This week: a ball and some grass, the uncertain horizon, ghost metaphors, the film of familiarity, and much more. Enjoy.

On this morning’s walk I stopped
to look at a shattered tree trunk
in a sunlit clearing in the woods,
the ground carpeted with fern and ivy,
an audience of light seeking trees
circling it, as if some kind of forest magic
had just happened there, some rite
or ceremony I had only just missed.

Whimsical? Or perhaps just imaginative?
All I know is, in that moment I was my own
blessing in the world, my own giver of gifts.
I must remember this. Stop. Look. Breathe.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Blessing

I am astounded by how much rest I need after a weary semester of teaching two Eng 112 classes on top of my normal work hours, fighting an English department’s compulsory AI use (anyone want some AI-generated sample essays in your course materials?!), publishing seven spring books at River River Books and bookselling at AWP, while parenting a tween and a teen and navigating relationships and small business taxes and—yes. All of it.

Conversation with my partner yesterday:

“I have been so exhausted.”

“It’s always like this for you, your first few days. You need to unwind.”

To resist means to soften into the powerful proposal of thriving right now. Of not waiting for permission from a toxic culture that blocks justice and moves from a spiritually deficient place. […] One day I hope we can all deprogram from the lie that rest, silence, and pausing is a luxury and privilege. It is not! The systems manipulated you to believe it is true.

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

The first full day of my residency was also the first day of my cycle, and the gift of only caring for my body on this day was just—oh, indescribable. I took naps. I read in bed. I took long walks in the pine woods. I ate half a melon on the veranda while reading more poems (Susan Briante’s new and selected 13 Questions for the Next Economy, rob mclennan’s The Sentence of the Book, Rest is Resistance—SO. GOOD! Also Sei Shōnagan’s The Pillow Book in the evening, and some Hildegard von Bingen while making coffee in the morning—variety is life!). I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) in the evening while drinking wine in bed. I watched 12 deer in the evening field. I tried to write, and oh, it was not happening—the essay I planned on working on, the poem notebook. “The best thing you can do for your writing is something else,” I reminded myself. My first night, I started reading Charles Wright’s large collected (not complete) Oblivion Banjo, which daringly opens with “Homage to Ezra Pound.” I took a walk in the pine woods and was drenched by a downpour, despite the weather saying it wouldn’t rain—don’t trust technology. “The rain waters the beans, and it waters me, too,” writes Thoreau in his journal. I think of this line all the time. I didn’t even take a shower that evening, I was so soaked and washed by the rain. It felt a little like a baptism into the woods and rest.

I’m astonished at how empty I am—how much I need to fill back up. Truly, our bodies are not factories, but flesh and blood and soul.

Han Vanderhart, June Residency (at Weymouth Center) & Rest

When you have worked with a group of people once you get a real flavour of what else might be fun to do. I felt particularly excited at the thought of working together to create a group poem. This would be an even more dynamic way to celebrate National Poetry Day together because we would then have our own poem to share on the day itself.

In preparation for my visit I put together a set of my own poems on this year’s new theme of ‘Wonder’, and thought about an appropriate writing prompt. This time I wanted to do away with pencil and paper and stay in the moment whilst we were sharing creative thinking time, so I decided to record the offered responses. With the group’s permission I recorded what they were saying in response to different mini prompts. I then took the recordings away so that I could listen and see how the poem itself would emerge for reveal typing up. I discovered that three poems were emerging and the main one was fully formed itself in the voice notes. I am so looking forward to recording it with them in October.

As we gathered together this time, I thoroughly enjoyed watching everyone settling in.  Anthologies of poetry were brought to the circle as well as poetry journals and individual poems. I felt lucky to be invited back to this creative community. This small group made up of lovely individuals is a wonderful place to be. It is enabling me to hear the poetry sets I put together with new ears. It brings the joy of spontaneous conversation and laughter. It is one of those spaces that is fully in the moment.

Sue Finch, DONNING THE T-SHIRT

Over the weekend I realised I’d missed the deadline to apply for some work I’d have loved to do with the Poetry Library, earlier this year were several residencies I drafted applications for but couldn’t finish in time… It’s a particular quality of gutted when it’s not a case of not being picked, but of not even managing to get your name in the hat.

And as increasingly it’s my peers who are the recipients it feels a little like missing the bus and then spotting my mates grinning together in the top seats as it drives past.

What is there to be done? Obviously not sulk at home or get jealous and bitter – even though I’m gutted I don’t want to cultivate that within me. So it’s a case of being gentle with myself and of practicing sympathetic joy, a concept I first came across as compersion back when I was practicing Polyamory.

What is sympathetic joy? Put simply it’s feeling happiness for the joy and success of others, even when that success is something you wanted for yourself. It’s rerouting your thinking from ‘I wish that was me’ to ‘I’m so pleased that person/poet/friend is getting to take advantage of this opportunity that’ll be really great for their development’.

But it’s more nuanced than just giving yourself a different script; there’s work there in acknowledging your disappointment and allowing yourself to grieve a missed opportunity, and in working to connect with the positive emotion and feeling behind the sentiment you’re cultivating: it’s not enough just to say the words, the meaning comes through embodying that position.

And the other thing? When I stop to think about it I am actually pleased for these friends and peers, it’s not that hard to cultivate positivity for them because it already exists – I like these people and I’m glad they’re benefitting from these wonderful opportunities. And when I acknowledge that, it feels better inside me too – it counteracts the gutted.

I actually suspect this kind of thinking and practice is really useful to cultivate as a writer full stop, not just for someone in my position. It goes hand in hand with the understanding that being in creative spaces isn’t about being in competition but in conversation with each other, and celebrating each other’s successes alongside our own; the arts space is so special because of the multitude of voices and perspectives it contains, and when any of us are benefitting then it’s bolstering the community and landscape as a whole.

Rachael Hill, Missing deadlines and practicing sympathetic joy

For years Dylan has toured constantly, and he has for decades refused to play a show the way you would expect if you were a fan, casual or otherwise. I have no idea whether this was a conscious plan with a long term objective, or innate rebelliousness, or something that he did because he wanted to. Probably some people know, he has probably talked about it, but from my perspective, it just seems like a fantastic mystery.

I won’t go on and on. The show was transcendent. Mostly what I felt was relief. I wasn’t emotional, mostly, though at times hearing him sing reminded me that so many things in my life have happened, and now are gone, and his music was there all the time. This music was not about him. In a way, anyone could do what he did, which was to get up and not to depend in any way on his celebrity, his history, his Dylan-ness, but just to make a space where we could experience something singular. Anyone could do it, but very few can. And that is the difference.

His performance reminded me of what I believe constitutes artistic integrity: if I can ever create such a space (in performance or otherwise) with poems or music, I have not wasted my life.

He was in a cloak, and he cloaked us all in mystery and duende and mortality and timelessness. The only songs I recognized were All Along the Watchtower, Trying to Get to Heaven (a great song on Time Out of Mind), and the closer, Every Grain of Sand. The band was absolutely perfect: they play exactly the way I dream a band of mine will someday play, the sound I have heard in my head a million times. Bass locked down, two guitarists just holding it down with the absolutely perfect edge of breakup natural tones, playing only what is necessary, drummer also locked in, Bob on keys and singing. It was dark on the stage and there was no possibility of seeing his face. But he was there. When he played the harmonica I felt a great wonder in my soul. He is the only one who can play like that, and it sounds just like it did from the beginning.

Matthew Zapruder, A Great Witch

Picture this: a little cockney, looks like trouble, a sickly, druggy type, abroad for the first time, too long holed up in a cheap pensione, hurls a plate of pasta into the piazza and it all kicks off.

You’ve got the image. You’ve seen it in the newsreels. There’s a football crowd. Probably. Water cannons. Possibly. Plastic chairs thrown in foreign town squares. Fat, bald blokes taking swings. It’s ugly. There is a collective national tutting. Commentators say it’s a disgrace, headlines: The English Disease, there is outcry, a blight on our nationhood. England away. Love it.

The incident I describe in the opening paragraph didn’t take place during a World Cup or have anything at all to do with football. But it did happen. In 1820. The little cockney in question, a poet, one John Keats. OK, so he didn’t exactly chuck his spaghetti and start a riot but he did scrape the contents of his dinner plate from a high window onto the Spanish Steps in Rome and it caused consternation. He made a scene. He was a trouble maker. I mean he was brought up above a London pub, he got into scraps in the streets as a kid, was disruptive in class. He was a trouble maker in the best possible sense. He may not have been one of the lads but Keats, oh Johnny Keats he was a geezer.

The World Cup is upon us. You may be doing your best to ignore it. I tried but slowly it’s reeling me in once again. But this year something is off. Perhaps it’s the disturbing rise of nationalistic anger away from the stadiums that’s making me uneasy about participating in the pageantry. Football was always more about belonging than it ever was about jingoism. It was about rooting for the outsider, cheering on the underdog, coming together, celebrating. Yes it got messy. Sometimes it got very messy. I’ll admit I rather liked it when it did. There were times when I got carried away. But that’s poetry, right? That’s what poetry is supposed to do, it’s supposed to carry you away.

Let’s get this straight. I never liked sports. I’m not a sporty type. I dislike competition in general. But I adore football. Or I used to. It was a love affair, a love affair that occasionally turned toxic. I got picked for my school team (once), turned out for a local league side (twice) and played every Sunday for the Cubs where the coach employed a ‘turn up and you’ll get a game’ strategy. I liked his approach. I still like this approach. This is how we make poetry. This is how Keats made poetry. He just turned up, got a game. He didn’t have an expensive education, specialist training or all the fancy kit. You don’t need those things. Just a pen and some paper. A ball and some grass.

Jan Noble, N°68 A game for poets

ELSEWHERE, in a parallel proximity, a triple-tap. The last strike coming a moment later. Just as souls are rising through the dust cloud. The uncertain horizon conflates macabre and paranormal. Reality is the gate booby-trapped at the hinge.

ELSEWHERE, words echo like tambura notes. An unresisting background resonance. The idea that the earth has been helplessly rotating from the beginning’s beginning, recalibrates meaning.

ELSEWHERE, thousands of flecks of light rise like dancers to create new constellations in the night sky. Heads gather themselves, with their feet and waists and hungry mouths, into waiting parentheses.

ELSEWHERE, the day itself is a disquieting monotone. The monsoon sets up percussion and string. Rain is a pendulum in motion. Silence slips into wetness and reflection. Lines are wheels in revolution. Again. Again.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, That which we call a drone by any other name

From April through September of last year, I was corresponding with a poet from Iran who’d asked to interview me. Given the current situation and the fact that I know nothing about the poet’s situation, not even whether or not they are still alive, I am not going to name them here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions they asked me since the beginning of the US-Israeli war against their country, since very few of them had any direct relationship to my work as a poet or to poetry in general. Still, they were all thought provoking, often leading me to articulate things I’d never really thought about before and that I think are worth sharing. Rather than work those answers into new essays, though, and out of respect for the poet who interviewed me, I’m going to preserve the Q&A format and publish my answers as I originally wrote them. You’ll understand immediately why I’ve decided to start with the second question in the series. Looking back, it seems especially prescient.

Q: “I strongly agree with Kafka’s statement that ‘war, in its first phase, emerges out of [a] total lack of…imagination.’ How do you view the main source of war?”

I’m not sure how to begin to answer this question. Since I have never—and I am grateful for this—had to live through a war, I have never been forced to confront face-to-face what it would mean for there to be people in the world who have defined me as an enemy who does not deserve to live. Even as I write that, though, I realize I have begun to formulate an answer. As my use of the word “defined” suggests, I believe lethal violence is rooted in a quintessentially imaginative act: the proactive imagining of another human being or group of human beings as nonhuman and therefore “killable” with impunity.

I have never believed that the default human stance towards others is to see them as so fundamentally, essentially different from ourselves that we also see their lives as inherently less worthy than ours; and I guess I do believe, therefore, that rendering someone “killable” requires willful, proactive effort. Even killing in self-defense requires this imaginative act. If someone is trying to kill you and killing them is the only way to save your life, you have to believe on some level that your potential murderer is no longer as fully human as you are and therefore no longer has the same right to live as you do.

I have never been through military training, but I remember walking to the post office in 1980 to register for Selective Service. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the possibility existed that then-President Jimmy Carter was going to reinstitute the military draft in response. He activated Selective Service registration in preparation for that possibility. I was eighteen years old. As I walked, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be trained to kill people I had never met and had no reason to hate. I couldn’t do it, but I knew that, if I ever were drafted, that’s what I would be trained to do, and the thought of what that would do to my humanity terrified me. I would never have been able to articulate it this way back then, but I was struggling with the question of whether and how I could resist the the militarization of my imagination.

Implicit in what I think you and Kafka mean by “a total lack of imagination” is the optimistic belief that the imagination is an inherently good and humanizing thing. That’s the way those of who are artists tend to think of the imaginative capacity out of which our art emerges, but I think we miss something crucial if we define as an absence a world view that is so diametrically opposed to our existence that the people who hold it are willing to go to war with us. I also think that defining their world view as an absence of imagination merely inverts the hierarchy that organizes how they see the world, placing ourselves on top instead of them.

If someone is indeed trying to kill you, though, if someone insists on prosecuting a war of aggression against you, you may very well have to kill them first in order to survive. I just think it’s important to remember that they’re not trying to kill you because they lack imagination, or because imagination has failed them. Rather, they are trying to kill you because of what they have imagined you to be, and they may very well give you no choice but to accept that nothing you can do will change their minds about that.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Source of War

i cease to sleep. i build the robot. i do not
want the robot but here it is. it makes
all the promises i do not want it to make.
it says, “we are gods.” my eyes well up.
the birds scatter into the dark hills.

Robin Gow, building the robot

Now that I’ve given up (temporarily?) the thought of getting a collection published, I’m going through my ‘collections’ and adding back all the poems I edited out. Poems that were removed because they weren’t ‘good’ enough, there wasn’t enough space for them to be included in a realistically publishable book, they retold a story or touched on a similar theme already established or they just didn’t quite make the cut. Poems I love, that tell the story I want to tell, capture the time the collection is about. Poems that deserve to be read, if only by me again. 

I’ve found poems in my first collection, poems in my Retired Poems and Spare Poems folders and in old versions of the collection that were lost over time and brought them together. I’ve printed the first set out, 160 pages. Crazy, I’ve forgotten so many of them. Rereading, stepping back into those moments is a wonderful way to waste a rainy afternoon. The pubs that I visited, people I’ve lost touch with or just lost, solo journeys I took, times before I was a partner, a mother, my youth, my inexperience. My glory days merging into real life. 

I’m boring so at the moment I just have them separated into the Scotland poems, the Finnish poems, the love poems. There are probably other exciting themes I haven’t delved into yet like My Childhood. The themes are so loose which allows me to collect more poems together. I’m not looking for something sellable, just a version of how I see my life and my work. It feels like a biography or another diary. Between my journals, my writing notebooks, my poems and their drafts I write so much. I’ve been writing obsessively for 30+ years, and it piles up.

Oh, how I want to edit some of the ones published in my first collection. My style has changed a lot. I used to love piling on the adjectives. I probably still do, I just hope I’m more subtle. I’m making notes on the print-outs, but I’m unsure if I’ll change much. I love to edit, but these feel like they should stay in my old voice. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just not me anymore. 

Gerry Stewart, Collecting the Collections

Today is the birthday of my friend Kathleen Kummer. After several falls, she is now very frail and housebound.

Kathleen and I met on a writing week with the poet Lawrence Sail at the beginning of the century. She had lived and worked in the Netherlands. We became friends. I visited her in Dorchester and in Devon where she moved, aged 79, to be nearer her two daughters.

Kathleen had a body of work when she moved to Devon and sent a manuscript to Alwyn Marriage at Oversteps Books. They published her debut collection Living below sea level (2012).

I am deeply grateful to Kathleen for our friendship and our poetry connection. Today I’m posting her poem Birthday Party, showing her empathy and eye for telling detail.

Fokkina McDonnell, Birthday Party – poem

I’ve been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don’t like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don’t become a wandering tangent where I can’t easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I’m going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it’s time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, “A Song Both Familiar and Strange.”  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it’s done, but before I started last week’s revisions, I thought it was done. […]

Last week I even made some poetry submissions. In some ways, it’s easier in the summer when many journals aren’t taking submissions. In September, when most journals are “open,” and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

I’m thrilled to share that poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” appears in Whale Road Review Issue 43, a summer issue full of sharp, resonant work from writers I deeply admire.

One of the things I love about Whale Road Review is how intentionally they support their contributors. Each author page includes a direct tip link, so if a poem or essay moves you, you can thank the writer directly. It’s a small gesture that makes a meaningful difference in sustaining literary work.

If you’re curious about the editorial vision behind the journal, you might enjoy revisiting my earlier conversation with them: My interview with Whale Road Review. It’s a look at their ethos, their approach to submissions, and what they hope to champion in contemporary poetry.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” published in Whale Road Review + NO FEE call, Deadline: 6/15/2026

I wrote this on Arran, thinking about previous times on a variety of islands, and only once I had committed fully to this title [“The Misty Isle”] did I realise that it is the vernacular name for the Isle of Skye. In this poem, the Isle itself is Britain, and the mist is manifold. It represents, metaphorically, the mysterious sub-Roman era of British history, which has proved a fecund ground for my imagination. It is also, at its essence, true mist, to coat the landscape, obfuscating objectivity and creating endless interpretations of events which, were you to investigate yourselves, you would see have a huge swathe of differing opinions around them.

Drop-in by Hadley-James Hoyles [Nigel Kent]

Third person gives objectivity, distance, observation. First person gives subjectivity, close range, self-analysis. Third person can seem judgemental, first person can seem confessional. Using the same words except for his/my or I, here are both versions of the poem.  […]

While the man in the first version comes over as seedy and pathetic in his loneliness, which is the way the narrator wants us to see him and which may not be accurate, the narrator of the second version, because of the intensity of his self-awareness, becomes arrogant and much more menacing.

Maybe the second one works better, but it was an either/or choice and, for right or wrong, I plumped for the first, objective take on it. Perhaps it’s just an example of the way we need to step back, ask ourselves ‘what if’ I altered third person to first, or the other way round.

Bob Mee, OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? WORKING OUT WHAT’S BEST

When I became a mother, I spent much more time in the house than I ever had before. On one of the endless nights of early motherhood when I was breastfeeding my daughter, I felt a wave of the most visceral panic wash over me as I realised I could not leave. I was tied there not just by the practicalities of breastfeeding, but the reality of love, which was as visceral as the panic I felt in that moment. I wrote about this in a poem in my recent collection The House of Broken Things called ‘Dear Wordsworth’: “I did not know / what horror love could be, how it keeps you / tied to one town, one house, one room, / one chair, one life”.

Later in the book I wrote about women who were found murdered and remain unidentified in a poem called “The Black Notices”. These women were found in the places women are often found, in bodies of water, in wasteland, in car parks, in forests. But once upon a time they lived in a House, and for whatever reason, they were not safe, they were pushed out, or driven out of a house, or they were kidnapped or lured away, or tricked on the way home, and now they are nameless.

The figure of the House and our expectations of it keeping us safe continues to haunt me. Writing The House of Broken Things has not exorcised the contradiction of the House from my mind or my desire to make sense of what it means to live with another – the gestures of love and the tiny acts of violence we inflict on ourselves and each other, and then if we are lucky, repair.

I’ve been doing quite a few readings recently and most have been followed by a question and answer session of some kind, and most of the interviewers (all apart from the one who didn’t bother to read my book in advance!) asked what the House was, what it represented to me, why I wrote multiple poems under the same title.

It’s taking me time to work out an answer that is in any way articulate, and part of the answer at least is that I don’t know, or I don’t know yet, or I am only beginning to know now. I know that the House is both the house of my childhood and the house of my motherhood, it is the house where I was mothered, and it is the house of my giving up, and the house of my enduring, it is the house of violence that I lived in once, and it is the house of my marriage, it is the house of loneliness and it is the house I escaped to, and I didn’t know until I finished writing this collection that I’m carrying all of these inside myself, that time means nothing inside the House.

Kim Moore, Inside the House of Broken Things

We were consumed? I keep on saying we.
Let’s talk about my own consuming passions,
the matter I’ve amassed for sixty years,
I and my spouse. At least our progeny
have flown, trailing their jettisoned possessions,
yet overnight we crammed space that was theirs
with things: books that seemed vital in the moment;
music, its living soul encased in vinyl.
What happened to the frugal hippie bride
I thought I was? What if it had to go—
everything, by some deadline, settled, final?
Fervent recycling wouldn’t stem the tide.
The angel might as well begin recording
the worst: I am a hoarder. This is hoarding.

Maryann Corbett, Stuff: a meditation

Jide Salawu is a Canadian-Nigerian writer. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada, and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press and Narrative Landscape. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario. 

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

Thank you, rob. My first book, Preface for Leaving Homeland, was published in 2019. I had received an invitation from the African Poetry Book Fund for their chapbook series, headed by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. The series has become a new cultural venue and has already produced new-generation African literary stars such as Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Nour Kamel, Leila Chatti, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Momtaza Mehri, among others. So, as I was saying, I was nominated to submit to the boxset series. Before then, I had written individual poems addressing a variety of subjects. But my first sustained work that explores the precarity of mobility in Africa and beyond would be the chapbook. The overwhelming experiences of African migrants moving through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes become daunting archives that will inform most of the poems. In Contraband Bodies, I was thinking about African migrant within Africa as a racialized figure; this includes the xenophobic rage in South Africa now; I was thinking about migration from below and what I mean by that is rural/urban migration; I was thinking about my private memories as a Black African migrant moving across different diasporic spaces, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and within Africa. But I don’t own these memories alone. I have described Contraband Bodies as a personal record—I think this work imbricates other public experiences of the Black diaspora.

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

It is a personal story that I am always glad to credit to my grandfather, who I would call a Yoruba poet, for his skill of oriki, a genre of oral poetry in Yoruba culture. He introduced me to the gift of literature and the sublimity of the Yoruba language. Yoruba is a highly tonal language, and quite musical. This does not mean all Yoruba people are poets, but the language is the first linguistic resource point for someone interested in literary culture. From that background, we can pick one or two things about my growth as a young writer. As a student, even when I was interested in poetry, and I had read literary greats such as David Rubadiri, Oswald Mtshali, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Jared Angira, I didn’t know how to begin writing. In 2005, Gabriel Arishe, a teacher in my secondary school in Shao, who had taken it as a duty to mentor me in English grammar, told me I could also write poetry. I thought I needed some celestial power to do so. That day ended with me writing a poem I titled, “Moonlight Days.” I wish I still had that scrap of paper on which I wrote the first poem. […]

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

Arts, as you know, can be perverted. Arts have been in the service of oppression. rob, let me tell you about what is going on in the case of Nigeria. The politicians, after their tenure, are writing hagiographies (life-writings of sorts), and they are getting reviewed by professors who praise them. In the books, they glorify themselves and talk about their good deeds for the masses. That is how terrible it is. Globally, too, you know, there are writers who side with horrendous leadership and even justify their need for the governance. Writings were first used to service colonialism itself; I recall now Achebe’s “The Image of Africa” where he is in dialogue with Joseph Conrad. I think as a writer, I want to reject grand narratives. Speaking against tyranny and oppressive structures has been a whole duty, and this is my pure sentiment given my own background, appearance at the margin, as a person from a country like Nigeria. Tell the counter-story.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jide Salawu

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?

And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.

I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.

At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.

Ann E. Michael, Ghost metaphors

Where are you now, Mama?

I want you to know that
I keep my hunger
under my bed
in the box
with the starving
baby.

I kept her bones.
I gnaw them sometimes
when all else fails.

I want you to know
that only a
silver of me
remains.
Starving.
An open pit,
a coal mine.

Rebecca Cook, Because My Hunger Has No Voice

Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong, is the latest (and second) pamphlet from Headless Poet.

Alex was kind enough to answer a few questions — on embarrassment, ‘bad’ puns, questionable taste, and the Victorians — over email. Some Poems is available for order here, and in stock now at the London Review Bookshop.

Jeremy Wikeley: I thought we might start by putting Hood in some kind of context, but every time I do this, I’ve no idea where to start. This is partly my own ignorance, but also because he straddles so many styles or concerns. There’s a romantic Hood, there’s a comic Hood, there’s a polemical Hood engaged in Victorian debates about poverty. The romantic, ‘Keatsian’ Hood was the biggest surprise to me. Is it fair to say he falls between the gaps?

Alex Wong: I think it is fair, if we’re talking about the gaps in current understandings of literary history. I mean the gaps between what have become the most familiar categories and groupings. For a start, when W.M. Rossetti called him ‘the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson’ he was placing Hood in a gap, and I think it’s still a gap in most people’s sense of the history of English poetry. It’s a small gap, almost not a gap at all unless you’re thinking in terms of ‘generations’, but in its small way it’s a little like the reign of Mary Tudor, or the gap between Chaucer and Malory: ask the average intelligent Eng Lit graduate who was writing in those periods and you’d be lucky to get more than one or two names. Very lucky, I should think.

And then he muddles our distinction between serious and ‘light’ verse, and between high and popular culture. Humorous poets who are basically doing something quite serious, though inconsistently and a bit under cover, tend to be hard to place … Stevie Smith for instance. But Hood muddles it further, because he also delves so deeply, and so obviously, into topical moral concerns — ‘big issues’ — without giving up the trappings of his light verse. And he muddles it all even further still, by also having written those comparatively highbrow ‘romantic’ poems you’re alluding to.

But I don’t think you could say that he fell between the gaps in his own day. A lot of people were reading Hood when not very many were reading Keats. Hood sold a lot of books, a lot of magazines and annuals. And also we sometimes forget about the reading rooms and circulating libraries that allowed people across classes to access these texts. He was truly popular. He found a gap in the market, and in the culture, but he filled it pretty effectively; he didn’t fall through it. […]

JW: Punning must have something to do with writing from the unconscious? Could you say something more about the way in which Hood shaped that appreciation (for puns) at the time, or in perhaps in the poets he’s influenced? You mention Auden was a fan in the introduction — so much of Auden is in terribly ‘bad taste’. And Moul recently spotted that J. H. Prynne’s first published poem seems to have been a translation (into German, I mean really) of ‘Silence’.

AW: Well, the Lacanians say the unconscious is structured like a language — but we won’t get into that. Anyway a mind that is habitually punning is a mind that is letting associations range pretty freely, you could say. And I think Hood, not only when he’s punning, does tend to be open to the associations of things – erotic, violent or scatological associations, awkward afterthoughts – and he’s happy to run with them. It’s part of what makes his writing seem a bit overcharged for some tastes, the O.T.T. quality. As with the puns and ingenious rhymes, so with other things; there’s an opportunism, if you like, or just a huge openness. He goes for it. But Empson makes an interesting point in Seven Types of Ambiguity, when he argues that Hood’s comical verse seems to use punning to pull back from things that could get really awkward, to dispel the tension somehow. Which is almost the opposite point of view. And I guess it does relate to what I was saying about ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and the impulse to make something tolerable, even though that’s a poem in which he does get seriously involved in something genuinely challenging.

Of course, the puns are also embarrassing when you don’t get them. That’s another important aspect of the embarrassment of puns. And I suppose it connects with Prynne, about whom I can’t say very much because generally I don’t ‘get’ him. I mean I haven’t reached a satisfactory accommodation with what he’s doing, at least after the earliest poems. And I’m somewhat embarrassed about it. But, well, I suppose it’s not surprising that Prynne should have had an interest in Hood. Although that particular sonnet isn’t a punning one (it’s about ‘silence’, so in a sense it’s about the terrifying void that’s left when the punning has to stop), still there’s conceivably a relationship between Hood’s almost maniacal aliveness to double-entendre and Prynne’s — I would call it rather intellectual — love of etymological and phonetic play.

The really fundamental difference for me is that Hood’s poems always create the illusion of a real utterance, a person speaking, with the bonhomie that comes with that; he’s appealing more directly to our ways of reading small adjustments of tone in our everyday communications. Auden is closer to Hood in that respect, although in some ways … I think you could say that where his debt to light verse is most apparent, his urbane wit probably feels closer in inspiration to other predecessors, like Praed. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spent much time with Auden, so I may be wrong.

Jeremy Wikeley, How much depends on the exactness of the spell

The publication of Michael Laskey’s Collected Poems by Smith/Doorstop coincides with his receiving the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry at the beginning of this year. As well as consistently publishing his own poetry across four decades (he is now 81), Laskey is well known for co-founding and directing the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, co-editing the magazine Smiths Knoll for twenty-one years, as a poetry tutor, and as publisher of The Garlic Press, which mainly features work by poets from Suffolk, where Laskey lives.

This edition combines Laskey’s six existing collections and fifteen new poems. Until his recent royal accolade (which ‘completely astonished’ Laskey), his poetry had not gained the public recognition some felt it deserved; an endorsement on the back of the book by Stephen Fry says: ‘Michael Laskey is one of England’s finest poets you’ve probably never heard of.’ Typically, a Laskey poem is a quiet one – and quiet work is often unjustly overlooked or sidelined. This is a pity: Laskey’s poems, I feel, have real lasting power.

I read almost the whole of this 385-page collection outside on a sunny April day, the setting enhancing the poems, and vice versa. I found I then wanted to read the collection again more slowly – as an ‘off-duty’ reader rather than a critic – simply because the poems were a pleasure to engage with and I wanted to spend more time with them. Laskey is a poet who celebrates, even ‘thrives on’, he explains in ‘Quotidian’, the ‘everyday, the humdrum, dull for some’: ‘small’ pleasures; humble, ordinary experience. Craig Raine has called him ‘our poetic Alan Bennett – a genius of, as it were, biscuit barrels and wry grief.’ As Andrew McCulloch has pointed out though, on introducing Laskey’s poem ‘The Lawnmower’ as the TLS ‘Poem of the week’, ‘The world Laskey describes may be familiar […] but its images are far from cosy’ or complacent: the interplay of real familial emotions and failed connection that he often depicts, especially between parent and child, is (in McCulloch’s brilliantly exact observation) ‘softly tragic’. He is like a more domesticised Larkin – a poet who also had the sensitivity to see, and to reveal, the beauty and the interest in the so-called ‘dull’ moments of our lives. As Larkin remarked in an interview with John Haffenden: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’ Laskey’s own attention to the commonplace extends to the word itself: he wittily points out in ‘Quotidian’ that he doesn’t like this ornate, Latinate synonym: ‘not a word / I’d choose, actually one I avoid – / […] it contradicts / what it means’. Obfuscation is not part of Laskey’s poetic project.

Nicola Healey, Thriving on ‘the humdrum’: Michael Laskey

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), wrote Arthur Symons in 1904 in the Atlantic,

was twenty-six, the age of Keats at his death, before he wrote any original verse. He then wrote two poems to two ladies: one out of a bitter personal feeling, the other as a passing courtesy; neither out of any instinct for poetry.

From inauspicious beginnings, how strangely things fall out. Through the last three years of the eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth, Scott followed these first amateur attempts with translations from Goethe and collections of traditional ballads in two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His narrative poem Lay of the Last Minstrel — begun in 1802, published in 1805 — was followed in fairly rapid succession by the 1808 Marmion (of which “Lochinvar” remains the best-known section), The Lady of the Lake in 1810, and four other long narrative poems. All this output made him, temporarily, the most famous poet in of his era.

What rendered Scott’s poetic fame so temporary? Short answer: the appearance, in 1812, of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. There was, Symons wrote, “a more popular poet in England,” and his name was not Scott, but Byron. Though Scott continued to write verse — his final long poem, Harold the Dauntless, would appear in 1817 — he turned his energies to prose and the completion of the story that became Waverley, the first of his historical novels, published in 1814.

At this juncture we could ask, as Symons did, whether Scott hadn’t really been a novelist all along: not a poet after all, but a mere “improviser in rhyme,” whose true charism was prose narrative. Certainly the verse by which he had made his name had narrative as its first end — though as we might reflect, casting our minds back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, poetry was telling stories almost before it was doing anything else. It’s not as though the narrative impulse somehow canceled out the poetry; Scott’s own narrative poems drew directly from the tradition of the medieval romance. And yet if Scott’s poems were as popular as they were, it was because

they were so like novels. They were, what every publisher still wants, “stories with plenty of action;”and the public either forgave their being in verse, or for some reason was readier than usual, just then, to welcome verse.

Scott’s turn to the novel, then, simply dispensed with the need to go through the motions of verse — at which Byron was better, anyway — in order to deliver what the public really wanted: “stories with plenty of action.” No need to make those stories rhyme and scan, if the musical pleasure of verse wasn’t the first principle of composition and integral to the generation of the narrative.

If those narrative poems of Walter Scott had been successes, then — in dispensing with the effort of poetry altogether — Scott with his gift for a rousing good tale could and did make the novel popular, in a way that even his own action-packed poems, as poems, had not been. “The fact is,” wrote Symons, “that skill in story-telling never made any man a poet” — not, again, that “skill in storytelling” ever made any man not a poet, either. The question is one of priority and proportion, and of what the indispensable element in a given literary work actually is, for both writer and reader. For Scott, and for his readers, that indispensable element was action, not music.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Proud Maisie

Those trained up in civics and classical political theory — which, with the decline of philology, may well be a good majority of intellectuals with a leaning toward the traditional — would tend to take Yeats to be describing something akin to thumos, the kind of drive toward that Tennyson’s Ulysses has. Major Gregory seeks some reward, even if it’s a hidden fame, and such rewards are of necessity defined by the social order. “Man is by nature a political animal,” as Aristotle put it, and nobility is found in the polis, and the virtues of the great soul are in life lived among others.

That is, on its face, absent from the Irish airman. He confesses a social location: “My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.” But he’s deliberately left them behind, willing to fight for the British with whom he feels no connection, to seek some entirely individual experience — not just an impulse of delight, but a lonely impulse of delight.

He lacks, for example, the virtue of bravery we think expressed most clearly in self-sacrifice, the willingness to give up one’s life to save another. Oh, he’s obviously brave in the sense of having willingly entered the sphere of war, where life and death are brought to the sharpest point. But the thing he finds therein is sheer experience, as felt by someone with the rare gift of sensibility — a figure great enough to feel the heightened sense of the moment. He wants not fame, I think, or glory, but the perfect balance of the now:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

This is not a social claim, a placing in a political order, but a metaphysical thing, new to humanity in the modern order — born of the highly self-conscious self of modernity. He seeks not Tennyson’s newer world but the sheer perfection of the experienced now in the life and death of war.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I dreamed of a dead friend.
We did not touch. We spoke.

I was deaf. We looked at art,
though I was blind. This morning,

the roses are pink and smell
of rain.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot Poem 10 June 02026

“The Intentions of Thunder” is a collection of new and selected poems from Patricia Smith. It is deliberately substantial, both in terms of the number of poems and the depth of poetry. The collection draws from “Life According to Motown” (1991), “Big Towns, Big Talk” (1992), “Close to Death” (1993), “Blood Dazzler” (2008), “Shoulda been Jimi Savannah” (2012), “Incendiary Art” (2017), “Unshuttered” (2023) plus uncollected poems. It is nearly impossible to provide a flavour of the range of poems that the collection covers. Picking favourites is easy but would render this review far too long to read. […]

Patricia Smith is a poet of witness, determined not to let her community go unheard or unrecorded. That doesn’t make her worthy or dull, on the contrary, she has a playfulness and a deft control of form, whether that’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ choice of sonnets on Emmett Till or recording the aftermath of Katrina without letting politicians off the hook. “Intentions of Thunder” is a book to return to, each visit bringing a new reward. It’s lazy to describe her as heir to Gwendolyn Brooks. Smith has long stepped out from that useful mentorship and found her own strong, compelling voice. But it’s useful to let Brooks have the last word, writing that Smith’s work is “direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome.”

“The Intentions of Thunder” is available from Bloodaxe. If you’ve not read any Patricia Smith, this is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “The Intentions of Thunder” Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe) – book review

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy, Lana Hechtman Ayers, The Poetry Box, 2026

What a lucky thing to have poet-friends.

I had two big deadlines at the end of May (didn’t quite make them, but almost);  I’m teaching another Creative Retirement Institute Class (on William Stafford, and it’s going beautifully); and I seem to have forgotten all about being a blogger. But then comes this package in the mail, two books from none other than the Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor (and one-woman dynamo) of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. […]

Penelope Scambly Schott calls Still Life with Sorrow & Joy ” a joyous celebration,” full of both grief and delights. The collection plays with form, pays tribute to other poets, dreams wildly, and blends paeans to beloved pets with longing for lost two-legged loved ones. The poems are all about love, though at times they keen over our failure to love enough. In the very short, “Night Vision Goggles,” we get these three bare lines: “All we do not understand / could fill battlefields — // and does.”

Bethany Reid, Lana Hechtman Ayers, STILL LIFE WITH SORROW & JOY

Near the end of Eclogue 9, Lycidas, who is keen to continue singing despite Moeris’ obvious sorrow and reluctance, points out that they’ve reached the tomb of Bianor, the half-way point of their journey, where the farmers are stripping the foliage. He suggests they should put the kids they are carrying down here and pause for a song.

hinc adeo media est nobis via; namque sepulcrum
incipit apparere Bianoris. hic, ubi densas
agricolae stringunt frondes, hic, Moeri, canamus;
hic haedos depone, tamen veniemus in urbem.

Here’s Heaney again:

We’ve come half-way.
Already you can see Bianor’s tomb
Just up ahead. Here where they’ve trimmed and faced
The old green hedge, here’s where we’re going to sing.
Set that creel and those kid-goats on the ground.
We’ll make it into town in all good time.

Once again, what sounds pragmatic is also allusive. In Theocritus 7, a tomb — in that case of Brasilas — similarly marks the half-way point of a journey. But the name Bianor itself comes from Homer (Iliad 11.86-92), where he is, like so many of those words in Callimachus’s epigram for Heraclitus, a hapax, a name that appears only once. His death, which sets off the battle that ends with the death of Patroclus, takes place, we are told, at that hour in the day when woodsmen at work cutting trees in the forest feel the longing to rest and eat. In his enthusiasm, Lycidas is, as it were, suggesting a Homeric pause.

Moeris refuses: he says they have to get on and there’s no time to waste. In that, he is rather like Meliboeus in the first eclogue, who is being cast out in such a hurry that he has had to leave behind two new-born kids, twins who are the spes gregis (“hope of the flock”), forcing the mother goat to go on without them. There is no solace there of the kind offered by Heraclitus’ poem, in which one twin accompanies the mother in death and the other stays with the father. Here in the ninth eclogue, though, they are carrying the kids with them; and though Moeris does not want to sing any more himself, he hopes that Menaclas will yet take up the song.

Virgil is not sure that songs endure. As Heaney says himself in his fine essay on pastoral, the question of the Eclogues is that of Shakespeare:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

He’s not sure, but he hopes it might be so.

Victoria Moul, All these songs I have forgotten

— One of those books I own and will never let go of is Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks by W.S. Di Piero. In some ways, it doesn’t look like much, it’s a slim volume, but some of the thoughts it holds have changed me, helped me, opened me up. The style of writing, the form, these too have been useful.

— I’ve quoted from it before at length, but today this:

“The offices of poetry. To use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity. To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumour, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic vicious wind tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, over against opportunistic mendacity. If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it really is marginal or beside the point.”

— Published in 2017, that could be from yesterday.

— Everywhere you look, enshittification, mediocrity. (For this is what degenAI is). But good poetry is the opposite of that, good art of any sort. I think, and I’ve said this before and should probably just stop, that there is no point in talking about the lousy stuff, but to just give space to great art, great literature etc.

Shawna Lemay, The Offices of Poetry

Wordsworth began his “Ode” in 1802. It’s a poem that embodies his philosophical stance on childhood vision and its eventual loss, implying that what has been forfeited must first be named before it can be recovered.

Could there be a more problematic condition for a poet? If it’s the poet’s job to pay tribute to states of feeling (as Wordsworth writes in the Preface, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility,”) then their success hinges on the ability to see and sense deeply, to recollect clearly and attentively.

And these are the poem’s opening lines. He’s set high stakes for the rest, which documents Wordsworth’s departure from a world of wonder to a world worn smooth by sight. Adulthood strips away that “freshness of a dream,” leaving the poet feeling less able, maybe even less inclined, to write about the world with the same appetite and astonishment.

Coleridge, Wordsworth’s longtime collaborator, talks about this risk in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria. He praises his friend in Preface to Lyrical Ballads and credits him for tuning Coleridge’s own sight “to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarly and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I love the phrase “the film of familiarity,” which suggests that time dulls the senses, reducing one’s sensitivity to the world’s wonder, yes, but also reducing one’s capacity for empathy, “ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I’m sometimes asked why I chose to research wonder—saying my PhD was on the role of wonder in poetry does sound slightly like I apprenticed myself to a unicorn paddock for four years. Here’s why: the potential and incentive for renewing wonder is serious business. It transcends the individual and speaks to the larger human project, to the belief that deep inquiry into individual experience may lead to greater appreciation of collective experience, and that this appreciation is vital for humanity’s survival.

The more we wonder, the less of an appetite we have for destruction, Rachel Carson argued. Poems are the perfect wonder vehicles. They are wonderfully efficient and cost-effective wonder delivery systems.

Maya C. Popa, What Adulthood Forgets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Fate of Wonder

I went on a long hiatus from writing, a sort of starvation, somewhere around the start of the pandemic. I can’t tell if this was a totally conscious choice, but I knew my writing life needed a deeper anchor.

I am slower now. I rarely submit my work. And when I do, it’s because I feel truly called to the journal. I speak and read when it feels aligned. I write because I want to. I work on projects that feel like I am alive. I say no to opportunities that are extractive and dulling, even if they are shiny.

I spend a lot of days not writing. I read a lot. I live. I celebrate other writers. I write books and pieces that have no intended publisher and no end goal. I am working on a memoir in a time when “no one wants memoir unless you’re a celebrity,” bla bla bla.

I am doing it because I would rather die than not.

Some of this is also about being tired, older, chronically ill, and overstimulated without social media and expectation. Some of this is that my life has expanded, and I am nourished beyond art. But most of it is that I burned myself out on myself.

Writing is a gift. We don’t have to do it. Literally, we don’t have to be here. Like, we can quit. We get to do it. We want to do it, right? We get to be the arbiters of pure and total consciousness. We get to reach into the river and feel the current. And we get to translate it. What a joy to crawl back into the creative self as a joy and not as a form of proof or punishment.

Lisa Marie Basile, There are two writers within me—and they are eating each other alive

Just write it out of you. Write anything, don’t even try to get to the new. Have no goal to heal the the pain you think is in you through the writing. Just write any damn thing that comes before your eyes. Fictionalise it. Steal. Be the bad guy for once, but just write and in a while as you keep writing it will start to be enough. I don’t know or care why. Nor do I want you to write a book or monetise your pain in some way. Just fucking write, and forget healing, forget being a writer, a poet, a thinker, someone with an opinion. Let the writing fill up the page without all these things you think you are and it will raise you up just by you having written, and without you getting in your own way.

John Siddique, Write It

I remember crossing out poems in the school booklet because we weren’t doing them.

I remember “Bean green over blue”.

I remember the poetry editor who said of a rival: “We must crush them.”

I remember the poet who paused mid-reading to savour the word “ontologically”.

I remember the poet who was sarcastic about skiing holidays to the festival organiser.

I remember finding rhymes.

I remember fridge poetry, but not fridge poems.

I remember the poet stuck on a bus texting about what it meant to send a text saying “I am here”.

I remember “Fire-fangled feathers dangle down”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, I Remember Poetry

That was the invitation of the final prompt: to imagine a future self, ancestor, spirit, object, animal, place, or other presence watching over a moment from our lives. What might they see that we could not see then? What language might they use for our seeing? What might their gaze loosen, bless, protect, question, or refuse?

During the session, I found myself writing about the “birdbath” visible from our apartment balcony. I say “birdbath,” but what I really mean is the sizeable dip in the parking lot asphalt that becomes a watering hole after rain. Birds gather there for hours, splashing, pausing, lifting off, returning.

The prompts kept asking us to shift perspective, to let looking move from the self to elsewhere and back again. Here’s a haiku that came from that space:

robin in a puddle
my eyes from there
an afterthought

I like that the poem lets the looking happen away from me. The robin does not need to become symbol, messenger, or metaphor right away. It gets to be there first: in the puddle, in the after-rain, in its own attention. My eyes arrive later, almost beside the point.

That feels like one lesson I’m carrying from the workshop: sometimes looking as a way of writing means letting the self become secondary, decentered long enough for the world to look back.

José Angel Araguz, post-workshop thoughts: my eyes from there

Morning light tints the walls
the same color as what leaks into the streets.
You swing your feet over the side of the bed
and they look for slippers, as if they had that
small, separate autonomy. What does it mean
to live without asking, or expectation? Your arms
slide into sleeves, lift a cup of water to your lips.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

This week: notebooks full of angel drawings, a dream of burning, forced dactyls, a springboard to spring, and much more. Enjoy.

Do poets tend to have managers, or at least drivers? I think we should be issued with one for gigs and the like. It may stem from me not being the best driver in the world, but I drove back from a reading in Faversham last night and it absolutely horsed it down in stair rods all the way back. There was an hour and a bit I wouldn’t care to repeat in a hurry…

I am always grateful for the gigs, but that’s the second gig now in a couple of weeks that involves travelling an hour or more in each direction.

Two weeks ago it was a trip to Chipping Norton to read at a lovely gallery there called Art & Talking. […] It’s a 150-mile round trip to Chippy and back for me… However, I got to read for the first time in a beautiful venue, I got to read with the wonderful Laura Theis and Robin Vaughn-Williams again. Robin puts on a great night….The open mic readers were also excellent. My friend’s teenage daughter told me I wasn’t as boring as she thought I would be, so I’m calling that all worthwhile.

Mat Riches, The Great Song of Indifference (and Engines)

At my desk I drink my coffee, check my diary again and work out how many hours I need for the other non writerly stuff in the week. This week I have emails to answer, a small pitch to put together and a meeting about a future work project that I am trying to pull together. I also have a couple of requests for brain picking sessions from emerging writers who want advice because they are writing in similar fields. I do these when I can, but I can’t always do them because it sacrifices time from my own work. I always feel guilty turning down endorsements and blurbs for exactly the same reason, and invitations to read at events from tiny organisations who don’t have a budget. I do them when I can, but I can’t always do them.

Then to work. I have to put my phone in a drawer otherwise every time I get frustrated I will look at it for the quick dopamine hit of watching cats do stuff. I am addicted. I cannot stop at one cat video.

On my notice board I have this quote by Hilary Mantel – my notice board is a shrine to this god of writing whose wise words have gotten me through some awful blocks:

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.”

In my case other people include cat videos.

Wendy Pratt, Day by Day: My Writing Week

Looking at my notebooks full of angel drawings and asemic mark making, I’m sure the average person would see a sort of madness. I prefer to concentrate on the meditative quality. But maybe the marks are a kind of refusal. (To be anything less than completely human). The more marks I make the more I realize that it is impossible to make the same mark twice. In fact, I’m generally trying for a unique mark/scribble. Some days the marks are responding to a piece of music I’m listening to but other times, I’m notating the silence, or the sounds in my skull. They are a ravelling and an unravelling, a joy, a calm, a human touch. Sometimes deliberate, sometimes wild, or thoughtless, beyond thought, a flying, a soaring, a darkness, a skating, a tangle.

Shawna Lemay, With No Illusions But With Some Joy – On Asemic Writing

It’s so hard to focus these days, and find a rhythm of living that is not disrupted by fear. I mean we all should be feeling fear, but also hope and joy and solidarity. I hope you are all staying as safe as you can be.

One thing that helped me recently was to do an event at Clio’s with the DSA and the Oakland Education Association Rapid Response Team, a group of Oakland educators organizing to protect families from ICE. They organize community patrols and raise funds to provide legal aid, click here if you want to donate. Just being in the room with with people who are taking action and being in solidarity felt good. Zeina Hashem Beck, Jason Bayani, and Sara Borjas gave amazing readings. I read some poems too.

Another thing that helps is to read a poem closely, and just sit with it. I’m getting ready to teach an on-line class on Tuesday on how to read a contemporary poem, which in some ways is an absolutely absurdly vast subject to even begin to approach. But I have some thoughts of ways to do it. Reading closely for me is always the way I get back to writing. For me, reading poetry is really about accepting and embracing and getting excited about what is challenging, unexpected, new, different. Reading poems has changed me. I feel like if everyone read poems there would be less evil in the world. I realize that’s naive, but I can’t help thinking it.

Matthew Zapruder, Reader, You Already Know

There is an intervention by poets to be made, into the fiction-led “should writers read” debate and the “should writers read for pleasure” sequel. It should have something particular, and not only concerning that poets don’t get paid very much. It should also consider Donald Davie’s dictum that there is a group pressure to remain at the level of the skilled amateur – because for them, and you can detect this in many blurbs that aren’t (soi-disant) political, everything is “reading for pleasure” if they read other poets at all. For the practitioner of the ancient art, there is definitely reading for fulfilment, for a guide to living, and living must include pleasure. I wonder too about suggesting a new category for the current debaters of “reading for morality”, which is what enables us to sift among people who make political speeches and also to act locally (which will affect the personal anecdotes in our own poems but also guide us in making narrative without it always having to be politically exemplary – whatever that is – line by line). Regardless of all of this, what of seeing the poet made to struggle by their poem – not with the poetry basics, but with a form they could handle easily if it were inert? An oeuvre entirely composed of good poems that are totally commonplace workmanlike in the idiom of a century or two up to the day is unlikely to survive. So is the struggle crucial, and how do poets do their reading of other poems to aid the struggle only of not writing badly (not, per se, every time the political struggle nor, as with fiction, “good writing”/the saleable)?

Ira Lightman, READING TO WRITE POEMS

On a news channel someone says the President
is planning a gigantic triumphal arch
and wants an airport named after him.
(Of course he does.)
Wind rattles the windows.
I think ‘OK, I need to get work done’,
open the laptop, remember once
a Buddhist monk told me
in a station waiting room
life requires no explanation.

Bob Mee, HARPOONING PRAWNS IN A WOK

Look at this picture from the gold medal winner for women’s figure skating, and her celebratory leap in the air. And if you haven’t done it yet, watch Alysa Liu’s gold-medal winning skate—I promise even if you don’t like skating, it will inspire joy. If they don’t cut it, you can see how afterwards she curses as she celebrates, as well as hugging the bronze medalist and swinging her around in a spontaneous hug. It reminded me of the poetry world, how we need to celebrate our wins with this much joy, and the wins of our friends and colleagues.

On that note, AWP. I’m not going to be there this year, as I am instead taking a trip home to Cincinnati to visit my father, who is ill, and family. Which is not to say, I will not miss seeing my friends. But AWP can be a lot even for completely healthy young people, much less people with disabilities and illnesses that tend to flare up under stress. And right now, I have to prioritize family, and if I only have so much strength, energy, and money for travel, I’m going to choose home over a conference. If you’re going, I hope you have a wonderful time, and post lots of pictures. […]

I […] had good news from my poet friend, Kelli Russell Agodon—she got her first poem in the March issue of Poetry, “Trying to Sext My Partner, Who Replies ‘I Can’t Get My Camera to Work.’” It’s not up on their web site yet, but I got my issue and so Charlotte the literary kitten and I had so much fun reading it.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Missing AWP? Me too. Celebrating Wins, New Glasses, and Quail

I stopped going to AWP when I had a baby and haven’t attended since. For many years, I blamed new motherhood for my lack of attendance. But I am no longer a new mother. And yet, I still have not attended the conference.

It is only now, in writing this, that I think I understand the true reason. In 2014, my last time at the conference, I was genuinely dismayed by how little attention was paid to the serious crises within academia. So much so that I was compelled to write an open letter to AWP: Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts.

Since then, the conference has improved somewhat in this regard. They have incorporated one or two panels on the subject of adjuncts. There is also now an AWP Writers Adjunct Caucus. Yet largely, the conference remains dedicated to pursuing one’s own personal career ambitions—publishing, getting an agent, improving craft, enriching one’s pedagogy.

Meanwhile, 70% of the academic workforce is now contingent labor. Many adjuncts are earning less than minimum wage. Since I published that article in 2014, conditions have only gotten worse. Adjuncts still report juggling several teaching jobs at once, working for poverty wages, and avoiding hospital visits for fear of financial ruin.

According to the Higher Education Inquirer,

Pay and Financial Security: Poverty Wages Become the Norm

In 2006, Hoeller reported that Washington community college adjuncts earned just 57 cents for every dollar paid to their full-time colleagues. The disparity persists—and in some ways, it has widened. Today, more than a quarter of adjuncts report earning under $26,500 a year, below the federal poverty line for a family of four.

According to a report on The Impacts of 2020 on Advancement of Non-Tenure Track and Adjunct Faculty,

The pandemic…increased career insecurity for non-tenure-track faculty in ways that are more subtle but equally important. For instance, when institutions extended tenure and promotion clocks, they often failed to think about the implications of moving online for instructional and research faculty.

All this and yet I’ve yet to see a single panel dedicated to the kind of structural changes that would improve the material conditions of grad students, adjuncts and non-tenured professors. These might include sessions on how to create a grad student union, how to obtain health insurance as adjuncts, how to organize a sit-in at your university for increased teaching stipends (as former Gulf Coast editors and students at University of Houston successfully did).

But no. Such panels do not exist at AWP. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of panels dedicated to political engagement. We can learn to “write resistively” or learn “Cartooning at the End of the World.” We can discuss “Editing for Community and Change” or “Strategies for Navigating Organizational Change.”

But, it seems, what we cannot, must not, should not ever discuss is the broken system staring us all right in the face. Perhaps it’s not very sexy to have a panel dedicated to collectively organizing for health insurance and a living wage. Or, maybe such panels might not be very welcome by those who actually sponsor the conference.

Becky Tuch, Q: Why does AWP barely touch the crises in academia?

Lately, I’m trying to find enough mojo to send out some poems. My thinking is that given current circumstances, having poems in (mostly) online journals offers more possibility that someone, anyone, will read them. Poetry like most arts is communicative, so poets need readers; I treasure my readers, but they are few. I love books, but my books do not sell well. That means the poems don’t reach an audience. This blog doesn’t have a host of regular readers, either, though there are some stalwart followers for whom I am immensely grateful. Then what are a poet’s options? Small-press publication (let’s hear it for those wonderful folks!) and self-publishing can get you the physical book, but for readers you have to do a ton of self-promotion. This is a skill I have never developed and that I do not, at my age, wish to learn. Besides, I am out of the job market now and have no need for a CV full of publication credits.

But I read literary journals. My colleagues in creative writing read literary journals. Some lit journals continue to produce paper issues, bless them, but more of them post poems on various social media platforms, where casual viewers might run across a poem and–who knows?–read it! Therefore, it seems to me that’s what I ought to be doing: getting my work in magazines, large and small, local and international, professional and amateur, one poem at a time as a kind and careful editor decides my poem suits the journal. I think that in 2026, more poems reach people online than in books. Am I wrong about that? I guess I could research that question if I really want to know.

Of course I love books and will never stop reading them, poetry books and other kinds. Of course I would be thrilled to have another book in print if the manuscripts I send out ever were to find homes. However, probably my focus this year will be on the more ephemeral but wider-reaching media forms. I want to remind myself that I write because what I want to say may be valuable to someone other than myself; might strike someone as beautiful, sad, or wise; might make someone think in a different way or learn something new. Poetry has always done that for me, after all.

Now if only I can generate the mojo…

Ann E. Michael, Midwinter mojo

I’ve lost my enthusiasm for all things writing, except the actual writing. I’ve barely tried to get published, picking publications and press that I have a connection with or that I really want to get into, mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness of getting rejections year after year. I’m determined that eventually I’ll find one they like. 

My poetry collection that was accepted in 2019, and delayed and delayed, will never be published, at least by that press as it is closing this year. The editor had long gone silent to my queries, so I stopped trying. I continue to occasionally send out that collection and my others to different editors, more out of habit than with any hope. 

Mostly now, I think of my collections as a record of my life and thoughts that will never really be shared until I’m gone, like my writing notebooks and my diaries, just a bit more thematically organised. And the thought of not publishing them doesn’t really bother me. […]

I wrote or finished 73 poems in 2025 which is higher than average for me, as most were written for a specific collection that will probably never be published. I’ve had an urge to write unusual love poems, so I’ve just gone with it. I think it’s complete, but as is my way, I will continue to tinker with it for a long while yet.

My new writing practice routines means I’m writing regularly, even if only just a few notes or scribbles. I try and draft out at least one poem a week, not necessarily a good one, but it’s a nice feeling on Sunday to have something typed into my drafts file. […] I’ve gone back to the process, what I love about writing, the slow accumulation of ideas, words on the page. 

Gerry Stewart, Sweeping Away the Last Clutter of 2025

Under my bangs
this smudged and gritty
cross a remembrance:
A dream of burning, my very
bones done in.

Kristen McHenry, Lenten Poem-a-Week Project: Week 1

Unbidden, I imagine
a womb

fashioned from
blue, purple, and crimson cloths

(knitting and weaving:
women’s work)

twisted yarn like blood vessels
intertwining, carrying blood

back and forth, looping in
the lungs of all creation, nourishing

us in this nest
where if we listen, really listen

we can hear the heartbeat
of Shekhinah.

*

Another poem from my current project, an expanded volume of Torah poetry. This poem arises out of Terumah in the book of Exodus.

Rachel Barenblat, Mishkan

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with my writing – (as in Dr. Frankenstein but using a journal and pencil in place of electrodes and lightning) – and it’s opened doors and closed windows for me. I’ve discovered a great deal in the power of words, but I’ve also found new rivers in myself. And that’s felt good.

I’ve spent the last two years moving into hybrid work – fusing genres, blurring lines – or that’s what I’m telling myself. But, it seems to be working on several levels. There’ve been a few falls from cliffs, of course, but I keep moving.

I’m more open to ideas, less controlled. A statement by Stanley Kunitz – “A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of” – has been a map for me. I apply his notion of “secrets” to all the forms of writing I’ve been working in – poetry, essay, cnf, flash.

I also hear words by Flannery O’Connor in this – “I write to discover what I know”. My own writing does reveal layers of self – layers I didn’t know were there, but they were. They’ve always been there. Waiting.

So – we wait – for the writing to appear. And, we never know when that’s going to happen. Of course, I’m meaning the moments of writing that lead to discovery – not the day-to-day writing, in whatever genre … the time set aside or found to allow the drafting to move forward. Writing with no plan, no agenda. Putting words on the page – or screen.

Sam Rasnake, The Experiment: Finding the New

Like all endings, endings in poetry are often caught between two extremes. It is tempting to slam the door too hard, or to slink out so quietly nobody notices you’ve gone. They are all the more difficult, I think, when a poet is writing in so-called free verse, though ending a (so-called) formal poem isn’t exactly easy either.

Perhaps, like all the best endings, the best endings in poetry aren’t endings at all. Looking back at the poems I wrote about on this blog last year, one thing I notice is the way in which they each close with musical and metrical effects which ring out after the poem is over: Thomas’s misty counties, Brooks’s twinklings and twinges, Masefield’s long trick, even Larkin’s whispering trees. Here is the final stanza of ‘Why Brownlee Left’ by the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, its abandoned horses staring out beyond the last line:

By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future.

The horses can’t quite move forward into the future they’re gazing at, but they keep moving all the same. They seem to be caught there forever, shifting their weight from foot to foot. And one way in which Muldoon achieves this effect is by setting that ambiguous image, the not-quite-ending, off against the ‘closing’ rhyme which, again, is only half a closure (foot to / future). A half-rhyme is all it takes to set the thing ringing. Muldoon makes it look easy. It isn’t.

Jeremy Wikeley, Poetry of Departures

In the 1970s, I didn’t know poems could speak to my life as a young woman. I’d never heard a contemporary poet read in person. That changed in college when I discovered Diane Wakoski’s Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. Later, hearing Gary Snyder read about wildness and Gwendolyn Brooks describe love “like honey” made me realize poetry could be a living, breathing force. I wanted my students to feel that too—and to find the power of their own voices.

I also wanted to bring in some of the magic of InsideOut, the Detroit poets-in-the-schools program founded by Terry Blackhawk. I invited local poets from the University of Michigan or visiting writers passing through town. We hosted all-school readings, performances, and a beloved event called “Shorts on the Ledge,” where students read brief pieces from a hallway ledge during National Poetry Month. We partnered with Jazz Band, Dance Body, and the annual Art Show. We read poems on the first day of school and at graduation. Whenever the school gathered, we offered a poetry prelude.

In 2011, a colleague and I opened our classroom once a week for Poetry Club. We advertised in the student bulletin, hung posters, and I brought homemade cookies or muffins. Our formula was simple: read a poem, talk about it, write, and share. Students came because they needed a place to write what they wanted to write in school.

Fifteen years later, the club is thriving. In the early days, we begged for five or six students; now a dozen come regularly.

Creating a High School Poetry Club: Why and How – guest post by Ellen Stone (Trish Hopkinson)

When I was at school, the English department ran a (voluntary) verse speaking competition, in which we, well, spoke verse, competitively. It was immensely absorbing. One year, I did ‘Death, be not proud’ (alas, when I tried it just now, I only remember the first quatrain). Another year, I did a passage of Paradise Lost, (ending ‘Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms’) now lost to me. I knew other sections of Milton at university. I performed in several Shakespeare plays, and remember a fraction of them now, though I know my way around Hamlet reasonably well. In those days, though it was never a formal requirement, I took memorisation seriously. I once knew the whole of Ode to a Nightingale…

It didn’t all vanish, thankfully. And the poetry I learned subsequently has largely stayed with me, and I slowly add to my stocks, meagre though they are. (One thing I can recite in full on demand is Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, of all things.) I decided several years ago to start memorising more, (including several poems by Robert Frost, which I used to say by heart to my children when they were little), and though I am, and always have been, an insufficient pupil, bad at schedules and consistency, I am not entirely failing at that endeavour even now, though I do far too little.

Last year, I memorised ‘Daffodils’ by Herrick. I am currently learning ‘My true love hath my heart.’ Alan Lascelles, Private Secretary to King George VI (and also to the Abdicator—hiss) knew Gray’s Elegy by heart, as, once, did so many English school boys. Lascelles was appalled to learn that the king hadn’t even heard of it. Perhaps I shall learn that one next. I am resolved to take memorisation as seriously again as I used to at school. (Join me!—though you should expect me to fail!)

Henry Oliver, George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.

The students look at me as if I’m the lab
animal in the crate, and they’re the scientists

circling the room with clipboards and pens.
I dearly want to know: what will it take

to kindle a fire, get them to care
about stories and poems, warm up

to metaphor and meaning? Toward the end
of the session, they shut their tablets

and zip backpacks close, heave out of their
seats and walk out of the room— expressions

mostly unchanged as I erase the board, return
the matchstick to its box marked “strike anywhere.”

Luisa A. Igloria, Strike Anywhere Match

This scene was outside King’s College Cambridge yesterday [photo]. Typewriter at the ready, the poet offers the public a “Poem on the Spot”. No AI.

Today I went to Huntingdon, about 30km from Cambridge. They have an alley of murals I didn’t know about, featuring T.S. Eliot, William Cowper, Lucy Maria Boston, Henry of Huntingdon, George Herbert and Samuel Pepys.

Tim Love, Street Poetry

I am currently on hiatus from daily poems in favor of hammering away slowly [at] plays as I try to increase my skills there, but will be making an e-zine in March of the Bluebeard poems (and a special print book object edition for Patreon subscribers, so keep an eye out for that.) You can still get in on the action there before the end of this month and land a signed copy of CLOVEN and my little 2026 desk calendar featuring collage work. This was a small print run, but I hope next year to make both a spiral-bound calendar and a desk standing version.  

Tuesday, we are headed to Steppenwolf to see another Strindberg play, Dance of Death, which looks to be about a contentious marriage, which fits well as I am finishing up a first draft of the Chopin adaptation.  This week, we also have new bookshelves arriving to deal with the living room situation, in which they are basically collapsing under the weight of way too many books[.]

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 2/22/2026

How easy it is to build a house from the pieces at hand. A mini table here, a houseplant and storage boxes there. With glue, scissors, pencil, cardboard, wood. But who says it couldn’t look completely different? Each little house remains one model among many.

marks
on the new floorboards
years ago

How many variations could be created? Imagine them in a single line. The judges enter. Point with their fingers. Take notes. Look concerned. Smile. Move back and forth.

How easy it is to read the room but forget the house.

Kati Mohr, Compass Needlework

I’m fascinated by the potentially infinite array of how literary influence shapes writing. How could American short story writer Lydia Davis, one of the most striking prose stylists of the past few decades (as well as one of my personal favourite writers), profess that the late Connecticut prose poet Russell Edson (1935-2014) was the most important writer on the development of her style? Whatever overlap between their work might exist, one of these things is not like the other.

One of the first of my contemporaries I encountered with a personal library as large as mine was the late Toronto writer Priscila Uppal (1974-2018), and there was something both striking and wonderfully exciting upon realizing our libraries had little to no overlap. From what I could see, only P.K. Page’s Hologram (1994) was the exception, although I’m sure there were others. Based on her library alone, one might gather that Uppal’s was a literature fueled by a narrative lyric with a more European base, offering a heft of titles by Guernica Editions and Exile Editions, which sat as a counterpoint to my own, rooted in 1960s Canadian postmodernism: west coast TISH poetics, Talonbooks and Coach House Press, into the prairies and south, towards Black Mountain, Richard Brautigan and the San Francisco Renaissance. I remember thinking how glorious it was to see a collection so wildly different but equal in scale, and the two in counterpoint suggested to me the mark of a healthy, vibrant literature: knowing these alternate perspectives were both held in high regard. If you want a quick overview of how any writer is shaped, head straight for their library.

Of course, influence is rarely a straight line. A collage, perhaps, or a constellation. I remember a conversation with Kingston writer Steven Heighton (1961-2022) and Ottawa poet David O’Meara, back when O’Meara had that apartment in Ottawa’s Lowertown; how they both swore by John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” as collected through his 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). I remain baffled by their attachment to the work. I’ve also never understood how anyone could enjoy the poetry of Don Coles, another poet I know admired by Heighton and O’Meara. What am I missing? The years I’ve attempted to return to the work of Robert Duncan, unable to grasp the appeal, despite admiring the work of multiple writers who swear by him; despite my holding Duncan’s contemporary and compatriot Jack Spicer as such an important poet across my own trajectory, as well as Robin Blaser, the third in their triumvirate of American poetry and poetics. The San Francisco Renaissance: Spicer, Duncan and Blaser. What am I missing?

In some ways, I find Davis citing Edson reminiscent of longtime and former Talonbooks publisher Karl Siegler who once offered that he could see how the works of Vancouver poet George Bowering or Montreal poet Artie Gold influenced my work, but couldn’t understand my attachment to the work of the late prairie poet Andrew Suknaski. I mean, I thought it might have been obvious, but I suppose not: I came to Suknaski through the work of Dennis Cooley (and other prairie writers, I’m sure), latching onto Suknaski’s self-described “loping, coyote lines,” and quickly realized an affinity to how he returned to writing on the histories and complications of his geography-of-origin, a geographic and cultural space that had not yet been articulated through poetry. This is where I might point to the crowd, and bellow: I say “Glengarry,” you say “Wood Mountain.” A chant begins.

rob mclennan, Lecture for an Empty Room

For former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, it took nearly 50 years of listening to the deepest, locked-away part of himself to address the profound abuse to which his Catholic parish priest subjected him when Krapf was a child. During the period of that abuse, the priest took the photograph that became part of the cover art for Krapf’s 2014 autobiographical collection Catholic Boy Blues (Greystone Publishing), and gave it to Krapf’s parents. That haunting photograph, an evocative visualization of the painful words comprising Krapf’s poems, contains both dark secret and starker truth. Krapf wrestles with both over the course of his four-part collection by assuming four dramatically different yet intertwined voices: the boy who suffers sexual abuse, the man who sets upon the “healing journey” that requires reconciling the boy he was to the adult he became, the priest whom Krapf allows to engage in dialogue with the boy, who finds in himself the extraordinary courage to speak back once and for all, and a wise figure Krapf calls “Mr. Blues.” The latter speaks in four voices, too — friend, advice-giver, counselor, mentor — that if they could be sounded as one, might best be described as “savior,” for Mr. Blues ultimately helps the boy Krapf was and the man Krapf is today to “break free” of “the language of pain” to sing as “one with the spirit inside me” where hope and forgiveness, even love, reside. Mr. Blues teaches boy and man to see that

there’s always a hopeful boy inside the man. Deep down lives a hopeful boy inside the man won’t quit fighting till he comes out best he can.

In that final “Love Song for Mr. Blues” from which the above lines are quoted, we find all the reasons Krapf is able to survive his harrowing journey.

*

Catholic Boy Blues, the twenty-sixth of Krapf’s more than 30 books, is dedicated to “my sisters and brothers of any age in all lands abused by priests or other authority figures.” As anyone knows who pays even slight attention to the news, especially over the last two decades, an enormous group of Catholics and former Catholics — Krapf now known to be among the thousands of primarily male adolescents abused — suffered a profound silencing, because of the presence of priest-pedophiles in the Church. Krapf movingly describes that silencing:

Not even the great
visionary wordsmiths
Isaiah and Jeremiah

had to find words
to tell their people
how it feels

for a boy
to be so defiled
by a priest

that for fifty years
he keeps his mouth shut
even to those he loves.

~ “Not Even Isaiah and Jeremiah”

In his acknowledgment in the Preface that his “responsibility and mission as a poet” oblige him to share the “dirty little secret” with the public, Krapf, born in 1943, bears startling witness to art’s power to save when, as the persona Mr. Blues says in “Mr. Blues Wakes Up,” we can “sing it straight.”

Maureen Doallas, Norbert Krapfs ‘Cathlic Boy Blues’

Part of the reason why Isobar is a vital press is because [Paul] Rossiter has a clear purpose in mind for it, a purpose with three parts or strands. The first of these is to bring into English the work of key 20th century Japanese poets who have been generally neglected, poets like Yoshioka, Kiwao Nomura, Rin Ishigaki and Sanki Saitō (to name just ones that I’ve reviewed). Many of these poets engaged with western poetry; Yoshioka translated Rene Char, who was a key figure for Nomura, and Ishigaki was also clearly influenced by surrealism. Equally, the VOU poets were clearly in conversation with western concrete/visual work.

The second strand is the publication of English-language poets who live and work in Japan, and who engage, to one degree or another with Japanese literature and culture. The result is that Isobar books are a venue for cross-cultural fertilisation in very real terms.

Glasgow–Tokyo Line by James McGonigal and John Pazdziora, subtitles An East-West Hyakuin, fits perfectly into this strand. A hyakuin, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a 100-poem renga, or linked verse, written collaboratively by two or more poets turn-taking. There are rules or conventions to the form that McGonigal and Pazdziora follow, with one key exception; their collaboration was not in person and limited to a single block of time, but extended and conducted through email.

Another interesting aspect of the book is the blend of languages, with most of the text being in standard English, with a healthy leavening of Scots, and the odd hint of Japanese included. This has the effect of making it seem like there are more than two voices at play at points.

The linked verses hover around the passage of time, the seasons, mortality, impermanence and, ultimately, cyclical renewal.

Can fresh leaves foretell
the snick-snap of garden shears
on October days?

There’s a sense of the human integrated with the Buddha nature of the world:

Stretching for plums, my fingers
greet a snail. Good day, neighbour.

Billy Mills, Several Isobars: A Review

I love this love poem, the “philia” kind, dear old pal. Nostalgia in its “algia,” an ache, but funny and odd, in the way that old friendships and memories can be. There is a helplessness to it, how the speaker is awash in his own foibles, ones that he knows he can admit to this old friend, who likely knew them all too well, and maybe had a few more. It cracks me up. It makes me sad-laugh, laugh-cry, this apostrophe, which is a strange word for speech or a poem addressed to a person, as its etymology lies in words meaning “turning away from,” but is also used to describe an indicator of possession, as well as an indicator of something missing. Which also makes me sad in a isn’t-that-funny way.

Marilyn McCabe, the fate of the cruel & unusual

How should I be? is the question I’ve been asking myself these last two months. If my lifespan is now counting down in years or months or maybe even weeks rather than the decades I expect we mostly luxuriate in imagining, what is it I should do with a day, an hour, a breath, a synapse? What should be my mindset, and the means by which my time—imaginary god—is made? Thus far I have tried: pious, melancholic, pragmatic, defeated, paralyzed, depressed, and, simply, numb: unfeeling, unthinking, if-I-don’t-move-nothing-else-can-go-wrong. Those of you who know me in real life can probably guess that none of these has fit particularly well.

One must have a mind of winter I thought to myself yesterday, getting dressed for a run, and as I ambled along in safe-heartrate-zone I found myself transfixed by the verbs: to regard, to behold. Stevens was an insurance executive, and legend has it that he’d send a page down the street to the library to copy out definitions and etymologies of words he was turning over in his mind whilst writing policies and other boring business things, a fact I take to mean: there is nothing accidental about any word that turns up in one of his poems. It’s not simply that one must accept one’s circumstances in order to understand them so much as that one must accept them—develop a mind for their reality—in order to see them clearly and thus to hold them in esteem, to see what is remarkable, what can be held dear, no matter the odds.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

In addition to showing us that grief is both a complex shared and unique emotion, Webb suggests that there are many forms of loss, just as complex and difficult to resolve. in She called her Melanie we meet the unresolvable loss of a mother who gave her child up for adoption; in New and to him who came from my body we find the loss of a way of life experienced by a mother on the birth of her first child and the loss when that child gains independence; and in  If only you didn’t have to shove your living in my face we find the loss and ultimate recovery of self-respect during and after an abusive relationship.

There will be many potential readers who have experienced grief in their lifetimes: it is an inevitable consequence of having loved.  There will be much to connect with for such readers in this collection. However, like all literature worth reading, Webb offers us fresh perspectives and insights, deepening our understanding in emotionally intelligent poems of great skill.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Grey Time’ by Julia Webb

Among the poems one really doesn’t expect, there’s this: a poem about Christ’s forty days in the wilderness by Robert Graves (1895–1985). Graves was young when he published the poem in his second collection, the 1918 Fairies and Fusiliers. He’d been through the war, become friends with the poets Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), and published his own war verses. (In 1985, a memorial was placed in Westminster Abbey for the poets of the First World War. The long-lived Graves was the only one left to attend.)

He had yet to write his memoir of the war, Good-Bye to All That (1929) or his strange book about poetry’s beginning in worship of a divine mother figure, The White Goddess (1948). His best-selling historical novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, wouldn’t appear till 1934 and 1935.

In 1918, for that matter, Graves had yet to make a public point of his loss of faith. By 1948, following James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), Graves would insist in The White Goddess that “Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.” In Today’s Poem, “In the Wilderness,” however, Graves emphasized not the personality but exactly those mythopoeic elements of Jesus. (He would later call it his “last Christian-minded poem.”)

His fantastical account of that mythopoesis is aided enormously — turned nearly into an incantation prayer — by the rhymed two-stress lines of the poem and its forced dactyls. The meter quickly turns artificial, standing outside the natural words to become the kind of musical chant we know from nursery rhymes and counting games.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: In the Wilderness

[Geoffrey] Heptonstall explores the nature of storytelling and how a narrator can try to influence a reader to draw a desired conclusion. However, a narrator can’t control a reader, especially a reader with an enquiring mind, who reads and sits with what they’ve read to bring their own lived experience to the text and question it. Ultimately, Heptonstall also questions what truth might be. A narrator doesn’t tell the same story twice, placing emphasis on certain details can tailor the story to a different audience, who, for cultural or personal reasons, might need different arguments or persuasion to see the narrator’s viewpoint. “The Truth on the Tongue” is a quiet, thought-provoking collection that aims to recreate the sense of timelessness that is an audience listening or reading a tale.

Emma Lee, “The Truth on the Tongue” Geoffrey Heptonstall (Cyberwit) – book review

Last week I was struck by the wording of a Latin memorial composed in the 1660s by Payne Fisher — once Cromwell’s poet, though glossing over that phase for obvious reasons by 1665 — for one Jane Robinson, wife of Thomas Robinson, protonotary of the Common Pleas and prominent member of the Inner Temple. Jane died in November 1665, aged 49, of metastatic breast cancer. Most unusually, the memorial specifies the disease and even how it was treated:

Septendecim Annos
Cum Marito suo suavissimè feriata est,
Et ab Ipsius sinu demùm malevolè divulsa est
Per MORBUM CANCRALEM.
Cujus infandos Cruciatus postquàm diù victrix pertulisset,
Et Laevè Mammae detruncationem
Intrepidè passa fit:
Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo,
Et vitalia validiùs invadente,
Fato concessit:

This means:

For seventeen years
she rejoiced most sweetly in the company of her husband,
and was at last cruelly torn from his embrace
by CANCEROUS DISEASE
after she had long victoriously endured its unspeakable torments,
and had intrepidly suffered the amputation
of her left breast:
when the old disease returned (after an interval of six months)
and invaded her vital organs more powerfully,
she yielded to fate.

This describes a mastectomy — surely a very horrible business indeed in the 1660s, without any anaesthesia — that Jane surprisingly survived, followed by a recurrence of the disease, which spread into her vitalia, i.e. her interior organs. This seems to describe metastasized cancer, recognised as such. Although general statements about the courageous endurance of suffering are quite common in elegies and memorials, this sort of detail is unusual and must have been requested specifically, presumably by her husband.

Fisher’s inscription is prose, not poetry, though it is densely rhetorical in a way that we might associate more with verse. The pronounced alliteration for emphasis — as at Veteri (post intervallum sex Mensium) revertente Morbo, / Et vitalia validiùs invadente, is typical of Fisher’s style. In any case, the distinction between Latin prose and verse in this kind of text was fuzzier than you might think: the mid- to late seventeenth century saw a particular vogue for a kind of free verse in Latin that was related to the fashion for the ‘literary inscription’. (I’ve written about Latin free verse and related forms before here.) Fisher, who had a sharp ear for a new trend, was rather a pioneer in this form. Back in 1651 he composed an elegy for Henry Ireton the Latin of which is a very early British example of this kind of free verse. The parallel English version uses rhymes, and indeed it is parallel-text examples like this help to demonstrate that this sort of Latin was understood as verse, rather than prose.

Victoria Moul, Dying is a difficult enterprise

“The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

At one point in March 2024, I copied these words into a yellow notebook. It was the spring of Larry Levis; azaleas aching to bud, stammering possible colors in the margins of former journals. I remember thinking spring would destroy me, as it does annually, gutting me with its flushes and fevers, distracting me from the needs of surrounding mammals. Each day lengthening by inches of light. Moths moving like nocturnes near the doors. And Levis’ poems garlanding the floor of the porch with their gentleness…

WOUND

I’ve loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight

on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.

Like the ravish of spring, Levis seasons his stanzas with unremitting tenderness for life, the sap-work of being. I return often to his “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” for the momentum it accrues as it winds down the page, working the space between the biography and the apologia:

I also had laughter, the affliction of angels & children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then
You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free
In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
Either because no one else could hear them, or because
No one else wanted to. And, mostly, because they know.

… and for the inflammatory, unforgettable scherzo:

One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,

… and for how Levis circles the figure of Billie Holiday, a talismanic figure that animated his jazz pantheon, jazz being the musical form that Levis deployed and studied for its repetitions and returns and metaphysical resonances.

“My Story in a Late Style of Fire” is a self-portrait that leaps from the canvas like the face in Caravaggio’s convex shield, occupying the continuous present of poetic address. Yet its speaker takes leave of the reader with an embrace, a likening as bright as it is critical:

I know this isn’t much. But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass,
The flames reaching through the second story of a house
Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who
Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

Brief, it is. Brief as the blooming set to a season. And what literary form turns this brevity to face vastness? Poetry.

Alina Stefanescu, Larry Levis: For love of immanence.

In the interests of research I’ve been doing some investigating. Just how easy would it be to pass off an AI-generated poem as one’s own work?

So on Chat GPT I offered the prompt: “Can you write a 14 line poem with a science fiction theme in the style of Caroline Bird?” In a few seconds this is what it produced:

The British Secret Service issues me a sensible coat
and a name that tastes like static.
I learn to listen through walls politely,
to sip tea while history clears its throat.
My handler says don’t fall in love—
everything leaks eventually.
The dead drop is a park bench feeding pigeons secrets.
I memorise faces the way others memorise prayers.
At night, the truth sleeps beside me, fully clothed.
London keeps blinking like it knows.
I file my feelings under miscellaneous,
and burn the rest with the kettle on.

Once I’d tried the same exercise with four or five other poets a few commonalities started to leap out, such as heavy use of simile, often one ‘quirky’ idea per line, little or no through-references, sonic echoes or layered meanings. The poems kind of looked like poems but there wasn’t much below the surface, Which ties in with the fact that AI is only privy to what’s already been written. Or as Rachel Piercey, editor of Tyger Tyger said to me: “Each new poem works on its own terms – a highly individual, poem-by-poem house style that AI could never comprehend, because it has never been done before and AI can only look back.”

The twist in the tail is that I then ran these AI-generated poems by Originality.ai, an AI engine trained to spot AI in texts. It’s not fool-proof as is has been trained primarily on non-fiction texts, but the result was pretty conclusive. […] Busted!

Robin Houghton, Can AI engines write poetry?

This my the 52nd free newsletter / essay / manifesto / article and it marks one year of writing weekly dispatches on this platform. It is also the tenth and final chapter in a series I’ve been writing about the poet John Keats and his last days in Rome.

February is an important month in the Keats calendar. It was in February of 1820 that the poet suffered his first lung haemorrhage, coughing blood and understanding the seriousness of his condition. He would die the following February in Rome, cared for by his friend, the artist Joseph Severn.

Over these last weeks I’ve described events leading up to his death and it doesn’t make for easy reading. We know how this story plays out and who really would want to follow it toward its inevitable, uncomfortable, painful end? This wasn’t exactly the reason the poet who wrote to me gave when she left but I think it had something to do with it. She’d spent long periods of last year in hospital, in pain and witness to the pain of others. Weekly instalments describing another poet’s demise isn’t exactly the most comforting material to receive. I myself find a fatigue has set in as the story of Keats approaches its sad conclusion. I mean, what do you say? I mean, what can you say? […]

I thought I’d shift focus, not in order to avoid describing how a light went out, not to ignore the Bright Star of this story but to consider its supporting actor, Joseph Severn.

Severn had been with Keats on his journey from London in September of 1820 when the Maria Crowther set sail on an arduous voyage to Naples. He was there for the poet’s 25th birthday in October spent in quarantine on their ship in the Italian port. There are stories that he threw Keats’ opium overboard into the Bay of Naples believing, with their arrival, the promise of fairer weather would restore the poet’s health.

Severn felt Keats no longer required the drug he’d used to treat the pain of his condition and the sore throats he suffered brought on by coughing fits. Severn later removed (another) bottle of laudanum from Keats’ possession in Rome when he feared the poet may try to take his own life. Severn was a man of faith. A believer in God. Keats was not. While Keats didn’t possess the same fierce atheism that earned Shelley the epitaph of ‘the infidel poet’ he was a free thinker, his devotion was to poetry. That he may have been tempted in his last days by the ‘ungodly’ act of suicide was something abhorrent to Severn. Although it goes too far to say he’d rather see his friend suffer in acute pain than provide him with oportunity to end it forever we do know how tormented Severn was in his duty of care, how he wrestled with decisions such as this.

Nicholas Roe, chair of the Keats Foundation and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, states in his 2012 biography that he believed that Keats was in fact an opium addict and Severn, among several of his friends, was aware of this. It is a claim, of course, and there’s no real evidence beyond the jealous mood swings Keats displays in letters to his fiancee Fanny Brawne and veiled references to the use of opiates (in Ode to a Nightingale for example) to support it. He certainly didn’t have the same appetites as Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was a bonafide junkie and the first poet to enter rehab. But that’s another story.

Jan Noble, Nº52 Loving the pain away

Whitman’s words in the preface to the original edition are at least as radiant and rousing as the verses themselves — words that continue to enliven heart, mind, and spirit a century and a half later. He writes:

The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes … but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects … they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.

And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Maria Popova, Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

I have been looking at rough drafts, as I’ve been doing when I don’t have a new poem bubbling up.  I am surprised by how many poems came from the bushel of apples I bought in October.  In the future, when I deliberate the wisdom of buying apples in bulk, let me remember how many ways those apples fed me.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tuesday Scraps: Texting Mix-ups and Passings and Other Goblins

After last weekend’s yarn show I set myself a catching up kind of a week. The kind where sparkly conversations with good friends featured amongst time to tackle admin type things and time to see if the poems that wait patiently in the draft folder are ready for polishing. The kind of week without a particular routine which allowed for resting and for seizing the moment when there was a gap in the rain to take a daily stroll.

It was good to get out for daily walks again after having recently had to wait for my cough to diminish. I felt my body easing its way back in to striding out and being glad for being out in the fresh air. I also realised how much I had missed listening to music for that dedicated segment of the day. My soul shines more fully when the right sounds are in the day. The country road route is currently muddy and wet, but I like its familiarity as I get back into the swing of things. The fact that walking this route takes as long as listening to the album Personal History by Mary Chapin Carpenter is also rather splendid.

It was good to have a free and easy week, it felt rather like having a springboard to jump from on the journey towards spring. Spring is my favourite season, and I love the feeling of entering it with a sense of renewal and to revelling in the newness it offers. So many reminders of growth as the rhubarb stretches out new stems and the snowdrops flourish in the borders. Mixing these wonderful visuals in with the joy of lengthened days makes so much seem possible. It even had me venturing into the garden with a pair of secateurs to begin the big tidy up.

Sue Finch, I SEE BLUE SKY

It’s an all-white affair, the blizzard sweeps
in with style, its blinding white tux,
bow tie and stiff starched shirt,
its grandeur, its threats and proclamations,
its show of power. In a flick of its
handsome wrist, it shows us who’s who.

How blankly we stare at its parts,
its top hat and white entrails,
wanting, not wanting its magic entourage
to disappear.

Jill Pearlman, Mr. Universe

春泥に厚き硝子の破片かな　松本てふこ

shundei ni atsuki garasu no hahen kana

            spring mud
            a thick piece of glass
            in it…
                                    Chōko Matsumoto

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

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (February 17, 2026)