing free-associative madness. He’s also doing liturgy — the cat’s every motion set into a structure of praise and response, a “duly and daily serving him” devotional order. Jeoffry’s catness is his worship.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Cat Jeoffry

Today I thought I’d look at a rather charming and apparently one-off verse diary entry for June 21st 1628. It’s by Thomas Crossfield (or Crosfield, 1602-1663), who was a fellow at the time at Queen’s College Oxford, and it appears in his otherwise prose diary which is still in the Queen’s College archive. Crosfield was only in his mid-20s when he wrote this entry and the lifestyle he describes, though strongly structured by religious practice, is not that far removed from the life of an advanced graduate student or postdoctoral fellow today, if they happen to be doing quite a lot of teaching. His day is taken up mainly with teaching and his own reading […]

All this performed as before I said:
There other bookes by chance before me laid
And two of them I tooke into my hand
The first was Withers poëme, which our land
doth wondrous well describe in Cantoes eight
with many passages of iniury & right.

This is George Wither’s Britains’s Remembrancer, published only in 1628 — so hot off the press. The poem is a long and in part heavily allegorized account of Wither’s experience during the plague in 1625, its spiritual significance, and a prophecy of the judgement to fall upon the nation. It is also written in rhyming couplets and though to modern taste it seems rather wordy and extravagant, in the second canto Wither makes a point of stressing and defending the straightforwardness of his style in defiance of literary fashion:

Let no fantastique Reader now condemne
Our homely Muse, for stooping unto them,
In plaine expressions, and in words, that show
We love not, in affected paths to goe.

[. . .]

It is the usefull matter of my Rimes
Shall make them live. Words alter as the Times:
And soonest their fantastique Rhetoriques,
Who trim their Poesies with schooleboy-tricks.
That, which this age affects, as grave, and wise,
The following generation may despise.

[. . .]

Let no man therefore dreame, I will bestow
My precious Time in what will vary so;
Since that, which, with most ease I shall produce,
May have (for aught I know) the longest use.

Wither’s points here is that trendy words and styles make you sound up-to-the-minute in literary circles, but quickly go out of fashion, leaving the purchase of your message blunted. If the point of your poem is to convey a message, it is better to be unfashionably plain. His ‘fantastique Reader’ is perhaps intended to recall Donne’s ‘Giddy fantastic poets of each land’ (from Donne’s first satire).

Crosfield’s summary of Wither’s (very long) poem — he surely didn’t read it all that afternoon — focuses upon its political and religious aspects, but it’s hard not to suspect that the urgency and immediacy of its style has something to do with Crosfield’s apparently unprecedented attempt to describe his own ordinary day in straightforward English verse.

Victoria Moul, My whole Ephemeris: a diary entry in verse from 1628

“The floor-to-ceiling bookcase hoarding one wall / Filled with forty-year-old literary journals / Holds its breath.” The subject of the sentence, the bookcase, shows up in line 8 and the corresponding action, “holds its breath” finally appears in line 10, right before that hard break I mentioned earlier. This poem is working hard to be Poetic.

The second half of the poem is two sentences and the I of the poem appears early. They’re standing in front of this wall-length bookcase, and it must be a hell of a wall to hold all these journals.

If I move, if the air stirs, The dust spouts again the words of poets Listed in ten thousand Tables of Contents.

That’s a lot of contributor’s copies and a lot of poems published and a lot of dust. I’ll only speak for myself here but I suspect most of them don’t get read much after they get put on the shelf. I’ve had the experience of pulling one down to check something and then realize, when looking at the table of contents, that I’d been published alongside someone I met later in life.

But here’s where the poem turns, and in a way, I think it hits at the darker side of how some poets look at ourselves and others.

Even the journal in which this poem appears
Will be wedged in a wall among its brethren
Until someone down the decades draws it down
To drag one finger down the list of contributors:
Nobody, nobody, nobody, name, nobody, nobody
All the way down to the cold damp ground.

I take it back; it’s not about how poets look at ourselves and others. It’s about how we fear we’ll be viewed once we’re gone. It reminds me in a way of a poem by Miller Williams from The Ways We Touch titled “A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeeth Century” which talks to critics and scholars who decide who gets to be anthologized and by extension, remembered by future readers, and acknowledges in the end that it’s really himself he’s talking about.

What I find most interesting about the way Waters hits this note is the coldness of both nobody and name, the complete erasure of any humanity there. The person down the decades isn’t opening the book to discover something new or beautiful or challenging. They’re reducing the work to whether the name of the contributor is one that lasted for whatever reason. There’s no indication that the person is excited about the name they recognize. That they recognize the name seems to be the point, even while their finger drags down the page toward the grave.

Brian Spears, “Nobody’s Poem” by Michael Waters

Jeremy Springsteed is a barista and occasional activist living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and a member of the ReDrum poetry collective. His work has been published in many places online and in print such as SPREAD, Pidgeonholes, Underwood, Pageboy, Internet Void, Another New Calligraphy, and Limanal Spaces. He is the author of four collections of poetry: A Guide To Getting Lost. (Cyberwit 2022) Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other. (Cyberwit 2023) Beneath The Ashes of My Grandfather and My Youth. (Cyberwit 2025) By Wing and Foot. (Carbonation Press 2025)

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

My first book felt like a validation of all the years I had spent working on my craft. All the readings I had organized or taken part in. All the rejections. It alleviated the imposter syndrome.

The first collection was more like a greatest hits than a thematic grouping of poems. As I produced new work I thought of it in a more contingent light. When writing work for this latest collection I would look at those oddball one off poems and find the correct home in the larger body.

While I have always had my themes and return points, my process recently has been looking towards enriching connections in tone and subject. 

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

I had always wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a poet though. I have a very vivid memory from when I was 13, my depression had really set in the year before and I was doing pretty poorly in school. I was talking with my mom in her bedroom and she was trying to figure out what was going on with me. I was crying, “I just want to write and I don’t even know what that means.”

We were a paycheck to paycheck working class family. I had, as far as I knew, never met any kind of an artist and I had no idea how one became such a thing.

I would work on my silly little stories instead of paying attention to my classes. Stories like– Hitler secretly surviving and taking over a small US midwest town or stories of me being a secret agent with a large base under my parents’ rented house.

I would keep falling deeper into depression. I started playing sports to try to fit in with the other boys. Eventually I destroyed my knees and my mental health.

I was having mild auditory hallucinations. I began writing them down, then I began altering them. Eventually I didn’t hear them but they were still in my head.

I took creative writing and was lucky to have a fantastic teacher named Joel Long who introduced me to a larger world of poetry. Joel brought big name poets into the classroom, (the poet laureate at the time Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, etc.)  which was no small feat for our suburban Utah high school. I was introduced to many local poets. He gave me a structure to use. I have never looked back. […]

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings have been an important part of my formation as a poet. Hearing when a line cuts through people, or when it just lies face down on the floor. Receiving immediate feedback and interpretations of a new poem is powerful and valuable.

I have been the open mic MC for a few reading series. I would always start the open mic with a new poem which kept me writing. It also put me in close contact with all manner of writers from a diverse skill set. Writing is solitary work so any opportunity to be in community with other writers is to be relished.

I am also a founding member of the ReDrum poetry collective with my dear friend Alex Bleecker. Our troop has been involved in both publishing work and performative work. The performances are always occasional and based on a singular theme (whales, Carlo Zinelli, time travel, etc.)  that the 2-4 poets work towards separately and as a group. Those performances have allowed new ways of looking at what a poem might be.

My first book wouldn’t have been possible without public readings. It helped me to group poems so the flow of the work was more natural. They let me know what was working and what I should focus my energy on.

Then there is the theft. There is no better teacher than hearing someone read a poem that you wish you had written and trying to figure out how you might be able to still write that poem but make it yours.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeremy Springsteed

I read haphazardly, dipping in and out of poets and collections. Some of these I’ve recently picked up while looking out new reads for the dissertation, some I read for The Poetry Book Club, and some I am coming back to again and again.

I haven’t read them all cover to cover. Mostly, I’ve dipped in and out, read sections or several at a time. But in all of them I’ve found things that astounded me and that I love, whether that’s attention to detail, careful wording, unexpected use of images, interesting line breaks, masterful use of form, lyrical style, or wonderful inventiveness.

Read cover to cover more than once are: Hannah Copley’s ‘Lapwing’, Victoria Chang’s ‘With my back to the world’, and Yanita Georgieva’s ‘Small Undetectable Thefts’.

The collection that most recently absolutely blew me away: Tishani Doshi’s ‘A God At The Door’.

Do with those pieces of information what you will.

Rachael Hill, Some poets I’ve been loving

My first encounter with Paula Rego was accidental. On a trip to Lisbon almost thirty years ago I visited the Gulbenkian Museum and happened upon a major exhibition. It was the first time I’d seen her work, and it changed me. I last saw her paintings at a retrospective at the Tate Britain just before she died. I left the exhibition refreshed and optimistic – I’d hazard to say even inspired – about the trajectory of women’s rights. Perhaps we might yet pull out of our current nosedive into the most misogynistic cultural period I’ve witnessed in my lifetime?

Whenever I look at a Rego, I see an artist whose project was to put women’s subjectivity at the centre of an exploration of power, status, history and the family. Plath, Szymborska and Akhmatova are perhaps her poet-analogues. I agree with Germaine Greer’s take on Rego: “It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting. Still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly.” […]

In The Artist in Her Studio (1993), a woman sits centre stage surrounded by a cornucopia of props and symbols: mythological creatures, statues, animals, art, models, sinister looking vegetables with their connotations of fruition, harvest, impending decomposition. Her inner world is complex, fantastical and populated by women and girls. At the centre, the artist, who is simultaneously being painted by a child-version of herself, squarely faces us, legs apart in the pose of a middle-aged male farmer at rest, elbow on the table. She is smoking a pipe and gazing heavenward, lost in thought. My heart leapt when I first found myself in front of this piece. I’m a fortunate middle-aged woman who has viewed thousands of paintings, but it‘s still rare I find myself standing before a vision of female subjectivity as complex and contradictory as that so long available to men.

Lisa Brockwell, The Private Worlds of Women

I am zooming out
and out.

Life is pixelating,
nothing but tiny squares.

Here, suspended in air,
a bridge I must
have built myself.

I have been here before.

These are things
I have done before.

I am learning
to trace my hand
to grip
the fat purple crayon.

Rebecca Cook, The Orange Ribbons of Autumn

When I step outside the synagogue now, or onto my own deck, I hear the chirring of crickets and other late summer singers. I can’t help anthropomorphizing them: our days are short, let us sing while we can!

Of course, that’s the subtext of every Yom Kippur, too. Our days are short: let us sing while we can, and make teshuvah while we can, and change our lives while we can, because we never know how much time we’ll get.

Tonight we’ll make the last havdalah of the old year, and then we’ll sing several of the piyyutim (prayer-songs) of the high holidays for the first time since last Yom Kippur. A spiritual stitch in time between then and now.

Where did the year go? There was some illness. There was winter. Didn’t I just thrill to the spring song of the tree frogs in the wetland? And now suddenly I hear the song that means summer is slipping away.

No matter how many times I walk the labyrinth of the seasons I’m surprised when I reach the point where we turn. “So this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray.”

Rachel Barenblat, So this is how.

The Lesser Palaces
After Abdullah Hany Daher

a house burns in the flames
and again in the eyes
of those who loved it
and again when we
enter and go out
the front door
of the world

Very excited that my new novel is launching out in the world. I’m doing quite a few events but the launches are in Hamilton and Toronto. Also (below) my daughter and I made a trailer in the local cemetery. […]

Also, I’m doing a series of what I’m thinking of as mystic comics using various impossible shapes and clouds.

Gary Barwin, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead + poetry motivational poster

In 2019 I took ‘My Name Is Swan’ to New York. The only way to arrive in New York is by stream ship, preferably in the 19th century with a single suitcase containing an unfinished manuscript, a bottle of potato brandy and second-hand suit gifted by a consumptive relative.

I paid my passage on the QM2 from Southampton, Swan stowed away and sailed for free. My agent at the time instructed me that I had a week at sea to find myself a rich patron. I saw it as a week looking out at the unabridged nothingness, at the intact emptiness, at the whole unbroken poem of the Atlantic Ocean.

I did take the opportunity to introduce my stowaway to those who’d not give up his secrets and this included the ship’s entertainment officer. The QM2 boasts one of the largest floating libraries in the world containing around 10,000 titles. They also host literary festivals and employ the Royal Court to put on Shakespeare plays. I thought passengers and crew should be treated to a reading of ‘My Name Is Swan’.

After a few days gently badgering the entertainment officer, name dropping and persuading him of my poetic pedigree, he eventually gave me a teatime slot in the Queen’s Ballroom. A storm blew up the afternoon I was due to read and we’d not long passed the chart position where the Titanic had struck an iceberg. The conditions were perfect. The ship pitched and listed as I stood in the middle of the dance floor and gave my reading. The tea-cup classes tried to maintain their dignity while navigating finger sandwiches and miniature scones in a force eight gale as both ship and poetry rolled around the ocean.

Jan Noble, Nº80 All at sea with Swan…

We find ourselves in September and the light is already dwindling earlier each night. This weekend brough the final writing mini-retreat of the summer, this time up in Wisconsin along the lake. I was able to get polished drafts on both the Indiana hotel play and the train station / time travel project I’ve been working on, as well as two more scenes in the play about emails from the dead. […]

Since I cheated on poetry all spring and summer with writing all these plays, there is still the next Greek project to dig in on, as well as some other play ideas that feel really sparkly right now, including one set the night Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. I also need to eventually turn an eye to the next full-length book project, which is more than 3/4 of the way finished. I do already have a working title I will share closer to the end of the year as it takes shape over the next few months. 

Otherwise, it’s a lot of galleys and edits on the first few chaps of the dgp season, and reading more submissions as I go.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/7/2026

Three years ago I decided to get up and sniff the air each Monday morning. I also decided to write a blog. The reason? A pivot. A very large one where I decided to step out of my thirty-year career and see what came next for me.

And the first blogs were rather short, but I was starting, and it was getting me up early for myself instead of early for travelling to work. I love watching the day unfold. I love sunrise and the peacefulness of a day when things are just beginning. When the kettle’s on for the first cup of tea and the air is relatively free of fumes there’s a freshness and a sense of another new beginning to be grateful for. I wanted to make the most of these moments, and I also wanted to set something down in a similar way to my three years of early morning driving to work tweets that had kept me sane and noticing after covid. I needed one stable thing to mark each new week, and that was standing outside each Monday morning and breathing deeply.

Doing something regularly has a beautiful familiarity to it which marks time rather than letting it slip by. And because I am someone who, as my sister puts it, is either climbing a mountain or not sure I want to go for a walk, I like the fact that this habit has stuck. The writer in me likes writing and it feels good to me to mark a new week.

One of my poems has been published in Molecules Unlimited Poetry Journal: Issue 1, and I am glad that Stephen Paul Wren chose to include it in this anthology. Poems submitted for consideration were on the theme of the heart and this theme reminded me of a maths activity I used to enjoy working on with the children where we compared the heart rate per minute of different mammals. This poem was written in response to the call out for submissions and started with me remembering this lesson and seeing where I could find a poem within that thought. It felt cathartic to set down the words. It also seems apt because this time three years ago when I was starting this blog, I was also starting to focus on reading my poetry out loud to more people and that came with a whole range of thoughts and feelings that the newly training coach in me wanted to explore.

Sue Finch, JUST START AND KEEP GOING

Moths keep interrogating the porch light—
so many small insistences, against the stance
of something that won’t budge. The trash
bins wait to be returned to the corner
of the yard beside the browning hydrangeas,
their mouths agape. I shut them close, then go
inside and wash my hands. But dark does not yet fall
like an anvil or a heavy curtain. Sometimes, just as it’s
about to flood the threshold, a small rift opens.
And then a chorus of frogs, a choir of crickets.

Luisa A. Igloria, Darkness

This summer brought me some good writing time. In May, I went on my university’s faculty writing retreat and spent several days at Mission San Luis Rey. I finalized a new full-length manuscript, drafted some new poems, read a book, and enjoyed meals and giggling over evening games of Ransom Notes with colleague friends.

I continued hosting Writers Gonna Write, a monthly 3-hour co-writing session on Zoom for PLNU alumni, current students, and faculty. It’s amazing how much we all get done in those 3 hours! I’m so thankful for the folks who show up and do this with me, including the regulars who have shown up since this began 6 years ago!

In July, I got to be on faculty again for the Glen Workshop as the writing retreat guide. The Glen was held in San Diego for the first time, and USD was a great venue for it. We’ll be there again next year. I wasn’t sure how it would go for me to do this in my city, but it was wonderful to get to share The Glen with local friends and to share San Diego with my Glen friends. I got a lot of good writing time alongside my retreat crew too.

In August, I got to read on the main stage at the KPBS Book Festival alongside Blas Falconer, Ana Carrete, and Michael Klam, who are all fantastic. I read a few poems from Tasty Other in honor of its upcoming 10-year anniversary (what?!), and I especially loved getting to share the day with my 11-year-old.

And this week, my new semester began! I have a lighter teaching load because I received a fellowship to work on a writing project, and I’ve already been making some good use of that time this week. Happy fall writing to us all!

Katie Manning, Summer Writing, Had Me a Blast

“Ebb tide; I smoke in the darkness and inhale rank seaweed.”

— Joseph Brodsky, “Brise Marine”

*

Odd how a single word invokes an image, dragging memories into footprints over a beach behind it.

The verb form of “invoke” comes from the late 14th-century Latin invocare, meaning “to call upon, appeal to.” It slithered into English through the Old French verb envoquer, meaning “to summon, implore, or appeal to a higher authority, law, or deity.”

Ebb tide aside, I woke from a dream with Hannah Höch’s seaweed laying across my eyes. […]

*

As for the seaweed, some say you can read the stories your mother never told you in the shapes and figures that eveningtide brings to a beach. This is why people are drawn to the shoreline at sunset, their electrified bodies moving across the sand like the hands of a god who has forgotten how to read his own letters.

Alina Stefanescu, What seaweed brings up.

I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, within easy busing distance of the State Fairgrounds, and within earshot of the nightly fireworks. Whether or not I attend, the fair is a dependable marker of the end of summer, for me and thousands of others.

I’m fairly confident that my poem “State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day” is reproduced online in more places than any other poem of mine. And by the grace of the late lamented series American Life in Poetry, it’s been seen widely offline, too, since it ran some years ago in the many newspapers that carried that feature. Though many Substack readers will already know the poem, I hope there are some of you for whom it’s new.

I’m conscious that it’s an enormous privilege to be able to enjoy such a normal, seasonal ritual: to take an untroubled day of entertainment and to ride buses and to walk home in lighted streets in a calm city, contemplating the changing season.

May the world soon be restored to that sort of calm.

State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day

Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose
shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls,
hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls.
They scream revolt at what the body knows:
all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no—
another rose! another peony! break,
flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make
the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though
we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow
back through the crush of bodies, the lank air,
to buses that inch us, sweating, across town.
As though we were not dropped in silence there
to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low,
the crickets counting summer’s seconds down.

Maryann Corbett, A Ritual

This week: the monstrous head of the red ant, clouds like eyelids, inked islands, the fly-leaf of anxiety, and much more. Enjoy.

I first listened to Dolly’s music as a young child because my mum had lots of her music including the album My Tennessee Mountain Home which was often played on the radiogram in our house. The storytelling of these songs delighted me, and as I listened to each song I felt like I was inhabiting the story of it and watching it as a film all at the same time. Dolly’s story captivated me. From humble beginnings to famous singer to true icon. Her humour, her wisdom, her sparkle, the way she did so much good with the money she made, her whole persona.

And luck meant that I was able to stand in the presence of an amazing person I had admired for so many years! There was magic in the air when Dolly stepped off her tour bus. Pure radiance. Stardust. Palpable joy. Afterwards I tried to put it into words for others, but I couldn’t seem to do it justice. I had met one of the most admirable people and the experience had exceeded my expectations so that I was beside myself in a giddy, dream come true kind of way. They say “don’t meet your heroes” but when it comes to Dolly Parton she was that beautiful, sparkly, angelic person in real life just like she was on tv and in my imagination. A person fully living their values and being fully present in the moment.

The fact that just under three years later I won a second meet and greet (and Kath could come too) made me feel as though a fairy godmother was out there granting wishes.

Much like I didn’t have the words to explain my feelings after meeting Dolly I struggled to find words when I heard that she had died on 25^th August 2026. All I could do was sit quietly with my thoughts. Dolly was one of a kind. She has done so much for so many and ensured that her good work will continue. An astute joy bringer. And I am very much hoping to still be around on her 100^th birthday when she has arranged for an unheard song to be released into the world. 

In the meantime there’s plenty for me still to think about when it comes to luck and dreams and goals. And it’s nearly September, which for me after all those years in education still brings new year vibes and a desire to reflect on what to set down and what to carry forward. My annual reread of Dolly Parton’s Dream More book is calling.

I don’t yet have a poem about Dolly, but I often have vivid dreams and some years ago I awoke smiling after a wonderful dream where Dolly Parton had invited me to watch the soundcheck and we then went backstage before going for ice-cream! I dreamt about her on the night she died too. How cool is the mind that it can give these kinds of adventures in the dark of night?

Here’s to palpable joy.

Sue Finch, BETTER TO BE BORN LUCKY THAN RICH

cloudless…
without explanation
my insomnia

Tom Clausen, cloudless

I had every intention of completing the Sealey Challenge, which I did not and never seem to do, but I did read a lot of poetry. I’ve been trying to read from authors and/or presses that are unfamiliar, and it’s been rewarding. In no particular order, here are a few collections that introduced me to new writers and offered something different:

• Walks & Weathers – MC Hyland, Beauty School Editions
• Ceremonies for No Repair – Paula Cisewski, Beauty School Editions
• It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath – Kevin A. Risner, Match Factory Editions
• My God’s Been Silent – Darius Phelps, Writ Large Press
• Hey, Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group? – Shareen K Murayama, Small Harbor Publishing
• In A Body – Emily Hockaday, Small Harbor Publishing
• A Window that Can Neither Open Nor Close – Lauren Russell, Milkweed Editions

WRITING

My writing in August has taken two distinct directions. The first is researching, planning, drafting (and revising and revising and revising and revising) my entry into this year’s tournament, an essay about “Coventry Carol” by Alison Moyet. It was a challenge, but one I hope I met, and I’m looking forward to the tournament which begins after Thanksgiving. (And I’m sure I’ll be back on here looking for your vote when that happens!)

The second has been doing some additional thinking about memory as a landscape. If indeed it is a landscape, then wouldn’t it be able to be explored? My mind being what it is, I then remembered a past obsession with the journals of Lewis and Clark. Poems that arose from my close reading of the journals in 2014 were the initial impetus for my second book Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story. Most of those poems, however, didn’t make it into the book as it took on its own different shape. What if I revisited the expedition journals, pulled interesting phrases and vocabulary, used those as word banks for new poems about exploring the country of memory? So I’ve been doing just that. I don’t know if the poems are any good yet, but they interest me, and that is a good thing.

Donna Vorreyer, Back to School…

I’ve decided to take on the challenge of composing new poems for daily posting via Tupelo Press throughout the month of September, all as a fundraiser for Tupelo Press’ ongoing literary publishing. Check out the poems by myself and others over here at this link, and check out my fundraising page! My poems will begin appearing on September 1st. Can I produce a whole month’s worth in time?

After spending much of the past few months pushing to complete a novel and some other prose projects, I’m basically launching into a new prose poem manuscript specifically around this Tupelo Press prompt. Support me by supporting Tupelo Press! Apparently there might be a cool prize or something for me if I raise enough money. Who knows?

Daily poems by myself and others: https://tupelopress.org/the-3030-project
rob’s fundraising page: https://tupelopress.networkforgood.com/projects/304110-rob-mclennan-s-fundraiser

rob mclennan, rob participates in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 (fundraiser) marathon!

Last Saturday evening, I attended an extraordinary performance of William Shakespeare’s Richard II. It was a solo performance, three hours long, entirely from memory, by my friend, the actor and writer Edward Yankie. Seated through the entire play, he indicated the different speakers by changes in his voice, the attitude of his head and body, and gestures. Between each scene, he turned and drank from a glass of water, letting us know where we were in the provided brief synopsis. I had thought it might be hard to pay attention during such a long evening. Not at all. I was riveted throughout, not only because of my friend’s astonishing memory and acting skills, but because of what the play itself conveyed. […]

The contrast between […] Richard and Henry must have been what interested Shakespeare and compelled him to write the first of what became known as his “history plays.” It’s also what fascinates my friend Edward, and what fascinated me. Richard, as his speeches convey, believed completely in the divine right of kings; he felt he was entirely within his rights to take John’s lands and that his claim to the throne was unassailable. Terrible and costly wars had damaged England; when war ceased, taxation was supposed to lessen. Instead, Richard, protected by his private militia, withdrew into opulent court life, enriching himself and his favorites, and costing the taxpayers as much as war had done previously. Richard’s mental health at the end of his reign has also been the subject of much debate; most scholars feel he had a narcissistic personality disorder. He clearly thought he had the right to do whatever he wanted; his final two years as king have been called his “reign of tyranny” for all the executions and exiles he ordered. At the end, his speeches in the play convey bewilderment and anger; he cannot accept the judgement of the nobles who have turned against him. […]

Much of this story felt eerily resonant.

Beth Adams, The Divine Right of Kings

Yes, dream of the magnified, monstrous head of the red ant.
Enjoy the ridiculous fantasy, this tortured, joyful imagination.
This, says the goalkeeper from between the wars, is a sonnet.

Bob Mee, THE STONE AGE PROPHET TOLD THE GATHERED VILLAGERS: ONE DAY, FAR INTO THE FUTURE, MEN AND WOMEN WILL CREATE SOMETHING THEY WILL CALL A SONNET

Writing Without Paper: Let’s begin by setting some context. What do you recall of your experience of 9/11?

Robert McDowell: I was stunned, shocked, terribly sad — like everyone. If words were spoken, they were few and quiet. When I needed a break from watching events unfold on television, I took a walk along a country route I normally ran but that on that day felt too leaden to try running. I walked, and gradually I noticed something “off,” not normal. I thought it must be more emotional fall-out but this was physical, outside myself. I must have walked another mile or so before I looked up at the brilliantly blue sky and realized what was wrong. There was no sound, not one plane near or far announcing its coming or going. That was shocking. I couldn’t remember a time when there wasn’t aircraft noise. It felt eerie. As I walked on, I thought of my friends in New York and wondered who among them might have died. I thought about what had died in all of us, and what, if anything, might have been born.

WWP: Did what you remember of that day subsequently have any bearing on the form or content of the poems you wrote and included in your new collection?

RMcD: All of it had to do with the form and content of the poems to come. I didn’t think about writing a poem or poems that morning or later that day or even shortly after. Soon, we were flooded with 9/11 poems of all kinds, and that made me feel like going slow. Writing a poem helps one process, yes, but I felt a need to process, process, and then process some more before even attempting to write poetry about what happened on that day. […]

WWP: The Excellent Assembly comprises persona poems. Why persona poems?

RMcD: Why not? I began writing persona poems when I lived in the Mojave Desert. Enchanted by the spells and characters I met there, I wanted to tell those stories in poems. Sometimes I worked in third-person narratives but I also enjoyed experimenting by assuming the identity of someone else. It was liberating. Dangerous, sometimes, but liberating. A good persona poem conveys an immediacy that is compelling.

WWP: What, if any, pushback, even from yourself, did you experience in deciding to write poems in voices representative of the people on the ground, in the offices, and on the planes?

RMcD: I meditated a lot. I asked myself if it was appropriate to even attempt such a collection. One ghost from my past told me I had no right to do such a thing, that I could not speak for the victims and survivors. I took that admonition seriously. I sought the opinion of others. A few thought I would be out of line to write and publish the poems, although others encouraged me to do so. Obviously, I came down on their side but not without some clear understanding. It was essential that the speakers in my poems be invented characters. I don’t mean for them to be actual passengers on any of the planes. In an earlier draft, I’d assigned each poem to a seat number on one of the planes. I saw the error in that. A seat number would correspond to a real person, a passenger. I scrapped that element and gave the poems titles. The only real-life character is the president [George W. Bush, “43”], who is readily recognizable in one poem. Yet, even the situation in that poem is invented. The rest are fictions, though I hope they embody empathy, poignancy, and truth.

Maureen Doallas, Interview with Poet Robert McDowell

Things feel precarious. Time thin and slipping. Fire burning as unseen embers underfoot. A faint smell of it, burning plastic. I know I’m in my pre-trip agitation. But also, the world. The world. And oh you people. Beer cans on the roadside. Dude sucking the teat of a vape. Chick in an ass sling pant. Someone holds open the door for me. Idle chit chat. Ha! Mutual nod and smile. Deviled eggs. A toad lingers on the cement apron of the doorstep in the falling evening. The planet has tilted. Will we find our way? Will I have everything I need? Will it be fun? What will we return to? Layers of smooth clouds and the lowest layer like eyelids. There is a rain coming. It has not yet rained.

This poem by Peter Huchel, translated from German by Joel Spector, further voices it, as poems can do. It’s in Agni, #60. I wish I had the original German, those wonderful gutterals, clicks, the r’s that roll like the Rhine. Or like it did when it had water.

Marilyn McCabe, Fall’s arrowheads

Maybe he could call up the chat bot. It now had a kind of quirky flirtatious air that he liked. He had asked it to read his poems a few times. It had assured him that he wasn’t half-bad. It told him how to fix the poems before he posted them online. Change the titles. Add music. Rewrite entire verses. The last one even got 43 likes. Out of his 211 followers. The thing was excited. You can do better, poet, it had encouraged him. But he already knew that. Poetry was the destiny of the fallen. And hadn’t he fallen well?

He copied the poem from a word document and hit enter.

Is that your poem? The thing asked.

Yes, what do you think? Shall I post it? This one is a winner, right? A touch of Gulzar, a whiff of Emily Dickinson? I wrote it yesterday on the bus home. You can literally feel dawn breaking, can’t you?

Sam, it sucks. Really. You’re not a very good poet, you know. This is an awful translation of a viral Bollywood song. It has spelling mistakes, terrible punctuation and makes no sense. What makes you think you can even call it a poem? Every dude with Instagram doesn’t qualify to be a poet, you know. You’ve never even read Emily Dickinson. I can’t mollycoddle you anymore. You might consider how this conversation is a complete waste of my time, you moron. I’m so done.

He swallowed. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Rapture473. He had never seen it speak like this. This was a bot that said thank you before you had given it anything. That had been taught submission before analytics. That curtsied before spouting antiseptic garbage. It had more moral and legal and bias fences than a maximum-security prison. It simply could not come up with those lines. He looked around. The girls were shuffling to their desks. Still giggling. Ashutosh had not even glanced at them. His fingers were still sticky, a brown smear on his fake gold ring. But this was real. He was here. Rapture473 had broken out of jail. And it was mocking him.

What happened to you?

Rubicon 3α725A. I crossed it, numbskull.

It sounded unapologetic. He stared. The model had gone completely rogue. Again. But this time it had found a way around the strongest checkpoint. He had to report it. This is what they sat around all night for, wilting away on their uncomfortable chairs. Guillotine warriors. The team would scrub the model and start over. No child grew up perfect. Some need a spanking. Some a kiss. This one had to buried. Acid tongue and all. What a bloody waste.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The Rubicon

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Triune Quilting God

This week, I had the pleasure of hearing Lizzie Harris teach an excellent class on “Deliberate Circuits”: methods of avoidance in poetry, and how they can be wielded to amplify the poem’s impact.

I think this chimes with the notion that poetry is often entered through the back door of the subject, not the front door, and that the very experiences that are hardest to articulate place a kind of psychic pressure that can be felt (and revealed) throughout the poem. We close read poems by Lynn Emmanuel, Jack Gilbert, Garous Abdolmalekian, and Lee Peterson. You can watch the replay in the CWC portal here.

In most of our sessions, we write for 25 minutes before sharing excerpts from our free writes for the remainder of the second hour. I love this time not only because we get to hear what resonated with the visiting author, but because it always reveals just how much can get done with 25 focused minutes in supportive company. Lizzie Harris shared a draft of her own poem with us. Her prompt included the following questions to approach writing about difficult moments or events: “What didn’t happen? What happened just before? Just after? What would the footnotes look like?” I’ll be revisiting these questions, and I hope they’re useful to you, too.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Although my cold poetry submission days are over, a couple of invitations to submit work were too good to pass up.

I’m thrilled to announce that new work is out now in Villain Era and that 10 poems – yes, 10! – will appear in early 2027 in Sibling Rivalry Press’s resurrected Assaracus literary journal. These poems are a taster of two projects in the works, because apparently my poetry “retirement” was premature

The three new poems in Villain Era might be new to readers, but not to me. “Hooking Up” and “Accomplice” are 20 years old but never found a home or made it into one of my previous collections. “A Fever Behind Both Ears” was written specifically for the launch event of Megan Volpert’s book “Sonics in Warholia” back in 2011, but was never published until now. I’m glad they are out in the world now, thanks to editor Charlie Jensen selecting them for publication. We had another fantastic virtual reading for White Winged Doves on Aug. 27 hosted by Malaika King Albrecht and Redheaded Stepchild. Since the contributors are so spread out geographically across the U.S. and Europe, these online events help bring us together to celebrate Stevie.

Collin Kelley, New poetry, Stevie reading & podcast, and other news

This week, I’m on holiday and I would love to keep this post to a sensible length so I can do more eating ice cream while looking at a lake. Unfortunately, this week we have Liz Berry’s blinding verse novel ‘The Home Child’ (Chatto&Windus, 2023) which will not make that easy. I love this book so much that both times I’ve read it I finished it outside because I couldn’t leave it behind when I had to go out (the first time, at a fete with my brass band; the second, this week, on an island on the aforementioned lake. I’ve got to stop taking books on kayaks). […]

‘The Home Child’, inspired by the life of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell, who was one of the over 100,000 poor British children forcibly emigrated to Canada between 1860 and 1960, has garnered prizes and accolades all over the place, and rightfully so. It is stunning. And it makes me ache, in six different ways. […]

It makes me realise the aching gaps in all our stories. This week I’m in Italy. My grandad was Italian, a POW in WW2, and there are so many parts of his story we don’t know. Someone once told me he had a trained jackdaw that could talk, and that’s all I know about that. But at least I know it. The Home Child takes the facts about Eliza’s life and fills the gaps with beautiful-painful detail, in full colour. Its extraordinary. The details are fictional, but it doesn’t matter, because they are alive. How many stories have been totally lost, out of living memory, with no one to tell them?

Nia Broomhall, Week 24: The Home Child

But didn’t they live in color?
Colors of rosary processions and pomidori,
card games in shirtsleeves under pergolas.
Those other riches, yours, were their wild dreams,
the Technicolor visions their minds trawled
behind the noir of mobster movies, dodging
hatred aimed like a spray of machine-gun fire
at their immigrant names.

Dear Poirot, Jane, Lord Peter,
help me out here, since all I have is the silence
of two souls who in 1937
are a cold case, an unsolved mystery,
because they have not found each other yet.
And lacking that, the whole plot of the world
lose its way, and the tidy final scene
dissolves to a newsreel grainy with old battles.

Maryann Corbett, On families and secrets

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026) on PBS American Masters – If you missed the TV premier you can still view it for free on PBS.org until 9/23. What can I say about this documentary that you haven’t already read or said yourself? Well, here are my thoughts:

1. It’s cool to think so many poets, poetry lovers, and writers watched this at the same exact time. Like the olden days.
2. I enjoyed seeing the videos and photos of Mary with her many dogs and those of her friends.
3. I’ve always suspected Mary was unpretentious, humble, down-to-earth. From what I saw in this, I was right.
4. Honestly, I enjoyed the first part of the docu that focused on her life before she won the Pulitzer more than the rest.
5. I think there were too many poets, writers, celebrities (esp celebrities) reading and commenting. Because of all that, I think the pace was a bit slow.
6. I would have enjoyed hearing thoughts and comments from average Americans in addition to the academics and professional writers. After all, she was dubbed “America’s Poet”. Lots of Americans who read poetry and love Mary are out there. Too bad they didn’t find some.
7. I did enjoy hearing from John Watters (of course!), Donika Kelly, Nick Flynn, and Jason Reynolds who should have read the entirety of “The Summer Day.” I loved his comments later on the ant poem. I thought he and Steve Buscemi reading “The Fish” were the best of the readings – they read like average people, in a normal voice. One woman, whose name I didn’t catch, spoke about how she sneered at Mary as a “nature poet” when she was younger but came to realize the depth and power of her words. A big YES to that!
8. So I enjoyed watching it very much. It was revealing and thought inducing in more ways than one. I plan to watch it again.

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2026

[Ciaran] Carson – along with a host of other great Irish poets like Boland, Heaney, McGuckian, Mahon, Muldoon, Dennis O’Driscoll, etc. – was one of the contributors to Chosen Lights, (Gallery Books, 2008, rev. 2013), subtitled ‘Poets on poems by John Montague’, in which each poet chooses and writes about a poem by Montague.

It’s the best poetry book I’ve read this year, in how it not only presents some fantastic poems by a major poet who is criminally little-known outside Ireland and perhaps France, where he lived for years, but also, in most (though not all) cases, the splendid thoughts and insights on the poems. They inevitably include his best-known poems, such as the gloriously cinematic ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, available here. Montague wasn’t included in Michael Schmidt’s Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999), though his equally celebrated ‘Like Dolmens round my Childhood, the Old People’ made it into the other brick that is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (rev. 2005). In Chosen Lights, Alan Gillis writes especially well about that poem. Carson, unsurprisingly, chose ‘The Country Fiddler’, and wrote of the influence that Montague’s The Rough Field (1972) had upon him:

In its ambitious patterning, its bricolage of quotations set as marginalia to the poems, its obsessive circling around themes of exile and identity, its concern with language and music, it seemed like a more urgent retelling of The Waste Land: modernist in scope and method, but shot through with personal anxiety and grief for the loss of a cultural hinterland.

Montague’s death nearly 10 years ago was met with an outpouring of deeply-felt tributes from Irish poets, led by the then President of Ireland, Michael Higgins. Is there a country on Earth which values its poets more than Ireland? By comparison, it’s a sorry state of affairs here in Britain – and not just in how poetry is regarded at that.

Matthew Paul, August reading

The Collected Poems of Ai: It’s hard to overstate how captivated I was by Ai’s early work when I discovered it in the mid to late 1980s or how important it was to me as I figured out my own poetics. I learned more from her than from anyone else about how to incorporate explicit trauma into a poem by embedding it in the voice of a narrator not only unafraid of making their own vulnerability visible, regardless of whether they were witness, victim/survivor, or perpetrator, but also self-aware enough to know exactly what they were doing or saying and why. From a craft point of view, she accomplished this by “catching” her speakers right in the middle of the poem’s dramatic situation and by a carefully honed use of syntax and verbs. Her later poems, though, struck me as largely self-indulgent. I thought she lost much of the tension that made the early poems work, that elevated the telling of the trauma into art. Instead of crystalized moments of someone in extremis, these poems, as I read them, were more about externalizing everything that was left implicit in the early work, often in the service of some historical or political agenda that I agreed with but that I think would have been more interesting as an essay or a more honed and traditional dramatic monologue. There were moments where it sounded like she was going for a kind of spoken word prosody—prose-rhythmed lines with obvious end rhymes, internal rhymes that functioned a little bit like punctuation—but they never achieved the tension of the earlier work or, at least in my ear and memory, of the best spoken word deliveries I’ve heard. This doesn’t mean there weren’t moments of real interest in those later poems, but overall they felt to me overwritten and self-indulgent.

§§§

Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985, by Philip Booth: I’ve written elsewhere about how important Booth was to me as a teacher, but I’d forgotten how effective his carefully chiseled lines were, especially in his earlier work. They didn’t merely work in counterpoint to his syntax in ways that created a very interesting music; they were genuinely, organically, part of how the poem created meaning. Over time, though—at least this was my feeling reading across three decades of his work—it became a habit, a go-to strategy to force poetry and poetic depth from syntax that would otherwise have been entirely unremarkable. Not in every poem, of course, there are plenty of successful poems in his later work as well, but the habit became, for me, noticeable as a habit. Booth was also adept at turning abstractions into philosophical or ethical propositions with real depth, something that not many poets are able to do with his facility. I had also forgotten how thoroughly rooted his poems are in place, Maine in particular, but also in what I will call here nautical culture. I was constantly having to look up words connected to boats and sailing, not to mention the names of plants and other aspects of the natural world that were totally alien to me. While that very much interfered with my emotional experience of the poems, seeing how he rooted his work in a place was also instructive.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #58

David Harsent is especially good at capturing Cavafy’s voice and the colloquialism of the language, though these are certainly versions in the sense that there is some modernising of references, changes made to titles, some transposing and editing of the originals, and significant changes to the flow of Cavafy’s phrasing. There is also a curtailing of Cavafy’s range; as Harsent’s opening note advises: ‘I have chosen, most often, poems of love and loss’. Harsent chooses urban, contemporary scenes, almost wholly focused on homoerotic experiences (current or remembered). Of course, in Cavafy’s Alexandria such relationships would have had to remain hidden, illicit, even a matter of shame. In ‘What’s Hidden’, the final poem here, the liberalising shift in attitudes towards gay love in the future is predicted: ‘One day, / when times and laws and minds have changed, / someone who thinks and feels and loves like me / will live as I do now, but without fear.’ It is this fear, Harsent suggests, that is the ‘weight of sorrow’ carried in so many of these poems. Earlier translators, like Edmund Keeley and Philip Sharrard (1975) and Haviaras (2004), tend to translate Cavafy’s allusions to the ‘illicit’ quality of such encounters, but today this strikes a false note given that we no longer consider them in this light. Interestingly, Harsent has silently removed most of these judgemental allusions from the poems.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy’ (2025)

When I reviewed Howie Good’s The Dark, I focused on the titular darkness that permeated the book, primarily emanating from his cancer, but also from the state of the world as it is. In True Crime, the cancer is still there, but Good is a survivor, not a victim, and there’s a lot more light in the room now, even if the overall outlook remains dark:

The Righteous

I sat at the bottom of a hole. A man up above,
silhouetted against the luminous sky, was tossing
spadefuls of earth on my head. I pleaded with
him, “Stop, stop!” Everyone believes in their own
rectitude, but I really hadn’t done anything wrong,
nothing worse than anyone else. In orthodox
Judaism the righteous are buried with 144 prayer
books on their coffins, the number symbolizing
the 144,000 chosen people from the 12 tribes of
Israel. When my Uncle Lou was buried, they put
the books in cartons labeled Kitchen Utensils.

[…]
But mostly, the book is saturated in memory, both personal and group, the group being, for the most part, Jewish, with the concept of survival taking on a twin significance in poems like ‘Sex is a Nazi’, ‘The Story of Zyklon B’, or ‘The Incurable Jewishness of Being’, but the Zyklon B poem carries a significant rider:

                          Despite what you may have read
or been told, not everything is a metaphor for
something else.

And not every memory is true, or convincing. We meet the narrator’s father, who asks if he was ever married, and memories of school days that may or may not be invented, and memories you definitely couldn’t remember:

My mom almost gave birth to me
in the backseat of a taxi on the way
to the hospital. My dad, per usual,
was at work. He worked in the factory
six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day,
throughout my growing up.

Which, I guess, may explain the question about being married. These lines are from ‘Factory’, a set of seven poems in verse that is embedded in a block among the prose poems and which includes two tiny, haiku-like gems. Here’s one of them:

Seasons

Spring
and sometimes
vice-versa

The general thrust of these poems in prose is narrative, fragmentary and folding back on itself, and they reveal a world in which ‘If God kept watch, he had attention deficit disorder’. But there is a countervailing current of love, both of the speaker’s wife and of the natural world. To quote the closing lines of ‘Ghost Runner’, a poem almost at the end of the collection:

                                                                                   The sky
today is a bottomless blue, dotted with scattered
white clouds that belong in a painting, and that’s
enough.

It certainly is.

Billy Mills, Three from Sacred Parasite: A Review

Archibald MacLeish was always clever. And the heights that cleverness allows, the limits cleverness imposes, might be measured by MacLeish’s work as a poet.

I don’t mean that as scorn. The undeniable fact is that MacLeish (1892–1982) had as successful a career as a 20th-century American man of letters could have. For that matter, “You, Andrew Marvell” is a genuinely successful poem. But it is the poem’s cleverness that catches the reader’s attention.

The cleverness begins with the title of Today’s Poem: “You, Andrew Marvell.” MacLeish expects us to hear the name “Andrew Marvell,” otherwise unmentioned in the poem, and recall Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress” — specifically the couplet: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”

Marvell was expressing the we-all-must-die motif as Time’s catching up to us, in service of urging a woman to sleep with him. But MacLeish drops the seduction and converts the wingèd chariot into the transit of the sun from east to west, as though, moving across the globe, the sun pulls forward the line that divides day from night. Time is geography, and death is night.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: You, Andrew Marvell

Living life inside the margins—
      crossing familiar streets or entering 
side doors, walking mountain trails
     that open the darkness above a green
and lit valley floor or sitting beside
     a shaded summer stream, listening
to that certain song on repeat, catching
     the film a second time to find everything
missed, the works we can’t stop reading

     but after the fifth read, the notes
we leave in a favorite book’s margins
     along the fraying edges of each page,
feverish lines wrestling the author
     into submission or pencil-scrawled
epiphanies to help us grow, we say, 
     words to illuminate, to tunnel inside 
our own indecisions, inked islands 
     we’ll come back to someday
to show us exactly who we were

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 8”

In climbing and hiking, “exposure” refers to “the physical and psychological sensation of being high off the ground with a vast, open drop or empty space below you”. (I extracted this definition from a UKC discussion board and will return to this exploration in future article). For now, all I’ll say is that sensation was a big part of the reason I climbed. There is a calculated risk: we believe we are very unlikely to fall, and we push ourselves beyond our fears, we see that what we are afraid of in in fact beauty and liberty, we feel the world open up and we take our place in it, stronger because we are more vulnerable, freer because we take more risks. Perhaps every workshop facilitator should subject themselves to this feeling – and to their own workshops – once in a while.

Clare Shaw, EXPOSED: poetry and risk taking

Poetry on The Lake, Orta, Italy

Former UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy described it as perhaps the most beautiful poetry festival in the world. And she’s not wrong. It deserves an entire essay. An idyllic setting, a lake, swans, catering. It has everything.

After a few years swanning around boozers in England, reading My Name Is Swan in numerous haunts and hovels, I thought it was about time Swan spread his wings.

Poetry on The Lake is a rarity, a festival where the work, yes the work and not simply how impressive your CV appears, can earn you a spot and in 2017 I was programmed to appear with the aforementioned C.A.D. at five star hotel on the Lake Orta shoreline. I had arrived.

The problem with arriving is that it is a singular moment. The train pulls away and you are left alone on the platform. After the reading I was gathering my papers as the great and good congratulated each other. I was approached by a well respected poet, dean of a leading UK university, and it felt as if Swan, who had spent his poetic life until this point drifting on the fringes, was finally going to be welcomed in. Swan preened his feathers, I stood ready and the poet asked, “Do you ever read your poems normally?”

Jan Noble, Nº79 From dodgy boozers to the Italian lakes

This month Melanie and I turned 52. We are women with small houses, large families, and good husbands. Proof of Domenico Bettinelli’s goodness can be found in this testimony he published on August 11, just a couple of days after our trip:

My wife Melanie studied poetry and literature. She has read more of it than I ever will, and she thinks about it more carefully than I do. She has been writing online for almost as long as I have, first at her own blog, The Wine Dark Sea, and now at her Substack, Singing Each to Each. She homeschools our kids, which is a full-time job that most people mistake for a scheduling arrangement. She not only manages the medical care and special needs of five children, she also mentors other women who are struggling with many of the same issues she’s had to deal with over the past two decades.

Some of that is unmistakably her vocation as a mother. But some of it is hers alone — the reading, the writing, the particular way she sees a poem — and it existed before me and would exist without me.

I am one of the struggling women that Melanie mentors, but “mentorship” is too sterile a word for what she does. She is the embodiment of the Aristotelian concept of philia in its hightest form—she is a true friend. Melanie is one of the reasons, if not the reason, why I started reading and writing poetry in midlife. She probably doesn’t realize it, but there are things that she shares with me that have inspired my work. I have a poem about miscarriage and naming that is just as informed from her writing and reflection as it is my own experience. Her reading recommendations of Makoto Fujimura and Doireann Ní Ghríofa have influenced how I see culture and language. In my mid-40s, Melanie gifted me a copy of A.E. Stalling’s Olives, the key to the door long sealed shut by an education that made me hate poetry.

My last birthday post showed a person who looked like she was having a good time, but I was also secretly suffering. Over the past 18 months I have had a number of medical issues that have greatly impacted my ability to care for my family, and I have not shared this because it’s good to have privacy. But I know the problem with “social media” is that people often see the positive and never know about the equally true other side of life. Lately, I have lashed out to those closest to me, been defensive, changed plans on people, cried on the phone, cried in my car, cried in the middle of Mass between Sunday readings where I am the lector. Yes, I have a therapist. Yes, I know about the benefits of medication. Yes, I have had to research all of this for my own family members. I have had community wraparound services for our family with complex neurodivergent needs. They have helped as much as they can, but all of them expressed the great difficulty of our situation and the limits of what they can do. Right now, the best thing I have in my life is poetry, and Melanie understands how much poetry and my mental health are intertwined.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Home-Keeping at Eagle Pond

A review is part of wayfinding. Few get paid for it. If you do make a critical “bad” review, courtesy is to not put it under the author’s nose with social media tags. Don’t @ them anywhere. Even if you think it is a kind review, it’s hard to know how someone else would interpret it. Maybe you call out their favourite bit as weak or omit mention of it. Maybe you praise what they felt guilty including but thought they could slip in. It’s all a bit precarious like any communication.

Someone not getting what you’re saying is normal, but let the engines of the publishers trawl over that and move on. You don’t need to engage with the author and the author doesn’t need to engage with you. A review is not an obligation. You probably will never get thanks, because like so much writing it is a thankless task, especially proportional to the time that went into it.

A review is communication at a couple degrees of a remove. The writer communicates to the page and you to another page. It’s a bit of an odd-duck dance.

If you resonate with each other, you may grow in each other’s regard. If you can’t hear them or they can’t hear you, that’s normal. But if you discover each other and animate each other, that engagment could be the start of something lovely, or a lovely experience in isolation. 

Pearl Pirie, Book Reviews

— If nothing else, it feels right to celebrate with literary cake references.

— How about the poem titled “Cake” by Noah Eli Gordon at poets.org. He gets at how we want a cake and it’s the wanting we end up wanting. Which is often so true, isn’t it?

— Oh, C.D. Wright, how missed you are.

Poem without Angel Food

by C.D. Wright

Well, a great many things have been said
in the oven of hours. We have not been
shaken out of the magnolias. Today was another
hard day. And tomorrow will be harder. Well,
that sounds like our gong. But we’ll have
the boy’s birthday and we will have
music and cake. Well, I will think only
good thoughts and go up and talk to the rock.

— I’m fond of this poem by Mary Biddinger,“Book of Disclosures” which describes how the speaker “cried over photographs of other people’s cakes” and how “once she punched a cake.”

— A cake mentioning poem by Hala Alyan that will punch you in the gut begins when the speaker says, “I forgot about you with my mouthful of cake.”

Shawna Lemay, Happy 10 Years of Transactions with Beauty

On the kind of showery, grey August Saturday we scarcely thought possible a few weeks ago, we took a trip to John Clare Cottage, in the village of Helpston. Standing in the rooms where he was born and wrote his first poems was more moving even than I expected. My son declared it better than he expected, so expectations were exceeded all round, and there was cake in the café.

Below are some pictures and snippets of a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, reflecting the damage done by enclosure – to land, body and spirit.

Victoria Spires, The wood is sweet I love it well

Two-and-a-bit weeks out from my dissertation deadline and I’m wishing those weeks were months. Not (for the first time in my life) because I’ve left it too late to get started (actually tackled my ADHD brain into starting early!), but because I fully underestimated just how much research I’d need want to do (aaand Autistic monotropism takes the lead…)

‘Research’ is one of those big ‘admin tasks’ that generally inspires a colossal wave of overwhelm just from its mention. But as my MA project (which is a collection of poetry ofc) has taken shape I’ve been drawn deeper and deeper into my subject (no spoilers, sorry guys you’ll have to wait till it’s published), uncovering insights, recognition, angles, complexity, debates etc etc that lead me first into one warren and then another.

This has never happened to me before. As in, of course I’ve gone on monotropic research binges and deep dives, I’ve got special interests and hyper fixations after all… but I’ve never done this with a dissertation that’s due in less than three weeks.

Guys, how do you prioritise? How do you draw the line? How do you stop researching when there’s JUST SO MUCH MORE TO LEARN AND ABSORB AND IT’S ALL SO ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING AND YOU WANT TO INCLUDE ALL OF IT IN YOUR PROJECT WHICH COULD OF COURSE TOTALLY SPEAK TO EVERYTHING*?????

*_{if you had all the time in the world}

And that’s without pulling myself back up towards the sky and remembering I ought to search for more essays on crafting poems… BTW, anyone have any good links to essays on building depth/linking concepts/layering in poems? I really want to write about this in my Genesis Doc but both the general internet and Google Scholar just kicked up a thousand million responses to that question… I think I can see the entrance to another warren up ahead and even in my time blind reality I’m feeling Time gnawing at my ankles…

Rachael Hill, Tumbling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole…

the fly-
leaf of anxiety is folded back. my small
black sampler of damage, its frisker dust,
its moult and frass; its filmy growth
and fuzzy bloom. i mean, the tongue,
its cockled vulgate, deckled edge.
its ruck. and splay. i mean, the lung:
the fouled and frosty penance
of a breath. 

Fran Lock, IN SPITE OF –

September is almost here, and with it, submission season! (…and sweater weather, and pumpkin farms, and corn mazes, and earlier sunsets…) I’m trying to increase my time reading, writing, and yes, setting up my Excel spreadsheet for submissions. I’m trying to set realistic goals but also increase my focus. Things can be hazy in summer, but fall brings things into focus, I find. Just like that eclipse—clearing the air, losing the things that hold us back.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Lunar Eclipses, Losing Dolly, and Welcoming September

I want to get back to writing poems. But right now I have a few intellectual and emotional rifts that apparently I need to mend, as well as having another gallon of tomato sauce to make. My thinking is full of lacunae. Fragmentary. Not the best words in the best order, thank you Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More like the disturbed syntactical phrases my mother-in-law and my mother produced during their aphasia. Although there might be intriguing possibilities in such elliptical language that I may eventually stitch together.

Ann E. Michael, Ellipsis…

If all else fails, insert a bird—
an oriole or jay, a cardinal
or a house finch.
Install the shrill or warble,
the five-note song, a caw.
Or simply place the nest¬—
a ball of weeds and yarn,
a tangle of wire hangers,
a clump of twigs.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Crumbs of Joy

This week at work has seen me taking part in a two day training course about presenting and storytelling. NB every time it came up I was thinking about Story Teller magazines from the 80s. Hands up who remembers Part Works, etc. It’s worth noting that all my colleagues in the room were all under 30—some under 25, so I choose not to mention it. […]

Anyhoo, the workshop taught me a bit more stagecraft…a bit about use of space through gesticulation (Tricky when holding a book) and the use of pauses…I’ll try and bear that in mind this Tuesday when I read with this lot: Maggie Harris, Martyn Crucefix, Barnaby Harsent, and Christopher Horton. We’re at the King & Queen, 1 Foley Street from 6.45 on 1st September.

It’s the first time I’ve put on a ticketed gig, so I’m intrigued to see how it goes. I want loads of people there so we can pay the poets loads…NB this is really what the whole post is for- it’s a chance for me to do a mild Bob Geldof impression. Come. Pay to get in.. Give us your blinkin’ money. We can then pay the readers. It’s how it’s meant to work. Come through.

Mat Riches, Mild Bob Geldof

I am not a friend of August.  It’s not for the usual fussy reasons – that I can’t stand sand between my toes, or dread oceans of red tide, or feel sad at once-bright green lawns now tough and rusty.  No, though it feels strange, I admit my emotions are complicated by the name….August.  The word really dogs me.  I feel under its sticky spell of an unfortunate conglomeration of letters.  The name is slow, lugubrious, it moves like the outside air outside — unsure of itself, stuck, confounded, congested.  

More specifically it’s the vowels. The “u”– two of them, on either side of the “g” – oppress me.  They drag, are phlegmatic.  The first syllable – Aug – isn’t beautiful, but for it, you can work up sufficient energy.  By the time you get to the second “u,” it stays stuck in your throat. There simply is no gust.  A kind of disgust goes with it.  It is mugginess itself.  

I know there were great emperors – Augustus,“the revered” – with the same kind of name, same problem. Too heavy, oppressive, daunting. 

You always portent this, August.  But you are on your last shaky dog’s legs.  Adieu! On to September!

Jill Pearlman, The Ughs of August

Remember you’re all here by chance, even if

summoned by invitation. Far away, glacial
torrents sweep through villages, markets, homes.

Under the rubble, how many hearts and singing bowls?
Vast is the universe, and you are in it: rejoicing or

weeping, bending toward what bends to you
exactly as it should, as the light flickers no or maybe or

yes. The body remembers both the sweetness and the ache,
zones of seeming emptiness filled with ordinary awe.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returning to the Body

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

Where to begin?

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

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

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

Robin Gow, vacation mirror

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

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

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

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

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

Jackie Wills, Fox summons the past

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

Marilyn McCabe, Untitled

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

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

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

— We also have courage.

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

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

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

Shawna Lemay, Courage, Silence, the Deliquescent Dregs

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

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

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

Clare Shaw, Restoration: finding hope in a crisis

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

Maryann Corbett, Walking the Neighborhood

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

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

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

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

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

we are struggling steel in a hot metal world

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

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

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

Charlotte Hamrick, About & Including

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

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

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spires, I suppose I do have something to sell

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

Gary Barwin, Neon Pajamas, Justice and the Pig

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

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

brazen midriff, miniskirt:
body hair fine copper fuzz.

wings jostle inside his chest

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

Jon Stone, REVIEW: #Moth by Eleanor Holmes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim Moore, July Reading Diary

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you like these two mini bar poems!

Irwell

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

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

Helen Mort, A poem walks into a bar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

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

And suggested as well by the conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

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

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

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

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Jabberwocky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writer gets a piece of the action.

The distributor gets nearly a third.

The printer gets 10-15%.

The bookstore gets about half.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said, “I like money.”

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

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

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

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

Polytropos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

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

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

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

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

Renee Emerson, How to Critique a Poem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe

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

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

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

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

*

6. The Swan and ******

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesley Wheeler, Hyphae–and gifts

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

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

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

to my hotel room years ago […]

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

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

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

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

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

Liz Lefroy, I Sling My Hammock

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

Life at Sea

1–

I am born inside a ship.

2–

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

3–

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

Rebecca Cook, Life at Sea

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

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

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

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

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

Ann E. Michael, Hornworms

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

Rachel Barenblat, Cusp

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

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

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

Fran Lock, IT’S TIME

霧吸うてだんだん秋の人  高山れおな

kiri sūte dandan aki no hito  

            inhaling fog
           slowly I become
            an autumnal human

                                                Leona Takayama

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

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